0209
0209f
The Essays of George Eliot
THE ESSAYS
OF
“GEORGE ELIOT.”
COMPLETE.
COLLECTED AND ARRANGED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION
ON HER “ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES,”
BY
NATHAN SHEPPARD,
EDITOR OF “CHARACTER READINGS FROM GEORGE ELIOT,” AND “THE DICKENS
READER;” AND AUTHOR OF “SHUT UP IN PARIS.”
* * * * *
NEW YORK:
FUNK & WAGNALLS, PUBLISHERS,
10 AND 12 DEY STREET.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by
FUNK & WAGNALLS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C.
CONTENTS.
PREFACE, 5
“GEORGE ELIOT’S” ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES, 7
I.—CARLYLE’S LIFE OF STERLING, 25
II.—WOMAN IN FRANCE, 31
III.—EVANGELICAL TEACHING, 64
IV.—GERMAN WIT, 99
V.—NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE, 141
VI.—SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS, 178
VII.—WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS, 205
VIII.—THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM, 257
IX.—THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT, 272
X.—FELIX HOLT’S ADDRESS TO WORKINGMEN, 275
PREFACE.
Since the death of George Eliot much public curiosity has been excited by
the repeated allusions to, and quotations from, her contributions to
periodical literature, and a leading newspaper gives expression to a
general wish when it says that “this series of striking essays ought to
be collected and reprinted, both because of substantive worth and because
of the light they throw on the author’s literary canons and
predilections.” In fact, the articles which were published anonymously
in _The Westminster Review_ have been so pointedly designated by the
editor, and the biographical sketch in the “Famous Women” series is so
emphatic in its praise of them, and so copious in its extracts from one
and the least important one of them, that the publication of all the
Review and magazine articles of the renowned novelist, without abridgment
or alteration, would seem but an act of fair play to her fame, while at
the same time a compliance with a reasonable public demand.
Nor are these first steps in her wonderful intellectual progress any the
less, but are all the more noteworthy, for being first steps. “To ignore
this stage,” says the author of the valuable little volume to which we
have just referred—“to ignore this stage in George Eliot’s mental
development would be to lose one of the connecting links in her history.”
Furthermore, “nothing in her fictions excels the style of these papers.”
Here is all her “epigrammatic felicity,” and an irony not surpassed by
Heine himself, while her paper on the poet Young is one of her wittiest
bits of critical analysis.
Her translation of Status’s “Life of Jesus” was published in 1840, and
her translation of Feuerbach’s “Essence of Christianity” in 1854. Her
translation of Spinoza’s “Ethics” was finished the same year, but remains
unpublished. She was associate editor of _The Westminster Review_ from
1851 to 1853. She was about twenty-seven years of age when her first
translation appeared, thirty-three when the first of these magazine
articles appeared, thirty-eight at the publication of her first story,
and fifty-nine when she finished “Theophrastus Such.” Two years after
she died, at the age of sixty-one. So that George Eliot’s literary life
covered a period of about thirty-two years.
The introductory chapter on her “Analysis of Motives” first appeared as a
magazine article, and appears here at the request of the publishers,
after having been carefully revised, indeed almost entirely rewritten by
its author.
“GEORGE ELIOT’S” ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES.
George Eliot is the greatest of the novelists in the delineation of
feeling and the analysis of motives. In “uncovering certain human lots,
and seeing how they are woven and interwoven,” some marvellous work has
been done by this master in the two arts of rhetoric and fiction.
If you say the telling of a story is her forte, you put her below Wilkie
Collins or Mrs. Oliphant; if you say her object is to give a picture of
English society, she is surpassed by Bulwer and Trollope; if she be
called a satirist of society, Thackeray is her superior; if she intends
to illustrate the absurdity of behavior, she is eclipsed by Dickens; but
if the analysis of human motives be her forte and art, she stands first,
and it is very doubtful whether any artist in fiction is entitled to
stand second. She reaches clear in and touches the most secret and the
most delicate spring of human action. She has done this so well, so
apart from the doing of everything else, and so, in spite of doing some
other things indifferently, that she works on a line quite her own, and
quite alone, as a creative artist in fiction. Others have done this
incidentally and occasionally, as Charlotte Brontë and Walter Scott, but
George Eliot does it elaborately, with laborious painstaking, with
purpose aforethought. Scott said of Richardson: “In his survey of the
heart he left neither head, bay, nor inlet behind him until he had traced
its soundings, and laid it down in his chart with all its minute
sinuosities, its depths and its shallows.”
This is too much to say of Richardson, but it is not too much to say of
George Eliot. She has sounded depths and explored sinuosities of the
human heart which were utterly unknown to the author of “Clarissa
Harlowe.” It is like looking into the translucent brook—you see the
wriggling tad, the darting minnow, the leisurely trout, the motionless
pike, while in the bays and inlets you see the infusoria and animalculæ
as well.
George Eliot belongs to and is the greatest of the school of artists in
fiction who write fiction as a means to an end, instead of as an end.
And, while she certainly is not a story-teller of the first order,
considered simply as a story-teller, her novels are a striking
illustration of the power of fiction as a means to an end. They remind
us, as few other stories do, of the fact that however inferior the story
may be considered simply as a story, it is indispensable to the
delineation of character. No other form of composition, no discourse, or
essay, or series of independent sketches, however successful, could
succeed in bringing out character equal to the novel. Herein is at once
the justification of the power of fiction. “He spake a parable,” with an
“end” in view which could not be so expeditiously attained by any other
form of address.
A story of the first-class, with the story as end in itself, and a story
of the first class told as a means to an end, has never been, and it is
not likely ever will be, found together. The novel with a purpose is
fatal to the novel written simply to excite by a plot, or divert by
pictures of scenery, or entertain as a mere panorama of social life. So
intense is George Eliot’s desire to dissect the human heart and discover
its motives, that plot, diction, situations, and even consistency in the
vocabulary of the characters, are all made subservient to it. With her
it is not so much that the characters do thus and so, but why they do
thus and so. Dickens portrays the behavior, George Eliot dissects the
motive of the behavior. Here comes the human creature, says Dickens, now
let us see how he will behave. Here comes the human creature, says
George Eliot, now let us see why he behaves.
“Suppose,” she says, “suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to
wonder with keener interest what is the report of his own consciousness
about his doings, with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily
labors, and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure,
which may one day be too heavy for him and bring his heart to a final
pause.” The outside estimate is the work of Dickens and Thackeray, the
inside estimate is the work of George Eliot.
Observe in the opening pages of the great novel of “Middlemarch” how soon
we pass from the outside dress to the inside reasons for it, from the
costume to the motives which control it and color it. It was “only to
close observers that Celia’s dress differed from her sister’s,” and had
“a shade of coquetry in its arrangements.” Dorothea’s “plain dressing
was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared.” They
were both influenced by “the pride of being ladies,” of belonging to a
stock not exactly aristocratic, but unquestionably “good.” The very
quotation of the word good is significant and suggestive. There were “no
parcel-tying forefathers” in the Brooke pedigree. A Puritan forefather,
“who served under Cromwell, but afterward conformed and managed to come
out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family
estate,” had a hand in Dorothea’s “plain” wardrobe. “She could not
reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal
consequences with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of
drapery,” but Celia “had that common-sense which is able to accept
momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation.” Both were examples
of “reversion.” Then, as an instance of heredity working itself out in
character “in Mr. Brooke, the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was
clearly in abeyance, but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through
faults and virtues.”
Could anything be more natural than for a woman with this passion for,
and skill in, “unravelling certain human lots,” to lay herself out upon
the human lot of woman, with all her “passionate patience of genius?”
One would say this was inevitable. And, for a delineation of what that
lot of woman really is, as made for her, there is nothing in all
literature equal to what we find in “Middlemarch,” “Romola,” “Daniel
Deronda,” and “Janet’s Repentance.” “She was a woman, and could not make
her own lot.” Never before, indeed, was so much got out of the word
“lot.” Never was that little word so hard worked, or well worked. “We
women,” says Gwendolen Harleth, “must stay where we grow, or where the
gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to
look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my
notion about the plants, and that is the reason why some of them have got
poisonous.” To appreciate the work that George Eliot has done you must
read her with the determination of finding out the reason why Gwendolen
Harleth “became poisonous,” and Dorothea, with all her brains and
“plans,” a failure; why “the many Theresas find for themselves no epic
life, only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual
grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.” You must search
these marvellous studies in motives for the key to the blunders of “the
blundering lives” of woman which “some have felt are due to the
inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme power has fashioned
the natures of women.” But as there is not “one level of feminine
incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the
social lot of woman cannot be treated with scientific certitude.” It is
treated with a dissective delineation in the women of George Eliot
unequalled in the pages of fiction.
And then woman’s lot, as respects her “social promotion” in matrimony, so
much sought, and so necessary for her to seek, even in spite of her
conscience, and at the expense of her happiness—the unravelling of that
lot would also come very natural to this expert unraveller. And never
have we had the causes of woman’s “blunders” in match-making, and man’s
blunders in love-making, told with such analytic acumen, or with such
pathetic and sarcastic eloquence. It is not far from the question of
woman’s social lot to the question of questions of human life, the
question which has so tremendous an influence upon the fortunes of
mankind and womankind, the question which it is so easy for one party to
“pop” and so difficult for the other party to answer intelligently or
sagaciously.
Why does the young man fall in love with the young woman who is most
unfit for him of all the young women of his acquaintance, and why does
the young woman accept the young man, or the old man, who is better
adapted to making her life unendurable than any other man of her circle
of acquaintances? Why does the stalwart Adam Bede fall in love with
Hetty Sorrel, “who had nothing more than her beauty to recommend her?”
The delineator of his motives “respects him none the less.” She thinks
that “the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, dark-eyed Hetty, of
whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very
strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it
any weakness, pray, to be wrought upon by exquisite music? To feel its
wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the
delicate fibres of life which no memory can penetrate, and binding
together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable
vibration? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon
by the exquisite curves of a woman’s cheek, and neck, and arms; by the
liquid depth of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet girlish pout of her
lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music—what can one say
more?” And so “the noblest nature is often blinded to the character of
the woman’s soul that beauty clothes.” Hence “the tragedy of human life
is likely to continue for a long time to come, in spite of mental
philosophers who are ready with the best receipts for avoiding all
mistakes of the kind.”
How simple the motive of the Rev. Edward Casaubon in popping the question
to Dorothea Brooke, bow complex her motives in answering the question!
He wanted an amanuensis to “love, honor, and obey” him. She wanted a
husband who would be “a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew
if you wished it.” The matrimonial motives are worked to draw out the
character of Dorothea, and nowhere does the method of George Eliot show
to greater advantage than in probing the motives of this fine, strong,
conscientious, blundering young woman, whose voice “was like the voice of
a soul that once lived in an Æolian harp.” She had a theoretic cast of
mind. She was “enamored of intensity and greatness, and rash in
embracing what seemed to her to have those aspects.” The awful divine
had those aspects, and she embraced him. “Certainly such elements in the
character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and
hinder it from being decided, according to custom, by good looks, vanity,
and merely canine affection.” That’s a George Eliot stroke. If the
reader does not see from that what she is driving at he may as well
abandon all hope of ever appreciating her great forte and art.
Dorothea’s goodness and sincerity did not save her from the worst blunder
that a woman can make, while her conscientiousness only made it
inevitable. “With all her eagerness to know the truths of life she
retained very childlike ideas about marriage.” A little of the goose as
well as the child in her conscientious simplicity, perhaps. She “felt
sure she would have accepted the judicious Hooker if she had been born in
time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony, or John
Milton, when his blindness had come on, or any other great man whose odd
habits it would be glorious piety to endure.”
True to life, our author furnishes the “great man,” and the “odd habits,”
and the miserable years of “glorious” endurance. “Dorothea looked deep
into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected
there every quality she herself brought.” They exchanged experiences—he
his desire to have an amanuensis, and she hers, to be one. He told her
in the billy-cooing of their courtship that “his notes made a formidable
range of volumes, but the crowning task would be to condense these
voluminous, still accumulating results, and bring them, like the earlier
vintage of Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf.” Dorothea was
altogether captivated by the wide embrace of this conception. Here was
something beyond the shallows of ladies’ school literature. Here was a
modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint. Dorothea
said to herself: “His feeling, his experience, what a lake compared to my
little pool!” The little pool runs into the great reservoir.
Will you take this reservoir to be your husband, and will you promise to
be unto him a fetcher of slippers, a dotter of I’s and crosser of T’s and
a copier and condenser of manuscripts; until death doth you part? I
will.
They spend their honeymoon in Rome, and on page 211 of Vol. I. we find
poor Dorothea “alone in her apartments, sobbing bitterly, with such an
abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually
controlled by pride will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely
alone.” What was she crying about? “She thought her feeling of
desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty.” A characteristic
George Eliot probe. Why does not Dorothea give the real reason for her
desolateness? Because she does not know what the real reason
is—conscience makes blunderers of us all. “How was it that in the weeks
since their marriage Dorothea had not distinctly observed, but felt, with
a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she
had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms
and winding passages which seemed to lead no whither? I suppose it was
because in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and
preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken
to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will
reveal. But, the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is
concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital
voyage, you may become aware that you make no way, and that the sea is
not within sight—that in fact you are exploring an inclosed basin.” So
the ungauged reservoir turns out to be an inclosed basin, but Dorothea
was prevented by her social lot, and perverse goodness, and puritanical
“reversion,” from foreseeing that. She might have been saved from her
gloomy marital voyage “if she could have fed her affection with those
childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman who has begun
by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy
soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love.” Then,
perhaps, Ladislaw would have been her first husband instead of her
second, as he certainly was her first and only love. Such are the
chances and mischances in the lottery of matrimony.
Equally admirable is the diagnosis of Gwendolen Harleth’s motives in
“drifting toward the tremendous decision,” and finally landing in it.
“We became poor, and I was tempted.” Marriage came to her as it comes to
many, as a temptation, and like the deadening drug or the maddening bowl,
to keep off the demon of remorse or the cloud of sorrow, like the forgery
or the robbery to save from want. “The brilliant position she had longed
for, the imagined freedom she would create for herself in marriage”—these
“had come to her hunger like food, with the taint of sacrilege upon it,”
which she “snatched with terror.” Grandcourt “fulfilled his side of the
bargain by giving her the rank and luxuries she coveted.” Matrimony as a
bargain never had and never will have but one result. “She had a root of
conscience in her, and the process of purgatory had begun for her on
earth.” Without the root of conscience it would have been purgatory all
the same. So much for resorting to marriage for deliverance from poverty
or old maidhood. Better be an old maid than an old fool. But how are we
to be guaranteed against “one of those convulsive motiveless actions by
which wretched men and women leap from a temporary sorrow into a lifelong
misery?” Rosamond Lydgate says, “Marriage stays with us like a murder.”
Yes, if she could only have found that out before instead of after her
own marriage!
But “what greater thing,” exclaims our novelist, “is there for two human
souls than to feel that they are joined for life, to strengthen each
other in all labor, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with
each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the last parting?”
While a large proportion of her work in the analysis of motives is
confined to woman, she has done nothing more skilful or memorable than
the “unravelling” of Bulstrode’s mental processes by which he “explained
the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with his
beliefs.” If there were no Dorothea in “Middlemarch” the character of
Bulstrode would give that novel a place by itself among the masterpieces
of fiction. The Bulstrode wound was never probed in fiction with more
scientific precision. The pious villain finally finds himself so near
discovery that he becomes conscientious. “His equivocation now turns
venomously upon him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie.” The
past came back to make the present unendurable. “The terror of being
judged sharpens the memory.” Once more “he saw himself the banker’s
clerk, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech, and fond of
theological definition. He had striking experience in conviction and
sense of pardon; spoke in prayer-meeting and on religious platforms.
That was the time he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest
of dream. He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were
private and were filled with arguments—some of these taking the form of
prayer.”
Private prayer—but “is private prayer necessarily candid? Does it
necessarily go to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible
speech, and speech is representative. Who can represent himself just as
he is, even in his own reflections?”
Bulstrode’s course up to the time of his being suspected “had, he
thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences, appearing to point
the way for him to be the agent in making the best use of a large
property.” Providence would have him use for the glory of God the money
he had stolen. “Could it be for God’s service that this fortune should
go to” its rightful owners, when its rightful owners were “a young woman
and her husband who were given up to the lightest pursuits, and might
scatter it abroad in triviality—people who seemed to lie outside the path
of remarkable providences?”
Bulstrode felt at times “that his action was unrighteous, but how could
he go back? He had mental exercises calling himself naught, laid hold on
redemption and went on in his course of instrumentality.” He was
“carrying on two distinct lives”—a religious one and a wicked one. “His
religious activity could not be incompatible with his wicked business as
soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it incompatible.”
“The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be
coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the
sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was
simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs,
and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into
satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.”
And now Providence seemed to be taking sides against him. “A threatening
Providence—in other words, a public exposure—urged him to a kind of
propitiation which was not a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal
had changed its aspect to him. Self-prostration was no longer enough.
He must bring restitution in his hand. By what sacrifice could he stay
the rod? He believed that if he did something right God would stay the
rod, and save him from the consequences of his wrong-doing.” His
religion was “the religion of personal fear,” which “remains nearly at
the level of the savage.” The exposure comes, and the explosion.
Society shudders with hypocritical horror, especially in the presence of
poor Mrs. Bulstrode, who “should have some hint given her, that if she
knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet.” Society
when it is very candid, and very conscientious, and very scrupulous,
cannot “allow a wife to remain ignorant long that the town holds a bad
opinion of her husband.” The photograph of the Middlemarch gossips
sitting upon the case of Mrs. Bulstrode is taken accurately. Equally
accurate, and far more impressive, is the narrative of circumstantial
evidence gathering against the innocent Lydgate and the guilty
Bulstrode—circumstances that will sometimes weave into one tableau of
public odium the purest and the blackest characters. From this tableau
you may turn to that one in “Adam Bede,” and see how circumstances are
made to crush the weak woman and clear the wicked man. And then you can
go to “Romola,” or indeed to almost any of these novels, and see how
wrong-doing may come of an indulged infirmity of purpose, that
unconscious weakness and conscious wickedness may bring about the same
disastrous results, and that repentance has no more effect in averting or
altering the consequences in one case than the other. Tito’s ruin comes
of a feeble, Felix Holt’s victory of an unconquerable, will. Nothing is
more characteristic of George Eliot than her tracking of Tito through all
the motives and counter motives from which he acted. “Because he tried
to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing
so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit such deeds as make a
man infamous.” So poor Romola tells her son, as a warning, and adds: “If
you make it the rule of your life to escape from what is disagreeable,
calamity may come just the same, and it would be calamity falling on a
base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it.”
Out of this passion for the analysis of motives comes the strong
character, slightly gnarled and knotted by natural circumstances, as
trees that are twisted and misshapen by storms and floods—or characters
gnarled by some interior force working in conjunction with or in
opposition to outward circumstances. She draws no monstrosities, or
monsters, thus avoiding on the one side romance and on the other
burlesque. She keeps to life—the life that fails from “the meanness of
opportunity,” or is “dispersed among hindrances” or “wrestles”
unavailingly “with universal pressure.”
Why had Mr. Gilfil in those late years of his beneficent life “more of
the knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear
hint of it in the open-eyed, loving” young Maynard? Because “it is with
men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches into which they
were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with
some rough boss, some odd excrescence, and what might have been a grand
tree, expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical, misshapen trunk.
Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard
sorrow which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding
into plenteous beauty; and the trivial, erring life, which we visit with
our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best
limb is withered. The dear old Vicar had been sketched out by nature as
a noble tree. The heart of him was sound, the grain was of the finest,
and in the gray-haired man, with his slipshod talk and caustic tongue,
there was the main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender nature that
had poured out the finest, freshest forces of its life-current in a first
and only love.”
Her style is influenced by her purpose—may be said, indeed, to be created
by it. The excellences and the blemishes of the diction come of the end
sought to be attained by it. Its subtleties and obscurities were equally
inevitable. Analytical thinking takes on an analytical phraseology. It
is a striking instance of a mental habit creating a vocabulary. The
method of thought produces the form of rhetoric. Some of the sentences
are mental landscapes. The meaning seems to be in motion on the page.
It is elusive from its very subtlety. It is more our analyst than her
character of Rufus Lyon, who “would fain find language subtle enough to
follow the utmost intricacies of the soul’s pathways.” Mrs. Transome’s
“lancet-edged epigrams” are dull in comparison with her own. She uses
them with startling success in dissecting motive and analyzing feeling.
They deserve as great renown as “Nélaton’s probe.”
For example: “Examine your words well, and you will find that even when
you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact
truth, especially about your own feelings—much harder than to say
something fine about them which is not the exact truth.” That ought to
make such a revelation of the religious diary-keeper to himself as to
make him ashamed of himself. And this will fit in here: “Our consciences
are not of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws—they are
the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories;” and this: “Every
strong feeling makes to itself a conscience of its own—has its own
piety.”
Who can say that the joints of his armor are not open to this thrust?
“The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is in the
logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never
happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition
which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he worked in a
mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should
apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink.” Silas Marner
lost his money through his “sense of security,” which “more frequently
springs from habit than conviction.” He went unrobbed for fifteen years,
which supplied the only needed condition for his being robbed now. A
compensation for stupidity: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all
ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the
squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar that lies on the
other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well
wadded with stupidity.” Who does not at once recognize “that mixture of
pushing forward and being pushed forward” as “the brief history of most
human beings?” Who has not seen “advancement hindered by impetuous
candor?” or “private grudges christened by the name of public zeal?” or
“a church built with an exuberance of faith and a deficiency of funds?”
or a man “who would march determinedly along the road he thought best,
but who was easily convinced which was best?” or a preacher “whose
oratory was like a Belgian railway horn, which shows praiseworthy
intentions inadequately fulfilled?”
There is something chemical about such an analysis as this of Rosamond:
“Every nerve and muscle was adjusted to the consciousness that she was
being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into
her physique. She even acted her own character, and so well that she did
not know it to be precisely her own!” Nor is the exactness of this any
less cruel: “We may handle extreme opinions with impunity, while our
furniture and our dinner-giving link us to the established order.” Why
not own that “the emptiness of all things is never so striking to us as
when we fail in them?” Is it not better to avoid “following great
reformers beyond the threshold of their own homes?” Does not “our moral
sense learn the manners of good society?”
The lancet works impartially, because the hand that holds it is the hand
of a conscientious artist. She will endure the severest test you can
apply to an artist in fiction. She does not betray any religious bias in
her novels, which is all the more remarkable now that we find it in these
essays. Nor is it at all remarkable that this bias is so very easily
discovered in the novels by those who have found it in her essays!
Whatever opinions she may have expressed in her critical reviews, she is
not the Evangelical, or the Puritan, or the Jew, or the Methodist, or the
Dissenting Minister, or the Churchman, any more than she is the Radical,
the Liberal, or the Tory, who talks in the pages of her fiction.
Every side has its say, every prejudice its voice, and every prejudice
and side and vagary even has the philosophical reason given for it, and
the charitable explanation applied to it. She analyzes the religious
motives without obtrusive criticism or acrid cynicism or nauseous
cant—whether of the orthodox or heretical form.
The art of fiction has nothing more elevated, or more touching, or fairer
to every variety of religious experience, than the delineation of the
motives that actuated Dinah Morris the Methodist preacher, Deronda the
Jew, Dorothea the Puritan, Adam and Seth Bede, and Janet Dempster.
Who can object to this? “Religious ideas have the fate of melodies,
which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of
instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until
people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”
Is it not one of the “mixed results of revivals” that “some gain a
religious vocabulary rather than a religious experience?” Is there a
descendant of the Puritans who will not relish the fair play of this?
“They might give the name of piety to much that was only Puritanic
egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin, but they had
at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and
color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total
blindness, which sees no distinction of color at all.” Is not Adam Bede
justified in saying that “to hear some preachers you’d think a man must
be doing nothing all his life but shutting his eyes and looking at what’s
going on in the inside of him,” or that “the doctrines are like finding
names for your feelings so that you can talk of them when you’ve never
known them?” Read all she has said before you object to anything she has
said. Then see whether you will find fault with her for delineating the
motives of those with whom “great illusions” are mistaken for “great
faith;” of those “whose celestial intimacies do not improve their
domestic manners,” however “holy” they may claim to be; of those who
“contrive to conciliate the consciousness of filthy rags with the best
damask;” of those “whose imitative piety and native worldliness is
equally sincere;” of those who “think the invisible powers will be
soothed by a bland parenthesis here and there, coming from a man of
property”—parenthetical recognition of the Almighty! May not “religious
scruples be like spilled needles, making one afraid of treading or
sitting down, or even eating?”
But if this is a great mind fascinated with the insoluble enigma of human
motives, it is a mind profoundly in sympathy with those who are puzzling
hopelessly over the riddle or are struggling hopelessly in its toils.
She is “on a level and in the press with them as they struggle their way
along the stony road through the crowd of unloving fellow-men.” She says
“the only true knowledge of our fellows is that which enables us to feel
with them, which gives us a finer ear for the heart-pulses that are
beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.” No artist
in fiction ever had a finer ear or a more human sympathy for the
straggler who “pushes manfully on” and “falls at last,” leaving “the
crowd to close over the space he has left.” Her extraordinary skill in
disclosing “the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts which
constitute a man’s critical actions,” only makes her the more charitable
in judging them. “Until we know what this combination has been, or will
be, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about” the character
that results. “There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first
turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the
change. And for this reason the second wrong presents itself to him in
the guise of the only practicable right.” There is nothing of the spirit
of “served him right,” or “just what she deserved,” or “they ought to
have known better,” in George Eliot. That is not in her line. The
opposite of that is exactly in her line. This is characteristic of her:
“In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have
no picturesque or sentimental wretchedness! And it is so needful we
should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite
out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only
fit a world of extremes.” She does not leave them out. Her books are
full of them, and of a Christly charity and plea for them. Who can ever
forget little Tiny, “hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in
the breast of the bird that has fluttered down to its nest with the
long-sought food, and has found the nest torn and empty?” There is
nothing in fiction to surpass in pathos the picture of the death of Mrs.
Amos Barton. George Eliot’s fellow-feeling comes of the habit she
ascribes to Daniel Deronda, “the habit of thinking herself imaginatively
into the experience of others.” That is the reason why her novels come
home so pitilessly to those who have had a deep experience of human life.
These are the men and women whom she fascinates and alienates. I know
strong men and brave women who are afraid of her books, and say so. It
is because of her realness, her unrelenting fidelity to human nature and
human life. It is because the analysis is so delicate, subtle, and
far-in. Hence the atmosphere of sadness that pervades her pages. It was
unavoidable. To see only the behavior, as Dickens did, amuses us; to
study only the motive at the root of the behavior, as George Eliot does,
saddens us. The humor of Mrs. Poyser and the wit of Mrs. Transome only
deepen the pathos by relieving it. There is hardly a sarcasm in these
books but has its pensive undertone.
It is all in the key of “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon,” and that
would be an appropriate key for a requiem over the grave of George Eliot.
All her writings are now before the world, and are accessible to all.
They have taken their place, and will keep their place, high among the
writings of those of our age who have made that age illustrious in the
history of the English tongue.
THE ESSAYS OF “GEORGE ELIOT.”
I. CARLYLE’S LIFE OF STERLING.
As soon as the closing of the Great Exhibition afforded a reasonable hope
that there would once more be a reading public, “The Life of Sterling”
appeared. A new work by Carlyle must always be among the literary births
eagerly chronicled by the journals and greeted by the public. In a book
of such parentage we care less about the subject than about its
treatment, just as we think the “Portrait of a Lord” worth studying if it
come from the pencil of a Vandyck. The life of John Sterling, however,
has intrinsic interest, even if it be viewed simply as the struggle of a
restless aspiring soul, yearning to leave a distinct impress of itself on
the spiritual development of humanity, with that fell disease which, with
a refinement of torture, heightens the susceptibility and activity of the
faculties, while it undermines their creative force. Sterling, moreover,
was a man thoroughly in earnest, to whom poetry and philosophy were not
merely another form of paper currency or a ladder to fame, but an end in
themselves—one of those finer spirits with whom, amid the jar and hubbub
of our daily life,
“The melodies abide
Of the everlasting chime.”
But his intellect was active and rapid, rather than powerful, and in all
his writings we feel the want of a stronger electric current to give that
vigor of conception and felicity of expression, by which we distinguish
the undefinable something called genius; while his moral nature, though
refined and elevated, seems to have been subordinate to his intellectual
tendencies and social qualities, and to have had itself little
determining influence on his life. His career was less exceptional than
his character: a youth marked by delicate health and studious tastes, a
short-lived and not very successful share in the management of the
_Athenæum_, a fever of sympathy with Spanish patriots, arrested before it
reached a dangerous crisis by an early love affair ending in marriage, a
fifteen months’ residence in the West Indies, eight months of curate’s
duty at Herstmonceux, relinquished on the ground of failing health, and
through his remaining years a succession of migrations to the South in
search of a friendly climate, with the occasional publication of an
“article,” a tale, or a poem in _Blackwood_ or elsewhere—this, on the
prosaic background of an easy competence, was what made up the outer
tissue of Sterling’s existence. The impression of his intellectual power
on his personal friends seems to have been produced chiefly by the
eloquence and brilliancy of his conversation; but the mere reader of his
works and letters would augur from them neither the wit nor the _curiosa
felicitas_ of epithet and imagery, which would rank him with the men
whose sayings are thought worthy of perpetuation in books of table-talk
and “ana.” The public, then, since it is content to do without
biographies of much more remarkable men, cannot be supposed to have felt
any pressing demand even for a single life of Sterling; still less, it
might be thought, when so distinguished a writer as Archdeacon Hare had
furnished this, could there be any need for another. But, in opposition
to the majority of Mr. Carlyle’s critics, we agree with him that the
first life is properly the justification of the second. Even among the
readers personally unacquainted with Sterling, those who sympathized with
his ultimate alienation from the Church, rather than with his transient
conformity, were likely to be dissatisfied with the entirely apologetic
tone of Hare’s life, which, indeed, is confessedly an incomplete
presentation of Sterling’s mental course after his opinions diverged from
those of his clerical biographer; while those attached friends (and
Sterling possessed the happy magic that secures many such) who knew him
best during this latter part of his career, would naturally be pained to
have it represented, though only by implication, as a sort of deepening
declension ending in a virtual retraction. Of such friends Carlyle was
the most eminent, and perhaps the most highly valued, and, as co-trustee
with Archdeacon Hare of Sterling’s literary character and writings, he
felt a kind of responsibility that no mistaken idea of his departed
friend should remain before the world without correction. Evidently,
however, his “Life of Sterling” was not so much the conscientious
discharge of a trust as a labor of love, and to this is owing its strong
charm. Carlyle here shows us his “sunny side.” We no longer see him
breathing out threatenings and slaughter as in the Latter-Day Pamphlets,
but moving among the charities and amenities of life, loving and
beloved—a Teufelsdröckh still, but humanized by a Blumine worthy of him.
We have often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently to
the task of the biographer—that when some great or good personage dies,
instead of the dreary three or five volumed compilations of letter, and
diary, and detail, little to the purpose, which two thirds of the reading
public have not the chance, nor the other third the inclination, to read,
we could have a real “Life,” setting forth briefly and vividly the man’s
inward and outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to make clear
the meaning which his experience has for his fellows. A few such lives
(chiefly, indeed, autobiographies) the world possesses, and they have,
perhaps, been more influential on the formation of character than any
other kind of reading. But the conditions required for the perfection of
life writing—personal intimacy, a loving and poetic nature which sees the
beauty and the depth of familiar things, and the artistic power which
seizes characteristic points and renders them with lifelike effect—are
seldom found in combination. “The Life of Sterling” is an instance of
this rare conjunction. Its comparatively tame scenes and incidents
gather picturesqueness and interest under the rich lights of Carlyle’s
mind. We are told neither too little nor too much; the facts noted, the
letters selected, are all such as serve to give the liveliest conception
of what Sterling was and what he did; and though the book speaks much of
other persons, this collateral matter is all a kind of scene-painting,
and is accessory to the main purpose. The portrait of Coleridge, for
example, is precisely adapted to bring before us the intellectual region
in which Sterling lived for some time before entering the Church. Almost
every review has extracted this admirable description, in which genial
veneration and compassion struggle with irresistible satire; but the
emphasis of quotation cannot be too often given to the following pregnant
paragraph:
“The truth is, I now see Coleridge’s talk and speculation was the
emblem of himself. In it, as in him, a ray of heavenly inspiration
struggled, in a tragically ineffectual degree, with the weakness of
flesh and blood. He says once, he ‘had skirted the howling deserts
of infidelity.’ This was evident enough; but he had not had the
courage, in defiance of pain and terror, to press resolutely across
said deserts to the new firm lands of faith beyond; he preferred to
create logical _fata-morganas_ for himself on this hither side, and
laboriously solace himself with these.”
The above mentioned step of Sterling—his entering the Church—is the point
on which Carlyle is most decidedly at issue with Archdeacon Hare. The
latter holds that had Sterling’s health permitted him to remain in the
Church, he would have escaped those aberrations from orthodoxy, which, in
the clerical view, are to be regarded as the failure and shipwreck of his
career, apparently thinking, like that friend of Arnold’s who recommended
a curacy as the best means of clearing up Trinitarian difficulties, that
“orders” are a sort of spiritual backboard, which, by dint of obliging a
man to look as if he were strait, end by making him so. According to
Carlyle, on the contrary, the real “aberration” of Sterling was his
choice of the clerical profession, which was simply a mistake as to his
true vocation:
“Sterling,” he says, “was not intrinsically, nor had ever been in the
highest or chief degree, a devotional mind. Of course all excellence
in man, and worship as the supreme excellence, was part of the
inheritance of this gifted man; but if called to define him, I should
say artist, not saint, was the real bent of his being.”
Again:
“No man of Sterling’s veracity, had he clearly consulted his own
heart, or had his own heart been capable of clearly responding, and
not been bewildered by transient fantasies and theosophic moonshine,
could have undertaken this function. His heart would have answered,
‘No, thou canst not. What is incredible to thee, thou shalt not, at
thy soul’s peril, attempt to believe! Elsewhither for a refuge, or
die here. Go to perdition if thou must, but not with a lie in thy
mouth; by the eternal Maker, no!’”
From the period when Carlyle’s own acquaintance with Sterling commenced,
the Life has a double interest, from the glimpses it gives us of the
writer, as well as of his hero. We are made present at their first
introduction to each other; we get a lively idea of their colloquies and
walks together, and in this easy way, without any heavy disquisition or
narrative, we obtain a clear insight into Sterling’s character and mental
progress. Above all, we are gladdened with a perception of the affinity
that exists between noble souls, in spite of diversity in ideas—in what
Carlyle calls “the logical outcome” of the faculties. This “Life of
Sterling” is a touching monument of the capability human nature possesses
of the highest love, the love of the good and beautiful in character,
which is, after all, the essence of piety. The style of the work, too,
is for the most part at once pure and rich; there are passages of deep
pathos which come upon the reader like a strain of solemn music, and
others which show that aptness of epithet, that masterly power of close
delineation, in which, perhaps, no writer has excelled Carlyle.
We have said that we think this second “Life of Sterling” justified by
the first; but were it not so, the book would justify itself.
II. WOMAN IN FRANCE: MADAME DE SABLÉ. {31}
In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, leaving a library
entirely composed of works written by women, in various languages, and
this library amounted to nearly 32,000 volumes. We will not hazard any
conjecture as to the proportion of these volumes which a severe judge,
like the priest in Don Quixote, would deliver to the flames, but for our
own part, most of these we should care to rescue would be the works of
French women. With a few remarkable exceptions, our own feminine
literature is made up of books which could have been better written by
men—books which have the same relation to literature is general, as
academic prize poems have to poetry: when not a feeble imitation, they
are usually an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the
swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire. Few English women have
written so much like a woman as Richardson’s Lady G. Now we think it an
immense mistake to maintain that there is no sex in literature. Science
has no sex: the mere knowing and reasoning faculties, if they act
correctly, must go through the same process, and arrive at the same
result. But in art and literature, which imply the action of the entire
being, in which every fibre of the nature is engaged, in which every
peculiar modification of the individual makes itself felt, woman has
something specific to contribute. Under every imaginable social
condition, she will necessarily have a class of sensations and
emotions—the maternal ones—which must remain unknown to man; and the fact
of her comparative physical weakness, which, however it may have been
exaggerated by a vicious civilization, can never be cancelled, introduces
a distinctively feminine condition into the wondrous chemistry of the
affections and sentiments, which inevitably gives rise to distinctive
forms and combinations. A certain amount of psychological difference
between man and woman necessarily arises out of the difference of sex,
and instead of being destined to vanish before a complete development of
woman’s intellectual and moral nature, will be a permanent source of
variety and beauty as long as the tender light and dewy freshness of
morning affect us differently from the strength and brilliancy of the
midday sun. And those delightful women of France, who from the beginning
of the seventeenth to the close of the eighteenth century, formed some of
the brightest threads in the web of political and literary history, wrote
under circumstances which left the feminine character of their minds
uncramped by timidity, and unstrained by mistaken effort. They were not
trying to make a career for themselves; they thought little, in many
cases not at all, of the public; they wrote letters to their lovers and
friends, memoirs of their every-day lives, romances in which they gave
portraits of their familiar acquaintances, and described the tragedy or
comedy which was going on before their eyes. Always refined and
graceful, often witty, sometimes judicious, they wrote what they saw,
thought, and felt in their habitual language, without proposing any model
to themselves, without any intention to prove that women could write as
well as men, without affecting manly views or suppressing womanly ones.
One may say, at least with regard to the women of the seventeenth
century, that their writings were but a charming accident of their more
charming lives, like the petals which the wind shakes from the rose in
its bloom. And it is but a twin fact with this, that in France alone
woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in
France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current
through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy
and blurred; in France alone, if the writings of women were swept away, a
serious gap would be made in the national history.
Patriotic gallantry may perhaps contend that English women could, if they
had liked, have written as well as their neighbors; but we will leave the
consideration of that question to the reviewers of the literature that
might have been. In the literature that actually is, we must turn to
France for the highest examples of womanly achievement in almost every
department. We confess ourselves unacquainted with the productions of
those awful women of Italy, who held professorial chairs, and were great
in civil and canon law; we have made no researches into the catacombs of
female literature, but we think we may safely conclude that they would
yield no rivals to that which is still unburied; and here, we suppose,
the question of pre-eminence can only lie between England and France.
And to this day, Madame de Sévigné remains the single instance of a woman
who is supreme in a class of literature which has engaged the ambition of
men; Madame Dacier still reigns the queen of blue stockings, though women
have long studied Greek without shame; {33} Madame de Staël’s name still
rises first to the lips when we are asked to mention a woman of great
intellectual power; Madame Roland is still the unrivalled type of the
sagacious and sternly heroic, yet lovable woman; George Sand is the
unapproached artist who, to Jean Jacques’ eloquence and deep sense of
external nature, unites the clear delineation of character and the tragic
depth of passion. These great names, which mark different epochs, soar
like tall pines amidst a forest of less conspicuous, but not less
fascinating, female writers; and beneath these, again, are spread, like a
thicket of hawthorns, eglantines, and honey-suckles, the women who are
known rather by what they stimulated men to write, than by what they
wrote themselves—the women whose tact, wit, and personal radiance created
the atmosphere of the _Salon_, where literature, philosophy, and science,
emancipated from the trammels of pedantry and technicality, entered on a
brighter stage of existence.
What were the causes of this earlier development and more abundant
manifestation of womanly intellect in France? The primary one, perhaps,
lies in the physiological characteristics of the Gallic race—the small
brain and vivacious temperament which permit the fragile system of woman
to sustain the superlative activity requisite for intellectual
creativeness; while, on the other hand, the larger brain and slower
temperament of the English and Germans are, in the womanly organization,
generally dreamy and passive. The type of humanity in the latter may be
grander, but it requires a larger sum of conditions to produce a perfect
specimen. Throughout the animal world, the higher the organization, the
more frequent is the departure from the normal form; we do not often see
imperfectly developed or ill-made insects, but we rarely see a perfectly
developed, well-made man. And thus the _physique_ of a woman may suffice
as the substratum for a superior Gallic mind, but is too thin a soil for
a superior Teutonic one. Our theory is borne out by the fact that among
our own country-women those who distinguish themselves by literary
production more frequently approach the Gallic than the Teutonic type;
they are intense and rapid rather than comprehensive. The woman of large
capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical
conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous
activity; the voltaic-pile is not strong enough to produce
crystallizations; phantasms of great ideas float through her mind, but
she has not the spell which will arrest them, and give them fixity.
This, more than unfavorable external circumstances, is, we think, the
reason why woman has not yet contributed any new form to art, any
discovery in science, any deep-searching inquiry in philosophy. The
necessary physiological conditions are not present in her. That under
more favorable circumstances in the future, these conditions may prove
compatible with the feminine organization, it would be rash to deny. For
the present, we are only concerned with our theory so far as it presents
a physiological basis for the intellectual effectiveness of French women.
A secondary cause was probably the laxity of opinion and practice with
regard to the marriage-tie. Heaven forbid that we should enter on a
defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage! But it is
undeniable that unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, and
grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring
women into more intelligent sympathy with men, and to heighten and
complicate their share in the political drama. The quiescence and
security of the conjugal relation are doubtless favorable to the
manifestation of the highest qualities by persons who have already
attained a high standard of culture, but rarely foster a passion
sufficient to rouse all the faculties to aid in winning or retaining its
beloved object—to convert indolence into activity, indifference into
ardent partisanship, dulness into perspicuity. Gallantry and intrigue
are sorry enough things in themselves, but they certainly serve better to
arouse the dormant faculties of woman than embroidery and domestic
drudgery, especially when, as in the high society of France in the
seventeenth century, they are refined by the influence of Spanish
chivalry, and controlled by the spirit of Italian causticity. The dreamy
and fantastic girl was awakened to reality by the experience of wifehood
and maternity, and became capable of loving, not a mere phantom of her
own imagination, but a living man, struggling with the hatreds and
rivalries of the political arena; she espoused his quarrels, she made
herself, her fortune, and her influence, the stepping-stones of his
ambition; and the languid beauty, who had formerly seemed ready to “die
of a rose,” was seen to become the heroine of an insurrection. The vivid
interest in affairs which was thus excited in woman must obviously have
tended to quicken her intellect, and give it a practical application; and
the very sorrows—the heart-pangs and regrets which are inseparable from a
life of passion—deepened her nature by the questioning of self and
destiny which they occasioned, and by the energy demanded to surmount
them and live on. No wise person, we imagine, wishes to restore the
social condition of France in the seventeenth century, or considers the
ideal programme of woman’s life to be a _marriage de convenance_ at
fifteen, a career of gallantry from twenty to eight-and-thirty, and
penitence and piety for the rest of her days. Nevertheless, that social
condition has its good results, as much as the madly superstitious
Crusades had theirs.
But the most indisputable source of feminine culture and development in
France was the influence of the _salons_, which, as all the world knows,
were _réunions_ of both sexes, where conversation ran along the whole
gamut of subjects, from the frothiest _vers de société_ to the philosophy
of Descartes. Richelieu had set the fashion of uniting a taste for
letters with the habits of polite society and the pursuits of ambition;
and in the first quarter of the seventeenth century there were already
several hôtels in Paris, varying in social position from the closest
proximity of the Court to the debatable ground of the aristocracy and the
bourgeoisie, which served as a rendezvous for different circles of
people, bent on entertaining themselves either by showing talent or
admiring it. The most celebrated of these rendezvous was the Hôtel de
Rambouillet, which was at the culmination of its glory in 1630, and did
not become quite extinct until 1648, when the troubles of the Fronde
commencing, its _habitués_ were dispersed or absorbed by political
interests. The presiding genius of this _salon_, the Marquise de
Rambouillet, was the very model of the woman who can act as anamalgam to
the most incongruous elements; beautiful, but not preoccupied by
coquetry, or passion; an enthusiastic admirer of talent, but with no
pretensions to talent on her own part; exquisitely refined in language
and manners, but warm and generous withal; not given to entertain her
guests with her own compositions, or to paralyze them by her universal
knowledge. She had once _meant_ to learn Latin, but had been prevented
by an illness; perhaps she was all the better acquainted with Italian and
Spanish productions, which, in default of a national literature, were
then the intellectual pabulum of all cultivated persons in France who are
unable to read the classics. In her mild, agreeable presence was
accomplished that blending of the high-toned chivalry of Spain with the
caustic wit and refined irony of Italy, which issued in the creation of a
new standard of taste—the combination of the utmost exaltation in
sentiment with the utmost simplicity of language. Women are peculiarly
fitted to further such a combination—first, from their greater tendency
to mingle affection and imagination with passion, and thus subtilize it
into sentiment; and next, from that dread of what overtaxes their
intellectual energies, either by difficulty, or monotony, which gives
them an instinctive fondness for lightness of treatment and airiness of
expression, thus making them cut short all prolixity and reject all
heaviness. When these womanly characteristics were brought into
conversational contact with the materials furnished by such minds as
those of Richelieu, Corneille, the Great Condé, Balzac, and Bossuet, it
is no wonder that the result was something piquant and charming. Those
famous _habitués_ of the Hôtel de Rambouillet did not, apparently, first
lay themselves out to entertain the ladies with grimacing “small-talk,”
and then take each other by the sword-knot to discuss matters of real
interest in a corner; they rather sought to present their best ideas in
the guise most acceptable to intelligent and accomplished women. And the
conversation was not of literature only: war, politics, religion, the
lightest details of daily news—everything was admissible, if only it were
treated with refinement and intelligence. The Hôtel de Rambouillet was
no mere literary _réunion_; it included _hommes d’affaires_ and soldiers
as well as authors, and in such a circle women would not become _bas
bleus_ or dreamy moralizers, ignorant of the world and of human nature,
but intelligent observers of character and events. It is easy to
understand, however, that with the herd of imitators who, in Paris and
the provinces, aped the style of this famous _salon_, simplicity
degenerated into affectation, and nobility of sentiment was replaced by
an inflated effort to outstrip nature, so that the _genre précieux_ drew
down the satire, which reached its climax in the _Précieuses Ridicules_
and _Les Femmes Savantes_, the former of which appeared in 1660, and the
latter in 1673. But Madelon and Caltros are the lineal descendants of
Mademoiselle Scudery and her satellites, quite as much as of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet. The society which assembled every Saturday in her _salon_
was exclusively literary, and although occasionally visited by a few
persons of high birth, bourgeois in its tone, and enamored of madrigals,
sonnets, stanzas, and _bouts rimés_. The affectation that decks trivial
things in fine language belongs essentially to a class which sees another
above it, and is uneasy in the sense of its inferiority; and this
affectation is precisely the opposite of the original _genre précieux_.
Another centre from which feminine influence radiated into the national
literature was the Palais du Luxembourg, where Mademoiselle d’Orleans, in
disgrace at court on account of her share in the Fronde, held a little
court of her own, and for want of anything else to employ her active
spirit busied herself with literature. One fine morning it occurred to
this princess to ask all the persons who frequented her court, among whom
were Madame de Sévigné, Madame de la Fayette, and La Rochefoucauld, to
write their own portraits, and she at once set the example. It was
understood that defects and virtues were to be spoken of with like
candor. The idea was carried out; those who were not clever or bold
enough to write for themselves employing the pen of a friend.
“Such,” says M. Cousin, “was the pastime of Mademoiselle and her
friends during the years 1657 and 1658: from this pastime proceeded a
complete literature. In 1659 Ségrais revised these portraits, added
a considerable number in prose and even in verse, and published the
whole in a handsome quarto volume, admirably printed, and now become
very rare, under the title, ‘Divers Portraits.’ Only thirty copies
were printed, not for sale, but to be given as presents by
Mademoiselle. The work had a prodigious success. That which had
made the fortune of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s romances—the pleasure
of seeing one’s portrait a little flattered, curiosity to see that of
others, the passion which the middle class always have had and will
have for knowing what goes on in the aristocratic world (at that time
not very easy of access), the names of the illustrious persons who
were here for the first time described physically and morally with
the utmost detail, great ladies transformed all at once into writers,
and unconsciously inventing a new manner of writing, of which no book
gave the slightest idea, and which was the ordinary manner of
speaking of the aristocracy; this undefinable mixture of the natural,
the easy, and at the same time of the agreeable, and supremely
distinguished—all this charmed the court and the town, and very early
in the year 1659 permission was asked of Mademoiselle to give a new
edition of the privileged book for the use of the public in general.”
The fashion thus set, portraits multiplied throughout France, until in
1688 La Bruyère adopted the form in his “Characters,” and ennobled it by
divesting it of personality. We shall presently see that a still greater
work than La Bruyère’s also owed its suggestion to a woman, whose salon
was hardly a less fascinating resort than the Hôtel de Rambouillet
itself.
In proportion as the literature of a country is enriched and culture
becomes more generally diffused, personal influence is less effective in
the formation of taste and in the furtherance of social advancement. It
is no longer the coterie which acts on literature, but literature which
acts on the coterie; the circle represented by the word _public_ is ever
widening, and ambition, poising itself in order to hit a more distant
mark, neglects the successes of the salon. What was once lavished
prodigally in conversation is reserved for the volume or the “article,”
and the effort is not to betray originality rather than to communicate
it. As the old coach-roads have sunk into disuse through the creation of
railways, so journalism tends more and more to divert information from
the channel of conversation into the channel of the Press; no one is
satisfied with a more circumscribed audience than that very indeterminate
abstraction “the public,” and men find a vent for their opinions not in
talk, but in “copy.” We read the _Athenæum_ askance at the tea-table,
and take notes from the _Philosophical Journal_ at a soirée; we invite
our friends that we may thrust a book into their hands, and presuppose an
exclusive desire in the “ladies” to discuss their own matters, “that we
may crackle the _Times_” at our ease. In fact, the evident tendency of
things to contract personal communication within the narrowest limits
makes us tremble lest some further development of the electric telegraph
should reduce us to a society of mutes, or to a sort of insects
communicating by ingenious antenna of our own invention. Things were far
from having reached this pass in the last century; but even then
literature and society had outgrown the nursing of coteries, and although
many _salons_ of that period were worthy successors of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet, they were simply a recreation, not an influence. Enviable
evenings, no doubt, were passed in them; and if we could be carried back
to any of them at will, we should hardly know whether to choose the
Wednesday dinner at Madame Geoffrin’s, with d’Alembert, Mademoiselle de
l’Espinasse, Grimm, and the rest, or the graver society which, thirty
years later, gathered round Condorcet and his lovely young wife. The
_salon_ retained its attractions, but its power was gone: the stream of
life had become too broad and deep for such small rills to affect it.
A fair comparison between the French women of the seventeenth century and
those of the eighteenth would, perhaps, have a balanced result, though it
is common to be a partisan on this subject. The former have more
exaltation, perhaps more nobility of sentiment, and less consciousness in
their intellectual activity—less of the _femme auteur_, which was
Rousseau’s horror in Madame d’Epinay; but the latter have a richer fund
of ideas—not more ingenuity, but the materials of an additional century
for their ingenuity to work upon. The women of the seventeenth century,
when love was on the wane, took to devotion, at first mildly and by
halves, as English women take to caps, and finally without compromise;
with the women of the eighteenth century, Bossuet and Massillon had given
way to Voltaire and Rousseau; and when youth and beauty failed, then they
were thrown on their own moral strength.
M. Cousin is especially enamored of the women of the seventeenth century,
and relieves himself from his labors in philosophy by making researches
into the original documents which throw light upon their lives. Last
year he gave us some results of these researches in a volume on the youth
of the Duchess de Longueville; and he has just followed it up with a
second volume, in which he further illustrates her career by tracing it
in connection with that of her friend, Madame de Sablé. The materials to
which he has had recourse for this purpose are chiefly two celebrated
collections of manuscript: that of Conrart, the first secretary to the
French Academy, one of those universally curious people who seem made for
the annoyance of contemporaries and the benefit of posterity; and that of
Valant, who was at once the physician, the secretary, and general steward
of Madame de Sablé, and who, with or without her permission, possessed
himself of the letters addressed to her by her numerous correspondents
during the latter part of her life, and of various papers having some
personal or literary interest attached to them. From these stores M.
Cousin has selected many documents previously unedited; and though he
often leaves us something to desire in the arrangement of his materials,
this volume of his on Madame de Sablé is very acceptable to us, for she
interests us quite enough to carry us through more than three hundred
pages of rather scattered narrative, and through an appendix of
correspondence in small type. M. Cousin justly appreciates her character
as “un heureux mélange de raison, d’esprit, d’agrément, et de bonté;” and
perhaps there are few better specimens of the woman who is extreme in
nothing but sympathetic in all things; who affects us by no special
quality, but by her entire being; whose nature has no _tons criards_, but
is like those textures which, from their harmonious blending of all
colors, give repose to the eye, and do not weary us though we see them
every day. Madame de Sablé is also a striking example of the one order
of influence which woman has exercised over literature in France; and on
this ground, as well as intrinsically, she is worth studying. If the
reader agrees with us he will perhaps be inclined, as we are, to dwell a
little on the chief points in her life and character.
Madeline de Souvré, daughter of the Marquis of Courtenvaux, a nobleman
distinguished enough to be chosen as governor of Louis XIII., was born in
1599, on the threshold of that seventeenth century, the brilliant genius
of which is mildly reflected in her mind and history. Thus, when in 1635
her more celebrated friend, Mademoiselle de Bourbon, afterward the
Duchess de Longueville, made her appearance at the Hôtel de Rambouillet,
Madame de Sablé had nearly crossed that tableland of maturity which
precedes a woman’s descent toward old age. She had been married in 1614,
to Philippe Emanuel de Laval-Montmorency, Seigneur de Bois-Dauphin, and
Marquis de Sablé, of whom nothing further is known than that he died in
1640, leaving her the richer by four children, but with a fortune
considerably embarrassed. With beauty and high rank added to the mental
attractions of which we have abundant evidence, we may well believe that
Madame de Sablé’s youth was brilliant. For her beauty, we have the
testimony of sober Madame de Motteville, who also speaks of her as having
“beaucoup de lumière et de sincérité;” and in the following passage very
graphically indicates one phase of Madame de Sablé’s character:
“The Marquise de Sablé was one of those whose beauty made the most
noise when the Queen came into France. But if she was amiable, she
was still more desirous of appearing so; this lady’s self-love
rendered her too sensitive to the regard which men exhibited toward
her. There yet existed in France some remains of the politeness
which Catherine de Medici had introduced from Italy, and the new
dramas, with all the other works in prose and verse, which came from
Madrid, were thought to have such great delicacy, that she (Madame de
Sablé) had conceived a high idea of the gallantry which the Spaniards
had learned from the Moors.
“She was persuaded that men can, without crime, have tender
sentiments for women—that the desire of pleasing them led men to the
greatest and finest actions—roused their intelligence, and inspired
them with liberality, and all sorts of virtues; but, on the other
hand, women, who were the ornament of the world, and made to be
served and adored, ought not to admit anything from them but their
respectful attentions. As this lady supported her views with much
talent and great beauty, she had given them authority in her time,
and the number and consideration of those who continued to associate
with her have caused to subsist in our day what the Spaniards call
_finezas_.”
Here is the grand element of the original _femme précieuse_, and it
appears farther, in a detail also reported by Madame de Motteville, that
Madame de Sablé had a passionate admirer in the accomplished Duc de
Montmorency, and apparently reciprocated his regard; but discovering (at
what period of their attachment is unknown) that he was raising a lover’s
eyes toward the queen, she broke with him at once. “I have heard her
say,” tells Madame de Motteville, “that her pride was such with regard to
the Duc de Montmorency, that at the first demonstrations which he gave of
his change, she refused to see him any more, being unable to receive with
satisfaction attentions which she had to share with the greatest princess
in the world.” There is no evidence except the untrustworthy assertion
of Tallement de Réaux, that Madame de Sablé had any other _liaison_ than
this; and the probability of the negative is increased by the ardor of
her friendships. The strongest of these was formed early in life with
Mademoiselle Dona d’Attichy, afterward Comtesse de Maure; it survived the
effervescence of youth, and the closest intimacy of middle age, and was
only terminated by the death of the latter in 1663. A little incident in
this friendship is so characteristic in the transcendentalism which was
then carried into all the affections, that it is worth relating at
length. Mademoiselle d’Attichy, in her grief and indignation at
Richelieu’s treatment of her relative, quitted Paris, and was about to
join her friend at Sablé, when she suddenly discovered that Madame de
Sablé, in a letter to Madame de Rambouillet, had said that her greatest
happiness would be to pass her life with Julie de Rambouillet, afterward
Madame de Montausier. To Anne d’Attichy this appears nothing less than
the crime of _lèse-amitié_. No explanations will appease her: she
refuses to accept the assurance that the offensive expression was used
simply out of unreflecting conformity to the style of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet—that it was mere “_galimatias_.” She gives up her journey,
and writes a letter, which is the only one Madame de Sablé chose to
preserve, when, in her period of devotion, she sacrificed the records of
her youth. Here it is:
“I have seen this letter in which you tell me there is so much
_galimatias_, and I assure you that I have not found any at all. On
the contrary, I find everything very plainly expressed, and among
others, one which is too explicit for my satisfaction—namely, what
you have said to Madame de Rambouillet, that if you tried to imagine
a perfectly happy life for yourself, it would be to pass it all alone
with Mademoiselle de Rambouillet. You know whether any one can be
more persuaded than I am of her merit; but I confess to you that that
has not prevented me from being surprised that you could entertain a
thought which did so great an injury to our friendship. As to
believing that you said this to one, and wrote it to the other,
simply for the sake of paying them an agreeable compliment, I have
too high an esteem for your courage to be able to imagine that
complaisance would cause you thus to betray the sentiments of your
heart, especially on a subject in which, as they were unfavorable to
me, I think you would have the more reason for concealing them, the
affection which I have for you being so well known to every one, and
especially to Mademoiselle de Rambouillet, so that I doubt whether
she will not have been more sensible of the wrong you have done me,
than of the advantage you have given her. The circumstance of this
letter falling into my hands has forcibly reminded me of these lines
of Bertaut:
“‘Malheureuse est l’ignorance
Et plus malheureux le savoir.”
