The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Prose
by Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
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Title: English Prose
A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice
Author: Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
Release Date: April 14, 2004 [EBook #12025]
Language: English
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ENGLISH PROSE
A SERIES OF RELATED ESSAYS FOR THE DISCUSSION AND PRACTICE
OF THE ART OF WRITING
SELECTED AND EDITED
BY
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROE, PH.D.
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
AND
GEORGE ROY ELLIOTT, PH.D.
OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE
1913
PREFACE
The selections in the present volume, designed primarily for the
discussion and practice in college classes of the art of composition,
have been arranged under a scheme which the editors believe to be new.
There are nine related groups. Each successive group represents a
different phase of life, beginning with character and personality, and
concluding with art and literature. The whole together, as the table of
contents will show, thus presents a body of ideas that includes
practically all the great departments of human thought and interest.
It is evident that certain ideals of teaching composition underlie the
scheme. The editors believe heartily with Pater that "the chief stimulus
of good style is to possess a full, rich, complex matter to grapple
with". Instruction in writing, it is to be feared, too often neglects
this sound doctrine and places an emphasis upon formal matters that
seems disproportionate, especially when form is made to appear as a
thing apart. Form and content go together and one must not suffer at the
expense of the other. But a sustained interest in the ways and means of
correct expression is aroused only when the student feels that he has
something to express. Instructors often contend indeed that the ideas of
undergraduates are far to seek, and that most of the time in the
class-room is therefore best spent upon formal exercises and drill. The
editors do not share this view. They believe that there is no class of
people more responsive to new ideas and impressions than college
students, and none more eager, when normally stimulated, to express
themselves in writing. They have therefore aimed to present a series of
related selections that would arouse thought and provoke oral discussion
in the class-room, as well as furnish suitable models of style. In most
cases the pieces are too long to be adequately handled in one class
hour. A live topic may well be discussed for several hours, until its
various sides have been examined and students are awakened to the many
questions at issue. The editors have aimed, also, to supply selections
so rich and vital in content that instructors themselves will feel
challenged to add to the class discussion from their own knowledge and
experience, and so turn a stream of fresh ideas upon "stock notions".
Thus English composition, which in many courses in our larger
institutions is now almost the only non-special study, can be made a
direct means of liberalization in the meaning and art of life, as well
as an instrument for correct and effective writing.
The present volume therefore differs from others in the same field. Many
recent collections contain pieces too short and unrelated to satisfy the
ideals suggested above--ideals which, the editors feel sure, are held by
an increasing number of teachers. And older and newer collections alike
have been constructed primarily with the purpose of illustrating the
conventional categories,--description, narration, exposition. Teachers
of composition everywhere are becoming distrustful of an arrangement
which is frankly at variance with the actual practice of writing, and
are of the opinion that it is better to set the student to the task of
composition without confining him too narrowly to one form of discourse.
The editors have deliberately avoided, however, the other extreme, which
is reflected in one or two recent volumes, of choosing pieces of one
type to the exclusion of all others. In collections of this kind variety
in form and subject-matter is fully as important as richness of content.
Instructors who believe in the use of the types of discourse as the most
practicable means of instruction, will find all the types liberally
represented in the present volume. And in order to meet their
requirements even more adequately, the editors have included two short
stories at the end, as examples of narration with a plot.
Much attention has been given to the suggestions at the end of the
volume with the aim of making them practically serviceable and, at the
same time, as free as possible from duplication of class work. This aim,
the editors came to believe, could best be attained by providing for
each group of selections definite suggestions of theme-subjects to be
derived by the student from supplementary readings closely related to
that group.
F.W.R.
G.R.E.
MADISON, WISCONSIN,
May, 1913.
CONTENTS
I. THE PERSONAL LIFE.
1. Self-Reliance...............RALPH WALDO EMERSON
2. Early Education
at Herne Hill.............JOHN RUSKIN
3. A Crisis in My
Mental History............JOHN STUART MILL
4. Old China...................CHARLES LAMB
II. EDUCATION.
5. What is Education?..........THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
6. Knowledge Viewed in
Relation to Learning .....JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
7. Literature and Science......MATTHEW ARNOLD
8. How to Read.................FREDERIC HARRISON
III. RECREATION AND TRAVELS.
9. On Going a Journey..........WILLIAM HAZLITT
10. Regrets of a Mountaineer....LESLIE STEPHEN
IV. SOCIAL LIFE AND MANNERS.
11. Behavior....................RALPH WALDO EMERSON
12. Manners and Fashion.........HERBERT SPENCER
13. Talk and Talkers............ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
V. PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
14. The Social Value
of the College-bred.......WILLIAM JAMES
15. The Law of
Human Progress............HENRY GEORGE
16. The Morals of Trade.........HERBERT SPENCER
VI. SCIENCE.
17. The Physical Basis
of Life...................THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
18. Mental Powers of
Men and Animals...........CHARLES DARWIN
19. The Importance of Dust......ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
VII. NATURE.
20. The Battle of the Ants......HENRY DAVID THOREAU
21. A Windstorm
in the Forests............JOHN MUIR
22. Walden Pond.................HENRY DAVID THOREAU
23. Extracts from
Modern Painters...........JOHN RUSKIN
VIII. CONDUCT AND INNER LIFE.
24. The Stoics.. .............WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY
25. Enthusiasm of Humanity......JOHN ROBERT SEELEY
26. Loyalty and Insight.........JOSIAH ROYCE
IX. LITERATURE AND ART.
27. Poetry for Poetry's Sake.... A.C. BRADLEY
28. Greek Tragedy................G. LOWES DICKINSON
29. Shakespeare..................THOMAS CARLYLE
30. Charles Lamb.................WALTER PATER
31. Dr. Heidegger's Experiment...NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
32. Markheim.....................ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS.
With some topics for Discussion and Composition.
ENGLISH PROSE
SELF-RELIANCE[1]
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. Always the soul hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil
is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own
thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is
true for all men,--that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it
shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the
outmost--and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of
the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the
highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at
naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they
thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the
firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his
thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than
this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on
the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good
sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall
be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the
wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to
him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given
to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until
he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes
much impression on him, and another none. It is not without
preestablished harmony, this sculpture in the memory. The eye was placed
where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.
Bravely let him speak the utmost syllable of his confession. We but half
express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us
represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good
issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work
made manifest by cowards. It needs a divine man to exhibit anything
divine. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his
work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall
give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the
attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no
hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the
place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so,
and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying
their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working
through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now
men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny;
and not pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution,
but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay under
the Almighty effort let us advance on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and
behavior of children, babes, and even brutes. That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their
mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in
their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all
conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the
adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty
and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it
enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand
by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak
to you and me. Hark! in the next room who spoke so clear and emphatic?
Good Heaven! it is he! it is that very lump of bashfulness and phlegm
which for weeks has done nothing but eat when you were by, and now rolls
out these words like bell-strokes. It seems he knows how to speak to his
contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us
seniors very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as
much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the
healthy attitude of human nature. How is a boy the master of
society!--independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on
such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their
merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting,
silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about
consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict.
You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it were
clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or
spoken with eclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or
the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his
account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into
his neutral, godlike independence! Who can thus lose all pledge and,
having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased,
unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable, must
always engage the poet's and the man's regards. Of such an immortal
youth the force would be felt. He would utter opinions on all passing
affairs, which being seen to be not private but necessary, would sink
like darts into the ear of men and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and
inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a
joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing
of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture
of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is
its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and
customs.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity
of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the
suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was
prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with
the deaf old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do
with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my
friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from
above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the
devil's child, I will live then from the devil." No law can be sacred to
me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my
constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry
himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular
and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to
badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent
and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I
ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If
malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an
angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me
with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, "Go love
thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that
grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this
incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar
is spite at home." Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth
is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some
edge to it,--else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached,
as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and
whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius
calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, _Whim_. I hope
it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in
explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude
company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they _my_ poor? I
tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the
dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I
do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual
affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be;
but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of
fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
stand; alms to sots, and the thousandfold Relief Societies;--though I
confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a
wicked dollar, which by-and-by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good
action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a
fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are
done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I
do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a
life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it
should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it
should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and
not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an
alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine. I ask primary evidence that you
are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know
that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those
actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a
privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be,
I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of
my fellows any secondary testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This
rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for
the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder
because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty
better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the
world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the
great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect
sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is
that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression
of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead
Bible Society, vote with a great party either for the Government or
against it, spread your table like base housekeepers,--under all these
screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And of
course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your
thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce
yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-bluff is this game of
conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument. I hear a
preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the
institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly
can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this
ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no
such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but
at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister?
He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest
affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities
of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars,
authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth
is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the
real four: so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where
to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in
the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one
cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine
expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does
not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the
foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company
where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not
interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low
usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, and make
the most disagreeable sensation; a sensation of rebuke and warning which
no brave young man will suffer twice.
For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And
therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders
look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If
this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own
he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the
multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause,--disguise no god,
but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is
the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate
and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to
brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and
prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But
when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when
the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute
force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it
needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a
trifle of no concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a
reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no
other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath
to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you
have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a
new day. Trust your emotion. In your metaphysics you have denied
personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come,
yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape
and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the
harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great
soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his
shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with
packthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day
in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said
to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be
misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad
then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates,
and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and
every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.
I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are
rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and
Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it
matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or
Alexandrian stanza;--read it forward, backward, or across, it still
spells the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God
allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect
or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though
I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound
with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave
that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass
for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that
they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not
see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever variety of actions,
so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the
actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties
are lost sight of when seen at a little distance, at a little height of
thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a
zigzag line of a hundred tacks. This is only microscopic criticism. See
the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the
average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will
explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.
Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.
Greatness always appeals to the future. If I can be great enough now to
do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to
defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances
and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the
foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the
majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the
imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories
behind. There they all stand and shed an united light on the advancing
actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels to every man's
eye. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity
into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable
to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We
worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it
homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is
self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate
pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan
fife. Let us bow and apologize never more. A great man is coming to eat
at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to
please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it
kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth
mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of
custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all
history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving
wherever moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time or place,
but is the center of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures
you and all men and all events. You are constrained to accept his
standard. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else,
or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing
else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that
he must make all circumstances indifferent--put all means into the
shade. This: all great men are and do. Every true man is a cause, a
country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully
to accomplish his thought;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a
procession. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman
Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his
genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An
institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, the Reformation, of
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson.
Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves
itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest
persons.
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a
bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him. But the man
in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the
force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he
looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book has an alien
and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seems to say like
that, "Who are you, sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice,
petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take
possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me,
but I am to settle its claim to praise. That popular fable of the sot
who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's
house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his
waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured
that he had been insane--owes its popularity to the fact that it
symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot,
but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true
prince.
