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Title: My Commonplace Book

Author: Various

Editor: J. T. Hackett

Release Date: November 5, 2019 [EBook #60637]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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[i]

MY
COMMONPLACE
BOOK

J. T. HACKETT

“Omne meum, nihil meum”

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

[ii]

[iii]

First publication in Great Britain, September, 1919.

Second English Edition, September, 1920.

Third English Edition, January, 1921.

[iv]

[v]

[vi]

[vii]

DEDICATED
TO MY
DEAR FRIEND
RICHARD HODGSON
WHO HAS PASSED OVER
TO THE OTHER SIDE

[viii]

[ix]

PREFACE[2]

A large proportion of the most interesting quotations in this book was collected between 1874 and 1886. During that period I was under the influence of Richard Hodgson, who was my close friend from childhood. To him directly and indirectly this book is largely indebted.

Hodgson (1855-1905) had a remarkably pure, noble, and lovable character, and was one of the most gifted men Australia has produced. He is known in philosophic circles from some early contributions to Mind and other journals, but is mainly known from his work in psychical research, to which he devoted the best years of his life. Apart from his great ability in other directions, he was endowed, even in youth, with fine taste and a clear and mature literary judgment. This will appear to some extent in the quotations over his name, and the note on p. 208 will give further particulars of his career. He was from two to three years older than myself, and guided me in my early reading. Therefore, indirectly, he has to do with most of the contents of this book.

But, more than this, about one-third of the main quotations (not including the notes which I have only now added) came direct from Hodgson. He left Australia in 1877, but we maintained a voluminous correspondence until 1886. This correspondence contained most of the quotations referred to, and the remainder[x] Hodgson gave me in London on the only occasion I met him after he left Australia. (After 1886 he became so immersed in psychical research, and I in legal work, that our correspondence ceased to be of a literary character.) Thus directly and indirectly Hodgson has much to do with the book—and, if it had been practicable, I would have placed his name on the title-page.

This book is simply one to be taken up at odd moments, like any other collection of quotations. But there are two reasons why it may have some special interest. One reason is that it includes passages from a number of authors who appear to have become forgotten, or, at any rate, to be passing Lethe-wards. We, who dwell in the underworld,[3] cannot, of course, have a complete knowledge of what is known or forgotten in the inner literary circles of England. We can depend only on the books and periodicals that happen to come to our hands, and perhaps should not rely too much on such sources of information. Yet I cannot but think that Robert Buchanan, for example, has become largely forgotten, and apparently this is the case also with a number of other authors from whom I quote. Because of this, I have retained all the passages I had from such authors.

It must be remembered that this book is not an anthology. A commonplace book is usually a collection of reminders made by a young man who cannot afford an extensive library. There is no system in such a collection. A book is borrowed and extracts made from it; another book by the same author is bought and no extract made from it. On the one hand a favourite verse, although well known, is written out for some reason or other; on the other hand hundreds of beautiful poems are omitted. So far from this being an anthology, I have, as a matter of course, omitted many poems that since the seventy-eighty period have become general favourites; and, as regards the most beautiful gems of our literature, they are almost all excluded. There are for example, only a few lines from Shakespeare.

Some exceptions have, however, been made. In a series of word-pictures, a few of the best-known passages will be found. A few others have been included for reasons that will readily appear; they either form part of a series or the reason is apparent from the notes. Apart from these I have retained Blanco White’s great sonnet and “The Night has a thousand eyes,” written by F. W. Bourdillon when an undergraduate at Worcester College, Oxford, because with regard to these I had an interesting and instructive experience. I accidentally discovered that of four well-read men (two at least of them more thorough students[xi] of poetry than myself) two were ignorant of the one poem and two of the other. Seeking an explanation, I turned to the anthologies. I could not find in any of them Bourdillon’s little gem until I came to the comparatively recent Oxford Book of Victorian Verse and The Spirit of Man. The Blanco White sonnet I could find nowhere except in collections of sonnets, which in my opinion are little read. It will be observed that in anthologies alone can Blanco White’s one and only poem be kept alive.

The second reason why this book may have a special interest is that it may serve as a reminder to my contemporaries of our stirring thoughts and experiences in the seventies and eighties. How interesting this period was it is difficult to show in a few lines. In pure literature, books of value simply poured from the press. In the closing year, 1889, “One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward” died on the day that his last book, Asolando, was published, leaving Tennyson, an old man of eighty, the sole survivor of the poets of a great period. At almost the same moment “Crossing the Bar” was published.

Apart from literature, the seventies and eighties were an eventful period in science and religion. Darwinism was still causing its tremendous upheaval, and the supposed conflict between religion and science exercised an enormous effect on the minds of men. Evolution had explained so much of the processes in the history of life, that the majority of thinkers at that time imagined that no room was left for the super-natural. Science was supposed to have given a death-blow to religion, and the greatest wave of materialism ever known in the history of the world swept over England and Europe. It is strange how many great thinkers missed what now appears so obvious a fact, that causality still stood behind all law, and that Darwin, like Newton, had merely helped to show the method by which the universe is governed. (It seems to me that James Martineau stood supreme at that time as a man of genius who saw clearly the inherent defect of the whole materialist movement.)

However, agnosticism, materialism, positivism flourished and triumphed. Science, whose dignity had been so long unrecognized, came into her own, and, in her turn, usurped the same dogmatic superior attitude she had resented in ecclesiasticism. On the one hand pessimistic literature and philosophy poured from the press; on the other hand new religions arose to take the place of the old. Theosophy and spiritualism were in evidence everywhere (leading in 1882 to the happy result that the Society for Psychical Research was founded). Harrison, Clifford, Swinburne and others preached the deification of man. There were discords within, as well as foes without the church. The severely orthodox fought against the revelations of Colenso and the higher[xii] criticism; Seeley’s Ecce Homo and a host of other works aroused fierce antagonism; Pius IX, who had in 1864 published his Syllabus which would have destroyed modern civilization, proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope in 1870—and in 1872 was deprived of temporal power. Such questions as the literal interpretation and inerrancy of the Bible were the subjects of intense conflict—and especially strange is it to remember the dire struggle of well-intentioned men to maintain the horrible doctrine of eternal punishment. I imagine that this book will assist to some extent in recalling the atmosphere and aroma of that remarkable period.

I have made very little attempt to arrange my quotations—and now wish I had done less in that direction. The book is intended for casual reading, and to arrange it under headings would tend to make it heavy. The element of surprise is more calculated to make the book attractive.

I began the notes that are appended to some of the quotations with the intention of giving only such short, necessary explanations as would be of assistance to the inexperienced reader. When, however, I began to write, I found my pen running away with me. Apart from the usual, ineffectual efforts of one’s youth, I had never before attempted literary work, and for the first time experienced the great pleasure there is in such writing. With the immense variety of subjects in a collection of quotations, one could continue to write over a series of years; but it was necessary to keep the book within reasonable bounds, and, therefore, I had arbitrarily to come to a stop. In these notes I do not claim that there is much, if any, originality,[4] they are mostly recollections of old reading. Still they may serve the important purpose of revivifying old truths (see p. 78).

I have been astonished at the great deal of work this book has involved—and also how much I have needed the assistance of my friends. There were some sixty or seventy quotations in respect to which I had neglected to give any reference to the authors (for the same reason as one did not put the names on photographs of old friends—it seemed impossible that the names could be forgotten). The difficulty of finding even one such quotation is enormous, and we have no British Museum in Adelaide, but only some limited public libraries. However, with the help of my friends I have succeeded in tracing the paternity of most of these “orphans.” In this and other directions I have had the kind assistance of many gentlemen. Of these first and[xiii] foremost comes Mr. G. F. Hassell, the publisher of the Adelaide edition, who, in his devotion to literature as well as to his own art of printing, is a worthy representative of the old Renaissance printers. He has given me every assistance, has gone through every line, and, as he is both an exceedingly well-read man and also of a younger generation than myself, I have left it to him to decide what should be omitted and what retained in this book. Professor Mitchell has also been so kind as to revise and make suggestions concerning a number of notes on philosophic and other subjects. Professor Darnley Naylor has been uniformly good in revising any notes of a classical nature—though he takes no responsibility whatever for the views I express. Dr. E. Harold Davies has also helped me with two notes on music, in one instance correcting a serious mistake I had made. Sir Langdon Bonython, my friend of many years, has assisted me with practical as well as literary suggestions, and has thrown open his library to me. Mr. Francis Edwards, of High Street, Marylebone, has assisted in my search for references to quotations. Mr. H. Rutherford Purnell, Public Librarian of Adelaide, and his staff have helped me throughout, and Mr. E. La Touche Armstrong, Public Librarian of Melbourne, has gone to great trouble on my account. Miss M. R. Walker has assisted me in various ways, and especially in preparing the very difficult Index of Subjects. Mr. Sydney Temple Thomas has lent me a number of important books I specially required. Others who have helped me in one way or another are two English friends, Mrs. Caroline Sidgwick and Mrs. Rachael Bray, Messrs. J. R. Fowler, H. W. Uffindell, S. Talbot Smith and Dr. J. W. Browne, of Adelaide, Professor Dettmann of New Zealand, Professor Hyslop of New York and Mr. F. C. Govers of the State War Council, Sydney.