“Having through this lost a confidence which alone rendered life
supportable to me, it is impossible for me to take the journey so
much thought of. For would there be any propriety in travelling
sixty miles in this season, in order to burden you with a person so
little suited to you, that after years of a passion without parallel,
you cannot help thinking that the greatest pleasure of your life
would be to pass it without her? I return, then, into my solitude,
to examine the defects which cause me so much unhappiness, and unless
I can correct them, I should have less joy than confusion in seeing
you.”
It speaks strongly for the charm of Madame de Sablé’s nature that she was
able to retain so susceptible a friend as Mademoiselle d’Attichy in spite
of numerous other friendships, some of which, especially that with Madame
de Longueville, were far from lukewarm—in spite too of a tendency in
herself to distrust the affection of others toward her, and to wait for
advances rather than to make them. We find many traces of this tendency
in the affectionate remonstrances addressed to her by Madame de
Longueville, now for shutting herself up from her friends, now for
doubting that her letters are acceptable. Here is a little passage from
one of these remonstrances which indicates a trait of Madame de Sablé,
and is in itself a bit of excellent sense, worthy the consideration of
lovers and friends in general: “I am very much afraid that if I leave to
you the care of letting me know when I can see you, I shall be a long
time without having that pleasure, and that nothing will incline you to
procure it me, for I have always observed a certain lukewarmness in your
friendship after our _explanations_, from which I have never seen you
thoroughly recover; and that is why I dread explanations, for however
good they may be in themselves, since they serve to reconcile people, it
must always be admitted, to their shame, that they are at least the
effect of a bad cause, and that if they remove it for a time they
_sometimes leave a certain facility in getting angry again_, which,
without diminishing friendship, renders its intercourse less agreeable.
It seems to me that I find all this in your behavior to me; so I am not
wrong in sending to know if you wish to have me to-day.” It is clear
that Madame de Sablé was far from having what Sainte-Beuve calls the one
fault of Madame Necker—absolute perfection. A certain exquisiteness in
her physical and moral nature was, as we shall see, the source of more
than one weakness, but the perception of these weaknesses, which is
indicated in Madame de Longueville’s letters, heightens our idea of the
attractive qualities which notwithstanding drew from her, at the sober
age of forty, such expressions as these: “I assure you that you are the
person in all the world whom it would be most agreeable to me to see, and
there is no one whose intercourse is a ground of truer satisfaction to
me. It is admirable that at all times, and amidst all changes, the taste
for your society remains in me; and, _if one ought to thank God for the
joys which do not tend to salvation_, I should thank him with all my
heart for having preserved that to me at a time in which he has taken
away from me all others.”
Since we have entered on the chapter of Madame de Sablé’s weaknesses,
this is the place to mention what was the subject of endless raillery
from her friends—her elaborate precaution about her health, and her dread
of infection, even from diseases the least communicable. Perhaps this
anxiety was founded as much on æsthetic as on physical grounds, on
disgust at the details of illness as much as on dread of suffering: with
a cold in the head or a bilious complaint, the exquisite _précieuse_ must
have been considerably less conscious of being “the ornament of the
world,” and “made to be adored.” Even her friendship, strong as it was,
was not strong enough to overcome her horror of contagion; for when
Mademoiselle de Bourbon, recently become Madame de Longueville, was
attacked by small-pox, Madame de Sablé for some time had not courage to
visit her, or even to see Mademoiselle de Rambouillet, who was assiduous
in her attendance on the patient. A little correspondence _à propos_ of
these circumstances so well exhibits the graceful badinage in which the
great ladies of that day were adepts, that we are attempted to quote one
short letter.
“_Mlle. de Rambouillet to the Marquise de Sablé_.”
“Mlle, de Chalais (_dame de compagnie_ to the Marquise) will please
to read this letter to Mme. la Marquise, _out of_ a draught.
“Madame, I do not think it possible to begin my treaty with you too
early, for I am convinced that between the first proposition made to
me that I should see you, and the conclusion, you will have so many
reflections to make, so many physicians to consult, and so many fears
to surmount, that I shall have full leisure to air myself. The
conditions which I offer to fulfil for this purpose are, not to visit
you until I have been three days absent from the Hôtel de Condé
(where Mme. de Longueville was ill), to choose a frosty day, not to
approach you within four paces, not to sit down on more than one
seat. You may also have a great fire in your room, burn juniper in
the four corners, surround yourself with imperial vinegar, with rue
and wormwood. If you can feel yourself safe under these conditions,
without my cutting off my hair, I swear to you to execute them
religiously; and if you want examples to fortify you, I can tell you
that the Queen consented to see M. Chaudebonne, when he had come
directly from Mme. de Bourbon’s room, and that Mme. d’Aiguillon, who
has good taste in such matters, and is free from reproach on these
points, has just sent me word that if I did not go to see her she
would come to me.”
Madame de Sablé betrays in her reply that she winces under this raillery,
and thus provokes a rather severe though polite rejoinder, which, added
to the fact that Madame de Longueville is convalescent, rouses her
courage to the pitch of paying the formidable visit. Mademoiselle de
Rambouillet, made aware through their mutual friend Voiture, that her
sarcasm has cut rather too deep, winds up the matter by writing that very
difficult production a perfectly conciliatory yet dignified apology.
Peculiarities like this always deepen with age, and accordingly, fifteen
years later, we find Madame D’Orleans in her “Princesse de Paphlagonia”—a
romance in which she describes her court, with the little quarrels and
other affairs that agitated it—giving the following amusing picture, or
rather caricature, of the extent to which Madame de Sablé carried her
pathological mania, which seems to have been shared by her friend the
Countess de Maure (Mademoiselle d’Attichy). In the romance, these two
ladies appear under the names of Princesse Parthénie and the Reine de
Mionie.
“There was not an hour in the day in which they did not confer
together on the means of avoiding death, and on the art of rendering
themselves immortal. Their conferences did not take place like those
of other people; the fear of breathing an air which was too cold or
top warm, the dread lest the wind should be too dry or too moist—in
short, the imagination that the weather might not be as temperate as
they thought necessary for the preservation of their health, caused
them to write letters from one room to the other. It would be
extremely fortunate if these notes could be found, and formed into a
collection. I am convinced that they would contain rules for the
regimen of life, precautions even as to the proper time for applying
remedies, and also remedies which Hippocrates and Galen, with all
their science, never heard of. Such a collection would be very
useful to the public, and would be highly profitable to the faculties
of Paris and Montpellier. If these letters were discovered, great
advantages of all kinds might be derived from them, for they were
princesses who had nothing mortal about them but the _knowledge_ that
they were mortal. In their writings might be learned all politeness
in style, and the most delicate manner of speaking on all subjects.
There is nothing with which they were not acquainted; they knew the
affairs of all the States in the world, through the share they had in
all the intrigues of its private members, either in matters of
gallantry, as in other things, on which their advice was necessary;
either to adjust embroilments and quarrels, or to excite them, for
the sake of the advantages which their friends could derive from
them;—in a word, they were persons through whose hands the secrets of
the whole world had to pass. The Princess Parthénie (Mme. de Sablé)
had a palate as delicate as her mind; nothing could equal the
magnificence of the entertainments she gave; all the dishes were
exquisite, and her cleanliness was beyond all that could be imagined.
It was in their time that writing came into use; previously nothing
was written but marriage contracts, and letters were never heard of;
thus it is to them that we owe a practice so convenient in
intercourse.”
Still later in 1669, when the most uncompromising of the Port Royalists
seemed to tax Madame de Sablé with lukewarmness that she did not join
them at Port-Royal-des-Champs, we find her writing to the stern M. de
Sévigny: “En vérité, je crois que je ne pourrois mieux faire que de tout
quitter et de m’en aller là. Mais que deviendroient ces frayeurs de
n’avoir pas de médicines à choisir, ni de chirurgien pour me saigner?”
Mademoiselle, as we have seen, hints at the love of delicate eating,
which many of Madame de Sablé’s friends numbered among her foibles,
especially after her religious career had commenced. She had a genius
in_ friandise_, and knew how to gratify the palate without offending the
highest sense of refinement. Her sympathetic nature showed itself in
this as in other things; she was always sending _bonnes bouches_ to her
friends, and trying to communicate to them her science and taste in the
affairs of the table. Madame de Longueville, who had not the luxurious
tendencies of her friend, writes: “Je vous demande au nom de Dieu, que
vous ne me prépariez aucun ragoût. Surtout ne me donnez point de festin.
Au nom de Dieu, qu’il n’y ait rien que ce qu’on peut manger, car vous
savez que c’est inutile pour moi; de plus j’en ai scrupule.” But other
friends had more appreciation of her niceties. Voiture thanks her for
her melons, and assures her that they are better than those of yesterday;
Madame de Choisy hopes that her ridicule of Jansenism will not provoke
Madame de Sablé to refuse her the receipt for salad; and La Rochefoucauld
writes: “You cannot do me a greater charity than to permit the bearer of
this letter to enter into the mysteries of your marmalade and your
genuine preserves, and I humbly entreat you to do everything you can in
his favor. If I could hope for two dishes of those preserves, which I
did not deserve to eat before, I should be indebted to you all my life.”
For our own part, being as far as possible from fraternizing with those
spiritual people who convert a deficiency into a principle, and pique
themselves on an obtuse palate as a point of superiority, we are not
inclined to number Madame de Sablé’s _friandise_ among her defects. M.
Cousin, too, is apologetic on this point. He says:
“It was only the excess of a delicacy which can be really understood,
and a sort of fidelity to the character of _précieuse_. As the
_précieuse_ did nothing according to common usage, she could not dine
like another. We have cited a passage from Mme. de Motteville, where
Mme. de Sablé is represented in her first youth at the Hôtel de
Rambouillet, maintaining that woman is born to be an ornament to the
world, and to receive the adoration of men. The woman worthy of the
name ought always to appear above material wants, and retain, even in
the most vulgar details of life, something distinguished and
purified. Eating is a very necessary operation, but one which is not
agreeable to the eye. Mme. de Sablé insisted on its being conducted
with a peculiar cleanliness. According to her it was not every woman
who could with impunity be at table in the presence of a lover; the
first distortion of the face, she said, would be enough to spoil all.
Gross meals made for the body merely ought to be abandoned to
_bourgeoises_, and the refined woman should appear to take a little
nourishment merely to sustain her, and even to divert her, as one
takes refreshments and ices. Wealth did not suffice for this: a
particular talent was required. Mme. de Sablé was a mistress in this
art. She had transported the aristocratic spirit, and the _genre
précieux_, good breeding and good taste, even into cookery. Her
dinners, without any opulence, were celebrated and sought after.”
It is quite in accordance with all this that Madame de Sablé should
delight in fine scents, and we find that she did; for being threatened,
in her Port Royal days, when she was at an advanced age, with the loss of
smell, and writing for sympathy and information to Mère Agnès, who had
lost that sense early in life, she receives this admonition from the
stern saint: “You would gain by this loss, my very dear sister, if you
made use of it as a satisfaction to God, for having had too much pleasure
in delicious scents.” Scarron describes her as
“La non pareille Bois-Dauphine,
_Entre dames perle très fine_,”
and the superlative delicacy implied by this epithet seems to have
belonged equally to her personal habits, her affections, and her
intellect.
Madame de Sablé’s life, for anything we know, flowed on evenly enough
until 1640, when the death of her husband threw upon her the care of an
embarrassed fortune. She found a friend in Réné de Longueil, Seigneur de
Maisons, of whom we are content to know no more than that he helped
Madame de Sablé to arrange her affairs, though only by means of
alienating from her family the estate of Sablé, that his house was her
refuge during the blockade of Paris in 1649, and that she was not
unmindful of her obligations to him, when, subsequently, her credit could
be serviceable to him at court. In the midst of these pecuniary troubles
came a more terrible trial—the loss of her favorite son, the brave and
handsome Guy de Laval, who, after a brilliant career in the campaigns of
Condé, was killed at the siege of Dunkirk, in 1646, when scarcely
four-and-twenty. The fine qualities of this young man had endeared him
to the whole army, and especially to Condé, had won him the hand of the
Chancellor Séguire’s daughter, and had thus opened to him the prospect of
the highest honors. His loss seems to have been the most real sorrow of
Madame de Sablé’s life. Soon after followed the commotions of the
Fronde, which put a stop to social intercourse, and threw the closest
friends into opposite ranks. According to Lenet, who relies on the
authority of Gourville, Madame de Sablé was under strong obligations to
the court, being in the receipt of a pension of 2000 crowns; at all
events, she adhered throughout to the Queen and Mazarin, but being as far
as possible from a fierce partisan, and given both by disposition and
judgment to hear both sides of the question, she acted as a conciliator,
and retained her friends of both parties. The Countess de Maure, whose
husband was the most obstinate of _frondeurs_, remained throughout her
most cherished friend, and she kept up a constant correspondence with the
lovely and intrepid heroine of the Fronde, Madame de Longueville. Her
activity was directed to the extinction of animosities, by bringing about
marriages between the Montagues and Capulets of the Fronde—between the
Prince de Condé, or his brother, and the niece of Mazarin, or between the
three nieces of Mazarin and the sons of three noblemen who were
distinguished leaders of the Fronde. Though her projects were not
realized, her conciliatory position enabled her to preserve all her
friendships intact, and when the political tempest was over, she could
assemble around her in her residence, in the Place Royal, the same
society as before. Madame de Sablé was now approaching her twelfth
_lustrum_, and though the charms of her mind and character made her more
sought after than most younger women, it is not surprising that, sharing
as she did in the religious ideas of her time, the concerns of
“salvation” seemed to become pressing. A religious retirement, which did
not exclude the reception of literary friends or the care for personal
comforts, made the most becoming frame for age and diminished fortune.
Jansenism was then to ordinary Catholicism what Puseyism is to ordinary
Church of Englandism in these days—it was a _récherché_ form of piety
unshared by the vulgar; and one sees at once that it must have special
attractions for the _précieuse_. Madame de Sablé, then, probably about
1655 or ’56, determined to retire to Port Royal, not because she was
already devout, but because she hoped to become so; as, however, she
wished to retain the pleasure of intercourse with friends who were still
worldly, she built for herself a set of apartments at once distinct from
the monastery and attached to it. Here, with a comfortable
establishment, consisting of her secretary, Dr. Valant, Mademoiselle de
Chalais, formerly her _dame de compagnie_, and now become her friend; an
excellent cook; a few other servants, and for a considerable time a
carriage and coachman; with her best friends within a moderate distance,
she could, as M. Cousin says, be out of the noise of the world without
altogether forsaking it, preserve her dearest friendships, and have
before her eyes edifying examples—“vaquer enfin à son aise aux soins de
son salut et à ceux de sa santé.”
We have hitherto looked only at one phase of Madame de Sablé’s character
and influence—that of the _précieuse_. But she was much more than this:
she was the valuable, trusted friend of noble women and distinguished
men; she was the animating spirit of a society, whence issued a new form
of French literature; she was the woman of large capacity and large
heart, whom Pascal sought to please, to whom Arnauld submitted the
Discourse prefixed to his “Logic,” and to whom La Rochefoucauld writes:
“Vous savez que je ne crois que vous êtes sur de certains chapitres, et
surtout sur les replis da cœur.” The papers preserved by her secretary,
Valant, show that she maintained an extensive correspondence with persons
of various rank and character; that her pen was untiring in the interest
of others; that men made her the depositary of their thoughts, women of
their sorrows; that her friends were as impatient, when she secluded
herself, as if they had been rival lovers and she a youthful beauty. It
is into her ear that Madame de Longueville pours her troubles and
difficulties, and that Madame de la Fayette communicates her little
alarms, lest young Count de St. Paul should have detected her intimacy
with La Rochefoucauld. {53} The few of Madame de Sablé’s letters which
survive show that she excelled in that epistolary style which was the
specialty of the Hôtel de Rambouillet: one to Madame de Montausier, in
favor of M. Périer, the brother-in-law of Pascal, is a happy mixture of
good taste and good sense; but among them all we prefer quoting one to
the Duchess de la Tremouille. It is light and pretty, and made out of
almost nothing, like soap, bubbles.
“Je croix qu’il n’y a que moi qui face si bien tout le contraire de
ce que je veux faire, car il est vrai qu’il n’y a personne que
j’honore plus que vous, et j’ai si bien fait qu’il est quasi
impossible que vous le puissiez croire. Ce n’estoit pas assez pour
vous persuader que je suis indigne de vos bonnes grâces et de votre
souvenir que d’avoir manqué fort longtemps à vous écrire; il falloit
encore retarder quinze jours à me donner l’honneur de répondre à
votre lettre. En vérité, Madame, cela me fait parôitre si coupable,
que vers tout autre que vous j’aimeroix mieux l’être en effet que
d’entreprendre une chose si difficile qu’ est celle de me justifier.
Mais je me sens si innocente dans mon âme, et j’ai tant d’estime, de
respect et d’affection pour vous, qu’il me semble que vous devez le
connôitre à cent lieues de distance d’ici, encore que je ne vous dise
pas un mot. C’est ce que me donne le courage de vous écrire à cette
heure, mais non pas ce qui m’en a empêché si longtemps. J’ai
commencé, a faillir par force, ayant eu beaucoup de maux, et depuis
je l’ai faite par honte, et je vous avoue que si je n’avois à cette
heure la confiance que vous m’avez donnée en me rassurant, et celle
que je tire de mes propres sentimens pour vous, je n’oserois jamais
entreprendre de vous faire souvenir de moi; mais je m’assure que vous
oublierez tout, sur la protestation que je vous fais de ne me laisser
plus endurcir en mes fautes et de demeurer inviolablement, Madame,
votre, etc.”
Was not the woman, who could unite the ease and grace indicated by this
letter, with an intellect that men thought worth consulting on matters of
reasoning and philosophy, with warm affections, untiring activity for
others, no ambition as an authoress, and an insight into _confitures_ and
_ragoûts_, a rare combination? No wonder that her _salon_ at Port Royal
was the favorite resort of such women as Madame de la Fayette, Madame de
Montausier, Madame de Longueville, and Madame de Hautefort; and of such
men as Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Nicole, and Domat. The collections of
Valant contain papers which show what were the habitual subjects of
conversation in this salon. Theology, of course, was a chief topic; but
physics and metaphysics had their turn, and still more frequently morals,
taken in their widest sense. There were “Conferences on Calvinism,” of
which an abstract is preserved. When Rohault invented his glass tubes to
serve for the barometrical experiments in which Pascal had roused a
strong interest, the Marquis de Sourdis entertained the society with a
paper entitled “Why Water Mounts in a Glass Tube.” Cartesianism was an
exciting topic here, as well as everywhere else in France; it had its
partisans and opponents, and papers were read containing “Thoughts on the
Opinions of M. Descartes.” These lofty matters were varied by
discussions on love and friendship, on the drama, and on most of the
things in heaven and earth which the philosophy of that day dreamt of.
Morals—generalizations on human affections, sentiments, and conduct—seem
to have been the favorite theme; and the aim was to reduce these
generalizations to their briefest form of expression, to give them the
epigrammatic turn which made them portable in the memory. This was the
specialty of Madame de Sablé’s circle, and was, probably, due to her own
tendency. As the Hôtel de Rambouillet was the nursery of graceful
letter-writing, and the Luxembourg of “portraits” and “characters,” so
Madame de Sablé’s _salon_ fostered that taste for the sententious style,
to which we owe, probably, some of the best _Pensées_ of Pascal, and
certainly, the “Maxims” of La Rochefoucauld. Madame de Sablé herself
wrote maxims, which were circulated among her friends; and, after her
death, were published by the Abbé d’Ailly. They have the excellent sense
and nobility of feeling which we should expect in everything of hers; but
they have no stamp of genius or individual character: they are, to the
“Maxims” of La Rochefoucauld, what the vase moulded in dull, heavy clay
is to the vase which the action of fire has made light, brittle, and
transparent. She also wrote a treatise on Education, which is much
praised by La Rochefoucauld and M. d’Andilly; but which seems no longer
to be found: probably it was not much more elaborate than her so-called
“Treatise on Friendship,” which is but a short string of maxims. Madame
de Sablé’s forte was evidently not to write herself, but to stimulate
others to write; to show that sympathy and appreciation which are as
genial and encouraging as the morning sunbeams. She seconded a man’s wit
with understanding—one of the best offices which womanly intellect has
rendered to the advancement of culture; and the absence of originality
made her all the more receptive toward the originality of others.
The manuscripts of Pascal show that many of the _Pensées_, which are
commonly supposed to be raw materials for a great work on religion, were
remodelled again and again, in order to bring them to the highest degree
of terseness and finish, which would hardly have been the case if they
had only been part of a quarry for a greater production. Thoughts, which
are merely collected as materials, as stones out of which a building is
to be erected, are not cut into facets, and polished like amethysts or
emeralds. Since Pascal was from the first in the habit of visiting
Madame de Sablé, at Port Royal, with his sister, Madame Périer (who was
one of Madame de Sablé’s dearest friends), we may well suppose that he
would throw some of his jewels among the large and small coin of maxims,
which were a sort of subscription money there. Many of them have an
epigrammatical piquancy, which was just the thing to charm a circle of
vivacious and intelligent women: they seem to come from a La
Rochefoucauld who has been dipped over again in philosophy and wit, and
received a new layer. But whether or not Madame de Sablé’s influence
served to enrich the _Pensées_ of Pascal, it is clear that but for her
influence the “Maxims” of La Rochefoucauld would never have existed.
Just as in some circles the effort is, who shall make the best puns
(_horibile dictu_!), or the best charades, in the _salon_ of Port Royal
the amusement was to fabricate maxims. La Rochefoucauld said, “L’envie
de faire des maximes se gagne comme la rhume.” So far from claiming for
himself the initiation of this form of writing, he accuses Jacques
Esprit, another _habitué_ of Madame de Sablé’s _salon_, of having excited
in him the taste for maxims, in order to trouble his repose. The said
Esprit was an academician, and had been a frequenter of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet. He had already published “Maxims in Verse,” and he
subsequently produced a book called “La Faussete des Vertus Humaines,”
which seems to consist of Rochefoucauldism become flat with an infusion
of sour Calvinism. Nevertheless, La Rochefoucauld seems to have prized
him, to have appealed to his judgment, and to have concocted maxims with
him, which he afterward begs him to submit to Madame Sablé. He sends a
little batch of maxims to her himself, and asks for an equivalent in the
shape of good eatables: “Voilà tout ce que j’ai de maximes; mais comme je
ne donne rien pour rien, je vous demande un potage aux carottes, un
ragoût de mouton,” etc. The taste and the talent enhanced each other;
until, at last, La Rochefoucauld began to be conscious of his
pre-eminence in the circle of maxim-mongers, and thought of a wider
audience. Thus grew up the famous “Maxims,” about which little need be
said. Every at once is now convinced, or professes to be convinced,
that, as to form, they are perfect, and that as to matter, they are at
once undeniably true and miserably false; true as applied to that
condition of human nature in which the selfish instincts are still
dominant, false if taken as a representation of all the elements and
possibilities of human nature. We think La Rochefoucauld himself wavered
as to their universality, and that this wavering is indicated in the
qualified form of some of the maxims; it occasionally struck him that the
shadow of virtue must have a substance, but he had never grasped that
substance—it had never been present to his consciousness.
It is curious to see La Rochefoucauld’s nervous anxiety about presenting
himself before the public as an author; far from rushing into print, he
stole into it, and felt his way by asking private opinions. Through
Madame de Sablé he sent manuscript copies to various persons of taste and
talent, both men and women, and many of the written opinions which he
received in reply are still in existence. The women generally find the
maxims distasteful, but the men write approvingly. These men, however,
are for the most part ecclesiastics, who decry human nature that they may
exalt divine grace. The coincidence between Augustinianism or Calvinism,
with its doctrine of human corruption, and the hard cynicism of the
maxims, presents itself in quite a piquant form in some of the laudatory
opinions on La Rochefoucauld. One writer says: “On ne pourroit faire une
instruction plus propre à un catechumène pour convertir à Dieu son esprit
et sa volonté . . . Quand il n’y auroit que cet escrit au monde et
l’Evangile je voudrois etre chretien. L’un m’apprendroit à connoistre
mes misères, et l’autre à implorer mon libérateur.” Madame de Maintenon
tends word to La Rochefoucauld, after the publication of his work, that
the “Book of Job” and the “Maxims” are her only reading.
That Madame de Sablé herself had a tolerably just idea of La
Rochefoucauld’s character, as well as of his maxims, may be gathered not
only from the fact that her own maxims are as full of the confidence in
human goodness which La Rochefoucauld wants, as they are empty of the
style which he possesses, but also from a letter in which she replies to
the criticisms of Madame de Schomberg. “The author,” she says, “derived
the maxim on indolence from his own disposition, for never was there so
great an indolence as his, and I think that his heart, inert as it is,
owes this defect as much to his idleness as his will. It has never
permitted him to do the least action for others; and I think that, amid
all his great desires and great hopes, he is sometimes indolent even on
his own behalf.” Still she must have felt a hearty interest in the
“Maxims,” as in some degree her foster-child, and she must also have had
considerable affection for the author, who was lovable enough to those
who observed the rule of Helvetius, and expected nothing from him. She
not only assisted him, as we have seen, in getting criticisms, and
carrying out the improvements suggested by them, but when the book was
actually published she prepared a notice of it for the only journal then
existing—the _Journal des Savants_. This notice was originally a brief
statement of the nature of the work, and the opinions which had been
formed for and against it, with a moderate eulogy, in conclusion, on its
good sense, wit, and insight into human nature. But when she submitted
it to La Rochefoucauld he objected to the paragraph which stated the
adverse opinion, and requested her to alter it. She, however, was either
unable or unwilling to modify her notice, and returned it with the
following note:
“Je vous envoie ce que j’ai pu tirer de ma teste pour mettre dans le
_Journal des Savants_. J’y ai mis cet endroit qui vous est le plus
sensible, afin que cela vous fasse surmonter la mauvaise honte qui
vous fit mettre la préface sans y rien retrancher, et je n’ai pas
craint dele mettre, parce que je suis assurée que vous ne le ferez
pas imprimer, quand même le reste vous plairoit. Je vous assure
aussi que je vous serai pins obligée, si vous en usez comme d’une
chose qui servit à vous pour le corriger on pour le jeter au feu.
Nous autres grands auteurs, nous sommes trop riches pour craindre de
rien perdre de nos productions. Mandez-moi ce qu’il vous semble de
ce dictum.”
La Rochefoucauld availed himself of this permission, and “edited” the
notice, touching up the style, and leaving out the blame. In this
revised form it appeared in the _Journal des Savants_. In some points,
we see, the youth of journalism was not without promise of its future.
While Madame de Sablé was thus playing the literary confidante to La
Rochefoucauld, and was the soul of a society whose chief interest was the
_belles-lettres_, she was equally active in graver matters. She was in
constant intercourse or correspondence with the devout women of Port
Royal, and of the neighboring convent of the Carmelites, many of whom had
once been the ornaments of the court; and there is a proof that she was
conscious of being highly valued by them in the fact that when the
Princess Marie-Madeline, of the Carmelites, was dangerously ill, not
being able or not daring to visit her, she sent her youthful portrait to
be hung up in the sick-room, and received from the same Mère Agnès, whose
grave admonition we have quoted above, a charming note, describing the
pleasure which the picture had given in the infirmary of “Notre bonne
Mère.” She was interesting herself deeply in the translation of the New
Testament, which was the work of Sacy, Arnauld, Nicole, Le Maître, and
the Duc de Luynes conjointly, Sacy having the principal share. We have
mentioned that Arnauld asked her opinion on the “Discourse” prefixed to
his “Logic,” and we may conclude from this that he had found her judgment
valuable in many other cases. Moreover, the persecution of the Port
Royalists had commenced, and she was uniting with Madame de Longueville
in aiding and protecting her pious friends. Moderate in her Jansenism,
as in everything else, she held that the famous formulary denouncing the
Augustinian doctrine, and declaring it to have been originated by
Jansenius, should be signed without reserve, and, as usual, she had faith
in conciliatory measures; but her moderation was no excuse for inaction.
She was at one time herself threatened with the necessity of abandoning
her residence at Port Royal, and had thought of retiring to a religions
house at Auteuil, a village near Paris. She did, in fact, pass some
summers there, and she sometimes took refuge with her brother, the
Commandeur de Souvré, with Madame de Montausier, or Madame de
Longueville. The last was much bolder in her partisanship than her
friend, and her superior wealth and position enabled her to give the Port
Royalists more efficient aid. Arnauld and Nicole resided five years in
her house; it was under her protection that the translation of the New
Testament was carried on and completed, and it was chiefly through her
efforts that, in 1669, the persecution was brought to an end. Madame de
Sablé co-operated with all her talent and interest in the same direction;
but here, as elsewhere, her influence was chiefly valuable in what she
stimulated others to do, rather than in what she did herself. It was by
her that Madame de Longueville was first won to the cause of Port Royal;
and we find this ardent brave woman constantly seeking the advice and
sympathy of her more timid and self-indulgent, but sincere and judicious
friend.
In 1669, when Madame de Sablé had at length rest from these anxieties,
she was at the good old age of seventy, but she lived nine years
longer—years, we may suppose, chiefly dedicated to her spiritual
concerns. This gradual, calm decay allayed the fear of death, which had
tormented her more vigorous days; and she died with tranquillity and
trust. It is a beautiful trait of these last moments that she desired
not to be buried with her family, or even at Port Royal, among her
saintly and noble companions—but in the cemetery of her parish, like one
of the people, without pomp or ceremony.
It is worth while to notice, that with Madame de Sablé, as with some
other remarkable French women, the part of her life which is richest in
interest and results is that which is looked forward to by most of her
sex with melancholy as the period of decline. When between fifty and
sixty, she had philosophers, wits, beauties, and saints clustering around
her; and one naturally cares to know what was the elixir which gave her
this enduring and general attraction. We think it was, in a great
degree, that well-balanced development of mental powers which gave her a
comprehension of varied intellectual processes, and a tolerance for
varied forms of character, which is still rarer in women than in men.
Here was one point of distinction between her and Madame de Longueville;
and an amusing passage, which Sainte-Beuve has disinterred from the
writings of the Abbé St. Pierre, so well serves to indicate, by contrast,
what we regard as the great charm of Madame de Sablé’s mind, that we
shall not be wandering from our subject in quoting it.
“I one day asked M. Nicole what was the character of Mme. de
Longueville’s intellect; he told me it was very subtle and delicate
in the penetration of character; but very small, very feeble, and
that her comprehension was extremely narrow in matters of science and
reasoning, and on all speculations that did not concern matters of
sentiment. For example, he added, I one day said to her that I could
wager and demonstrate that there were in Paris at least two
inhabitants who had the same number of hairs, although I could not
point out who these two men were. She told me I could never be sure
of it until I had counted the hairs of these two men. Here is my
demonstration, I said: I take it for granted that the head which is
most amply supplied with hairs has not more than 200,000, and the
head which is least so has but one hair. Now, if you suppose that
200,000 heads have each a different number of hairs, it necessarily
follows that they have each one of the numbers of hairs which form
the series from one to 200,000; for if it were supposed that there
were two among these 200,000 who had the same number of hairs, I
should have gained my wager. Supposing, then, that these 200,000
inhabitants have all a different number of hairs, if I add a single
inhabitant who has hairs, and who has not more than 200,000, it
necessarily follows that this number of hairs, whatever it may be,
will be contained in the series from one to 200,000, and consequently
will be equal to the number of hairs on one of the previous 200,000
inhabitants. Now as, instead of one inhabitant more than 200,000,
there an nearly 800,000 inhabitants in Paris, you see clearly that
there must be many heads which have an equal number of hairs, though
I have not counted them. Still Mme. de Longueville could never
comprehend that this equality of hairs could be demonstrated, and
always maintained that the only way of proving it was to count them.”
Surely, the meet ardent admirer of feminine shallowness must have felt
some irritation when he found himself arrested by this dead wall of
stupidity, and have turned with relief to the larger intelligence of
Madame de Sablé, who was not the less graceful, delicate, and feminine
because she could follow a train of reasoning, or interest herself in a
question of science. In this combination consisted her pre-eminent
charm: she was not a genius, not a heroine, but a woman whom men could
more than love—whom they could make their friend, confidante, and
counsellor; the sharer, not of their joys and sorrows only, but of their
ideas and aims.
Such was Madame de Sablé, whose name is, perhaps, new to some of our
readers, so far does it lie from the surface of literature and history.
We have seen, too, that she was only one among a crowd—one in a firmament
of feminine stars which, when once the biographical telescope is turned
upon them, appear scarcely less remarkable and interesting. Now, if the
reader recollects what was the position and average intellectual
character of women in the high society of England during the reigns of
James the First and the two Charleses—the period through which Madame de
Sablé’s career extends—we think he will admit our position as to the
early superiority of womanly development in France, and this fact, with
its causes, has not merely an historical interest: it has an important
bearing on the culture of women in the present day. Women become
superior in France by being admitted to a common fund of ideas, to common
objects of interest with men; and this must ever be the essential
condition at once of true womanly culture and of true social well-being.
We have no faith in feminine conversazioni, where ladies are eloquent on
Apollo and Mars; though we sympathize with the yearning activity of
faculties which, deprived of their proper material, waste themselves in
weaving fabrics out of cobwebs. Let the whole field of reality be laid
open to woman as well as to man, and then that which is peculiar in her
mental modification, instead of being, as it is now, a source of discord
and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a necessary
complement to the truth and beauty of life. Then we shall have that
marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and
feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human
happiness.
III. EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. {64}
Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than
the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what
is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most
easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that
Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will
pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as
wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given
piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find
it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial
knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high
reputation for sanctity. Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra
only in what is purely theoretic; let him be stringent on predestination,
but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity
of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of
Time; ardent and imaginative on the pro-millennial advent of Christ, but
cold and cautious toward every other infringement of the _status quo_.
Let him fish for souls not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but
with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal
in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of
unbelievers and adversaries, but when the letter of the Scriptures
presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth
century, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it into
impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let
him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the
Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the
accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter
of prophecy, and rival Moore’s Almanack in the prediction of political
events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual
by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for
their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they
may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom
they may point as the “horn that had eyes,” “the lying prophet,” and the
“unclean spirits.” In this way he will draw men to him by the strong
cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the
name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit; the
avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he
has but to print his prophetic sermons and bind them in lilac and gold,
and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who
will regard as a sort of pious “light reading” the demonstration that the
prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail, is fulfilled in the
fact of the Turkish commander’s having taken a horse’s tail for his
standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the
Revelations.
Pleasant to the clerical flesh under such circumstances is the arrival of
Sunday! Somewhat at a disadvantage during the week, in the presence of
working-day interests and lay splendors, on Sunday the preacher becomes
the cynosure of a thousand eyes, and predominates at once over the
Amphitryon with whom he dines, and the most captious member of his church
or vestry. He has an immense advantage over all other public speakers.
The platform orator is subject to the criticism of hisses and groans.
Counsel for the plaintiff expects the retort of counsel for the
defendant. The honorable gentleman on one side of the House is liable to
have his facts and figures shown up by his honorable friend on the
opposite side. Even the scientific or literary lecturer, if he is dull
or incompetent, may see the best part of his audience quietly slip out
one by one. But the preacher is completely master of the situation: no
one may hiss, no one may depart. Like the writer of imaginary
conversations, he may put what imbecilities he pleases into the mouths of
his antagonists, and swell with triumph when he has refuted them. He may
riot in gratuitous assertions, confident that no man will contradict him;
he may exercise perfect free-will in logic, and invent illustrative
experience; he may give an evangelical edition of history with the
inconvenient facts omitted:—all this he may do with impunity, certain
that those of his hearers who are not sympathizing are not listening.
For the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and
chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to
make a “feature” in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most
irresponsible of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that
they do not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are
often induced to fix them in that black and white in which they are open
to the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to treat
them with thorough freedom of speech and pen.
It is because we think this criticism of clerical teaching desirable for
the public good that we devote some pages to Dr. Cumming. He is, as
every one knows, a preacher of immense popularity, and of the numerous
publications in which he perpetuates his pulpit labors, all circulate
widely, and some, according to their title-page, have reached the
sixteenth thousand. Now our opinion of these publications is the very
opposite of that given by a newspaper eulogist: we do _not_ “believe that
the repeated issues of Dr. Cumming’s thoughts are having a beneficial
effect on society,” but the reverse; and hence, little inclined as we are
to dwell on his pages, we think it worth while to do so, for the sake of
pointing out in them what we believe to be profoundly mistaken and
pernicious. Of Dr. Cumming personally we know absolutely nothing: our
acquaintance with him is confined to a perusal of his works, our judgment
of him is founded solely on the manner in which he has written himself
down on his pages. We know neither how he looks nor how he lives. We
are ignorant whether, like St. Paul, he has a bodily presence that is
weak and contemptible, or whether his person is as florid and as prone to
amplification as his style. For aught we know, he may not only have the
gift of prophecy, but may bestow the profits of all his works to feed the
poor, and be ready to give his own body to be burned with as much
alacrity as he infers the everlasting burning of Roman Catholics and
Puseyites. Out of the pulpit he may be a model of justice, truthfulness,
and the love that thinketh no evil; but we are obliged to judge of his
charity by the spirit we find in his sermons, and shall only be glad to
learn that his practice is, in many respects, an amiable _non sequitur_
from his teaching.
Dr. Cumming’s mind is evidently not of the pietistic order. There is not
the slightest leaning toward mysticism in his Christianity—no indication
of religious raptures, of delight in God, of spiritual communion with the
Father. He is most at home in the forensic view of Justification, and
dwells on salvation as a scheme rather than as an experience. He insists
on good works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors to be achieved
to the glory of God, but he rarely represents them as the spontaneous,
necessary outflow of a soul filled with Divine love. He is at home in
the external, the polemical, the historical, the circumstantial, and is
only episodically devout and practical. The great majority of his
published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against
Romanists and unbelievers, with “vindications” of the Bible, with the
political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events;
and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual and practical exhortation, is
tacked to them as a sort of fringe in a hurried sentence or two at the
end. He revels in the demonstration that the Pope is the Man of Sin; he
is copious on the downfall of the Ottoman empire; he appears to glow with
satisfaction in turning a story which tends to show how he abashed an
“infidel;” it is a favorite exercise with him to form conjectures of the
process by which the earth is to be burned up, and to picture Dr.
Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce being caught up to meet Christ in the air,
while Romanists, Puseyites, and infidels are given over to gnashing of
teeth. But of really spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death
of Christ as a manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of
sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus
weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime prayer, “Father, forgive
them,” of the gentler fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which
passeth understanding—of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming’s
discourses.
His style is in perfect correspondence with this habit of mind. Though
diffuse, as that of all preachers must be, it has rapidity of movement,
perfect clearness, and some aptness of illustration. He has much of that
literary talent which makes a good journalist—the power of beating out an
idea over a large space, and of introducing far-fetched _à propos_. His
writings have, indeed, no high merit: they have no originality or force
of thought, no striking felicity of presentation, no depth of emotion.
Throughout nine volumes we have alighted on no passage which impressed us
as worth extracting, and placing among the “beauties,” of evangelical
writers, such as Robert Hall, Foster the Essayist, or Isaac Taylor.
Everywhere there is commonplace cleverness, nowhere a spark of rare
thought, of lofty sentiment, or pathetic tenderness. We feel ourselves
in company with a voluble retail talker, whose language is exuberant but
not exact, and to whom we should never think of referring for precise
information or for well-digested thought and experience. His argument
continually slides into wholesale assertion and vague declamation, and in
his love of ornament he frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells
us (“Apoc. Sketches,” p. 265) that “Botany weaves around the cross her
amaranthine garlands; and Newton comes from his starry home—Linnæus from
his flowery resting-place—and Werner and Hutton from their subterranean
graves at the voice of Chalmers, to acknowledge that all they learned and
elicited in their respective provinces has only served to show more
clearly that Jesus of Nazareth is enthroned on the riches of the
universe:”—and so prosaic an injunction to his hearers as that they
should choose a residence within an easy distance of church, is
magnificently draped by him as an exportation to prefer a house “that
basks in the sunshine of the countenance of God.” Like all preachers of
his class, he is more fertile in imaginative paraphrase than in close
exposition, and in this way he gives us some remarkable fragments of what
we may call the romance of Scripture, filling up the outline of the
record with an elaborate coloring quite undreamed of by more literal
minds. The serpent, he informs us, said to Eve, “Can it be so? Surely
you are mistaken, that God hath said you shall die, a creature so fair,
so lovely, so beautiful. It is impossible. _The laws of nature and
physical science tell you that my interpretation is correct_; you shall
not die. I can tell you by my own experience as an angel that you shall
be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (“Apoc. Sketches,” p. 294.) Again,
according to Dr. Cumming, Abel had so clear an idea of the Incarnation
and Atonement, that when he offered his sacrifice “he must have said, ‘I
feel myself a guilty sinner, and that in myself I cannot meet thee alive;
I lay on thine altar this victim, and I shed its blood as my testimony
that mine should be shed; and I look for forgiveness and undeserved mercy
through him who is to bruise the serpent’s head, and whose atonement this
typifies.’” (“Occas. Disc.” vol. i. p. 23.) Indeed, his productions are
essentially ephemeral; he is essentially a journalist, who writes sermons
instead of leading articles, who, instead of venting diatribes against
her Majesty’s Ministers, directs his power of invective against Cardinal
Wiseman and the Puseyites; instead of declaiming on public spirit,
perorates on the “glory of God.” We fancy he is called, in the more
refined evangelical circles, an “intellectual preacher;” by the plainer
sort of Christians, a “flowery preacher;” and we are inclined to think
that the more spiritually minded class of believers, who look with
greater anxiety for the kingdom of God within them than for the visible
advent of Christ in 1864, will be likely to find Dr. Cumming’s
declamatory flights and historico-prophetical exercitations as little
better than “clouts o’ cauld parritch.”
Such is our general impression from his writings after an attentive
perusal. There are some particular characteristics which we shall
consider more closely, but in doing so we must be understood as
altogether declining any doctrinal discussion. We have no intention to
consider the grounds of Dr. Cumming’s dogmatic system, to examine the
principles of his prophetic exegesis, or to question his opinion
concerning the little horn, the river Euphrates, or the seven vials. We
identify ourselves with no one of the bodies whom he regards it as his
special mission to attack: we give our adhesion neither to Romanism,
Puseyism, nor to that anomalous combination of opinions which he
introduces to us under the name of infidelity. It is simply as
spectators that we criticise Dr. Cumming’s mode of warfare, and we
concern ourselves less with what he holds to be Christian truth than with
his manner of enforcing that truth, less with the doctrines he teaches
than with the moral spirit and tendencies of his teaching.
One of the most striking characteristics of Dr. Cumming’s writings is
_unscrupulosity of statement_. His motto apparently is,
_Christianitatem_, _quocunque modo_, _Christianitatem_; and the only
system he includes under the term Christianity is Calvinistic
Protestantism. Experience has so long shown that the human brain is a
congenial nidus for inconsistent beliefs that we do not pause to inquire
how Dr. Cumming, who attributes the conversion of the unbelieving to the
Divine Spirit, can think it necessary to co-operate with that Spirit by
argumentative white lies. Nor do we for a moment impugn the genuineness
of his zeal for Christianity, or the sincerity of his conviction that the
doctrines he preaches are necessary to salvation; on the contrary, we
regard the flagrant unveracity that we find on his pages as an indirect
result of that conviction—as a result, namely, of the intellectual and
moral distortion of view which is inevitably produced by assigning to
dogmas, based on a very complex structure of evidence, the place and
authority of first truths. A distinct appreciation of the value of
evidence—in other words, the intellectual perception of truth—is more
closely allied to truthfulness of statement, or the moral quality of
veracity, than is generally admitted. There is not a more pernicious
fallacy afloat, in common parlance, than the wide distinction made
between intellect and morality. Amiable impulses without intellect, man
may have in common with dogs and horses; but morality, which is
specifically human, is dependent on the regulation of feeling by
intellect. All human beings who can be said to be in any degree moral
have their impulses guided, not indeed always by their own intellect, but
by the intellect of human beings who have gone before them, and created
traditions and associations which have taken the rank of laws. Now that
highest moral habit, the constant preference of truth, both theoretically
and practically, pre-eminently demands the co-operation of the intellect
with the impulses, as is indicated by the fact that it is only found in
anything like completeness in the highest class of minds. In accordance
with this we think it is found that, in proportion as religious sects
exalt feeling above intellect, and believe themselves to be guided by
direct inspiration rather than by a spontaneous exertion of their
faculties—that is, in proportion as they are removed from
rationalism—their sense of truthfulness is misty and confused. No one
can have talked to the more enthusiastic Methodists and listened to their
stories of miracles without perceiving that they require no other
passport to a statement than that it accords with their wishes and their
general conception of God’s dealings; nay, they regard as a symptom of
sinful scepticism an inquiry into the evidence for a story which they
think unquestionably tends to the glory of God, and in retailing such
stories, new particulars, further tending to his glory, are “borne in”
upon their minds. Now, Dr. Cumming, as we have said, is no enthusiastic
pietist: within a certain circle—within the mill of evangelical
orthodoxy—his intellect is perpetually at work; but that principle of
sophistication which our friends the Methodists derive from the
predominance of their pietistic feelings, is involved for him in the
doctrine of verbal inspiration; what is for them a state of emotion
submerging the intellect, is with him a formula imprisoning the
intellect, depriving it of its proper function—the free search for
truth—and making it the mere servant-of-all-work to a foregone
conclusion. Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning
a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether
it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts, as such, but for
facts that will bear out their doctrine. They become accustomed to
reject the more direct evidence in favor of the less direct, and where
adverse evidence reaches demonstration they must resort to devices and
expedients in order to explain away contradiction. It is easy to see
that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the
sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into
fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.
We have entered into this digression for the sake of mitigating the
inference that is likely to be drawn from that characteristic of Dr.
Cumming’s works to which we have pointed. He is much in the same
intellectual condition as that professor of Padua; who, in order to
disprove Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s satellites, urged that as there
were only seven metals there could not be more than seven planets—a
mental condition scarcely compatible with candor. And we may well
suppose that if the professor had held the belief in seven planets, and
no more, to be a necessary condition of salvation, his mental condition
would have been so dazed that even if he had consented to look through
Galileo’s telescope, his eyes would have reported in accordance with his
inward alarms rather than with the external fact. So long as a belief in
propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of
truth _as such_ is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man
who is swimming for his life to make meteorological observations on the
storm which threatens to overwhelm him. The sense of alarm and haste,
the anxiety for personal safety, which Dr. Cumming insists upon as the
proper religious attitude, unmans the nature, and allows no thorough,
calm thinking no truly noble, disinterested feeling. Hence, we by no
means suspect that the unscrupulosity of statement with which we charge
Dr. Cumming, extends beyond the sphere of his theological prejudices; we
do not doubt that, religion apart, he appreciates and practices veracity.
A grave general accusation must be supported by details, and in adducing
those we purposely select the most obvious cases of
misrepresentation—such as require no argument to expose them, but can be
perceived at a glance. Among Dr. Cumming’s numerous books, one of the
most notable for unscrupulosity of statement is the “Manual of Christian
Evidences,” written, as he tells us in his Preface, not to give the
deepest solutions of the difficulties in question, but to furnish
Scripture Readers, City Missionaries, and Sunday School Teachers, with a
“ready reply” to sceptical arguments. This announcement that _readiness_
was the chief quality sought for in the solutions here given, modifies
our inference from the other qualities which those solutions present; and
it is but fair to presume that when the Christian disputant is not in a
hurry Dr. Cumming would recommend replies less ready and more veracious.
Here is an example of what in another place {74} he tells his readers is
“change in their pocket . . . a little ready argument which they can
employ, and therewith answer a fool according to his folly.” From the
nature of this argumentative small coin, we are inclined to think Dr.
Cumming understands answering a fool according to his folly to mean,
giving him a foolish answer. We quote from the “Manual of Christian
Evidences,” p. 62.
“Some of the gods which the heathen worshipped were among the
greatest monsters that ever walked the earth. Mercury was a thief;
and because he was an expert thief he was enrolled among the gods.
Bacchus was a mere sensualist and drunkard, and therefore he was
enrolled among the gods. Venus was a dissipated and abandoned
courtesan, and therefore she was enrolled among the goddesses. Mars
was a savage, that gloried in battle and in blood, and therefore he
was deified and enrolled among the gods.”
Does Dr. Cumming believe the purport of these sentences? If so, this
passage is worth handing down as his theory of the Greek myth—as a
specimen of the astounding ignorance which was possible in a metropolitan
preacher, A.D. 1854. And if he does not believe them . . . The inference
must then be, that he thinks delicate veracity about the ancient Greeks
is not a Christian virtue, but only a “splendid sin” of the unregenerate.
This inference is rendered the more probable by our finding, a little
further on, that he is not more scrupulous about the moderns, if they
come under his definition of “Infidels.” But the passage we are about to
quote in proof of this has a worse quality than its discrepancy with
fact. Who that has a spark of generous feeling, that rejoices in the
presence of good in a fellow-being, has not dwelt with pleasure on the
thought that Lord Byron’s unhappy career was ennobled and purified toward
its close by a high and sympathetic purpose, by honest and energetic
efforts for his fellow-men? Who has not read with deep emotion those
last pathetic lines, beautiful as the after-glow of sunset, in which love
and resignation are mingled with something of a melancholy heroism? Who
has not lingered with compassion over the dying scene at Missolonghi—the
sufferer’s inability to make his farewell messages of love intelligible,
and the last long hours of silent pain? Yet for the sake of furnishing
his disciples with a “ready reply,” Dr. Cumming can prevail on himself to
inoculate them with a bad-spirited falsity like the following:
“We have one striking exhibition of _an infidel’s brightest
thoughts_, in some lines _written in his dying moments_ by a man,
gifted with great genius, capable of prodigious intellectual prowess,
but of worthless principle, and yet more worthless practices—I mean
the celebrated Lord Byron. He says:
“‘Though gay companions o’er the bowl
Dispel awhile the sense of ill,
Though pleasure fills the maddening soul,
The heart—_the heart_ is lonely still.
“‘Ay, but to die, and go, alas!
Where all have gone and all must go;
To be the _Nothing_ that I was,
Ere born to life and living woe!
“‘Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o’er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
Tis _something better_ not to be.
“‘Nay, for myself, so dark my fate
Through every turn of life hath been,
_Man_ and the _world_ so much _I hate_,
I care not when I quit the scene.’”
It is difficult to suppose that Dr. Cumming can have been so grossly
imposed upon—that he can be so ill-informed as really to believe that
these lines were “written” by Lord Byron in his dying moments; but,
allowing him the full benefit of that possibility, how shall we explain
his introduction of this feebly rabid doggrel as “an infidel’s brightest
thoughts?”
In marshalling the evidences of Christianity, Dr. Cumming directs most of
his arguments against opinions that are either totally imaginary, or that
belong to the past rather than to the present, while he entirely fails to
meet the difficulties actually felt and urged by those who are unable to
accept Revelation. There can hardly be a stronger proof of misconception
as to the character of free-thinking in the present day, than the
recommendation of Leland’s “Short and Easy Method with the Deists”—a
method which is unquestionably short and easy for preachers disinclined
to reconsider their stereotyped modes of thinking and arguing, but which
has quite ceased to realize those epithets in the conversion of Deists.
Yet Dr. Cumming not only recommends this book, but takes the trouble
himself to write a feebler version of its arguments. For example, on the
question of the genuineness and authenticity of the New Testament
writing’s, he says: “If, therefore, at a period long subsequent to the
death of Christ, a number of men had appeared in the world, drawn up a
book which they christened by the name of the Holy Scripture, and
recorded these things which appear in it as facts when they were only the
fancies of their own imagination, surely the _Jews_ would have instantly
reclaimed that no such events transpired, that no such person as Jesus
Christ appeared in their capital, and that _their_ crucifixion of Him,
and their alleged evil treatment of his apostles, were mere fictions.”
{76} It is scarcely necessary to say that, in such argument as this, Dr.
Cumming is beating the air. He is meeting a hypothesis which no one
holds, and totally missing the real question. The only type of “infidel”
whose existence Dr. Cumming recognizes is that fossil personage who
“calls the Bible a lie and a forgery.” He seems to be ignorant—or he
chooses to ignore the fact—that there is a large body of eminently
instructed and earnest men who regard the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures
as a series of historical documents, to be dealt with according to the
rules of historical criticism, and that an equally large number of men,
who are not historical critics, find the dogmatic scheme built on the
letter of the Scriptures opposed to their profoundest moral convictions.
Dr. Cumming’s infidel is a man who, because his life is vicious, tries to
convince himself that there is no God, and that Christianity is an
imposture, but who is all the while secretly conscious that he is
opposing the truth, and cannot help “letting out” admissions “that the
Bible is the Book of God.” We are favored with the following “Creed of
the Infidel:”
“I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is
matter; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not. I
believe also that the world was not made, but that the world made
itself, or that it had no beginning, and that it will last forever.
I believe that man is a beast; that the soul is the body, and that
the body is the soul; and that after death there is neither body nor
soul. I believe there is no religion, that _natural religion is the
only religion_, _and all religion unnatural_. I believe not in
Moses; I believe in the first philosophers. I believe not in the
evangelists; I believe in Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Hobbes.
I believe in Lord Bolingbroke, and I believe not in St. Paul. I
believe not in revelation; _I believe in tradition_; _I believe in
the Talmud_; _I believe in the Koran_; I believe not in the Bible. I
believe in Socrates; I believe in Confucius; I believe in Mahomet; I
believe not in Christ. And lastly, _I believe_ in all unbelief.”
The intellectual and moral monster whose creed is this complex web of
contradictions, is, moreover, according to Dr. Cumming, a being who
unites much simplicity and imbecility with his Satanic hardihood—much
tenderness of conscience with his obdurate vice. Hear the “proof:”
“I once met with an acute and enlightened infidel, with whom I
reasoned day after day, and for hours together; I submitted to him
the internal, the external, and the experimental evidences, but made
no impression on his scorn and unbelief. At length I entertained a
suspicion that there was something morally, rather than
intellectually wrong, and that the bias was not in the intellect, but
in the heart; one day therefore I said to him, ‘I must now state my
conviction, and you may call me uncharitable, but duty compels me;
you are living in some known and gross sin.’ _The man’s countenance
became pale_; _he bowed and left me_.”—“Man. of Evidences,” p. 254.
Here we have the remarkable psychological phenomenon of an “acute and
enlightened” man who, deliberately purposing to indulge in a favorite
sin, and regarding the Gospel with scorn and unbelief, is, nevertheless,
so much more scrupulous than the majority of Christians, that he cannot
“embrace sin and the Gospel simultaneously;” who is so alarmed at the
Gospel in which he does not believe, that he cannot be easy without
trying to crush it; whose acuteness and enlightenment suggest to him, as
a means of crushing the Gospel, to argue from day to day with Dr.
Cumming; and who is withal so naïve that he is taken by surprise when Dr.
Cumming, failing in argument, resorts to accusation, and so tender in
conscience that, at the mention of his sin, he turns pale and leaves the
spot. If there be any human mind in existence capable of holding Dr.
Cumming’s “Creed of the Infidel,” of at the same time believing in
tradition and “believing in all unbelief,” it must be the mind of the
infidel just described, for whose existence we have Dr. Cumming’s _ex
officio_ word as a theologian; and to theologians we may apply what
Sancho Panza says of the bachelors of Salamanca, that they never tell
lies—except when it suits their purpose.
The total absence from Dr. Cumming’s theological mind of any demarcation
between fact and rhetoric is exhibited in another passage, where he
adopts the dramatic form:
“Ask the peasant on the hills—and _I have asked amid the mountains of
Braemar and Deeside_—‘How do you know that this book is divine, and
that the religion you profess is true? You never read Paley?’ ‘No,
I never heard of him.’—‘You have never read Butler?’ ‘No, I have
never heard of him.’—‘Nor Chalmers?’ ‘No, I do not know him.’—‘You
have never read any books on evidence?’ ‘No, I have read no such
books.’—‘Then, how do you know this book is true?’ ‘Know it! Tell
me that the Dee, the Clunie, and the Garrawalt, the streams at my
feet, do not run; that the winds do not sigh amid the gorges of these
blue hills; that the sun does not kindle the peaks of Loch-na-Gar;
tell me my heart does not beat, and I will believe you; but do not
tell me the Bible is not divine. I have found its truth illuminating
my footsteps; its consolations sustaining my heart. May my tongue
cleave to my mouth’s roof and my right hand forget its cunning, if I
every deny what is my deepest inner experience, that this blessed
book is the book of God.’”—“Church Before the Flood,” p. 35.
Dr. Cumming is so slippery and lax in his mode of presentation that we
find it impossible to gather whether he means to assert that this is what
a peasant on the mountains of Braemar _did_ say, or that it is what such
a peasant _would_ say: in the one case, the passage may be taken as a
measure of his truthfulness; in the other, of his judgment.