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination
makes fools of us, plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and
estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small
house and common day's work: but the things of life are the same to
both: the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to
Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they
wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day as
followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act
with original views, the luster will be transferred from the actions of
kings to those of gentlemen.
The world has indeed been instructed by its kings, who have so
magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal
symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful
loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or
the great proprietor to walk among them, by a law of his own, make his
own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not
with money but with honor, and represent the Law in his person, was the
hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of
their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is
the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax,
without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into
trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, the
essence of virtue, and the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity or
Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later
teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which
analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense
of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not
diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but
one with them and proceedeth obviously from the same source whence their
life and being also proceedeth. We first share the life by which things
exist and afterward see them as appearances in nature and forget that we
have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the fountain
of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man
wisdom, of that inspiration of man which cannot be denied without
impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which
makes us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth. When we
discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but
allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to
pry into the soul that causes--all metaphysics, all philosophy is at
fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man
discerns between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary
perceptions. And to his involuntary perceptions: he knows a perfect
respect is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that
these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. All my
wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving;--the most trivial
reverie, the faintest native emotion, are domestic and divine.
Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as
of opinions, or rather much more readily; for they do not distinguish
between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or
that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a
trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time all
mankind,--although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For
my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he
should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world
with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from
the center of the present thought; and new date and new create the
whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, then old
things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now,
and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made
sacred by relation to it,--one thing as much as another. All things are
dissolved to their center by their cause, and in the universal miracle
petty and particular miracles disappear. This is and must be. If
therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward
to the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in
another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which
is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into
whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the
past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of
the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye
maketh, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is
night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing
more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say
"I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before
the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make
no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they
are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is
simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before
a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower
there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is
satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time
to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present,
but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that
surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy
and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet
hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what
David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on
a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the
sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men
of talents and character they chance to see,--painfully recollecting the
exact words they spoke; afterward, when they come into the point of view
which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are
willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good
when occasion comes. So was it with us, so will it be, if we proceed. If
we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to
be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be
as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far off remembering
of the intuition: That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to
say it, is this: When good is near you, when you have life in
yourself,--it is not by any known or appointed way; you shall not
discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man;
you shall not hear any name;--the way, the thought, the good, shall be
wholly strange and new. It shall exclude all other being. You take the
way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its fugitive
ministers. There shall be no fear in it. Fear and hope are alike
beneath it. It asks nothing. There is somewhat low even in hope. We are
then in vision. There is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor
properly joy. The soul is raised over passion. It seeth identity and
eternal causation. It is a perceiving that Truth and Right are. Hence it
becomes a Tranquillity out of the knowing that all things go well. Vast
spaces of nature; the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; vast intervals of
time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel
underlay that former state of life and circumstances, as it does
underlie my present and will always all circumstances, and what is
called life and what is called death.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: From Essays, First Series, 1841; the second half of the
essay has here been omitted.]
EARLY EDUCATION AT HERNE HILL[2]
JOHN RUSKIN
When I was about four years old my father found himself able to buy the
lease of a house on Herne Hill, a rustic eminence four miles south of
the "Standard in Cornhill"; of which the leafy seclusion remains, in all
essential points of character, unchanged to this day: certain Gothic
splendours, lately indulged in by our wealthier neighbours, being the
only serious innovations; and these are so graciously concealed by the
fine trees of their grounds, that the passing viator remains unappalled
by them; and I can still walk up and down the piece of road between the
Fox tavern and the Herne Hill station, imagining myself four years old.
Our house was the northernmost of a group which stand accurately on the
top or dome of the hill, where the ground is for a small space level, as
the snows are, (I understand), on the dome of Mont Blanc; presently
falling, however, in what may be, in the London clay formation,
considered a precipitous slope, to our valley of Chamouni (or of
Dulwich) on the east; and with a softer descent into Cold Harbor lane on
the west: on the south, no less beautifully declining to the dale of the
Effra, (doubtless shortened from Effrena, signifying the "Unbridled"
river; recently, I regret to say, bricked over for the convenience of
Mr. Biffin, chemist, and others); while on the north, prolonged indeed
with slight depression some half mile or so, and receiving, in the
parish of Lambeth, the chivalric title of "Champion Hill," it plunges
down at last to efface itself in the plains of Peckham, and the rural
barbarism of Goose Green.
The group, of which our house was the quarter, consisted of two
precisely similar partner-couples of houses, gardens and all to match;
still the two highest blocks of buildings seen from Norwood on the crest
of the ridge; so that the house itself, three-storied, with garrets
above, commanded, in those comparatively smokeless days, a very notable
view from its garret windows, of the Norwood hills on one side, and the
winter sunrise over them; and of the valley of the Thames on the other,
with Windsor telescopically clear in the distance, and Harrow,
conspicuous always in fine weather to open vision against the summer
sunset. It had front and back garden in sufficient proportion to its
size; the front, richly set with old evergreens, and well-grown lilac
and laburnum; the back, seventy yards long by twenty wide, renowned over
all the hill for its pears and apples, which had been chosen with
extreme care by our predecessor, (shame on me to forget the name of a
man to whom I owe so much!)--and possessing also a strong old mulberry
tree, a tall white-heart cherry tree, a black Kentish one, and an almost
unbroken hedge, all round, of alternate gooseberry and currant bush;
decked, in due season, (for the ground was wholly beneficent), with
magical splendour of abundant fruit: fresh green, soft amber, and
rough-bristled crimson bending the spinous branches; clustered pearl and
pendent ruby joyfully discoverable under the large leaves that looked
like vine.
The differences of primal importance which I observed between the nature
of this garden, and that of Eden, as I had imagined it, were, that, in
this one, _all_ the fruit was forbidden; and there were no companionable
beasts: in other respects the little domain answered every purpose of
paradise to me; and the climate, in that cycle of our years, allowed me
to pass most of my life in it. My mother never gave me more to learn
than she knew I could easily get learnt, if I set myself honestly to
work, by twelve o'clock. She never allowed anything to disturb me when
my task was set; if it was not said rightly by twelve o'clock, I was
kept in till I knew it, and in general, even when Latin Grammar came to
supplement the Psalms, I was my own master for at least an hour before
half-past one dinner, and for the rest of the afternoon.
My mother, herself finding her chief personal pleasure in her flowers,
was often planting, or pruning beside me, at least if I chose to stay
beside _her_. I never thought of doing anything behind her back which I
would not have done before her face; and her presence was therefore no
restraint to me; but, also, no particular pleasure, for, from having
always been left so much alone, I had generally my own little affairs to
see after; and, on the whole, by the time I was seven years old, was
already getting too independent, mentally, even of my father and mother;
and, having nobody else to be dependent upon, began to lead a very
small, perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life,
in the central point which it appeared to me, (as it must naturally
appear to geometrical animals), that I occupied in the universe.
This was partly the fault of my father's modesty; and partly of his
pride. He had so much more confidence in my mother's judgment as to such
matters than in his own, that he never ventured even to help, much less
to cross her, in the conduct of my education; on the other hand, in the
fixed purpose of making an ecclesiastical gentleman of me, with the
superfinest of manners, and access to the highest circles of fleshly and
spiritual society, the visits to Croydon, where I entirely loved my
aunt, and young baker-cousins, became rarer and more rare: the society
of our neighbours on the hill could not be had without breaking up our
regular and sweetly selfish manner of living; and on the whole, I had
nothing animate to care for, in a childish way, but myself, some nests
of ants, which the gardener would never leave undisturbed for me, and a
sociable bird or two; though I never had the sense or perseverance to
make one really tame. But that was partly because, if ever I managed to
bring one to be the least trustful of me, the cats got it.
Under these circumstances, what powers of imagination I possessed,
either fastened themselves on inanimate things,--the sky, the leaves,
and pebbles, observable within the walls of Eden,--or caught at any
opportunity of flight into regions of romance, compatible with the
objective realities of existence in the nineteenth century, within a
mile and a quarter of Camberwell Green.
Herein my father, happily, though with no definite intention other than
of pleasing me, when he found he could do so without infringing any of
my mother's rules, became my guide. I was particularly fond of watching
him shave; and was always allowed to come into his room in the morning
(under the one in which I am now writing), to be the motionless witness
of that operation. Over his dressing-table hung one of his own
water-colour drawings, made under the teaching of the elder Nasmyth; I
believe, at the High School of Edinburgh. It was done in the early
manner of tinting, which, just about the time when my father was at the
High School, Dr. Munro was teaching Turner; namely, in gray under-tints
of Prussian blue and British ink, washed with warm colour afterwards on
the lights. It represented Conway Castle, with its Frith, and, in the
foreground, a cottage, a fisherman, and a boat at the water's edge.
When my father had finished shaving, he always told me a story about
this picture. The custom began without any initial purpose of his, in
consequence of my troublesome curiosity whether the fisherman lived in
the cottage, and where he was going to in the boat. It being settled,
for peace' sake, that he _did_ live in the cottage, and was going in the
boat to fish near the castle, the plot of the drama afterwards gradually
thickened; and became, I believe, involved with that of the tragedy of
Douglas, and of the Castle Specter, in both of which pieces my father
had performed in private theatricals, before my mother, and a select
Edinburgh audience, when he was a boy of sixteen, and she, at grave
twenty, a model housekeeper, and very scornful and religiously
suspicious of theatricals. But she was never weary of telling me, in
later years, how beautiful my father looked in his Highland dress, with
the high black feathers.
In the afternoons, when my father returned (always punctually) from his
business, he dined, at half-past four, in the front parlour, my mother
sitting beside him to hear the events of the day, and give counsel and
encouragement with respect to the same;--chiefly the last, for my father
was apt to be vexed if orders for sherry fell the least short of their
due standard, even for a day or two. I was never present at this time,
however, and only avouch what I relate by hearsay and probable
conjecture; for between four and six it would have been a grave
misdemeanour in me if I so much as approached the parlour door. After
that, in summer time, we were all in the garden as long as the day
lasted; tea under the white-heart cherry tree; or in winter and rough
weather, at six o'clock in the drawing-room,--I having my cup of milk,
and slice of bread-and-butter, in a little recess, with a table in front
of it, wholly sacred to me; and in which I remained in the evenings as
an Idol in a niche, while my mother knitted, and my father read to
her,--and to me, so far as I chose to listen.
The series of the Waverley novels, then drawing towards its close, was
still the chief source of delight in all households caring for
literature; and I can no more recollect the time when I did not know
them than when I did not know the Bible; but I have still a vivid
remembrance of my father's intense expression of sorrow mixed with
scorn, as he threw down Count Robert of Paris, after reading three or
four pages; and knew that the life of Scott was ended: the scorn being a
very complex and bitter feeling in him,--partly, indeed, of the book
itself, but chiefly of the wretches who were tormenting and selling the
wrecked intellect, and not a little, deep down, of the subtle dishonesty
which had essentially caused the ruin. My father never could forgive
Scott his concealment of the Ballantyne partnership.