For permission to include quotations from their works I thank the following authors: Rev. F. W. Boreham, Mr. F. W. Bourdillon, Mr. A. J. Edmunds, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Thomas Hardy, O.M., Professor Hobhouse, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. E. F. Knight, Mr. R. Le Gallienne, Mr. W. S. Lilly, Mr. Robert Loveman, Sir Frederick Pollock, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Professor A. H. Sayce, Mrs. Cronwright Schreiner, Mr. J. C. Squire, Mr. Herbert Trench, Mr. Samuel Waddington, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mr. F. A. Westbury, Mr. F. S. Williamson and Sir Francis Younghusband.

For extracts from the writings of their relatives I am grateful to Lady Arnold, Sir Francis Darwin, Mr. Henry James, The Earl of Lytton, Dr. Greville McDonald, Miss Martineau, Miss Massey, Mr. W. M. Meredith, Mrs. F. W. H. Myers, the Rev. Conrad Noel, Mr. William M. Rossetti, Sir Herbert Stephen and Lord Tennyson. Mr. Piddington has also given much assistance.

[xiv]

I am indebted to the following for quotations from the works of the authors named: of Ruskin to the Ruskin Literary Trustees and their publishers, Messrs. George Allen and Unwin; of Brunton Stephens to Messrs. Angus and Robertson; of C. S. Calverley to Messrs. G. Bell and Sons; of George Eliot to Messrs. William Blackwood & Sons; of James Kenneth Stephen to Messrs. Bowes and Bowes; of Francis Thompson to Messrs. Burns and Oates; of R. L. Stevenson to Messrs. Chatto and Windus and to Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons; of Robert Buchanan to Messrs. Chatto and Windus and to Mr. W. E. Martyn; of James Thomson (B.V.) to Messrs. P. J. and A. E. Dobell; of D. G. Rossetti to Messrs. Ellis; of Swinburne to Mr. W. Heinemann; of Mr. Le Gallienne, H. D. Lowry, Stephen Phillips and J. B. Tabb to Mr. John Lane; of R. Loveman to the J. B. Lippincott Co.; of A. K. H. Boyd, R. Jeffries, W. E. H. Lecky and the Rev. James Martineau, to Messrs. Longmans Green & Co.; of Alfred Austin, T. E. Brown, Lewis Carroll, Edward Fitzgerald, F. W. H. Myers, Walter Pater, Lord Tennyson and Charles Tennyson Turner to Messrs. Macmillan & Co.; of V. O’Sullivan to Mr. Elkin Matthews; of Mrs. Elizabeth Waterhouse to Messrs. Methuen & Co.; of Robert Browning to Mr. John Murray; of Dr. Moncure Conway and Sir Alfred Lyall to Messrs. Paul (Kegan), Trench Trubner & Co.; of George Gissing to Mr. James B. Pinker; of John Payne to Mr. O. M. Pritchard, his executor, and to Mr. Thomas Wright; of Sir Edwin Arnold, P. J. Bailey (Festus) and Coventry Patmore to Messrs. George Routledge & Sons; of G. Whyte Melville to Messrs. Ward Lock & Co. (songs and verses); of George MacDonald to Messrs. A. P. Watt & Son; Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s “L’Envoi” is reprinted from Departmental Ditties, by kind permission of the author and Messrs. Methuen & Co.; “To the True Romance” is published by Messrs. Macmillan & Co., to whom I am deeply indebted, not only for this and the permissions mentioned above, but also for much assistance in tracing copyrights. Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., Mr. John Murray and Messrs. A. P. Watt & Son have been most helpful in this direction, as have also been Messrs. T. B. Lippincott, the Oxford University Press and Messrs. Watts & Co. Messrs. Constable & Co. have generously granted permission for the quotations from George Meredith and, as the representatives in London of the Houghton Mifflin Co. of Boston, Mass., have secured the quotations from the works of American authors published by that Firm, viz., T. B. Aldrich, R. W. Gilder, W. V. Moody, S. M. B. Piatt, E. M. Thomas, C. D. Warner and the Classics of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier. Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons have also given much help; the lines from Anna Reeve Aldrich and R. C. Rogers are published by their New York House. Mr. Martin Seeker joins in the consent given by Mr. Squire for the extract from his poems. I thank the Editor[xv] of the Contemporary Review for quotations from the writings of Professor A. Bain and the Rev. R. F. Littledale; and the Editor of the Nineteenth Century for some lines by W. M. Hardinge (Greek Anthology) and an article on Multiplex Personality. I thank also the Society for Psychical Research for an obituary article by F. W. H. Myers on Gladstone, printed in the Journal of that Society.

For any unintentional omissions, oversights, or failures to trace rights I beg to tender my apologies. The distance of Adelaide from the centre of publication may, in some measure, serve as an excuse for such shortcomings.

All profits derived from the sale of this book will be paid to the Red Cross Fund.

J. T. Hackett.

Adelaide.

[xvi]

PREFACE
TO THE
SECOND ENGLISH EDITION.

In preparing this edition I have made a great number of more or less important corrections, alterations and additions. Most of these occupy only a few lines apiece and, although none call for special mention, they should together add to the interest and usefulness of this book. For a number of them I am indebted to Mr. Vernon Rendall, formerly editor of the Athenæum and Notes and Queries. With his wonderfully wide and exact knowledge of English and classical literature, he gave me much assistance and I am grateful to him.

The issue of a Second Edition enables me to thank my friend, Sir John Cockburn, for his truly remarkable kindness to me. When I sent this book home from Adelaide to be published, he undertook the heavy work of seeking the consent of the numerous copyright owners, negotiating with publishers, and seeing the book through the press. Only those who are experienced in such matters can realize the enormous amount of time and labour that all this involved. It is impossible for me to express adequately my obligations to my friend. He did not include any reference to himself in the original Preface, in spite of my insistence by letter and cable.

In associating his name with this book, I am bound to add that Sir John disagrees with and, therefore, disapproves of much that I have said in some notes on the Ancient Greeks.

J. T. Hackett.

London, September, 1920.

[xvii]

PREFACE
TO THE
THIRD ENGLISH EDITION.

This has presumably to be called a new edition, rather than a new issue, seeing that there are revisions and alterations. But these are not numerous, and the only ones to which I need call special attention are the substituted verses on pp. 153-5.

I am indebted to Mr. Denys Bray for permission to include his daughter’s verses.

J. T. Hackett.

Mentone, December, 1920.

[xviii]

YOUTH AND AGE

[1]

My Commonplace Book

ENGLAND

[3]

[5]

SACRIFICE

GREEKS OR GERMANS?

Do not imagine that you are fighting about a single issue, freedom or slavery. You have an empire to lose, and are exposed to danger by reason of the hatred which your imperial rule has inspired in other states. And you cannot resign your power, although some timid or unambitious spirits want you to act justly. For now your empire has become a despotism, a thing which in the opinion of mankind has been unjustly acquired yet cannot be safely relinquished. The men of whom I speak, if they could find followers, would soon ruin the state, and, if they were to found a state of their own, would just as soon ruin that.

(Speech by Pericles.)

I have observed again and again that a democracy cannot govern an empire; and never more clearly than now, when I see you regretting the sentence you pronounced on the Mityleneans. Having no fear or suspicion of one another, you deal with your allies on the same principle. You do not realize that, whenever you yield to them out of pity, or are prevailed on by their pleas, you are guilty of a weakness dangerous to yourselves and receive no gratitude from them. You need to bear in mind that your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are ever conspiring against you. They do not obey because of any kindness you show them: they obey just so far as you show yourselves their masters. They have no love for you, but are held down by force....

You must not be misled by pity, or eloquent pleading or by generosity. There are no three things more fatal to empire.

(Speech by Cleon) Thucydides, II, 63; III, 37, 40.

[6]

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he, that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives anything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Thomas Paine (1776).

FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY

PLATO TO STELLA

PTOLEMY

[11]

HERACLEITUS.

When I consider the shortness of my life, lost in an eternity before and behind, “passing away as the remembrance of a guest who tarrieth but a day,” the little space I fill or behold in the infinite immensity of spaces, of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me—when I reflect this, I am filled with terror, and wonder why I am here and not there, for there was no reason why it should be the one rather than the other; why now rather than then. Who set me here? By whose command and rule were this time and place appointed me? How many kingdoms know nothing of us! The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.

Pascal (Pensées).

[12]

Star unto star speaks light.

P. J. Bailey (Festus, Scene 1, Heaven).

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.

George Eliot (Romola).