His own faith, apparently, has not been altogether intuitive, like that
of his rhetorical peasant, for he tells us (“Apoc. Sketches,” p. 405)
that he has himself experienced what it is to have religious doubts. “I
was tainted while at the University by this spirit of scepticism. I
thought Christianity might not be true. The very possibility of its
being true was the thought I felt I must meet and settle. Conscience
could give me no peace till I had settled it. I read, and I read from
that day, for fourteen or fifteen years, till this, and now I am as
convinced, upon the clearest evidence, that this book is the book of God
as that I now address you.” This experience, however, instead of
impressing on him the fact that doubt may be the stamp of a truth-loving
mind—that _sunt quibus non credidisse honor est_, _et fidei futuræ
pignus_—seems to have produced precisely the contrary effect. It has not
enabled him even to conceive the condition of a mind “perplext in faith
but pure in deeds,” craving light, yearning for a faith that will
harmonize and cherish its highest powers and aspirations, but unable to
find that faith in dogmatic Christianity. His own doubts apparently were
of a different kind. Nowhere in his pages have we found a humble,
candid, sympathetic attempt to meet the difficulties that may be felt by
an ingenuous mind. Everywhere he supposes that the doubter is hardened,
conceited, consciously shutting his eyes to the light—a fool who is to be
answered according to his folly—that is, with ready replies made up of
reckless assertions, of apocryphal anecdotes, and, where other resources
fail, of vituperative imputation. As to the reading which he has
prosecuted for fifteen years—_either_ it has left him totally ignorant of
the relation which his own religions creed bears to the criticism and
philosophy of the nineteenth century, or he systematically blinks that
criticism and that philosophy; and instead of honestly and seriously
endeavoring to meet and solve what he knows to be the real difficulties,
contents himself with setting up popinjays to shoot at, for the sake of
confirming the ignorance and winning the heap admiration of his
evangelical hearers and readers. Like the Catholic preacher who, after
throwing down his cap and apostrophizing it as Luther, turned to his
audience and said, “You see this heretical fellow has not a word to say
for himself,” Dr. Cumming, having drawn his ugly portrait of the infidel,
and put arguments of a convenient quality into his mouth, finds a “short
and easy method” of confounding this “croaking frog.”
In his treatment of infidels, we imagine he is guided by a mental process
which may be expressed in the following syllogism: Whatever tends to the
glory of God is true; it is for the glory of God that infidels should be
as bad as possible; therefore, whatever tends to show that infidels are
as bad as possible is true. All infidels, he tells us, have been men of
“gross and licentious lives.” Is there not some well-known unbeliever,
David Hume, for example, of whom even Dr. Cumming’s readers may have
heard as an exception? No matter. Some one suspected that he was _not_
an exception, and as that suspicion tends to the glory of God, it is one
for a Christian to entertain. (See “Man. of Ev.,” p. 73.)—If we were
unable to imagine this kind of self-sophistication, we should be obliged
to suppose that, relying on the ignorance of his evangelical disciples,
he fed them with direct and conscious falsehoods. “Voltaire,” he informs
them, “declares there is no God;” he was “an antitheist, that is one who
deliberately and avowedly opposed and hated God; who swore in his
blasphemy that he would dethrone him;” and “advocated the very depths of
the lowest sensuality.” With regard to many statements of a similar
kind, equally at variance with truth, in Dr. Cumming’s volumes, we
presume that he has been misled by hearsay or by the second-hand
character of his acquaintance with free-thinking literature. An
evangelical preacher is not obliged to be well-read. Here, however, is a
case which the extremest supposition of educated ignorance will not
reach. Even books of “evidences” quote from Voltaire the line—
“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer;”
even persons fed on the mere whey and buttermilk of literature must know
that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if not a theist—must know that he
wrote not against God, but against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he
believed to be a false God—must know that to say Voltaire was an atheist
on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite opposed hereditary
monarchy because he declared the Brunswick family had no title to the
throne. That Dr. Cumming should repeat the vulgar fables about
Voltaire’s death is merely what we might expect from the specimens we
have seen of his illustrative stories. A man whose accounts of his own
experience are apocryphal is not likely to put borrowed narratives to any
severe test.
The alliance between intellectual and moral perversion is strikingly
typified by the way in which he alternates from the unveracious to the
absurd, from misrepresentation to contradiction. Side by side with the
abduction of “facts” such as those we have quoted, we find him arguing on
one page that the Trinity was too grand a doctrine to have been conceived
by man, and was _therefore_ Divine; and on another page, that the
Incarnation _had_ been preconceived by man, and is _therefore_ to be
accepted as Divine. But we are less concerned with the fallacy of his
“ready replies” than with their falsity; and even of this we can only
afford space for a very few specimens. Here is one: “There is a
_thousand times_ more proof that the gospel of John was written by him
than there is that the _Αναβασις_ was written by Xenophon, or the Ars
Poetica by Horace.” If Dr. Cumming had chosen Plato’s Epistles or
Anacreon’s Poems instead of the Anabasis or the Ars Poetica, he would
have reduced the extent of the falsehood, and would have furnished a
ready reply which would have been equally effective with his
Sunday-school teachers and their disputants. Hence we conclude this
prodigality of misstatement, this exuberance of mendacity, is an
effervescence of zeal _in majorem gloriam Dei_. Elsewhere he tells us
that “the idea of the author of the ‘Vestiges’ is, that man is the
development of a monkey, that the monkey is the embryo man, so that _if
you keep a baboon long enough_, _it will develop itself into a man_.”
How well Dr. Cumming has qualified himself to judge of the ideas in “that
very unphilosophical book,” as he pronounces it, may be inferred from the
fact that he implies the author of the “Vestiges” to have _originated_
the nebular hypothesis.
In the volume from which the last extract is taken, even the hardihood of
assertion is surpassed by the suicidal character of the argument. It is
called “The Church before the Flood,” and is devoted chiefly to the
adjustment of the question between the Bible and Geology. Keeping within
the limits we have prescribed to ourselves, we do not enter into the
matter of this discussion; we merely pause a little over the volume in
order to point out Dr. Cumming’s mode of treating the question. He first
tells us that “the Bible has not a single scientific error in it;” that
“_its slightest intimations of scientific principles or natural phenomena
have in every instance been demonstrated to be exactly and strictly
true_,” and he asks:
“How is it that Moses, with no greater education than the Hindoo or
the ancient philosopher, has written his book, touching science at a
thousand points, so accurately that scientific research has
discovered no flaws in it; and yet in those investigations which have
taken place in more recent centuries, it has not been shown that he
has committed one single error, or made one solitary assertion which
can be proved by the maturest science, or by the most eagle-eyed
philosopher, to be incorrect, scientifically or historically?”
According to this the relation of the Bible to science should be one of
the strong points of apologists for revelation: the scientific accuracy
of Moses should stand at the head of their evidences; and they might urge
with some cogency, that since Aristotle, who devoted himself to science,
and lived many ages after Moses, does little else than err ingeniously,
this fact, that the Jewish Lawgiver, though touching science at a
thousand points, has written nothing that has not been “demonstrated to
be exactly and strictly true,” is an irrefragable proof of his having
derived his knowledge from a supernatural source. How does it happen,
then, that Dr. Cumming forsakes this strong position? How is it that we
find him, some pages further on, engaged in reconciling Genesis with the
discoveries of science, by means of imaginative hypotheses and feats of
“interpretation?” Surely, that which has been demonstrated to be exactly
and strictly true does not require hypothesis and critical argument, in
order to show that it may _possibly_ agree with those very discoveries by
means of which its exact and strict truth has been demonstrated. And why
should Dr. Cumming suppose, as we shall presently find him supposing,
that men of science hesitate to accept the Bible, because it appears to
contradict their discoveries? By his own statement, that appearance of
contradiction does not exist; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated
that the Bible precisely agrees with their discoveries. Perhaps,
however, in saying of the Bible that its “slightest intimations of
scientific principles or natural phenomena have in every instance been
demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true,” Dr. Cumming merely means
to imply that theologians have found out a way of explaining the biblical
text so that it no longer, in their opinion, appears to be in
contradiction with the discoveries of science. One of two things,
therefore: either he uses language without the slightest appreciation of
its real meaning, or the assertions he makes on one page are directly
contradicted by the arguments he urges on another.
Dr. Cumming’s principles—or, we should rather say, confused notions—of
biblical interpretation, as exhibited in this volume, are particularly
significant of his mental calibre. He says (“Church before the Flood,”
p. 93): “Men of science, who are full of scientific investigation and
enamored of scientific discovery, will hesitate before they accept a book
which, they think, contradicts the plainest and the most unequivocal
disclosures they have made in the bowels of the earth, or among the stars
of the sky. To all these we answer, as we have already indicated, there
is not the least dissonance between God’s written book and the most
mature discoveries of geological science. One thing, however, there may
be: _there may be a contradiction between the discoveries of geology and
our preconceived interpretations of the Bible_. But this is not because
the Bible is wrong, but because our interpretation is wrong.” (The
italics in all cases are our own.)
Elsewhere he says: “It seems to me plainly evident that the record of
Genesis, when read fairly, and not in the light of our prejudices—_and
mind you_, _the essence of Popery is to read the Bible in the light of
our opinions_, _instead of viewing our opinions in the light of the
Bible_, _in its plain and obvious sense_—falls in perfectly with the
assertion of geologists.”
On comparing these two passages, we gather that when Dr. Cumming, under
stress of geological discovery, assigns to the biblical text a meaning
entirely different from that which, on his own showing, was universally
ascribed to it for more than three thousand years, he regards himself as
“viewing his opinions in the light of the Bible in its plain and obvious
sense!” Now he is reduced to one of two alternatives: either he must
hold that the “plain and obvious meaning” of the whole Bible differs from
age to age, so that the criterion of its meaning lies in the sum of
knowledge possessed by each successive age—the Bible being an elastic
garment for the growing thought of mankind; or he must hold that some
portions are amenable to this criterion, and others not so. In the
former case, he accepts the principle of interpretation adopted by the
early German rationalists; in the latter case he has to show a further
criterion by which we can judge what parts of the Bible are elastic and
what rigid. If he says that the interpretation of the text is rigid
wherever it treats of doctrines necessary to salvation, we answer, that
for doctrines to be necessary to salvation they must first be true; and
in order to be true, according to his own principle, they must be founded
on a correct interpretation of the biblical text. Thus he makes the
necessity of doctrines to salvation the criterion of infallible
interpretation, and infallible interpretation the criterion of doctrines
being necessary to salvation. He is whirled round in a circle, having,
by admitting the principle of novelty in interpretation, completely
deprived himself of a basis. That he should seize the very moment in
which he is most palpably betraying that he has no test of biblical truth
beyond his own opinion, as an appropriate occasion for flinging the
rather novel reproach against Popery that its essence is to “read the
Bible in the light of our opinions,” would be an almost pathetic
self-exposure, if it were not disgusting. Imbecility that is not even
meek, ceases to be pitiable, and becomes simply odious.
Parenthetic lashes of this kind against Popery are very frequent with Dr.
Cumming, and occur even in his more devout passages, where their
introduction must surely disturb the spiritual exercises of his hearers.
Indeed, Roman Catholics fare worse with him even than infidels. Infidels
are the small vermin—the mice to be bagged _en passant_. The main object
of his chase—the rats which are to be nailed up as trophies—are the Roman
Catholics. Romanism is the masterpiece of Satan; but reassure
yourselves! Dr. Cumming has been created. Antichrist is enthroned in the
Vatican; but he is stoutly withstood by the Boanerges of Crown-court.
The personality of Satan, as might be expected, is a very prominent tenet
in Dr. Cumming’s discourses; those who doubt it are, he thinks,
“generally specimens of the victims of Satan as a triumphant seducer;”
and it is through the medium of this doctrine that he habitually
contemplates Roman Catholics. They are the puppets of which the devil
holds the strings. It is only exceptionally that he speaks of them as
fellow-men, acted on by the same desires, fears, and hopes as himself;
his _rule_ is to hold them up to his hearers as foredoomed instruments of
Satan and vessels of wrath. If he is obliged to admit that they are “no
shams,” that they are “thoroughly in earnest”—that is because they are
inspired by hell, because they are under an “infra-natural” influence.
If their missionaries are found wherever Protestant missionaries go, this
zeal in propagating their faith is not in them a consistent virtue, as it
is in Protestants, but a “melancholy fact,” affording additional evidence
that they are instigated and assisted by the devil. And Dr. Cumming is
inclined to think that they work miracles, because that is no more than
might be expected from the known ability of Satan who inspires them.
{86a} He admits, indeed, that “there is a fragment of the Church of
Christ in the very bosom of that awful apostasy,” {86b} and that there
are members of the Church of Rome in glory; but this admission is rare
and episodical—is a declaration, _pro formâ_, about as influential on the
general disposition and habits as an aristocrat’s profession of
democracy.
This leads us to mention another conspicuous characteristic of Dr.
Cumming’s teaching—the _absence of genuine charity_. It is true that he
makes large profession of tolerance and liberality within a certain
circle; he exhorts Christians to unity; he would have Churchmen
fraternize with Dissenters, and exhorts these two branches of God’s
family to defer the settlement of their differences till the millennium.
But the love thus taught is the love of the _clan_, which is the
correlative of antagonism to the rest of mankind. It is not sympathy and
helpfulness toward men as men, but toward men as Christians, and as
Christians in the sense of a small minority. Dr. Cumming’s religion may
demand a tribute of love, but it gives a charter to hatred; it may enjoin
charity, but it fosters all uncharitableness. If I believe that God
tells me to love my enemies, but at the same time hates His own enemies
and requires me to have one will with Him, which has the larger scope,
love or hatred? And we refer to those pages of Dr. Cumming’s in which he
opposes Roman Catholics, Puseyites, and infidels—pages which form the
larger proportion of what he has published—for proof that the idea of God
which both the logic and spirit of his discourses keep present to his
hearers, is that of a God who hates his enemies, a God who teaches love
by fierce denunciations of wrath—a God who encourages obedience to his
precepts by elaborately revealing to us that his own government is in
precise opposition to those precepts. We know the usual evasions on this
subject. We know Dr. Cumming would say that even Roman Catholics are to
be loved and succored as men; that he would help even that “unclean
spirit,” Cardinal Wiseman, out of a ditch. But who that is in the
slightest degree acquainted with the action of the human mind will
believe that any genuine and large charity can grow out of an exercise of
love which is always to have an _arrière-pensée_ of hatred? Of what
quality would be the conjugal love of a husband who loved his spouse as a
wife, but hated her as a woman? It is reserved for the regenerate mind,
according to Dr. Cumming’s conception of it, to be “wise, amazed,
temperate and furious, loyal and neutral, in a moment.” Precepts of
charity uttered with a faint breath at the end of a sermon are perfectly
futile, when all the force of the lungs has been spent in keeping the
hearer’s mind fixed on the conception of his fellow-men not as
fellow-sinners and fellow-sufferers, but as agents of hell, as automata
through whom Satan plays his game upon earth—not on objects which call
forth their reverence, their love, their hope of good even in the most
strayed and perverted, but on a minute identification of human things
with such symbols as the scarlet whore, the beast out of the abyss,
scorpions whose sting is in their tails, men who have the mark of the
beast, and unclean spirits like frogs. You might as well attempt to
educate the child’s sense of beauty by hanging its nursery with the
horrible and grotesque pictures in which the early painters represented
the Last Judgment, as expect Christian graces to flourish on that
prophetic interpretation which Dr. Cumming offers as the principal
nutriment of his flock. Quite apart from the critical basis of that
interpretation, quite apart from the degree of truth there may be in Dr.
Cumming’s prognostications—questions into which we do not choose to
enter—his use of prophecy must be _à priori_ condemned in the judgment of
right-minded persons, by its results as testified in the net moral effect
of his sermons. The best minds that accept Christianity as a divinely
inspired system, believe that the great end of the Gospel is not merely
the saving but the educating of men’s souls, the creating within them of
holy dispositions, the subduing of egoistical pretensions, and the
perpetual enhancing of the desire that the will of God—a will synonymous
with goodness and truth—may be done on earth. But what relation to all
this has a system of interpretation which keeps the mind of the Christian
in the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial show, of which Satan is
the wild beast in the shape of the great red dragon, and two thirds of
mankind the victims—the whole provided and got up by God for the
edification of the saints? The demonstration that the Second Advent is
at hand, if true, can have no really holy, spiritual effect; the highest
state of mind inculcated by the Gospel is resignation to the disposal of
God’s providence—“Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; whether we die,
we die unto the Lord”—not an eagerness to see a temporal manifestation
which shall confound the enemies of God and give exaltation to the
saints; it is to dwell in Christ by spiritual communion with his nature,
not to fix the date when He shall appear in the sky. Dr. Cumming’s
delight in shadowing forth the downfall of the Man of Sin, in
prognosticating the battle of Gog and Magog, and in advertising the
pre-millennial Advent, is simply the transportation of political passions
on to a so-called religious platform; it is the anticipation of the
triumph of “our party,” accomplished by our principal men being “sent
for” into the clouds. Let us be understood to speak in all seriousness.
If we were in search of amusement, we should not seek for it by examining
Dr. Cumming’s works in order to ridicule them. We are simply discharging
a disagreeable duty in delivering our opinion that, judged by the highest
standard even of orthodox Christianity, they are little calculated to
produce—
“A closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame;”
but are more likely to nourish egoistic complacency and pretension, a
hard and condemnatory spirit toward one’s fellow-men, and a busy
occupation with the minutiæ of events, instead of a reverent
contemplation of great facts and a wise application of great principles.
It would be idle to consider Dr. Cumming’s theory of prophecy in any
other light; as a philosophy of history or a specimen of biblical
interpretation, it bears about the same relation to the extension of
genuine knowledge as the astrological “house” in the heavens bears to the
true structure and relations of the universe.
The slight degree in which Dr. Cumming’s faith is imbued with truly human
sympathies is exhibited in the way he treats the doctrine of Eternal
Punishment. Here a little of that readiness to strain the letter of the
Scriptures which he so often manifests when his object is to prove a
point against Romanism, would have been an amiable frailty if it had been
applied on the side of mercy. When he is bent on proving that the
prophecy concerning the Man of Sin, in the Second Epistle to the
Thessalonians, refers to the Pope, he can extort from the innocent word
_καθισαι_ the meaning _cathedrize_, though why we are to translate “He as
God cathedrizes in the temple of God,” any more than we are to translate
“cathedrize here, while I go and pray yonder,” it is for Dr. Cumming to
show more clearly than he has yet done. But when rigorous literality
will favor the conclusion that the greater proportion of the human race
will be eternally miserable—_then_ he is rigorously literal.
He says: “The Greek words, _εις_, _τους αιώνας των αιώνων_, here
translated ‘everlasting,’ signify literally ‘unto the ages of ages,’ αιει
ων, ‘always being,’ that is, everlasting, ceaseless existence. Plato
uses the word in this sense when he says, ‘The gods that live forever.’
_But I must also admit_ that this word is used several times in a limited
extent—as for instance, ‘The everlasting hills.’ Of course this does not
mean that there never will be a time when the hills will cease to stand;
the expression here is evidently figurative, but it implies eternity.
The hills shall remain as long as the earth lasts, and no hand has power
to remove them but that Eternal One which first called them into being;
_so the state of the soul_ remains the same after death as long as the
soul exists, and no one has power to alter it. The same word is often
applied to denote the existence of God—‘the Eternal God.’ Can we limit
the word when applied to him? Because occasionally used in a limited
sense, we must not infer it is always so. ‘Everlasting’ plainly means in
Scripture ‘without end;’ it is only to be explained figuratively when it
is evident it cannot be interpreted in any other way.”
We do not discuss whether Dr. Cumming’s interpretation accords with the
meaning of the New Testament writers: we simply point to the fact that
the text becomes elastic for him when he wants freer play for his
prejudices, while he makes it an adamantine barrier against the admission
that mercy will ultimately triumph—that God, _i.e._, Love, will be all in
all. He assures us that he does not “delight to dwell on the misery of
the lost:” and we believe him. That misery does not seem to be a
question of feeling with him, either one way or the other. He does not
merely resign himself to the awful mystery of eternal punishment; he
contends for it. Do we object, he asks, {90} to everlasting happiness?
then why object to everlasting misery?—reasoning which is perhaps felt to
be cogent by theologians who anticipate the everlasting happiness for
themselves, and the everlasting misery for their neighbors.
The compassion of some Christians has been glad to take refuge in the
opinion that the Bible allows the supposition of annihilation for the
impenitent; but the rigid sequence of Dr. Cumming’s reasoning will not
admit of this idea. He sees that flax is made into linen, and linen into
paper; that paper, when burned, partly ascends as smoke and then again
descends in rain, or in dust and carbon. “Not one particle of the
original flax is lost, although there may be not one particle that has
not undergone an entire change: annihilation is not, but change of form
is. _It will be thus with our bodies at the resurrection_. The death of
the body means not annihilation. _Not one feature of the face_ will be
annihilated.” Having established the perpetuity of the body by this
close and clear analogy, namely, that _as_ there is a total change in the
particles of flax in consequence of which they no longer appear as flax,
_so_ there will _not_ be a total change in the particles of the human
body, but they will reappear as the human body, he does not seem to
consider that the perpetuity of the body involves the perpetuity of the
soul, but requires separate evidence for this, and finds such evidence by
begging the very question at issue—namely, by asserting that the text of
the Scripture implies “the perpetuity of the punishment of the lost, and
the consciousness of the punishment which they endure.” Yet it is
drivelling like this which is listened to and lauded as eloquence by
hundreds, and which a Doctor of Divinity can believe that he has his
“reward as a saint” for preaching and publishing!
One more characteristic of Dr. Cumming’s writings, and we have done.
This is the _perverted moral judgment_ that everywhere reigns in them.
Not that this perversion is peculiar to Dr. Cumming: it belongs to the
dogmatic system which he shares with all evangelical believers. But the
abstract tendencies of systems are represented in very different degrees,
according to the different characters of those who embrace them; just as
the same food tells differently on different constitutions: and there are
certain qualities in Dr. Cumming that cause the perversion of which we
speak to exhibit itself with peculiar prominence in his teaching. A
single extract will enable us to explain what we mean:
“The ‘thoughts’ are evil. If it were possible for human eye to
discern and to detect the thoughts that flutter around the heart of
an unregenerate man—to mark their hue and their multitude, it would
be found that they are indeed ‘evil.’ We speak not of the thief, and
the murderer, and the adulterer, and such like, whose crimes draw
down the cognizance of earthly tribunals, and whose unenviable
character it is to take the lead in the paths of sin; but we refer to
the men who are marked out by their practice of many of the seemliest
moralities of life—by the exercise of the kindliest affections, and
the interchange of the sweetest reciprocities—and of these men, if
unrenewed and unchanged, we pronounce that their thoughts are evil.
To ascertain this, we must refer to the object around which our
thoughts ought continually to circulate. The Scriptures assert that
this object is _the glory of God_; that for this we ought to think,
to act, and to speak; and that in thus thinking, acting, and
speaking, there is involved the purest and most endearing bliss. Now
it will be found true of the most amiable men, that with all their
good society and kindliness of heart, and all their strict and
unbending integrity, they never or rarely think of the glory of God.
The question never occurs to them—Will this redound to the glory of
God? Will this make his name more known, his being more loved, his
praise more sung? And just inasmuch as their every thought comes
short of this lofty aim, in so much does it come short of good, and
entitle itself to the character of evil. If the glory of God is not
the absorbing and the influential aim of their thoughts, then they
are evil; but God’s glory never enters into their minds. They are
amiable, because it chances to be one of the constitutional
tendencies of their individual character, left uneffaced by the Fall;
and _they an just and upright_, _because they have perhaps no
occasion to be otherwise_, _or find it subservient to their interests
to maintain such a character_.”—“Occ. Disc.” vol. i. p. 8.
Again we read (Ibid. p. 236):
“There are traits in the Christian character which the mere worldly
man cannot understand. He can understand the outward morality, but
he cannot understand the inner spring of it; he can understand
Dorcas’ liberality to the poor, but he cannot penetrate the ground of
Dorcas’ liberality. _Some men give to the poor because they are
ostentatious_, _or because they think the poor will ultimately avenge
their __neglect_; _but the Christian gives to the poor_, _not only
because he has sensibilities like other men_, but because inasmuch as
ye did it to the least of these my brethren ye did it unto me.”
Before entering on the more general question involved in these
quotations, we must point to the clauses we have marked with italics,
where Dr. Cumming appears to express sentiments which, we are happy to
think, are not shared by the majority of his brethren in the faith. Dr.
Cumming, it seems, is unable to conceive that the natural man can have
any other motive for being just and upright than that it is useless to be
otherwise, or that a character for honesty is profitable; according to
his experience, between the feelings of ostentation and selfish alarm and
the feeling of love to Christ, there lie no sensibilities which can lead
a man to relieve want. Granting, as we should prefer to think, that it
is Dr. Cumming’s exposition of his sentiments which is deficient rather
than his sentiments themselves, still, the fact that the deficiency lies
precisely here, and that he can overlook it not only in the haste of oral
delivery but in the examination of proof-sheets, is strongly significant
of his mental bias—of the faint degree in which he sympathizes with the
disinterested elements of human feeling, and of the fact, which we are
about to dwell upon, that those feelings are totally absent from his
religious theory. Now, Dr. Cumming invariably assumes that, in
fulminating against those who differ from him, he is standing on a moral
elevation to which they are compelled reluctantly to look up; that his
theory of motives and conduct is in its loftiness and purity a perpetual
rebuke to their low and vicious desires and practice. It is time he
should be told that the reverse is the fact; that there are men who do
not merely cast a superficial glance at his doctrine, and fail to see its
beauty or justice, but who, after a close consideration of that doctrine,
pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development, and therefore
positively noxious. Dr. Cumming is fond of showing up the teaching of
Romanism, and accusing it of undermining true morality: it is time he
should be told that there is a large body, both of thinkers and practical
men, who hold precisely the same opinion of his own teaching—with this
difference, that they do not regard it as the inspiration of Satan, but
as the natural crop of a human mind where the soil is chiefly made up of
egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs.
Dr. Cumming’s theory, as we have seen, is that actions are good or evil
according as they are prompted or not prompted by an exclusive reference
to the “glory of God.” God, then, in Dr. Cumming’s conception, is a
being who has no pleasure in the exercise of love and truthfulness and
justice, considered as affecting the well-being of his creatures; He has
satisfaction in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and
dispositions of all relation to our fellow-beings, and replace sympathy
with men by anxiety for the “glory of God.” The deed of Grace Darling,
when she took a boat in the storm to rescue drowning men and women, was
not good if it was only compassion that nerved her arm and impelled her
to brave death for the chance of saving others; it was only good if she
asked herself—Will this redound to the glory of God? The man who endures
tortures rather than betray a trust, the man who spends years in toil in
order to discharge an obligation from which the law declares him free,
must be animated not by the spirit of fidelity to his fellow-man, but by
a desire to make “the name of God more known.” The sweet charities of
domestic life—the ready hand and the soothing word in sickness, the
forbearance toward frailties, the prompt helpfulness in all efforts and
sympathy in all joys, are simply evil if they result from a
“constitutional tendency,” or from dispositions disciplined by the
experience of suffering and the perception of moral loveliness. A wife
is not to devote herself to her husband out of love to him and a sense of
the duties implied by a close relation—she is to be a faithful wife for
the glory of God; if she feels her natural affections welling up too
strongly, she is to repress them; it will not do to act from natural
affection—she must think of the glory of God. A man is to guide his
affairs with energy and discretion, not from an honest desire to fulfil
his responsibilities as a member of society and a father, but—that “God’s
praise may be sung.” Dr. Cumming’s Christian pays his debts for the
glory of God; were it not for the coercion of that supreme motive, it
would be evil to pay them. A man is not to be just from a feeling of
justice; he is not to help his fellow-men out of good-will to his
fellow-men; he is not to be a tender husband and father out of affection:
all these natural muscles and fibres are to be torn away and replaced by
a patent steel-spring—anxiety for the “glory of God.”
Happily, the constitution of human nature forbids the complete prevalence
of such a theory. Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human
nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and though dogmas
may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls round
the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give
way before the slow and sure operation of the sap. But next to the
hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of persecution, there
perhaps has been no perversion more obstructive of true moral development
than this substitution of a reference to the glory of God for the direct
promptings of the sympathetic feelings. Benevolence and justice are
strong only in proportion as they are directly and inevitably called into
activity by their proper objects; pity is strong only because we are
strongly impressed by suffering; and only in proportion as it is
compassion that speaks through the eyes when we soothe, and moves the arm
when we succor, is a deed strictly benevolent. If the soothing or the
succor be given because another being wishes or approves it, the deed
ceases to be one of benevolence, and becomes one of deference, of
obedience, of self-interest, or vanity. Accessory motives may aid in
producing an _action_, but they presuppose the weakness of the direct
motive; and conversely, when the direct motive is strong, the action of
accessory motives will be excluded. If, then, as Dr. Cumming inculcates,
the glory of God is to be “the absorbing and the influential aim” in our
thoughts and actions, this must tend to neutralize the human sympathies;
the stream of feeling will be diverted from its natural current in order
to feed an artificial canal. The idea of God is really moral in its
influence—it really cherishes all that is best and loveliest in man—only
when God is contemplated as sympathizing with the pure elements of human
feeling, as possessing infinitely all those attributes which we recognize
to be moral in humanity. In this light, the idea of God and the sense of
His presence intensify all noble feeling, and encourage all noble effort,
on the same principle that human sympathy is found a source of strength:
the brave man feels braver when he knows that another stout heart is
beating time with his; the devoted woman who is wearing out her years in
patient effort to alleviate suffering or save vice from the last stages
of degradation, finds aid in the pressure of a friendly hand which tells
her that there is one who understands her deeds, and in her place would
do the like. The idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel
and endure for our fellow-men, but who will pour new life into our too
languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an
extension and multiplication of the effects produced by human sympathy;
and it has been intensified for the better spirits who have been under
the influence of orthodox Christianity, by the contemplation of Jesus as
“God manifest in the flesh.” But Dr. Cumming’s God is the very opposite
of all this: he is a God who instead of sharing and aiding our human
sympathies, is directly in collision with them; who instead of
strengthening the bond between man and man, by encouraging the sense that
they are both alike the objects of His love and care, thrusts himself
between them and forbids them to feel for each other except as they have
relation to Him. He is a God who, instead of adding his solar force to
swell the tide of those impulses that tend to give humanity a common life
in which the good of one is the good of all, commands us to check those
impulses, lest they should prevent us from thinking of His glory. It is
in vain for Dr. Cumming to say that we are to love man for God’s sake:
with the conception of God which his teaching presents, the love of man
for God’s sake involves, as his writings abundantly show, a strong
principle of hatred. We can only love one being for the sake of another
when there is an habitual delight in associating the idea of those two
beings—that is, when the object of our indirect love is a source of joy
and honor to the object of our direct love; but according to Dr.
Cumming’s theory, the majority of mankind—the majority of his
neighbors—are in precisely the opposite relation to God. His soul has no
pleasure in them, they belong more to Satan than to Him, and if they
contribute to His glory, it is against their will. Dr. Cumming then can
only love _some_ men for God’s sake; the rest he must in consistency
_hate_ for God’s sake.
There must be many, even in the circle of Dr. Cumming’s admirers, who
would be revolted by the doctrine we have just exposed, if their natural
good sense and healthy feeling were not early stifled by dogmatic
beliefs, and their reverence misled by pious phrases. But as it is, many
a rational question, many a generous instinct, is repelled as the
suggestion of a supernatural enemy, or as the ebullition of human pride
and corruption. This state of inward contradiction can be put an end to
only by the conviction that the free and diligent exertion of the
intellect, instead of being a sin, is part of their responsibility—that
Right and Reason are synonymous. The fundamental faith for man is, faith
in the result of a brave, honest, and steady use of all his faculties:
“Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul according well
May make one music as before,
But vaster.”
Before taking leave of Dr. Cumming, let us express a hope that we have in
no case exaggerated the unfavorable character of the inferences to be
drawn from his pages. His creed often obliges him to hope the worst of
men, and exert himself in proving that the worst is true; but thus far we
are happier than he. We have no theory which requires us to attribute
unworthy motives to Dr. Cumming, no opinions, religious or irreligious,
which can make it a gratification to us to detect him in delinquencies.
On the contrary, the better we are able to think of him as a man, while
we are obliged to disapprove him as a theologian, the stronger will be
the evidence for our conviction, that the tendency toward good in human
nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which
insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic
perversions.
IV. GERMAN WIT: HENRY HEINE. {99}
“Nothing,” says Goethe, “is more significant of men’s character than what
they find laughable.” The truth of this observation would perhaps have
been more apparent if he had said _culture_ instead of character. The
last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar
is their jocularity; and we can hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide
gulf which separates him from them, than by comparing the object which
shakes the diaphragm of a coal-heaver with the highly complex pleasure
derived from a real witticism. That any high order of wit is exceedingly
complex, and demands a ripe and strong mental development, has one
evidence in the fact that we do not find it in boys at all in proportion
to their manifestation of other powers. Clever boys generally aspire to
the heroic and poetic rather than the comic, and the crudest of all their
efforts are their jokes. Many a witty man will remember how in his
school days a practical joke, more or less Rabelaisian, was for him the
_ne plus ultra_ of the ludicrous. It seems to have been the same with
the boyhood of the human race. The history and literature of the ancient
Hebrews gives the idea of a people who went about their business and
their pleasure as gravely as a society of beavers; the smile and the
laugh are often mentioned metaphorically, but the smile is one of
complacency, the laugh is one of scorn. Nor can we imagine that the
facetious element was very strong in the Egyptians; no laughter lurks in
the wondering eyes and the broad calm lips of their statues. Still less
can the Assyrians have had any genius for the comic: the round eyes and
simpering satisfaction of their ideal faces belong to a type which is not
witty, but the cause of wit in others. The fun of these early races was,
we fancy, of the after-dinner kind—loud-throated laughter over the
wine-cup, taken too little account of in sober moments to enter as an
element into their Art, and differing as much from the laughter of a
Chamfort or a Sheridan as the gastronomic enjoyment of an ancient Briton,
whose dinner had no other “removes” than from acorns to beech-mast and
back again to acorns, differed from the subtle pleasures of the palate
experienced by his turtle-eating descendant. In fact they had to live
seriously through the stages which to subsequent races were to become
comedy, as those amiable-looking preadamite amphibia which Professor Owen
has restored for us in effigy at Sydenham, took perfectly _au sérieux_
the grotesque physiognomies of their kindred. Heavy experience in their
case, as in every other, was the base from which the salt of future wit
was to be made.
Humor is of earlier growth than Wit, and it is in accordance with this
earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic tendencies,
while Wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humor
draws its materials from situations and characteristics; Wit seizes on
unexpected and complex relations. Humor is chiefly representative and
descriptive; it is diffuse, and flows along without any other law than
its own fantastic will; or it flits about like a will-of-the-wisp,
amazing us by its whimsical transitions. Wit is brief and sudden, and
sharply defined as a crystal; it does not make pictures, it is not
fantastic; but it detects an unsuspected analogy or suggests a startling
or confounding inference. Every one who has had the opportunity of
making the comparison will remember that the effect produced on him by
some witticisms is closely akin to the effect produced on him by subtle
reasoning which lays open a fallacy or absurdity, and there are persons
whose delight in such reasoning always manifests itself in laughter.
This affinity of wit with ratiocination is the more obvious in proportion
as the species of wit is higher and deals less with less words and with
superficialities than with the essential qualities of things. Some of
Johnson’s most admirable witticisms consist in the suggestion of an
analogy which immediately exposes the absurdity of an action or
proposition; and it is only their ingenuity, condensation, and
instantaneousness which lift them from reasoning into Wit—they are
_reasoning raised to a higher power_. On the other hand, Humor, in its
higher forms, and in proportion as it associates itself with the
sympathetic emotions, continually passes into poetry: nearly all great
modern humorists may be called prose poets.
Some confusion as to the nature of Humor has been created by the fact
that those who have written most eloquently on it have dwelt almost
exclusively on its higher forms, and have defined humor in general as the
_sympathetic_ presentation of incongruous elements in human nature and
life—a definition which only applies to its later development. A great
deal of humor may coexist with a great deal of barbarism, as we see in
the Middle Ages; but the strongest flavor of the humor in such cases will
come, not from sympathy, but more probably from triumphant egoism or
intolerance; at best it will be the love of the ludicrous exhibiting
itself in illustrations of successful cunning and of the _lex talionis_
as in _Reineke Fuchs_, or shaking off in a holiday mood the yoke of a too
exacting faith, as in the old Mysteries. Again, it is impossible to deny
a high degree of humor to many practical jokes, but no sympathetic nature
can enjoy them. Strange as the genealogy may seem, the original
parentage of that wonderful and delicious mixture of fun, fancy,
philosophy, and feeling, which constitutes modern humor, was probably the
cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy—such is
the tendency of things toward the good and beautiful on this earth!
Probably the reason why high culture demands more complete harmony with
its moral sympathies in humor than in wit, is that humor is in its nature
more prolix—that it has not the direct and irresistible force of wit.
Wit is an electric shock, which takes us by violence, quite independently
of our predominant mental disposition; but humor approaches us more
deliberately and leaves us masters of ourselves. Hence it is, that while
coarse and cruel humor has almost disappeared from contemporary
literature, coarse and cruel wit abounds; even refined men cannot help
laughing at a coarse _bon mot_ or a lacerating personality, if the
“shock” of the witticism is a powerful one; while mere fun will have no
power over them if it jar on their moral taste. Hence, too, it is, that
while wit is perennial, humor is liable to become superannuated.
As is usual with definitions and classifications, however, this
distinction between wit and humor does not exactly represent the actual
fact. Like all other species, Wit and Humor overlap and blend with each
other. There are _bon mots_, like many of Charles Lamb’s, which are a
sort of facetious hybrids, we hardly know whether to call them witty or
humorous; there are rather lengthy descriptions or narratives, which,
like Voltaire’s “Micromégas,” would be more humorous if they were not so
sparkling and antithetic, so pregnant with suggestion and satire, that we
are obliged to call them witty. We rarely find wit untempered by humor,
or humor without a spice of wit; and sometimes we find them both united
in the highest degree in the same mind, as in Shakespeare and Molière. A
happy conjunction this, for wit is apt to be cold, and thin-lipped, and
Mephistophelean in men who have no relish for humor, whose lungs do never
crow like Chanticleer at fun and drollery; and broad-faced, rollicking
humor needs the refining influence of wit. Indeed, it may be said that
there is no really fine writing in which wit has not an implicit, if not
an explicit, action. The wit may never rise to the surface, it may never
flame out into a witticism; but it helps to give brightness and
transparency, it warns off from flights and exaggerations which verge on
the ridiculous—in every _genre_ of writing it preserves a man from
sinking into the _genre ennuyeux_. And it is eminently needed for this
office in humorous writing; for as humor has no limits imposed on it by
its material, no law but its own exuberance, it is apt to become
preposterous and wearisome unless checked by wit, which is the enemy of
all monotony, of all lengthiness, of all exaggeration.
Perhaps the nearest approach Nature has given us to a complete analysis,
in which wit is as thoroughly exhausted of humor as possible, and humor
as bare as possible of wit, is in the typical Frenchman and the typical
German. Voltaire, the intensest example of pure wit, fails in most of
his fictions from his lack of humor. “Micromégas” is a perfect tale,
because, as it deals chiefly with philosophic ideas and does not touch
the marrow of human feeling and life, the writer’s wit and wisdom were
all-sufficient for his purpose. Not so with “Candide.” Here Voltaire
had to give pictures of life as well as to convey philosophic truth and
satire, and here we feel the want of humor. The sense of the ludicrous
is continually defeated by disgust, and the scenes, instead of presenting
us with an amusing or agreeable picture, are only the frame for a
witticism. On the other hand, German humor generally shows no sense of
measure, no instinctive tact; it is either floundering and clumsy as the
antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lapland day, in
which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will ever come. For
this reason, Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorists, is unendurable
to many readers, and frequently tiresome to all. Here, as elsewhere, the
German shows the absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility to
gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the necessary
concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region of
metaphysics. For _Identität_ in the abstract no one can have an acuter
vision, but in the concrete he is satisfied with a very loose
approximation. He has the finest nose for _Empirismus_ in philosophical
doctrine, but the presence of more or less tobacco smoke in the air he
breathes is imperceptible to him. To the typical German—_Vetter
Michel_—it is indifferent whether his door-lock will catch, whether his
teacup be more or less than an inch thick; whether or not his book have
every other leaf unstitched; whether his neighbor’s conversation be more
or less of a shout; whether he pronounce _b_ or _p_, _t_ or _d_; whether
or not his adored one’s teeth be few and far between. He has the same
sort of insensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like a
German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it should ever
come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of
Providence rather than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word
_Langeweile_, the equivalent for ennui, and we have secretly wondered
_what_ it can be that produces ennui in a German. Not the longest of
long tragedies, for we have known him to pronounce that _höchst fesselnd_
(_so_ enchaining!); not the heaviest of heavy books, for he delights in
that as _gründlich_ (deep, Sir, deep!); not the slowest of journeys in a
_Postwagen_, for the slower the horses, the more cigars he can smoke
before he reaches his journey’s end. German ennui must be something as
superlative as Barclay’s treble X, which, we suppose, implies an
extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction.
It is easy to see that this national deficiency in nicety of perception
must have its effect on the national appreciation and exhibition of
Humor. You find in Germany ardent admirers of Shakespeare, who tell you
that what they think most admirable in him is his _Wortspiel_, his verbal
quibbles; and one of these, a man of no slight culture and refinement,
once cited to a friend of ours Proteus’s joke in “The Two Gentlemen of
Verona”—“Nod I? why that’s Noddy,” as a transcendant specimen of
Shakespearian wit. German facetiousness is seldom comic to foreigners,
and an Englishman with a swelled cheek might take up _Kladderadatsch_,
the German Punch, without any danger of agitating his facial muscles.
Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that, among the five great races
concerned in modern civilization, the German race is the only one which,
up to the present century, had contributed nothing classic to the common
stock of European wit and humor; for _Reineke Fuchs_ cannot be regarded
as a peculiarly Teutonic product. Italy was the birthplace of Pantomime
and the immortal Pulcinello; Spain had produced Cervantes; France had
produced Rabelais and Molière, and classic wits innumerable; England had
yielded Shakspeare and a host of humorists. But Germany had borne no
great comic dramatist, no great satirist, and she has not yet repaired
the omission; she had not even produced any humorist of a high order.
Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically
witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit—the “flavor of
mind”—throughout his writings; and it is often concentrated into pungent
satire, as every reader of the _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ remembers.
Still Lessing’s name has not become European through his wit, and his
charming comedy, _Minna von Barnhelm_, has won no place on a foreign
stage. Of course we do not pretend to an exhaustive acquaintance with
German literature; we not only admit—we are sure that it includes much
comic writing of which we know nothing. We simply state the fact, that
no German production of that kind, before the present century, ranked as
European; a fact which does not, indeed, determine the _amount_ of the
national facetiousness, but which is quite decisive as to its _quality_.
Whatever may be the stock of fun which Germany yields for home
consumption, she has provided little for the palate of other lands. All
honor to her for the still greater things she has done for us! She has
fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, has produced the
grandest inventions, has made magnificent contributions to science, has
given us some of the divinest poetry, and quite the divinest music in the
world. No one reveres and treasures the products of the German mind more
than we do. To say that that mind is not fertile in wit is only like
saying that excellent wheat land is not rich pasture; to say that we do
not enjoy German facetiousness is no more than to say that, though the
horse is the finest of quadrupeds, we do not like him to lay his hoof
playfully on our shoulder. Still, as we have noticed that the pointless
puns and stupid jocularity of the boy may ultimately be developed into
the epigrammatic brilliancy and polished playfulness of the man; as we
believe that racy wit and chastened delicate humor are inevitably the
results of invigorated and refined mental activity, we can also believe
that Germany will, one day, yield a crop of wits and humorists.
Perhaps there is already an earnest of that future crop in the existence
of Heinrich Heine, a German born with the present century, who, to
Teutonic imagination, sensibility, and humor, adds an amount of _esprit_
that would make him brilliant among the most brilliant of Frenchmen.
True, this unique German wit is half a Hebrew; but he and his ancestors
spent their youth in German air, and were reared on _Wurst_ and
_Sauerkraut_, so that he is as much a German as a pheasant is an English
bird, or a potato an Irish vegetable. But whatever else he may be, Heine
is one of the most remarkable men of this age: no echo, but a real voice,
and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth studying; a
surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious
song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his
fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art—who sheds his sunny
smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy
background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most
scorching lightnings of satire; an artist in prose literature, who has
shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose;
and—in spite of all charges against him, true as well as false—a lover of
freedom, who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men.
He is, moreover, a suffering man, who, with all the highly-wrought
sensibility of genius, has to endure terrible physical ills; and as such
he calls forth more than an intellectual interest. It is true, alas!
that there is a heavy weight in the other scale—that Heine’s magnificent
powers have often served only to give electric force to the expression of
debased feeling, so that his works are no Phidian statue of gold, and
ivory, and gems, but have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay
mingled with the precious metal. The audacity of his occasional
coarseness and personality is unparalleled in contemporary literature,
and has hardly been exceeded by the license of former days. Hence,
before his volumes are put within the reach of immature minds, there is
need of a friendly penknife to exercise a strict censorship. Yet, when
all coarseness, all scurrility, all Mephistophelean contempt for the
reverent feelings of other men, is removed, there will be a plenteous
remainder of exquisite poetry, of wit, humor, and just thought. It is
apparently too often a congenial task to write severe words about the
transgressions committed by men of genius, especially when the censor has
the advantage of being himself a man of _no_ genius, so that those
transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; _he_, forsooth, never
lacerated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse
allusion, and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the
temptation that lies in transcendent power. We are also apt to measure
what a gifted man has done by our arbitrary conception of what he might
have done, rather than by a comparison of his actual doings with our own
or those of other ordinary men. We make ourselves overzealous agents of
heaven, and demand that our brother should bring usurious interest for
his five Talents, forgetting that it is less easy to manage five Talents
than two. Whatever benefit there may be in denouncing the evil, it is
after all more edifying, and certainly more cheering, to appreciate the
good. Hence, in endeavoring to give our readers some account of Heine
and his works, we shall not dwell lengthily on his failings; we shall not
hold the candle up to dusty, vermin-haunted corners, but let the light
fall as much as possible on the nobler and more attractive details. Our
sketch of Heine’s life, which has been drawn from various sources, will
be free from everything like intrusive gossip, and will derive its
coloring chiefly from the autobiographical hints and descriptions
scattered through his own writings. Those of our readers who happen to
know nothing of Heine will in this way be making their acquaintance with
the writer while they are learning the outline of his career.
We have said that Heine was born with the present century; but this
statement is not precise, for we learn that, according to his certificate
of baptism, he was born December 12th, 1799. However, as he himself
says, the important point is that he was born, and born on the banks of
the Rhine, at Düsseldorf, where his father was a merchant. In his
“Reisebilder” he gives us some recollections, in his wild poetic way, of
the dear old town where he spent his childhood, and of his schoolboy
troubles there. We shall quote from these in butterfly fashion, sipping
a little nectar here and there, without regard to any strict order:
“I first saw the light on the banks of that lovely stream, where
Folly grows on the green hills, and in autumn is plucked, pressed,
poured into casks, and sent into foreign lands. Believe me, I
yesterday heard some one utter folly which, in anno 1811, lay in a
bunch of grapes I then saw growing on the Johannisberg. . . . Mon
Dieu! if I had only such faith in me that I could remove mountains,
the Johannisberg would be the very mountain I should send for
wherever I might be; but as my faith is not so strong, imagination
must help me, and it transports me at once to the lovely Rhine. . . .
I am again a child, and playing with other children on the
Schlossplatz, at Düsseldorf on the Rhine. Yes, madam, there was I
born; and I note this expressly, in case, after my death, seven
cities—Schilda, Krähwinkel, Polkwitz, Bockum, Dülken, Göttingen, and
Schöppenstädt—should contend for the honor of being my birthplace.
Düsseldorf is a town on the Rhine; sixteen thousand men live there,
and many hundred thousand men besides lie buried there. . . . . Among
them, many of whom my mother says, that it would be better if they
were still living; for example, my grandfather and my uncle, the old
Herr von Geldern and the young Herr von Geldern, both such celebrated
doctors, who saved so many men from death, and yet must die
themselves. And the pious Ursula, who carried me in her arms when I
was a child, also lies buried there and a rosebush grows on her
grave; she loved the scent of roses so well in life, and her heart
was pure rose-incense and goodness. The knowing old Canon, too, lies
buried there. Heavens, what an object he looked when I last saw him!
_He was made up of nothing but mind and plasters_, and nevertheless
studied day and night, as if he were alarmed lest the worms should
find an idea too little in his head. And the little William lies
there, and for this I am to blame. We were schoolfellows in the
Franciscan monastery, and were playing on that side of it where the
Düssel flows between stone walls, and I said, ‘William, fetch out the
kitten that has just fallen in’—and merrily he went down on to the
plank which lay across the brook, snatched the kitten out of the
water, but fell in himself, and was dragged out dripping and dead.
_The kitten lived to a good old age_. . . . Princes in that day were
not the tormented race as they are now; the crown grew firmly on
their heads, and at night they drew a nightcap over it, and slept
peacefully, and peacefully slept the people at their feet; and when
the people waked in the morning, they said, ‘Good morning, father!’
and the princes answered, ‘Good morning, dear children!’ But it was
suddenly quite otherwise; for when we awoke one morning at
Düsseldorf, and were ready to say, ‘Good morning, father!’ lo! the
father was gone away; and in the whole town there was nothing but
dumb sorrow, everywhere a sort of funeral disposition; and people
glided along silently to the market, and read the long placard placed
on the door of the Town Hall. It was dismal weather; yet the lean
tailor, Kilian, stood in his nankeen jacket which he usually wore
only in the house, and his blue worsted stockings hung down so that
his naked legs peeped out mournfully, and his thin lips trembled
while he muttered the announcement to himself. And an old soldier
read rather louder, and at many a word a crystal tear trickled down
to his brave old mustache. I stood near him and wept in company, and
asked him, ‘_Why we wept_?’ He answered, ‘The Elector has
abdicated.’ And then he read again, and at the words, ‘for the
long-manifested fidelity of my subjects,’ and ‘hereby set you free
from your allegiance,’ he wept more than ever. It is strangely
touching to see an old man like that, with faded uniform and scarred
face, weep so bitterly all of a sudden. While we were reading, the
electoral arms were taken down from the Town Hall; everything had
such a desolate air, that it was as if an eclipse of the sun were
expected. . . . I went home and wept, and wailed out, ‘The Elector
has abdicated!’ In vain my mother took a world of trouble to explain
the thing to me. I knew what I knew; I was not to be persuaded, but
went crying to bed, and in the night dreamed that the world was at an
end.”
The next morning, however, the sun rises as usual, and Joachim Murat is
proclaimed Grand Duke, whereupon there is a holiday at the public school,
and Heinrich (or Harry, for that was his baptismal name, which he
afterward had the good taste to change), perched on the bronze horse of
the Electoral statue, sees quite a different scene from yesterday’s:
“The next day the world was again all in order, and we had school as
before, and things were got by heart as before—the Roman emperors,
chronology, the nouns in _im_, the _verba irregularia_, Greek,
Hebrew, geography, mental arithmetic!—heavens! my head is still dizzy
with it—all must be learned by heart! And a great deal of this came
very conveniently for me in after life. For if I had not known the
Roman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite
indifferent to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that
they never really existed. . . . But oh! the trouble I had at school
with the endless dates. And with arithmetic it was still worse.
What I understood best was subtraction, for that has a very practical
rule: ‘Four can’t be taken from three, therefore I must borrow one.’
But I advise every one in such a case to borrow a few extra pence,
for no one can tell what may happen. . . . As for Latin, you have no
idea, madam, what a complicated affair it is. The Romans would never
have found time to conquer the world if they had first had to learn
Latin. Luckily for them, they already knew in their cradles what
nouns have their accusative in _im_. I, on the contrary, had to
learn them by heart in the sweat of my brow; nevertheless, it is
fortunate for me that I know them . . . and the fact that I have them
at my finger-ends if I should ever happen to want them suddenly,
affords me much inward repose and consolation in many troubled hours
of life. . . . Of Greek I will not say a word, I should get too much
irritated. The monks in the Middle Ages were not so far wrong when
they maintained that Greek was an invention of the devil. God knows
the suffering I endured over it. . . . With Hebrew it went somewhat
better, for I had always a great liking for the Jews, though to this
very hour they crucify my good name; but I could never get on so far
in Hebrew as my watch, which had much familiar intercourse with
pawnbrokers, and in this way contracted many Jewish habits—for
example, it wouldn’t go on Saturdays.”
Heine’s parents were apparently not wealthy, but his education was cared
for by his uncle, Solomon Heine, a great banker in Hamburg, so that he
had no early pecuniary disadvantages to struggle with. He seems to have
been very happy in his mother, who was not of Hebrew but of Teutonic
blood; he often mentions her with reverence and affection, and in the
“Buch der Lieder” there are two exquisite sonnets addressed to her, which
tell how his proud spirit was always subdued by the charm of her
presence, and how her love was the home of his heart after restless weary
ramblings:
“Wie mächtig auch mein stolzer Muth sich blähe,
In deiner selig süssen, trauten Nahe
Ergreift mich oft ein demuthvolles Zagen.
* * * * *
Und immer irrte ich naeh Liebe, immer
Nach Liebe, doch die Liebe fand ich nimmer,
Und kehrte um nach Hause, krank und trübe.
Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen,
Und ach! was da in deinem Aug’ geschwommen,
Das war die süsse, langgesuchte Liebe.”
He was at first destined for a mercantile life, but Nature declared too
strongly against this plan. “God knows,” he has lately said in
conversation with his brother, “I would willingly have become a banker,
but I could never bring myself to that pass. I very early discerned that
bankers would one day be the rulers of the world.” So commerce was at
length given up for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the
University of Bonn. He had already published some poems in the corner of
a newspaper, and among them was one on Napoleon, the object of his
youthful enthusiasm. This poem, he says in a letter to St. Réné
Taillandier, was written when he was only sixteen. It is still to be
found in the “Buch der Lieder” under the title “Die Grenadiere,” and it
proves that even in its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly
specific character.
It will be easily imagined that the germs of poetry sprouted too
vigorously in Heine’s brain for jurisprudence to find much room there.
Lectures on history and literature, we are told, were more diligently
attended than lectures on law. He had taken care, too, to furnish his
trunk with abundant editions of the poets, and the poet he especially
studied at that time was Byron. At a later period, we find his taste
taking another direction, for he writes, “Of all authors, Byron is
precisely the one who excites in me the most intolerable emotion; whereas
Scott, in every one of his works, gladdens my heart, soothes, and
invigorates me.” Another indication of his bent in these Bonn days was a
newspaper essay, in which he attacked the Romantic school; and here also
he went through that chicken-pox of authorship—the production of a
tragedy. Heine’s tragedy—_Almansor_—is, as might be expected, better
than the majority of these youthful mistakes. The tragic collision lies
in the conflict between natural affection and the deadly hatred of
religion and of race—in the sacrifice of youthful lovers to the strife
between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and Christian. Some of the situations
are striking, and there are passages of considerable poetic merit; but
the characters are little more than shadowy vehicles for the poetry, and
there is a want of clearness and probability in the structure. It was
published two years later, in company with another tragedy, in one act,
called _William Ratcliffe_, in which there is rather a feeble use of the
Scotch second-sight after the manner of the Fate in the Greek tragedy.
We smile to find Heine saying of his tragedies, in a letter to a friend
soon after their publication: “I know they will be terribly cut up, but I
will confess to you in confidence that they are very good, better than my
collection of poems, which are not worth a shot.” Elsewhere he tells us,
that when, after one of Paganini’s concerts, he was passionately
complimenting the great master on his violin-playing. Paganini
interrupted him thus: “But how were you pleased with my _bows_?”
In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen. He there pursued his omission of
law studies, and at the end of three months he was rusticated for a
breach of the laws against duelling. While there, he had attempted a
negotiation with Brockhaus for the printing of a volume of poems, and had
endured the first ordeal of lovers and poets—a refusal. It was not until
a year after that he found a Berlin publisher for his first volume of
poems, subsequently transformed, with additions, into the “Buch der
Lieder.” He remained between two and three years at Berlin, and the
society he found there seems to have made these years an important epoch
in his culture. He was one of the youngest members of a circle which
assembled at the house of the poetess Elise von Hohenhausen, the
translator of Byron—a circle which included Chamisso, Varnhagen, and
Rahel (Varnhagen’s wife). For Rahel, Heine had a profound admiration and
regard; he afterward dedicated to her the poems included under the tide
“Heimkehr;” and he frequently refers to her or quotes her in a way that
indicates how he valued her influence. According to his friend F. von
Hohenhausen, the opinions concerning Heine’s talent were very various
among his Berlin friends, and it was only a small minority that had any
presentiment of his future fame. In this minority was Elise von
Hohenhausen, who proclaimed Heine as the Byron of Germany; but her
opinion was met with much head-shaking and opposition. We can imagine
how precious was such a recognition as hers to the young poet, then only
two or three and twenty, and with by no means an impressive personality
for superficial eyes. Perhaps even the deep-sighted were far from
detecting in that small, blonde, pale young man, with quiet, gentle
manners, the latent powers of ridicule and sarcasm—the terrible talons
that were one day to be thrust out from the velvet paw of the young
leopard.
It was apparently during this residence in Berlin that Heine united
himself with the Lutheran Church. He would willingly, like many of his
friends, he tells us, have remained free from all ecclesiastical ties if
the authorities there had not forbidden residence in Prussia, and
especially in Berlin, to every one who did not belong to one of the
positive religions recognized by the State.
“As Henry IV. once laughingly said, ‘_Paris vaut bien une messe_,’ so
I might with reason say, ‘_Berlin vaut bien une prêche_;’ and I could
afterward, as before, accommodate myself to the very enlightened
Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be
had in the churches of Berlin, and which was even free from the
divinity of Christ, like turtle-soup without turtle.”