Such being the salutary pleasures of Herne Hill, I have next with deeper
gratitude to chronicle what I owe to my mother for the resolutely
consistent lessons which so exercised me in the Scriptures as to make
every word of them familiar to my ear in habitual music,--yet in that
familiarity reverenced, as transcending all thought, and ordaining all
conduct.
This she effected, not by her own sayings or personal authority; but
simply by compelling me to read the book thoroughly, for myself. As soon
as I was able to read with fluency, she began a course of Bible work
with me, which never ceased till I went to Oxford. She read alternate
verses with me, watching, at first, every intonation of my voice, and
correcting the false ones, till she made me understand the verse, if
within my reach, rightly, and energetically. It might be beyond me
altogether; that she did not care about; but she made sure that as soon
as I got hold of it at all, I should get hold of it by the right end.
In this way she began with the first verse of Genesis, and went straight
through, to the last verse of the Apocalypse; hard names, numbers,
Levitical law, and all; and began again at Genesis the next day. If a
name was hard, the better the exercise in pronunciation,--if the chapter
was tiresome, the better lesson in patience,--if loathsome, the better
lesson in faith that there was some use in its being so outspoken. After
our chapters, (from two to three a day, according to their length, the
first thing after breakfast, and no interruption from servants
allowed,--none from visitors, who either joined in the reading or had to
stay upstairs,--and none from any visitings or excursions, except real
travelling), I had to learn a few verses by heart, or repeat, to make
sure I had not lost, something of what was already known; and, with the
chapters thus gradually possessed from the first word to the last, I had
to learn the whole body of the fine old Scottish paraphrases, which are
good, melodious, and forceful verse; and to which, together with the
Bible itself, I owe the first cultivation of my ear in sound.
It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother thus
taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was, to my
child's mind, chiefly repulsive--the 119th Psalm--has now become of all
the most precious to me, in its overflowing and glorious passion of love
for the Law of God, in opposition to the abuse of it by modern preachers
of what they imagine to be His gospel.
But it is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours
of toil, as regular as sunrise,--toil on both sides equal,--by which,
year after year, my mother forced me to learn these paraphrases, and
chapters, (the eighth of 1st Kings being one--try it, good reader, in a
leisure hour!) allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or
misplaced; while every sentence was required to be said over and over
again till she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a
struggle between us of about three weeks, concerning the accent of the
"of" in the lines
"Shall any following spring revive
The ashes of the urn?"--
I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct
for rhythm, (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and their
contents), on reciting it with an accented _of_. It was not, I say, till
after three weeks' labor, that my mother got the accent lightened on the
"of" and laid on the "ashes," to her mind. But had it taken three years
she would have done it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly,
had she not done it,--well, there's no knowing what would have happened;
but I'm very thankful she _did_.
I have just opened my oldest (in use) Bible,--a small, closely, and very
neatly printed volume it is, printed in Edinburgh by Sir D. Hunter Blair
and J. Bruce, Printers, to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, in 1816.
Yellow, now, with age, and flexible, but not unclean, with much use,
except that the lower corners of the pages at 8th of 1st Kings, and 32d
Deuteronomy, are worn somewhat thin and dark, the learning of these two
chapters having cost me much pains. My mother's list of the chapters
with which, thus learned, she established my soul in life, has just
fallen out of it. I will take what indulgence the incurious reader can
give me, for printing the list thus accidentally occurrent:
Exodus, chapters 15th and 20th.
2 Samuel, " 1st, from 17th verse to end.
1 Kings, " 8th.
Psalms, " 23d, 32d, 90th, 91st, 103d, 112th, 119th, 139th.
Proverbs, " 2d, 3d, 8th, 12th.
Isaiah, " 58th.
Matthew, " 5th, 6th, 7th.
Acts, " 26th.
1 Corinthians, " 13th, 15th.
James, " 4th.
Revelation, " 5th, 6th.
And, truly, though I have picked up the elements of a little further
knowledge--in mathematics, meteorology, and the like, in after
life,--and owe not a little to the teaching of many people, this
maternal installation of my mind in that property of chapters, I count
very confidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the one
_essential_ part of all my education.
And it is perhaps already time to mark what advantage and mischief, by
the chances of life up to seven years old, had been irrevocably
determined for me.
I will first count my blessings (as a not unwise friend once recommended
me to do, continually; whereas I have a bad trick of always numbering
the thorns in my fingers and not the bones in them).
And for best and truest beginning of all blessings, I had been taught
the perfect meaning of Peace, in thought, act, and word.
I never had heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in any
question with each other; nor seen an angry, or even slightly hurt or
offended, glance in the eyes of either. I had never heard a servant
scolded; nor even suddenly, passionately, or in any severe manner,
blamed. I had never seen a moment's trouble or disorder in any household
matter; nor anything whatever either done in a hurry, or undone in due
time. I had no conception of such a feeling as anxiety; my father's
occasional vexation in the afternoons, when he had only got an order for
twelve butts after expecting one for fifteen, as I have just stated, was
never manifested to _me_; and itself related only to the question
whether his name would be a step higher or lower in the year's list of
sherry exporters; for he never spent more than half his income, and
therefore found himself little incommoded by occasional variations in
the total of it. I had never done any wrong that I knew of--beyond
occasionally delaying the commitment to heart of some improving
sentence, that I might watch a wasp on the window pane, or a bird in the
cherry tree; and I had never seen any grief.
Next to this quite priceless gift of Peace, I had received the perfect
understanding of the natures of Obedience and Faith. I obeyed word, or
lifted finger, of father or mother, simply as a ship her helm; not only
without idea of resistance, but receiving the direction as a part of my
own life and force, a helpful law, as necessary to me in every moral
action as the law of gravity in leaping. And my practice in Faith was
soon complete: nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and
nothing ever told me that was not true.
Peace, obedience, faith; these three for chief good; next to these, the
habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind--on which I will not
further enlarge at this moment, this being the main practical faculty of
my life, causing Mazzini to say of me, in conversation authentically
reported, a year or two before his death, that I had "the most analytic
mind in Europe." An opinion in which, so far as I am acquainted with
Europe, I am myself entirely disposed to concur.
Lastly, an extreme perfection in palate and all other bodily senses,
given by the utter prohibition of cake, wine, comfits, or, except in
carefulest restriction, fruit; and by fine preparation of what food was
given me. Such I esteem the main blessings of my childhood;--next, let
me count the equally dominant calamities.
First, that I had nothing to love.
My parents were--in a sort--visible powers of nature to me, no more
loved than the sun and the moon: only I should have been annoyed and
puzzled if either of them had gone out; (how much, now, when both are
darkened!)--still less did I love God; not that I had any quarrel with
Him, or fear of Him; but simply found what people told me was His
service, disagreeable; and what people told me was His book, not
entertaining. I had no companions to quarrel with, neither; nobody to
assist, and nobody to thank. Not a servant was ever allowed to do
anything for me, but what it was their duty to do; and why should I have
been grateful to the cook for cooking, or the gardener for
gardening,--when the one dared not give me a baked potato without asking
leave, and the other would not let my ants' nests alone, because they
made the walks untidy? The evil consequence of all this was not,
however, what might perhaps have been expected, that I grew up selfish
or unaffectionate; but that, when affection did come, it came with
violence utterly rampant and unmanageable, at least by me, who never
before had anything to manage.
For (second of chief calamities) I had nothing to endure. Danger or pain
of any kind I knew not: my strength was never exercised, my patience
never tried, and my courage never fortified. Not that I was ever afraid
of anything,--either ghosts, thunder, or beasts; and one of the nearest
approaches to insubordination which I was ever tempted into as a child,
was in passionate effort to get leave to play with the lion's cubs in
Wombwell's menagerie.
Thirdly, I was taught no precision nor etiquette of manners; it was
enough if, in the little society we saw, I remained unobtrusive, and
replied to a question without shyness: but the shyness came later, and
increased as I grew conscious of the rudeness arising from the want of
social discipline, and found it impossible to acquire, in advanced life,
dexterity in any bodily exercise, skill in any pleasing accomplishment,
or ease and tact in ordinary behaviour.
Lastly, and chief of evils. My judgment of right and wrong, and powers
of independent action, were left entirely undeveloped; because the
bridle and blinkers were never taken off me. Children should have their
times of being off duty, like soldiers; and when once the obedience, if
required, is certain, the little creature should be very early put for
periods of practice in complete command of itself; set on the barebacked
horse of its own will, and left to break it by its own strength. But the
ceaseless authority exercised over my youth left me, when cast out at
last into the world, unable for some time to do more than drift with its
vortices.
My present verdict, therefore, on the general tenor of my education at
that time, must be, that it was at once too formal and too luxurious;
leaving my character, at the most important moment for its construction,
cramped indeed, but not disciplined; and only by protection innocent,
instead of by practice virtuous.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: From "Praeterita," _1885, Vol. I, Chapter II_.]
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY[3]
JOHN STUART MILL
From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from
the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be
called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception
of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object. The
personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow labourers in this
enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the
way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon,
my whole reliance was placed on this; and I was accustomed to felicitate
myself on the certainty of a happy life which I enjoyed, through placing
my happiness in something durable and distant, in which some progress
might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete
attainment. This did very well for several years, during which the
general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as
engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill
up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I
awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826. I was
in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to;
unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods
when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent;
the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are,
when smitten by their first "conviction of sin." In this frame of mind
it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that
all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in
institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be
completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and
happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly
answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on
which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have
been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to
charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I
seemed to have nothing left to live for.
At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did
not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of
life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the
woful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all
occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes'
oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and
thicker. The lines in Coleridge's "Dejection"--I was not then acquainted
with them--exactly describe my case:
"A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear."
In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past
nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength
and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed
feeling _minus_ all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of
mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I
sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved
any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should
not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an
interesting, or in any way respectable distress. There was nothing in it
to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would
have been most precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often
occurred to my thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the
faintest hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been
natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the
last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help.
Everything convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental
state as I was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to
understand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My education,
which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the
possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him
the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was
probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of _his_
remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any
hope of making my condition intelligible. It was, however, abundantly
intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless
it appeared.