[13]

(Referring to the Gorham case) The future historian of opinion will write of us in this strain: “The people who spoke the language of Shakespeare were great in the constructive arts: the remains of their vast works evince an extraordinary power of combining and economizing labour: their colonies were spread over both hemispheres, and their industry penetrated to the remotest tribes: they knew how to subjugate nature and to govern men: but the weakness of their thought presented a strange contrast to the vigour of their arm; and though they were an earnest people, their conceptions of human life and its Divine Author seems to have been of the most puerile nature. Some orations have been handed down—apparently delivered before one of their most dignified tribunals—in which the question is discussed: ‘In what way the washing of new-born babes according to certain rules prevented God’s hating them.’ The curious feature is, that the discussion turns entirely upon the manner in which this wetting operated; and no doubt seems to have been entertained by disputants, judges, or audience, that, without it, a child or other person dying would fall into the hands of an angry Deity, and be kept alive for ever to be tortured in a burning cave. Now, all researches into the contemporary institutions of the island show that its religion found its chief support among the classes possessing no mean station or culture, and that the education for the priesthood was the highest which the country afforded. This strange belief must be taken, therefore, as the measure, not of popular ignorance, but of their most intellectual faith. A philosophy and worship embodying such a superstition can present nothing to reward the labour of research.”

James Martineau (Essay on “The Church of England”).

[16]

[17]

DE TEA FABULA

[20]

TO THE MOON

There is no short cut, no patent tramroad, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

George Eliot (The Lifted Veil).

[25]

I love and honour Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. Nor can you excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, “He acted, and thou sittest still.” I see action to be good when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock, and one for the sleeper of a bridge; the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.

R. W. Emerson (Spiritual Laws).

You know what a sad and sombre decorum it is that outwardly reigns through the lands oppressed by Moslem sway. By a strange chance in these latter days, it happened that, alone of all the places in the land, this Bethlehem, the native village of our Lord, escaped the moral yoke of the Mussulmans, and heard again, after ages of dull oppression, the cheering clatter of social freedom, and the voices of laughing girls. When I was at Bethlehem, though long after the flight of the Mussulmans, the cloud of Moslem propriety had not yet come back to cast its cold shadow upon life. When you reach that gladsome village, pray heaven there still may be heard there the voice of free innocent girls. Distant at first, and then nearer and nearer the timid flock will gather round you with their large burning eyes[26] gravely fixed against yours, so that they see into your brain; and if you imagine evil against them they will know of your ill-thought before it is yet well born, and will fly and be gone in the moment. But presently if you will only look virtuous enough to prevent alarm, and vicious enough to avoid looking silly, the blithe maidens will draw nearer and nearer to you; and soon there will be one, the bravest of the sisters, who will venture right up to your side, and touch the hem of your coat in playful defiance of the danger; and then the rest will follow the daring of their youthful leader, and gather close round you, and hold a shrill controversy on the wondrous formation that you call a hat, and the cunning of the hands that clothed you with cloth so fine; and then, growing more profound in their researches, they will pass from the study of your mere dress to a serious contemplation of your stately height, and your nut-brown hair, and the ruddy glow of your English cheeks. And if they catch a glimpse of your ungloved fingers, then again will they make the air ring with their sweet screams of delight and amazement, as they compare the fairness of your hand with the hues of your sunburnt face, or with their own warmer tints. Instantly the ringleader of the gentle rioters imagines a new sin; with tremulous boldness she touches, then grasps your hand, and smoothes it gently betwixt her own, and pries curiously into its make and colour, as though it were silk of Damascus or shawl of Cashmere. And when they see you, even then still sage and gentle, the joyous girls will suddenly, and screamingly, and all at once, explain to each other that you are surely quite harmless and innocent—a lion that makes no spring—a bear that never hugs; and upon this faith, one after the other, they will take your passive hand, and strive to explain it, and make it a theme and a controversy. But the one—the fairest and the sweetest of all—is yet the most timid; she shrinks from the daring deeds of her playmates, and seeks shelter behind their sleeves, and strives to screen her glowing consciousness from the eyes that look upon her. But her laughing sisters will have none of this cowardice; they vow that the fair one shall be their complice—shall share their dangers—shall touch the hand of the stranger; they seize her small wrist and draw her forward by force, and at last, whilst yet she strives to turn away, and to cover up her whole soul under the folds of downcast eyelids, they vanquish her utmost strength, they vanquish her utmost modesty and marry her hand to yours. The quick pulse springs from her fingers and throbs like a whisper upon your listening palm. For an instant her large timid eyes are upon you—in an instant they are shrouded again, and there comes a blush so burning, that the frightened girls stay their shrill laughter as though they had played too perilously and harmed their gentle sister. A moment, and all with a sudden intelligence turn away and fly like deer; yet soon[27] again like deer they wheel round, and return, and stand, and gaze upon the danger, until they grow brave once more.

A. W. Kinglake (Eothen).

Discedant nunc amores; maneat Amor.

(Loves, farewell; let Love, the sole, remain.)

Author not traced.

[28]

UNTIL DEATH

[30]

DEATH

Je prends mon bien où je le trouve.

(I take my property wherever I find it.)

Molière (1622-1673).

[34]

The disposition to judge every enterprise by its event, and believe in no wisdom that is not endorsed by success, is apt to grow upon us with years, till we sympathize with nothing for which we cannot take out a policy of assurance.

James Martineau (Hours of Thought I, 87).

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

De Quincey (Murder, as one of the Fine Arts).

Mrs. Crupp had indignantly assured him that there wasn’t room to swing a cat there; but, as Mr. Dick justly observed to me, sitting down on the foot of the bed, nursing his leg, “You know, Trotwood, I don’t want to swing a cat. I never do swing a cat. Therefore, what does that signify to me!”

Dickens (David Copperfield).

[35]

(After looking at his watch) “Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter would not suit the works!” he added, looking angrily at the March Hare.

“It was the best butter,” the March Hare replied.

Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland).

“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, “and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with an M—”

“Why with an M?” said Alice.

“Why not?” said the March Hare.

Alice was silent.

Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland).

Perhaps, as two negatives make one affirmative, it may be thought that two layers of moonshine might coalesce into one pancake; and two Barmecide banquets might be the square root of one poached egg.

Author not traced.

In a Dublin lunatic asylum, one of the inmates peremptorily ordered a visitor to take off his hat. Deferentially obeying the order, the visitor asked why he should remove his hat. The lunatic replied: “Do you not know, sir, that I am the Crown Prince of Prussia?” Having duly made his apologies, the visitor proceeded on his round; but, coming upon the same lunatic, was met with the same demand. Again obeying the order, he repeated the question: “May I ask why you wish me to take off my hat?” The lunatic replied: “Are you not aware, sir, that I am the Prince of Wales?” “But,” said the visitor, “you told me just now you were the Crown Prince of Prussia.” The lunatic, after scratching his head and deliberating for a moment, replied: “Ah, but that was by a different mother.”

(Another Irish lunatic always lost himself and insisted on looking for himself under the bed.)

Author not traced.

[36]

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

(Much Ado About Nothing.)

Pointz. Come, your reason, Jack,—your reason.

Falstaff. Give you a reason on compulsion! If reasons were as plenty as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.

(1 Henry IV, ii, 4.)

Still I cannot believe in clairvoyance—because the thing is impossible.

Samuel Rogers, 1763-1855 (Table Talk).

TO THE TRUE ROMANCE

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

George Eliot (Middlemarch).

The stars make no noise.

Irish Proverb.

[40]

WHO FANCIED WHAT A PRETTY SIGHT

They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law. All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an inter-radiating connection and dependence of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already embodied. The blank, which is only a forgotten life lying behind the consciousness, and the misty splendour, which is an undeveloped life lying before it, may be full of mysterious revelations of other connections with the worlds around us than those of science and poetry. No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and green glory in a self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation with the hidden things of a man’s soul, and, it may be, with the secret history of his body as well. They are portions of the living house within which he abides.

G. MacDonald (Phantastes).

[41]

(Dr. Slop has been uttering terrible curses against Obadiah) I declare, quoth my Uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the devil himself with so much bitterness.—He is the father of curses, replied Dr. Slop.—So am not I, replied my uncle.—But he is cursed and damned already to all eternity, replied Dr. Slop.

I am sorry for it, quoth my Uncle Toby.

Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy).

[42]

“Shargar, what think ye? Gin the deil war to repent, wad God forgie him?”

“There’s no sayin’ what folk wad dae till ance they’re tried,” returned Shargar cautiously.

George MacDonald (Robert Falconer, ch. xii.)

AN EXCELENTE BALADE OF CHARITIE

[45]

You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows. Wise men are afraid to say that there is anything contrary to nature, except what is contrary to mathematical truth, as that two and two cannot make five. There are dozens and hundreds of things in the world which we should[48] certainly have said were contrary to nature, if we did not see them going on under our eyes all day long. If people had never seen little seeds grow into great plants and trees, of quite different shapes from themselves, and these trees again produce fresh seeds, they would have said, “The thing cannot be”.... Suppose that no human being had ever seen or heard of an elephant. And suppose that you described him to people, and said, “This is the shape, and plan, and anatomy of the beast ... and this is the section of his skull, more like a mushroom than a reasonable skull of a reasonable or unreasonable beast; yet he is the wisest of all beasts, and can do everything save read, write, and cast accounts.” People would surely have said, “Nonsense; your elephant is contrary to nature,” and have thought you were telling stories—as the French thought of Le Vaillant when he came back to Paris and said that he had shot a giraffe; and as the King of the Cannibal Islands thought of the English sailor, when he said that in his country water turned to marble, and rain fell as feathers. The truth is that folks’ fancy that such and such things cannot be, simply because they have not seen them, is worth no more than a savage’s fancy that there cannot be such a thing as a locomotive, because he never saw one running wild in the forest.