At the same period, too, Heine became acquainted with Hegel. In his
lately published “Geständnisse” (Confessions) he throws on Hegel’s
influence over him the blue light of demoniacal wit, and confounds us by
the most bewildering double-edged sarcasms; but that influence seems to
have been at least more wholesome than the one which produced the mocking
retractations of the “Geständnisse.” Through all his self-satire, we
discern that in those days he had something like real earnestness and
enthusiasm, which are certainly not apparent in his present theistic
confession of faith.
“On the whole, I never felt a strong enthusiasm for this philosophy,
and conviction on the subject was out of question. I never was an
abstract thinker, and I accepted the synthesis of the Hegelian
doctrine without demanding any proof; since its consequences
flattered my vanity. I was young and proud, and it pleased my
vainglory when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my
grandmother believed, the God who lives in heaven, but myself here
upon earth. This foolish pride had not in the least a pernicious
influence on my feelings; on the contrary, it heightened these to the
pitch of heroism. I was at that time so lavish in generosity and
self-sacrifice that I must assuredly have eclipsed the most brilliant
deeds of those good _bourgeois_ of virtue who acted merely from a
sense of duty, and simply obeyed the laws of morality.”
His sketch of Hegel is irresistibly amusing; but we must warn the reader
that Heine’s anecdotes are often mere devices of style by which he
conveys his satire or opinions. The reader will see that he does not
neglect an opportunity of giving a sarcastic lash or two, in passing, to
Meyerbeer, for whose music he has a great contempt. The sarcasm conveyed
in the substitution of _reputation_ for _music_ and _journalists_ for
_musicians_, might perhaps escape any one unfamiliar with the sly and
unexpected turns of Heine’s ridicule.
“To speak frankly, I seldom understood him, and only arrived at the
meaning of his words by subsequent reflection. I believe he wished
not to be understood; and hence his practice of sprinkling his
discourse with modifying parentheses; hence, perhaps, his preference
for persons of whom he knew that they did not understand him, and to
whom he all the more willingly granted the honor of his familiar
acquaintance. Thus every one in Berlin wondered at the intimate
companionship of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich Beer, a
brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by his
reputation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists.
This Beer, namely Heinrich, was a thoroughly stupid fellow, and
indeed was afterward actually declared imbecile by his family, and
placed under guardianship, because instead of making a name for
himself in art or in science by means of his great fortune, he
squandered his money on childish trifles; and, for example, one day
bought six thousand thalers’ worth of walking-sticks. This poor man,
who had no wish to pass either for a great tragic dramatist, or for a
great star-gazer, or for a laurel-crowned musical genius, a rival of
Mozart and Rossini, and preferred giving his money for
walking-sticks—this degenerate Beer enjoyed Hegel’s most confidential
society; he was the philosopher’s bosom friend, his Pylades, and
accompanied him everywhere like his shadow. The equally witty and
gifted Felix Mendelssohn once sought to explain this phenomenon, by
maintaining that Hegel did not understand Heinrich Beer. I now
believe, however, that the real ground of that intimacy consisted in
this—Hegel was convinced that no word of what he said was understood
by Heinrich Beer; and he could therefore, in his presence, give
himself up to all the intellectual outpourings of the moment. In
general, Hegel’s conversation was a sort of monologue, sighed forth
by starts in a noiseless voice; the odd roughness of his expressions
often struck me, and many of them have remained in my memory. One
beautiful starlight evening we stood together at the window, and I, a
young man of one-and-twenty, having just had a good dinner and
finished my coffee, spoke with enthusiasm of the stars, and called
them the habitations of the departed. But the master muttered to
himself, ‘The stars! hum! hum! The stars are only a brilliant
leprosy on the face of the heavens.’ ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried, ‘is
there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is rewarded after
death?’ But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said, cuttingly,
‘So you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick mother, and
refrained from poisoning your worthy brother?’ At these words he
looked anxiously round, but appeared immediately set at rest when he
observed that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite
him to a game at whist.”
In 1823 Heine returned to Göttingen to complete his career as a
law-student, and this time he gave evidence of advanced mental maturity,
not only by producing many of the charming poems subsequently included in
the “Reisebilder,” but also by prosecuting his professional studies
diligently enough to leave Göttingen, in 1825, as _Doctor juris_.
Hereupon he settled at Hamburg as an advocate, but his profession seems
to have been the least pressing of his occupations. In those days a
small blonde young man, with the brim of his hat drawn over his nose, his
coat flying open, and his hands stuck in his trousers pockets, might be
seen stumbling along the streets of Hamburg, staring from side to side,
and appearing to have small regard to the figure he made in the eyes of
the good citizens. Occasionally an inhabitant more literary than usual
would point out this young man to his companion as _Heinrich Heine_; but
in general the young poet had not to endure the inconveniences of being a
lion. His poems were devoured, but he was not asked to devour flattery
in return. Whether because the fair Hamburgers acted in the spirit of
Johnson’s advice to Hannah More—to “consider what her flattery was worth
before she choked him with it”—or for some other reason, Heine, according
to the testimony of August Lewald, to whom we owe these particulars of
his Hamburg life, was left free from the persecution of tea-parties.
Not, however, from another persecution of Genius—nervous headaches, which
some persons, we are told, regarded as an improbable fiction, intended as
a pretext for raising a delicate white hand to his forehead. It is
probable that the sceptical persons alluded to were themselves untroubled
with nervous headaches, and that their hands were _not_ delicate. Slight
details, these, but worth telling about a man of genius, because they
help us to keep in mind that he is, after all, our brother, having to
endure the petty every-day ills of life as we have; with this difference,
that his heightened sensibility converts what are mere insect stings for
us into scorpion stings for him.
It was, perhaps, in these Hamburg days that Heine paid the visit to
Goethe, of which he gives us this charming little picture:
“When I visited him in Weimar, and stood before him, I involuntarily
glanced at his side to see whether the eagle was not there with the
lightning in his beak. I was nearly speaking Greek to him; but, as I
observed that he understood German, I stated to him in German that
the plums on the road between Jena and Weimar were very good. I had
for so many long winter nights thought over what lofty and profound
things I would say to Goethe, if ever I saw him. And when I saw him
at last, I said to him, that the Saxon plums were very good! And
Goethe smiled.”
During the next few years Heine produced the most popular of all his
works—those which have won him his place as the greatest of living German
poets and humorists. Between 1826 and 1829 appeared the four volumes of
the “Reisebilder” (Pictures of Travel) and the “Buch der Lieder” (Book of
Songs), a volume of lyrics, of which it is hard to say whether their
greatest charm is the lightness and finish of their style, their vivid
and original imaginativeness, or their simple, pure sensibility. In his
“Reisebilder” Heine carries us with him to the Hartz, to the isle of
Norderney, to his native town Düsseldorf, to Italy, and to England,
sketching scenery and character, now with the wildest, most fantastic
humor, now with the finest idyllic sensibility—letting his thoughts
wander from poetry to politics, from criticism to dreamy reverie, and
blending fun, imagination, reflection, and satire in a sort of exquisite,
ever-varying shimmer, like the hues of the opal.
Heine’s journey to England did not at all heighten his regard for the
English. He calls our language the “hiss of egoism (_Zischlaute des
Egoismus_); and his ridicule of English awkwardness is as merciless
as—English ridicule of German awkwardness. His antipathy toward us seems
to have grown in intensity, like many of his other antipathies; and in
his “Vermischte Schriften” he is more bitter than ever. Let us quote one
of his philippics, since bitters are understood to be wholesome:
“It is certainly a frightful injustice to pronounce sentence of
condemnation on an entire people. But with regard to the English,
momentary disgust might betray me into this injustice; and on looking
at the mass I easily forget the many brave and noble men who
distinguished themselves by intellect and love of freedom. But
these, especially the British poets, were always all the more
glaringly in contrast with the rest of the nation; they were isolated
martyrs to their national relations; and, besides, great geniuses do
not belong to the particular land of their birth: they scarcely
belong to this earth, the Golgotha of their sufferings. The mass—the
English blockheads, God forgive me!—are hateful to me in my inmost
soul; and I often regard them not at all as my fellow-men, but as
miserable automata—machines, whose motive power is egoism. In these
moods, it seems to me as if I heard the whizzing wheelwork by which
they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray: their praying, their
mechanical Anglican church-going, with the gilt Prayer-book under
their arms, their stupid, tiresome Sunday, their awkward piety, is
most of all odious to me. I am firmly convinced that a blaspheming
Frenchman is a more pleasing sight for the Divinity than a praying
Englishman.”
On his return from England Heine was employed at Munich in editing the
_Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen_, but in 1830 he was again in the north,
and the news of the July Revolution surprised him on the island of
Heligoland. He has given us a graphic picture of his democratic
enthusiasm in those days in some letters, apparently written from
Heligoland, which he has inserted in his book on Börne. We quote some
passages, not only for their biographic interest as showing a phase of
Heine’s mental history, but because they are a specimen of his power in
that kind of dithyrambic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily
becomes ridiculous:
“The thick packet of newspapers arrived from the Continent with these
warm, glowing-hot tidings. They were sunbeams wrapped up in
packing-paper, and they inflamed my soul till it burst into the
wildest conflagration. . . . It is all like a dream to me; especially
the name Lafayette sounds to me like a legend out of my earliest
childhood. Does he really sit again on horseback, commanding the
National Guard? I almost fear it may not be true, for it is in
print. I will myself go to Paris, to be convinced of it with my
bodily eyes. . . . It must be splendid, when he rides through the
street, the citizen of two worlds, the godlike old man, with his
silver locks streaming down his sacred shoulder. . . . He greets,
with his dear old eyes, the grandchildren of those who once fought
with him for freedom and equality. . . . It is now sixty years since
he returned from America with the Declaration of Human Rights, the
decalogue of the world’s new creed, which was revealed to him amid
the thunders and lightnings of cannon. . . . And the tricolored flag
waves again on the towers of Paris, and its streets resound with the
Marseillaise! . . . It is all over with my yearning for repose. I
now know again what I will do, what I ought to do, what I must do. .
. . I am the son of the Revolution, and seize again the hallowed
weapons on which my mother pronounced her magic benediction. . . .
Flowers! flowers! I will crown my head for the death-fight. And the
lyre too, reach me the lyre, that I may sing a battle-song. . . .
Words like flaming stars, that shoot down from the heavens, and burn
up the palaces, and illuminate the huts. . . . Words like bright
javelins, that whirr up to the seventh heaven and strike the pious
hypocrites who have skulked into the Holy of Holies. . . . I am all
joy and song, all sword and flame! Perhaps, too, all delirium. . . .
One of those sunbeams wrapped in brown paper has flown to my brain,
and set my thoughts aglow. In vain I dip my head into the sea. No
water extinguishes this Greek fire: . . . Even the poor Heligolanders
shout for joy, although they have only a sort of dim instinct of what
has occurred. The fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little
sand island, which is the bathing-place here, said to me smilingly,
‘The poor people have won!’ Yes; instinctively the people comprehend
such events, perhaps, better than we, with all our means of
knowledge. Thus Frau von Varnhagen once told me that when the issue
of the Battle of Leipzig was not yet known, the maid-servant suddenly
rushed into the room with the sorrowful cry, ‘The nobles have won!’ .
. . This morning another packet of newspapers is come, I devour them
like manna. Child that I am, affecting details touch me yet more
than the momentous whole. Oh, if I could but see the dog Medor. . .
. The dog Medor brought his master his gun and cartridge-box, and
when his master fell, and was buried with his fellow-heroes in the
Court of the Louvre, there stayed the poor dog like a monument of
faithfulness, sitting motionless on the grave, day and night, eating
but little of the food that was offered him—burying the greater part
of it in the earth, perhaps as nourishment for his buried master!”
The enthusiasm which was kept thus at boiling heat by imagination, cooled
down rapidly when brought into contact with reality. In the same book be
indicates, in his caustic way, the commencement of that change in his
political _temperature_—for it cannot be called a change in opinion—which
has drawn down on him immense vituperation from some of the patriotic
party, but which seems to have resulted simply from the essential
antagonism between keen wit and fanaticism.
“On the very first days of my arrival in Paris I observed that things
wore, in reality, quite different colors from those which had been
shed on them, when in perspective, by the light of my enthusiasm.
The silver locks which I saw fluttering so majestically on the
shoulders of Lafayette, the hero of two worlds, were metamorphosed
into a brown perruque, which made a pitiable covering for a narrow
skull. And even the dog Medor, which I visited in the Court of the
Louvre, and which, encamped under tricolored flags and trophies, very
quietly allowed himself to be fed—he was not at all the right dog,
but quite an ordinary brute, who assumed to himself merits not his
own, as often happens with the French; and, like many others, he made
a profit out of the glory of the Revolution. . . . He was pampered
and patronized, perhaps promoted to the highest posts, while the true
Medor, some days after the battle, modestly slunk out of sight, like
the true people who created the Revolution.”
That it was not merely interest in French politics which sent Heine to
Paris in 1831, but also a perception that German air was not friendly to
sympathizers in July revolutions, is humorously intimated in the
“Geständnisse.”
“I had done much and suffered much, and when the sun of the July
Revolution arose in France, I had become very weary, and needed some
recreation. Also, my native air was every day more unhealthy for me,
and it was time I should seriously think of a change of climate. I
had visions: the clouds terrified me, and made all sorts of ugly
faces at me. It often seemed to me as if the sun were a Prussian
cockade; at night I dreamed of a hideous black eagle, which gnawed my
liver; and I was very melancholy. Add to this, I had become
acquainted with an old Berlin Justizrath, who had spent many years in
the fortress of Spandau, and he related to me how unpleasant it is
when one is obliged to wear irons in winter. For myself I thought it
very unchristian that the irons were not warmed a trifle. If the
irons were warmed a little for us they would not make so unpleasant
an impression, and even chilly natures might then bear them very
well; it would be only proper consideration, too, if the fetters were
perfumed with essence of roses and laurels, as is the case in this
country (France). I asked my Justizrath whether he often got oysters
to eat at Spandau? He said, No; Spandau was too far from the sea.
Moreover, he said meat was very scarce there, and there was no kind
of _volaille_ except flies, which fell into one’s soup. . . . Now, as
I really needed some recreation, and as Spandau is too far from the
sea for oysters to be got there, and the Spandau fly-soup did not
seem very appetizing to me, as, besides all this, the Prussian chains
are very cold in winter, and could not be conducive to my health, I
resolved to visit Paris.”
Since this time Paris has been Heine’s home, and his best prose works
have been written either to inform the Germans on French affairs or to
inform the French on German philosophy and literature. He became a
correspondent of the _Allgemeine Zeitung_, and his correspondence, which
extends, with an interruption of several years, from 1831 to 1844, forms
the volume entitled “Französische Zustände” (French Affairs), and the
second and third volume of his “Vermischte Schriften.” It is a witty and
often wise commentary on public men and public events: Louis Philippe,
Casimir Périer, Thiers, Guizot, Rothschild, the Catholic party, the
Socialist party, have their turn of satire and appreciation, for Heine
deals out both with an impartiality which made his less favorable
critics—Börne, for example—charge him with the rather incompatible sins
of reckless caprice and venality. Literature and art alternate with
politics: we have now a sketch of George Sand or a description of one of
Horace Vernet’s pictures; now a criticism of Victor Hugo or of Liszt; now
an irresistible caricature of Spontini or Kalkbrenner; and occasionally
the predominant satire is relieved by a fine saying or a genial word of
admiration. And all is done with that airy lightness, yet precision of
touch, which distinguishes Heine beyond any living writer. The charge of
venality was loudly made against Heine in Germany: first, it was said
that he was paid to write; then, that he was paid to abstain from
writing; and the accusations were supposed to have an irrefragable basis
in the fact that he accepted a stipend from the French government. He
has never attempted to conceal the reception of that stipend, and we
think his statement (in the “Vermischte Schriften”) of the circumstances
under which it was offered and received, is a sufficient vindication of
himself and M. Guizot from any dishonor in the matter.
It may be readily imagined that Heine, with so large a share of the
Gallic element as he has in his composition, was soon at his ease in
Parisian society, and the years here were bright with intellectual
activity and social enjoyment. “His wit,” wrote August Lewald, “is a
perpetual gushing fountain; he throws off the most delicious descriptions
with amazing facility, and sketches the most comic characters in
conversations.” Such a man could not be neglected in Paris, and Heine
was sought on all sides—as a guest in distinguished salons, as a possible
proselyte in the circle of the Saint Simonians. His literary
productiveness seems to have been furthered by his congenial life, which,
however, was soon to some extent embittered by the sense of exile; for
since 1835 both his works and his person have been the object of
denunciation by the German governments. Between 1833 and 1845 appeared
the four volumes of the “Salon,” “Die Romantische Schule” (both written,
in the first instance, in French), the book on Börne, “Atta Troll,” a
romantic poem, “Deutschland,” an exquisitely humorous poem, describing
his last visit to Germany, and containing some grand passages of serious
writing; and the “Neue Gedichte,” a collection of lyrical poems. Among
the most interesting of his prose works are the second volume of the
“Salon,” which contains a survey of religion and philosophy in Germany,
and the “Romantische Schule,” a delightful introduction to that phase of
German literature known as the Romantic school. The book on Börne, which
appeared in 1840, two years after the death of that writer, excited great
indignation in Germany, as a wreaking of vengeance on the dead, an insult
to the memory of a man who had worked and suffered in the cause of
freedom—a cause which was Heine’s own. Börne, we may observe
parenthetically for the information of those who are not familiar with
recent German literature, was a remarkable political writer of the
ultra-liberal party in Germany, who resided in Paris at the same time
with Heine: a man of stern, uncompromising partisanship and bitter humor.
Without justifying Heine’s production of this book, we see excuses for
him which should temper the condemnation passed on it. There was a
radical opposition of nature between him and Börne; to use his own
distinction, Heine is a Hellene—sensuous, realistic, exquisitely alive to
the beautiful; while Börne was a Nazarene—ascetic, spiritualistic,
despising the pure artist as destitute of earnestness. Heine has too
keen a perception of practical absurdities and damaging exaggerations
ever to become a thoroughgoing partisan; and with a love of freedom, a
faith in the ultimate triumph of democratic principles, of which we see
no just reason to doubt the genuineness and consistency, he has been
unable to satisfy more zealous and one-sided liberals by giving his
adhesion to their views and measures, or by adopting a denunciatory tone
against those in the opposite ranks. Börne could not forgive what he
regarded as Heine’s epicurean indifference and artistic dalliance, and he
at length gave vent to his antipathy in savage attacks on him through the
press, accusing him of utterly lacking character and principle, and even
of writing under the influence of venal motives. To these attacks Heine
remained absolutely mute—from contempt according to his own account; but
the retort, which he resolutely refrained from making during Börne’s
life, comes in this volume published after his death with the
concentrated force of long-gathering thunder. The utterly inexcusable
part of the book is the caricature of Börne’s friend, Madame Wohl, and
the scurrilous insinuations concerning Börne’s domestic life. It is
said, we know not with how much truth, that Heine had to answer for these
in a duel with Madame Wohl’s husband, and that, after receiving a serious
wound, he promised to withdraw the offensive matter from a future
edition. That edition, however, has not been called for. Whatever else
we may think of the book, it is impossible to deny its transcendent
talent—the dramatic vigor with which Börne is made present to us, the
critical acumen with which he is characterized, and the wonderful play of
wit, pathos, and thought which runs through the whole. But we will let
Heine speak for himself, and first we will give part of his graphic
description of the way in which Börne’s mind and manners grated on his
taste:
“To the disgust which, in intercourse with Börne, I was in danger of
feeling toward those who surrounded him, was added the annoyance I
felt from his perpetual talk about politics. Nothing but political
argument, and again political argument, even at table, where he
managed to hunt me out. At dinner, when I so gladly forget all the
vexations of the world, he spoiled the best dishes for me by his
patriotic gall, which he poured as a bitter sauce over everything.
Calf’s feet, _à la maître d’hôtel_, then my innocent _bonne bouche_,
he completely spoiled for me by Job’s tidings from Germany, which he
scraped together out of the most unreliable newspapers. And then his
accursed remarks, which spoiled one’s appetite! . . . This was a sort
of table-talk which did not greatly exhilarate me, and I avenged
myself by affecting an excessive, almost impassioned indifference for
the object of Börne’s enthusiasm. For example, Börne was indignant
that immediately on my arrival in Paris I had nothing better to do
than to write for German papers a long account of the Exhibition of
Pictures. I omit all discussion as to whether that interest in Art
which induced me to undertake this work was so utterly irreconcilable
with the revolutionary interests of the day; but Börne saw in it a
proof of my indifference toward the sacred cause of humanity, and I
could in my turn spoil the taste of his patriotic _sauerkraut_ for
him by talking all dinner-time of nothing but pictures, of Robert’s
‘Reapers,’ Horace Vernet’s ‘Judith,’ and Scheffer’s ‘Faust.’ . . .
That I never thought it worth while to discuss my political
principles with him it is needless to say; and once when he declared
that he had found a contradiction in my writings, I satisfied myself
with the ironical answer, ‘You are mistaken, _mon cher_; such
contradictions never occur in my works, for always before I begin to
write, I read over the statement of my political principles in my
previous writings, that I may not contradict myself, and that no one
may be able to reproach me with apostasy from my liberal
principles.’”
And here is his own account of the spirit in which the book was written:
“I was never Börne’s friend, nor was I ever his enemy. The
displeasure which he could often excite in me was never very
important, and he atoned for it sufficiently by the cold silence
which I opposed to all his accusations and raillery. While he lived
I wrote not a line against him, I never thought about him, I ignored
him completely; and that enraged him beyond measure. If I now speak
of him, I do so neither out of enthusiasm nor out of uneasiness; I am
conscious of the coolest impartiality. I write here neither an
apology nor a critique, and as in painting the man I go on my own
observation, the image I present of him ought perhaps to be regarded
as a real portrait. And such a monument is due to him—to the great
wrestler who, in the arena of our political games, wrestled so
courageously, and earned, if not the laurel, certainly the crown of
oak leaves. I give an image with his true features, without
idealization—the more like him the more honorable for his memory. He
was neither a genius nor a hero; he was no Olympian god. He was a
man, a denizen of this earth; he was a good writer and a great
patriot. . . . Beautiful, delicious peace, which I feel at this
moment in the depths of my soul! Thou rewardest me sufficiently for
everything I have done and for everything I have despised. . . . I
shall defend myself neither from the reproach of indifference nor
from the suspicion of venality. I have for years, during the life of
the insinuator, held such self-justification unworthy of me; now even
decency demands silence. That would be a frightful
spectacle!—polemics between Death and Exile! Dost thou stretch out
to me a beseeching hand from the grave? Without rancor I reach mine
toward thee. . . . See how noble it is and pure! It was never soiled
by pressing the hands of the mob, any more than by the impure gold of
the people’s enemy. In reality thou hast never injured me. . . . In
all thy insinuations there is not a _louis d’or’s_ worth of truth.”
In one of these years Heine was married, and, in deference to the
sentiments of his wife, married according to the rites of the Catholic
Church. On this fact busy rumor afterward founded the story of his
conversion to Catholicism, and could of course name the day and spot on
which he abjured Protestanism. In his “Geständnisse” Heine publishes a
denial of this rumor; less, he says, for the sake of depriving the
Catholics of the solace they may derive from their belief in a new
convert, than in order to cut off from another party the more spiteful
satisfaction of bewailing his instability:
“That statement of time and place was entirely correct. I was
actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was,
moreover, a Jesuit church, namely, St. Sulpice; and I then went
through a religious act. But this act was no odious abjuration, but
a very innocent conjugation; that is to say, my marriage, already
performed, according to the civil law there received the
ecclesiastical consecration, because my wife, whose family are
staunch Catholics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough
without such a ceremony. And I would on no account cause this
beloved being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views.”
For sixteen years—from 1831 to 1847—Heine lived that rapid concentrated
life which is known only in Paris; but then, alas! stole on the “days of
darkness,” and they were to be many. In 1847 he felt the approach of the
terrible spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed
in acute suffering. The last time he went out of doors, he tells us, was
in May, 1848:
“With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank
down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess
of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her
feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied
me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time
disconsolately, as if she would say, Dost thou not see, then, that I
have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?”
Since 1848, then, this poet, whom the lovely objects of Nature have
always “haunted like a passion,” has not descended from the second story
of a Parisian house; this man of hungry intellect has been shut out from
all direct observation of life, all contact with society, except such as
is derived from visitors to his sick-room. The terrible nervous disease
has affected his eyes; the sight of one is utterly gone, and he can only
raise the lid of the other by lifting it with his finger. Opium alone is
the beneficent genius that stills his pain. We hardly know whether to
call it an alleviation or an intensification of the torture that Heine
retains his mental vigor, his poetic imagination, and his incisive wit;
for if this intellectual activity fills up a blank, it widens the sphere
of suffering. His brother described him in 1851 as still, in moments
when the hand of pain was not too heavy on him, the same Heinrich Heine,
poet and satirist by turns. In such moments he would narrate the
strangest things in the gravest manner. But when he came to an end, he
would roguishly lift up the lid of his right eye with his finger to see
the impression he had produced; and if his audience had been listening
with a serious face, he would break into Homeric laughter. We have other
proof than personal testimony that Heine’s disease allows his genius to
retain much of its energy, in the “Romanzero,” a volume of poems
published in 1851, and written chiefly during the three first years of
his illness; and in the first volume of the “Vermischte Schriften,” also
the product of recent years. Very plaintive is the poet’s own
description of his condition, in the epilogue to the “Romanzero:”
“Do I really exist? My body is so shrunken that I am hardly anything
but a voice; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave of the
magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in Brittany,
under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames toward heaven.
Alas! I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that moves their
branches, brother Merlin, for no green leaf rustles about my
mattress-grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but the
rolling of vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strumming. A
grave without repose, death without the privileges of the dead, who
have no debts to pay, and need write neither letters nor books—that
is a piteous condition. Long ago the measure has been taken for my
coffin and for my necrology, but I die so slowly that the process is
tedious for me as well as my friends. But patience: everything has
an end. You will one day find the booth closed where the puppet-show
of my humor has so often delighted you.”
As early as 1850 it was rumored that since Heine’s illness a change had
taken place in his religious views; and as rumor seldom stops short of
extremes, it was soon said that he had become a thorough pietist.
Catholics and Protestants by turns claiming him as a convert. Such a
change in so uncompromising an iconoclast, in a man who had been so
zealous in his negations as Heine, naturally excited considerable
sensation in the camp he was supposed to have quitted, as well as in that
he was supposed to have joined. In the second volume of the “Salon,” and
in the “Romantische Schule,” written in 1834 and ’35, the doctrine of
Pantheism is dwelt on with a fervor and unmixed seriousness which show
that Pantheism was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what
he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity as the
enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well-being. Now, however, it
was said that Heine had recanted all his heresies; but from the fact that
visitors to his sick-room brought away very various impressions as to his
actual religious views, it seemed probable that his love of mystification
had found a tempting opportunity for exercise on this subject, and that,
as one of his friends said, he was not inclined to pour out unmixed wine
to those who asked for a sample out of mere curiosity. At length, in the
epilogue to the “Romanzero,” dated 1851, there appeared, amid much
mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced Theism and the
belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and
reliability to this affirmation was the fact that he took care to
accompany it with certain negations:
“As concerns myself, I can boast of no particular progress in
politics; I adhered (after 1848) to the same democratic principles
which had the homage of my youth, and for which I have ever since
glowed with increasing fervor. In theology, on the contrary, I must
accuse myself of retrogression, since, as I have already confessed, I
returned to the old superstition—to a personal God. This fact is,
once for all, not to be stifled, as many enlightened and well-meaning
friends would fain have had it. But I must expressly contradict the
report that my retrograde movement has carried me as far as to the
threshold of a Church, and that I have even been received into her
lap. No: my religions convictions and views have remained free from
any tincture of ecclesiasticism; no chiming of bells has allured me,
no altar candles have dazzled me. I have dallied with no dogmas, and
have not utterly renounced my reason.”
This sounds like a serious statement. But what shall we say to a convert
who plays with his newly-acquired belief in a future life, as Heine does
in the very next page? He says to his reader:
“Console thyself; we shall meet again in a better world, where I also
mean to write thee better books. I take for granted that my health
will there be improved, and that Swedenborg has not deceived me. He
relates, namely, with great confidence, that we shall peacefully
carry on our old occupations in the other world, just as we have done
in this; that we shall there preserve our individuality unaltered,
and that death will produce no particular change in our organic
development. Swedenborg is a thoroughly honorable fellow, and quite
worthy of credit in what he tells us about the other world, where he
saw with his own eyes the persons who had played a great part on our
earth. Most of them, he says, remained unchanged, and busied
themselves with the same things as formerly; they remained
stationary, were old-fashioned, _rococo_—which now and then produced
a ludicrous effect. For example, our dear Dr. Martin Luther kept
fast by his doctrine of Grace, about which he had for three hundred
years daily written down the same mouldy arguments—just in the same
way as the late Baron Ekstein, who during twenty years printed in the
_Allgemeine Zeitung_ one and the same article, perpetually chewing
over again the old cud of Jesuitical doctrine. But, as we have said,
all persons who once figured here below were not found by Swedenborg
in such a state of fossil immutability: many had considerably
developed their character, both for good and evil, in the other
world; and this gave rise to some singular results. Some who had
been heroes and saints on earth had _there_ sunk into scamps and
good-for-nothings; and there were examples, too, of a contrary
transformation. For instance, the fumes of self-conceit mounted to
Saint Anthony’s head when he learned what immense veneration and
adoration had been paid to him by all Christendom; and he who here
below withstood the most terrible temptations was now quite an
impertinent rascal and dissolute gallows-bird, who vied with his pig
in rolling himself in the mud. The chaste Susanna, from having been
excessively vain of her virtue, which she thought indomitable, came
to a shameful fall, and she who once so gloriously resisted the two
old men, was a victim to the seductions of the young Absalom, the son
of David. On the contrary, Lot’s daughters had in the lapse of time
become very virtuous, and passed in the other world for models of
propriety: the old man, alas! had stuck to the wine-flask.”
In his “Geständnisse,” the retractation of former opinions and profession
of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony that repels our sympathy
and baffles our psychology. Yet what strange, deep pathos is mingled
with the audacity of the following passage!
“What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my
marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged nurse are
pressing Spanish flies behind my ears? What avails it me, that all
the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me? Alas! Shiraz is
two thousand miles from the Rue d’Amsterdam, where, in the wearisome
loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it be, perhaps,
the perfume of warmed towels. Alas! God’s satire weighs heavily on
me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven,
was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little,
earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only
pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably
I am beneath him in humor, in colossal mockery.”
For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence with which Heine
professes his theoretical reverence as pathological, as the diseased
exhibition of a predominant tendency urged into anomalous action by the
pressure of pain and mental privation—as a delirium of wit starved of its
proper nourishment. It is not for us to condemn, who have never had the
same burden laid on us; it is not for pigmies at their ease to criticise
the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock.
On one other point we must touch before quitting Heine’s personal
history. There is a standing accusation against him in some quarters of
wanting political principle, of wishing to denationalize himself, and of
indulging in insults against his native country. Whatever ground may
exist for these accusations, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be
found in his writings. He may not have much faith in German revolutions
and revolutionists; experience, in his case as in that of others, may
have thrown his millennial anticipations into more distant perspective;
but we see no evidence that he has ever swerved from his attachment to
the principles of freedom, or written anything which to a philosophic
mind is incompatible with true patriotism. He has expressly denied the
report that he wished to become naturalized in France; and his yearning
toward his native land and the accents of his native language is
expressed with a pathos the more reliable from the fact that he is
sparing in such effusions. We do not see why Heine’s satire of the
blunders and foibles of his fellow-countrymen should be denounced as a
crime of _lèse-patrie_, any more than the political caricatures of any
other satirist. The real offences of Heine are his occasional coarseness
and his unscrupulous personalities, which are reprehensible, not because
they are directed against his fellow-countrymen, but because they are
_personalities_. That these offences have their precedents in men whose
memory the world delights to honor does not remove their turpitude, but
it is a fact which should modify our condemnation in a particular case;
unless, indeed, we are to deliver our judgments on a principle of
compensation—making up for our indulgence in one direction by our
severity in another. On this ground of coarseness and personality, a
true bill may be found against Heine; _not_, we think, on the ground that
he has laughed at what is laughable in his compatriots. Here is a
specimen of the satire under which we suppose German patriots wince:
“Rhenish Bavaria was to be the starting-point of the German
revolution. Zweibrücken was the Bethlehem in which the infant
Saviour—Freedom—lay in the cradle, and gave whimpering promise of
redeeming the world. Near his cradle bellowed many an ox, who
afterward, when his horns were reckoned on, showed himself a very
harmless brute. It was confidently believed that the German
revolution would begin in Zweibrücken, and everything was there ripe
for an outbreak. But, as has been hinted, the tender-heartedness of
some persons frustrated that illegal undertaking. For example, among
the Bipontine conspirators there was a tremendous braggart, who was
always loudest in his rage, who boiled over with the hatred of
tyranny, and this man was fixed on to strike the first blow, by
cutting down a sentinel who kept an important post. . . . . ‘What!’
cried the man, when this order was given him—‘What!—me! Can you
expect so horrible, so bloodthirsty an act of me? I—_I_, kill an
innocent sentinel? I, who am the father of a family! And this
sentinel is perhaps also father of a family. One father of a family
kill another father of a family? Yes. Kill—murder!’”
In political matters Heine, like all men whose intellect and taste
predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming
partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the
one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the
other as a half-hearted “trimmer.” He has no sympathy, as he says, with
“that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm,
which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of
generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had
so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from
the top of a mast into the sea, crying, “_I die for General Jackson_!”
“But thou liest, Brutus, thou liest, Cassius, and thou, too, liest,
Asinius, in maintaining that my ridicule attacks those ideas which
are the precious acquisition of Humanity, and for which I myself have
so striven and suffered. No! for the very reason that those ideas
constantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, he
is the more irresistibly overcome by laughter when he sees how
rudely, awkwardly, and clumsily those ideas are seized and mirrored
in the contracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mirrors
which have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in them
becomes a caricature, and excites our laughter. _But we laugh then
only at the caricature_, _not at the god_.”
For the rest, why should we demand of Heine that he should be a hero, a
patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than we should demand of a gazelle
that it should draw well in harness? Nature has not made him of her
sterner stuff—not of iron and adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the
juice of the grape, and Puck’s mischievous brain, plenteously mixing also
the dews of kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble thoughts. It is,
after all, a _tribute_ which his enemies pay him when they utter their
bitterest dictum, namely, that he is “_nur Dichter_”—only a poet. Let us
accept this point of view for the present, and, leaving all consideration
of him as a man, look at him simply as a poet and literary artist.
Heine is essentially a lyric poet. The finest products of his genius are
“Short swallow flights of song that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away;”
and they are so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we feel as if
each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same
inspiration. Heine is too impressible and mercurial for any sustained
production; even in his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into
laughter and his laughter into tears; and his longer poems, “Atta Troll”
and “Deutschland,” are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His song has a
wide compass of notes; he can take us to the shores of the Northern Sea
and thrill us by the sombre sublimity of his pictures and dreamy fancies;
he can draw forth our tears by the voice he gives to our own sorrows, or
to the sorrows of “Poor Peter;” he can throw a cold shudder over us by a
mysterious legend, a ghost story, or a still more ghastly rendering of
hard reality; he can charm us by a quiet idyl, shake us with laughter at
his overflowing fun, or give us a piquant sensation of surprise by the
ingenuity of his transitions from the lofty to the ludicrous. This last
power is not, indeed, essentially poetical; but only a poet can use it
with the same success as Heine, for only a poet can poise our emotion and
expectation at such a height as to give effect to the sudden fall.
Heine’s greatest power as a poet lies in his simple pathos, in the
ever-varied but always natural expression he has given to the tender
emotions. We may perhaps indicate this phase of his genius by referring
to Wordsworth’s beautiful little poem, “She dwelt among the untrodden
ways;” the conclusion—
“She dwelt alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh!
The difference to me”—
is entirely in Heine’s manner; and so is Tennyson’s poem of a dozen
lines, called “Circumstance.” Both these poems have Heine’s pregnant
simplicity. But, lest this comparison should mislead, we must say that
there is no general resemblance between either Wordsworth, or Tennyson,
and Heine. Their greatest qualities lie quite a way from the light,
delicate lucidity, the easy, rippling music, of Heine’s style. The
distinctive charm of his lyrics may best be seen by comparing them with
Goethe’s. Both have the same masterly, finished simplicity and rhythmic
grace; but there is more thought mingled with Goethe’s feeling—his
lyrical genius is a vessel that draws more water than Heine’s, and,
though it seems to glide along with equal ease, we have a sense of
greater weight and force, accompanying the grace of its movements.
But for this very reason Heine touches our hearts more strongly; his
songs are all music and feeling—they are like birds that not only enchant
us with their delicious notes, but nestle against us with their soft
breasts, and make us feel the agitated beating of their hearts. He
indicates a whole sad history in a single quatrain; there is not an image
in it, not a thought; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a “big
round tear”—it is pure feeling, breathed in pure music:
“Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen
Und ich glaubt’ ich trug es nie,
Und ich hab’ es doch getragen—
Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie.” {134}
He excels equally in the more imaginative expression of feeling: he
represents it by a brief image, like a finely cut cameo; he expands it
into a mysterious dream, or dramatizes it in a little story, half ballad,
half idyl; and in all these forms his art is so perfect that we never
have a sense of artificiality or of unsuccessful effort; but all seems to
have developed itself by the same beautiful necessity that brings forth
vine-leaves and grapes and the natural curls of childhood. Of Heine’s
humorous poetry, “Deutschland” is the most charming specimen—charming,
especially, because its wit and humor grow out of a rich loam of thought.
“Atta Troll” is more original, more various, more fantastic; but it is
too great a strain on the imagination to be a general favorite. We have
said that feeling is the element in which Heine’s poetic genius
habitually floats; but he can occasionally soar to a higher region, and
impart deep significance to picturesque symbolism; he can flash a sublime
thought over the past and into the future; he can pour forth a lofty
strain of hope or indignation. Few could forget, after once hearing
them, the stanzas at the close of “Deutschland,” in which he warns the
King of Prussia not to incur the irredeemable hell which the injured poet
can create for him—the _singing flames_ of a Dante’s _terza rima_!
“Kennst du die Hölle des Dante nicht,
Die schrecklichen Terzetten?
Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt
Den kann kein Gott mehr retten.
“Kein Gott, kein Heiland, erlöst ihn je
Aus diesen singenden Flammen!
Nimm dich in Acht, das wir dich nicht
Zu solcher Hölle verdammen.” {135}
As a prosaist, Heine is, in one point of view, even more distinguished
than as a poet. The German language easily lends itself to all the
purposes of poetry; like the ladies of the Middle Ages, it is gracious
and compliant to the Troubadours. But as these same ladies were often
crusty and repulsive to their unmusical mates, so the German language
generally appears awkward and unmanageable in the hands of prose writers.
Indeed, the number of really fine German prosaists before Heine would
hardly have exceeded the numerating powers of a New Hollander, who can
count three and no more. Persons the most familiar with German prose
testify that there is an extra fatigue in reading it, just as we feel an
extra fatigue from our walk when it takes us over ploughed clay. But in
Heine’s hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull,
becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic,
brilliant; it is German in an _allotropic_ condition. No dreary
labyrinthine sentences in which you find “no end in wandering mazes
lost;” no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no
digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and
clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision, all
those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest order
of prose. And Heine has proved—what Madame de Stäel seems to have
doubted—that it is possible to be witty in German; indeed, in reading
him, you might imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit,
so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his management.
He is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth
and repose, and the calm development which belong to Goethe’s style, for
they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in
susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over
its effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow: he
alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion,
and daring piquancy; and athwart all these there runs a vein of sadness,
tenderness, and grandeur which reveals the poet. He continually throws
out those finely chiselled sayings which stamp themselves on the memory,
and become familiar by quotation. For example: “The People have time
enough, they are immortal; kings only are mortal.”—“Wherever a great soul
utters its thoughts, there is Golgotha.”—“Nature wanted to see how she
looked, and she created Goethe.”—“Only the man who has known bodily
suffering is truly a _man_; his limbs have their Passion history, they
are spiritualized.” He calls Rubens “this Flemish Titan, the wings of
whose genius were so strong that he soared as high as the sun, in spite
of the hundred-weight of Dutch cheeses that hung on his legs.” Speaking
of Börne’s dislike to the calm creations of the true artist, he says, “He
was like a child which, insensible to the glowing significance of a Greek
statue, only touches the marble and complains of cold.”
The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine’s prose writings are
the “Reisebilder.” The comparison with Sterne is inevitable here; but
Heine does not suffer from it, for if he falls below Sterne in raciness
of humor, he is far above him in poetic sensibility and in reach and
variety of thought. Heine’s humor is never persistent, it never flows on
long in easy gayety and drollery; where it is not swelled by the tide of
poetic feeling, it is continually dashing down the precipice of a
witticism. It is not broad and unctuous; it is aërial and sprite-like, a
momentary resting-place between his poetry and his wit. In the
“Reisebilder” he runs through the whole gamut of his powers, and gives us
every hue of thought, from the wildly droll and fantastic to the sombre
and the terrible. Here is a passage almost Dantesque in conception:
“Alas! one ought in truth to write against no one in this world.
Each of us is sick enough in this great lazaretto, and many a
polemical writing reminds me involuntarily of a revolting quarrel, in
a little hospital at Cracow, of which I chanced to be a witness, and
where it was horrible to hear how the patients mockingly reproached
each other with their infirmities: how one who was wasted by
consumption jeered at another who was bloated by dropsy; how one
laughed at another’s cancer in the nose, and this one again at his
neighbor’s locked-jaw or squint, until at last the delirious
fever-patient sprang out of bed and tore away the coverings from the
wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was to be seen but
hideous misery and mutilation.”
And how fine is the transition in the very next chapter, where, after
quoting the Homeric description of the feasting gods, he says:
“Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew, with drops of blood
on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great cross
laid on his shoulders; and he threw the cross on the high table of
the gods, so that the golden cups tottered, and the gods became dumb
and pale, and grew ever paler, till they at last melted away into
vapor.”
The richest specimens of Heine’s wit are perhaps to be found in the works
which have appeared since the “Reisebilder.” The years, if they have
intensified his satirical bitterness, have also given his wit a finer
edge and polish. His sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slily
allusive, that they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not
very acute; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors
of style, there can hardly be any wit more irresistible than Heine’s. We
may measure its force by the degree in which it has subdued the German
language to its purposes, and made that language brilliant in spite of a
long hereditary transmission of dulness. As one of the most harmless
examples of his satire, take this on a man who has certainly had his
share of adulation:
“Assuredly it is far from my purpose to depreciate M. Victor Cousin.
The titles of this celebrated philosopher even lay me under an
obligation to praise him. He belongs to that living pantheon of
France which we call the peerage, and his intelligent legs rest on
the velvet benches of the Luxembourg. I must indeed sternly repress
all private feelings which might seduce me into an excessive
enthusiasm. Otherwise I might be suspected of servility; for M.
Cousin is very influential in the State by means of his position and
his tongue. This consideration might even move me to speak of his
faults as frankly as of his virtues. Will he himself disapprove of
this? Assuredly not. I know that we cannot do higher honor to great
minds than when we throw as strong a light on their demerits as on
their merits. When we sing the praises of a Hercules, we must also
mention that he once laid aside the lion’s skin and sat down to the
distaff: what then? he remains notwithstanding a Hercules! So when
we relate similar circumstances concerning M. Cousin, we must
nevertheless add, with discriminating eulogy: _M. Cousin_, _if he has
sometimes sat twaddling at the distaff_, _has never laid aside the
lion’s skin_. . . . It is true that, having been suspected of
demagogy, he spent some time in a German prison, just as Lafayette
and Richard Cœur de Lion. But that M. Cousin there in his leisure
hours studied Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ is to be doubted on
three grounds. First, this book is written in German. Secondly, in
order to read this book, a man must understand German. Thirdly, M.
Cousin does not understand German. . . . I fear I am passing unawares
from the sweet waters of praise into the bitter ocean of blame. Yes,
on one account I cannot refrain from bitterly blaming M.
Cousin—namely, that he who loves truth far more than he loves Plato
and Tenneman is unjust to himself when he wants to persuade us that
he has borrowed something from the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel.
Against this self-accusation I must take M. Cousin under my
protection. On my word and conscience! this honorable man has not
stolen a jot from Schelling and Hegel, and if he brought home
anything of theirs, it was merely their friendship. That does honor
to his heart. But there are many instances of such false
self-accusation in psychology. I knew a man who declared that he had
stolen silver spoons at the king’s table; and yet we all knew that
the poor devil had never been presented at court, and accused himself
of stealing these spoons to make us believe that he had been a guest
at the palace. No! In German philosophy M. Cousin has always kept
the sixth commandment; here he has never pocketed a single idea, not
so much as a salt-spoon of an idea. All witnesses agree in attesting
that in this respect M. Cousin is honor itself. . . . I prophesy to
you that the renown of M. Cousin, like the French Revolution, will go
round the world! I hear some one wickedly add: Undeniably the renown
of M. Cousin is going round the world, and _it has already taken its
departure from France_.”
The following “symbolical myth” about Louis Philippe is very
characteristic of Heine’s manner:
“I remember very well that immediately on my arrival (in Paris) I
hastened to the Palais Royal to see Louis Philippe. The friend who
conducted me told me that the king now appeared on the terrace only
at stated hours, but that formerly he was to be seen at any time for
five francs. ‘For five francs!’ I cried with amazement; ‘does he
then show himself for money?’ ‘No, but he is shown for money, and it
happens in this way: There is a society of _claqueurs_, _marchands de
contremarques_, and such riff-raff, who offered every foreigner to
show him the king for five francs: if he would give ten francs, he
might see the king raise his eyes to heaven, and lay his hand
protestingly on his heart; if he would give twenty francs, the king
would sing the Marseillaise. If the foreigner gave five francs, they
raised a loud cheering under the king’s windows, and His Majesty
appeared on the terrace, bowed, and retired. If ten francs, they
shouted still louder, and gesticulated as if they had been possessed,
when the king appeared, who then, as a sign of silent emotion, raised
his eyes to heaven and laid his hand on his heart. English visitors,
however, would sometimes spend as much as twenty francs, and then the
enthusiasm mounted to the highest pitch; no sooner did the king
appear on the terrace than the Marseillaise was struck up and roared
out frightfully, until Louis Philippe, perhaps only for the sake of
putting an end to the singing, bowed, laid his hand on his heart, and
joined in the Marseillaise. Whether, as is asserted, he beat time
with his foot, I cannot say.’”
One more quotation, and it must be our last:
“Oh the women! We must forgive them much, for they love much—and
many. Their hate is properly only love turned inside out. Sometimes
they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they can in
this way gratify another man. When they write, they have always one
eye on the paper and the other on a man; and this is true of all
authoresses, except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who has only one eye.”
V. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. {141}
It is an interesting branch of psychological observation to note the
images that are habitually associated with abstract or collective
terms—what may be called the picture-writing of the mind, which it
carries on concurrently with the more subtle symbolism of language.
Perhaps the fixity or variety of these associated images would furnish a
tolerably fair test of the amount of concrete knowledge and experience
which a given word represents, in the minds of two persons who use it
with equal familiarity. The word _railways_, for example, will probably
call up, in the mind of a man who is not highly locomotive, the image
either of a “Bradshaw,” or of the station with which he is most familiar,
or of an indefinite length of tram-road; he will alternate between these
three images, which represent his stock of concrete acquaintance with
railways. But suppose a man to have had successively the experience of a
“navvy,” an engineer, a traveller, a railway director and shareholder,
and a landed proprietor in treaty with a railway company, and it is
probable that the range of images which would by turns present themselves
to his mind at the mention of the _word_ “railways,” would include all
the essential facts in the existence and relations of the _thing_. Now
it is possible for the first-mentioned personage to entertain very
expanded views as to the multiplication of railways in the abstract, and
their ultimate function in civilization. He may talk of a vast network
of railways stretching over the globe, of future “lines” in Madagascar,
and elegant refreshment-rooms in the Sandwich Islands, with none the less
glibness because his distinct conceptions on the subject do not extend
beyond his one station and his indefinite length of tram-road. But it is
evident that if we want a railway to be made, or its affairs to be
managed, this man of wide views and narrow observation will not serve our
purpose.
Probably, if we could ascertain the images called up by the terms “the
people,” “the masses,” “the proletariat,” “the peasantry,” by many who
theorize on those bodies with eloquence, or who legislate without
eloquence, we should find that they indicate almost as small an amount of
concrete knowledge—that they are as far from completely representing the
complex facts summed up in the collective term, as the railway images of
our non-locomotive gentleman. How little the real characteristics of the
working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their
natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as
well as by our political and social theories. Where, in our picture
exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry? What English
artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies of popular
life as the pictures of Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one
of the greatest painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while, in
his picture of “The Hireling Shepherd,” he gave us a landscape of
marvellous truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who
were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our
chimney ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy
with our peasantry could give a moment’s popularity to such a picture as
“Cross Purposes,” where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew
L. E. L.’s poems by heart, and English rustics, whose costume seems to
indicate that they are meant for ploughmen, with exotic features that
remind us of a handsome _primo tenore_. Rather than such cockney
sentimentality as this, as an education for the taste and sympathies, we
prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But
even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of
features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the “Keepsake”
style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and
prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that
peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a
smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound
teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children
necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the
artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of
life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic literature,
which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and
town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are
jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds make bashful
love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the checkered
shade and refresh themselves, not immoderately, with spicy nut-brown ale.
But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund; no
one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them
merry. The slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humor
twinkles, the slow utterance, and the heavy, slouching walk, remind one
rather of that melancholy animal the camel than of the sturdy countryman,
with striped stockings, red waistcoat, and hat aside, who represents the
traditional English peasant. Observe a company of haymakers. When you
see them at a distance, tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden
light, while the wagon creeps slowly with its increasing burden over the
meadow, and the bright green space which tells of work done gets larger
and larger, you pronounce the scene “smiling,” and you think these
companions in labor must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to
which they give animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find
that haymaking time is a time for joking, especially if there are women
among the laborers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and
then, and expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your
conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the
mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except
tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English
clown exists at the bottom of the third quart pot.
The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket-books and
never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty
has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake, that an
unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that
slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true
that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical
cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master’s corn
in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing
begging-letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairymaid into
filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not
subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least
established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men
moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.
Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin’s indignation, are
surely too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular
chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can hardly
object to lyric rustics in elegant laced boddices and picturesque motley,
unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit
costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But our social
novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of
their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to
the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our
sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a
sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture
of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial
and the selfish into that attention to what is a part from themselves,
which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott
takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage, or tells the story of “The
Two Drovers;” when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of “Poor Susan;”
when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which
leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw; when Hornung
paints a group of chimney-sweepers—more is done toward linking the higher
classes with the lower, toward obliterating the vulgarity of
exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical
dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of
amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men
beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task
of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People.
Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial
aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false
ideas about evanescent fashions—about the manners and conversation of
beaux and duchesses; but it _is_ serious that our sympathy with the
perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humor in the
life of our more heavily laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and
turned toward a false object instead of the true one.
This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation which
give rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for
mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the
moralist thinks _ought_ to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what
are the motives and influences which _do_ act on him. We want to be
taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant,
but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his
suspicious selfishness.
We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of
rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could
give us their psychological character—their conception of life, and their
emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would
be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social
sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish’s colloquial style with
the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the same startling
inspiration in his description of the gestures and phrases of “Boots,” as
in the speeches of Shakespeare’s mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever
passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic,
without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment
before in his artistic truthfulness. But for the precious salt of his
humor, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve in some
degree as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his
preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic
boatmen and courtesans, would be as obnoxious as Eugène Sue’s idealized
proletaires, in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and
refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and
want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once
into a millennial state of _altruism_, wherein every one is caring for
everyone else, and no one for himself.
If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our
sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct
us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid conquests
of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged
in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors
may be settled by algebraic equations—the dream that the uncultured
classes are prepared for a condition which appeals principally to their
moral sensibilities—the aristocractic dilettantism which attempts to
restore the “good old times” by a sort of idyllic masquerading, and to
grow feudal fidelity and veneration as we grow prize turnips, by an
artificial system of culture—none of these diverging mistakes can coexist
with a real knowledge of the people, with a thorough study of their
habits, their ideas, their motives. The landholder, the clergyman, the
mill-owner, the mining-agent, have each an opportunity for making
precious observations on different sections of the working-classes, but
unfortunately their experience is too often not registered at all, or its
results are too scattered to be available as a source of information and
stimulus to the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral
and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a
foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote
himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially
of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry—the degree in which
they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the
points of view from which they regard their religions teachers, and the
degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the
interaction of the various classes on each other, and what are the
tendencies in their position toward disintegration or toward
development—and if, after all this study, he would give us the result of
his observation in a book well nourished with specific facts, his work
would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer.
What we are desiring for ourselves has been in some degree done for the
Germans by Riehl, the author of the very remarkable books, the titles of
which are placed at the head of this article; and we wish to make these
books known to our readers, not only for the sake of the interesting
matter they contain, and the important reflections they suggest, but also
as a model for some future or actual student of our own people. By way
of introducing Riehl to those who are unacquainted with his writings, we
will give a rapid sketch from his picture of the German Peasantry, and
perhaps this indication of the mode in which he treats a particular
branch of his subject may prepare them to follow us with more interest
when we enter on the general purpose and contents of his works.
In England, at present, when we speak of the peasantry we mean scarcely
more than the class of farm-servants and farm-laborers; and it is only in
the most primitive districts, as in Wales, for example, that farmers are
included under the term. In order to appreciate what Riehl says of the
German peasantry, we must remember what the tenant-farmers and small
proprietors were in England half a century ago, when the master helped to
milk his own cows, and the daughters got up at one o’clock in the morning
to brew—when the family dined in the kitchen with the servants, and sat
with them round the kitchen fire, in the evening. In those days, the
quarried parlor was innocent of a carpet, and its only specimens of art
were a framed sampler and the best tea-board; the daughters even of
substantial farmers had often no greater accomplishment in writing and
spelling than they could procure at a dame-school; and, instead of
carrying on sentimental correspondence, they were spinning their future
table-linen, and looking after every saving in butter and eggs that might
enable them to add to the little stock of plate and china which they were
laying in against their marriage. In our own day, setting aside the
superior order of farmers, whose style of living and mental culture are
often equal to that of the professional class in provincial towns, we can
hardly enter the least imposing farm-house without finding a bad piano in
the “drawing-room,” and some old annuals, disposed with a symmetrical
imitation of negligence, on the table; though the daughters may still
drop their _h’s_, their vowels are studiously narrow; and it is only in
very primitive regions that they will consent to sit in a covered vehicle
without springs, which was once thought an advance in luxury on the
pillion.
The condition of the tenant-farmers and small proprietors in Germany is,
we imagine, about on a par, not, certainly, in material prosperity, but
in mental culture and habits, with that of the English farmers who were
beginning to be thought old-fashioned nearly fifty years ago, and if we
add to these the farm servants and laborers we shall have a class
approximating in its characteristics to the _Bauernthum_, or peasantry,
described by Riehl.
In Germany, perhaps more than in any other country, it is among the
peasantry that we must look for the historical type of the national
_physique_. In the towns this type has become so modified to express the
personality of the individual that even “family likeness” is often but
faintly marked. But the peasants may still be distinguished into groups,
by their physical peculiarities. In one part of the country we find a
longer-legged, in another a broader-shouldered race, which has inherited
these peculiarities for centuries. For example, in certain districts of
Hesse are seen long faces, with high foreheads, long, straight noses, and
small eyes, with arched eyebrows and large eyelids. On comparing these
physiognomies with the sculptures in the church of St. Elizabeth, at
Marburg, executed in the thirteenth century, it will be found that the
same old Hessian type of face has subsisted unchanged, with this
distinction only, that the sculptures represent princes and nobles, whose
features then bore the stamp of their race, while that stamp is now to be
found only among the peasants. A painter who wants to draw mediæval
characters with historic truth must seek his models among the peasantry.
This explains why the old German painters gave the heads of their
subjects a greater uniformity of type than the painters of our day; the
race had not attained to a high degree of individualization in features
and expression. It indicates, too, that the cultured man acts more as an
individual, the peasant more as one of a group. Hans drives the plough,
lives, and thinks, just as Kunz does; and it is this fact that many
thousands of men are as like each other in thoughts and habits as so many
sheep or oysters, which constitutes the weight of the peasantry in the
social and political scale.