My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral
feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the
results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take
pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another
sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those
things, from the effect of education or of experience. As a corollary
from this, I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself
convinced, that the object of education should be to form the strongest
possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure
with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all
things hurtful to it. This doctrine appeared inexpugnable; but it now
seemed to me, on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied themselves
but superficially with the means of forming and keeping up these
salutary associations. They seemed to have trusted altogether to the old
familiar instruments, praise and blame, reward and punishment. Now, I
did not doubt that by these means, begun early, and applied
unremittingly, intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of
pain, might be created, and might produce desires and aversions capable
of lasting undiminished to the end of life. But there must always be
something artificial and casual in associations thus produced. The pains
and pleasures thus forcibly associated with things, are not connected
with them by any natural tie; and it is therefore, I thought, essential
to the durability of these associations, that they should have become so
intense and inveterate as to be practically indissoluble, before the
habitual exercise of the power of analysis had commenced. For I now saw,
or thought I saw, what I had always before received with
incredulity--that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the
feelings: as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated,
and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and
correctives. The very excellence of analysis (I argued) is that it tends
to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of prejudice; that it
enables us mentally to separate ideas which have only casually clung
together: and no associations whatever could ultimately resist this
dissolving force, were it not that we owe to analysis our clearest
knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature; the real connections
between Things, not dependent on our will and feelings; natural laws, by
virtue of which, in many cases, one thing is inseparable from another in
fact; which laws, in proportion as they are clearly perceived and
imaginatively realised, cause our ideas of things which are always
joined together in Nature, to cohere more and more closely in our
thoughts. Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations
between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to
weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a _mere_ matter of feeling.
They are therefore (I thought) favourable to prudence and
clear-sightedness, but a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions
and of the virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermine all desires, and
all pleasures, which are the effects of association, that is, according
to the theory I held, all except the purely physical and organic; of the
entire insufficiency of which to make life desirable, no one had a
stronger conviction than I had. These were the laws of human nature, by
which, as it seemed to me, I had been brought to my present state. All
those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy
with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and
especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were
the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was
convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it,
did not give me the feeling. My education, I thought, had failed to
create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving
influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual
cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate
habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the
commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but
no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so
carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general
good, but also just as little in anything else. The fountains of vanity
and ambition seemed to have dried up within me, as completely as those
of benevolence. I had had (as I reflected) some gratification of vanity
at too early an age: I had obtained some distinction, and felt myself of
some importance, before the desire of distinction and of importance had
grown into a passion: and little as it was which I had attained, yet
having been attained too early, like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, it
had made me _blase_ and indifferent to the pursuit. Thus neither selfish
nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me. And there seemed no power
in nature sufficient to begin the formation of my character anew, and
create in a mind now irretrievably analytic, fresh associations of
pleasure with any of the objects of human desire.
These were the thoughts which mingled with the dry heavy dejection of
the melancholy winter of 1826-7. During this time I was not incapable of
my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere
force of habit. I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental
exercise, that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone
out of it. I even composed and spoke several speeches at the debating
society, how, or with what degree of success, I know not. Of four years'
continual speaking at that society, this is the only year of which I
remember next to nothing. Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of all
writers I have found a true description of what I felt, were often in my
thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read them), but in a later
period of the same mental malady:
"Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live."
In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I fancied it,
and I doubt not that many others have passed through a similar state;
but the idiosyncrasies of my education had given to the general
phenomenon a special character, which made it seem the natural effect of
causes that it was hardly possible for time to remove. I frequently
asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life
must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself, that I
did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not
more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light
broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's
"Memoires," and came to the passage which relates his father's death,
the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by
which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be
everything to them--would supply the place of all that they had lost. A
vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was
moved to tears. From this moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression
of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no
longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed,
some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all
capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever present sense of
irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents
of life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again find
enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and
sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was,
once more, excitement, though of a moderate kind, in exerting myself for
my opinions, and for the public good. Thus the cloud gradually drew off,
and I again enjoyed life: and though I had several relapses, some of
which lasted many months, I never again was as miserable as I had been.
The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my
opinions and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a
theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having
much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of,
the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle. I never, indeed, wavered
in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct,
and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be
attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I
thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own
happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind,
even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an
ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the
way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to
make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken _en passant_, without
being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are
immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinising
examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it,
as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your
self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise
fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you
breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either
forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal
questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life.
And I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a
moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment, that is,
for the great majority of mankind.
The other important change which my opinions at this: time underwent,
was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime
necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the
individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the
ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being
for speculation and for action.
I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed
to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be
nourished and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an instant,
lose sight of, or undervalue, that part of the truth which I had seen
before; I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to
consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition
both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had
consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of
cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the
faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of
the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and
philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an
increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental
to that object.
I now began to find meaning in the things which I had read or heard
about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture.
But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal
experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from
childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which
(and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting
enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated
kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement
gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost
height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of
music I had often experienced; but like all my pleasurable
susceptibilities it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had sought
relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide
had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward
by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this time first
became acquainted with Weber's Oberon, and the extreme pleasure which I
drew from its delicious melodies did me good, by showing me a source of
pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was
much impaired by the thought, that the pleasure of music (as is quite
true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with
familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed
by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then
state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life,
that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of
musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two
semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways,
of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed
to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room
for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had
done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This
source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the
philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It
was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the
only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way
honourable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could
not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I
thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in
general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own.
I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the
question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could
succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free
and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no
longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.
And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this
for human happiness in general my dejection must continue; but that if I
could see such an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure;
content as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the
general lot.
This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading
Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important
event in my life. I took up the collection of his poems from curiosity,
with no expectation of mental relief from it, though I had before
resorted to poetry with that hope. In the worst period of my depression,
I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try whether a
poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser
feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no
good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet's state of mind was
too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all
pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the
good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing
which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them
which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from
the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his
Laras. But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition,
Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into the Excursion two or
three years before, and found little in it; and I should probably have
found as little, had I read it at this time. But the miscellaneous
poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was
added in the latter part of the author's life), proved to be the precise
thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.
In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one
of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural
objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for
much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one
of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty
over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's
poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which,
owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty.
But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had
merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott
does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape
does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a
medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward
beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under
the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the
feelings which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source
of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasures, which could be
shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or
imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the
physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn
what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater
evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better
and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly been,
even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper
and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his
did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent
happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only
without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the
common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight
which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there
was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the
conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic,
"Intimations of Immortality:" in which, along with more than his usual
sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand
imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had
similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first
freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had
sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now
teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely,
emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.
I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic
merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with
the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures,
possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are
precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation
Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically
far more poets than he.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: From Chapter V of the Autobiography, 1874.]
OLD CHINA[4]
CHARLES LAMB
I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any
great house, I inquire for the china-closet, and next for the
picture-gallery. I cannot defend the order of preference, but by saying
that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of
our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to
mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to; but
I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced
into my imagination.
I had no repugnance then--why should I now have?--to those little,
lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, under the notion of men and
women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element in that world before
perspective--a china tea-cup.
I like to see my old friends, whom distance cannot diminish, figuring up
in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on _terra firma_
still--for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue,
which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, had made to spring up
beneath their sandals.
I love the men with women's faces, and women, if possible, with still
more womanish expressions.
Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a
salver--two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And
here the same lady, or another--for likeness is identity on tea-cups--is
stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this
calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle
of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the
midst of a flowery mead--a furlong off on the other side of the same
strange stream!
Further on--if far or near can be predicated of their world--see horses,
trees, pagodas, dancing the hays.[5]
Here--a cow and rabbit couchant, and coextensive--so objects show, seen
through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay.
I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson (which we
are old-fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon), some
of these _speciosa miracula_[6] upon a set of extraordinary old blue
china (a recent purchase) which we were now for the first time using;
and could not help remarking, how favourable circumstances had been to
us of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes with
trifles of this sort--when a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the
brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in
Bridget.
"I wish the good old times would come again," she said, "when we were
not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was a
middle state,"--so she was pleased to ramble on,--"in which I am sure we
were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you
have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When
we coveted a cheap luxury (and, oh! how much ado I had to get you to
consent in those times!) we were used to have a debate two or three days
before, and to weigh the _for_ and _against_, and think what we might
spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon, that should be an
equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that
we paid for it.
"Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till
your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and all
because of that folio _Beaumont and Fletcher_, which you dragged home
late at night from Barker's in Covent-garden? Do you remember how we
eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and
had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the
Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be
too late--and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his
shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bed-ward) lighted
out the relic from his dusty treasures--and when you lugged it home,
wishing it were twice as cumbersome--and when you presented it to
me--and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (_collating_ you
called it)--and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with
paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till
daybreak--was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat
black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed,
since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity
with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit--your old
corbeau--for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to
pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen--or sixteen
shillings was it?--a great affair we thought it then--which you had
lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that
pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old
purchases now.
"When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number
of shillings upon that print after Lionardo which we christened the
'Lady Blanch'; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the
money--and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture--was
there no pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but
to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you?
"Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter's bar,
and Waltham, when we had a holiday--holidays and all other fun are gone
now we are rich--and the little handbasket in which I used to deposit
our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad--and how you would pry
about at noon-tide for some decent house, where we might go in and
produce our store--only paying for the ale that you must call for--and
speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to
allow us a tablecloth--and wish for such another honest hostess as Izaak
Walton has described many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when
he went a fishing--and sometimes they would prove obliging enough, and
sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us--but we had cheerful looks
still for one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely
grudging Piscator[7] his Trout Hall? Now, when we go out a day's
pleasuring, which is seldom, moreover, we _ride_ part of the way, and go
into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the
expense, which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance
country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a
precarious welcome.
"You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you
remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw the _Battle of
Hexham_, and the _Surrender of Calais_, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in
the _Children in the Wood_--when we squeezed out our shilling apiece to
sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery--where
you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me--and more
strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me--and the
pleasure was the better for a little shame--and when the curtain drew
up, what cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where
we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or with
Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say that the gallery was the
best place of all for enjoying a play socially; that the relish of such
exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going; that the
company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were
obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on on the
stage, because a word lost would have been a chasm which it was
impossible for them to fill up. With such reflections we consoled our
pride then, and I appeal to you whether, as a woman, I met generally
with less attention and accommodation than I have done since in more
expensive situations in the house? The getting in, indeed, and the
crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad enough,--but there
was still a law of civility to woman recognised to quite as great an
extent as we ever found in the other passages--and how a little
difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat, and the play, afterward!
Now we can only pay our money, and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in
the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough
then--but sight, and all, I think, is gone with our poverty.
"There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they became quite
common--in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear--to have
them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we were
to treat ourselves now--that is, to have dainties a little above our
means, it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that
we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that makes
what I call a treat--when two people living together, as we have done,
now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury, which both like;
while each apologises, and is willing to take both halves of the blame
to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of themselves
in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make much of
others. But now--what I mean by the word--we never _do_ make much of
ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor
of all, but persons as we were, just above poverty.