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) (Water-Babies).

[49]

THE DARK GLASS

The gods are on the side of the strongest.

Tacitus (Hist. 4, 17).

THE OCTOPUS

By ALGERNON SINBURN

He seemed to me to be one of those men who have not very extended minds, but who know what they know very well—shallow streams, and clear because they are shallow.

S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

R. L. Stevenson (Virginibus Puerisque).

Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.

(To know all is forgive all.)

French Proverb.

The true life of the human community is planted deep in the private affections of its members; in the greatness of its individual minds; in the pure severities of its domestic conscience; in the noble and transforming thoughts that fertilize its sacred nooks. Who can observe, without astonishment, the durable action of men truly great on the history of the world, and the evanescence of vast military revolutions, once threatening all things with destruction? How often is it the fate of the former to be invisible for an age, and then live for ever; of the latter, to sweep a generation from the earth, and then vanish with slight trace?

James Martineau (The Outer and the Inner Temple).

[52]

A century ago men were following, with bated breath, the march of Napoleon, and waiting with feverish impatience for the latest news of the wars. And all the while, in their own homes, babies were being born. But who could think about babies? Everybody was thinking about battles. In one year, lying midway between Trafalgar and Waterloo, there stole into the world a host of heroes! During that one year, 1809, Mr. Gladstone was born in Liverpool; Alfred Tennyson was born at the Somersby rectory and Oliver Wendell Holmes made his first appearance in Massachusetts. On the very self-same day of that self-same year Charles Darwin made his debut at Shrewsbury, and Abraham Lincoln drew his first breath in old Kentucky. Music was enriched by the advent of Frederic Chopin at Warsaw, and of Felix Mendelssohn at Hamburg. Within the same year, too, Samuel Morley was born in Homerton, Edward Fitzgerald in Woodbridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Durham, and Frances Kemble in London. But nobody thought of babies. Everybody was thinking of battles. Yet, viewing that age in the truer perspective which the distance of a hundred years enables us to command, we may well ask ourselves, “Which of the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies of 1809?” ...

We fancy that God can only manage His world by big battalions abroad, when all the while He is doing it by beautiful babies at home. When a wrong wants righting, or a truth wants preaching, or a continent wants opening, God sends a baby into the world to do it. That is why, long, long ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem.

Frank W. Boreham (Mountains in the Mist).

REINFORCEMENTS

THE WIND

WHAT OF THE DARKNESS?

Continuing the work of creation, i.e., co-operating as instruments of Providence in bringing order out of disorder ... is only a part of the mission of mankind, and the time will come again when its due rank will be assigned to contemplation and the calm culture of reverence and love. Then poetry will resume her equality with prose.... But that time is not yet, and the crowning glory of Wordsworth is that he has borne witness to it and kept alive its traditions in an age, which, but for him, would have lost sight of it entirely.

J. S. Mill.

My sarcastic friend says, with the utmost gravity, that no man with less than a thousand pounds a year can afford to have private opinions upon certain important subjects. He admits that he has known it done upon eight hundred a year; but only by very prudent people with small families.

Sir A. Helps (Companions of my Solitude).

’Tis an old theme, this Divine Love, and it cannot be exhausted. Men have not outlived it, angels cannot outlearn it. It swayed the ancient world by many a fair god and goddess; its light has been cast over ages of Christian controversy and warfare; it is still the guiding Star of the Sea to each voyager after the nobler[55] faith. The youth leaves the old shore of belief, only because love has left it. His starved affections will no longer accept stone, though pulverized flour-like and artfully kneaded, for bread. Their white sails fill the purple and the sombre seas, and they hail each other to ask for the summer-land, where faith climbs to beauty, and the lost bowers of childhood’s trust may be found again.

Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907).

THE DARK COMPANION

[57]

SEQUEL TO “MY QUEEN”

The devil has made the stuff of our life and God makes the hem.

Victor Hugo (By the King’s Command).

I think, I said, I can make it plain that there are at least six personalities distinctly to be recognized as taking part in a dialogue between John and Thomas.

Three Johns: The real John—known only to his Maker. John’s ideal John—never the real one, and often very unlike him. Thomas’s ideal John—never the real John, nor John’s John, but often very unlike either.

[60]

Three Thomases: The real Thomas. Thomas’s ideal Thomas. John’s ideal Thomas.

Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a platform balance; but the other two are just as important in the conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks from the point of view of this ideal. Thomas, again, believes him to be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore he is, so far as Thomas’s attitude in the conversation is concerned, an artful rogue, though really simple and stupid. The same conditions apply to the three Thomases. It follows that, until a man can be found who knows himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself as others see him, there must be at least six persons engaged in every dialogue between two. Of these the least important, philosophically speaking, is the one that we have called the real person. No wonder two disputants often get angry, when there are six of them talking and listening all at the same time.

(A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made by a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable little known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the meantime he had eaten the peaches.)

O. W. Holmes (Autocrat of the Breakfast Table).

[61]

A HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER.

[62]

Very likely female pelicans like so to bleed under the selfish little beaks of their young ones: it is certain that women do. There must be some sort of pleasure, which we men don’t understand, which accompanies the pain of being scarified.

Thackeray (Pendennis).

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

George Eliot (Felix Holt).

LET IT BE THERE.

Every man hath his gift, one a cup of wine, another heart’s blood.

Hafiz.

The devil could drive woman out of Paradise; but the devil himself cannot drive the Paradise out of a woman.

G. MacDonald (Robert Falconer).

THE PULLEY

(Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in November, 1859.) At the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860 Huxley had on Thursday, June 28, directly contradicted Professor Owen’s statement that a gorilla’s brain differed more from a man’s than it did from the brain of the lowest of the Quadrumana (apes, monkeys, and lemurs). He was thus marked out as the champion of evolution. On the Saturday, although the public were not admitted, the members crowded the room to suffocation, anxious to hear the brilliant controversialist, Bishop Wilberforce, take part in the debate. An unimportant paper was read bearing upon Darwinism, and a discussion followed. The Bishop, inspired by Owen, began his speech. He spoke in dulcet tones, persuasive manner, and with well-turned periods, but ridiculing Darwin badly and Huxley savagely. “In a light, scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution: rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to Huxley, with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey.”

As he said this, Huxley turned to his neighbour and said, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands!” On rising to speak, he first gave a forcible and eloquent reply to the scientific part of the Bishop’s argument. Then “he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words—words, which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. “He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor: but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.” No one[65] doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat.” (Macmillan’s, 1898.) There is no verbatim report of this incident, but the varying accounts agree in outline.

(Extracted from Life of Huxley.)

On tracing the line of life backwards, we see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical condition. We come at length to those organisms which I have compared to drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water. We reach the protogenes of Haeckel, in which we have “a type distinguishable from a fragment of albumen only by its finely granular character.” Can we pause here? We break a magnet and find two poles in each of its fragments. We continue the process of breaking; but however small the parts, each carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. And when we can break no longer, we prolong the intellectual vision to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do something similar in the case of life?... Believing, as I do, in the continuity of nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By a necessity engendered and justified by science I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.

[66]

(Referring to the question of inquiring into the mystery of our origin). Here, however, I touch a theme too great for me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled by the loftiest minds, when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.

John Tyndall.

THE NEW GOSPEL

[71]

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

Swift (Gulliver’s Travels).

A child of our grandmother Eve, a female, or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.

(Love’s Labour Lost, I, 1.)

The whole World was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman: Man is the whole World, and the Breath of God; Woman the rib and crooked piece of man.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (Religio Medici).

A woman is the most inconsistent compound of obstinacy and self-sacrifice that I am acquainted with.

J. P. F. Richter (Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces).

[73]

God made the world in six days, and then he rested. He then made man and rested again. He then made woman and, since then, neither man, woman, nor anything else has rested.

Author not traced.

What is experience? A little cottage made with the débris of those palaces of gold and marble which we call our illusions.

Author not traced.

A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said, “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.

S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).

THE BALLAD OF JUDAS ISCARIOT

[78]

The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.

Alexander Smith (On the Writing of Essays).

It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.

Sydney Smith.

In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstances of their universal admission. Extremes meet. Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.

S. T. Coleridge (Aids to Reflection).

[80]

I’m not denying the women are foolish: God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

George Eliot (Adam Bede).

[81]

The Baptist might be in the Wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening with all their might and faith to the preacher’s awful accents and denunciations of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd, and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse, over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato, or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what, we say, does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful, because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Myths alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest farther than a laugh: if, plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward.