In the cultivated world each individual has his style of speaking and
writing. But among the peasantry it is the race, the district, the
province, that has its style—namely, its dialect, its phraseology, its
proverbs, and its songs, which belong alike to the entire body of the
people. This provincial style of the peasant is again, like his
_physique_, a remnant of history, to which he clings with the utmost
tenacity. In certain parts of Hungary there are still descendants of
German colonists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who go about
the country as reapers, retaining their old Saxon songs and manners,
while the more cultivated German emigrants in a very short time forget
their own language, and speak Hungarian. Another remarkable case of the
same kind is that of the Wends, a Slavonic race settled in Lusatia, whose
numbers amount to 200,000, living either scattered among the German
population or in separate parishes. They have their own schools and
churches, and are taught in the Slavonic tongue. The Catholics among
them are rigid adherents of the Pope; the Protestants not less rigid
adherents of Luther, or _Doctor_ Luther, as they are particular in
calling him—a custom which a hundred years ago was universal in
Protestant Germany. The Wend clings tenaciously to the usages of his
Church, and perhaps this may contribute not a little to the purity in
which he maintains the specific characteristics of his race. German
education, German law and government, service in the standing army, and
many other agencies, are in antagonism to his national exclusiveness; but
the _wives_ and _mothers_ here, as elsewhere, are a conservative
influence, and the habits temporarily laid aside in the outer world are
recovered by the fireside. The Wends form several stout regiments in the
Saxon army; they are sought far and wide, as diligent and honest
servants; and many a weakly Dresden or Leipzig child becomes thriving
under the care of a Wendish nurse. In their villages they have the air
and habits of genuine sturdy peasants, and all their customs indicate
that they have been from the first an agricultural people. For example,
they have traditional modes of treating their domestic animals. Each cow
has its own name, generally chosen carefully, so as to express the
special qualities of the animal; and all important family events are
narrated to the _bees_—a custom which is found also in Westphalia.
Whether by the help of the bees or not, the Wend farming is especially
prosperous; and when a poor Bohemian peasant has a son born to him he
binds him to the end of a long pole and turns his face toward Lusatia,
that he may be as lucky as the Wends, who live there.
The peculiarity of the peasant’s language consists chiefly in his
retention of historical peculiarities, which gradually disappear under
the friction of cultivated circles. He prefers any proper name that may
be given to a day in the calendar, rather than the abstract date, by
which he very rarely reckons. In the baptismal names of his children he
is guided by the old custom of the country, not at all by whim and fancy.
Many old baptismal names, formerly common in Germany, would have become
extinct but for their preservation among the peasantry, especially in
North Germany; and so firmly have they adhered to local tradition in this
matter that it would be possible to give a sort of topographical
statistics of proper names, and distinguish a district by its rustic
names as we do by its Flora and Fauna. The continuous inheritance of
certain favorite proper names in a family, in some districts, forces the
peasant to adopt the princely custom of attaching a numeral to the name,
and saying, when three generations are living at once, Hans I., II., and
III.; or—in the more antique fashion—Hans the elder, the middle, and the
younger. In some of our English counties there is a similar adherence to
a narrow range of proper names, and a mode of distinguishing collateral
branches in the same family, you will hear of Jonathan’s Bess, Thomas’s
Bess, and Samuel’s Bess—the three Bessies being cousins.
The peasant’s adherence to the traditional has much greater inconvenience
than that entailed by a paucity of proper names. In the Black Forest and
in Hüttenberg you will see him in the dog-days wearing a thick fur cap,
because it is an historical fur cap—a cap worn by his grandfather. In
the Wetterau, that peasant girl is considered the handsomest who wears
the most petticoats. To go to field-labor in seven petticoats can be
anything but convenient or agreeable, but it is the traditionally correct
thing, and a German peasant girl would think herself as unfavorably
conspicuous in an untraditional costume as an English servant-girl would
now think herself in a “linsey-wolsey” apron or a thick muslin cap. In
many districts no medical advice would induce the rustic to renounce the
tight leather belt with which he injures his digestive functions; you
could more easily persuade him to smile on a new communal system than on
the unhistorical invention of braces. In the eighteenth century, in
spite of the philanthropic preachers of potatoes, the peasant for years
threw his potatoes to the pigs and the dogs, before he could be persuaded
to put them on his own table. However, the unwillingness of the peasant
to adopt innovations has a not unreasonable foundation in the fact that
for him experiments are practical, not theoretical, and must be made with
expense of money instead of brains—a fact that is not, perhaps,
sufficiently taken into account by agricultural theorists, who complain
of the farmer’s obstinacy. The peasant has the smallest possible faith
in theoretic knowledge; he thinks it rather dangerous than otherwise, as
is well indicated by a Lower Rhenish proverb—“One is never too old to
learn, said an old woman; so she learned to be a witch.”
Between many villages an historical feud, once perhaps the occasion of
much bloodshed, is still kept up under the milder form of an occasional
round of cudgelling and the launching of traditional nicknames. An
historical feud of this kind still exists, for example, among many
villages on the Rhine and more inland places in the neighborhood.
_Rheinschnacke_ (of which the equivalent is perhaps “water-snake”) is the
standing term of ignominy for the inhabitant of the Rhine village, who
repays it in kind by the epithet “karst” (mattock), or “kukuk” (cuckoo),
according as the object of his hereditary hatred belongs to the field or
the forest. If any Romeo among the “mattocks” were to marry a Juliet
among the “water-snakes,” there would be no lack of Tybalts and Mercutios
to carry the conflict from words to blows, though neither side knows a
reason for the enmity.
A droll instance of peasant conservatism is told of a village on the
Taunus, whose inhabitants, from time immemorial, had been famous for
impromptu cudgelling. For this historical offence the magistrates of the
district had always inflicted the equally historical punishment of
shutting up the most incorrigible offenders, not in prison, but in their
own pig-sty. In recent times, however, the government, wishing to
correct the rudeness of these peasants, appointed an “enlightened” man as
a magistrate, who at once abolished the original penalty above mentioned.
But this relaxation of punishment was so far from being welcome to the
villagers that they presented a petition praying that a more energetic
man might be given them as a magistrate, who would have the courage to
punish according to law and justice, “as had been beforetime.” And the
magistrate who abolished incarceration in the pig-sty could never obtain
the respect of the neighborhood. This happened no longer ago than the
beginning of the present century.
But it must not be supposed that the historical piety of the German
peasant extends to anything not immediately connected with himself. He
has the warmest piety toward the old tumble-down house which his
grandfather built, and which nothing will induce him to improve, but
toward the venerable ruins of the old castle that overlooks his village
he has no piety at all, and carries off its stones to make a fence for
his garden, or tears down the gothic carving of the old monastic church,
which is “nothing to him,” to mark off a foot-path through his field. It
is the same with historical traditions. The peasant has them fresh in
his memory, so far as they relate to himself. In districts where the
peasantry are unadulterated, you can discern the remnants of the feudal
relations in innumerable customs and phrases, but you will ask in vain
for historical traditions concerning the empire, or even concerning the
particular princely house to which the peasant is subject. He can tell
you what “half people and whole people” mean; in Hesse you will still
hear of “four horses making a whole peasant,” or of “four-day and
three-day peasants;” but you will ask in vain about Charlemagne and
Frederic Barbarossa.
Riehl well observes that the feudal system, which made the peasant the
bondman of his lord, was an immense benefit in a country, the greater
part of which had still to be colonized—rescued the peasant from
vagabondage, and laid the foundation of persistency and endurance in
future generations. If a free German peasantry belongs only to modern
times, it is to his ancestor who was a serf, and even, in the earliest
times, a slave, that the peasant owes the foundation of his independence,
namely, his capability of a settled existence—nay, his unreasoning
persistency, which has its important function in the development of the
race.
Perhaps the very worst result of that unreasoning persistency is the
peasant’s inveterate habit of litigation. Every one remembers the
immortal description of Dandle Dinmont’s importunate application to
Lawyer Pleydell to manage his “bit lawsuit,” till at length Pleydell
consents to help him to ruin himself, on the ground that Dandle may fall
into worse hands. It seems this is a scene which has many parallels in
Germany. The farmer’s lawsuit is his point of honor; and he will carry
it through, though he knows from the very first day that he shall get
nothing by it. The litigious peasant piques himself, like Mr.
Saddletree, on his knowledge of the law, and this vanity is the chief
impulse to many a lawsuit. To the mind of the peasant, law presents
itself as the “custom of the country,” and it is his pride to be versed
in all customs. _Custom with him holds the place of sentiment_, _of
theory_, _and in many cases of affection_. Riehl justly urges the
importance of simplifying law proceedings, so as to cut off this vanity
at its source, and also of encouraging, by every possible means, the
practice of arbitration.
The peasant never begins his lawsuit in summer, for the same reason that
he does not make love and marry in summer—because he has no time for that
sort of thing. Anything is easier to him than to move out of his
habitual course, and he is attached even to his privations. Some years
ago a peasant youth, out of the poorest and remotest region of the
Westerwald, was enlisted as a recruit, at Weilburg in Nassau. The lad,
having never in his life slept in a bed, when he had got into one for the
first time began to cry like a child; and he deserted twice because he
could not reconcile himself to sleeping in a bed, and to the “fine” life
of the barracks: he was homesick at the thought of his accustomed poverty
and his thatched hut. A strong contrast, this, with the feeling of the
poor in towns, who would be far enough from deserting because their
condition was too much improved! The genuine peasant is never ashamed of
his rank and calling; he is rather inclined to look down on every one who
does not wear a smock frock, and thinks a man who has the manners of the
gentry is likely to be rather windy and unsubstantial. In some places,
even in French districts, this feeling is strongly symbolized by the
practice of the peasantry, on certain festival days, to dress the images
of the saints in peasant’s clothing. History tells us of all kinds of
peasant insurrections, the object of which was to obtain relief for the
peasants from some of their many oppressions; but of an effort on their
part to step out of their hereditary rank and calling, to become gentry,
to leave the plough and carry on the easier business of capitalists or
government functionaries, there is no example.
The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of peasant-life fall
into the same mistake as our English novelists: they transfer their own
feelings to ploughmen and woodcutters, and give them both joys and
sorrows of which they know nothing. The peasant never questions the
obligation of family ties—he questions _no custom_—but tender affection,
as it exists among the refined part of mankind, is almost as foreign to
him as white hands and filbert-shaped nails. That the aged father who
has given up his property to his children on condition of their
maintaining him for the remainder of his life, is very far from meeting
with delicate attentions, is indicated by the proverb current among the
peasantry—“Don’t take your clothes off before you go to bed.” Among
rustic moral tales and parables, not one is more universal than the story
of the ungrateful children, who made their gray-headed father, dependent
on them for a maintenance, eat at a wooden trough became he shook the
food out of his trembling hands. Then these same ungrateful children
observed one day that their own little boy was making a tiny wooden
trough; and when they asked him what it was for, he answered—that his
father and mother might eat out of it, when he was a man and had to keep
them.
Marriage is a very prudential affair, especially among the peasants who
have the largest share of property. Politic marriages are as common
among them as among princes; and when a peasant-heiress in Westphalia
marries, her husband adopts her name, and places his own after it with
the prefix _geborner_ (_née_). The girls marry young, and the rapidity
with which they get old and ugly is one among the many proofs that the
early years of marriage are fuller of hardships than of conjugal
tenderness. “When our writers of village stories,” says Riehl,
“transferred their own emotional life to the peasant, they obliterated
what is precisely his most predominant characteristic, namely, that with
him general custom holds the place of individual feeling.”
We pay for greater emotional susceptibility too often by nervous diseases
of which the peasant knows nothing. To him headache is the least of
physical evils, because he thinks head-work the easiest and least
indispensable of all labor. Happily, many of the younger sons in peasant
families, by going to seek their living in the towns, carry their hardy
nervous system to amalgamate with the overwrought nerves of our town
population, and refresh them with a little rude vigor. And a return to
the habits of peasant life is the best remedy for many moral as well as
physical diseases induced by perverted civilization. Riehl points to
colonization as presenting the true field for this regenerative process.
On the other side of the ocean a man will have the courage to begin life
again as a peasant, while at home, perhaps, opportunity as well as
courage will fail him. _Apropos_ of this subject of emigration, he
remarks the striking fact, that the native shrewdness and mother-wit of
the German peasant seem to forsake him entirely when he has to apply them
under new circumstances, and on relations foreign to his experience.
Hence it is that the German peasant who emigrates, so constantly falls a
victim to unprincipled adventurers in the preliminaries to emigration;
but if once he gets his foot on the American soil he exhibits all the
first-rate qualities of an agricultural colonist; and among all German
emigrants the peasant class are the most successful.
But many disintegrating forces have been at work on the peasant
character, and degeneration is unhappily going on at a greater pace than
development. In the wine districts especially, the inability of the
small proprietors to bear up under the vicissitudes of the market, or to
insure a high quality of wine by running the risks of a late vintage and
the competition of beer and cider with the inferior wines, have tended to
produce that uncertainty of gain which, with the peasant, is the
inevitable cause of demoralization. The small peasant proprietors are
not a new class in Germany, but many of the evils of their position are
new. They are more dependent on ready money than formerly; thus, where a
peasant used to get his wood for building and firing from the common
forest, he has now to pay for it with hard cash; he used to thatch his
own house, with the help perhaps of a neighbor, but now he pays a man to
do it for him; he used to pay taxes in kind, he now pays them in money.
The chances of the market have to be discounted, and the peasant falls
into the hands of money-lenders. Here is one of the cases in which
social policy clashes with a purely economical policy.
Political vicissitudes have added their influence to that of economical
changes in disturbing that dim instinct, that reverence for traditional
custom, which is the peasant’s principle of action. He is in the midst
of novelties for which he knows no reason—changes in political geography,
changes of the government to which he owes fealty, changes in
bureaucratic management and police regulations. He finds himself in a
new element before an apparatus for breathing in it is developed in him.
His only knowledge of modern history is in some of its results—for
instance, that he has to pay heavier taxes from year to year. His chief
idea of a government is of a power that raises his taxes, opposes his
harmless customs, and torments him with new formalities. The source of
all this is the false system of “enlightening” the peasant which has been
adopted by the bureaucratic governments. A system which disregards the
traditions and hereditary attachments of the peasant, and appeals only to
a logical understanding which is not yet developed in him, is simply
disintegrating and ruinous to the peasant character. The interference
with the communal regulations has been of this fatal character. Instead
of endeavoring to promote to the utmost the healthy life of the Commune,
as an organism the conditions of which are bound up with the historical
characteristics of the peasant, the bureaucratic plan of government is
bent on improvement by its patent machinery of state-appointed
functionaries and off-hand regulations in accordance with modern
enlightenment. The spirit of communal exclusiveness—the resistance to
the indiscriminate establishment of strangers, is an intense traditional
feeling in the peasant. “This gallows is for us and our children,” is
the typical motto of this spirit. But such exclusiveness is highly
irrational and repugnant to modern liberalism; therefore a bureaucratic
government at once opposes it, and encourages to the utmost the
introduction of new inhabitants in the provincial communes. Instead of
allowing the peasants to manage their own affairs, and, if they happen to
believe that five and four make eleven, to unlearn the prejudice by their
own experience in calculation, so that they may gradually understand
processes, and not merely see results, bureaucracy comes with its “Ready
Reckoner” and works all the peasant’s sums for him—the surest way of
maintaining him in his stupidity, however it may shake his prejudice.
Another questionable plan for elevating the peasant is the supposed
elevation of the clerical character by preventing the clergyman from
cultivating more than a trifling part of the land attached to his
benefice; that he may be as much as possible of a scientific theologian,
and as little as possible of a peasant. In this, Riehl observes, lies
one great source of weakness to the Protestant Church as compared with
the Catholic, which finds the great majority of its priests among the
lower orders; and we have had the opportunity of making an analogous
comparison in England, where many of us can remember country districts in
which the great mass of the people were christianized by illiterate
Methodist and Independent ministers, while the influence of the parish
clergyman among the poor did not extend much beyond a few old women in
scarlet cloaks and a few exceptional church-going laborers.
Bearing in mind the general characteristics of the German peasant, it is
easy to understand his relation to the revolutionary ideas and
revolutionary movements of modern times. The peasant, in Germany as
elsewhere, is a born grumbler. He has always plenty of grievances in his
pocket, but he does not generalize those grievances; he does not complain
of “government” or “society,” probably because he has good reason to
complain of the burgomaster. When a few sparks from the first French
Revolution fell among the German peasantry, and in certain villages of
Saxony the country people assembled together to write down their demands,
there was no glimpse in their petition of the “universal rights of man,”
but simply of their own particular affairs as Saxon peasants. Again,
after the July revolution of 1830, there were many insignificant peasant
insurrections; but the object of almost all was the removal of local
grievances. Toll-houses were pulled down; stamped paper was destroyed;
in some places there was a persecution of wild boars, in others, of that
plentiful tame animal, the German _Rath_, or councillor who is never
called into council. But in 1848 it seemed as if the movements of the
peasants had taken a new character; in the small western states of
Germany it seemed as if the whole class of peasantry was in insurrection.
But, in fact, the peasant did not know the meaning of the part he was
playing. He had heard that everything was being set right in the towns,
and that wonderful things were happening there, so he tied up his bundle
and set off. Without any distinct object or resolution, the country
people presented themselves on the scene of commotion, and were warmly
received by the party leaders. But, seen from the windows of ducal
palaces and ministerial hotels, these swarms of peasants had quite
another aspect, and it was imagined that they had a common plan of
co-operation. This, however, the peasants have never had. Systematic
co-operation implies general conceptions, and a provisional subordination
of egoism, to which even the artisans of towns have rarely shown
themselves equal, and which are as foreign to the mind of the peasant as
logarithms or the doctrine of chemical proportions. And the
revolutionary fervor of the peasant was soon cooled. The old mistrust of
the towns was reawakened on the spot. The Tyrolese peasants saw no great
good in the freedom of the press and the constitution, because these
changes “seemed to please the gentry so much.” Peasants who had given
their voices stormily for a German parliament asked afterward, with a
doubtful look, whether it were to consist of infantry or cavalry. When
royal domains were declared the property of the State, the peasants in
some small principalities rejoiced over this, because they interpreted it
to mean that every one would have his share in them, after the manner of
the old common and forest rights.
The very practical views of the peasants with regard to the demands of
the people were in amusing contrast with the abstract theorizing of the
educated townsmen. The peasant continually withheld all State payments
until he saw how matters would turn out, and was disposed to reckon up
the solid benefit, in the form of land or money, that might come to him
from the changes obtained. While the townsman was heating his brains
about representation on the broadest basis, the peasant asked if the
relation between tenant and landlord would continue as before, and
whether the removal of the “feudal obligations” meant that the farmer
should become owner of the land!
It is in the same naïve way that Communism is interpreted by the German
peasantry. The wide spread among them of communistic doctrines, the
eagerness with which they listened to a plan for the partition of
property, seemed to countenance the notion that it was a delusion to
suppose the peasant would be secured from this intoxication by his love
of secure possession and peaceful earnings. But, in fact, the peasant
contemplated “partition” by the light of an historical reminiscence
rather than of novel theory. The golden age, in the imagination of the
peasant, was the time when every member of the commune had a right to as
much wood from the forest as would enable him to sell some, after using
what he wanted in firing—in which the communal possessions were so
profitable that, instead of his having to pay rates at the end of the
year, each member of the commune was something in pocket. Hence the
peasants in general understood by “partition,” that the State lands,
especially the forests, would be divided among the communes, and that, by
some political legerdemain or other, everybody would have free fire-wood,
free grazing for his cattle, and over and above that, a piece of gold
without working for it. That he should give up a single clod of his own
to further the general “partition” had never entered the mind of the
peasant communist; and the perception that this was an essential
preliminary to “partition” was often a sufficient cure for his Communism.
In villages lying in the neighborhood of large towns, however, where the
circumstances of the peasantry are very different, quite another
interpretation of Communism is prevalent. Here the peasant is generally
sunk to the position of the proletaire living from hand to mouth: he has
nothing to lose, but everything to gain by “partition.” The coarse
nature of the peasant has here been corrupted into bestiality by the
disturbance of his instincts, while he is as yet incapable of principles;
and in this type of the degenerate peasant is seen the worst example of
ignorance intoxicated by theory.
A significant hint as to the interpretation the peasants put on
revolutionary theories may be drawn from the way they employed the few
weeks in which their movements were unchecked. They felled the forest
trees and shot the game; they withheld taxes; they shook off the
imaginary or real burdens imposed on them by their mediatized princes, by
presenting their “demands” in a very rough way before the ducal or
princely “Schloss;” they set their faces against the bureaucratic
management of the communes, deposed the government functionaries who had
been placed over them as burgomasters and magistrates, and abolished the
whole bureaucratic system of procedure, simply by taking no notice of its
regulations, and recurring to some tradition—some old order or disorder
of things. In all this it is clear that they were animated not in the
least by the spirit of modern revolution, but by a purely narrow and
personal impulse toward reaction.
The idea of constitutional government lies quite beyond the range of the
German peasant’s conceptions. His only notion of representation is that
of a representation of ranks—of classes; his only notion of a deputy is
of one who takes care, not of the national welfare, but of the interests
of his own order. Herein lay the great mistake of the democratic party,
in common with the bureaucratic governments, that they entirely omitted
the peculiar character of the peasant from their political calculations.
They talked of the “people” and forgot that the peasants were included in
the term. Only a baseless misconception of the peasant’s character could
induce the supposition that he would feel the slightest enthusiasm about
the principles involved in the reconstitution of the Empire, or even
about the reconstitution itself. He has no zeal for a written law, as
such, but only so far as it takes the form of a living law—a tradition.
It was the external authority which the revolutionary party had won in
Baden that attracted the peasants into a participation of the struggle.
Such, Riehl tells us, are the general characteristics of the German
peasantry—characteristics which subsist amid a wide variety of
circumstances. In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Brandenburg the peasant
lives on extensive estates; in Westphalia he lives in large isolated
homesteads; in the Westerwald and in Sauerland, in little groups of
villages and hamlets; on the Rhine land is for the most part parcelled
out among small proprietors, who live together in large villages. Then,
of course, the diversified physical geography of Germany gives rise to
equally diversified methods of land-culture; and out of these various
circumstances grow numerous specific differences in manner and character.
But the generic character of the German peasant is everywhere the same;
in the clean mountain hamlet and in the dirty fishing village on the
coast; in the plains of North Germany and in the backwoods of America.
“Everywhere he has the same historical character—everywhere custom is his
supreme law. Where religion and patriotism are still a naïve instinct,
are still a sacred _custom_, there begins the class of the German
Peasantry.”
* * * * *
Our readers will perhaps already have gathered from the foregoing
portrait of the German peasant that Riehl is not a man who looks at
objects through the spectacles either of the doctrinaire or the dreamer;
and they will be ready to believe what he tells us in his Preface,
namely, that years ago he began his wanderings over the hills and plains
of Germany for the sake of obtaining, in immediate intercourse with the
people, that completion of his historical, political, and economical
studies which he was unable to find in books. He began his
investigations with no party prepossessions, and his present views were
evolved entirely from his own gradually amassed observations. He was,
first of all, a pedestrian, and only in the second place a political
author. The views at which he has arrived by this inductive process, he
sums up in the term—_social-political-conservatism_; but his conservatism
is, we conceive, of a thoroughly philosophical kind. He sees in European
society _incarnate history_, and any attempt to disengage it from its
historical elements must, he believes, be simply destructive of social
vitality. {164} What has grown up historically can only die out
historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The external
conditions which society has inherited from the past are but the
manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings who
compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to each
other as the organism and its medium, and development can take place only
by the gradual consentaneous development of both. Take the familiar
example of attempts to abolish titles, which have been about as effective
as the process of cutting off poppy-heads in a cornfield. _Jedem
Menschem_, says Riehl, _ist sein Zopf angeboren_, _warum soll denn der
sociale Sprachgebrauch nicht auch sein Zopf haben_?—which we may
render—“As long as snobism runs in the blood, why should it not run in
our speech?” As a necessary preliminary to a purely rational society,
you must obtain purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter
prejudices of hereditary affection and antipathy; which is as easy as to
get running streams without springs, or the leafy shade of the forest
without the secular growth of trunk and branch.
The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of
language. It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations is
in anything but a rational state; the great sections of the civilized
world are only approximatively intelligible to each other, and even that
only at the cost of long study; one word stands for many things, and many
words for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and still subtler
echoes of association, make language an instrument which scarcely
anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and certainty.
Suppose, then, that the effect which has been again and again made to
construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length
succeeded, and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no
whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful simmer of many-hued
significance, no hoary Archaisms “familiar with forgotten years”—a patent
deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the purpose of
communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language
may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express
_life_, which is a great deal more than science. With the anomalies and
inconveniences of historical language you will have parted with its music
and its passions, and its vital qualities as an expression of individual
character, with its subtle capabilities of wit, with everything that
gives it power over the imagination; and the next step in simplification
will be the invention of a talking watch, which will achieve the utmost
facility and despatch in the communication of ideas by a graduated
adjustment of ticks, to be represented in writing by a corresponding
arrangement of dots. A melancholy “language of the future!” The sensory
and motor nerves that run in the same sheath are scarcely bound together
by a more necessary and delicate union than that which binds men’s
affections, imagination, wit and humor, with the subtle ramifications of
historical language. Language must be left to grow in precision,
completeness, and unity, as minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness,
and sympathy. And there is an analogous relation between the moral
tendencies of men and the social conditions they have inherited. The
nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can
only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the
process of development is going on until that perfect ripeness of the
seed which carries with it a life independent of the root. This vital
connection with the past is much more vividly felt on the Continent than
in England, where we have to recall it by an effort of memory and
reflection; for though our English life is in its core intensely
traditional, Protestantism and commerce have modernized the face of the
land and the aspects of society in a far greater degree than in any
continental country:
“Abroad,” says Ruskin, “a building of the eighth or tenth century
stands ruinous in the open streets; the children play round it, the
peasants heap their corn in it, the buildings of yesterday nestle
about it, and fit their new stones in its rents, and tremble in
sympathy as it trembles. No one wonders at it, or thinks of it as
separate, and of another time; we feel the ancient world to be a real
thing; and one with the new; antiquity is no dream; it is rather the
children playing about the old stones that are the dream. But all is
continuous; and the words “from generation to generation”
understandable here.”
This conception of European society as incarnate history is the
fundamental idea of Riehl’s books. After the notable failure of
revolutionary attempts conducted from the point of view of abstract
democratic and socialistic theories, after the practical demonstration of
the evils resulting from a bureaucratic system, which governs by an
undiscriminating, dead mechanism, Riehl wishes to urge on the
consideration of his countrymen a social policy founded on the special
study of the people as they are—on the natural history of the various
social ranks. He thinks it wise to pause a little from theorizing, and
see what is the material actually present for theory to work upon. It is
the glory of the Socialists—in contrast with the democratic doctrinaires
who have been too much occupied with the general idea of “the people” to
inquire particularly into the actual life of the people—that they have
thrown themselves with enthusiastic zeal into the study at least of one
social group, namely, the factory operatives; and here lies the secret of
their partial success. But, unfortunately, they have made this special
duty of a single fragment of society the basis of a theory which quietly
substitutes for the small group of Parisian proletaires or English
factory-workers the society of all Europe—nay, of the whole world. And
in this way they have lost the best fruit of their investigations. For,
says Riehl, the more deeply we penetrate into the knowledge of society in
its details, the more thoroughly we shall be convinced that _a universal
social policy has no validity except on paper_, and can never be carried
into successful practice. The conditions of German society are
altogether different from those of French, of English, or of Italian
society; and to apply the same social theory to these nations
indiscriminately is about as wise a procedure as Triptolemus Yellowley’s
application of the agricultural directions in Virgil’s “Georgics” to his
farm in the Shetland Isles.
It is the clear and strong light in which Riehl places this important
position that in our opinion constitutes the suggestive value of his
books for foreign as well as German readers. It has not been
sufficiently insisted on, that in the various branches of Social Science
there is an advance from the general to the special, from the simple to
the complex, analogous with that which is found in the series of the
sciences, from Mathematics to Biology. To the laws of quantity comprised
in Mathematics and Physics are superadded, in Chemistry, laws of quality;
to these again are added, in Biology, laws of life; and lastly, the
conditions of life in general branch out into its special conditions, or
Natural History, on the one hand, and into its abnormal conditions, or
Pathology, on the other. And in this series or ramification of the
sciences, the more general science will not suffice to solve the problems
of the more special. Chemistry embraces phenomena which are not
explicable by Physics; Biology embraces phenomena which are not
explicable by Chemistry; and no biological generalization will enable us
to predict the infinite specialities produced by the complexity of vital
conditions. So Social Science, while it has departments which in their
fundamental generality correspond to mathematics and physics, namely,
those grand and simple generalizations which trace out the inevitable
march of the human race as a whole, and, as a ramification of these, the
laws of economical science, has also, in the departments of government
and jurisprudence, which embrace the conditions of social life in all
their complexity, what may be called its Biology, carrying us on to
innumerable special phenomena which outlie the sphere of science, and
belong to Natural History. And just as the most thorough acquaintance
with physics, or chemistry, or general physiology, will not enable you at
once to establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that
your particular society of zoophytes, mollusks, and echinoderms may feel
themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skin; so the most
complete equipment of theory will not enable a statesman or a political
and social reformer to adjust his measures wisely, in the absence of a
special acquaintance with the section of society for which he legislates,
with the peculiar characteristics of the nation, the province, the class
whose well-being he has to consult. In other words, a wise social policy
must be based not simply on abstract social science, but on the natural
history of social bodies.
Riehl’s books are not dedicated merely to the argumentative maintenance
of this or of any other position; they are intended chiefly as a
contribution to that knowledge of the German people on the importance of
which he insists. He is less occupied with urging his own conclusions
than with impressing on his readers the facts which have led him to those
conclusions. In the volume entitled “Land und Leute,” which, though
published last, is properly an introduction to the volume entitled “Die
Bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” he considers the German people in their
physical geographical relations; he compares the natural divisions of the
race, as determined by land and climate, and social traditions, with the
artificial divisions which are based on diplomacy; and he traces the
genesis and influences of what we may call the ecclesiastical geography
of Germany—its partition between Catholicism and Protestantism. He shows
that the ordinary antithesis of North and South Germany represents no
real ethnographical distinction, and that the natural divisions of
Germany, founded on its physical geography are threefold—namely, the low
plains, the middle mountain region, and the high mountain region, or
Lower, Middle, and Upper Germany; and on this primary natural division
all the other broad ethnographical distinctions of Germany will be I
found to rest. The plains of North or Lower Germany include all the
seaboard the nation possesses; and this, together with the fact that they
are traversed to the depth of 600 miles by navigable rivers, makes them
the natural seat of a trading race. Quite different is the geographical
character of Middle Germany. While the northern plains are marked off
into great divisions, by such rivers as the Lower Rhine, the Weser, and
the Oder, running almost in parallel lines, this central region is cut up
like a mosaic by the capricious lines of valleys and rivers. Here is the
region in which you find those famous roofs from which the rain-water
runs toward two different seas, and the mountain-tops from which you may
look into eight or ten German states. The abundance of water-power and
the presence of extensive coal-mines allow of a very diversified
industrial development in Middle Germany. In Upper Germany, or the high
mountain region, we find the same symmetry in the lines of the rivers as
in the north; almost all the great Alpine streams flow parallel with the
Danube. But the majority of these rivers are neither navigable nor
available for industrial objects, and instead of serving for
communication they shut off one great tract from another. The slow
development, the simple peasant life of many districts is here determined
by the mountain and the river. In the south-east, however, industrial
activity spreads through Bohemia toward Austria, and forms a sort of
balance to the industrial districts of the Lower Rhine. Of course, the
boundaries of these three regions cannot be very strictly defined; but an
approximation to the limits of Middle Germany may be obtained by
regarding it as a triangle, of which one angle lies in Silesia, another
in Aix-la-Chapelle, and a third at Lake Constance.
This triple division corresponds with the broad distinctions of climate.
In the northern plains the atmosphere is damp and heavy; in the southern
mountain region it is dry and rare, and there are abrupt changes of
temperature, sharp contrasts between the seasons, and devastating storms;
but in both these zones men are hardened by conflict with the roughness
of the climate. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is little of
this struggle; the seasons are more equable, and the mild, soft air of
the valleys tends to make the inhabitants luxurious and sensitive to
hardships. It is only in exceptional mountain districts that one is here
reminded of the rough, bracing air on the heights of Southern Germany.
It is a curious fact that, as the air becomes gradually lighter and rarer
from the North German coast toward Upper Germany, the average of suicides
regularly decreases. Mecklenburg has the highest number, then Prussia,
while the fewest suicides occur in Bavaria and Austria.
Both the northern and southern regions have still a large extent of waste
lands, downs, morasses, and heaths; and to these are added, in the south,
abundance of snow-fields and naked rock; while in Middle Germany culture
has almost over-spread the face of the land, and there are no large
tracts of waste. There is the same proportion in the distribution of
forests. Again, in the north we see a monotonous continuity of
wheat-fields, potato-grounds, meadow-lands, and vast heaths, and there is
the same uniformity of culture over large surfaces in the southern
table-lands and the Alpine pastures. In Middle Germany, on the contrary,
there is a perpetual variety of crops within a short space; the diversity
of land surface and the corresponding variety in the species of plants
are an invitation to the splitting up of estates, and this again
encourages to the utmost the motley character of the cultivation.
According to this threefold division, it appears that there are certain
features common to North and South Germany in which they differ from
Central Germany, and the nature of this difference Riehl indicates by
distinguishing the former as _Centralized Land_ and the latter as
_Individualized Land_; a distinction which is well symbolized by the fact
that North and South Germany possess the great lines of railway which are
the medium for the traffic of the world, while Middle Germany is far
richer in lines for local communication, and possesses the greatest
length of railway within the smallest space. Disregarding
superficialities, the East Frieslanders, the Schleswig-Holsteiners, the
Mecklenburghers, and the Pomeranians are much more nearly allied to the
old Bavarians, the Tyrolese, and the Styrians than any of these are
allied to the Saxons, the Thuringians, or the Rhinelanders. Both in
North and South Germany original races are still found in large masses,
and popular dialects are spoken; you still find there thoroughly peasant
districts, thorough villages, and also, at great intervals, thorough
cities; you still find there a sense of rank. In Middle Germany, on the
contrary, the original races are fused together or sprinkled hither and
thither; the peculiarities of the popular dialects are worn down or
confused; there is no very strict line of demarkation between the country
and the town population, hundreds of small towns and large villages being
hardly distinguishable in their characteristics; and the sense of rank,
as part of the organic structure of society, is almost extinguished.
Again, both in the north and south there is still a strong ecclesiastical
spirit in the people, and the Pomeranian sees Antichrist in the Pope as
clearly as the Tyrolese sees him in Doctor Luther; while in Middle
Germany the confessions are mingled, they exist peaceably side by side in
very narrow space, and tolerance or indifference has spread itself widely
even in the popular mind. And the analogy, or rather the causal relation
between the physical geography of the three regions and the development
of the population goes still further:
“For,” observes Riehl, “the striking connection which has been
pointed out between the local geological formations in Germany and
the revolutionary disposition of the people has more than a
metaphorical significance. Where the primeval physical revolutions
of the globe have been the wildest in their effects, and the most
multiform strata have been tossed together or thrown one upon the
other, it is a very intelligible consequence that on a land surface
thus broken up, the population should sooner develop itself into
small communities, and that the more intense life generated in these
smaller communities should become the most favorable nidus for the
reception of modern culture, and with this a susceptibility for its
revolutionary ideas; while a people settled in a region where its
groups are spread over a large space will persist much more
obstinately in the retention of its original character. The people
of Middle Germany have none of that exclusive one-sidedness which
determines the peculiar genius of great national groups, just as this
one-sidedness or uniformity is wanting to the geological and
geographical character of their land.”
This ethnographical outline Riehl fills up with special and typical
descriptions, and then makes it the starting-point for a criticism of the
actual political condition of Germany. The volume is fall of vivid
pictures, as well as penetrating glances into the maladies and tendencies
of modern society. It would be fascinating as literature if it were not
important for its facts and philosophy. But we can only commend it to
our readers, and pass on to the volume entitled “Die Bürgerliche
Gesellschaft,” from which we have drawn our sketch of the German
peasantry. Here Riehl gives us a series of studies in that natural
history of the people which he regards as the proper basis of social
policy. He holds that, in European society, there are _three natural
ranks or estates_: the hereditary landed aristocracy, the citizens or
commercial class, and the peasantry or agricultural class. By _natural
ranks_ he means ranks which have their roots deep in the historical
structure of society, and are still, in the present, showing vitality
above ground; he means those great social groups which are not only
distinguished externally by their vocation, but essentially by their
mental character, their habits, their mode of life—by the principle they
represent in the historical development of society. In his conception of
the “Fourth Estate” he differs from the usual interpretation, according
to which it is simply equivalent to the Proletariat, or those who are
dependent on daily wages, whose only capital is their skill or bodily
strength—factory operatives, artisans, agricultural laborers, to whom
might be added, especially in Germany, the day-laborers with the quill,
the literary proletariat. This, Riehl observes, is a valid basis of
economical classification, but not of social classification. In his
view, the Fourth Estate is a stratum produced by the perpetual abrasion
of the other great social groups; it is the sign and result of the
decomposition which is commencing in the organic constitution of society.
Its elements are derived alike from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and
the peasantry. It assembles under its banner the deserters of historical
society, and forms them into a terrible army, which is only just awaking
to the consciousness of its corporate power. The tendency of this Fourth
Estate, by the very process of its formation, is to do away with the
distinctive historical character of the other estates, and to resolve
their peculiar rank and vocation into a uniform social relation founded
on an abstract conception of society. According to Riehl’s
classification, the day-laborers, whom the political economist designates
as the Fourth Estate, belong partly to the peasantry or agricultural
class, and partly to the citizens or commercial class.
Riehl considers, in the first place, the peasantry and aristocracy as the
“Forces of social persistence,” and, in the second, the bourgeoisie and
the “fourth Estate” as the “Forces of social movement.”
The aristocracy, he observes, is the only one among these four groups
which is denied by others besides Socialists to have any natural basis as
a separate rank. It is admitted that there was once an aristocracy which
had an intrinsic ground of existence, but now, it is alleged, this is an
historical fossil, an antiquarian relic, venerable because gray with age.
It what, it is asked, can consist the peculiar vocation of the
aristocracy, since it has no longer the monopoly of the land, of the
higher military functions, and of government offices, and since the
service of the court has no longer any political importance? To this
Riehl replies, that in great revolutionary crises, the “men of progress”
have more than once “abolished” the aristocracy. But, remarkably enough,
the aristocracy has always reappeared. This measure of abolition showed
that the nobility were no longer regarded as a real class, for to abolish
a real class would be an absurdity. It is quite possible to contemplate
a voluntary breaking up of the peasant or citizen class in the
socialistic sense, but no man in his senses would think of straightway
“abolishing” citizens and peasants. The aristocracy, then, was regarded
as a sort of cancer, or excrescence of society. Nevertheless, not only
has it been found impossible to annihilate an hereditary nobility by
decree, but also the aristocracy of the eighteenth century outlived even
the self-destructive acts of its own perversity. A life which was
entirely without object, entirely destitute of functions, would not, says
Riehl, be so persistent. He has an acute criticism of those who conduct
a polemic against the idea of an hereditary aristocracy while they are
proposing an “aristocracy of talent,” which after all is based on the
principle of inheritance. The Socialists are, therefore, only consistent
in declaring against an aristocracy of talent. “But when they have
turned the world into a great Foundling Hospital they will still be
unable to eradicate the ‘privileges of birth.’” We must not follow him
in his criticism, however; nor can we afford to do more than mention
hastily his interesting sketch of the mediæval aristocracy, and his
admonition to the German aristocracy of the present day, that the
vitality of their class is not to be sustained by romantic attempts to
revive mediæval forms and sentiments, but only by the exercise of
functions as real and salutary for actual society as those of the
mediæval aristocracy were for the feudal age. “In modern society the
divisions of rank indicate _division of labor_, according to that
distribution of functions in the social organism which the historical
constitution of society has determined. In this way the principle of
differentiation and the principle of unity are identical.”
The elaborate study of the German bourgeoisie, which forms the next
division of the volume, must be passed over, but we may pause a moment to
note Riehl’s definition of the social _Philister_ (Philistine), an
epithet for which we have no equivalent, not at all, however, for want of
the object it represents. Most people who read a little German know that
the epithet _Philister_ originated in the _Burschen-leben_, or
Student-life of Germany, and that the antithesis of _Bursch_ and
_Philister_ was equivalent to the antithesis of “gown” and “town;” but
since the word has passed into ordinary language it has assumed several
shades of significance which have not yet been merged into a single,
absolute meaning; and one of the questions which an English visitor in
Germany will probably take an opportunity of asking is, “What is the
strict meaning of the word _Philister_?” Riehl’s answer is, that the
_Philister_ “is one who is indifferent to all social interests, all
public life, as distinguished from selfish and private interests; he has
no sympathy with political and social events except as they affect his
own comfort and prosperity, as they offer him material for amusement or
opportunity for gratifying his vanity. He has no social or political
creed, but is always of the opinion which is most convenient for the
moment. He is always in the majority, and is the main element of
unreason and stupidity in the judgment of a “discerning public.” It
seems presumptuous in us to dispute Riehl’s interpretation of a German
word, but we must think that, in literature, the epithet _Philister_ has
usually a wider meaning than this—includes his definition and something
more. We imagine the _Philister_ is the personification of the spirit
which judges everything from a lower point of view than the subject
demands; which judges the affairs of the parish from the egotistic or
purely personal point of view; which judges the affairs of the nation
from the parochial point of view, and does not hesitate to measure the
merits of the universe from the human point of view. At least this must
surely be the spirit to which Goethe alludes in a passage cited by Riehl
himself, where he says that the Germans need not be ashamed of erecting a
monument to him as well as to Blucher; for if Blucher had freed them from
the French, he (Goethe) had freed them from the nets of the _Philister_:
“Ihr mögt mirimmer ungescheut
Gleich Blüchern Denkmal setzen!
Von Franzosen hat er euch befreit,
Ich von Philister-netzen.”
Goethe could hardly claim to be the apostle of public spirit; but he is
eminently the man who helps us to rise to a lofty point of observation,
so that we may see things in their relative proportions.
The most interesting chapters in the description of the “Fourth Estate,”
which concludes the volume, are those on the “Aristocratic Proletariat”
and the “Intellectual Proletariat.” The Fourth Estate in Germany, says
Riehl, has its centre of gravity not, as in England and France, in the
day laborers and factory operatives, and still less in the degenerate
peasantry. In Germany the _educated_ proletariat is the leaven that sets
the mass in fermentation; the dangerous classes there go about, not in
blouses, but in frock coats; they begin with the impoverished prince and
end in the hungriest _littérateur_. The custom that all the sons of a
nobleman shall inherit their father’s title necessarily goes on
multiplying that class of aristocrats who are not only without function
but without adequate provision, and who shrink from entering the ranks of
the citizens by adopting some honest calling. The younger son of a
prince, says Riehl, is usually obliged to remain without any vocation;
and however zealously he may study music, painting, literature, or
science, he can never be a regular musician, painter, or man of science;
his pursuit will be called a “passion,” not a “calling,” and to the end
of his days he remains a dilettante. “But the ardent pursuit of a fixed
practical calling can alone satisfy the active man.” Direct legislation
cannot remedy this evil. The inheritance of titles by younger sons is
the universal custom, and custom is stronger than law. But if all
government preference for the “aristocratic proletariat” were withdrawn,
the sensible men among them would prefer emigration, or the pursuit of
some profession, to the hungry distinction of a title without rents.
The intellectual proletaires Riehl calls the “church militant” of the
Fourth Estate in Germany. In no other country are they so numerous; in
no other country is the trade in material and industrial capital so far
exceeded by the wholesale and retail trade, the traffic and the usury, in
the intellectual capital of the nation. _Germany yields more
intellectual produce than it can use and pay for_.
“This over-production, which is not transient but permanent, nay, is
constantly on the increase, evidences a diseased state of the
national industry, a perverted application of industrial powers, and
is a far more pungent satire on the national condition than all the
poverty of operatives and peasants. . . . Other nations need not envy
us the preponderance of the intellectual proletariat over the
proletaires of manual labor. For man more easily becomes diseased
from over-study than from the labor of the hands; and it is precisely
in the intellectual proletariat that there are the most dangerous
seeds of disease. This is the group in which the opposition between
earnings and wants, between the ideal social position and the real,
is the most hopelessly irreconcilable.”
We must unwillingly leave our readers to make acquaintance for themselves
with the graphic details with which Riehl follows up this general
statement; but before quitting these admirable volumes, let us say, lest
our inevitable omissions should have left room for a different
conclusion, that Riehl’s conservatism is not in the least tinged with the
partisanship of a class, with a poetic fanaticism for the past, or with
the prejudice of a mind incapable of discerning the grander evolution of
things to which all social forms are but temporarily subservient. It is
the conservatism of a clear-eyed, practical, but withal large-minded
man—a little caustic, perhaps, now and then in his epigrams on democratic
doctrinaires who have their nostrum for all political and social
diseases, and on communistic theories which he regards as “the despair of
the individual in his own manhood, reduced to a system,” but nevertheless
able and willing to do justice to the elements of fact and reason in
every shade of opinion and every form of effort. He is as far as
possible from the folly of supposing that the sun will go backward on the
dial because we put the hands of our clock backward; he only contends
against the opposite folly of decreeing that it shall be mid-day while in
fact the sun is only just touching the mountain-tops, and all along the
valley men are stumbling in the twilight.
VI. SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS.
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined
by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the
frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of
all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest
class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the
_mind-and-millinery_ species. The heroine is usually an heiress,
probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an
amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in
the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle
distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her
eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike
free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb _contralto_ and
a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly
religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original
tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress—that rank and
wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly
gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and
securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of
crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in
impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her
reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of
rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches,
and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her
recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded
conversations amazingly witty. She is understood to have a depth of
insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of
philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men
have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well. The men
play a very subordinate part by her side. You are consoled now and then
by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps you in mind that the
working-day business of the world is somehow being carried on, but
ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may accompany
the heroine on her “starring” expedition through life. They see her at a
ball, and they are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on
a riding excursion, and they are witched by her noble horsemanship; at
church, and they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanor. She is
the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces. For all this she
as often as not marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers
terribly from the plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even
death has a soft place in his heart for such a paragon, and remedies all
mistakes for her just at the right moment. The vicious baronet is sure
to be killed in a duel, and the tedious husband dies in his bed
requesting his wife, as a particular favor to him, to marry the man she
loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the lover informing
him of the comfortable arrangement. Before matters arrive at this
desirable issue our feelings are tried by seeing the noble, lovely, and
gifted heroine pass through many _mauvais moments_, but we have the
satisfaction of knowing that her sorrows are wept into embroidered
pocket-handkerchiefs, that her fainting form reclines on the very best
upholstery, and that whatever vicissitudes she may undergo, from being
dashed out of her carriage to having her head shaved in a fever, she
comes out of them all with a complexion more blooming and locks more
redundant than ever.
We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved from a serious
scruple by discovering that silly novels by lady novelists rarely
introduce us into any other than very lofty and fashionable society. We
had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned
governesses, because they had no other “ladylike” means of getting their
bread. On this supposition, vacillating syntax, and improbable incident
had a certain pathos for us, like the extremely supererogatory
pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a
blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but we were glad to
think that the money went to relieve the necessitous, and we pictured to
ourselves lonely women struggling for a maintenance, or wives and
daughters devoting themselves to the production of “copy” out of pure
heroism—perhaps to pay their husband’s debts or to purchase luxuries for
a sick father. Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a
lady’s novel: her English might be faulty, but we said to ourselves her
motives are irreproachable; her imagination may be uninventive, but her
patience is untiring. Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and
twaddle was consecrated by tears. But no! This theory of ours, like
many other pretty theories, has had to give way before observation.
Women’s silly novels, we are now convinced, are written under totally
different circumstances. The fair writers have evidently never talked to
a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the
working-classes except as “dependents;” they think five hundred a year a
miserable pittance; Belgravia and “baronial halls” are their primary
truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not
at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. It is clear
that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby
pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and
inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is
true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in
their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but
then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If
their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men,
tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to
have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they _have_ seen
and heard, and what they have _not_ seen and heard, with equal
unfaithfulness.
There are few women, we suppose, who have not seen something of children
under five years of age, yet in “Compensation,” a recent novel of the
mind-and-millinery species, which calls itself a “story of real life,” we
have a child of four and a half years old talking in this Ossianic
fashion:
“‘Oh, I am so happy, dear grand mamma;—I have seen—I have seen such a
delightful person; he is like everything beautiful—like the smell of
sweet flowers, and the view from Ben Lemond;—or no, _better than
that_—he is like what I think of and see when I am very, very happy;
and he is really like mamma, too, when she sings; and his forehead is
like _that distant sea_,’ she continued, pointing to the blue
Mediterranean; ‘there seems no end—no end; or like the clusters of
stars I like best to look at on a warm fine night. . . . Don’t look
so . . . your forehead is like Loch Lomond, when the wind is blowing
and the sun is gone in; I like the sunshine best when the lake is
smooth. . . . So now—I like it better than ever . . . It is more
beautiful still from the dark cloud that has gone over it, _when the
sun suddenly lights up all the colors of the forests and shining
purple rocks_, _and it is all reflected in the waters below_.’”
We are not surprised to learn that the mother of this infant phenomenon,
who exhibits symptoms so alarmingly like those of adolescence repressed
by gin, is herself a phœnix. We are assured, again and again, that she
had a remarkably original in mind, that she was a genius, and “conscious
of her originality,” and she was fortunate enough to have a lover who was
also a genius and a man of “most original mind.”
This lover, we read, though “wonderfully similar” to her “in powers and
capacity,” was “infinitely superior to her in faith and development,” and
she saw in him “‘Agape’—so rare to find—of which she had read and admired
the meaning in her Greek Testament; having, _from her great facility in
learning languages_, read the Scriptures in their original _tongues_.”
Of course! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to a heroine; Sanscrit is no
more than _a_ _b_ _c_ to her; and she can talk with perfect correctness
in any language, except English. She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in
crinoline. Poor men. There are so few of you who know even Hebrew; you
think it something to boast of if, like Bolingbroke, you only “understand
that sort of learning and what is writ about it;” and you are perhaps
adoring women who can think slightingly of you in all the Semitic
languages successively. But, then, as we are almost invariably told that
a heroine has a “beautifully small head,” and as her intellect has
probably been early invigorated by an attention to costume and
deportment, we may conclude that she can pick up the Oriental tongues, to
say nothing of their dialects, with the same aërial facility that the
butterfly sips nectar. Besides, there can be no difficulty in conceiving
the depth of the heroine’s erudition when that of the authoress is so
evident.
In “Laura Gay,” another novel of the same school, the heroine seems less
at home in Greek and Hebrew but she makes up for the deficiency by a
quite playful familiarity with the Latin classics—with the “dear old
Virgil,” “the graceful Horace, the humane Cicero, and the pleasant Livy;”
indeed, it is such a matter of course with her to quote Latin that she
does it at a picnic in a very mixed company of ladies and gentlemen,
having, we are told, “no conception that the nobler sex were capable of
jealousy on this subject. And if, indeed,” continues the biographer of
Laura Gray, “the wisest and noblest portion of that sex were in the
majority, no such sentiment would exist; but while Miss Wyndhams and Mr.
Redfords abound, great sacrifices must be made to their existence.” Such
sacrifices, we presume, as abstaining from Latin quotations, of extremely
moderate interest and applicability, which the wise and noble minority of
the other sex would be quite as willing to dispense with as the foolish
and ignoble majority. It is as little the custom of well-bred men as of
well-bred women to quote Latin in mixed parties; they can contain their
familiarity with “the humane Cicero” without allowing it to boil over in
ordinary conversation, and even references to “the pleasant Livy” are not
absolutely irrepressible. But Ciceronian Latin is the mildest form of
Miss Gay’s conversational power. Being on the Palatine with a party of
sight-seers, she falls into the following vein of well-rounded remark:
“Truth can only be pure objectively, for even in the creeds where it
predominates, being subjective, and parcelled out into portions, each of
these necessarily receives a hue of idiosyncrasy, that is, a taint of
superstition more or less strong; while in such creeds as the Roman
Catholic, ignorance, interest, the basis of ancient idolatries, and the
force of authority, have gradually accumulated on the pure truth, and
transformed it, at last, into a mass of superstition for the majority of
its votaries; and how few are there, alas! whose zeal, courage, and
intellectual energy are equal to the analysis of this accumulation, and
to the discovery of the pearl of great price which lies hidden beneath
this heap of rubbish.” We have often met with women much more novel and
profound in their observations than Laura Gay, but rarely with any so
inopportunely long-winded. A clerical lord, who is half in love with
her, is alarmed by the daring remarks just quoted, and begins to suspect
that she is inclined to free-thinking. But he is mistaken; when in a
moment of sorrow he delicately begs leave to “recall to her memory, a
_depôt_ of strength and consolation under affliction, which, until we are
hard pressed by the trials of life, we are too apt to forget,” we learn
that she really has “recurrence to that sacred depôt,” together with the
tea-pot. There is a certain flavor of orthodoxy mixed with the parade of
fortunes and fine carriages in “Laura Gay,” but it is an orthodoxy
mitigated by study of “the humane Cicero,” and by an “intellectual
disposition to analyze.”
“Compensation” is much more heavily dosed with doctrine, but then it has
a treble amount of snobbish worldliness and absurd incident to tickle the
palate of pious frivolity. Linda, the heroine, is still more speculative
and spiritual than Laura Gay, but she has been “presented,” and has more
and far grander lovers; very wicked and fascinating women are
introduced—even a French _lionne_; and no expense is spared to get up as
exciting a story as you will find in the most immoral novels. In fact,
it is a wonderful _pot pourri_ of Almack’s, Scotch second-sight, Mr.
Rogers’s breakfasts, Italian brigands, death-bed conversions, superior
authoresses, Italian mistresses, and attempts at poisoning old ladies,
the whole served up with a garnish of talk about “faith and development”
and “most original minds.” Even Miss Susan Barton, the superior
authoress, whose pen moves in a “quick, decided manner when she is
composing,” declines the finest opportunities of marriage; and though old
enough to be Linda’s mother (since we are told that she refused Linda’s
father), has her hand sought by a young earl, the heroine’s rejected
lover. Of course, genius and morality must be backed by eligible offers,
or they would seem rather a dull affair; and piety, like other things, in
order to be _comme il faut_, must be in “society,” and have admittance to
the best circles.
“Rank and Beauty” is a more frothy and less religious variety of the
mind-and-millinery species. The heroine, we are told, “if she inherited
her father’s pride of birth and her mother’s beauty of person, had in
herself a tone of enthusiastic feeling that, perhaps, belongs to her age
even in the lowly born, but which is refined into the high spirit of wild
romance only in the far descended, who feel that it is their best
inheritance.” This enthusiastic young lady, by dint of reading the
newspaper to her father, falls in love with the _prime minister_, who,
through the medium of leading articles and “the _resumé_ of the debates,”
shines upon her imagination as a bright particular star, which has no
parallax for her living in the country as simple Miss Wyndham. But she
forthwith becomes Baroness Umfraville in her own right, astonishes the
world with her beauty and accomplishments when she bursts upon it from
her mansion in Spring Gardens, and, as you foresee, will presently come
into contact with the unseen _objet aimé_. Perhaps the words “prime
minister” suggest to you a wrinkled or obese sexagenarian; but pray
dismiss the image. Lord Rupert Conway has been “called while still
almost a youth to the first situation which a subject can hold in the
_universe_,” and even leading articles and a _resumé_ of the debates have
not conjured up a dream that surpasses the fact.
“The door opened again, and Lord Rupert Conway entered. Evelyn gave
one glance. It was enough; she was not disappointed. It seemed as
if a picture on which she had long gazed was suddenly instinct with
life, and had stepped from its frame before her. His tall figure,
the distinguished simplicity of his air—it was a living Vandyke, a
cavalier, one of his noble cavalier ancestors, or one to whom her
fancy had always likened him, who long of yore had with an Umfraville
fought the Paynim far beyond the sea. Was this reality?”
Very little like it, certainly.
By and by it becomes evident that the ministerial heart is touched. Lady
Umfraville is on a visit to the Queen at Windsor, and—
“The last evening of her stay, when they returned from riding, Mr.
Wyndham took her and a large party to the top of the Keep, to see the
view. She was leaning on the battlements, gazing from that ‘stately
height’ at the prospect beneath her, when Lord Rupert was by her
side. ‘What an unrivalled view!’ exclaimed she.
“‘Yes, it would have been wrong to go without having been up here.
You are pleased with your visit?’
“‘Enchanted! A Queen to live and die under, to live and die for!’
“‘Ha!’ cried he, with sudden emotion, and with a _eureka_ expression
of countenance, as if he had _indeed found a heart in unison with his
own_.”
The “_eureka_ expression of countenance” you see at once to be prophetic
of marriage at the end of the third volume; but before that desirable
consummation there are very complicated misunderstandings, arising
chiefly from the vindictive plotting of Sir Luttrel Wycherley, who is a
genius, a poet, and in every way a most remarkable character indeed. He
is not only a romantic poet, but a hardened rake and a cynical wit; yet
his deep passion for Lady Umfraville has so impoverished his epigrammatic
talent that he cuts an extremely poor figure in conversation. When she
rejects him, he rushes into the shrubbery and rolls himself in the dirt;
and on recovering, devotes himself to the most diabolical and laborious
schemes of vengeance, in the course of which he disguises himself as a
quack physician and enters into general practice, foreseeing that Evelyn
will fall ill, and that he shall be called in to attend her. At last,
when all his schemes are frustrated, he takes leave of her in a long
letter, written, as you will perceive from the following passage,
entirely in the style of an eminent literary man:
“Oh, lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure, will you ever cast one
thought upon the miserable being who addresses you? Will you ever,
as your gilded galley is floating down the unruffled stream of
prosperity, will you ever, while lulled by the sweetest music—thine
own praises—hear the far-off sigh from that world to which I am
going?”
On the whole, however, frothy as it is, we rather prefer “Rank and
Beauty” to the two other novels we have mentioned. The dialogue is more
natural and spirited; there is some frank ignorance and no pedantry; and
you are allowed to take the heroine’s astounding intellect upon trust,
without being called on to read her conversational refutations of
sceptics and philosophers, or her rhetorical solutions of the mysteries
of the universe.