"I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the
end of the year to make all meet,--and much ado we used to have every
Thirty-first Night of December to account for our exceedings--many a
long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to
make it out how we had spent so much--or that we had not spent so
much--or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year--and
still we found our slender capital decreasing--but then, betwixt ways,
and projects, and compromises of one sort or another and talk of
curtailing this charge, and doing without that for the future--and the
hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were never
poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with 'lusty
brimmers' (as you used to quote it out of _hearty, cheerful Mr.
Cotton_[8], as you called him), we used to welcome in the 'coming
guest.' Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year; no
flattering promises about the new year doing better for us."
Bridget is so sparing of her speech, on most occasions, that when she
gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could
not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear
imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor ---- hundred
pounds a year. "It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we
were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the
excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should
not much mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle with, as we grew
up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened and
knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to
each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain
of. The resisting power, those natural dilations of the youthful spirit,
which circumstances can not straiten--with us are long since passed
away. Competence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry supplement
indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride where we
formerly walked: live better and lie softer--and shall be wise to do
so--than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet
could those days return, could you and I once more walk our thirty miles
a day, could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I be
young to see them, could the good old one shilling gallery days
return--they are dreams, my cousin, now, but could you and I at this
moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside,
sitting on this luxurious sofa--be once more struggling up those
inconvenient staircases, pushed about and squeezed, and elbowed by the
poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers--could I once more hear those
anxious shrieks of yours, and the delicious _Thank God, we are safe_,
which always followed, when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the
first light of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us--I know not
the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be
willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew R----
is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that merry
little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester,
over the head of that pretty insipid half-Madonna-ish chit of a lady in
that very blue summer-house."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: From "Last Essays of Elia," 1833.]
[Footnote 5: The hays: an old English dance.]
[Footnote 6: Speciosa miracula: beautiful marvels.]
[Footnote 7: Piscator: The Angler--the author's spokesman in Walton's
"The Complete Angler."]
[Footnote 8: Charles Cotton, a humorist of the seventeenth century.]
WHAT IS EDUCATION?[9]
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
What is education? Above all things, what is our ideal of a thoroughly
liberal education?--of that education which, if we could begin life
again, we would give ourselves--of that education which, if we could
mould the fates to our own will, we would give our children? Well, I
know not what may be your conceptions upon this matter, but I will tell
you mine, and I hope I shall find that our views are not very
discrepant.
Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one
of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game
of chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary
duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a
notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and
getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a
disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son,
or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a
pawn from a knight?
Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the
fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of
those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of
the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than
chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and
woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own.
The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The
player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is
always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he
never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for
ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with
that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight
in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but
without remorse.
My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which
Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul.
Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm, strong angel
who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win--and
I should accept it as an image of human life.
Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty
game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in
the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and
their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the
affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in
harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less
than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be
tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not
call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of
numbers, upon the other side.
It is important to remember that, in strictness, there is no such thing
as an uneducated man. Take an extreme case. Suppose that an adult man,
in the full vigour of his faculties, could be suddenly placed in the
world, as Adam is said to have been, and then left to do as he best
might. How long would he be left uneducated? Not five minutes. Nature
would begin to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the
properties of objects. Pain and pleasure would be at his elbow telling
him to do this and avoid that; and by slow degrees the man would receive
an education which, if narrow, would be thorough, real, and adequate to
his circumstances, though there would be no extras and very few
accomplishments.
And if to this solitary man entered a second Adam, or, better still, an
Eve, a new and greater world, that of social and moral phenomena, would
be revealed. Joys and woes, compared with which all others might seem
but faint shadows, would spring from the new relations. Happiness and
sorrow would take the place of the coarser monitors, pleasure and pain;
but conduct would still be shaped by the observation of the natural
consequences of actions; or, in other words, by the laws of the nature
of man.
To every one of us the world was once as fresh and new as to Adam. And
then, long before we were susceptible of any other modes of instruction,
Nature took us in hand, and every minute of waking life brought its
educational influence, shaping our actions into rough accordance with
Nature's laws, so that we might not be ended untimely by too gross
disobedience. Nor should I speak of this process of education as past
for any one, be he as old as he may. For every man the world is as fresh
as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who
has the eyes to see them. And Nature is still continuing her patient
education of us in that great university, the universe, of which we are
all members--Nature having no Test-Acts.
Those who take honours in Nature's university, who learn the laws which
govern men and things and obey them, are the really great and successful
men in this world. The great mass of mankind are the "Poll,"[10] who
pick up just enough to get through without much discredit. Those who
won't learn at all are plucked; and then you can't come up again.
Nature's pluck means extermination.
Thus the question of compulsory education is settled so far as Nature
is concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and passed long ago.
But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and
wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful
disobedience--incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime.
Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first;
but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out why your
ears are boxed.
The object of what we commonly call education--that education in which
man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial education--is
to make good these defects in Nature's methods; to prepare the child to
receive Nature's education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with
wilful disobedience; and to understand the preliminary symptoms of her
pleasure, without waiting for the box on the ear. In short, all
artificial education ought to be an anticipation of natural education.
And a liberal education is an artificial education which has not only
prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural
laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards,
which Nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties.
That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with
ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of
equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine,
to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as
forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of
the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her
operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but
whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the
servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty,
whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others
as himself.
Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for
he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will
make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely;
she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious
self, her minister and interpreter.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 9: From "A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It," 1868.]
[Footnote 10: Poll (a slang term used at Cambridge University): those
who take a degree without honours.]
KNOWLEDGE VIEWED IN RELATION TO LEARNING[11]
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
It were well if the English, like the Greek language, possessed some
definite word to express, simply and generally, intellectual proficiency
or perfection, such as "health," as used with reference to the animal
frame, and "virtue," with reference to our moral nature. I am not able
to find such a term;--talent, ability, genius, belong distinctly to the
raw material, which is the subject-matter, not to that excellence which
is the result of exercise and training. When we turn, indeed, to the
particular kinds of intellectual perfection, words are forthcoming for
our purpose, as, for instance, judgment, taste, and skill; yet even
these belong, for the most part, to powers or habits bearing upon
practice or upon art, and not to any perfect condition of the intellect,
considered in itself. Wisdom, again, is certainly a more comprehensive
word than any other, but it has a direct relation to conduct, and to
human life. Knowledge, indeed, and science express purely intellectual
ideas but still not a state or quality of the intellect; for knowledge,
in its ordinary sense, is but one of its circumstances, denoting a
possession or a habit; and science has been appropriated to the
subject-matter of the intellect, instead of belonging in English, as it
ought to do, to the intellect itself. The consequence is that, on an
occasion like this, many words are necessary, in order, first, to bring
out and convey what surely is no difficult idea in itself,--that of the
cultivation of the intellect as an end; next, in order to recommend
what surely is no unreasonable object; and lastly, to describe and make
the mind realise the particular perfection in which that object
consists. Every one knows practically what are the constituents of
health or of virtue; and every one recognises health and virtue as ends
to be pursued; it is otherwise with intellectual excellence, and this
must be my excuse, if I seem to anyone to be bestowing a good deal of
labour on a preliminary matter.
In default of a recognised term, I have called the perfection or virtue
of the intellect by the name of philosophy, philosophical knowledge,
enlargement of mind, or illumination, terms which are not uncommonly
given to it by writers of this day: but, whatever name we bestow on it,
it is, I believe, as a matter of history, the business of a university
to make this intellectual culture its direct scope, or to employ itself
in the education of the intellect,--just as the work of a hospital lies
in healing the sick or wounded, of a riding or fencing school, or of a
gymnasium, in exercising the limbs, of an almshouse, in aiding and
solacing the old, of an orphanage, in protecting innocence, of a
penitentiary, in restoring the guilty. I say, a university, taken in its
bare idea, and before we view it as an instrument of the church, has
this object and this mission; it contemplates neither moral impression
nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in
art nor in duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave
its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this.
It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out
towards truth, and to grasp it.
This, I said in my foregoing discourse, was the object of a university,
viewed in itself, and apart from the Catholic Church, or from the state,
or from any other power which may use it; and I illustrated this in
various ways. I said that the intellect must have an excellence of its
own, for there was nothing which had not its specific good; that the
word "educate" would not be used of intellectual culture, as it is used,
had not the intellect had an end of its own; that, had it not such an
end, there would be no meaning in calling certain intellectual exercises
"liberal," in contrast with "useful," as is commonly done; that the very
notion of a philosophical temper implied it, for it threw us back upon
research and system as ends in themselves, distinct from effects and
works of any kind; that a philosophical scheme of knowledge, or system
of sciences, could not, from the nature of the case, issue in any one
definite art or pursuit, as its end; and that, on the other hand, the
discovery and contemplation of truth, to which research and
systematising led, were surely sufficient ends, though nothing beyond
them were added, and that they had ever been accounted sufficient by
mankind.
Here then I take up the subject; and having determined that the
cultivation of the intellect is an end distinct and sufficient in
itself, and that, so far as words go, it is an enlargement or
illumination. I proceed to inquire what this mental breadth, or power,
or light, or philosophy consists in. A hospital heals a broken limb or
cures a fever: what does an institution effect, which professes the
health, not of the body, not of the soul, but of the intellect? What is
this good, which in former times, as well as our own, has been found
worth the notice, the appropriation of the Catholic Church?
I have then to investigate, in the discourses which follow, those
qualities and characteristics of the intellect in which its cultivation
issues or rather consists; and, with a view of assisting myself in this
undertaking, I shall recur to certain questions which have already been
touched upon. These questions are three: viz. the relation of
intellectual culture, first, to _mere_ knowledge; secondly, to
_professional_ knowledge; and thirdly, to _religious_ knowledge. In
other words, are _acquirements_ and _attainments_ the scope of a
university education? or _expertness in particular arts_ and _pursuits_?
or _moral and religious proficiency_? or something besides these three?
These questions I shall examine in succession, with the purpose I have
mentioned; and I hope to be excused, if, in this anxious undertaking, I
am led to repeat what, either in these discourses or elsewhere, I have
already put upon paper. And first, of _mere knowledge_, or learning, and
its connection with intellectual illumination or philosophy.