W. M. Thackeray (Pendennis, XXIII).

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his[82] neighbour, to his God; an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop.

R. L. Stevenson (Pulvis et Umbra).

A CHARGE.

[83]

Human nature, trained in the School of Christianity, throws away as false the delineation of piety in the disguise of Hebe, and declares that there is something higher than happiness—that thought which is ever full of care and truth is better far—that all true and disinterested affection, which often is called to mourn, is better still—that the devoted allegiance of conscience to duty and to God—which ever has in it more of penitence than of joy—is noblest of all.

James Martineau (Endeavours after the Christian Life, p. 42).

There is in man a Higher than Love of Happiness; he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs, the poet and the priest, in all times have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom? Which God-inspired Doctrine art thou also honoured to be taught; O Heavens! and broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even till thou become contrite and learn it! O thank thy Destiny for these; thankfully bear what yet remain; thou hadst need of them; the Self in thee needed to be annihilated.... Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.... To the Worship of Sorrow, ascribe what origin and genesis thou pleasest, has not that Worship originated, and been generated? Is it not here? Feel it in thy heart, and then say whether it is of God! This is Belief; all else is Opinion.... Do the Duty which liest nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty. The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. The Ideal is in thyself.

Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus).

[84]

[85]

[86]

THE FEAST OF ADONIS.

Gorgo. Is Praxinoë at home?

Praxinoë. My dear Gorgo, at last! Yes, here I am. Euno, find a chair—get a cushion for it.

Gorgo. It will do beautifully as it is.

Praxinoë. Do sit down.

[87]

Gorgo. Oh, this gad-about spirit! I could hardly get to you, Praxinoë, through all the crowd and all the carriages. Nothing but heavy boots, nothing but men in uniform. And what a journey it is! My dear child, you really live too far off.

Praxinoë. It is all that insane husband of mine. He has chosen to come out here to the end of the world, and take a hole of a place—for a house it is not—on purpose that you and I might not be neighbours. He is always just the same—anything to quarrel with one! anything for spite!

Gorgo. My dear, don’t talk so of your husband before the little fellow. Just see how astonished he looks at you. (Talking to the child.) Never mind, Zopyrio my pet, she is not talking about papa. (Good heavens, the child does really understand.) Pretty papa!

Praxinoë. That “pretty papa” of his the other day (though I told him beforehand to mind what he was about), when I sent him to a shop to buy soap and rouge, brought me home salt instead; stupid, great, big, interminable animal!

Gorgo. Mine is just the fellow to him. But never mind now, get on your things and let us be off to the palace to see the Adonis. I hear the Queen’s decorations are something splendid.

Praxinoë. “In grand people’s houses everything is grand.” What things you have seen in Alexandria! What a deal you will have to tell to anybody who has never been there!

Gorgo. Come, we ought to be going.

Praxinoë. “Every day is a holiday to people who have nothing to do.” Eunoë, pick up your work; and take care, you lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again; the cats find it just the bed they like. Come, stir yourself, fetch me some water, quick! I wanted the water first, and the girl brings me the soap. Never mind; give it me. Not all that, extravagant! Now pour out the water—stupid! Why don’t you take care of my dress? That will do. I have got my hands washed as it pleased God. Where is the key of the large wardrobe? Bring it here—quick!

Gorgo. Praxinoë, you can’t think how well that dress, made full, as you have got it, suits you. Tell me, how much did it cost—the dress by itself, I mean?

Praxinoë. Don’t talk of it, Gorgo: more than eight guineas of good hard money. And about the work on it, I have almost worn my life out.

Gorgo. Well, you couldn’t have done better.

Praxinoë. Thank you. Bring me my shawl, and put my hat properly on my head—properly. No, child (to her little boy,) I am not going to take you; there’s a bogey on horseback[88] who bites. Cry as much as you like; I’m not going to have you lamed for life. Now we’ll start. Nurse take the little one and amuse him; call the dog in, and shut the street door. (They go out.) Good heavens! what a crowd of people! How on earth are we ever to get through all this? They are like ants: you can’t count them. My dearest Gorgo, what will become of us? Here are the Royal Horse Guards. My good man, don’t ride over me! Look at that bay horse rearing bolt upright; what a vicious one! Eunoë, you mad girl, do take care!—that horse will certainly be the death of the man on his back. How glad I am now, that I left the child safe at home.

Gorgo. All right, Praxinoë, we are safe behind them; and they have gone on to where they are stationed.

Praxinoë. Well, yes, I begin to revive again. From the time I was a little girl I have had more horror of horses and snakes than of anything else in the world. Let us get on; here’s a great crowd coming this way upon us.

Gorgo (to an old woman). Mother, are you from the palace?

Old woman. Yes, my dears.

Gorgo. Has one a tolerable chance of getting there?

Old woman. My pretty young lady, the Greeks got to Troy by dint of trying hard; trying will do anything in this world.

Gorgo. The old creature has delivered an oracle and disappeared.

Praxinoë. Women can tell you everything about everything, even about Jupiter’s marriage with Juno!

Gorgo. Look, Praxinoë, what a squeeze at the palace gates.

Praxinoë. Tremendous! Take hold of me, Gorgo; and you, Eunoë, take hold of Eutychis!—tight hold, or you’ll be lost. Here we go in all together. Hold tight to us, Eunoë! Oh, dear! oh, dear! Gorgo, there’s my scarf torn right in two. For heaven’s sake, my good man, as you hope to be saved, take care of my dress!

Stranger. I’ll do what I can, but it doesn’t depend upon me.

Praxinoë. What heaps of people! They push like a drove of pigs.

Stranger. Don’t be frightened, ma’am, we are all right.

Praxinoë. May you be all right, my dear sir, to the last day you live, for the care you have taken of us! What a kind, considerate man! There is Eunoë jammed in a squeeze. Push, you goose, push! Capital! We are all of us the right side of the door, as the bridegroom said when he had locked himself in with the bride.

[89]

Gorgo. Praxinoë, come this way. Do but look at that work, how delicate it is!—how exquisite! Why, the gods might wear it in heaven.

Praxinoë. Goddess of Spinning, what hands were hired to do that work? Who designed those beautiful patterns? They seem to stand up and move about, as if they were real—as if they were living things, and not needlework. Well, man is a wonderful creature! And look, look, how charming he lies there on his silver couch, with just a soft down on his cheeks, that beloved Adonis—Adonis, whom one loves even though he is dead!

Another stranger. You wretched women, do stop your incessant chatter! Like turtles, you go on for ever.

Gorgo. Lord, where does the man come from? What is it to you if we are chatterboxes? Order about your own servants!

Praxinoë. Oh, honey-sweet Proserpine, let us have no more masters than the one we’ve got! We don’t the least care for you; pray don’t trouble yourself for nothing.

Gorgo. Be quiet, Praxinoë! That first-rate singer, the Argive woman’s daughter, is going to sing the Adonis hymn. She is the same who was chosen to sing the dirge last year. We are sure to have something first-rate from her. She is going through her airs and graces ready to begin.

Theocritus (Fifteenth Idyll).

Marriage is a desperate thing; the Frogs in Aesop were extreme wise: they had a great mind to some Water, but they would not leap into the Well, because they could not get out again.

’Tis reason a Man that will have a Wife should be at the Charge of her Trinkets, and pay all the Scores she sets on him. He that will keep a Monkey, ’tis fit he should pay for the Glasses he breaks.

Selden (Table Talk).

When you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much to learn so little, as the charity-boy said wen he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o’ taste. I rayther think it isn’t.

Charles Dickens (Pickwick Papers).

[91]

Matrimony is the only game of chance the clergy favour.

Author not traced.

A man, who admires a fine woman, has yet no more reason to wish himself her husband, than one, who admired the Hesperian fruit, would have had to wish himself the dragon that kept it.

Alexander Pope.

IN THE TWILIGHT.

[93]

I am especially pleased with their freundin (the German word meaning a female friend), which unlike the amica of the Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now I know it will be said that a friend is already something more than a friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a female; but this I deny—in that sense at least in which the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a sister—nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.

S. T. Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, Letter to a Lady).

Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer when once we know them.

Alexander Pope.

[95]

Compare the ancient with the modern world; “Look on this picture, and on that.” One broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the epithet “holy.” In other words, there were not more than one or two, if any, who besides being virtuous in their actions were possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice regarded even a vicious thought with horror. Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth is, that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country since the time of Christ where a century has passed without exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has Christ failed? or can Christianity die?

Sir J. R. Seeley (Ecce Homo).

DAY

[96]

I shall be old and ugly one day, and I shall look for man’s chivalrous help, but I shall not find it. The bees are very attentive to the flowers till their honey is done, and then they fly over them.

Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm).

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate “Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.”

Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm).

Il n’a jamais fait couler larmes à personne sauf à sa mort.

(He never caused any one to shed tears, except at his death.)

B. Seebohm’s Life of Grellet.

... that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.

George Eliot (Middlemarch).