Writers of the mind-and-millinery school are remarkably unanimous in
their choice of diction. In their novels there is usually a lady or
gentleman who is more or less of a upas tree; the lover has a manly
breast; minds are redolent of various things; hearts are hollow; events
are utilized; friends are consigned to the tomb; infancy is an engaging
period; the sun is a luminary that goes to his western couch, or gathers
the rain-drops into his refulgent bosom; life is a melancholy boon;
Albion and Scotia are conversational epithets. There is a striking
resemblance, too, in the character of their moral comments, such, for
instance, as that “It is a fact, no less true than melancholy, that all
people, more or less, richer or poorer, are swayed by bad example;” that
“Books, however trivial, contain some subjects from which useful
information may be drawn;” that “Vice can too often borrow the language
of virtue;” that “Merit and nobility of nature must exist, to be
accepted, for clamor and pretension cannot impose upon those too well
read in human nature to be easily deceived;” and that “In order to
forgive, we must have been injured.” There is doubtless a class of
readers to whom these remarks appear peculiarly pointed and pungent; for
we often find them doubly and trebly scored with the pencil, and delicate
hands giving in their determined adhesion to these hardy novelties by a
distinct _très vrai_, emphasized by many notes of exclamation. The
colloquial style of these novels is often marked by much ingenious
inversion, and a careful avoidance of such cheap phraseology as can be
heard every day. Angry young gentlemen exclaim, “’Tis ever thus,
methinks;” and in the half hour before dinner a young lady informs her
next neighbor that the first day she read Shakespeare she “stole away
into the park, and beneath the shadow of the greenwood tree, devoured
with rapture the inspired page of the great magician.” But the most
remarkable efforts of the mind-and-millinery writers lie in their
philosophic reflections. The authoress of “Laura Gay,” for example,
having married her hero and heroine, improves the event by observing that
“if those sceptics, whose eyes have so long gazed on matter that they can
no longer see aught else in man, could once enter with heart and soul,
into such bliss as this, they would come to say that the soul of man and
the polypus are not of common origin, or of the same texture.” Lady
novelists, it appears, can see something else besides matter; they are
not limited to phenomena, but can relieve their eyesight by occasional
glimpses of the _noumenon_, and are, therefore, naturally better able
than any one else to confound sceptics, even of that remarkable but to us
unknown school which maintains that the soul of man is of the same
texture as the polypus.
The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may
call the _oracular_ species—novels intended to expound the writer’s
religious, philosophical, or moral theories. There seems to be a notion
abroad among women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and
actions of idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely
exhausted of common-sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. To judge
from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing
ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible
qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and
speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such
difficulties is something like this: Take a woman’s head, stuff it with a
smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false
notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every
day, and serve up hot in feeble English when not required. You will
rarely meet with a lady novelist of the oracular class who is diffident
of her ability to decide on theological questions—who has any suspicion
that she is not capable of discriminating with the nicest accuracy
between the good and evil in all church parties—who does not see
precisely how it is that men have gone wrong hitherto—and pity
philosophers in general that they have not had the opportunity of
consulting her. Great writers, who have modestly contented themselves
with putting their experience into fiction, and have thought it quite a
sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are, she sighs over as
deplorably deficient in the application of their powers. “They have
solved no great questions”—and she is ready to remedy their omission by
setting before you a complete theory of life and manual of divinity in a
love story, where ladies and gentlemen of good family go through genteel
vicissitudes, to the utter confusion of Deists, Puseyites, and
ultra-Protestants, and to the perfect establishment of that peculiar view
of Christianity which either condenses itself into a sentence of small
caps, or explodes into a cluster of stars on the three hundred and
thirtieth page. It is true, the ladies and gentlemen will probably seem
to you remarkably little like any you have had the fortune or misfortune
to meet with, for, as a general rule, the ability of a lady novelist to
describe actual life and her fellow-men is in inverse proportion to her
confident eloquence about God and the other world, and the means by which
she usually chooses to conduct you to true ideas of the invisible is a
totally false picture of the visible.
As typical a novel of the oracular kind as we can hope to meet with, is
“The Enigma: a Leaf from the Chronicles of the Wolchorley House.” The
“enigma” which this novel is to solve is certainly one that demands
powers no less gigantic than those of a lady novelist, being neither more
nor less than the existence of evil. The problem is stated and the
answer dimly foreshadowed on the very first page. The spirited young
lady, with raven hair, says, “All life is an inextricable confusion;” and
the meek young lady, with auburn hair, looks at the picture of the
Madonna which she is copying, and—“_There_ seemed the solution of that
mighty enigma.” The style of this novel is quite as lofty as its
purpose; indeed, some passages on which we have spent much patient study
are quite beyond our reach, in spite of the illustrative aid of italics
and small caps; and we must await further “development” in order to
understand them. Of Ernest, the model young clergyman, who sets every
one right on all occasions, we read that “he held not of marriage in the
marketable kind, after a social desecration;” that, on one eventful
night, “sleep had not visited his divided heart, where tumultuated, in
varied type and combination, the aggregate feelings of grief and joy;”
and that, “for the _marketable_ human article he had no toleration, be it
of what sort, or set for what value it might, whether for worship or
class, his upright soul abhorred it, whose ultimatum, the self-deceiver,
was to him THE _great spiritual lie_, ‘living in a vain show, deceiving
and being deceived;’ since he did not suppose the phylactery and enlarged
border on the garment to be _merely_ a social trick.” (The italics and
small caps are the author’s, and we hope they assist the reader’s
comprehension.) Of Sir Lionel, the model old gentleman, we are told that
“the simple ideal of the middle age, apart from its anarchy and
decadence, in him most truly seemed to live again, when the ties which
knit men together were of heroic cast. The first-born colors of pristine
faith and truth engraven on the common soul of man, and blent into the
wide arch of brotherhood, where the primæval law of _order_ grew and
multiplied each perfect after his kind, and mutually interdependent.”
You see clearly, of course, how colors are first engraven on the soul,
and then blent into a wide arch, on which arch of colors—apparently a
rainbow—the law of order grew and multiplied, each—apparently the arch
and the law—perfect after his kind? If, after this, you can possibly
want any further aid toward knowing what Sir Lionel was, we can tell you
that in his soul “the scientific combinations of thought could educe no
fuller harmonies of the good and the true than lay in the primæval pulses
which floated as an atmosphere around it!” and that, when he was sealing
a letter, “Lo! the responsive throb in that good man’s bosom echoed back
in simple truth the honest witness of a heart that condemned him not, as
his eye, bedewed with love, rested, too, with something of ancestral
pride, on the undimmed motto of the family—‘LOIAUTE.’”
The slightest matters have their vulgarity fumigated out of them by the
same elevated style. Commonplace people would say that a copy of
Shakespeare lay on a drawing-room table; but the authoress of “The
Enigma,” bent on edifying periphrasis, tells you that there lay on the
table, “that fund of human thought and feeling, which teaches the heart
through the little name, ‘Shakespeare.’” A watchman sees a light burning
in an upper window rather longer than usual, and thinks that people are
foolish to sit up late when they have an opportunity of going to bed;
but, lest this fact should seem too low and common, it is presented to us
in the following striking and metaphysical manner: “He marvelled—as a man
_will_ think for others in a necessarily separate personality,
consequently (though disallowing it) in false mental premise—how
differently _he_ should act, how gladly _he_ should prize the rest so
lightly held of within.” A footman—an ordinary Jeames, with large calves
and aspirated vowels—answers the door-bell, and the opportunity is seized
to tell you that he was a “type of the large class of pampered menials,
who follow the curse of Cain—‘vagabonds’ on the face of the earth, and
whose estimate of the human class varies in the graduated scale of money
and expenditure. . . . These, and such as these, O England, be the false
lights of thy morbid civilization!” We have heard of various “false
lights,” from Dr. Cumming to Robert Owen, from Dr. Pusey to the
Spirit-rappers, but we never before heard of the false light that
emanates from plush and powder.
In the same way very ordinary events of civilized life are exalted into
the most awful crises, and ladies in full skirts and _manches à la
Chinoise_, conduct themselves not unlike the heroines of sanguinary
melodramas. Mrs. Percy, a shallow woman of the world, wishes her son
Horace to marry the auburn-haired Grace, she being an heiress; but he,
after the manner of sons, falls in love with the raven-haired Kate, the
heiress’s portionless cousin; and, moreover, Grace herself shows every
symptom of perfect indifference to Horace. In such cases sons are often
sulky or fiery, mothers are alternately manœuvring and waspish, and the
portionless young lady often lies awake at night and cries a good deal.
We are getting used to these things now, just as we are used to eclipses
of the moon, which no longer set us howling and beating tin kettles. We
never heard of a lady in a fashionable “front” behaving like Mrs. Percy
under these circumstances. Happening one day to see Horace talking to
Grace at a window, without in the least knowing what they are talking
about, or having the least reason to believe that Grace, who is mistress
of the house and a person of dignity, would accept her son if he were to
offer himself, she suddenly rushes up to them and clasps them both,
saying, “with a flushed countenance and in an excited manner”—“This is
indeed happiness; for, may I not call you so, Grace?—my Grace—my Horace’s
Grace!—my dear children!” Her son tells her she is mistaken, and that he
is engaged to Kate, whereupon we have the following scene and tableau:
“Gathering herself up to an unprecedented height (!) her eyes
lightening forth the fire of her anger:
“‘Wretched boy!’ she said, hoarsely and scornfully, and clenching her
hand, ‘Take then the doom of your own choice! Bow down your
miserable head and let a mother’s—’
“‘Curse not!’ spake a deep low voice from behind, and Mrs. Percy
started, scared, as though she had seen a heavenly visitant appear,
to break upon her in the midst of her sin.
“Meantime Horace had fallen on his knees, at her feet, and hid his,
face in his hands.
“Who then, is she—who! Truly his ‘guardian spirit’ hath stepped
between him and the fearful words, which, however unmerited, must
have hung as a pall over his future existence;—a spell which could
not be unbound—which could not be unsaid.
“Of an earthly paleness, but calm with the still, iron-bound calmness
of death—the only calm one there—Katherine stood; and her words smote
on the ear in tones whose appallingly slow and separate intonation
rung on the heart like a chill, isolated tolling of some fatal knell.
“‘He would have plighted me his faith, but I did not accept it; you
cannot, therefore—you _dare_ not curse him. And here,’ she
continued, raising her hand to heaven, whither her large dark eyes
also rose with a chastened glow, which, for the first time,
_suffering_ had lighted in those passionate orbs—‘here I promise,
come weal, come woe, that Horace Wolchorley and I do never
interchange vows without his mother’s sanction—without his mother’s
blessing!’”
Here, and throughout the story, we see that confusion of purpose which is
so characteristic of silly novels written by women. It is a story of
quite modern drawing-room society—a society in which polkas are played
and Puseyism discussed; yet we have characters, and incidents, and traits
of manner introduced, which are mere shreds from the most heterogeneous
romances. We have a blind Irish harper, “relic of the picturesque bards
of yore,” startling us at a Sunday-school festival of tea and cake in an
English village; we have a crazy gypsy, in a scarlet cloak, singing
snatches of romantic song, and revealing a secret on her death-bed which,
with the testimony of a dwarfish miserly merchant, who salutes strangers
with a curse and a devilish laugh, goes to prove that Ernest, the model
young clergyman, is Kate’s brother; and we have an ultra-virtuous Irish
Barney, discovering that a document is forged, by comparing the date of
the paper with the date of the alleged signature, although the same
document has passed through a court of law and occasioned a fatal
decision. The “Hall” in which Sir Lionel lives is the venerable
country-seat of an old family, and this, we suppose, sets the imagination
of the authoress flying to donjons and battlements, where “lo! the warder
blows his horn;” for, as the inhabitants are in their bedrooms on a night
certainly within the recollection of Pleaceman X. and a breeze springs
up, which we are at first told was faint, and then that it made the old
cedars bow their branches to the greensward, she falls into this mediæval
vein of description (the italics are ours): “The banner _unfurled it_ at
the sound, and shook its guardian wing above, while the startled owl
_flapped her_ in the ivy; the firmament looking down through her ‘argus
eyes’—
‘Ministers of heaven’s mute melodies.’
And lo! two strokes tolled from out the warder tower, and ‘Two o’clock’
re-echoed its interpreter below.”
Such stories as this of “The Enigma” remind us of the pictures clever
children sometimes draw “out of their own head,” where you will see a
modern villa on the right, two knights in helmets fighting in the
foreground, and a tiger grinning in a jungle on the left, the several
objects being brought together because the artist thinks each pretty, and
perhaps still more because he remembers seeing them in other pictures.
But we like the authoress much better on her mediæval stilts than on her
oracular ones—when she talks of the _Ich_ and of “subjective” and
“objective,” and lays down the exact line of Christian verity, between
“right-hand excesses and left-hand declensions.” Persons who deviate
from this line are introduced with a patronizing air of charity. Of a
certain Miss Inshquine she informs us, with all the lucidity of italics
and small caps, that “_function_, not _form_, AS _the inevitable outer
expression of the spirit in this tabernacle age_, weakly engrossed her.”
And _à propos_ of Miss Mayjar, an evangelical lady who is a little too
apt to talk of her visits to sick women and the state of their souls, we
are told that the model clergyman is “not one to disallow, through the
_super_ crust, the undercurrent toward good in the _subject_, or the
positive benefits, nevertheless, to the _object_.” We imagine the
double-refined accent and protrusion of chin which are feebly represented
by the italics in this lady’s sentences! We abstain from quoting any of
her oracular doctrinal passages, because they refer to matters too
serious for our pages just now.
The epithet “silly” may seem impertinent, applied to a novel which
indicates so much reading and intellectual activity as “The Enigma,” but
we use this epithet advisedly. If, as the world has long agreed, a very
great amount of instruction will not make a wise man, still less will a
very mediocre amount of instruction make a wise woman. And the most
mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form, because it
tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the more solid education
of women.
When men see girls wasting their time in consultations about bonnets and
ball dresses, and in giggling or sentimental love-confidences, or
middle-aged women mismanaging their children, and solacing themselves
with acrid gossip, they can hardly help saying, “For Heaven’s sake, let
girls be better educated; let them have some better objects of
thought—some more solid occupations.” But after a few hours’
conversation with an oracular literary woman, or a few hours’ reading of
her books, they are likely enough to say, “After all, when a woman gets
some knowledge, see what use she makes of it! Her knowledge remains
acquisition instead of passing into culture; instead of being subdued
into modesty and simplicity by a larger acquaintance with thought and
fact, she has a feverish consciousness of her attainments; she keeps a
sort of mental pocket-mirror, and is continually looking in it at her own
‘intellectuality;’ she spoils the taste of one’s muffin by questions of
metaphysics; ‘puts down’ men at a dinner-table with her superior
information; and seizes the opportunity of a _soirée_ to catechise us on
the vital question of the relation between mind and matter. And then,
look at her writings! She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for
eloquence, and affectation for originality; she struts on one page, rolls
her eyes on another, grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth.
She may have read many writings of great men, and a few writings of great
women; but she is as unable to discern the difference between her own
style and theirs as a Yorkshireman is to discern the difference between
his own English and a Londoner’s: rhodomontade is the native accent of
her intellect. No—the average nature of women is too shallow and feeble
a soil to bear much tillage; it is only fit for the very lightest crops.”
It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such very
superficial and imperfect observation may not be among the wisest in the
world; but we have not now to contest their opinion—we are only pointing
out how it is unconsciously encouraged by many women who have volunteered
themselves as representatives of the feminine intellect. We do not
believe that a man was ever strengthened in such an opinion by
associating with a woman of true culture, whose mind had absorbed her
knowledge instead of being absorbed by it. A really cultured woman, like
a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her
knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like
just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters
herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it
a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself.
She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not
because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of
men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not
present itself to her as edifying or graceful. She does not write books
to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that
delight them. In conversation she is the least formidable of women,
because she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you
_can’t_ understand her. She does not give you information, which is the
raw material of culture—she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest
essence.
A more numerous class of silly novels than the oracular (which are
generally inspired by some form of High Church or transcendental
Christianity) is what we may call the _white neck-cloth_ species, which
represent the tone of thought and feeling in the Evangelical party. This
species is a kind of genteel tract on a large scale, intended as a sort
of medicinal sweetmeat for Low Church young ladies; an Evangelical
substitute for the fashionable novel, as the May Meetings are a
substitute for the Opera. Even Quaker children, one would think, can
hardly have been denied the indulgence of a doll; but it must be a doll
dressed in a drab gown and a coal-scuttle-bonnet—not a worldly doll, in
gauze and spangles. And there are no young ladies, we imagine—unless
they belong to the Church of the United Brethren, in which people are
married without any love-making—who can dispense with love stories.
Thus, for Evangelical young ladies there are Evangelical love stories, in
which the vicissitudes of the tender passion are sanctified by saving
views of Regeneration and the Atonement. These novels differ from the
oracular ones, as a Low Churchwoman often differs from a High
Churchwoman: they are a little less supercilious and a great deal more
ignorant, a little less correct in their syntax and a great deal more
vulgar.
The Orlando of Evangelical literature is the young curate, looked at from
the point of view of the middle class, where cambric bands are understood
to have as thrilling an effect on the hearts of young ladies as
epaulettes have in the classes above and below it. In the ordinary type
of these novels the hero is almost sure to be a young curate, frowned
upon, perhaps by worldly mammas, but carrying captive the hearts of their
daughters, who can “never forget _that_ sermon;” tender glances are
seized from the pulpit stairs instead of the opera-box; _tête-à-têtes_
are seasoned with quotations from Scripture instead of quotations from
the poets; and questions as to the state of the heroine’s affections are
mingled with anxieties as to the state of her soul. The young curate
always has a background of well-dressed and wealthy if not fashionable
society—for Evangelical silliness is as snobbish as any other kind of
silliness—and the Evangelical lady novelist, while she explains to you
the type of the scapegoat on one page, is ambitious on another to
represent the manners and conversations of aristocratic people. Her
pictures of fashionable society are often curious studies, considered as
efforts of the Evangelical imagination; but in one particular the novels
of the White Neck-cloth School are meritoriously realistic—their favorite
hero, the Evangelical young curate, is always rather an insipid
personage.
The most recent novel of this species that we happen to have before us is
“The Old Grey Church.” It is utterly tame and feeble; there is no one
set of objects on which the writer seems to have a stronger grasp than on
any other; and we should be entirely at a loss to conjecture among what
phases of life her experience has been gained, but for certain vulgarisms
of style which sufficiently indicate that she has had the advantage,
though she has been unable to use it, of mingling chiefly with men and
women whose manners and characters have not had all their bosses and
angles rubbed down by refined conventionalism. It is less excusable in
an Evangelical novelist than in any other, gratuitously to seek her
subjects among titles and carriages. The real drama of
Evangelicalism—and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has
genius enough to discern and reproduce it—lies among the middle and lower
classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood to give an especial
interest in the weak things of the earth, rather than in the mighty?
Why, then, cannot our Evangelical lady novelists show us the operation of
their religious views among people (there really are many such in the
world) who keep no carriage, “not so much as a brass-bound gig,” who even
manage to eat their dinner without a silver fork, and in whose mouths the
authoress’s questionable English would be strictly consistent? Why can
we not have pictures of religious life among the industrial classes in
England, as interesting as Mrs. Stowe’s pictures of religious life among
the negroes? Instead of this pious ladies nauseate us with novels which
remind us of what we sometimes see in a worldly woman recently
“converted;”—she is as fond of a fine dinner-table as before, but she
invites clergymen instead of beaux; she thinks as much of her dress as
before, but she adopts a more sober choice of colors and patterns; her
conversation is as trivial as before, but the triviality is flavored with
gospel instead of gossip. In “The Old Grey Church” we have the same sort
of Evangelical travesty of the fashionable novel, and of course the
vicious, intriguing baronet is not wanting. It is worth while to give a
sample of the style of conversation attributed to this high-born rake—a
style that, in its profuse italics and palpable innuendoes, is worthy of
Miss Squeers. In an evening visit to the ruins of the Colosseum,
Eustace, the young clergyman, has been withdrawing the heroine, Miss
Lushington, from the rest of the party, for the sake of a _tête-à-tête_.
The baronet is jealous, and vents his pique in this way:
“There they are, and Miss Lushington, no doubt, quite safe; for she
is under the holy guidance of Pope Eustace the First, who has, of
course, been delivering to her an edifying homily on the wickedness
of the heathens of yore, who, as tradition tells us, in this very
place let loose the wild _beastises_ on poor St. Paul!—Oh, no! by the
bye, I believe I am wrong, and betraying my want of clergy, and that
it was not at all St. Paul, nor was it here. But no matter, it would
equally serve as a text to preach from, and from which to diverge to
the degenerate _heathen_ Christians of the present day, and all their
naughty practices, and so end with an exhortation to ‘come but from
among them, and be separate;’—and I am sure, Miss Lushington, you
have most scrupulously conformed to that injunction this evening, for
we have seen nothing of you since our arrival. But every one seems
agreed it has been a _charming party of pleasure_, and I am sure we
all feel _much indebted_ to Mr. Gray for having _suggested_ it; and
as he seems so capital a cicerone, I hope he will think of something
else equally agreeable to _all_.”
This drivelling kind of dialogue, and equally drivelling narrative,
which, like a bad drawing, represents nothing, and barely indicates what
is meant to be represented, runs through the book; and we have no doubt
is considered by the amiable authoress to constitute an improving novel,
which Christian mothers will do well to put into the hands of their
daughters. But everything is relative; we have met with American
vegetarians whose normal diet was dry meal, and who, when their appetite
wanted stimulating, tickled it with _wet_ meal; and so, we can imagine
that there are Evangelical circles in which “The Old Grey Church” is
devoured as a powerful and interesting fiction.
But perhaps the least readable of silly women’s novels are the
_modern-antique_ species, which unfold to us the domestic life of Jannes
and Jambres, the private love affairs of Sennacherib, or the mental
struggles and ultimate conversion of Demetrius the silversmith. From
most silly novels we can at least extract a laugh; but those of the
modern-antique school have a ponderous, a leaden kind of fatuity, under
which we groan. What can be more demonstrative of the inability of
literary women to measure their own powers than their frequent assumption
of a task which can only be justified by the rarest concurrence of
acquirement with genius? The finest effort to reanimate the past is of
course only approximative—is always more or less an infusion of the
modern spirit into the ancient form—
Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,
Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.
Admitting that genius which has familiarized itself with all the relics
of an ancient period can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic
divination, restore the missing notes in the “music of humanity,” and
reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote
past nearer to us, and interpret it to our duller apprehension—this form
of imaginative power must always be among the very rarest, because it
demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigor. Yet we
find ladies constantly choosing to make their mental mediocrity more
conspicuous by clothing it in a masquerade of ancient names; by putting
their feeble sentimentality into the mouths of Roman vestals or Egyptian
princesses, and attributing their rhetorical arguments to Jewish
high-priests and Greek philosophers. A recent example of this heavy
imbecility is “Adonijah, a Tale of the Jewish Dispersion,” which forms
part of a series, “uniting,” we are told, “taste, humor, and sound
principles.” “Adonijah,” we presume, exemplifies the tale of “sound
principles;” the taste and humor are to be found in other members of the
series. We are told on the cover that the incidents of this tale are
“fraught with unusual interest,” and the preface winds up thus: “To those
who feel interested in the dispersed of Israel and Judea, these pages may
afford, perhaps, information on an important subject, as well as
amusement.” Since the “important subject” on which this book is to
afford information is not specified, it may possibly lie in some esoteric
meaning to which we have no key; but if it has relation to the dispersed
of Israel and Judea at any period of their history, we believe a
tolerably well-informed school-girl already knows much more of it than
she will find in this “Tale of the Jewish Dispersion.” “Adonijah” is
simply the feeblest kind of love story, supposed to be instructive, we
presume, because the hero is a Jewish captive and the heroine a Roman
vestal; because they and their friends are converted to Christianity
after the shortest and easiest method approved by the “Society for
Promoting the Conversion of the Jews;” and because, instead of being
written in plain language, it is adorned with that peculiar style of
grandiloquence which is held by some lady novelists to give an antique
coloring, and which we recognize at once in such phrases as these:—“the
splendid regnal talent, undoubtedly, possessed by the Emperor Nero”—“the
expiring scion of a lofty stem”—“the virtuous partner of his couch”—“ah,
by Vesta!”—and “I tell thee, Roman.” Among the quotations which serve at
once for instruction and ornament on the cover of this volume, there is
one from Miss Sinclair, which informs us that “Works of imagination are
_avowedly_ read by men of science, wisdom, and piety;” from which we
suppose the reader is to gather the cheering inference that Dr. Daubeny,
Mr. Mill, or Mr. Maurice may openly indulge himself with the perusal of
“Adonijah,” without being obliged to secrete it among the sofa cushions,
or read it by snatches under the dinner-table.
* * * * *
“Be not a baker if your head be made of butter,” says a homely proverb,
which, being interpreted, may mean, let no woman rush into print who is
not prepared for the consequences. We are aware that our remarks are in
a very different tone from that of the reviewers who, with perennial
recurrence of precisely similar emotions, only paralleled, we imagine, in
the experience of monthly nurses, tell one lady novelist after another
that they “hail” her productions “with delight.” We are aware that the
ladies at whom our criticism is pointed are accustomed to be told, in the
choicest phraseology of puffery, that their pictures of life are
brilliant, their characters well drawn, their style fascinating, and
their sentiments lofty. But if they are inclined to resent our plainness
of speech, we ask them to reflect for a moment on the chary praise, and
often captious blame, which their panegyrists give to writers whose works
are on the way to become classics. No sooner does a woman show that she
has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being
moderately praised and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric
adjustment, when a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is
at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no
more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical
enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell,
and Mrs. Gaskell have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men.
And every critic who forms a high estimate of the share women may
ultimately take in literature, will on principle abstain from any
exceptional indulgence toward the productions of literary women. For it
must be plain to every one who looks impartially and extensively into
feminine literature that its greatest deficiencies are due hardly more to
the want of intellectual power than to the want of those moral qualities
that contribute to literary excellence—patient diligence, a sense of the
responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation of the
sacredness of the writer’s art. In the majority of woman’s books you see
that kind of facility which springs from the absence of any high
standard; that fertility in imbecile combination or feeble imitation
which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to barrenness; just
as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of tune, while a
degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them silent. The
foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being
counterbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral
derogation implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the
extremely false impression that to write _at all_ is a proof of
superiority in a woman. On this ground we believe that the average
intellect of women is unfairly represented by the mass of feminine
literature, and that while the few women who write well are very far
above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many women who
write ill are very far below it. So that, after all, the severer critics
are fulfilling a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine
authorship of any false prestige which may give it a delusive attraction,
and in recommending women of mediocre faculties—as at least a negative
service they can render their sex—to abstain from writing.
The standing apology for women who become writers without any special
qualification is that society shuts them out from other spheres of
occupation. Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the
manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad
poetry. But society, like “matter,” and Her Majesty’s Government, and
other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as well as
excessive praise. Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we
believe there are three women who write from vanity; and besides, there
is something so antispetic in the mere healthy fact of working for one’s
bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not
likely to have been produced under such circumstances. “In all labor
there is profit;” but ladies’ silly novels, we imagine, are less the
result of labor than of busy idleness.
Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a
department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully
equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our
memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but
among the very finest—novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying
quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational
restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there
is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like
crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have
only to pour in the right elements—genuine observation, humor, and
passion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which
constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women.
Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of
playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution
have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art
which had its absolute _technique_ is, to a certain extent, guarded from
the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing
there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external
criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery.
And so we have again and again the old story of La Fontaine’s ass, who
pats his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound,
exclaims, “Moi, aussie, je joue de la flute”—a fable which we commend, at
parting, to the consideration of any feminine reader who is in danger of
adding to the number of “silly novels by lady novelists.”
VII. WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS: THE POET YOUNG. {205}
The study of men, as they have appeared in different ages and under
various social conditions, may be considered as the natural history of
the race. Let us, then, for a moment imagine ourselves, as students of
this natural history, “dredging” the first half of the eighteenth century
in search of specimens. About the year 1730 we have hauled up a
remarkable individual of the species _divine_—a surprising name,
considering the nature of the animal before us, but we are used to
unsuitable names in natural history. Let us examine this individual at
our leisure. He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his
metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if
you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a
psalmist; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the “Last Day”
and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic applause of
King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After spending “a foolish
youth, the sport of peers and poets,” after being a hanger-on of the
profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamentary
career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications
and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success,
and has determined to retire from the general mendicancy business to a
particular branch; in other words, he has determined on that renunciation
of the world implied in “taking orders,” with the prospect of a good
living and an advantageous matrimonial connection. And no man can be
better fitted for an Established Church. He personifies completely her
nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally
impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees; he
languishes at once for immortal life and for “livings;” he has a fervid
attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty.
He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the
nothingness of earthly things; and he will feel something more than
private disgust if his meritorious efforts in directing men’s attention
to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His
secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as
characteristic attire for “an ornament of religion and virtue;” hopes
courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes
begging letters to the King’s mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no
motives more familiar than Golgotha and “the skies;” it walks in
graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His religion exhausts itself in
ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and
the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he
considers, it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent or to murder
one’s father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any
man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and
the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its “relation
to the stalls,” and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of
death-beds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this
world and exalting the next; and by this double process you get the
Christian—“the highest style of man.” With all this, our new-made divine
is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling
and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He
will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical
religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will
stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and
repulsive: for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of the
“Night Thoughts.”
It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not
acquainted with the facts of Young’s life; they are among the things that
“every one knows;” but we have observed that, with regard to these
universally known matters, the majority of readers like to be treated
after the plan suggested by Monsieur Jourdain. When that distinguished
_bourgeois_ was asked if he knew Latin, he implied, “Oui, mais faîtes
comme si je ne le savais pas.” Assuming, then, as a polite writer
should, that our readers know everything about Young, it will be a direct
_sequitur_ from that assumption that we should proceed as if they knew
nothing, and recall the incidents of his biography with as much
particularity as we may without trenching on the space we shall need for
our main purpose—the reconsideration of his character as a moral and
religious poet.
Judging from Young’s works, one might imagine that the preacher had been
organized in him by hereditary transmission through a long line of
clerical forefathers—that the diamonds of the “Night Thoughts” had been
slowly condensed from the charcoal of ancestral sermons. Yet it was not
so. His grandfather, apparently, wrote himself _gentleman_, not _clerk_;
and there is no evidence that preaching had run in the family blood
before it took that turn in the person of the poet’s father, who was
quadruply clerical, being at once rector, prebendary, court chaplain, and
dean. Young was born at his father’s rectory of Upham in 1681. We may
confidently assume that even the author of the “Night Thoughts” came into
the world without a wig; but, apart from Dr. Doran’s authority, we should
not have ventured to state that the excellent rector “kissed, _with
dignified emotion_, his only son and intended namesake.” Dr. Doran
doubtless knows this, from his intimate acquaintance with clerical
physiology and psychology. He has ascertained that the paternal emotions
of prebendaries have a sacerdotal quality, and that the very chyme and
chyle of a rector are conscious of the gown and band.
In due time the boy went to Winchester College, and subsequently, though
not till he was twenty-two, to Oxford, where, for his father’s sake, he
was befriended by the wardens of two colleges, and in 1708, three years
after his father’s death, nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law
fellowship at All Souls. Of Young’s life at Oxford in these years,
hardly anything is known. His biographer, Croft, has nothing to tell us
but the vague report that, when “Young found himself independent and his
own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality
that he afterward became,” and the perhaps apocryphal anecdote, that
Tindal, the atheist, confessed himself embarrassed by the originality of
Young’s arguments. Both the report and the anecdote, however, are borne
out by indirect evidence. As to the latter, Young has left us sufficient
proof that he was fond of arguing on the theological side, and that he
had his own way of treating old subjects. As to the former, we learn
that Pope, after saying other things which we know to be true of Young,
added, that he passed “a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets;”
and, from all the indications we possess of his career till he was nearly
fifty, we are inclined to think that Pope’s statement only errs by
defect, and that he should rather have said, “a foolish youth and
_middle_ age.” It is not likely that Young was a very hard student, for
he impressed Johnson, who saw him in his old age, as “not a great
scholar,” and as surprisingly ignorant of what Johnson thought “quite
common maxims” in literature; and there is no evidence that he filled
either his leisure or his purse by taking pupils. His career as an
author did not commence till he was nearly thirty, even dating from the
publication of a portion of the “Last Day,” in the _Tatler_; so that he
could hardly have been absorbed in composition. But where the fully
developed insect is parasitic, we believe the larva is usually parasitic
also, and we shall probably not be far wrong in supposing that Young at
Oxford, as elsewhere, spent a good deal of his time in hanging about
possible and actual patrons, and accommodating himself to the habits with
considerable flexibility of conscience and of tongue; being none the less
ready, upon occasion, to present himself as the champion of theology and
to rhapsodize at convenient moments in the company of the skies or of
skulls. That brilliant profligate, the Duke of Wharton, to whom Young
afterward clung as his chief patron, was at this time a mere boy; and,
though it is probable that their intimacy had commenced, since the Duke’s
father and mother were friends of the old dean, that intimacy ought not
to aggravate any unfavorable inference as to Young’s Oxford life. It is
less likely that he fell into any exceptional vice than that he differed
from the men around him chiefly in his episodes of theological advocacy
and rhapsodic solemnity. He probably sowed his wild oats after the
coarse fashion of his times, for he has left us sufficient evidence that
his moral sense was not delicate; but his companions, who were occupied
in sowing their own oats, perhaps took it as a matter of course that he
should be a rake, and were only struck with the exceptional circumstance
that he was a pious and moralizing rake.
There is some irony in the fact that the two first poetical productions
of Young, published in the same year, were his “Epistles to Lord
Lansdowne,” celebrating the recent creation of peers—Lord Lansdowne’s
creation in particular; and the “Last Day.” Other poets besides Young
found the device for obtaining a Tory majority by turning twelve
insignificant commoners into insignificant lords, an irresistible
stimulus to verse; but no other poet showed so versatile an enthusiasm—so
nearly equal an ardor for the honor of the new baron and the honor of the
Deity. But the twofold nature of the sycophant and the psalmist is not
more strikingly shown in the contrasted themes of the two poems than in
the transitions from bombast about monarchs to bombast about the
resurrection, in the “Last Day” itself. The dedication of the poem to
Queen Anne, Young afterward suppressed, for he was always ashamed of
having flattered a dead patron. In this dedication, Croft tells us, “he
gives her Majesty praise indeed for her victories, but says that the
author is more pleased to see her rise from this lower world, soaring
above the clouds, passing the first and second heavens, and leaving the
fixed stars behind her; nor will he lose her there, he says, but keep her
still in view through the boundless spaces on the other side of creation,
in her journey toward eternal bliss, till he behold the heaven of heavens
open, and angels receiving and conveying her still onward from the
stretch of his imagination, which tires in her pursuit, and falls back
again to earth.”
The self-criticism which prompted the suppression of the dedication did
not, however, lead him to improve either the rhyme or the reason of the
unfortunate couplet—
“When other Bourbons reign in other lands,
And, if men’s sins forbid not, other Annes.”
In the “Epistle to Lord Lansdowne” Young indicates his taste for the
drama; and there is evidence that his tragedy of “Busiris” was “in the
theatre” as early as this very year, 1713, though it was not brought on
the stage till nearly six years later; so that Young was now very
decidedly bent on authorship, for which his degree of B.C.L., taken in
this year, was doubtless a magical equipment. Another poem, “The Force
of Religion; or, Vanquished Love,” founded on the execution of Lady Jane
Grey and her husband, quickly followed, showing fertility in feeble and
tasteless verse; and on the Queen’s death, in 1714, Young lost no time in
making a poetical lament for a departed patron a vehicle for extravagant
laudation of the new monarch. No further literary production of his
appeared until 1716, when a Latin oration, which he delivered on the
foundation of the Codrington Library at All Souls, gave him a new
opportunity for displaying his alacrity in inflated panegyric.
In 1717 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke of Wharton to
Ireland, though so slender are the materials for his biography that the
chief basis for this supposition is a passage in his “Conjectures on
Original Composition,” written when he was nearly eighty, in which he
intimates that he had once been in that country. But there are many
facts surviving to indicate that for the next eight or nine years Young
was a sort of _attaché_ of Wharton’s. In 1719, according to legal
records, the Duke granted him an annuity, in consideration of his having
relinquished the office of tutor to Lord Burleigh, with a life annuity of
£100 a year, on his Grace’s assurances that he would provide for him in a
much more ample manner. And again, from the same evidence, it appears
that in 1721 Young received from Wharton a bond for £600, in compensation
of expenses incurred in standing for Parliament at the Duke’s desire, and
as an earnest of greater services which his Grace had promised him on his
refraining from the spiritual and temporal advantages of taking orders,
with a certainty of two livings in the gift of his college. It is clear,
therefore, that lay advancement, as long as there was any chance of it,
had more attractions for Young than clerical preferment; and that at this
time he accepted the Duke of Wharton as the pilot of his career.
A more creditable relation of Young’s was his friendship with Tickell,
with whom he was in the habit of interchanging criticisms, and to whom in
1719—the same year, let us note, in which he took his doctor’s degree—he
addressed his “Lines on the Death of Addison.” Close upon these followed
his “Paraphrase of part of the Book of Job,” with a dedication to Parker,
recently made Lord Chancellor, showing that the possession of Wharton’s
patronage did not prevent Young from fishing in other waters. He know
nothing of Parker, but that did not prevent him from magnifying the new
Chancellor’s merits; on the other hand, he _did_ know Wharton, but this
again did not prevent him from prefixing to his tragedy, “The Revenge,”
which appeared in 1721, a dedication attributing to the Duke all virtues,
as well as all accomplishments. In the concluding sentence of this
dedication, Young naïvely indicates that a considerable ingredient in his
gratitude was a lively sense of anticipated favors. “My present fortune
is his bounty, and my future his care; which I will venture to say will
always be remembered to his honor; since he, I know, intended his
generosity as an encouragement to merit, through his very pardonable
partiality to one who bears him so sincere a duty and respect, I happen
to receive the benefit of it.” Young was economical with his ideas and
images; he was rarely satisfied with using a clever thing once, and this
bit of ingenious humility was afterward made to do duty in the
“Instalment,” a poem addressed to Walpole:
“Be this thy partial smile, from censure free,
’Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me.”
It was probably “The Revenge” that Young was writing when, as we learn
from Spence’s anecdotes, the Duke of Wharton gave him a skull with a
candle fixed in it, as the most appropriate lamp by which to write
tragedy. According to Young’s dedication, the Duke was “accessory” to
the scenes of this tragedy in a more important way, “not only by
suggesting the most beautiful incident in them, but by making all
possible provision for the success of the whole.” A statement which is
credible, not indeed on the ground of Young’s dedicatory assertion, but
from the known ability of the Duke, who, as Pope tells us, possessed
“each gift of Nature and of Art,
And wanted nothing but an honest heart.”
The year 1722 seems to have been the period of a visit to Mr. Dodington,
of Eastbury, in Dorsetshire—the “pure Dorsetian downs” celebrated by
Thomson—in which Young made the acquaintance of Voltaire; for in the
subsequent dedication of his “Sea Piece” to “Mr. Voltaire,” he recalls
their meeting on “Dorset Downs;” and it was in this year that Christopher
Pitt, a gentleman-poet of those days, addressed an “Epistle to Dr. Edward
Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire,” which has at least the merit of this
biographical couplet:
“While with your Dodington retired you sit,
Charm’d with his flowing Burgundy and wit.”
Dodington, apparently, was charmed in his turn, for he told Dr. Wharton
that Young was “far superior to the French poet in the variety and
novelty of his _bon-mots_ and repartees.” Unfortunately, the only
specimen of Young’s wit on this occasion that has been preserved to us is
the epigram represented as an extempore retort (spoken aside, surely) to
Voltaire’s criticism of Milton’s episode of sin and death:
“Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin,
At once, we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin;”—
an epigram which, in the absence of “flowing Burgundy,” does not strike
us as remarkably brilliant. Let us give Young the benefit of the doubt
thrown on the genuineness of this epigram by his own poetical dedication,
in which he represents himself as having “soothed” Voltaire’s “rage”
against Milton “with gentle rhymes;” though in other respects that
dedication is anything but favorable to a high estimate of Young’s wit.
Other evidence apart, we should not be eager for the after-dinner
conversation of the man who wrote:
“Thine is the Drama, how renown’d!
Thine Epic’s loftier trump to sound;—
_But let Arion’s sea-strung harp be mine_;
_But where’s his dolphin_? _Know’st thou where_?
_May that be found in thee_, _Voltaire_!”
The “Satires” appeared in 1725 and 1726, each, of course, with its
laudatory dedication and its compliments insinuated among the rhymes.
The seventh and last is dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole, is very short,
and contains nothing in particular except lunatic flattery of George the
First and his prime minister, attributing that royal hog’s late escape
from a storm at sea to the miraculous influence of his grand and virtuous
soul—for George, he says, rivals the angels:
“George, who in foes can soft affections raise,
And charm envenom’d satire into praise.
Nor human rage alone his pow’r perceives,
But the mad winds and the tumultuous waves,
Ev’n storms (Death’s fiercest ministers!) forbear,
And in their own wild empire learn to spare.
Thus, Nature’s self, supporting Man’s decree,
Styles Britain’s sovereign, sovereign of the sea.”
As for Walpole, what _he_ felt at this tremendous crisis
“No powers of language, but his own, can tell,
His own, which Nature and the Graces form,
At will, to raise, or hush, the civil storm.”
It is a coincidence worth noticing, that this seventh Satire was
published in 1726, and that the warrant of George the First, granting
Young a pension of £200 a year from Lady-day, 1725, is dated May 3d,
1726. The gratitude exhibited in this Satire may have been chiefly
prospective, but the “Instalment,” a poem inspired by the thrilling event
of Walpole’s installation as Knight of the Garter, was clearly written
with the double ardor of a man who has got a pension and hopes for
something more. His emotion about Walpole is precisely at the same pitch
as his subsequent emotion about the Second Advent. In the “Instalment”
he says:
“With invocations some their hearts inflame;
_I need no muse_, _a Walpole is my theme_.”
And of God coming to judgment, he says, in the “Night Thoughts:”
“I find my inspiration is my theme;
_The grandeur of my subject is my muse_.”
Nothing can be feebler than this “Instalment,” except in the strength of
impudence with which the writer professes to scorn the prostitution of
fair fame, the “profanation of celestial fire.”
Herbert Croft tells us that Young made more than three thousand pounds by
his “Satires”—a surprising statement, taken in connection with the
reasonable doubt he throws on the story related in Spence’s “Anecdotes,”
that the Duke of Wharton gave Young £2000 for this work. Young, however,
seems to have been tolerably fortunate in the pecuniary results of his
publications; and, with his literary profits, his annuity from Wharton,
his fellowship, and his pension, not to mention other bounties which may
be inferred from the high merits he discovers in many men of wealth and
position, we may fairly suppose that he now laid the foundation of the
considerable fortune he left at his death.
It is probable that the Duke of Wharton’s final departure for the
Continent and disgrace at Court in 1726, and the consequent cessation of
Young’s reliance on his patronage, tended not only to heighten the
temperature of his poetical enthusiasm for Sir Robert Walpole, but also
to turn his thoughts toward the Church again, as the second-best means of
rising in the world. On the accession of George the Second, Young found
the same transcendent merits in him as in his predecessor, and celebrated
them in a style of poetry previously unattempted by him—the Pindaric ode,
a poetic form which helped him to surpass himself in furious bombast.
“Ocean, an Ode: concluding with a Wish,” was the title of this piece. He
afterward pruned it, and cut off, among other things, the concluding
Wish, expressing the yearning for humble retirement, which, of course,
had prompted him to the effusion; but we may judge of the rejected
stanzas by the quality of those he has allowed to remain. For example,
calling on Britain’s dead mariners to rise and meet their “country’s
full-blown glory” in the person of the new King, he says:
“What powerful charm
Can Death disarm?
Your long, your iron slumbers break?
_By Jove_, _by Fame_,
_By George’s name_,
Awake! awake! awake! awake!”
Soon after this notable production, which was written with the ripe folly
of forty-seven, Young took orders, and was presently appointed chaplain
to the King. “The Brothers,” his third and last tragedy, which was
already in rehearsal, he now withdrew from the stage, and sought
reputation in a way more accordant with the decorum of his new
profession, by turning prose writer. But after publishing “A True
Estimate of Human Life,” with a dedication to the Queen, as one of the
“most shining representatives” of God on earth, and a sermon, entitled
“An Apology for Princes; or, the Reverence due to Government,” preached
before the House of Commons, his Pindaric ambition again seized him, and
he matched his former ode by another, called “Imperium Pelagi, a Naval
Lyric; written in imitation of Pindar’s spirit, occasioned by his
Majesty’s return from Hanover, 1729, and the succeeding Peace.” Since he
afterward suppressed this second ode, we must suppose that it was rather
worse than the first. Next came his two “Epistles to Pope, concerning
the Authors of the Age,” remarkable for nothing but the audacity of
affectation with which the most servile of poets professes to despise
servility.
In 1730 Young was presented by his college with the rectory of Welwyn, in
Hertfordshire, and, in the following year, when he was just fifty, he
married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a widow with two children, who seems to have
been in favor with Queen Caroline, and who probably had an income—two
attractions which doubtless enhanced the power of her other charms.
Pastoral duties and domesticity probably cured Young of some bad habits;
but, unhappily, they did not cure him either of flattery or of fustian.
Three more odes followed, quite as bad as those of his bachelorhood,
except that in the third he announced the wise resolution of never
writing another. It must have been about this time, since Young was now
“turned of fifty,” that he wrote the letter to Mrs. Howard (afterward
Lady Suffolk), George the Second’s mistress, which proves that he used
other engines, besides Pindaric ones, in “besieging Court favor.” The
letter is too characteristic to be omitted:
“Monday Morning.
“MADAM: I know his Majesty’s goodness to his servants, and his love
of justice in general, so well, that I am confident, if his Majesty
knew my case, I should not have any cause to despair of his gracious
favor to me.
“Abilities. Want.
Good Manners. Sufferings }
Service. and } for his
Majesty.
Age. Zeal }
_These_, madam, are the proper points of consideration in the person
that humbly hopes his Majesty’s favor.
“As to _Abilities_, all I can presume to say is, I have done the best
I could to improve them.
“As to _Good manners_, I desire no favor, if any just objection lies
against them.
“As for _Service_, I have been near seven years in his Majesty’s and
never omitted any duty in it, which few can say.
“As for _Age_, I am turned of fifty.
“As for _Want_, I have no manner of preferment.
“As for _Sufferings_, I have lost £300 per ann. by being in his
Majesty’s service; as I have shown in a _Representation_ which his
Majesty has been so good as to read and consider.
“As for _Zeal_, I have written nothing without showing my duty to
their Majesties, and some pieces are dedicated to them.
“This, madam, is the short and true state of my case. They that make
their court to the ministers, and not their Majesties, succeed
better. If my case deserves some consideration, and you can serve me
in it, I humbly hope and believe you will: I shall, therefore,
trouble you no farther; but beg leave to subscribe myself, with
truest respect and gratitude,
“Yours, etc.,
EDWARD YOUNG.
“P.S. I have some hope that my Lord Townshend is my friend; if
therefore soon, and before he leaves the court, you had an
opportunity of mentioning me, with that favor you have been so good
to show, I think it would not fail of success; and, if not, I shall
owe you more than any.”—“Suffolk Letters,” vol. i. p. 285.
Young’s wife died in 1741, leaving him one son, born in 1733. That he
had attached himself strongly to her two daughters by her former
marriage, there is better evidence in the report, mentioned by Mrs.
Montagu, of his practical kindness and liberality to the younger, than in
his lamentations over the elder as the “Narcissa” of the “Night
Thoughts.” “Narcissa” had died in 1735, shortly after marriage to Mr.
Temple, the son of Lord Palmerston; and Mr. Temple himself, after a
second marriage, died in 1740, a year before Lady Elizabeth Young.
These, then, are the three deaths supposed to have inspired “The
Complaint,” which forms the three first books of the “Night Thoughts:”
“Insatiate archer, could not one suffice?
Thy shaft flew thrice: and thrice my peace was slain:
And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had fill’d her horn.”
Since we find Young departing from the truth of dates, in order to
heighten the effect of his calamity, or at least of his climax, we need
not be surprised that he allowed his imagination great freedom in other
matters besides chronology, and that the character of “Philander” can, by
no process, be made to fit Mr. Temple. The supposition that the
much-lectured “Lorenzo” of the “Night Thoughts” was Young’s own son is
hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the poem was written when
that son was a boy, than by the obvious artificiality of the characters
Young introduces as targets for his arguments and rebukes. Among all the
trivial efforts of conjectured criticism, there can hardly be one more
futile than the attempts to discover the original of those pitiable
lay-figures, the “Lorenzos” and “Altamonts” of Young’s didactic prose and
poetry. His muse never stood face to face with a genuine living human
being; she would have been as much startled by such an encounter as a
necromancer whose incantations and blue fire had actually conjured up a
demon.
The “Night Thoughts” appeared between 1741 and 1745. Although he
declares in them that he has chosen God for his “patron” henceforth, this
is not at all to the prejudice of some half dozen lords, duchesses, and
right honorables who have the privilege of sharing finely-turned
compliments with their co-patron. The line which closed the Second Night
in the earlier editions—
“Wits spare not Heaven, O Wilmington!—nor thee”—
is an intense specimen of that perilous juxtaposition of ideas by which
Young, in his incessant search after point and novelty, unconsciously
converts his compliments into sarcasms; and his apostrophe to the moon as
more likely to be favorable to his song if he calls her “fair Portland of
the skies,” is worthy even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostentatious
renunciation of worldly schemes, and especially of his twenty-years’
siege of Court favor, are in the tone of one who retains some hope in the
midst of his querulousness.
He descended from the astronomical rhapsodies of his “Ninth Night,”
published in 1745, to more terrestrial strains in his “Reflections on the
Public Situation of the Kingdom,” dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle; but
in this critical year we get a glimpse of him through a more prosaic and
less refracting medium. He spent a part of the year at Tunbridge Wells;
and Mrs. Montagu, who was there too, gives a very lively picture of the
“divine Doctor” in her letters to the Duchess of Portland, on whom Young
had bestowed the superlative bombast to which we have recently alluded.
We shall borrow the quotations from Dr. Doran, in spite of their length,
because, to our mind, they present the most agreeable portrait we possess
of Young:
“I have great joy in Dr. Young, whom I disturbed in a reverie. At
first he started, then bowed, then fell back into a surprise; then
began a speech, relapsed into his astonishment two or three times,
forgot what he had been saying; began a new subject, and so went on.
I told him your grace desired he would write longer letters; to which
he cried ‘Ha!’ most emphatically, and I leave you to interpret what
it meant. He has made a friendship with one person here, whom I
believe you would not imagine to have been made for his bosom friend.
You would, perhaps, suppose it was a bishop or dean, a prebend, a
pious preacher, a clergyman of exemplary life, or, if a layman, of
most virtuous conversation, one that had paraphrased St. Matthew, or
wrote comments on St. Paul. . . . You would not guess that this
associate of the doctor’s was—old Cibber! Certainly, in their
religious, moral, and civil character, there is no relation; but in
their dramatic capacity there is some.—Mrs. Montagu was not aware
that Cibber, whom Young had named not disparagingly in his Satires,
was the brother of his old school-fellow; but to return to our hero.
‘The waters,’ says Mrs. Montagu, ‘have raised his spirits to a fine
pitch, as your grace will imagine, when I tell you how sublime an
answer he made to a very vulgar question. I asked him how long he
stayed at the Wells; he said, ‘As long as my rival stayed;—as long as
the sun did.’ Among the visitors at the Wells were Lady Sunderland
(wife of Sir Robert Sutton), and her sister, Mrs. Tichborne. ‘He did
an admirable thing to Lady Sunderland: on her mentioning Sir Robert
Sutton, he asked her where Sir Robert’s lady was; on which we all
laughed very heartily, and I brought him off, half ashamed, to my
lodgings, where, during breakfast, he assured me he had asked after
Lady Sunderland, because he had a great honor for her; and that,
having a respect for her sister, he designed to have inquired after
her, if we had not put it out of his head by laughing at him. You
must know, Mrs. Tichborne sat next to Lady Sunderland. It would have
been admirable to have had him finish his compliment in that manner.’
. . . ‘His expressions all bear the stamp of novelty, and his
thoughts of sterling sense. He practises a kind of philosophical
abstinence. . . . He carried Mrs. Rolt and myself to Tunbridge, five
miles from hence, where we were to see some fine old ruins. First
rode the doctor on a tall steed, decently caparisoned in dark gray;
next, ambled Mrs. Rolt on a hackney horse; . . . then followed your
humble servant on a milk-white palfrey. I rode on in safety, and at
leisure to observe the company, especially the two figures that
brought up the rear. The first was my servant, valiantly armed with
two uncharged pistols; the last was the doctor’s man, whose uncombed
hair so resembled the mane of the horse he rode, one could not help
imagining they were of kin, and wishing, for the honor of the family,
that they had had one comb betwixt them. On his head was a velvet
cap, much resembling a black saucepan, and on his side hung a little
basket. At last we arrived at the King’s Head, where the loyalty of
the doctor induced him to alight; and then, knight-errant-like, he
took his damsels from off their palfreys, and courteously handed us
into the inn.’ . . . The party returned to the Wells; and ‘the silver
Cynthia held up her lamp in the heavens’ the while. ‘The night
silenced all but our divine doctor, who sometimes uttered things fit
to be spoken in a season when all nature seems to be hushed and
hearkening. I followed, gathering wisdom as I went, till I found, by
my horse’s stumbling, that I was in a bad road, and that the blind
was leading the blind. So I placed my servant between the doctor and
myself; which he not perceiving, went on in a most philosophical
strain, to the great admiration of my poor clown of a servant, who,
not being wrought up to any pitch of enthusiasm, nor making any
answer to all the fine things he heard, the doctor, wondering I was
dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, looked round and declared his
surprise.’”
Young’s oddity and absence of mind are gathered from other sources
besides these stories of Mrs. Montagu’s, and gave rise to the report that
he was the original of Fielding’s “Parson Adams;” but this Croft denies,
and mentions another Young, who really sat for the portrait, and who, we
imagine, had both more Greek and more genuine simplicity than the poet.
His love of chatting with Colley Cibber was an indication that the old
predilection for the stage survived, in spite of his emphatic contempt
for “all joys but joys that never can expire;” and the production of “The
Brothers,” at Drury Lane in 1753, after a suppression of fifteen years,
was perhaps not entirely due to the expressed desire to give the proceeds
to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The author’s profits
were not more than £400—in those days a disappointing sum; and Young, as
we learn from his friend Richardson, did not make this the limit of his
donation, but gave a thousand guineas to the Society. “I had some talk
with him,” says Richardson, in one of his letters, “about this great
action. ‘I always,’ said he, ‘intended to do something handsome for the
Society. Had I deferred it to my demise, I should have given away my
son’s money. All the world are inclined to pleasure; could I have given
myself a greater by disposing of the sum to a different use, I should
have done it.’” Surely he took his old friend Richardson for “Lorenzo!”
His next work was “The Centaur not Fabulous; in Six Letters to a Friend,
on the Life in Vogue,” which reads very much like the most objurgatory
parts of the “Night Thoughts” reduced to prose. It is preceded by a
preface which, though addressed to a lady, is in its denunciations of
vice as grossly indecent and almost as flippant as the epilogues written
by “friends,” which he allowed to be reprinted after his tragedies in the
latest edition of his works. We like much better than “The Centaur,”
“Conjectures on Original Composition,” written in 1759, for the sake, he
says, of communicating to the world the well-known anecdote about
Addison’s deathbed, and with the exception of his poem on Resignation,
the last thing he ever published.
The estrangement from his son, which must have embittered the later years
of his life, appears to have begun not many years after the mother’s
death. On the marriage of her second daughter, who had previously
presided over Young’s household, a Mrs. Hallows, understood to be a woman
of discreet age, and the daughter (a widow) of a clergyman who was an old
friend of Young’s, became housekeeper at Welwyn. Opinions about ladies
are apt to differ. “Mrs. Hallows was a woman of piety, improved by
reading,” says one witness. “She was a very coarse woman,” says Dr.
Johnson; and we shall presently find some indirect evidence that her
temper was perhaps not quite so much improved as her piety. Servants, it
seems, were not fond of remaining long in the house with her; a satirical
curate, named Kidgell, hints at “drops of juniper” taken as a cordial
(but perhaps he was spiteful, and a teetotaller); and Young’s son is said
to have told his father that “an old man should not resign himself to the
management of anybody.” The result was, that the son was banished from
home for the rest of his father’s life-time, though Young seems never to
have thought of disinheriting him.
Our latest glimpses of the aged poet are derived from certain letters of
Mr. Jones, his curate—letters preserved in the British Museum, and
happily made accessible to common mortals in Nichols’s “Anecdotes.” Mr.
Jones was a man of some literary activity and ambition—a collector of
interesting documents, and one of those concerned in the “Free and Candid
Disquisitions,” the design of which was “to point out such things in our
ecclesiastical establishment as want to be reviewed and amended.” On
these and kindred subjects he corresponded with Dr. Birch, occasionally
troubling him with queries and manuscripts. We have a respect for Mr.
Jones. Unlike any person who ever troubled _us_ with queries or
manuscripts, he mitigates the infliction by such gifts as “a fat pullet,”
wishing he “had anything better to send; but this depauperizing vicarage
(of Alconbury) too often checks the freedom and forwardness of my mind.”