I suppose the _prima-facie_[12] view which the public at large would
take of a university, considering it as a place of education, is nothing
more or less than a place for acquiring a great deal of knowledge on a
great many subjects. Memory is one of the first developed of the mental
faculties; a boy's business when he goes to school is to learn, that is,
to store up things in his memory. For some years his intellect is little
more than an instrument for taking in facts, or a receptacle for storing
them; he welcomes them as fast as they come to him; he lives on what is
without; he has his eyes ever about him; he has a lively susceptibility
of impressions; he imbibes information of every kind; and little does he
make his own in a true sense of the word, living rather upon his
neighbours all around him. He has opinions, religious, political and
literary, and, for a boy, is very positive in them and sure about them;
but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents,
as the case may be. Such as he is in his other relations, such also is
he in his school exercises; his mind is observant, sharp, ready,
retentive; he is almost passive in the acquisition of knowledge. I say
this in no disparagement of the idea of a clever boy. Geography,
chronology, history, language, natural history, he heaps up the matter
of these studies as treasures for a future day. It is the seven years of
plenty with him: he gathers in by handfuls, like the Egyptians, without
counting; and though, as time goes on, there is exercise for his
argumentative powers in the elements of mathematics, and for his taste
in the poets and orators, still, while at school, or at least, till
quite the last years of his time, he acquires, and little more; and when
he is leaving for the university, he is mainly the creature of foreign
influences and circumstances, and made up of accidents, homogeneous or
not, as the case may be. Moreover, the moral habits, which are a boy's
praise, encourage and assist this result; that is, diligence, assiduity,
regularity, despatch, persevering application; for these are the direct
conditions of acquisition, and naturally lead to it. Acquirements,
again, are emphatically producible, and at a moment; they are a
something to show, both for master and scholar; an audience, even though
ignorant themselves of the subjects of an examination, can comprehend
when questions are answered and when they are not. Here again is a
reason why mental culture is in the minds of men identified with the
acquisition of knowledge.
The same notion possesses the public mind, when it passes on from the
thought of a school to that of a university: and with the best of
reasons so far as this, that there is no true culture without
acquirements, and that philosophy presupposes knowledge. It requires a
great deal of reading, or a wide range of information, to warrant us in
putting forth our opinions on any serious subject; and without such
learning the most original mind may be able indeed to dazzle, to amuse,
to refute, to perplex, but not to come to any useful result or any
trustworthy conclusion. There are indeed persons who profess a different
view of the matter, and even act upon it. Every now and then you will
find a person of vigorous or fertile mind, who relies upon his own
resources, despises all former authors, and gives the world, with the
utmost fearlessness, his views upon religion, or history, or any other
popular subject. And his works may sell for a while; he may get a name
in his day; but this will be all. His readers are sure to find on the
long run that his doctrines are mere theories, and not the expression of
facts, that they are chaff instead of bread, and then his popularity
drops as suddenly as it rose.
Knowledge then is the indispensable condition of expansion of mind, and
the instrument of attaining to it; this cannot be denied, it is ever to
be insisted on; I begin with it as a first principle; however, the very
truth of it carries men too far, and confirms to them the notion that it
is the whole of the matter. A narrow mind is thought to be that which
contains little knowledge; and an enlarged mind, that which holds a
great deal; and what seems to put the matter beyond dispute is, the fact
of the great number of studies which are pursued in a university, by its
very profession. Lectures are given on every kind of subject;
examinations are held; prizes awarded. There are moral, metaphysical,
physical professors; professors of languages, of history, of
mathematics, of experimental science. Lists of questions are published,
wonderful for their range and depth, variety and difficulty; treatises
are written, which carry upon their very face the evidence of extensive
reading or multifarious information; what then is wanting for mental
culture to a person of large reading and scientific attainments? what is
grasp of mind but acquirement? where shall philosophical repose be
found, but in the consciousness and enjoyment of large intellectual
possessions?
And yet this notion is, I conceive, a mistake, and my present business
is to show that it is one, and that the end of a liberal education is
not mere knowledge, or knowledge considered in its _matter_; and I shall
best attain my object, by actually setting down some cases, which will
be generally granted to be instances of the process of enlightenment or
enlargement of mind, and others which are not, and thus, by the
comparison, you will be able to judge for yourselves, gentlemen, whether
knowledge, that is, acquirement, is after all the real principle of the
enlargement or whether that principle is not rather something beyond it.
For instance, let a person, whose experience has hitherto been confined
to the more calm and unpretending scenery of these islands, whether here
or in England, go for the first time into parts where physical nature
puts on her wilder and more awful forms, whether at home or abroad, as
into mountainous districts; or let one, who has ever lived in a quiet
village, go for the first time to a great metropolis,--then I suppose he
will have a sensation which perhaps he never had before. He has a
feeling not in addition or increase of former feelings, but of something
different in its nature. He will perhaps be borne forward, and find for
a time that he has lost his bearings. He has made a certain progress,
and he has a consciousness of mental enlargement; he does not stand
where he did, he has a new centre, and a range of thoughts to which he
was before a stranger.
Again, the view of the heavens which the telescope opens upon us, if
allowed to fill and possess the mind, may almost whirl it round and make
it dizzy. It brings in a flood of ideas, and is rightly called an
intellectual enlargement, whatever is meant by the term.
And so again, the sight of beasts of prey and other foreign animals,
their strangeness, the originality (if I may use the term) of their
forms and gestures and habits, and their variety and independence of
each other, throw us out of ourselves into another creation, and as if
under another Creator, if I may so express the temptation which may come
on the mind. We seem to have new faculties, or a new exercise for our
faculties, by this addition to our knowledge; like a prisoner, who,
having been accustomed to wear manacles or fetters, suddenly finds his
arms and legs free.
Hence physical science generally, in all its departments, as bringing
before us the exuberant riches and resources, yet the orderly course, of
the universe, elevates and excites the student, and at first, I may say,
almost takes away his breath, while in time it exercises a
tranquillising influence upon him.
Again the study of history is said to enlarge and enlighten the mind,
and why? because, as I conceive, it gives it a power of judging of
passing events and of all events, and a conscious superiority over them,
which before it did not possess.
And in like manner, what is called seeing the world, entering into
active life, going into society, travelling, gaining acquaintance with
the various classes of the community, coming into contact with the
principles and modes of thought of various parties, interests, and
races, their views, aims, habits and manners, their religious creeds and
forms of worship,--gaining experience how various yet how alike men
are, how low-minded, how bad, how opposed, yet how confident in their
opinions; all this exerts a perceptible influence upon the mind, which
it is impossible to mistake, be it good or be it bad, and is popularly
called its enlargement.
And then again, the first time the mind comes across the arguments and
speculations of unbelievers, and feels what a novel light they cast upon
what he has hitherto accounted sacred; and still more, if it gives in to
them and embraces them, and throws off as so much prejudice what it has
hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realise to its
imagination that there is now no such thing as law and the transgression
of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free
to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further, when
it does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and hold just what it
will, that "the world is all before it where to choose," and what system
to build up as its own private persuasion; when this torrent of wilful
thoughts rushes over and inundates it, who will deny that the fruit of
the tree of knowledge, or what the mind takes for knowledge, has made it
one of the gods, with a sense of expansion and elevation,--an
intoxication in reality, still, so far as the subjective state of the
mind goes, an illumination? Hence the fanaticism of individuals or
nations, who suddenly cast off their Maker. Their eyes are opened; and,
like the judgment-stricken king in the tragedy, they see two suns, and a
magic universe, out of which they look back upon their former state of
faith and innocence with a sort of contempt and indignation, as if they
were then but fools, and the dupes of imposture.
On the other hand, religion has its own enlargement, and an enlargement,
not of tumult, but of peace. It is often remarked of uneducated persons,
who have hitherto thought little of the unseen world, that, on their
turning to God, looking into themselves, regulating their hearts,
reforming their conduct, and meditating on death and judgment, heaven
and hell, they seem to become, in point of intellect, different beings
from what they were. Before, they took things as they came, and thought
no more of one thing than another. But now every event has a meaning;
they have their own estimate of whatever happens to them; they are
mindful of times and seasons, and compare the present with the past; and
the world, no longer dull, monotonous, unprofitable, and hopeless, is a
various and complicated drama, with parts and an object, and an awful
moral.
Now from these instances, to which many more might be added, it is
plain, first, that the communication of knowledge certainly is either a
condition or the means of that sense of enlargement or enlightenment, of
which at this day we hear so much in certain quarters: this cannot be
denied; but next, it is equally plain, that such communication is not
the whole of the process. The enlargement consists, not merely in the
passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to
it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards
and among those new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. It is the
action of a formative power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of
our acquirements; it is a making the objects of our knowledge
subjectively our own, or, to use a familiar word, it is a digestion of
what we receive, into the substance of our previous state of thought;
and without this no enlargement is said to follow. There is no
enlargement, unless there be a comparison of ideas one with another, as
they come before the mind, and a systematising of them. We feel our
minds to be growing and expanding _then_, when we not only learn, but
refer what we learn to what we know already. It is not the mere addition
to our knowledge that is the illumination; but the locomotion, the
movement onwards, of that mental centre, to which both what we know, and
what we are learning, the accumulating mass of our acquirements,
gravitates. And therefore a truly great intellect, and recognised to be
such by the common opinion of mankind, such as the intellect of
Aristotle, or of St. Thomas, or of Newton, or of Goethe (I purposely
take instances within and without the Catholic pale, when I would speak
of the intellect as such), is one which takes a connected view of old
and new, past and present, far and near, and which has an insight into
the influence of all these one on another; without which there is no
whole and no centre. It possesses the knowledge, not only of things, but
also of their mutual and true relations; knowledge, not merely
considered as acquirement but as philosophy.
Accordingly, when this analytical, distributive, harmonising process is
away, the mind experiences no enlargement, and is not reckoned as
enlightened or comprehensive, whatever it may add to its knowledge. For
instance, a great memory, as I have already said, does not make a
philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called a grammar. There
are men who embrace in their minds a vast multitude of ideas, but with
little sensibility about their real relations towards each other. These
may be antiquarians, annalists, naturalists; they may be learned in the
law; they may be versed in statistics; they are most useful in their own
place; I should shrink from speaking disrespectfully of them; still,
there is nothing in such attainments to guarantee the absence of
narrowness of mind. If they are nothing more than well-read men, or men
of information, they have not what specially deserves the name of
culture of mind, or fulfils the type of liberal education.
In like manner, we sometimes fall in with persons who have seen much of
the world, and of the men who, in their day, have played a conspicuous
part in it, but who generalise, nothing, and have no observation, in the
true sense of the word. They abound in information in detail, curious
and entertaining, about men and things; and, having lived under the
influence of no very clear or settled principles, religious or
political, they speak of every one and every thing, only as so many
phenomena, which are complete in themselves, and lead to nothing, not
discussing them, or teaching any truth, or instructing the hearer, but
simply talking. No one would say that these persons, well informed as
they are, had attained to any great culture of intellect or to
philosophy.
The case is the same still more strikingly where the persons in question
are beyond dispute men of inferior powers and deficient education.