If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—I say there is a third, and that is ignorance, when one is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.

George Eliot (Romola—Nello speaking).

[97]

[98]

“You remember Tom Martin, Neddy? Bless my dear eyes,” said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and gazing abstractedly out of the grated window before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth; “it seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox-under-the-hill, by the wharf there. I think I can see him now, a-coming up the Strand between the two street-keepers, a little sobered by his bruising, with a patch o’ winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and that ’ere lovely bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a-following at his heels. What a rum thing Time is, ain’t it, Neddy?”

Charles Dickens (Pickwick Papers).

THE COURTIN’

What is the life of man? Is it not to turn from side to side? From sorrow to sorrow? To button up one cause of vexation and unbutton another?

Sterne (Tristram Shandy).

[101]

I know thy heart by heart.

P. J. Bailey (Festus).

HERBERT SPENCER’S “FIRST PRINCIPLES.”

Mr. Spencer’s genesis of the universe from chaos to the Crimean War ... For our own part, we must confess that this new book of Genesis appears to us no more credible than the old.

J. Martineau (Science, Nescience, and Faith).

JAMES MILL.

Did the facts of consciousness stand, as he represents them, his method would work. He satisfactorily explains—the wrong human nature.

J. Martineau (Essay on John Stuart Mill).

(Referring to those who insist on the practical as against the theoretical.) This solitary term (“practical”) serves a large number of persons as a substitute for all patient and steady thought; and, at all events, instead of meaning that which is useful as opposed to that which is useless, it constantly signifies that of which the use is grossly and immediately palpable, as distinguished from that of which the usefulness can only be discerned after attention and exertion.

Sir Henry Maine.

(Men are) dragged along the physiological history, because easy to conceive, and baffled by the spiritual, because it has no pictures to help it.

J. Martineau (Hours of Thought, I, 100).

[102]

As psychology comprises all our sensibilities, pleasures, affections, aspirations, capacities, it is thought on that ground to have a special nobility and greatness, and a special power of evoking in the student the feelings themselves. The mathematician, dealing with conic sections, spirals, and differential equations, is in danger of being ultimately resolved into a function or a co-efficient: the metaphysician, by investigating conscience, must become conscientious; driving fat oxen is the way to grow fat.

Alexander Bain (1818-1903) (Contemporary Review, April 1877).

There is a crude absurd materialism abroad which hasn’t yet learned the fundamental difference between Mind and Matter. It is altogether incomprehensible how any material processes can beget sensations and feelings and thoughts; it is altogether incomprehensible how you arose or I arose. Listen to Spencer:—“Were we compelled to choose between the alternatives of translating mental phenomena into physical phenomena, or of translating physical phenomena into mental phenomena, the latter alternative would seem the more preferable of the two.... Hence though of the two it seems easier to translate so-called Matter into so-called Spirit, than to translate so-called Spirit into so-called Matter (which latter is, indeed, wholly impossible), yet no translation can carry us beyond our symbols.”

Richard Hodgson (Letter, March 21, 1880).

Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?

Malvolio. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion?

Malvolio. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.

Clown. Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness.

Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, IV, 2).

As the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, “That, that is, is.”

Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, IV, 2).

[103]

WHAT IS LOVE?

The passion which unites the sexes ... is the most compound, and therefore the most powerful of all the feelings. Added to the purely physical elements of it are, first, those highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty.... With this there is united the complex sentiment which we term affection—a sentiment which, as it can exist between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an independent sentiment.... Then there is the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence.... There comes next the feeling called love of approbation. To be preferred above all the world, and that by one admired above all others, is to have the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous experience.... Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment from, and sway over, another is a proof of power which cannot fail agreeably to excite the amour propre. Yet again, the proprietary feeling has its share in the general activity: there is the pleasure of possession—the two belong to each other. Once more, the relation allows of an extended liberty of action. Towards other persons a restrained behaviour is requisite. Round each there is a subtle boundary that may not be crossed—an individuality on which none may trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is gratified. Finally there is an exaltation of the sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by another’s sympathetic participation; and the pleasures of another are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling, forming the nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation, of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. These, all greatly exalted, and severally tending to reflect their excitements on one another, unite to form the mental state we call Love.

Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, 3rd Ed., Vol. I, 487).

WHAT AM I?

The aggregate of feelings and ideas, constituting the mental I, have not in themselves the principle of cohesion holding them together as a whole; but the I which continuously survives as the subject of these changing states is that portion of the[104] Unknowable Power, which is statically conditioned in (my particular one of those) special nervous structures pervaded by a dynamically-conditioned portion of the Unknowable Power called energy.

Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, 3rd Ed., Vol. II, 504).

New truths, old truths! sirs, there is nothing new possible to be revealed to us in the moral world; we know all we shall ever know: and it is for simply reminding us, by their various respective expedients, how we do know this and the other matter, that men get called prophets, poets, and the like. A philosopher’s life is spent in discovering that, of the half-dozen truths he knew when a child, such an one is a lie, as the world states it in set terms; and then, after a weary lapse of years, and plenty of hard-thinking, it becomes a truth again after all, as he happens to newly consider it and view it in a different relation with the others: and so he restates it, to the confusion of somebody else in good time. As for adding to the original stock of truths,—impossible!

R. Browning (A Soul’s Tragedy).

The law of equal freedom which Herbert Spencer deduces is binding only upon those who admit both that human happiness is the Divine Will and that we should act in accordance with the Divine Will. Why should I obey this law? Because without such obedience human happiness cannot be complete. Why should I aim at human happiness? Because human happiness is the Divine Will. The inexorable why pursues us here—Why should I aim at the fulfilment of the Divine Will? To this question there seems no satisfactory reply but that it is for my own happiness to do so.

Richard Hodgson (Unpublished Essay, 1879).

[105]

I have no ambition to wander into the inane and usurp the sceptre of the dim Hegel, situated Nowhere, with pure Nothing behind him, and pure Being before him, steadfastly and vainly endeavouring with his Werden to stop the sand-flowing of smiling Time.

Richard Hodgson (Early Unpublished Essay).

Edwin (afterwards Sir Edwin) Arnold was with Herbert Spencer on a Nile steamer. Spencer was dyspeptic and irritable; Arnold was a nocturnal bird, pacing the deck alone in a long gown and smoking a long pipe. Suddenly appeared a white figure, Spencer in his night-shirt, who in the bad light took Arnold for a sailor (and Arnold did not undeceive him).

“Hi! there!”

“Ay, ay, Sir.”

“What are the men making that noise there forward for?”

“Cleaning the engines, Sir.”

“Just tell them not to make such a row, keeping good Christians from their sleep at this time of night.”

“Ay, ay, Sir.”

(Disappearance of ghost; joke next morning,)

(Told by Arnold to Hodgson, June, 1884).

WILLIAM BLAKE.

[107]

[108]

Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony.... Even that vulgar and Tavern Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.... There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear as the whole World, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.

Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici).

(Speaking of an Essay on Wordsworth he is about to write for some Melbourne society) I purpose describing briefly the poetic tendencies, or rather the unpoetic tendencies, of the 18th Century, and the new school beginning to manifest itself in Cowper. I shall then refer to W.’s principles—shall banish to a future time the working out of the psychological connection between forms of nature and the human soul—shall banish also the feelings, the elementary feelings, of humanity, which W. drew powerful attention to, and confine myself to pointing out those characteristics in external nature which he took note of. These produce corresponding feelings in the “human,” and some of them are beauty, silence and calm, joyousness, generosity, freedom, grandeur, and Spirituality. These are found in Nature, and W. saw them, and in the growing familiarity with them a man’s soul becomes beautiful, calm, joyous, generous, free, grand, and spiritual. The first ones, of course, all depend on and grow from the last, and the Spirituality is God immanent. This last, as the root of all the others, will merit special attention—it exhibits W.’s poetico-philosophy so far as it regards the work of Nature upon man; and includes too the Platonic Reminiscence business. (Here follows personal chit-chat.) I think we might add the “supreme loftiness of labour” to the foregoing elements in Nature. In the Gipsies (I give both readings)

[109]

[110]

MEDITATIONS OF A HINDU PRINCE

[112]

MEDITATION OF A HINDU PRINCE AND SCEPTIC

[113]

The present writer ... was seated in a railway-carriage, five minutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certain waggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, and quite close to the window at which he sat. The cattle wore a much-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient, melancholy eyes,—for, as before mentioned, there was no space to speak of intervening,—a feeling of puzzlement arose in his mind.... The much-enduring animals in the trucks opposite had unquestionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world; of objects they had some unknown cognizance; but he could not get behind the melancholy eye within a yard of him and look through it. How, from that window, the world shaped itself, he could not discover, could not even fancy; and yet, staring on the animals, he was conscious of a certain fascination in which there lurked an element of terror. These wild, unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned together, lived, could choose between this thing and the other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could even love and hate; and gazing into a placid, heavy countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a yard away, he was conscious of an obscure and shuddering recognition of a life akin so far with his own. But to enter into that life imaginatively, and to conceive it, he found impossible. Eye looked upon eye, but the one could not flash recognition on the other; and, thinking of this, he remembers, with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came,—what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could be elicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there were indeed a point at which man and ox could meet and compare notes? Suppose some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye? Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would make a sudden dash into vegetarianism!