Another day comes a “pound canister of tea,” another, a “young fatted
goose.” Clearly, Mr. Jones was entirely unlike your literary
correspondents of the present day; he forwarded manuscripts, but he had
“bowels,” and forwarded poultry too. His first letter from Welwyn is
dated June, 1759, not quite six years before Young’s death. In June,
1762, he expresses a wish to go to London “this summer. But,” he
continues:
“My time and pains are almost continually taken up here, and . . . I
have been (I now find) a considerable loser, upon the whole, by
continuing here so long. The consideration of this, and the
inconveniences I sustained, and do still experience, from my late
illness, obliged me at last to acquaint the Doctor (Young) with my
case, and to assure him that I plainly perceived the duty and
confinement here to be too much for me; for which reason I must (I
said) beg to be at liberty to resign my charge at Michaelmas. I
began to give him these notices in February, when I was very ill; and
now I perceive, by what he told me the other day, that he is in some
difficulty: for which reason he is at last (he says) resolved to
advertise, _and even_ (_which is much wondered at_) _to raise the
salary considerably __higher_. (What he allowed my predecessors was
20_l._ per annum; and now he proposes 50_l._, as he tells me.) I
never asked him to raise it for me, though I well knew it was not
equal to the duty; nor did I say a word about myself when he lately
suggested to me his intentions upon this subject.”
In a postscript to this letter he says:
“I may mention to you farther, as a friend that may be trusted, that
in all likelihood the poor old gentleman will not find it a very easy
matter, unless by dint of money, _and force upon himself_, to procure
a man that he can like for his next curate, _nor one that will stay
with him so long as I have done_. Then, his great age will recur to
people’s thoughts; and if he has any foibles, either in temper or
conduct, they will be sure not to be forgotten on this occasion by
those who know him; and those who do not will probably be on their
guard. On these and the like considerations, it is by no means an
eligible office to be seeking out for a curate for him, as he has
several times wished me to do; and would, if he knew that I am now
writing to you, wish your assistance also. But my best friends here,
_who well foresee the probable consequences_, and wish me well,
earnestly dissuade me from complying: and I will decline the office
with as much decency as I can: but high salary will, I suppose, fetch
in somebody or other, soon.”
In the following July he writes:
“The old gentleman here (I may venture to tell you freely) seems to
me to be in a pretty odd way of late—moping, dejected, self-willed,
and as if surrounded with some perplexing circumstances. Though I
visit him pretty frequently for short intervals, I say very little to
his affairs, not choosing to be a party concerned, especially in
cases of so critical and tender a nature. There is much mystery in
almost all his temporal affairs, as well as in many of his
speculative theories. Whoever lives in this neighborhood to see his
exit will probably see and hear some very strange things. Time will
show;—I am afraid, not greatly to his credit. There is thought to be
_an irremovable obstruction to his happiness within his walls_, _as
well as another without them_; but the former is the more powerful,
and like to continue so. He has this day been trying anew to engage
me to stay with him. No lucrative views can tempt me to sacrifice my
liberty or my health, to such measures as are proposed here. _Nor do
I like to __have to do with persons whose word and honor cannot be
depended on_. So much for this very odd and unhappy topic.”
In August Mr. Jones’s tone is slightly modified. Earnest entreaties, not
lucrative considerations, have induced him to cheer the Doctor’s dejected
heart by remaining at Welwyn some time longer. The Doctor is, “in
various respects, a very unhappy man,” and few know so much of these
respects as Mr. Jones. In September he recurs to the subject:
“My ancient gentleman here is still full of trouble, which moves my
concern, though it moves only the secret laughter of many, and some
untoward surmises in disfavor of him and his household. The loss of
a very large sum of money (about 200_l._) is talked of; whereof this
vill and neighborhood is full. Some disbelieve; others says, ‘_It is
no wonder_, _where about eighteen or more servants are sometimes
taken and dismissed in the course of a year_.’ The gentleman himself
is allowed by all to be far more harmless and easy in his family than
some one else who hath too much the lead in it. This, among others,
was one reason for my late motion to quit.”
No other mention of Young’s affairs occurs until April 2d, 1765, when he
says that Dr. Young is very ill, attended by two physicians.
“Having mentioned this young gentleman (Dr. Young’s son), I would
acquaint you next, that he came hither this morning, having been sent
for, as I am told, by the direction of Mrs. Hallows. Indeed, she
intimated to me as much herself. And if this be so, I must say, that
it is one of the most prudent Acts she ever did, or could have done
in such a case as this; as it may prove a means of preventing much
confusion after the death of the Doctor. I have had some little
discourse with the son: he seems much affected, and I believe really
is so. He earnestly wishes his father might be pleased to ask after
him; for you must know he has not yet done this, nor is, in my
opinion, like to do it. And it has been said farther, that upon a
late application made to him on the behalf of his son, he desired
that no more might be said to him about it. How true this may be I
cannot as yet be certain; all I shall say is, it seems not improbable
. . . I heartily wish the ancient man’s heart may prove tender toward
his son; _though_, _knowing him so well_, _I can scarce hope to hear
such desirable news_.”
Eleven days later he writes:
“I have now the pleasure to acquaint you, that the late Dr. Young,
though he had for many years kept his son at a distance from him, yet
has now at last left him all his possessions, after the payment of
certain legacies; so that the young gentleman (who bears a fair
character, and behaves well, as far as I can hear or see) will, I
hope, soon enjoy and make a prudent use of a handsome fortune. The
father, on his deathbed, and since my return from London, was applied
to in the tenderest manner, by one of his physicians, and by another
person, to admit the son into his presence, to make submission,
intreat forgiveness, and obtain his blessing. As to an interview
with his son, he intimated that he chose to decline it, as his
spirits were then low and his nerves weak. With regard to the next
particular, he said, ‘_I heartily forgive him_;’ and upon ‘mention of
this last, he gently lifted up his hand, and letting it gently fall,
pronounced these words, ‘_God bless him_!’ . . . I know it will give
you pleasure to be farther informed that he was pleased to make
respectful mention of me in his will; expressing his satisfaction in
my care of his parish, _bequeathing to me a handsome legacy_, and
appointing me to be one of his executors.”
So far Mr. Jones, in his confidential correspondence with a “friend, who
may be trusted.” In a letter communicated apparently by him to the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_, seven years later, namely, in 1782, on the
appearance of Croft’s biography of Young, we find him speaking of “the
ancient gentleman” in a tone of reverential eulogy, quite at variance
with the free comments we have just quoted. But the Rev. John Jones was
probably of opinion, with Mrs. Montagu, whose contemporary and
retrospective letters are also set in a different key, that “the
interests of religion were connected with the character of a man so
distinguished for piety as Dr. Young.” At all events, a subsequent
quasi-official statement weighs nothing as evidence against contemporary,
spontaneous, and confidential hints.
To Mrs. Hallows, Young left a legacy of £1000, with the request that she
would destroy all his manuscripts. This final request, from some unknown
cause, was not complied with, and among the papers he left behind him was
the following letter from Archbishop Secker, which probably marks the
date of his latest effort after preferment:
“DEANERY OF ST. PAUL’S, July 8, 1758.
“Good DR. YOUNG: I have long wondered that more suitable notice of
your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. But how to
remedy the omission I see not. No encouragement hath ever been given
me to mention things of this nature to his Majesty. And therefore,
in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would be
weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on some
other occasions. _Your fortune and your reputation set you above the
need of advancement_; _and your sentiments above that concern for
it_, _on your own account_, which, on that of the public, is
sincerely felt by
“Your loving Brother,
“THO. CANT.”
The loving brother’s irony is severe!
Perhaps the least questionable testimony to the better side of Young’s
character is that of Bishop Hildesley, who, as the vicar of a parish near
Welwyn, had been Young’s neighbor for upward of twenty years. The
affection of the clergy for each other, we have observed, is, like that
of the fair sex, not at all of a blind and infatuated kind; and we may
therefore the rather believe them when they give each other any
extra-official praise. Bishop Hildesley, then writing of Young to
Richardson, says:
“The impertinence of my frequent visits to him was amply rewarded;
forasmuch as, I can truly say, he never received me but with
agreeable open complacency; and I never left him but with profitable
pleasure and improvement. He was one or other, the most modest, the
most patient of contradiction, and the most informing and
entertaining I ever conversed with—at least, of any man who had so
just pretensions to pertinacity and reserve.”
Mr. Langton, however, who was also a frequent visitor of Young’s,
informed Boswell—
“That there was an air of benevolence in his manner; but that he
could obtain from him less information than he had hoped to receive
from one who had lived so much in intercourse with the brightest men
of what had been called the Augustan age of England; and that he
showed a degree of eager curiosity concerning the common occurrences
that were then passing, which appeared somewhat remarkable in a man
of such intellectual stores, of such an advanced age, and who had
retired from life with declared disappointment in his expectations.”
The same substance, we know, will exhibit different qualities under
different tests; and, after all, imperfect reports of individual
impressions, whether immediate or traditional, are a very frail basis on
which to build our opinion of a man. One’s character may be very
indifferently mirrored in the mind of the most intimate neighbor; it all
depends on the quality of that gentleman’s reflecting surface.
But, discarding any inferences from such uncertain evidence, the outline
of Young’s character is too distinctly traceable in the well-attested
facts of his life, and yet more in the self-betrayal that runs through
all his works, for us to fear that our general estimate of him may be
false. For, while no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no
poet discloses himself more completely. Men’s minds have no hiding-place
out of themselves—their affectations do but betray another phase of their
nature. And if, in the present view of Young, we seem to be more intent
on laying bare unfavorable facts than on shrouding them in “charitable
speeches,” it is not because we have any irreverential pleasure in
turning men’s characters “the seamy side without,” but because we see no
great advantage in considering a man as he was _not_. Young’s
biographers and critics have usually set out from the position that he
was a great religious teacher, and that his poetry is morally sublime;
and they have toned down his failings into harmony with their conception
of the divine and the poet. For our own part, we set out from precisely
the opposite conviction—namely, that the religious and moral spirit of
Young’s poetry is low and false, and we think it of some importance to
show that the “Night Thoughts” are the reflex of the mind in which the
higher human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is entirely opposed
to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm. The sweet garden-breath of
early enjoyment lingers about many a page of the “Night Thoughts,” and
even of the “Last Day,” giving an extrinsic charm to passages of stilted
rhetoric and false sentiment; but the sober and repeated reading of
maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly be possible to find a
more typical instance than Young’s poetry, of the mistake which
substitutes interested obedience for sympathetic emotion, and baptizes
egoism as religion.
* * * * *
Pope said of Young, that he had “much of a sublime genius without
common-sense.” The deficiency Pope meant to indicate was, we imagine,
moral rather than intellectual: it was the want of that fine sense of
what is fitting in speech and action, which is often eminently possessed
by men and women whose intellect is of a very common order, but who have
the sincerity and dignity which can never coexist with the selfish
preoccupations of vanity or interest. This was the “common-sense” in
which Young was conspicuously deficient; and it was partly owing to this
deficiency that his genius, waiting to be determined by the highest
prize, fluttered uncertainly from effort to effort, until, when he was
more than sixty, it suddenly spread its broad wing, and soared so as to
arrest the gaze of other generations besides his own. For he had no
versatility of faculty to mislead him. The “Night Thoughts” only differ
from his previous works in the degree and not in the kind of power they
manifest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank verse,
dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, we see everywhere the same
Young—the same narrow circle of thoughts, the same love of abstractions,
the same telescopic view of human things, the same appetency toward
antithetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax. The passages that arrest us in
his tragedies are those in which he anticipates some fine passage in the
“Night Thoughts,” and where his characters are only transparent shadows
through which we see the bewigged _embonpoint_ of the didactic poet,
excogitating epigrams or ecstatic soliloquies by the light of a candle
fixed in a skull. Thus, in “The Revenge,” “Alonzo,” in the conflict of
jealousy and love that at once urges and forbids him to murder his wife,
says:
“This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun,
Those skies, through which it rolls, must all have end.
What then is man? The smallest part of nothing.
Day buries day; month, month; and year the year!
Our life is but a chain of many deaths.
Can then Death’s self be feared? Our life much rather:
_Life is the desert_, _life the solitude_;
Death joins us to the great majority;
’Tis to be born to Plato and to Cæsar;
’Tis to be great forever;
’Tis pleasure, ’tis ambition, then, to die.”
His prose writings all read like the “Night Thoughts,” either diluted
into prose or not yet crystallized into poetry. For example, in his
“Thoughts for Age,” he says:
“Though we stand on its awful brink, such our leaden bias to the
world, we turn our faces the wrong way; we are still looking on our
old acquaintance, _Time_; though now so wasted and reduced, that we
can see little more of him than his wings and his scythe: our age
enlarges his wings to our imagination; and our fear of death, his
scythe; as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep; his
annihilation is at hand.”
This is a dilution of the magnificent image—
“Time in advance behind him hides his wings,
And seems to creep decrepit with his age.
Behold him when past by! What then is seen
But his proud pinions, swifter than the winds?”
Again:
“A requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy reason
more? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but
ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee,
to take in all _that_ suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck
of misery and sin! How abject thy weakness! how great is thy power!
Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller
of the skies! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in
view: which cannot be weighed too much; which the more they are
weighed, amaze the more; which to have supposed, before they were
revealed, would have been as great madness, and to have presumed on
as great sin, as it is now madness and sin not to believe.”
Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most violent efforts
against nature, he is still neither more nor less than the Young of the
“Last Day,” emptied and swept of his genius, and possessed by seven
demons of fustian and bad rhyme. Even here his “Ercles’ Vein” alternates
with his moral platitudes, and we have the perpetual text of the “Night
Thoughts:”
“Gold pleasure buys;
But pleasure dies,
For soon the gross fruition cloys;
Though raptures court,
The sense is short;
But virtue kindles living joys;—
“Joys felt alone!
Joys asked of none!
Which Time’s and fortune’s arrows miss:
Joys that subsist,
Though fates resist,
An unprecarious, endless bliss!
“Unhappy they!
And falsely gay!
Who bask forever in success;
A constant feast
Quite palls the taste,
_And long enjoyment is distress_.”
In the “Last Day,” again, which is the earliest thing he wrote, we have
an anticipation of all his greatest faults and merits. Conspicuous among
the faults is that attempt to exalt our conceptions of Deity by vulgar
images and comparisons, which is so offensive in the later “Night
Thoughts.” In a burst of prayer and homage to God, called forth by the
contemplation of Christ coming to judgment, he asks, Who brings the
change of the seasons? and answers:
“Not the great Ottoman, or Greater Czar;
Not Europe’s arbitress of peace and war!”
Conceive the soul in its most solemn moments, assuring God that it
doesn’t place his power below that of Louis Napoleon or Queen Victoria!
But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, vaulting
sublimity that o’erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we have in this
poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch of simple grandeur, which
promises as much as Young ever achieved. Describing the on-coming of the
dissolution of all things, he says:
“No sun in radiant glory shines on high;
_No light but from the terrors of the sky_.”
And again, speaking of great armies:
“Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn
Rous’d the broad front, and call’d the battle on.”
And this wail of the lost souls is fine:
“And this for sin?
Could I offend if I had never been?
But still increas’d the senseless, happy mass,
Flow’d in the stream, _or shiver’d in the grass_?
Father of mercies! Why from silent earth
Didst thou awake and curse me into birth?
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night,
And make a thankless present of thy light?
Push into being a reverse of Thee,
And _animate a clod with misery_?”
But it is seldom in Young’s rhymed poems that the effect of a felicitous
thought or image is not counteracted by our sense of the constraint he
suffered from the necessities of rhyme—that “Gothic demon,” as he
afterward called it, “which, modern poetry tasting, became mortal.” In
relation to his own power, no one will question the truth of this dictum,
that “blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed,
reinthroned in the true language of the gods; who never thundered nor
suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme.” His want of mastery in rhyme
is especially a drawback on the effects of his Satires; for epigrams and
witticisms are peculiarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous
word, or to an inversion which implies constraint. Here, even more than
elsewhere, the art that conceals art is an absolute requisite, and to
have a witticism presented to us in limping or cumbrous rhythm is as
counteractive to any electrifying effect as to see the tentative grimaces
by which a comedian prepares a grotesque countenance. We discern the
process, instead of being startled by the result.
This is one reason why the Satires, read _seriatim_, have a flatness to
us, which, when we afterward read picked passages, we are inclined to
disbelieve in, and to attribute to some deficiency in our own mood. But
there are deeper reasons for that dissatisfaction. Young is not a
satirist of a high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigor, the
lacerating energy of genuine indignation, nor the humor which owns loving
fellowship with the poor human nature it laughs at; nor yet the personal
bitterness which, as in Pope’s characters of Sporus and Atticus, insures
those living touches by virtue of which the individual and particular in
Art becomes the universal and immortal. Young could never describe a
real, complex human being; but what he _could_ do with eminent success
was to describe, with neat and finished point, obvious _types_, of
manners rather than of character—to write cold and clever epigrams on
personified vices and absurdities. There is no more emotion in his
satire than if he were turning witty verses on a waxen image of Cupid or
a lady’s glove. He has none of these felicitious epithets, none of those
pregnant lines, by which Pope’s Satires have enriched the ordinary speech
of educated men. Young’s wit will be found in almost every instance to
consist in that antithetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms
of wit, is most within reach of a clever effort. In his gravest
arguments, as well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that he
had set himself to work out the problem, how much antithesis might be got
out of a given subject. And there he completely succeeds. His neatest
portraits are all wrought on this plan. “Narcissus,” for example, who
“Omits no duty; nor can Envy say
He miss’d, these many years, the Church or Play:
He makes no noise in Parliament, ’tis true;
But pays his debts, and visit when ’tis due;
His character and gloves are ever clean,
And then he can out-bow the bowing Dean;
A smile eternal on his lip he wears,
Which equally the wise and worthless shares.
In gay fatigues, this most undaunted chief,
Patient of idleness beyond belief,
Most charitably lends the town his face
For ornament in every public place;
As sure as cards he to th’ assembly comes,
And is the furniture of drawing-rooms:
When Ombre calls, his hand and heart are free,
And, joined to two, he fails not—to make three;
Narcissus is the glory of his race;
For who does nothing with a better grace?
To deck my list by nature were designed
Such shining expletives of human kind,
Who want, while through blank life they dream along,
Sense to be right and passion to be wrong.”
It is but seldom that we find a touch of that easy slyness which gives an
additional zest to surprise; but here is an instance:
“See Tityrus, with merriment possest,
Is burst with laughter ere he hears the jest,
What need he stay, for when the joke is o’er,
His _teeth_ will be no whiter than before.”
Like Pope, whom he imitated, he sets out with a psychological mistake as
the basis of his satire, attributing all forms of folly to one
passion—the love of fame, or vanity—a much grosser mistake, indeed, than
Pope’s, exaggeration of the extent to which the “ruling passion”
determines conduct in the individual. Not that Young is consistent in
his mistake. He sometimes implies no more than what is the truth—that
the love of fame is the cause, not of all follies, but of many.
Young’s satires on women are superior to Pope’s, which is only saying
that they are superior to Pope’s greatest failure. We can more
frequently pick out a couplet as successful than an entire sketch. Of
the too emphatic “Syrena” he says:
“Her judgment just, her sentence is too strong;
Because she’s right, she’s ever in the wrong.”
Of the diplomatic “Julia:”
“For her own breakfast she’ll project a scheme,
Nor take her tea without a stratagem.”
Of “Lyce,” the old painted coquette:
“In vain the cock has summoned sprites away;
She walks at noon and blasts the bloom of day.”
Of the nymph, who, “gratis, clears religious mysteries:”
“’Tis hard, too, she who makes no use but chat
Of her religion, should be barr’d in that.”
The description of the literary _belle_, “Daphne,” well prefaces that of
“Stella,” admired by Johnson:
“With legs toss’d high, on her sophee she sits,
Vouchsafing audience to contending wits:
Of each performance she’s the final test;
One act read o’er, she prophecies the rest;
And then, pronouncing with decisive air,
Fully convinces all the town—_she’s fair_.
Had lonely Daphne Hecatessa’s face,
How would her elegance of taste decrease!
Some ladies’ judgment in their features lies,
And all their genius sparkles in their eyes.
But hold, she cries, lampooner! have a care;
Must I want common sense because I’m fair?
O no; see Stella: her eyes shine as bright
As if her tongue was never in the right;
And yet what real learning, judgment, fire!
She seems inspir’d, and can herself inspire.
How then (if malice ruled not all the fair)
_Could Daphne publish_, _and could she forbear_?”
After all, when we have gone through Young’s seven Satires, we seem to
have made but an indifferent meal. They are a sort of fricassee, with
some little solid meat in them, and yet the flavor is not always piquant.
It is curious to find him, when he pauses a moment from his satiric
sketching, recurring to his old platitudes:
“Can gold calm passion, or make reason shine?
Can we dig peace or wisdom from the mine?
Wisdom to gold prefer;”—
platitudes which he seems inevitably to fall into, for the same reason
that some men are constantly asserting their contempt for
criticism—because he felt the opposite so keenly.
The outburst of genius in the earlier books of the “Night Thoughts” is
the more remarkable, that in the interval between them and the Satires he
had produced nothing but his Pindaric odes, in which he fell far below
the level of his previous works. Two sources of this sudden strength
were the freedom of blank verse and the presence of a genuine emotion.
Most persons, in speaking of the “Night Thoughts,” have in their minds
only the two or three first Nights, the majority of readers rarely
getting beyond these, unless, as Wilson says, they “have but few books,
are poor, and live in the country.” And in these earlier Nights there is
enough genuine sublimity and genuine sadness to bribe us into too
favorable a judgment of them as a whole. Young had only a very few
things to say or sing—such as that life is vain, that death is imminent,
that man is immortal, that virtue is wisdom, that friendship is sweet,
and that the source of virtue is the contemplation of death and
immortality—and even in his two first Nights he had said almost all he
had to say in his finest manner. Through these first outpourings of
“complaint” we feel that the poet is really sad, that the bird is singing
over a rifled nest; and we bear with his morbid picture of the world and
of life, as the Job-like lament of a man whom “the hand of God hath
touched.” Death has carried away his best-beloved, and that “silent
land” whither they are gone has more reality for the desolate one than
this world which is empty of their love:
“This is the desert, this the solitude;
How populous, how vital is the grave!”
Joy died with the loved one:
“The disenchanted earth
Lost all her lustre. Where her glitt’ring towers?
Her golden mountains, where? All darkened down
To naked waste; a dreary vale of tears:
_The great magician’s dead_!”
Under the pang of parting, it seems to the bereaved man as if love were
only a nerve to suffer with, and he sickens at the thought of every joy
of which he must one day say—“_it __was_.” In its unreasoning anguish,
the soul rushes to the idea of perpetuity as the one element of bliss:
“O ye blest scenes of permanent delight!—
Could ye, so rich in rapture, fear an end,—
That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy,
And quite unparadise the realms of light.”
In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, we tolerate
morbid exaggerations; we are prepared to see him turn away a weary eye
from sunlight and flowers and sweet human faces, as if this rich and
glorious life had no significance but as a preliminary of death; we do
not criticise his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is
with Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some artificiality
even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but through it
all we are thrilled with the unmistakable cry of pain, which makes us
tolerant of egoism and hyperbole:
“In every varied posture, place, and hour,
How widow’d every thought of every joy!
Thought, busy thought! too busy for my peace!
Through the dark postern of time long elapsed
Led softly, by the stillness of the night,—
Led like a murderer (and such it proves!)
Strays (wretched rover!) o’er the pleasing past,—
In quest of wretchedness, perversely strays;
And finds all desert now; and meets the ghosts
Of my departed joys.”
But when he becomes didactic, rather than complaining—when he ceases to
sing his sorrows, and begins to insist on his opinions—when that distaste
for life which we pity as a transient feeling is thrust upon us as a
theory, we become perfectly cool and critical, and are not in the least
inclined to be indulgent to false views and selfish sentiments.
Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young’s failings and failures,
we ought, if a reviewer’s space were elastic, to dwell also on his
merits—on the startling vigor of his imagery—on the occasional grandeur
of his thought—on the piquant force of that grave satire into which his
meditations continually run. But, since our “limits” are rigorous, we
must content ourselves with the less agreeable half of the critic’s duty;
and we may the rather do so, because it would be difficult to say
anything new of Young, in the way of admiration, while we think there are
many salutary lessons remaining to be drawn from his faults.
One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his _radical
insincerity as a poetic artist_. This, added to the thin and artificial
texture of his wit, is the true explanation of the paradox—that a poet
who is often inopportunely witty has the opposite vice of bombastic
absurdity. The source of all grandiloquence is the want of taking for a
criterion the true qualities of the object described or the emotion
expressed. The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying what he feels
or what he sees, but on producing a certain effect on his audience; hence
he may float away into utter inanity without meeting any criterion to
arrest him. Here lies the distinction between grandiloquence and genuine
fancy or bold imaginativeness. The fantastic or the boldly imaginative
poet may be as sincere as the most realistic: he is true to his own
sensibilities or inward vision, and in his wildest flights he never
breaks loose from his criterion—the truth of his own mental state. Now,
this disruption of language from genuine thought and feeling is what we
are constantly detecting in Young; and his insincerity is the more likely
to betray him into absurdity, because he habitually treats of
abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific emotions. He
descants perpetually on virtue, religion, “the good man,” life, death,
immortality, eternity—subjects which are apt to give a factitious
grandeur to empty wordiness. When a poet floats in the empyrean, and
only takes a bird’s-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere
fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth
for proximity to heaven. Thus:
“His hand the good man fixes on the skies,
And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl,”
may, perhaps, pass for sublime with some readers. But pause a moment to
realize the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man’s grasping the
skies, and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously
bids the earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have
suggested so unnatural a conception. Again,
“See the man immortal: him, I mean,
Who lives as such; whose heart, full bent on Heaven,
Leans all that way, his bias to the stars.”
This is worse than the previous example: for you can at least form some
imperfect conception of a man hanging from the skies, though the position
strikes you as uncomfortable and of no particular use; but you are
utterly unable to imagine how his heart can lean toward the stars.
Examples of such vicious imagery, resulting from insincerity, may be
found, perhaps, in almost every page of the “Night Thoughts.” But simple
assertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, are often equally
false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked by the slightest truthful
intentions could have said—
“An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,
And roll forever.”
Abstracting the more poetical associations with the eye, this is hardly
less absurd than if he had wished to stand forever with his mouth open.
Again:
“Far beneath
A soul immortal is a mortal joy.”
Happily for human nature, we are sure no man really believes that. Which
of us has the impiety not to feel that our souls are only too narrow for
the joy of looking into the trusting eyes of our children, of reposing on
the love of a husband or a wife—nay, of listening to the divine voice of
music, or watching the calm brightness of autumnal afternoons? But Young
could utter this falsity without detecting it, because, when he spoke of
“mortal joys,” he rarely had in his mind any object to which he could
attach sacredness. He was thinking of bishoprics, and benefices, of
smiling monarchs, patronizing prime ministers, and a “much indebted
muse.” Of anything between these and eternal bliss he was but rarely and
moderately conscious. Often, indeed, he sinks very much below even the
bishopric, and seems to have no notion of earthly pleasure but such as
breathes gaslight and the fumes of wine. His picture of life is
precisely such as you would expect from a man who has risen from his bed
at two o’clock in the afternoon with a headache and a dim remembrance
that he has added to his “debts of honor:”
“What wretched repetition cloys us here!
What periodic potions for the sick,
Distemper’d bodies, and distemper’d minds?”
And then he flies off to his usual antithesis:
“In an eternity what scenes shall strike!
Adventures thicken, novelties surprise!”
“Earth” means lords and levees, duchesses and Dalilahs, South-Sea dreams,
and illegal percentage; and the only things distinctly preferable to
these are eternity and the stars. Deprive Young of this antithesis, and
more than half his eloquence would be shrivelled up. Place him on a
breezy common, where the furze is in its golden bloom, where children are
playing, and horses are standing in the sunshine with fondling necks, and
he would have nothing to say. Here are neither depths of guilt nor
heights of glory; and we doubt whether in such a scene he would be able
to pay his usual compliment to the Creator:
“Where’er I torn, what claim on all applause!”
It is true that he sometimes—not often—speaks of virtue as capable of
sweetening life, as well as of taking the sting from death and winning
heaven; and, lest we should be guilty of any unfairness to him, we will
quote the two passages which convey this sentiment the most explicitly.
In the one he gives “Lorenzo” this excellent recipe for obtaining
cheerfulness:
“Go, fix some weighty truth;
Chain down some passion; do some generous good;
Teach Ignorance to see, or Grief to smile;
Correct thy friend; befriend thy greatest foe;
Or, with warm heart, and confidence divine,
Spring up, and lay strong hold on Him who made thee.”
The other passage is vague, but beautiful, and its music has murmured in
our minds for many years:
“The cuckoo seasons sing
The same dull note to such as nothing prize
But what those seasons from the teeming earth
To doting sense indulge. But nobler minds,
Which relish fruit unripened by the sun,
Make their days various; various as the dyes
On the dove’s neck, which wanton in his rays.
On minds of dove-like innocence possess’d,
On lighten’d minds that bask in Virtue’s beams,
Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolves
In that for which they long, for which they live.
Their glorious efforts, winged with heavenly hopes,
Each rising morning sees still higher rise;
Each bounteous dawn its novelty presents
To worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame;
While Nature’s circle, like a chariot wheel,
Boiling beneath their elevated aims,
Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour;
Advancing virtue in a line to bliss.”
Even here, where he is in his most amiable mood, you see at what a
telescopic distance he stands from mother Earth and simple human
joys—“Nature’s circle rolls beneath.” Indeed, we remember no mind in
poetic literature that seems to have absorbed less of the beauty and the
healthy breath of the common landscape than Young’s. His images, often
grand and finely presented—witness that sublimely sudden leap of thought,
“Embryos we must be till we burst the shell,
_Yon ambient azure shell_, and spring to life”—
lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be
familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the
newspaper, and went home often by moon and starlight.
There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any
strong attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for
patronage, and “pays his court” to her. It is reckoned among the many
deficiencies of “Lorenzo” that he “never asked the moon one question”—an
omission which Young thinks eminently unbecoming a rational being. He
describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond
detail over nothing more familiar than the day of judgment and an
imaginary journey among the stars. Once on Saturn’s ring he feels at
home, and his language becomes quite easy:
“What behold I now?
A wilderness of wonders burning round,
Where larger suns inhabit higher spheres;
Perhaps _the villas of descending gods_!”
It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, in the “Night
Thoughts,” we come on any allusion that carries us to the lanes, woods,
or fields. Such allusions are amazingly rare, and we could almost count
them on a single hand. That we may do him no injustice, we will quote
the three best:
“Like _blossom’d trees o’erturned by vernal storm_,
Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay.
* * * * *
“In the same brook none ever bathed him twice:
To the same life none ever twice awoke.
We call the brook the same—the same we think
Our life, though still more rapid in its flow;
Nor mark the much irrevocably lapsed
And mingled with the sea.”
* * * * *
“The crown of manhood is a winter joy;
An evergreen that stands the northern blast,
And blossoms in the rigor of our fate.”
The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions,
is closely allied in Young to the _want of genuine emotion_. He sees
virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists and storms of
earth; he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with this world in
her left hand and the other world in her right; but we never find him
dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists—in the emotions of a
man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an
evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter, in
courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice
and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation
and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life.
Now, emotion links itself with particulars, and only in a faint and
secondary manner with abstractions. An orator may discourse very
eloquently on injustice in general, and leave his audience cold; but let
him state a special case of oppression, and every heart will throb. The
most untheoretic persons are aware of this relation between true emotion
and particular facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly
recognize it in the repulsion they feel toward any one who professes
strong feeling about abstractions—in the interjectional “Humbug!” which
immediately rises to their lips. Wherever abstractions appear to excite
strong emotion, this occurs in men of active intellect and imagination,
in whom the abstract term rapidly and vividly calls up the particulars it
represents, these particulars being the true source of the emotion; and
such men, if they wished to express their feeling, would be infallibly
prompted to the presentation of details. Strong emotion can no more be
directed to generalities apart from particulars, than skill in figures
can be directed to arithmetic apart from numbers. Generalities are the
refuge at once of deficient intellectual activity and deficient feeling.
If we except the passages in “Philander,” “Narcissa,” and “Lucia,” there
is hardly a trace of human sympathy, of self-forgetfulness in the joy or
sorrow of a fellow-being, throughout this long poem, which professes to
treat the various phases of man’s destiny. And even in the “Narcissa”
Night, Young repels us by the low moral tone of his exaggerated lament.
This married step-daughter died at Lyons, and, being a Protestant, was
denied burial, so that her friends had to bury her in secret—one of the
many miserable results of superstition, but not a fact to throw an
educated, still less a Christian man, into a fury of hatred and
vengeance, in contemplating it after the lapse of five years. Young,
however, takes great pains to simulate a bad feeling:
“Of grief
And indignation rival bursts I pour’d,
Half execration mingled with my pray’r;
Kindled at man, while I his God adored;
Sore grudg’d the savage land her sacred dust;
Stamp’d the cursed soil; _and with humanity_
(_Denied Narcissa_) _wish’d them all a grave_.”
The odiously bad taste of this last clause makes us hope that it is
simply a platitude, and not intended as witticism, until he removes the
possibility of this favorable doubt by immediately asking, “Flows my
resentment into guilt?”
When, by an afterthought, he attempts something like sympathy, he only
betrays more clearly his want of it. Thus, in the first Night, when he
turns from his private griefs to depict earth as a hideous abode of
misery for all mankind, and asks,
“What then am I, who sorrow for myself?”
he falls at once into calculating the benefit of sorrowing for others:
“More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts;
_And conscious virtue mitigates the pang_.
Nor virtue, more than prudence, bids me give
Swollen thought a second channel.”
This remarkable negation of sympathy is in perfect consistency with
Young’s theory of ethics:
“Virtue is a crime,
A crime of reason, if it costs us pain
Unpaid.”
If there is no immortality for man—
“Sense! take the rein; blind Passion, drive us on;
And Ignorance! befriend us on our way. . .
Yes; give the pulse full empire; live the Brute,
Since as the brute we die. The sum of man,
Of godlike man, to revel and to rot.”
* * * * *
“If this life’s gain invites him to the deed,
Why not his country sold, his father slain?”
* * * * *
“Ambition, avarice, by the wise disdain’d,
Is perfect wisdom, while mankind are fools,
And think a turf or tombstone covers all.”
* * * * *
“Die for thy country, thou romantic fool!
Seize, seize the plank thyself, and let her sink.”
* * * * *
“As in the dying parent dies the child,
Virtue with Immortality expires.
Who tells me he denies his soul immortal,
_Whate’er his boost_, _has told me he’s a knave_.
_His duty ’tis to love himself alone_.
_Nor care though mankind perish if he smiles_.”
We can imagine the man who “denies his soul immortal,” replying, “It is
quite possible that _you_ would be a knave, and love yourself alone, if
it were not for your belief in immortality; but you are not to force upon
me what would result from your own utter want of moral emotion. I am
just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but
because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty toward myself,
I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if
I were unjust or dishonest toward them. Why should I give my neighbor
short weight in this world, because there is not another world in which I
should have nothing to weigh out to him? I am honest, because I don’t
like to inflict evil on others in this life, not because I’m afraid of
evil to myself in another. The fact is, I do _not_ love myself alone,
whatever logical necessity there may be for that in your mind. I have a
tender love for my wife, and children, and friends, and through that love
I sympathize with like affections in other men. It is a pang to me to
witness the sufferings of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the
more acutely because he is _mortal_—because his life is so short, and I
would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery.
Through my union and fellowship with the men and women I _have_ seen, I
feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have _not_ seen; and
I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come, that
their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labor for ends
which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them. It is possible that
you may prefer to ‘live the brute,’ to sell your country, or to slay your
father, if you were not afraid of some disagreeable consequences from the
criminal laws of another world; but even if I could conceive no motive
but my own worldly interest or the gratification of my animal desire, I
have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide are the
direct way to happiness and comfort on earth. And I should say, that if
you feel no motive to common morality but your fear of a criminal bar in
heaven, you are decidedly a man for the police on earth to keep their eye
upon, since it is matter of world-old experience that fear of distant
consequences is a very insufficient barrier against the rush of immediate
desire. Fear of consequences is only one form of egoism, which will
hardly stand against half a dozen other forms of egoism bearing down upon
it. And in opposition to your theory that a belief in immortality is the
only source of virtue, I maintain that, so far as moral action is
dependent on that belief, so far the emotion which prompts it is not
truly moral—is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet attained the
higher development of sympathy. In proportion as a man would care less
for the rights and welfare of his fellow, if he did not believe in a
future life, in that proportion is he wanting in the genuine feelings of
justice and benevolence; as the musician who would care less to play a
sonata of Beethoven’s finely in solitude than in public, where he was to
be paid for it, is wanting in genuine enthusiasm for music.”
Thus far might answer the man who “denies himself immortal;” and,
allowing for that deficient recognition of the finer and more indirect
influences exercised by the idea of immortality which might be expected
from one who took up a dogmatic position on such a subject, we think he
would have given a sufficient reply to Young and other theological
advocates who, like him, pique themselves on the loftiness of their
doctrine when they maintain that “virtue with immortality expires.” We
may admit, indeed, that if the better part of virtue consists, as Young
appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in “meditation of our own
decease,” and in “applause” of God in the style of a congratulatory
address to Her Majesty—all which has small relation to the well-being of
mankind on this earth—the motive to it must be gathered from something
that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy. But, for certain
other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to
untheological minds—a delicate sense of our neighbor’s rights, an active
participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous
acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the
condition of good to others, in a word, the extension and intensification
of our sympathetic nature—we think it of some importance to contend that
they have no more direct relation to the belief in a future state than
the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds.
Nay, to us it is conceivable that in some minds the deep pathos lying in
the thought of human mortality—that we are here for a little while and
then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our
loved ones and to our many suffering fellow-men—lies nearer the fountains
of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. And surely
it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of _mortality_, as well as
of immortality, be favorable to virtue. Do writers of sermons and
religious novels prefer that men should be vicious in order that there
may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed sermons
and clerical fictions? Because learned gentlemen are theological, are we
to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We can imagine that the
proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread of common springs; but,
for our own part, we think there cannot be too great a security against a
lack of fresh water or of pure morality. To us it is a matter of unmixed
rejoicing that this latter necessary of healthful life is independent of
theological ink, and that its evolution is insured in the interaction of
human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art, with
which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable
limits.
To return to Young. We can often detect a man’s deficiencies in what he
admires more clearly than in what he contemns—in the sentiments he
presents as laudable rather than in those he decries. And in Young’s
notion of what is lofty he casts a shadow by which we can measure him
without further trouble. For example, in arguing for human immortality,
he says:
“First, what is _true ambition_? The pursuit
Of glory _nothing less than man can share_.
* * * *
The Visible and Present are for brutes,
A slender portion, and a narrow bound!
These Reason, with an energy divine,
O’erleaps, and claims the Future and Unseen;
The vast Unseen, the Future fathomless!
When the great soul buoys up to this high point,
Leaving gross Nature’s sediments below,
Then, and then only, Adam’s offspring quits
The sage and hero of the fields and woods,
Asserts his rank, and rises into man.”
So, then, if it were certified that, as some benevolent minds have tried
to infer, our dumb fellow-creatures would share a future existence, in
which it is to be hoped we should neither beat, starve, nor maim them,
our ambition for a future life would cease to be “lofty!” This is a
notion of loftiness which may pair off with Dr. Whewell’s celebrated
observation, that Bentham’s moral theory is low because it includes
justice and mercy to brutes.
But, for a reflection of Young’s moral personality on a colossal scale,
we must turn to those passages where his rhetoric is at its utmost
stretch of inflation—where he addresses the Deity, discourses of the
Divine operations, or describes the last judgment. As a compound of
vulgar pomp, crawling adulation, and hard selfishness, presented under
the guise of piety, there are few things in literature to surpass the
Ninth Night, entitled “Consolation,” especially in the pages where he
describes the last judgment—a subject to which, with naïve self-betrayal,
he applies phraseology, favored by the exuberant penny-a-liner. Thus,
when God descends, and the groans of hell are opposed by “shouts of joy,”
much as cheers and groans contend at a public meeting where the
resolutions are _not_ passed unanimously, the poet completes his climax
in this way:
“Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise,
The _charmed spectators_ thunder their applause.”
In the same taste he sings:
“Eternity, the various sentence past,
Assigns the sever’d throng distinct abodes,
_Sulphureous_ or _ambrosial_.”
Exquisite delicacy of indication! He is too nice to be specific as to
the interior of the “sulphureous” abode; but when once half the human
race are shut up there, hear how he enjoys turning the key on them!
“What ensues?
The deed predominant, the deed of deeds!
Which makes a hell of hell, a _heaven of heaven_!
The goddess, with determin’d aspect turns
Her adamantine key’s enormous size
Through Destiny’s inextricable wards,
_Deep driving every bolt_ on both their fates.
Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven,
Down, down she hurls it through the dark profound,
Ten thousand, thousand fathom; there to rust
And ne’er unlock her resolution more.
The deep resounds; and Hell, through all her glooms,
Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar.”
This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks God “most:”
“For all I bless thee, most, for the severe;
Her death—my own at hand—_the fiery gulf_,
_That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent_!
_It thunders_;—_but it thunders to preserve_;
. . . its wholesome dread
Averts the dreaded pain; _its hideous groans_
_Join Heaven’s sweet Hallelujahs in Thy praise_,
Great Source of good alone! How kind in all!
In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, _save_” . . .
_i.e._, save _me_, Dr. Young, who, in return for that favor, promise to
give my divine patron the monopoly of that exuberance in laudatory
epithet, of which specimens may be seen at any moment in a large number
of dedications and odes to kings, queens, prime ministers, and other
persons of distinction. _That_, in Young’s conception, is what God
delights in. His crowning aim in the “drama” of the ages, is to
vindicate his own renown. The God of the “Night Thoughts” is simply
Young himself “writ large”—a didactic poet, who “lectures” mankind in the
antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars,
hell and heaven; and expects the tribute of inexhaustible “applause.”
Young has no conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned
heavenward; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on it.
Religion, he tells us, in argumentative passages too long to quote, is
“ambition, pleasure, and the love of gain,” directed toward the joys of
the future life instead of the present. And his ethics correspond to his
religion. He vacillates, indeed, in his ethical theory, and shifts his
position in order to suit his immediate purpose in argument; but he never
changes his level so as to see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness.
Sometimes he insists, as we have seen, that the belief in a future life
is the only basis of morality; but elsewhere he tells us—
“In self-applause is virtue’s golden prize.”
Virtue, with Young, must always squint—must never look straight toward
the immediate object of its emotion and effort. Thus, if a man risks
perishing in the snow himself rather than forsake a weaker comrade, he
must either do this because his hopes and fears are directed to another
world, or because he desires to applaud himself afterward! Young, if we
may believe him, would despise the action as folly unless it had these
motives. Let us hope he was not so bad as he pretended to be! The tides
of the divine life in man move under the thickest ice of theory.
Another indication of Young’s deficiency in moral, _i.e._, in sympathetic
emotion, is his unintermitting habit of pedagogic moralizing. On its
theoretic and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its emotional
side, Art. Now, the products of Art are great in proportion as they
result from that immediate prompting of innate power which we call
Genius, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the
presence of genius or innate prompting is directly opposed to the
perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious,
and excludes the reflection _why_ it should act. In the same way, in
proportion as morality is emotional, _i.e._, has affinity with Art, it
will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as
the recognition of a rule. Love does not say, “I ought to love”—it
loves. Pity does not say, “It is right to be pitiful”—it pities.
Justice does not say, “I am bound to be just”—it feels justly. It is
only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of
a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action; and in accordance
with this, we think experience, both in literature and life, has shown
that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic—which insist on a
“lesson,” and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are
deficient in sympathetic emotion. A certain poet is recorded to have
said that he “wished everything of his burned that did not impress some
moral; even in love-verses, it might be flung in by the way.” What poet
was it who took this medicinal view of poetry? Dr. Watts, or James
Montgomery, or some other singer of spotless life and ardent piety? Not
at all. It was _Waller_. A significant fact in relation to our
position, that the predominant didactic tendency proceeds rather from the
poet’s perception that it is good for other men to be moral, than from
any overflow of moral feeling in himself. A man who is perpetually
thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can
have little energy left for simple emotion. And this is the case with
Young. In his highest flights of contemplation and his most wailing
soliloquies he interrupts himself to fling an admonitory parenthesis at
“Lorenzo,” or to hint that “folly’s creed” is the reverse of his own.
Before his thoughts can flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary
miscreant, who gives unlimited scope for lecturing, and recriminates just
enough to keep the spring of admonition and argument going to the extent
of nine books. It is curious to see how this pedagogic habit of mind
runs through Young’s contemplation of Nature. As the tendency to see our
own sadness reflected in the external world has been called by Mr. Ruskin
the “pathetic fallacy,” so we may call Young’s disposition to see a
rebuke or a warning in every natural object, the “pedagogic fallacy.” To
his mind, the heavens are “forever _scolding_ as they shine;” and the
great function of the stars is to be a “lecture to mankind.” The
conception of the Deity as a didactic author is not merely an implicit
point of view with him; he works it out in elaborate imagery, and at
length makes it the occasion of his most extraordinary achievement in the
“art of sinking,” by exclaiming, _à propos_, we need hardly say, of the
nocturnal heavens,
“Divine Instructor! Thy first volume this
For man’s perusal! all in CAPITALS!”
It is this pedagogic tendency, this sermonizing attitude of Young’s mind,
which produces the wearisome monotony of his pauses. After the first two
or three nights he is rarely singing, rarely pouring forth any continuous
melody inspired by the spontaneous flow of thought or feeling. He is
rather occupied with argumentative insistence, with hammering in the
proofs of his propositions by disconnected verses, which he puts down at
intervals. The perpetual recurrence of the pause at the end of the line
throughout long passages makes them as fatiguing to the ear as a
monotonous chant, which consists of the endless repetition of one short
musical phrase. For example:
“Past hours,
If not by guilt, yet wound us by their flight,
If folly bound our prospect by the grave,
All feeling of futurity be numb’d,
All godlike passion for eternals quench’d,
All relish of realities expired;
Renounced all correspondence with the skies;
Our freedom chain’d; quite wingless our desire;
In sense dark-prison’d all that ought to soar;
Prone to the centre; crawling in the dust;
Dismounted every great and glorious aim;
Enthralled every faculty divine,
Heart-buried in the rubbish of the world.”
How different from the easy, graceful melody of Cowper’s blank verse!
Indeed, it is hardly possible to criticise Young without being reminded
at every step of the contrast presented to him by Cowper. And this
contrast urges itself upon us the more from the fact that there is, to a
certain extent, a parallelism between the “Night Thoughts” and the
“Task.” In both poems the author achieves his greatest in virtue of the
new freedom conferred by blank verse; both poems are professionally
didactic, and mingle much satire with their graver meditations; both
poems are the productions of men whose estimate of this life was formed
by the light of a belief in immortality, and who were intensely attached
to Christianity. On some grounds we might have anticipated a more morbid
view of things from Cowper than from Young. Cowper’s religion was
dogmatically the more gloomy, for he was a Calvinist; while Young was a
“low” Arminian, believing that Christ died for all, and that the only
obstacle to any man’s salvation lay in his will, which he could change if
he chose. There was real and deep sadness involved in Cowper’s personal
lot; while Young, apart from his ambitious and greedy discontent, seems
to have had no great sorrow.
Yet, see how a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in spite of
creed and circumstance! Where is the poem that surpasses the “Task” in
the genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate
existence—in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of presentation—in
the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects for their own
sake, without self-reference—in divine sympathy with the lowliest
pleasures, with the most short-lived capacity for pain? Here is no
railing at the earth’s “melancholy map,” but the happiest lingering over
her simplest scenes with all the fond minuteness of attention that
belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the inferiority of the
“brutes,” but a warm plea on their behalf against man’s inconsiderateness
and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship
in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that
close and vivid presentation of particular sorrows and privations, of
particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions.
How Cowper’s exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning
sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail, and
investing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his
song—not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a
bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town-lodging with a
“hint that Nature lives;” and yet his song is never trivial, for he is
alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his
glance is clear and his heart is large. Instead of trying to edify us by
supercilious allusions to the “brutes” and the “stalls,” he interests us
in that tragedy of the hen-roost when the thief has wrenched the door,
“Where Chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps
_In unsuspecting pomp_;”
in the patient cattle, that on the winter’s morning
“Mourn in corners where the fence
Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep
_In unrecumbent sadness_;”
in the little squirrel, that, surprised by him in his woodland walk,
“At once, swift as a bird,
Ascends the neighboring beech; there whisks his brush,
And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud,
With all the prettiness of feign’d alarm
And anger insignificantly fierce.”
And then he passes into reflection, not with curt apothegm and snappish
reproof, but with that melodious flow of utterance which belongs to
thought when it is carried along in a stream of feeling:
“The heart is hard in nature, and unfit
For human fellowship, as being void
Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike
To love and friendship both, that is not pleased
With sight of animals enjoying life,
Nor feels their happiness augment his own.”
His large and tender heart embraces the most every-day forms of human
life—the carter driving his team through the wintry storm; the cottager’s
wife who, painfully nursing the embers on her hearth, while her infants
“sit cowering o’er the sparks,”
“Retires, content to quake, so they be warm’d;”
or the villager, with her little ones, going out to pick
“A cheap but wholesome salad from the brook;”
and he compels our colder natures to follow his in its manifold
sympathies, not by exhortations, not by telling us to meditate at
midnight, to “indulge” the thought of death, or to ask ourselves how we
shall “weather an eternal night,” _but by presenting to us the object of
his compassion truthfully and lovingly_. And when he handles greater
themes, when he takes a wider survey, and considers the men or the deeds
which have a direct influence on the welfare of communities and nations,
there is the same unselfish warmth of feeling, the same scrupulous
truthfulness. He is never vague in his remonstrance or his satire, but
puts his finger on some particular vice or folly which excites his
indignation or “dissolves his heart in pity,” because of some specific
injury it does to his fellow-man or to a sacred cause. And when he is
asked why he interests himself about the sorrows and wrongs of others,
hear what is the reason he gives. Not, like Young, that the movements of
the planets show a mutual dependence, and that
“Thus man his sovereign duty learns in this
Material picture of benevolence,”
or that—
“More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts,
And conscious virtue mitigates the pang.”
What is Cowper’s answer, when he imagines some “sage, erudite, profound,”
asking him “What’s the world to you?”
“Much. _I was born of woman_, _and drew milk_
_As sweet as charity from human breasts_.
I think, articulate, I laugh and weep,
And exercise all functions of a man.
How then should I and any man that lives
Be strangers to each other?”
Young is astonished that men can make war on each other—that any one can
“seize his brother’s throat,” while
“The Planets cry, ‘Forbear.’”
Cowper weeps because
“There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart:
_It does not feel for man_.”
Young applauds God as a monarch with an empire and a court quite superior
to the English, or as an author who produces “volumes for man’s perusal.”
Cowper sees his father’s love in all the gentle pleasures of the home
fireside, in the charms even of the wintry landscape, and thinks—
“Happy who walks with him! whom what he finds
Of flavor or of scent in fruit or flower,
Or what he views of beautiful or grand
In nature, from the broad, majestic oak
To the green blade that twinkles in the sun,
_Prompts with remembrance of a present God_.”
To conclude—for we must arrest ourselves in a contrast that would lead us
beyond our bounds. Young flies for his utmost consolation to the day of
judgment, when
“Final Ruin fiercely drives
Her ploughshare o’er creation;”
when earth, stars, and sun are swept aside,
“And now, all dross removed, Heaven’s own pure day,
Full on the confines of our ether, flames:
While (dreadful contrast!) far (how far!) beneath,
Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas,
And storms suphureous; her voracious jaws
Expanding wide, and roaring for her prey,”
Dr. Young and similar “ornaments of religion and virtue” passing of
course with grateful “applause” into the upper region. Cowper finds his
highest inspiration in the Millennium—in the restoration of this our
beloved home of earth to perfect holiness and bliss, when the Supreme
“Shall visit earth in mercy; shall descend
Propitious in his chariot paved with love;
And what his storms have blasted and defaced
For man’s revolt, shall with a smile repair.”
And into what delicious melody his song flows at the thought of that
blessedness to be enjoyed by future generations on earth!
“The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks
Shout to each other, and the mountains tops
From distant mountains catch the flying joy;
Till, nation after nation taught the strain,
Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round!”
The sum of our comparison is this: In Young we have the type of that
deficient human sympathy, that impiety toward the present and the
visible, which flies for its motives, its sanctities, and its religion,
to the remote, the vague, and the unknown: in Cowper we have the type of
that genuine love which cherishes things in proportion to their nearness,
and feels its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its
knowledge.
VIII. THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. {257}
There is a valuable class of books on great subjects which have something
of the character and functions of good popular lecturing. They are not
original, not subtle, not of close logical texture, not exquisite either
in thought or style; but by virtue of these negatives they are all the
more fit to act on the average intelligence. They have enough of
organizing purpose in them to make their facts illustrative, and to leave
a distinct result in the mind even when most of the facts are forgotten;
and they have enough of vagueness and vacillation in their theory to win
them ready acceptance from a mixed audience. The vagueness and
vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the honest result of
the writer’s own mental character, which adapts him to be the instructor
and the favorite of “the general reader.” For the most part, the general
reader of the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes; he
only knows that he does not go “too far.” Of any remarkable thinker,
whose writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said that
“his errors are to be deplored,” leaving it not too certain what those
errors are; he is fond of what may be called disembodied opinions, that
float in vapory phrases above all systems of thought or action; he likes
an undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in particular,
an undefined education of the people, an undefined amelioration of all
things: in fact, he likes sound views—nothing extreme, but something
between the excesses of the past and the excesses of the present. This
modern type of the general reader may be known in conversation by the
cordiality with which he assents to indistinct, blurred statements: say
that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it; say that
black is not so very black, he will reply, “Exactly.” He has no
hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up at a public meeting and
express his conviction that at times, and within certain limits, the
radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal; but, on the other hand, he
would urge that the spirit of geometry may be carried a little too far.
His only bigotry is a bigotry against any clearly defined opinion; not in
the least based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of
coherent thought—a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to
nothing. The one thing he is staunch for is, the utmost liberty of
private haziness.
But precisely these characteristics of the general reader, rendering him
incapable of assimilating ideas unless they are administered in a highly
diluted form, make it a matter of rejoicing that there are clever,
fair-minded men, who will write books for him—men very much above him in
knowledge and ability, but not too remote from him in their habits of
thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of history and
science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and save him from a
fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton. Among such serviceable
writers, Mr. Lecky’s “History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of
Rationalism in Europe” entitles him to a high place. He has prepared
himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading;
he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; and he gives
proof of those important moral qualifications, impartiality, seriousness,
and modesty. This praise is chiefly applicable to the long chapter on
the history of Magic and Witchcraft, which opens the work, and to the two
chapters on the antecedents and history of Persecution, which occur, the
one at the end of the first volume, the other at the beginning of the
second. In these chapters Mr. Lecky has a narrower and better-traced
path before him than in other portions of his work; he is more occupied
with presenting a particular class of facts in their historical sequence,
and in their relation to certain grand tide-marks of opinion, than with
disquisition; and his writing is freer than elsewhere from an apparent
confusedness of thought and an exuberance of approximative phrases, which
can be serviceable in no other way than as diluents needful for the sort
of reader we have just described.
The history of magic and witchcraft has been judiciously chosen by Mr.
Lecky as the subject of his first section on the Declining Sense of the
Miraculous, because it is strikingly illustrative of a position with the
truth of which he is strongly impressed, though he does not always treat
of it with desirable clearness and precision, namely, that certain
beliefs become obsolete, not in consequence of direct arguments against
them, but because of their incongruity with prevalent habits of thought.
Here is his statement of the two “classes of influences” by which the
mass of men, in what is called civilized society, get their beliefs
gradually modified:
“If we ask why it is that the world has rejected what was once so
universally and so intensely believed, why a narrative of an old
woman who had been seen riding on a broomstick, or who was proved to
have transformed herself into a wolf, and to have devoured the flocks
of her neighbors, is deemed so entirely incredible, most persons
would probably be unable to give a very definite answer to the
question. It is not because we have examined the evidence and found
it insufficient, for the disbelief always precedes, when it does not
prevent, examination. It is rather because the idea of absurdity is
so strongly attached to such narratives, that it is difficult even to
consider them with gravity. Yet at one time no such improbability
was felt, and hundreds of persons have been burnt simply on the two
grounds I have mentioned.
“When so complete a change takes place in public opinion, it may be
ascribed to one or other of two causes. It may be the result of a
controversy which has conclusively settled the question, establishing
to the satisfaction of all parties a clear preponderance of argument
or fact in favor of one opinion, and making that opinion a truism
which is accepted by all enlightened men, even though they have not
themselves examined the evidence on which it rests. Thus, if any one
in a company of ordinarily educated persons were to deny the motion
of the earth, or the circulation of the blood, his statement would be
received with derision, though it is probable that some of his
audience would be unable to demonstrate the first truth, and that
very few of them could give sufficient reasons for the second. They
may not themselves be able to defend their position; but they are
aware that, at certain known periods of history, controversies on
those subjects took place, and that known writers then brought
forward some definite arguments or experiments, which were ultimately
accepted by the whole learned world as rigid and conclusive
demonstrations. It is possible, also, for as complete a change to be
effected by what is called the spirit of the age. The general
intellectual tendencies pervading the literature of a century
profoundly modify the character of the public mind. They form a new
tone and habit of thought. They alter the measure of probability.
They create new attractions and new antipathies, and they eventually
cause as absolute a rejection of certain old opinions as could be
produced by the most cogent and definite arguments.”