Perhaps they have been much in foreign countries, and they receive, in a
passive, otiose, unfruitful way, the various facts which are forced upon
them there. Seafaring men, for example, range from one end of the earth
to the other; but the multiplicity of external objects, which they have
encountered, forms no symmetrical and consistent picture upon their
imagination; they see the tapestry of human life, as it were on the
wrong side, and it tells no story. They sleep, and they rise up, and
they find themselves, now in Europe, now in Asia; they see visions of
great cities and wild regions; they are in the marts of commerce, or
amid the islands of the South; they gaze on Pompey's Pillar, or on the
Andes; and nothing which meets them carries them forward or backward, to
any idea beyond itself. Nothing has a drift or relation; nothing has a
history or a promise. Every thing stands by itself, and comes and goes
in its turn, like the shifting scenes of a show, which leave the
spectator where he was. Perhaps you are near such a man on a particular
occasion, and expect him to be shocked or perplexed at something which
occurs; but one thing is much the same to him as another, or, if he is
perplexed, it is as not knowing what to say, whether it is right to
admire, or to ridicule or to disapprove, while conscious that some
expression of opinion is expected from him; for in fact he has no
standard of judgment at all, and no landmarks to guide him to a
conclusion. Such is mere acquisition, and, I repeat, no one would dream
of calling it philosophy.
Instances, such as these, confirm, by the contrast, the conclusion I
have already drawn from those which preceded them. That only is true
enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as
one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the
universal system, of understanding their respective values, and
determining their mutual dependence. Thus is that form of universal
knowledge, of which I have on a former occasion spoken, set up in the
individual intellect, and constitutes its perfection. Possessed of this
real illumination, the mind never views any part of the extended
subject-matter of knowledge without recollecting that it is but a part,
or without the associations which spring from this recollection. It
makes everything in some sort lead to everything else; it would
communicate the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that
whole becomes in imagination like a spirit, everywhere pervading and
penetrating its component parts, and giving them one definite meaning.
Just as our bodily organs, when mentioned, recall their function in the
body, as the word "creation" suggests the Creator, and "subjects" a
sovereign, so, in the mind of the philosopher as we are abstractedly
conceiving of him, the elements of the physical and moral world,
sciences, arts, pursuits, ranks, offices, events, opinions,
individualities, are all viewed as one with correlative functions, and
as gradually by successive combinations converging, one and all, to the
true centre.
To have even a portion of this illuminative reason and true philosophy
is the highest state to which nature can aspire, in the way of
intellect; it puts the mind above the influences of chance and
necessity, above anxiety, suspense, unsettlement, and superstition,
which is the lot of the many. Men, whose minds are possessed with some
one object, take exaggerated views of its importance, are feverish in
the pursuit of it, make it the measure of things which are utterly
foreign to it, and are startled and despond if it happens to fail them.
They are ever in alarm or in transport. Those on the other hand who have
no object or principle whatever to hold by, lose their way every step
they take. They are thrown out, and do not know what to think or say, at
every fresh juncture; they have no view of persons, or occurrences, or
facts, which come suddenly upon them, and they hang upon the opinion of
others for want of internal resources. But the intellect, which has been
disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows, and thinks
while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and
events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be
partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss,
cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it
discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in
every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where
it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another. It is the
[Greek: tetragonos][13] of the Peripatetic, and has the _nil
admirari_[14] of the Stoic,--
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari.[15]
There are men who, when in difficulties, originate at the moment vast
ideas or dazzling projects; who, under the influence of excitement, are
able to cast a light, almost as if from inspiration, on a subject or
course of action which comes before them; who have a sudden presence of
mind equal to any emergency, rising with the occasion, and an undaunted
magnanimous bearing, and an energy and keenness which is but made
intense by opposition. This is genius, this is heroism; it is the
exhibition of a natural gift, which no culture can teach, at which no
institution can aim: here, on the contrary, we are concerned, not with
mere nature, but with training and teaching. That perfection of the
intellect, which is the result of education, and its _beau ideal_, to be
imparted to individuals in their respective measures, is the clear,
calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the
finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own
characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of
history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human
nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from
littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because
nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly
contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and
the music of the spheres.
And now, if I may take for granted that the true and adequate end of
intellectual training and of a university is not learning or
acquirement, but rather, is thought or reason exercised upon knowledge,
or what may be called philosophy, I shall be in a position to explain
the various mistakes which at the present day beset the subject of
university education.
I say then, if we would improve the intellect, first of all, we must
ascend; we cannot gain real knowledge on a level; we must generalise, we
must reduce to method, we must have a grasp of principles, and group and
shape our acquisitions by means of them. It matters not whether our
field of operation be wide or limited; in every case, to command it, is
to mount above it. Who has not felt the irritation of mind and
impatience created by a deep, rich country, visited for the first time,
with winding lanes, and high hedges, and green steeps, and tangled
woods, and every thing smiling indeed, but in a maze? The same feeling
comes upon us in a strange city, when we have no map of its streets.
Hence you hear of practised travellers, when they first come into a
place, mounting some high hill or church tower, by way of reconnoitering
its neighbourhood. In like manner, you must be above your knowledge, not
under it, or it will oppress you; and the more you have of it, the
greater will be the load. The learning of a Salmasius or a Burman,
unless you are its master, will be your tyrant. _Imperat aut
servit_;[16] if you can wield it with a strong arm, it is a great
weapon; otherwise,
Vis consili expers
Mole ruit sua.[17]
You will be overwhelmed, like Tarpeia, by the heavy wealth which you
have exacted from tributary generations.
Instances abound; there are authors who are as pointless as they are
inexhaustible in their literary resources. They measure knowledge by
bulk, as it lies in the rude block, without symmetry, without design.
How many commentators are there on the classics, how many on Holy
Scripture, from whom we rise up, wondering at the learning which has
passed before us, and wondering why it passed! How many writers are
there of Ecclesiastical history, such as Mosheim or Du Pin, who,
breaking up their subject into details, destroy its life, and defraud us
of the whole by their anxiety about the parts! The sermons, again, of
the English divines in the seventeenth century, how often are they mere
repertories of miscellaneous and officious learning! Of course Catholics
also may read without thinking; and in their case, equally as with
Protestants, it holds good, that such knowledge is unworthy of the name,
knowledge which they have not thought through, and thought out. Such
readers are only possessed by their knowledge, not possessed of it; nay,
in matter of fact they are often even carried away by it, without any
volition of their own. Recollect, the memory can tyrannise, as well as
the imagination. Derangement, I believe, has been considered as a loss
of control over the sequence of ideas. The mind, once set in motion, is
henceforth deprived of the power of initiation, and becomes the victim
of a train of associations, one thought suggesting another, in the way
of cause and effect, as if by a mechanical process, or some physical
necessity. No one, who has had experience of men of studious habits, but
must recognise the existence of a parallel phenomenon in the case of
those who have over-stimulated the memory. In such persons reason acts
almost as feebly and as impotently as in the madman; once fairly started
on any subject whatever, they have no power of self-control; they
passively endure the succession of impulses which are evolved out of the
original exciting cause; they are passed on from one idea to another
and go steadily forward, plodding along one line of thought in spite of
the amplest concessions of the hearer, or wandering from it in endless
digression in spite of his remonstrances. Now, if, as is very certain,
no one would envy the madman the glow and originality of his
conceptions, why must we extol the cultivation of that intellect which
is the prey, not indeed of barren fancies but of barren facts, of random
intrusions from without, though not of morbid imaginations from within?
And in thus speaking, I am not denying that a strong and ready memory is
in itself a real treasure; I am not disparaging a well-stored mind,
though it be nothing besides, provided it be sober, any more than I
would despise a bookseller's shop:--it is of great value to others, even
when not so to the owner. Nor am I banishing, far from it, the
possessors of deep and multifarious learning from my ideal University;
they adorn it in the eyes of men; I do but say that they constitute no
type of the results at which it aims; that it is no great gain to the
intellect to have enlarged the memory at the expense of faculties which
are indisputably higher.
Nor indeed am I supposing that there is any great danger, at least in
this day, of over-education; the danger is on the other side. I will
tell you, gentlemen, what has been the practical error of the last
twenty years,--not to load the memory of the student with a mass of
undigested knowledge, but to force upon him so much that he has rejected
all. It has been the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an
unmeaning profusion of subjects; of implying that a smattering in a
dozen branches of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but
enlargement, which it is not; of considering an acquaintance with the
learned names of things and persons and the possession of clever
duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent lecturers, and membership with
scientific institutions, and the sight of the experiments of a platform
and the specimens of a museum, that all this was not dissipation of
mind, but progress. All things now are to be learned at once, not first
one thing, then another, not one well, but many badly. Learning is to
be without exertion, without attention, without toil; without grounding,
without advance, without finishing. There is to be nothing individual in
it; and this, forsooth, is the wonder of the age. What the steam engine
does with matter, the printing press is to do with the mind; it is to
act mechanically, and the population is to be passively, almost
unconsciously enlightened, by the mere multiplication and dissemination
of volumes. Whether it be the school boy, or the school girl, or the
youth at college, or the mechanic in the town, or the politician in the
senate, all have been the victims in one way or other of this most
preposterous and pernicious of delusions. Wise men have lifted up their
voices in vain; and at length, lest their own institutions should be
outshone and should disappear in the folly of the hour, they have been
obliged, as far as they could with a good conscience, to humour a spirit
which they could not withstand, and make temporising concessions at
which they could not but inwardly smile.
It must not be supposed that, because I so speak, therefore I have some
sort of fear of the education of the people: on the contrary, the more
education they have, the better, so that it is really education. Nor am
I an enemy to the cheap publication of scientific and literary works,
which is now in vogue: on the contrary, I consider it a great advantage,
convenience, and gain; that is, to those to whom education has given a
capacity for using them. Further, I consider such innocent recreations
as science and literature are able to furnish will be a very fit
occupation of the thoughts and the leisure of young persons, and may be
made the means of keeping them from bad employments and bad companions.
Moreover, as to that superficial acquaintance with chemistry, and
geology, and astronomy, and political economy, and modern history, and
biography, and other branches of knowledge, which periodical literature
and occasional lectures and scientific institutions diffuse through the
community, I think it a graceful accomplishment, and a suitable, nay,
in this day a necessary accomplishment, in the case of educated men.
Nor, lastly, am I disparaging or discouraging the thorough acquisition
of any one of these studies, or denying that, as far as it goes, such
thorough acquisition is a real education of the mind. All I say is, call
things by their right names, and do not confuse together ideas which are
essentially different. A thorough knowledge of one science and a
superficial acquaintance with many, are not the same thing; a smattering
of a hundred things or a memory for detail, is not a philosophical or
comprehensive view. Recreations are not education; accomplishments are
not education. Do not say, the people must be educated, when, after all,
you only mean amused, refreshed, soothed, put into good spirits and good
humour, or kept from vicious excesses. I do not say that such
amusements, such occupations of mind, are not a great gain; but they are
not education. You may as well call drawing and fencing education as a
general knowledge of botany or conchology. Stuffing birds or playing
stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle,
but it is not education; it does not form or cultivate the intellect.