Alexander Smith (On the Importance of Man to Himself).

[114]

When I am playing with my Cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her? We entertaine one another with mutual apish trickes: If I have my houre to begin or to refuse, so hath she hers.

Montaigne (Bk. II, ch. 12).

[115]

THE LAMB

Who can wrestle against Sleep? Yet is that giant very gentleness.

Martin Tupper (Of Beauty).

ON A FINE MORNING

Of two opposite methods of action, do you desire to know which should have the preference? Calculate their effects in pleasures and pains, and prefer that which promises the greater sum of pleasures.

Think not that a man will so much as lift up his little finger on your behalf, unless he sees his advantage in it.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).

LIFE

[118]

[119]

PEU DE CHOSE ET PRESQUE TROP.

[120]

A very strange, fantastic world—where each one pursues his own golden bubble, and laughs at his neighbour for doing the same. I have been thinking how a moral Linnæus would classify our race.

Author not traced.

TWO LOVERS

[122]

Whatever else may or may not work on through eternity, we are bound to believe that the love, which moved the Father to redeem the world at such infinite cost, must work on, while there is one pang in the universe, born of sin, which can touch the Divine pity, or one wretched prodigal in rags and hunger far from the home and the heart of God.

Rev. Baldwin Brown.

[123]

Canon Farrar is not happy in his rejoinder to the argument that to cast a doubt on the endlessness of punishment is to invalidate the argument for the endlessness of bliss, since both rest on exactly the same Biblical sanction. There are three replies, cumulatively exhaustive, which he has failed to adduce.... (Firstly, evil and temptation are banished from heaven; Second, the two arguments do not rest on the same Biblical sanction) ... Thirdly, the difference of the two eternities, heaven and hell, consists in the presence or absence of God. Let us put α for each of those eternities or aeons, and θ to denote Him. The assertion of the equality of the two, then, is that α + θ = α - θ, which can stand only if θ = 0, the postulate of atheism.

Rev. R. F. Littledale, D.C.L.

I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of Hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place. I have so fixed my contemplations on Heaven, that I have almost forgot the Idea of Hell, and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one, than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a perfect Hell, and needs, methinks, no addition to compleat our afflictions. That terrible term hath never detained me from sin, nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear GOD, yet am not afraid of Him: His Mercies make me ashamed of my sins, before His Judgments afraid thereof.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (Religio Medici).

Ne nous imaginons pas que l’enfer consiste dans ces étangs de feu et de soufre, dans ces flammes éternellement dévorantes, dans cette rage, dans ce désespoir, dans cet horrible grincement de dents. L’enfer, si nous l’entendons, c’est péché même: l’enfer, c’est d’être éloigné de Dieu.

Bossuet (1627-1704).

[124]

... Sir Henry Wotton’s celebrated answer to a priest in Italy, who asked him, “Where was your religion to be found before Luther?” “My religion was to be found there—where yours is not to be found now—in the written word of God.” In Selden’s Table Talk we have the following more witty reply made to the same question: “Where was America an hundred or six score years ago?”

Boswell’s Life of Johnson, VIII, 176.

During the horrible time of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, a French priest and a Jew became very intimate friends. The priest, very anxious for the future welfare of his friend, urged him to be received into the church: and the Jew promised to earnestly consider this advice. The priest, however, gave up all hope on learning that the Jew was called by his business to Rome, where he would see the unutterably monstrous life of the Pope and clergy. To his surprise the Jew on his return announced that he wished to be baptized, saying that a religion, which could still exist in spite of such abominations, must be the true religion.

Author not traced.

I verily believe that, if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have strength and energy enough to stick it into a Dissenter.

Sydney Smith.

[125]

LONG EXPECTED

A QUESTION

To Fausta.

To see the soul as she really is, not as we now behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity—and then her beauty will be revealed.... We must remember that we have seen her only in a condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways, and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he is more like some monster than his own natural form. And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition, disfigured by ten thousand ills. But not there, Glaucon, not there must we look.

Where then!

At her love of wisdom. Let us see whom she affects, and what society and converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal and eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly following this superior principle, and borne[130] by a divine impulse out of the ocean in which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and shells and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up around her because she feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things of this life as they are termed: then you would see her as she is, and know ... what her nature is.

Plato (Republic, Bk. 10, Jowett’s translation).

Ah, gracious powers! I wish you would send me an old aunt—a maiden aunt—an aunt with a lozenge on her carriage and a front of light, coffee-coloured hair—how my children should work work-bags for her, and my Julia and I would make her comfortable! Sweet—sweet vision! Foolish—foolish dream!

Thackeray (Vanity Fair).

IDENTITY.

[131]

Has anyone ever pinched into its pillulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

George Eliot (Middlemarch).

TO R.K.

[132]

If it be true, and it can scarcely be disputed, that nothing has been for centuries consecrated by public admiration, without possessing in a high degree some kind of sterling excellence, it is not because the average intellect and feeling of the majority of the public are competent in any way to distinguish what is really excellent, but because all erroneous opinion is inconsistent, and all ungrounded opinion transitory; so that while the fancies and feelings which deny deserved honour, and award what is undue, have neither root nor strength sufficient to maintain consistent testimony for a length of time, the opinions formed on right grounds by those few who are in reality competent judges, being necessarily stable, communicate themselves gradually from mind to mind, descending lower as they extend wider, until they leaven the whole lump, and rule by absolute[133] authority, even where the grounds and reasons for them cannot be understood. On this gradual victory of what is consistent over what is vacillating, depends the reputation of all that is highest in art and literature.

John Ruskin (Modern Painters, I, 1).

The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth, who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendour around the facts of his death, which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact.

Emerson (Essay on Character).

[134]

(Speaking of future state) “Those who are neither good nor bad, or are too insignificant for notice, will be dropt entirely. This is my opinion. It is consistent with my idea of God’s justice, and with the reason that God has given me, and I gratefully know that He has given me a large share of that Divine gift”(!)

Thomas Paine (Age of Reason).

SIXTEEN CHARACTERISTICS OF LOVE (ΑΓΑΠΗ).

St. Paul (1 Cor. xiii.)

In the Eighth Century B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. “And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”[20]

T. H. Huxley (Essays, IV, 161).

[135]

LOST DAYS.

BIRTHDAYS.

[136]

[137]

Who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? It is the Devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other, he is never out of his diocese, ye shall never find him unoccupied, ye shall never find him out of the way, call for him when you will; he is ever at home, the diligentest preacher in all the Realm; ye shall never find him idle, I warrant you.... He is no lordly loiterer, but a busy ploughman, so that among all the pack of them the Devil shall go for my money! Therefore, ye prelates, learn of the Devil to be diligent in doing of your office. If you will not learn of God nor good men: for shame learn of the Devil.

Bishop Latimer (Sermon on the Ploughers, 1549).

APPRECIATION.

In the present day it is not easy to find a well-meaning man among our more earnest thinkers, who will not take upon himself to dispute the whole system of redemption, because he cannot unravel the mystery of the punishment of sin. But can he unravel the mystery of the punishment of NO sin? Can he entirely account for all that happens to a cab-horse? Has he ever looked fairly at the fate of one of those beasts as it is dying—measured the work it has done, and the reward it has got—put his hand upon the bloody wounds through which its bones are piercing, and so looked up to Heaven with an entire understanding of Heaven’s ways about the horse? Yet the horse is a fact—no dream—no revelation among the myrtle trees by night;[138] and the dust it dies upon, and the dogs that eat it, are facts; and yonder happy person, whose the horse was, till its knees were broken over the hurdles; who had an immortal soul to begin with, and wealth and peace to help forward his immortality; who has also devoted the powers of his soul, and body, and wealth, and peace, to the spoiling of houses, the corruption of the innocent, and the oppression of the poor; and has, at this actual moment of his prosperous life, as many curses waiting round about him in calm shadow, with their death-eyes fixed upon him, biding their time, as ever the poor cab-horse had launched at him in meaningless blasphemies, when his failing feet stumbled at the stones,—this happy person shall have no stripes,—shall have only the horse’s fate of annihilation! Or, if other things are indeed reserved for him, Heaven’s kindness or omnipotence is to be doubted therefore!

We cannot reason of these things. But this I know—and this may by all men be known—that no good or lovely thing exists in this world without its correspondent darkness; and that the universe presents itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of choice, the good and the evil set on the right hand and the left.

John Ruskin (Modern Painters, V, 19).

Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gauntlet in the cause of Verity: many, from the ignorance of these Maximes, and an inconsiderate Zeal unto Truth, have too rashly charged the troops of Error, and remain as Trophies unto the enemies of Truth. A man may be in as just possession of[139] Truth as of a City and yet be forced to surrender; ’tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace than to hazzard her on a battle.

Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici).

“Very well,” cried I, “that’s a good girl; I find you are perfectly qualified for making converts, and so go help your mother to make a gooseberry pye.”

Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield).

Hope, folding her wings, looked backward and became Regret.

George Eliot (Silas Marner, ch. 15).

By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

George Eliot (Middlemarch, ch. 39).

A world without a contingency or an agony could have no hero and no saint, and enable no Son of Man to discover that he was a Son of God. But for the suspended plot, that is folded in every life, history is a dead chronicle of what was known before as well as after; art sinks into the photograph of a moment, that hints at nothing else; and poetry breaks the cords and throws the lyre away. There is no Epic of the certainties; and no lyric without the surprise of sorrow and the sigh of fear. Whatever touches and ennobles us in the lives and in the voices of the past is a divine birth from human doubt and pain. Let then the shadows lie, and the perspective of the light still deepen beyond our view; else, while we walk together, our hearts will never burn within us as we go, and the darkness as it falls, will deliver us into no hand that is Divine.

Jas. Martineau (Hours of Thought, 1, 328).

[141]

[142]

GROWN UP.

[144]

Where gods are not, spectres rule.

Where children are is a golden age.

A people, like a child, is a separate educational problem.

Novalis.

Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false imagining, an unreal character—but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature—loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by a divine gift of prophecy—like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a vision, standing, clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right hand of God—as he has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious foresight unveil to us this resurrection form of the friends with whom we daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity, we should follow them with faith and reverence through all the disguises of human faults and weaknesses, “waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (The Minister’s Wooing).

[145]

[146]

We live in a world, where one fool makes many fools, but one wise man only a few wise men.

Lichtenberg.

TELLING STORIES.

THE REVELATION

[148]

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself![21] To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily, through long years of the foretime, hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along, and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.

William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience).

Et in Arcadia ego.

(I too have been in Arcady.)

Anon.

It often happens that those are the best people, whose characters have been most injured by slanderers; as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

Alexander Pope.

[149]

There are many flowers of heavenly origin in this world; they do not flourish in this climate but are properly heralds, clear-voiced messengers of a better existence: Religion is one; Love is another.

Novalis.

ON DYING

On n’a pas d’antécédent pour cela. Il faut improviser—c’est donc si difficile. (Death admits of no rehearsal.)

Amiel.

C’est le maître jour; c’est le jour juge de tous les autres. (It is the master-day; the day that judges all the others.)

Montaigne.

Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower, where I thought a flower would grow.

Abraham Lincoln.

Why describe our life-history as a state of waking rather than of sleep? Why assume that sleep is the acquired, vigilance the normal condition? It would not be hard to defend the opposite thesis. The newborn infant might urge with cogency that his habitual state of slumber was primary, as regards the individual, ancestral as regards the race; resembling at least, far more closely than does our adult life, a primitive or protozoic habit. “Mine,” he might say, “is a centrally stable state. It would need only some change in external conditions (as the permanent immersion in a nutritive fluid) to be safely and indefinitely maintained. Your waking state, on the other hand, is centrally unstable. While you talk and bustle around me you are living on your physiological capital, and the mere prolongation of vigilance is torture and death.”

A paradox such as this forms no part of my argument; but it may remind us that physiology at any rate hardly warrants us in speaking of our waking state as if that alone represented our true selves, and every deviation from it must be at best a mere interruption. Vigilance in reality is but one of two co-ordinate phases of our personality, which we have acquired or differentiated from each other during the stages of our long evolution.

F. W. H. Myers (Multiplex Personality).

[151]

Without good nature man is but a better kind of vermin.

Extreme self-lovers will set a man’s house on fire, though it were but to roast their eggs.

Bacon.

[152]

[153]

THE CORAL REEF

BENEATH MY WINDOW

[154]

MUSIC

[155]

THE MARTYR

[156]

THE ATTAINMENT

[157]

LOVE’S LAST MESSAGES

[158]

On Dreamthorp centuries have fallen, and have left no more trace than have last winter’s snowflakes. This commonplace sequence and flowing on of life is immeasurably affecting. That winter morning when Charles lost his head in front of the banqueting-hall of his own palace, the icicles hung from the eaves of the houses here, and the clown kicked the snowballs from his clouted shoon, and thought but of his supper when, at three o’clock, the red sun set in the purple mist.... Battles have been fought, kings have died, history has transacted itself; but, all unheeding and untouched, Dreamthorp has watched apples-trees redden, and wheat ripen, and smoked its pipe, and quaffed its mug of beer, and rejoiced over its newborn children, and with proper solemnity carried its dead to the churchyard.

Alexander Smith (Dreamthorp).

[159]

Quixotism, or Utopianism: that is another of the devil’s pet words. I believe the quiet admission which we are all of us so ready to make, that, because things have long been wrong, it is impossible they should ever be right, is one of the most fatal sources of misery and crime from which this world suffers. Whenever you hear a man dissuading you from attempting to do well, on the ground that perfection is “Utopian,” beware of that man. Cast the word out of your dictionary altogether.

John Ruskin (Lectures on Architecture and Painting).

Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance: not one Christian: not one but undervalues Christianity—singly, what am I to do? Wesley (have you read his life?) was he not an elevated character? Wesley has said “Religion is not a solitary thing.” Alas! it necessarily is so with me, or next to solitary.

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) (Letter to S. T. Coleridge, Jan. 10, 1797).

[160]

INSCRIPTION FOR A BUST OF CUPID

[161]

UP-HILL

Aux coeurs blessés—l’ombre et le silence.

(For the wounded heart—shade and silence.)

Balzac (Le Médecin de Campagne).

[163]

The huge mass of black crags that towered at the head of the gloomy defile was exactly what one would picture as the enchanted castle of the evil magician, within sight of which all vegetation withered, looking from over the desolate valley of ruins to the barren shore strewed with its sad wreckage, and the wild ocean beyond....

The land-crabs certainly looked their part of goblin guardians of the approaches to the wicked magician’s fastness. They were fearful as the firelight fell on their yellow cynical faces, fixed as that of the sphinx, but fixed in a horrid grin. Those who have observed this foulest species of crab will know my meaning. Smelling the fish we were cooking they came down the mountains in thousands upon us. We threw them lumps of fish, which they devoured with crab-like slowness, yet perseverance.

It is a ghastly sight, a land-crab at his dinner. A huge beast was standing a yard from me; I gave him a portion of fish, and watched him. He looked at me straight in the face with his outstarting eyes, and proceeded with his two front claws to tear up his food, bringing bits of it to his mouth with one claw, as with a fork. But all this while he never looked at what he was doing; his face was fixed in one position, staring at me. And when I looked around, lo! there were half a dozen others all steadily feeding, but with immovable heads turned to me with that fixed basilisk stare. It was indeed horrible, and the effect was nightmarish in the extreme. While we slept that night they attacked us, and would certainly have devoured us, had we not awoke; and did eat holes in our clothes. One of us had to keep watch, so as to drive them from the other two, otherwise we should have had no sleep.

Imagine a sailor cast alone on this coast, weary, yet unable to sleep a moment on account of these ferocious creatures. After a few days of an existence full of horror he would die raving mad, and then be consumed in an hour by his foes. In all Dante’s Inferno there is no more horrible a suggestion of punishment than this.

E. F. Knight (The Cruise of the “Falcon”).

As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary: the wild flower by the wayside, as well as the tended corn; and the wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle: because man doth not live by bread alone, but also by the desert manna; by every wondrous word and unknowable work of God.

John Ruskin.

LOVE

Cet égoisme à deux.

De Staël.

[165]

It is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.

Washington Irving.

I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight,—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears.... In these depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments—the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith—sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth.

William James (Is Life Worth Living?).

[167]

[168]

SHE COMES AS COMES THE SUMMER NIGHT

[169]

No indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.

G. MacDonald (Robert Falconer).

WHEN LOVE MEETS LOVE

BETWEEN OUR FOLDING LIPS

[171]

SPIRITUALISM

He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed.

Thomas Fuller.

Habit dulls the senses and puts the critical faculty to sleep. The fierceness and hardness of ancient manners is apparent to us, but the ancients themselves were not shocked by sights which were familiar to them. To us it is sickening to think of the gladiatorial show, of the massacres common in Roman warfare, of the infanticide practised by grave and respectable citizens, who did not merely condemn their children to death, but often in practice, as they well knew, to what was still worse—a life of prostitution and beggary. The Roman regarded a gladiatorial show as we regard a hunt; the news of the slaughter of two hundred thousand Helvetians by Cæsar or half a million Jews by Titus excited in his mind a thrill of triumph; infanticide committed by a friend appeared to him a prudent measure of household economy.

Sir J. R. Seeley (Ecce Homo).

[173]

THE PACE THAT KILLS

Cato said ‘he had rather people should inquire why he had not a statue erected to his memory, than why he had.’

Plutarch (Political Precepts).

CHAMOUNI AND RYDAL.