Mr. Lecky proceeds to some questionable views concerning the evidences of
witchcraft, which seem to be irreconcilable even with his own remarks
later on; but they lead him to the statement, thoroughly made out by his
historical survey, that “movement was mainly silent, unargumentative, and
insensible; that men came gradually to disbelieve in witchcraft, because
they came gradually to look upon it as absurd; and that this new tone of
thought appeared, first of all, in those who were least subject to
theological influences, and soon spread through the educated laity, and,
last of all, took possession of the clergy.”
We have rather painful proof that this “second class of influences,” with
a vast number go hardly deeper than Fashion, and that witchcraft to many
of us is absurd only on the same ground that our grandfathers’ gigs are
absurd. It is felt preposterous to think of spiritual agencies in
connection with ragged beldames soaring on broomsticks, in an age when it
is known that mediums of communication with the invisible world are
usually unctuous personages dressed in excellent broadcloth, who soar
above the curtain-poles without any broomstick, and who are not given to
unprofitable intrigues. The enlightened imagination rejects the figure
of a witch with her profile in dark relief against the moon and her
broomstick cutting a constellation. No undiscovered natural laws, no
names of “respectable” witnesses, are invoked to make us feel our
presumption in questioning the diabolic intimacies of that obsolete old
woman, for it is known now that the undiscovered laws, and the witnesses
qualified by the payment of income tax, are all in favor of a different
conception—the image of a heavy gentleman in boots and black coat-tails
foreshortened against the cornice. Yet no less a person than Sir Thomas
Browne once wrote that those who denied there were witches, inasmuch as
they thereby denied spirits also, were “obliquely and upon consequence a
sort, not of infidels, but of atheists.” At present, doubtless, in
certain circles, unbelievers in heavy gentlemen who float in the air by
means of undiscovered laws are also taxed with atheism; illiberal as it
is not to admit that mere weakness of understanding may prevent one from
seeing how that phenomenon is necessarily involved in the Divine origin
of things. With still more remarkable parallelism, Sir Thomas Browne
goes on: “Those that, to refute their incredulity, desire to see
apparitions, shall questionless never behold any, nor have the power to
be so much as witches. The devil hath made them already in a heresy as
capital as witchcraft, _and to appear to them were but to convert them_.”
It would be difficult to see what has been changed here, but the mere
drapery of circumstance, if it were not for this prominent difference
between our own days and the days of witchcraft, that instead of
torturing, drowning, or burning the innocent, we give hospitality and
large pay to—the highly distinguished medium. At least we are safely rid
of certain horrors; but if the multitude—that “farraginous concurrence of
all conditions, tempers, sexes, and ages”—do not roll back even to a
superstition that carries cruelty in its train, it is not because they
possess a cultivated reason, but because they are pressed upon and held
up by what we may call an external reason—the sum of conditions resulting
from the laws of material growth, from changes produced by great
historical collisions shattering the structures of ages and making new
highways for events and ideas, and from the activities of higher minds no
longer existing merely as opinions and teaching, but as institutions and
organizations with which the interests, the affections, and the habits of
the multitude are inextricably interwoven. No undiscovered laws
accounting for small phenomena going forward under drawing-room tables
are likely to affect the tremendous facts of the increase of population,
the rejection of convicts by our colonies, the exhaustion of the soil by
cotton plantations, which urge even upon the foolish certain questions,
certain claims, certain views concerning the scheme of the world, that
can never again be silenced. If right reason is a right representation
of the co-existence and sequences of things, here are co-existences and
sequences that do not wait to be discovered, but press themselves upon us
like bars of iron. No séances at a guinea a head for the sake of being
pinched by “Mary Jane” can annihilate railways, steamships, and electric
telegraphs, which are demonstrating the interdependence of all human
interests, and making self-interest a duct for sympathy. These things
are part of the external Reason to which internal silliness has
inevitably to accommodate itself.
Three points in the history of magic and witchcraft are well brought out
by Mr. Lecky. First, that the cruelties connected with it did not begin
until men’s minds had ceased to repose implicitly in a sacramental system
which made them feel well armed against evil spirits; that is, until the
eleventh century, when there came a sort of morning dream of doubt and
heresy, bringing on the one side the terror of timid consciences, and on
the other the terrorism of authority or zeal bent on checking the rising
struggle. In that time of comparative mental repose, says Mr. Lecky,
“All those conceptions of diabolical presence; all that
predisposition toward the miraculous, which acted so fearfully upon
the imaginations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, existed;
but the implicit faith, the boundless and triumphant credulity with
which the virtue of ecclesiastical rites was accepted, rendered them
comparatively innocuous. If men had been a little less
superstitious, the effects of their superstition would have been much
more terrible. It was firmly believed that any one who deviated from
the strict line of orthodoxy must soon succumb beneath the power of
Satan; but as there was no spirit of rebellion or doubt, this
persuasion did not produce any extraordinary terrorism.”
The Church was disposed to confound heretical opinion with sorcery; false
doctrine was especially the devil’s work, and it was a ready conclusion
that a denier or innovator had held consultation with the father of lies.
It is a saying of a zealous Catholic in the sixteenth century, quoted by
Maury in his excellent work, “De la Magie”—“_Crescit cum magia hæresis_,
_cum hæresi magia_.” Even those who doubted were terrified at their
doubts, for trust is more easily undermined than terror. Fear is earlier
born than hope, lays a stronger grasp on man’s system than any other
passion, and remains master of a larger group of involuntary actions. A
chief aspect of man’s moral development is the slow subduing of fear by
the gradual growth of intelligence, and its suppression as a motive by
the presence of impulses less animally selfish; so that in relation to
invisible Power, fear at last ceases to exist, save in that interfusion
with higher faculties which we call awe.
Secondly, Mr. Lecky shows clearly that dogmatic Protestantism, holding
the vivid belief in Satanic agency to be an essential of piety, would
have felt it shame to be a whit behind Catholicism in severity against
the devil’s servants. Luther’s sentiment was that he would not suffer a
witch to live (he was not much more merciful to Jews); and, in spite of
his fondness for children, believing a certain child to have been
begotten by the devil, he recommended the parents to throw it into the
river. The torch must be turned on the worst errors of heroic minds—not
in irreverent ingratitude, but for the sake of measuring our vast and
various debt to all the influences which have concurred, in the
intervening ages, to make us recognize as detestable errors the honest
convictions of men who, in mere individual capacity and moral force, were
very much above us. Again, the Scotch Puritans, during the comparatively
short period of their ascendency, surpassed all Christians before them in
the elaborate ingenuity of the tortures they applied for the discovery of
witchcraft and sorcery, and did their utmost to prove that if Scotch
Calvinism was the true religion, the chief “note” of the true religion
was cruelty. It is hardly an endurable task to read the story of their
doings; thoroughly to imagine them as a past reality is already a sort of
torture. One detail is enough, and it is a comparatively mild one. It
was the regular profession of men called “prickers” to thrust long pins
into the body of a suspected witch in order to detect the insensible spot
which was the infallible sign of her guilt. On a superficial view one
would be in danger of saying that the main difference between the
teachers who sanctioned these things and the much-despised ancestors who
offered human victims inside a huge wicker idol, was that they arrived at
a more elaborate barbarity by a longer series of dependent propositions.
We do not share Mr. Buckle’s opinion that a Scotch minister’s groans were
a part of his deliberate plan for keeping the people in a state of
terrified subjection; the ministers themselves held the belief they
taught, and might well groan over it. What a blessing has a little false
logic been to the world! Seeing that men are so slow to question their
premises, they must have made each other much more miserable, if pity had
not sometimes drawn tender conclusions not warranted by Major and Minor;
if there had not been people with an amiable imbecility of reasoning
which enabled them at once to cling to hideous beliefs, and to be
conscientiously inconsistent with them in their conduct. There is
nothing like acute deductive reasoning for keeping a man in the dark: it
might be called the _technique_ of the intellect, and the concentration
of the mind upon it corresponds to that predominance of technical skill
in art which ends in degradation of the artist’s function, unless new
inspiration and invention come to guide it.
And of this there is some good illustration furnished by that third node
in the history of witchcraft, the beginning of its end, which is treated
in an interesting manner by Mr. Lecky. It is worth noticing, that the
most important defences of the belief in witchcraft, against the growing
scepticism in the latter part of the sixteenth century and in the
seventeenth, were the productions of men who in some departments were
among the foremost thinkers of their time. One of them was Jean Bodin,
the famous writer on government and jurisprudence, whose “Republic,”
Hallam thinks, had an important influence in England, and furnished “a
store of arguments and examples that were not lost on the thoughtful
minds of our countrymen.” In some of his views he was original and bold;
for example, he anticipated Montesquieu in attempting to appreciate the
relations of government and climate. Hallam inclines to the opinion that
he was a Jew, and attached Divine authority only to the Old Testament.
But this was enough to furnish him with his chief data for the existence
of witches and for their capital punishment; and in the account of his
“Republic,” given by Hallam, there is enough evidence that the sagacity
which often enabled him to make fine use of his learning was also often
entangled in it, to temper our surprise at finding a writer on political
science of whom it could be said that, along with Montesquieu, he was
“the most philosophical of those who had read so deeply, the most learned
of those who had thought so much,” in the van of the forlorn hope to
maintain the reality of witchcraft. It should be said that he was
equally confident of the unreality of the Copernican hypothesis, on the
ground that it was contrary to the tenets of the theologians and
philosophers and to common-sense, and therefore subversive of the
foundations of every science. Of his work on witchcraft, Mr. Lecky says:
“The ‘Démonomanie des Sorciers’ is chiefly an appeal to authority,
which the author deemed on this subject so unanimous and so
conclusive, that it was scarcely possible for any sane man to resist
it. He appealed to the popular belief in all countries, in all ages,
and in all religions. He cited the opinions of an immense multitude
of the greatest writers of pagan antiquity, and of the most
illustrious of the Fathers. He showed how the laws of all nations
recognized the existence of witchcraft; and he collected hundreds of
cases which had been investigated before the tribunals of his own or
of other countries. He relates with the most minute and
circumstantial detail, and with the most unfaltering confidence, all
the proceedings at the witches’ Sabbath, the methods which the
witches employed in transporting themselves through the air, their
transformations, their carnal intercourse with the devil, their
various means of injuring their enemies, the signs that lead to their
detection, their confessions when condemned, and their demeanor at
the stake.”
Something must be allowed for a lawyer’s affection toward a belief which
had furnished so many “cases.” Bodin’s work had been immediately
prompted by the treatise “De Prestigiis Dænionum,” written by John Wier,
a German physician, a treatise which is worth notice as an example of a
transitional form of opinion for which many analogies may be found in the
history both of religion and science. Wier believed in demons, and in
possession by demons, but his practice as a physician had convinced him
that the so-called witches were patients and victims, that the devil took
advantage of their diseased condition to delude them, and that there was
no consent of an evil will on the part of the women. He argued that the
word in Leviticus translated “witch” meant “poisoner,” and besought the
princes of Europe to hinder the further spilling of innocent blood.
These heresies of Wier threw Bodin into such a state of amazed
indignation that if he had been an ancient Jew instead of a modern
economical one, he would have rent his garments. “No one had ever heard
of pardon being accorded to sorcerers;” and probably the reason why
Charles IX. died young was because he had pardoned the sorcerer, Trios
Echelles! We must remember that this was in 1581, when the great
scientific movement of the Renaissance had hardly begun—when Galileo was
a youth of seventeen, and Kepler a boy of ten.
But directly afterward, on the other side, came Montaigne, whose
sceptical acuteness could arrive at negatives without any apparatus of
method. A certain keen narrowness of nature will secure a man from many
absurd beliefs which the larger soul, vibrating to more manifold
influences, would have a long struggle to part with. And so we find the
charming, chatty Montaigne—in one of the brightest of his essays, “Des
Boiteux,” where he declares that, from his own observation of witches and
sorcerers, he should have recommended them to be treated with curative
hellebore—stating in his own way a pregnant doctrine, since taught more
gravely. It seems to him much less of a prodigy that men should lie, or
that their imaginations should deceive them, than that a human body
should be carried through the air on a broomstick, or up a chimney by
some unknown spirit. He thinks it a sad business to persuade oneself
that the test of truth lies in the multitude of believers—“en une prosse
où les fols surpassent de tant les sages en nombre.” Ordinarily, he has
observed, when men have something stated to them as a fact, they are more
ready to explain it than to inquire whether it is real: “ils passent
pardessus les propositions, mais ils examinent les conséquences; _ils
laissent les choses_, _et courent aux causes_.” There is a sort of
strong and generous ignorance which is as honorable and courageous as
science—“ignorance pour laquelle concevoir il n’y a pas moins de science
qu’à concevoir la science.” And _à propos_ of the immense traditional
evidence which weighed with such men as Bodin, he says—“As for the proofs
and arguments founded on experience and facts, I do not pretend to
unravel these. What end of a thread is there to lay hold of? I often
cut them as Alexander did his knot. _Après tout_, _c’est mettre ses
conjectures â bien haut prix_, _que d’en faire cuire un homme tout dif_.”
Writing like this, when it finds eager readers, is a sign that the
weather is changing; yet much later, namely, after 1665, when the Royal
Society had been founded, our own Glanvil, the author of the “Scepsis
Scientifica,” a work that was a remarkable advance toward the true
definition of the limits of inquiry, and that won him his election as
fellow of the society, published an energetic vindication of the belief
in witchcraft, of which Mr. Lecky gives the following sketch:
“The ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus,’ which is probably the ablest book
ever published in defence of the superstition, opens with a striking
picture of the rapid progress of the scepticism in England.
Everywhere, a disbelief in witchcraft was becoming fashionable in the
upper classes; but it was a disbelief that arose entirely from a
strong sense of its antecedent improbability. All who were opposed
to the orthodox faith united in discrediting witchcraft. They
laughed at it, as palpably absurd, as involving the most grotesque
and ludicrous conceptions, as so essentially incredible that it would
be a waste of time to examine it. This spirit had arisen since the
Restoration, although the laws were still in force, and although
little or no direct reasoning had been brought to bear upon the
subject. In order to combat it, Glanvil proceeded to examine the
general question of the credibility of the miraculous. He saw that
the reason why witchcraft was ridiculed was, because it was a phase
of the miraculous and the work of the devil; that the scepticism was
chiefly due to those who disbelieved in miracles and the devil; and
that the instances of witchcraft or possession in the Bible were
invariably placed on a level with those that were tried in the law
courts of England. That the evidence of the belief was overwhelming,
he firmly believed; and this, indeed, was scarcely disputed; but,
until the sense of _à priori_ improbability was removed, no possible
accumulation of facts would cause men to believe it. To that task he
accordingly addressed himself. Anticipating the idea and almost the
words of modern controversialists, he urged that there was such a
thing as a credulity of unbelief; and that those who believed so
strange a concurrence of delusions, as was necessary on the
supposition of the unreality of witchcraft, were far more credulous
than those who accepted the belief. He made his very scepticism his
principal weapon; and, analyzing with much acuteness the _à priori_
objections, he showed that they rested upon an unwarrantable
confidence in our knowledge of the laws of the spirit world; that
they implied the existence of some strict analogy between the
faculties of men and of spirits; and that, as such analogy most
probably did not exist, no reasoning based on the supposition could
dispense men from examining the evidence. He concluded with a large
collection of cases, the evidence of which was, as he thought,
incontestable.”
We have quoted this sketch because Glanvil’s argument against the _à
priori_ objection of absurdity is fatiguingly urged in relation to other
alleged marvels which, to busy people seriously occupied with the
difficulties of affairs, of science, or of art, seem as little worthy of
examination as aëronautic broomsticks. And also because we here see
Glanvil, in combating an incredulity that does not happen to be his own,
wielding that very argument of traditional evidence which he had made the
subject of vigorous attack in his “Scepsis Scientifica.” But perhaps
large minds have been peculiarly liable to this fluctuation concerning
the sphere of tradition, because, while they have attacked its
misapplications, they have been the more solicited by the vague sense
that tradition is really the basis of our best life. Our sentiments may
be called organized traditions; and a large part of our actions gather
all their justification, all their attraction and aroma, from the memory
of the life lived, of the actions done, before we were born. In the
absence of any profound research into psychological functions or into the
mysteries of inheritance, in the absence of any comprehensive view of
man’s historical development and the dependence of one age on another, a
mind at all rich in sensibilities must always have had an indefinite
uneasiness in an undistinguishing attack on the coercive influence of
tradition. And this may be the apology for the apparent inconsistency of
Glanvil’s acute criticism on the one side, and his indignation at the
“looser gentry,” who laughed at the evidences for witchcraft on the
other. We have already taken up too much space with this subject of
witchcraft, else we should be tempted to dwell on Sir Thomas Browne, who
far surpassed Glanvil in magnificent incongruity of opinion, and whose
works are the most remarkable combination existing, of witty sarcasm
against ancient nonsense and modern obsequiousness, with indications of a
capacious credulity. After all, we may be sharing what seems to us the
hardness of these men, who sat in their studies and argued at their ease
about a belief that would be reckoned to have caused more misery and
bloodshed than any other superstition, if there had been no such thing as
persecution on the ground of religious opinion.
On this subject of Persecution, Mr. Lecky writes his best: with clearness
of conception, with calm justice, bent on appreciating the necessary
tendency of ideas, and with an appropriateness of illustration that could
be supplied only by extensive and intelligent reading. Persecution, he
shows, is not in any sense peculiar to the Catholic Church; it is a
direct sequence of the doctrines that salvation is to be had only within
the Church, and that erroneous belief is damnatory—doctrines held as
fully by Protestant sects as by the Catholics; and in proportion to its
power, Protestantism has been as persecuting as Catholicism. He
maintains, in opposition to the favorite modern notion of persecution
defeating its own object, that the Church, holding the dogma of exclusive
salvation, was perfectly consequent, and really achieved its end of
spreading one belief and quenching another, by calling in the aid of the
civil arm. Who will say that governments, by their power over
institutions and patronage, as well as over punishment, have not power
also over the interests and inclinations of men, and over most of those
external conditions into which subjects are born, and which make them
adopt the prevalent belief as a second nature? Hence, to a sincere
believer in the doctrine of exclusive salvation, governments had it in
their power to save men from perdition; and wherever the clergy were at
the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or
Protestant, persecution was the result. “Compel them to come in” was a
rule that seemed sanctioned by mercy, and the horrible sufferings it led
men to inflict seemed small to minds accustomed to contemplate, as a
perpetual source of motive, the eternal unmitigated miseries of a hell
that was the inevitable destination of a majority among mankind.
It is a significant fact, noted by Mr. Lecky, that the only two leaders
of the Reformation who advocated tolerance were Zuinglius and Socinus,
both of them disbelievers in exclusive salvation. And in corroboration
of other evidence that the chief triumphs of the Reformation were due to
coercion, he commends to the special attention of his readers the
following quotation from a work attributed without question to the famous
Protestant theologian, Jurieu, who had himself been hindered, as a
Protestant, from exercising his professional functions in France, and was
settled as pastor at Rotterdam. It should be remembered that Jurieu’s
labors fell in the latter part of the seventeenth century and in the
beginning of the eighteenth, and that he was the contemporary of Bayle,
with whom he was in bitter controversial hostility. He wrote, then, at a
time when there was warm debate on the question of Toleration; and it was
his great object to vindicate himself and his French fellow-Protestants
from all laxity on this point.
“Peut on nier que le panganisme est tombé dans le monde par
l’autorité des empereurs Romains? On peut assurer sans temerité que
le paganisme seroit encore debout, et que les trois quarts de
l’Europe seroient encore payens si Constantin et ses successeurs
n’avaient employé leur autorité pour l’abolir. Mais, je vous prie,
de quelles voies Dieu s’est il servi dans ces derniers siècles pour
rétablir la veritable religion dans l’Occident? _Les rois de Suède_,
_ceux de Danemarck_, _ceux d’Angleterre_, _les magistrats souverains
de Suisse_, _des Païs Bas_, _des villes livres d’Allemagne_, _les
princes électeurs_, _et autres princes souverains de l’empire_,
_n’ont ils pas emploié leur autorité pour abbattre le Papisme_?”
Indeed, wherever the tremendous alternative of everlasting torments is
believed in—believed in so that it becomes a motive determining the
life—not only persecution, but every other form of severity and gloom are
the legitimate consequences. There is much ready declamation in these
days against the spirit of asceticism and against zeal for doctrinal
conversion; but surely the macerated form of a Saint Francis, the fierce
denunciations of a Saint Dominic, the groans and prayerful wrestlings of
the Puritan who seasoned his bread with tears and made all pleasurable
sensation sin, are more in keeping with the contemplation of unending
anguish as the destiny of a vast multitude whose nature we share, than
the rubicund cheerfulness of some modern divines, who profess to unite a
smiling liberalism with a well-bred and tacit but unshaken confidence in
the reality of the bottomless pit. But, in fact, as Mr. Lecky maintains,
that awful image, with its group of associated dogmas concerning the
inherited curse, and the damnation of unbaptized infants, of heathens,
and of heretics, has passed away from what he is fond of calling “the
realizations” of Christendom. These things are no longer the objects of
practical belief. They may be mourned for in encyclical letters; bishops
may regret them; doctors of divinity may sign testimonials to the
excellent character of these decayed beliefs; but for the mass of
Christians they are no more influential than unrepealed but forgotten
statutes. And with these dogmas has melted away the strong basis for the
defence of persecution. No man now writes eager vindications of himself
and his colleagues from the suspicion of adhering to the principle of
toleration. And this momentous change, it is Mr. Lecky’s object to show,
is due to that concurrence of conditions which he has chosen to call “the
advance of the Spirit of Rationalism.”
In other parts of his work, where he attempts to trace the action of the
same conditions on the acceptance of miracles and on other chief phases
of our historical development, Mr. Lecky has laid himself open to
considerable criticism. The chapters on the “Miracles of the Church,”
the æsthetic, scientific, and moral development of Rationalism, the
Secularization of Politics, and the Industrial History of Rationalism,
embrace a wide range of diligently gathered facts; but they are nowhere
illuminated by a sufficiently clear conception and statement of the
agencies at work, or the mode of their action, in the gradual
modification of opinion and of life. The writer frequently impresses us
as being in a state of hesitation concerning his own standing-point,
which may form a desirable stage in private meditation but not in
published exposition. Certain epochs in theoretic conception, certain
considerations, which should be fundamental to his survey, are introduced
quite incidentally in a sentence or two, or in a note which seems to be
an afterthought. Great writers and their ideas are touched upon too
slightly and with too little discrimination, and important theories are
sometimes characterized with a rashness which conscientious revision will
correct. There is a fatiguing use of vague or shifting phrases, such as
“modern civilization,” “spirit of the age,” “tone of thought,”
“intellectual type of the age,” “bias of the imagination,” “habits of
religious thought,” unbalanced by any precise definition; and the spirit
of rationalism is sometimes treated of as if it lay outside the specific
mental activities of which it is a generalized expression. Mr. Curdle’s
famous definition of the dramatic unities as “a sort of a general
oneness,” is not totally false; but such luminousness as it has could
only be perceived by those who already knew what the unities were. Mr.
Lecky has the advantage of being strongly impressed with the great part
played by the emotions in the formation of opinion, and with the high
complexity of the causes at work in social evolution; but he frequently
writes as if he had never yet distinguished between the complexity of the
conditions that produce prevalent states of mind and the inability of
particular minds to give distinct reasons for the preferences or
persuasions produced by those states. In brief, he does not
discriminate, or does not help his reader to discriminate, between
objective complexity and subjective confusion. But the most
muddle-headed gentleman who represents the spirit of the age by
observing, as he settles his collar, that the development theory is quite
“the thing” is a result of definite processes, if we could only trace
them. “Mental attitudes,” and “predispositions,” however vague in
consciousness, have not vague causes, any more than the “blind motions of
the spring” in plants and animals.
The word “Rationalism” has the misfortune, shared by most words in this
gray world, of being somewhat equivocal. This evil may be nearly
overcome by careful preliminary definition; but Mr. Lecky does not supply
this, and the original specific application of the word to a particular
phase of biblical interpretation seems to have clung about his use of it
with a misleading effect. Through some parts of his book he appears to
regard the grand characteristic of modern thought and civilization,
compared with ancient, as a radiation in the first instance from a change
in religious conceptions. The supremely important fact, that the gradual
reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law, which
carries as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous, has its
determining current in the development of physical science, seems to have
engaged comparatively little of his attention; at least, he gives it no
prominence. The great conception of universal regular sequence, without
partiality and without caprice—the conception which is the most potent
force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical form
given to our sentiments—could only grow out of that patient watching of
external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions, which are
urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science.
There is not room here to explain and justify the impressions of
dissatisfaction which have been briefly indicated, but a serious writer
like Mr. Lecky will not find such suggestions altogether useless. The
objections, even the misunderstandings, of a reader who is not careless
or ill-disposed, may serve to stimulate an author’s vigilance over his
thoughts as well as his style. It would be gratifying to see some future
proof that Mr. Lecky has acquired juster views than are implied in the
assertion that philosophers of the sensational school “can never rise to
the conception of the disinterested;” and that he has freed himself from
all temptation to that mingled laxity of statement and ill-pitched
elevation of tone which are painfully present in the closing pages of his
second volume.
IX. THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT. {272}
The inventor of movable types, says the venerable Teufelsdröckh, was
disbanding hired armies, cashiering most kings and senates, and creating
a whole new democratic world. Has any one yet said what great things are
being done by the men who are trying to banish ugliness from our streets
and our homes, and to make both the outside and inside of our dwellings
worthy of a world where there are forests and flower-tressed meadows, and
the plumage of birds; where the insects carry lessons of color on their
wings, and even the surface of a stagnant pool will show us the wonders
of iridescence and the most delicate forms of leafage? They, too, are
modifying opinions, for they are modifying men’s moods and habits, which
are the mothers of opinions, having quite as much to do with their
formation as the responsible father—Reason. Think of certain hideous
manufacturing towns where the piety is chiefly a belief in copious
perdition, and the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy surface of wall
pierced by the ugliest windows, the staring shop-fronts, paper-hangings,
carpets, brass and gilt mouldings, and advertising placards, have an
effect akin to that of malaria; it is easy to understand that with such
surroundings there is more belief in cruelty than in beneficence, and
that the best earthly bliss attainable is the dulling of the external
senses. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is
taken for beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty; the subtle
relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life forbids that
bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral sensibility or our
intellectual discernment; and—more than that—as it is probable that fine
musical harmonies have a sanative influence over our bodily organization,
it is also probable that just coloring and lovely combinations of lines
may be necessary to the complete well-being of our systems apart from any
conscious delight in them. A savage may indulge in discordant chuckles
and shrieks and gutturals, and think that they please the gods, but it
does not follow that his frame would not be favorably wrought upon by the
vibrations of a grand church organ. One sees a person capable of
choosing the worst style of wall-paper become suddenly afflicted by its
ugliness under an attack of illness. And if an evil state of blood and
lymph usually goes along with an evil state of mind, who shall say that
the ugliness of our streets, the falsity of our ornamentation, the
vulgarity of our upholstery, have not something to do with those bad
tempers which breed false conclusions?
On several grounds it is possible to make a more speedy and extensive
application of artistic reform to our interior decoration than to our
external architecture. One of these grounds is that most of our ugly
buildings must stand; we cannot afford to pull them down. But every year
we are decorating interiors afresh, and people of modest means may
benefit by the introduction of beautiful designs into stucco ornaments,
paper-hangings, draperies, and carpets. Fine taste in the decoration of
interiors is a benefit that spreads from the palace to the clerk’s house
with one parlor.
All honor, then, to the architect who has zealously vindicated the claim
of internal ornamentation to be a part of the architect’s function, and
has labored to rescue that form of art which is most closely connected
with the sanctities and pleasures of our hearths from the hands of
uncultured tradesmen. All the nation ought at present to know that this
effort is peculiarly associated with the name of Mr. Owen Jones; and
those who are most disposed to dispute with the architect about his
coloring must at least recognize the high artistic principle which has
directed his attention to colored ornamentation as a proper branch of
architecture. One monument of his effort in this way is his “Grammar of
Ornament,” of which a new and cheaper edition has just been issued. The
one point in which it differs from the original and more expensive
edition, viz., the reduction in the size of the pages (the amount of
matter and number of plates are unaltered), is really an advantage; it is
now a very manageable folio, and when the reader is in a lounging mood
may be held easily on the knees. It is a magnificent book; and those who
know no more of it than the title should be told that they will find in
it a pictorial history of ornamental design, from its rudimentary
condition as seen in the productions of savage tribes, through all the
other great types of art—the Egyptian, Assyrian, ancient Persian, Greek,
Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Moresque, Mohammedan-Persian, Indian, Celtic,
Mediæval, Renaissance, Elizabethan, and Italian. The letter-press
consists, first, of an introductory statement of fundamental principles
of ornamentation—principles, says the author, which will be found to have
been obeyed more or less instinctively by all nations in proportion as
their art has been a genuine product of the national genius; and,
secondly, of brief historical essays, some of them contributed by other
eminent artists, presenting a commentary on each characteristic series of
illustrations, with the useful appendage of bibliographical lists.
The title “Grammar of Ornament” is so far appropriate that it indicates
what Mr. Owen Jones is most anxious to be understood concerning the
object of his work, namely, that it is intended to illustrate
historically the application of principles, and not to present a
collection of models for mere copyists. The plates correspond to
examples in syntax, not to be repeated parrot-like, but to be studied as
embodiments of syntactical principles. There is a logic of form which
cannot be departed from in ornamental design without a corresponding
remoteness from perfection; unmeaning, irrelevant lines are as bad as
irrelevant words or clauses, that tend no whither. And as a suggestion
toward the origination of fresh ornamental design, the work concludes
with some beautiful drawings of leaves and flowers from nature, that the
student, tracing in them the simple laws of form which underlie an
immense variety in beauty, may the better discern the method by which the
same laws were applied in the finest decorative work of the past, and may
have all the clearer prospect of the unexhausted possibilities of
freshness which lie before him, if, refraining from mere imitation, he
will seek only such likeness to existing forms of ornamental art as
arises from following like principles of combination.
X. ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT.
Fellow-Workmen: I am not going to take up your time by complimenting you.
It has been the fashion to compliment kings and other authorities when
they have come into power, and to tell them that, under their wise and
beneficent rule, happiness would certainly overflow the land. But the
end has not always corresponded to that beginning. If it were true that
we who work for wages had more of the wisdom and virtue necessary to the
right use of power than has been shown by the aristocratic and mercantile
classes, we should not glory much in that fact, or consider that it
carried with it any near approach to infallibility.
In my opinion, there has been too much complimenting of that sort; and
whenever a speaker, whether he is one of ourselves or not, wastes our
time in boasting or flattery, I say, let us hiss him. If we have the
beginning of wisdom, which is, to know a little truth about ourselves, we
know that as a body we are neither very wise nor very virtuous. And to
prove this, I will not point specially to our own habits and doings, but
to the general state of the country. Any nation that had within it a
majority of men—and we are the majority—possessed of much wisdom and
virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and
swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating, and
the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A
majority has the power of creating a public opinion. We could groan and
hiss before we had the franchise: if we had groaned and hissed in the
right place, if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the
multitude of us artisans, and factory hands, and miners, and laborers of
all sorts, had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious,
sober—and I don’t see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere without
these qualities—we should have made an audience that would have shamed
the other classes out of their share in the national vices. We should
have had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers,
honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous
and brutal men; and we should not have had among us the abomination of
men calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten
gains. I say, it is not possible for any society in which there is a
very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society
is—to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief
in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what
pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows.
Therefore, let us have none with this nonsense about our being much
better than the rest of our countryman, or the pretence that that was a
reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has
been given to us. The reason for our having the franchise, as I want
presently to show, lies somewhere else than in our personal good
qualities, and does not in the least lie in any high betting chance that
a delegate is a better man than a duke, or that a Sheffield grinder is a
better man than any one of the firm he works for.
However, we have got our franchise now. We have been sarcastically
called in the House of Commons the future masters of the country; and if
that sarcasm contains any truth, it seems to me that the first thing we
had better think of is, our heavy responsibility; that is to say, the
terrible risk we run of working mischief and missing good, as others have
done before us. Suppose certain men, discontented with the irrigation of
a country which depended for all its prosperity on the right direction
being given to the waters of a great river, had got the management of the
irrigation before they were quite sure how exactly it could be altered
for the better, or whether they could command the necessary agency for
such on alteration. Those men would have a difficult and dangerous
business on their hands; and the more sense, feeling, and knowledge they
had, the more they would be likely to tremble rather than to triumph.
Our situation is not altogether unlike theirs. For general prosperity
and well-being is a vast crop, that like the corn in Egypt can be come
at, not at all by hurried snatching, but only by a well-judged patient
process; and whether our political power will be any good to us now we
have got it, must depend entirely on the means and materials—the
knowledge, ability, and honesty we have at command. These three things
are the only conditions on which we can get any lasting benefit, as every
clever workman among us knows: he knows that for an article to be worth
much there must be a good invention or plan to go upon, there must be a
well-prepared material, and there must be skilful and honest work in
carrying out the plan. And by this test we may try those who want to be
our leaders. Have they anything to offer us besides indignant talk?
When they tell us we ought to have this, that, or the other thing, can
they explain to us any reasonable, fair, safe way of getting it? Can
they argue in favor of a particular change by showing us pretty closely
how the change is likely to work? I don’t want to decry a just
indignation; on the contrary, I should like it to be more thorough and
general. A wise man, more than two thousand years ago, when he was asked
what would most tend to lessen injustice in the world, said, “If every
bystander felt as indignant at a wrong as if he himself were the
sufferer.” Let us cherish such indignation. But the long-growing evils
of a great nation are a tangled business, asking for a good deal more
than indignation in order to be got rid of. Indignation is a fine
war-horse, but the war-horse must be ridden by a man: it must be ridden
by rationality, skill, courage, armed with the right weapons, and taking
definite aim.
We have reason to be discontented with many things, and, looking back
either through the history of England to much earlier generations or to
the legislation and administrations of later times, we are justified in
saying that many of the evils under which our country now suffers are the
consequences of folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking in those who,
at different times have wielded the powers of rank, office, and money.
But the more bitterly we feel this, the more loudly we utter it, the
stronger is the obligation we lay on ourselves to beware, lest we also,
by a too hasty wresting of measures which seem to promise an immediate
partial relief, make a worse time of it for our own generation, and leave
a bad inheritance to our children. The deepest curse of wrong-doing,
whether of the foolish or wicked sort, is that its effects are difficult
to be undone. I suppose there is hardly anything more to be shuddered at
than that part of the history of disease which shows how, when a man
injures his constitution by a life of vicious excess, his children and
grandchildren inherit diseased bodies and minds, and how the effects of
that unhappy inheritance continue to spread beyond our calculation. This
is only one example of the law by which human lives are linked together;
another example of what we complain of when we point to our pauperism, to
the brutal ignorance of multitudes among our fellow countrymen, to the
weight of taxation laid on us by blamable wars, to the wasteful channels
made for the public money, to the expense and trouble of getting justice,
and call these the effects of bad rule. This is the law that we all bear
the yoke of, the law of no man’s making, and which no man can undo.
Everybody now sees an example of it in the case of Ireland. We who are
living now are sufferers by the wrong-doing of those who lived before us;
we are the sufferers by each other’s wrong-doing; and the children who
come after us are and will be sufferers from the same causes. Will any
man say he doesn’t care for that law—it is nothing to him—what he wants
is to better himself? With what face then will he complain of any
injury? If he says that in politics or in any sort of social action he
will not care to know what are likely to be the consequences to others
besides himself, he is defending the very worst doings that have brought
about his discontent. He might as well say that there is no better rule
needful for men than that each should tug and drive for what will please
him, without caring how that tugging will act on the fine widespread
network of society in which he is fast meshed. If any man taught that as
a doctrine, we should know him for a fool. But there are men who act
upon it; every scoundrel, for example, whether he is a rich religious
scoundrel who lies and cheats on a large scale, and will perhaps come and
ask you to send him to Parliament, or a poor pocket-picking scoundrel,
who will steal your loose pence while you are listening round the
platform. None of us are so ignorant as not to know that a society, a
nation is held together by just the opposite doctrine and action—by the
dependence of men on each other and the sense they have of a common
interest in preventing injury. And we working men are, I think, of all
classes the last that can afford to forget this; for if we did we should
be much like sailors cutting away the timbers of our own ship to warm our
grog with. For what else is the meaning of our trades-unions? What else
is the meaning of every flag we carry, every procession we make, every
crowd we collect for the sake of making some protest on behalf of our
body as receivers of wages, if not this: that it is our interest to stand
by each other, and that this being the common interest, no one of us will
try to make a good bargain for himself without considering what will be
good for his fellows? And every member of a union believes that the
wider he can spread his union, the stronger and surer will be the effect
of it. So I think I shall be borne out in saying that a working man who
can put two and two together, or take three from four and see what will
be the remainder, can understand that a society, to be well off, must be
made up chiefly of men who consider the general good as well as their
own.
Well, but taking the world as it is—and this is one way we must take it
when we want to find out how it can be improved—no society is made up of
a single class: society stands before us like that wonderful piece of
life, the human body, with all its various parts depending on one
another, and with a terrible liability to get wrong because of that
delicate dependence. We all know how many diseases the human body is apt
to suffer from, and how difficult it is even for the doctors to find out
exactly where the seat or beginning of the disorder is. That is because
the body is made up of so many various parts, all related to each other,
or likely all to feel the effect if any one of them goes wrong. It is
somewhat the same with our old nations or societies. No society ever
stood long in the world without getting to be composed of different
classes. Now, it is all pretence to say that there is no such thing as
class interest. It is clear that if any particular number of men get a
particular benefit from any existing institution, they are likely to band
together, in order to keep up that benefit and increase it, until it is
perceived to be unfair and injurious to another large number, who get
knowledge and strength enough to set up a resistance. And this, again,
has been part of the history of every great society since history began.
But the simple reason for this being, that any large body of men is
likely to have more of stupidity, narrowness, and greed than of
farsightedness and generosity, it is plain that the number who resist
unfairness and injury are in danger of becoming injurious in their turn.
And in this way a justifiable resistance has become a damaging
convulsion, making everything worse instead of better. This has been
seen so often that we ought to profit a little by the experience. So
long as there is selfishness in men; so long as they have not found out
for themselves institutions which express and carry into practice the
truth, that the highest interest of mankind must at last be a common and
not a divided interest; so long as the gradual operation of steady causes
has not made that truth a part of every man’s knowledge and feeling, just
as we now not only know that it is good for our health to be cleanly, but
feel that cleanliness is only another word for comfort, which is the
under-side or lining of all pleasure; so long, I say as men wink at their
own knowingness, or hold their heads high because they have got an
advantage over their fellows; so long class interest will be in danger of
making itself felt injuriously. No set of men will get any sort of power
without being in danger of wanting more than their right share. But, on
the other hand, it is just as certain that no set of men will get angry
at having less than their right share, and set up a claim on that ground,
without falling into just the same danger of exacting too much, and
exacting it in wrong ways. It’s human nature we have got to work with
all round, and nothing else. That seems like saying something very
commonplace—nay, obvious; as if one should say that where there are hands
there are mouths. Yet, to hear a good deal of the speechifying and to
see a good deal of the action that go forward, one might suppose it was
forgotten.
But I come back to this: that, in our old society, there are old
institutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited
advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the
wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our
commerce, and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such
as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought
and professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the
irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water distributed
or it will bear no crop; there are the old channels, the old banks, and
the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have
been prepared, or the structure of the old has been gradually altered.
But it would be fool’s work to batter down a pump only because a better
might be made, when you had no machinery ready for a new one: it would be
wicked work, if villages lost their crops by it. Now the only safe way
by which society can be steadily improved and our worst evils reduced, is
not by any attempt to do away directly with the actually existing class
distinctions and advantages, as if everybody could have the same sort of
work, or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers are stupid
enough to suppose), but by the turning of class interests into class
functions or duties. What I mean is, that each class should be urged by
the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the
strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large; that our public
affairs should be got into a state in which there should be no impunity
for foolish or faithless conduct. In this way the public judgment would
sift out incapability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even
personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the
desires of the most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the
opinions of those around them; and for one person to put on a cap and
bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he
may spend a vast sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors,
he must be pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him. Now, changes can
only be good in proportion as they help to bring about this sort of
result: in proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance,
and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of that
substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character,
and represent the varying duties of men, not their varying interests.
But this end will not come by impatience. “Day will not break the sooner
because we get up before the twilight.” Still less will it come by mere
undoing, or change merely as change. And moreover, if we believed that
it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the franchise, we
should be what I call superstitious men, believing in magic, or the
production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will
greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has
the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him
well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of things in
this world has been determined for us beforehand, and in such a way that
no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult voyage, and reach the
right port, unless it is well manned: the nature of the winds and the
waves, of the timbers, the sails, and the cordage, will not accommodate
itself to drunken, mutinous sailors.
You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to you, or of
joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine way, and need not be
made better. What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care, the
precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so that
the public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be
given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are
bound up. After the Reform Bill of 1832 I was in an election riot, which
showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must always be;
and I have never forgotten that the riot was brought about chiefly by the
agency of dishonest men who professed to be on the people’s side. Now,
the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends
to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men,
whose notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief
that they have got power into their hands, and may do pretty much as they
like. If any one can look round us and say that he sees no signs of any
such danger now, and that our national condition is running along like a
clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I call him a
cheerful man: perhaps he does his own gardening, and seldom taken
exercise far away from home. To us who have no gardens, and often walk
abroad, it is plain that we can never get into a bit of a crowd but we
must rub clothes with a set of roughs, who have the worst vices of the
worst rich—who are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else mere
sensual simpletons and victims. They are the ugly crop that has sprung
up while the stewards have been sleeping; they are the multiplying brood
begotten by parents who have been left without all teaching save that of
a too craving body, without all well-being save the fading delusions of
drugged beer and gin. They are the hideous margin of society, at one
edge drawing toward it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other
darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class. Here is one of
the evils which cannot be got rid of quickly, and against which any of us
who have got sense, decency, and instruction have need to watch. That
these degraded fellow-men could really get the mastery in a persistent
disobedience to the laws and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not
believe; but wretched calamities must come from the very beginning of
such a struggle, and the continuance of it would be a civil war, in which
the inspiration on both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion
of good, and might become the direct savage impulse of ferocity. We have
all to see to it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage
beast in the breasts of our generation—that we do not help to poison the
nation’s blood, and make richer provision for bestiality to come. We
know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way—that oppression
has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to resist oppression.
But let us, if possible, show that we can keep sane in our resistance,
and shape our means more and more reasonably toward the least harmful,
and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end. Let us, I say, show
that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad, but can keep that sober
determination which alone gives mastery over the adaptation of means.
And a first guarantee of this sanity will be to act as if we understood
that the fundamental duty of a government is to preserve order, to
enforce obedience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a man can
be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and
comfort to lose. But a better state of things would be, that men who had
little money and not much comfort should still be guardians of order,
because they had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a
heart of justice, pity, and fortitude, to keep them from making more
misery only because they felt some misery themselves. There are
thousands of artisans who have already shown this fine spirit, and have
endured much with patient heroism. If such a spirit spread, and
penetrated us all, we should soon become the masters of the country in
the best sense and to the best ends. For, the public order being
preserved, there can be no government in future that will not be
determined by our insistance on our fair and practicable demands. It is
only by disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall find
ourselves lost among a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of the
country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of guns that will
sweep us down in the ignoble martyrdom of fools.
It has been a too common notion that to insist much on the preservation
of order is the part of a selfish aristocracy and a selfish commercial
class, because among these, in the nature of things, have been found the
opponents of change. I am a Radical; and, what is more, I am not a
Radical with a title, or a French cook, or even an entrance into fine
society. I expect great changes, and I desire them. But I don’t expect
them to come in a hurry, by mere inconsiderate sweeping. A Hercules with
a big besom is a fine thing for a filthy stable, but not for weeding a
seed-bed, where his besom would soon make a barren floor.
That is old-fashioned talk, some one may say. We know all that.
Yes, when things are put in an extreme way, most people think they know
them; but, after all, they are comparatively few who see the small
degrees by which those extremes are arrived at, or have the resolution
and self-control to resist the little impulses by which they creep on
surely toward a fatal end. Does anybody set out meaning to ruin himself,
or to drink himself to death, or to waste his life so that he becomes a
despicable old man, a superannuated nuisance, like a fly in winter. Yet
there are plenty, of whose lot this is the pitiable story. Well now,
supposing us all to have the best intentions, we working men, as a body,
run some risk of bringing evil on the nation in that unconscious
manner—half hurrying, half pushed in a jostling march toward an end we
are not thinking of. For just as there are many things which we know
better and feel much more strongly than the richer, softer-handed classes
can know or feel them; so there are many things—many precious
benefits—which we, by the very fact of our privations, our lack of
leisure and instruction, are not so likely to be aware of and take into
our account. Those precious benefits form a chief part of what I may
call the common estate of society: a wealth over and above buildings,
machinery, produce, shipping, and so on, though closely connected with
these; a wealth of a more delicate kind, that we may more unconsciously
bring into danger, doing harm and not knowing that we do it. I mean that
treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling,
and manners, great memories and the interpretation of great records,
which is carried on from the minds of one generation to the minds of
another. This is something distinct from the indulgences of luxury and
the pursuit of vain finery; and one of the hardships in the lot of
working men is that they have been for the most part shut out from
sharing in this treasure. It can make a man’s life very great, very full
of delight, though he has no smart furniture and no horses: it also
yields a great deal of discovery that corrects error, and of invention
that lessens bodily pain, and must at least make life easier for all.
Now the security of this treasure demands, not only the preservation of
order, but a certain patience on our part with many institutions and
facts of various kinds, especially touching the accumulation of wealth,
which from the light we stand in, we are more likely to discern the evil
than the good of. It is constantly the task of practical wisdom not to
say, “This is good, and I will have it,” but to say, “This is the less of
two unavoidable evils, and I will bear it.” And this treasure of
knowledge, which consists in the fine activity, the exalted vision of
many minds, is bound up at present with conditions which have much evil
in them. Just as in the case of material wealth and its distribution we
are obliged to take the selfishness and weaknesses of human nature into
account, and however we insist that men might act better, are forced,
unless we are fanatical simpletons, to consider how they are likely to
act; so in this matter of the wealth that is carried in men’s minds, we
have to reflect that the too absolute predominance of a class whose wants
have been of a common sort, who are chiefly struggling to get better and
more food, clothing, shelter, and bodily recreation, may lead to hasty
measures for the sake of having things more fairly shared, which, even if
they did not fail of their object, would at last debase the life of the
nation. Do anything which will throw the classes who hold the treasures
of knowledge—nay, I may say, the treasure of refined needs—into the
background, cause them to withdraw from public affairs, stop too suddenly
any of the sources by which their leisure and ease are furnished, rob
them of the chances by which they may be influential and pre-eminent, and
you do something as short-sighted as the acts of France and Spain when in
jealousy and wrath, not altogether unprovoked, they drove from among them
races and classes that held the traditions of handicraft and agriculture.
You injure your own inheritance and the inheritance of your children.
You may truly say that this which I call the common estate of society has
been anything but common to you; but the same may be said, by many of us,
of the sunlight and the air, of the sky and the fields, of parks and
holiday games. Nevertheless that these blessings exist makes life
worthier to us, and urges us the more to energetic, likely means of
getting our share in them; and I say, let us watch carefully, lest we do
anything to lessen this treasure which is held in the minds of men, while
we exert ourselves, first of all, and to the very utmost, that we and our
children may share in all its benefits. Yes; exert ourselves to the
utmost, to break the yoke of ignorance. If we demand more leisure, more
ease in our lives, let us show that we don’t deserve the reproach of
wanting to shirk that industry which, in some form or other, every man,
whether rich or poor, should feel himself as much bound to as he is bound
to decency. Let us show that we want to have some time and strength left
to us, that we may use it, not for brutal indulgence, but for the
rational exercise of the faculties which make us men. Without this no
political measures can benefit us. No political institution will alter
the nature of Ignorance, or hinder it from producing vice and misery.
Let Ignorance start how it will, it must run the same round of low
appetites, poverty, slavery, and superstition. Some of us know this
well—nay, I will say, feel it; for knowledge of this kind cuts deep; and
to us it is one of the most painful facts belonging to our condition that
there are numbers of our fellow-workmen who are so far from feeling in
the same way, that they never use the imperfect opportunities already
offered them for giving their children some schooling, but turn their
little ones of tender age into bread-winners, often at cruel tasks,
exposed to the horrible infection of childish vice. Of course, the
causes of these hideous things go a long way back. Parents’ misery has
made parents’ wickedness. But we, who are still blessed with the hearts
of fathers and the consciences of men—we who have some knowledge of the
curse entailed on broods of creatures in human shape, whose enfeebled
bodies and dull perverted minds are mere centres of uneasiness in whom
even appetite is feeble and joy impossible—I say we are bound to use all
the means at our command to help in putting a stop to this horror. Here,
it seems to me, is a way in which we may use extended co-operation among
us to the most momentous of all purposes, and make conditions of
enrolment that would strengthen all educational measures. It is true
enough that there is a low sense of parental duties in the nation at
large, and that numbers who have no excuse in bodily hardship seem to
think it a light thing to beget children, to bring human beings with all
their tremendous possibilities into this difficult world, and then take
little heed how they are disciplined and furnished for the perilous
journey they are sent on without any asking of their own. This is a sin
shared in more or less by all classes; but there are sins which, like
taxation, fall the heaviest on the poorest, and none have such galling
reasons as we working men to try and rouse to the utmost the feeling of
responsibility in fathers and mothers. We have been urged into
co-operation by the pressure of common demands. In war men need each
other more; and where a given point has to be defended, fighters
inevitably find themselves shoulder to shoulder. So fellowship grows, so
grow the rules of fellowship, which gradually shape themselves to
thoroughness as the idea of a common good becomes more complete. We feel
a right to say, If you will be one of us, you must make such and such a
contribution—you must renounce such and such a separate advantage—you
must set your face against such and such an infringement. If we have any
false ideas about our common good, our rules will be wrong, and we shall
be co-operating to damage each other. But, now, here is a part of our
good, without which everything else we strive for will be worthless—I
mean the rescue of our children. Let us demand from the members of our
unions that they fulfil their duty as parents in this definite matter,
which rules can reach. Let us demand that they send their children to
school, so as not to go on recklessly, breeding a moral pestilence among
us, just as strictly as we demand that they pay their contributions to a
common fund, understood to be for a common benefit. While we watch our
public men, let us watch one another as to this duty, which is also
public, and more momentous even than obedience to sanitary regulations.
While we resolutely declare against the wickedness in high places, let us
set ourselves also against the wickedness in low places, not quarrelling
which came first, or which is the worse of the two—not trying to settle
the miserable precedence of plague or famine, but insisting unflinchingly
on remedies once ascertained, and summoning those who hold the treasure
of knowledge to remember that they hold it in trust, and that with them
lies the task of searching for new remedies, and finding the right
methods of applying them.
To find right remedies and right methods. Here is the great function of
knowledge: here the life of one man may make a fresh era straight away,
in which a sort of suffering that has existed shall exist no more. For
the thousands of years down to the middle of the sixteenth century that
human limbs had been hacked and amputated, nobody knew how to stop the
bleeding except by searing the ends of the vessels with red-hot iron.
But then came a man named Ambrose Paré, and said, “Tie up the arteries!”
That was a fine word to utter. It contained the statement of a method—a
plan by which a particular evil was forever assuaged. Let us try to
discern the men whose words carry that sort of kernel, and choose such
men to be our guides and representatives—not choose platform swaggerers,
who bring us nothing but the ocean to make our broth with.
To get the chief power into the hands of the wisest, which means to get
our life regulated according to the truest principles mankind is in
possession of, is a problem as old as the very notion of wisdom. The
solution comes slowly, because men collectively can only be made to
embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching
of the world’s events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and nothing
else but potatoes, till a potato disease comes and forces them to find
out the advantage of a varied crop. Selfishness, stupidity, sloth,
persist in trying to adapt the world to their desires, till a time comes
when the world manifests itself as too decidedly inconvenient to them.
Wisdom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the marks of
the changing seasons, before it finds a home within him, directs his
actions, and from the precious effects of obedience begets a
corresponding love.
But while still outside of us, wisdom often looks terrible, and wears
strange forms, wrapped in the changing conditions of a struggling world.
It wears now the form of wants and just demands in a great multitude of
British men: wants and demands urged into existence by the forces of a
maturing world. And it is in virtue of this—in virtue of this presence
of wisdom on our aide as a mighty fact, physical and moral, which must
enter into and shape the thoughts and actions of mankind—that we working
men have obtained the suffrage. Not because we are an excellent
multitude, but because we are a needy multitude.
But now, for our own part, we have seriously to consider this outside
wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable nature of things, and watch
to give it a home within us and obey it. If the claims of the unendowed
multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the
future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their
inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which no
worthy, noble future can be moulded. Many of the highest uses of life
are in their keeping; and if privilege has often been abused, it has also
been the nurse of excellence. Here again we have to submit ourselves to
the great law of inheritance. If we quarrel with the way in which the
labors and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down, we
are just as bigoted, just as narrow, just as wanting in that religion
which keeps an open ear and an obedient mind to the teachings of fact, as
we accuse those of being, who quarrel with the new truths and new needs
which are disclosed in the present. The deeper insight we get into the
causes of human trouble, and the ways by which men are made better and
happier, the less we shall be inclined to the unprofitable spirit and
practice of reproaching classes as such in a wholesale fashion. Not all
the evils of our condition are such as we can justly blame others for;
and, I repeat, many of them are such as no changes of institutions can
quickly remedy. To discern between the evils that energy can remove and
the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness
and childishness, between good sense and folly. And more than that,
without such discernment, seeing that we have grave duties toward our own
body and the country at large, we can hardly escape acts of fatal
rashness and injustice.
I am addressing a mixed assembly of workmen, and some of you may be as
well or better fitted than I am to take up this office. But they will
not think it amiss in me that I have tried to bring together the
considerations most likely to be of service to us in preparing ourselves
for the use of our new opportunities. I have avoided touching on special
questions. The best help toward judging well on these is to approach
them in the right temper without vain expectation, and with a resolution
which is mixed with temperance.
Footnotes:
{31} 1. “Madame de Sablé. Etudes sur les Femmes illustres et la
Société du XVIIe siècle.” Par M. Victor Cousin. Paris: Didier. 2.
“Portraits de Femmes.” Par C. A. Sainte-Beuve. Paris: Didier. 3. “Les
Femmes de la Revolutions.” Par J. Michelet.
{33} Queen Christina, when Mme. Dacier (then Mlle. Le Fèvre) sent her a
copy of her edition of “Callimachus,” wrote in reply: “Mais vous, de qui
on m’assure que vous êtes une belle et agréable fille, n’avez vous pas
honte d’être si savante?”
{53} The letter to which we allude has this charming little touch: “Je
hais comme la mort que les gens de son age puissent croire que j’ai des
galanteries. Il semble qu’on leur parait cent ans des qu’on est plus
vieille qu’eux, et ils sont tout propre à s’étonner qu’il y ait encore
question des gens.”
{64} 1. “The Church before the Flood.” By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D.
2. “Occasional Discourses.” By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. In two
vols. 3. “Signs of the Times; or, Present, Past, and Future.” By the
Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 4. “The Finger of God.” By the Rev. John
Cumming, D.D. 5. “Is Christianity from God? or, a Manual of Christian
Evidence, for Scripture-Readers, City Missionaries, Sunday-School
Teachers, etc.” By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 6. “Apocalyptic
Sketches; or, Lectures on the Book of Revelation.” First Series. By the
Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 7. “Apocalyptic Sketches.” Second Series. By
the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 8 “Prophetic Studies; or, Lectures on the
Book of Daniel.” By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D.
{74} “Lect. on Daniel,” p. 6.
{76} “Man of Ev.” p. 81.
{86a} “Signs of the Times,” p. 38.
{86b} “Apoc. Sketches,” p. 243.
{90} “Man. of Christ. Ev.” p. 184.
{99} 1. “Heinrich Heine’s Sämmtliche Werke.” Philadelphia: John Weik.
1855. 2. “Vermischte Schriften von Heinrich Heine.” Hamburg: Hoffman
und Campe. 1854.
{134} At first I was almost in despair, and I thought I could never bear
it, and yet I have borne it—only do not ask me _how_?
{135} It is not fair to the English reader to indulge in German
quotations, but in our opinion poetical translations are usually worse
than valueless. For those who think differently, however, we may mention
that Mr. Stores Smith has published a modest little book, containing
“Selections from the Poetry of Heinrich Heine,” and that a meritorious
(American) translation of Heine’s complete works, by Charles Leland, is
now appearing in shilling numbers.
{141} 1. “Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft.” Von W. H. Riehl. Dritte
Auflage. 1855. 2. “Land und Leute.” Von W. H. Riehl. Dritte Auflage.
1856.
{164} Throughout this article in our statement of Riehl’s opinions we
must be understood not as quoting Riehl, but as interpreting and
illustrating him.
{205} 1. “Young’s Works.” 1767. 2. “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.”
Edited by Peter Cunningham Murray: 1854. 3. “Life of Edward Young,
LL.D.” By Dr. Doran. Prefixed to “Night Thoughts.” Routledge: 1853.
4. _Gentleman’s Magazine_, 1782. 5. “Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes.”
Vol. I. 6. “Spence’s Anecdotes.”
{257} “History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in
Europe.” By W. E. H. Lecky, M.A. Longman & Co., London.
{272} “The Grammar of Ornament.” By Owen Jones, Architect. Illustrated
by Examples from various Styles of Ornament. Onto hundred and twelve
plates. Day & Son, London.
***