Education is a high word; it is the preparation for knowledge, and it is
the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that preparation. We require
intellectual eyes to know withal, as bodily eyes for sight. We need both
objects and organs intellectual; we cannot gain them without setting
about it; we cannot gain them in our sleep, or by haphazard. The best
telescope does not dispense with eyes; the printing press or the lecture
room will assist us greatly, but we must be true to ourselves, we must
be parties in the work. A university is, according to the usual
designation, an alma mater, knowing her children one by one, not a
foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill.
I protest to you, gentlemen, that if I had to choose between a so-called
university, which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence,
and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide
range of subjects, and a university which had no professors or
examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together
for three or four years, and then sent them away as the University of
Oxford is said to have done some sixty years since, if I were asked
which of these two methods was the better discipline of the
intellect,--mind, I do not say which is morally the better, for it is
plain that compulsory study must be a good and idleness an intolerable
mischief,--but if I must determine which of the two courses was the more
successful in training, moulding, enlarging the mind, which sent out men
the more fitted for their secular duties, which produced better public
men, men of the world, men whose names would descend to posterity, I
have no hesitation in giving the preference to that university which did
nothing, over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with
every science under the sun. And, paradox as this may seem, still if
results be the test of systems, the influence of the public schools and
colleges of England, in the course of the last century, at least will
bear out one side of the contrast as I have drawn it. What would come,
on the other hand, of the ideal systems of education which have
fascinated the imagination of this age, could they ever take effect, and
whether they would not produce a generation frivolous, narrow-minded,
and resourceless, intellectually considered, is a fair subject for
debate; but so far is certain, that the universities and scholastic
establishments, to which I refer, and which did little more than bring
together first boys and then youths in large numbers, these
institutions, with miserable deformities on the side of morals, with a
hollow profession of Christianity, and a heathen code of ethics,--I say,
at least they can boast of a succession of heroes and statesmen, of
literary men and philosophers, of men conspicuous for great natural
virtues, for habits of business, for knowledge of life, for practical
judgment, for cultivated tastes, for accomplishments, who have made
England what it is,--able to subdue the earth, able to domineer over
Catholics.
How is this to be explained? I suppose as follows: When a multitude of
young men, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant, as young men
are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to
learn one from another, even if there be no one to teach them; the
conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for
themselves new ideas and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct
principles for judging and acting, day by day. An infant has to learn
the meaning of the information which its senses convey to it, and this
seems to be its employment. It fancies all that the eye presents to it
to be close to it, till it actually learns the contrary, and thus by
practice does it ascertain the relations and uses of those first
elements of knowledge which are necessary for its animal existence. A
parallel teaching is necessary for our social being, and it is secured
by a large school or a college; and this effect may be fairly called in
its own department an enlargement of mind. It is seeing the world on a
small field with little trouble; for the pupils or students come from
very different places, and with widely different notions, and there is
much to generalise, much to adjust, much to eliminate, there are
inter-relations to be defined, and conventional rules to be established,
in the process, by which the whole assemblage is moulded together, and
gains one tone and one character.
Let it be clearly understood, I repeat it, that I am not taking into
account moral or religious considerations; I am but saying that that
youthful community will constitute a whole, it will embody a specific
idea, it will represent a doctrine, it will administer a code of
conduct, and it will furnish principles of thought and action. It will
give birth to a living teaching, which in course of time will take the
shape of a self-perpetuating tradition, or a _genius loci_,[18] as it is
sometimes called; which haunts the home where it has been born, and
which imbues and forms more or less, and one by one, every individual
who is successively brought under its shadow. Thus it is that,
independent of direct instruction on the part of superiors, there is a
sort of self-education in the academic institutions of Protestant
England; a characteristic tone of thought, a recognised standard of
judgment is found in them, which, as developed in the individual who is
submitted to it, becomes a twofold source of strength to him, both from
the distinct stamp it impresses on his mind, and from the bond of union
which it creates between him and others,--effects which are shared by
the authorities of the place, for they themselves have been educated in
it, and at all times are exposed to the influence of its ethical
atmosphere. Here then is a real teaching, whatever be its standards and
principles, true or false; and it at least tends towards cultivation of
the intellect; it at least recognises that knowledge is something more
than a sort of passive reception of scraps and details; it is a
something, and it does a something, which never will issue from the most
strenuous efforts of a set of teachers with no mutual sympathies and no
intercommunion, of a set of examiners with no opinions which they dare
profess, and with no common principles, who are teaching or questioning
a set of youths who do not know them, and do not know each other, on a
large number of subjects, different in kind, and connected by no wide
philosophy, three times a week, or three times a year, or once in three
years, in chill lecture-rooms or on a pompous anniversary.
Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is
preferable to a system of teaching which, professing so much, really
does so little for the mind. Shut your college gates against the votary
of knowledge, throw him back upon the searchings and the efforts of his
own mind; he will gain by being spared an entrance into your babel. Few
indeed there are who can dispense with the stimulus and support of
instructors, or will do anything at all, if left to themselves. And
fewer still (though such great minds are to be found), who will not,
from such unassisted attempts, contract a self-reliance and a
self-esteem, which are not only moral evils, but serious hindrances to
the attainment of truth. And next to none, perhaps, or none, who will
not be reminded from time to time of the disadvantage under which they
lie, by their imperfect grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and
irregularities of their knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and
the confusion of principle which they exhibit. They will be too often
ignorant of what every one knows and takes for granted, of that
multitude of small truths which fall upon the mind like dust, impalpable
and ever accumulating; they may be unable to converse, they may argue
perversely, they may pride themselves on their worst paradoxes or their
grossest truisms, they may be full of their own mode of viewing things,
unwilling to be put out of their way, slow to enter into the minds of
others;--but, with these and whatever other liabilities upon their
heads, they are likely to have more thought, more mind, more philosophy,
more true enlargement, than those earnest but ill-used persons who are
forced to load their minds with a score of subjects against an
examination, who have too much on their hands to indulge themselves in
thinking or investigation, who devour premise and conclusion together
with indiscriminate greediness, who hold whole sciences on faith, and
commit demonstrations to memory, and who too often, as might be
expected, when their period of education is passed, throw up all they
have learned in disgust, having gained nothing really by their anxious
labours, except perhaps the habit of application.
Yet such is the better specimen of the fruit of that ambitious system
which has of late years been making way among us: for its result on
ordinary minds, and on the common run of students, is less satisfactory
still; they leave their place of education simply dissipated and relaxed
by the multiplicity of subjects, which they have never really mastered,
and so shallow as not even to know their shallowness. How much better, I
say, it is for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be
found, to eschew the college and the university altogether, than to
submit to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! How much
more profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of
education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as
they meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his mother wit
suggests! How much healthier to wander into the fields, and there with
the exiled prince to find "tongues in the trees, books in the running
brooks!" How much more genuine an education is that of the poor boy in
the poem[19]--a poem, whether in conception or execution, one of the
most touching in our language--who, not in the wide world, but ranging
day by day around his widowed mother's home, "a dextrous gleaner" in a
narrow field and with only such slender outfit
as the village school and books a few
Supplied,
contrived from the beach, and the quay, and the fisher's boat, and the
inn's fireside, and the tradesman's shop, and the shepherd's walk, and
the smuggler's hut, and the mossy moor, and the screaming gulls, and the
restless waves, to fashion for himself a philosophy and a poetry of his
own!
But in a large subject, I am exceeding my necessary limits. Gentlemen, I
must conclude abruptly; and postpone any summing up of my argument,
should that be necessary, to another day.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 11: Discourse VI in "The Idea of a University," 1852.]
[Footnote 12: Prima-facie: based on one's first impression.]
[Footnote 13: Four-square.]
[Footnote 14: To be moved by nothing.]
[Footnote 15: Happy is he who has come to know the sequences of things,
and is thus above all fear and the dread march of fate and the roar of
greedy Acheron.]
[Footnote 16: It rules or it serves.]
[Footnote 17: Brute force without intelligence falls by its own weight.]
[Footnote 18: Genius loci: spirit of the place.]
[Footnote 19: Crabbe's _Tales of the Hall_. This poem, let me say, I
read on its first publication, above thirty years ago, with extreme
delight, and have never lost my love of it; and on taking it up lately,
found I was even more touched by it than heretofore. A work which can
please in youth and age, seems to fulfil (in logical language) the
_accidental definition_ of a classic. (A further course of twenty years
has passed, and I bear the same witness in favour of this poem.)]
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE[20]
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Practical people talk with a smile of Plato and of his absolute ideas;
and it is impossible to deny that Plato's ideas do often seem
unpractical and impracticable, and especially when one views them in
connection with the life of a great workaday world like the United
States. The necessary staple of the life of such a world Plato regards
with disdain; handicraft and trade and the working professions he
regards with disdain; but what becomes of the life of an industrial
modern community if you take handicraft and trade and the working
professions out of it? The base mechanic arts and handicrafts, says
Plato, bring about a natural weakness in the principle of excellence in
a man, so that he cannot govern the ignoble growths in him, but nurses
them, and cannot understand fostering any other. Those who exercise such
arts and trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred by their
vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by
them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek
self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker,
who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service,
and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a
bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into
poor and helpless estate.
Nor do the working professions fare any better than trade at the hands
of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture of the working lawyer,
and of his life of bondage; he shows how this bondage from his youth up
has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked of soul,
encompassing him with difficulties which he is not man enough to rely on
justice and truth as means to encounter, but has recourse, for help out
of them, to falsehood and wrong. And so, says Plato, this poor creature
is bent and broken, and grows up from boy to man without a particle of
soundness in him, although exceedingly smart and clever in his own
esteem.
One cannot refuse to admire the artist who draws these pictures. But we
say to ourselves that his ideas show the influence of a primitive and
obsolete order of things, when the warrior caste and the priestly caste
were alone in honour, and the humble work of the world was done by
slaves. We have now changed all that; the modern majority consists in
work, as Emerson declares; and in work, we may add, principally of such
plain and dusty kind as the work of cultivators of the ground,
handicraftsmen, men of trade and business, men of the working
professions. Above all is this true in a great industrious community
such as that of the United States.
Now education, many people go on to say, is still mainly governed by the
ideas of men like Plato, who lived when the warrior caste and the
priestly or philosophical class were alone in honour, and the really
useful part of the community were slaves. It is an education fitted for
persons of leisure in such a community. This education passed from
Greece and Rome to the feudal communities of Europe, where also the
warrior caste and the priestly caste were alone held in honour, and
where the really useful and working part of the community, though not
nominally slaves as in the pagan world, were practically not much better
off than slaves, and not more seriously regarded. And how absurd it is,
people end by saying, to inflict this education upon an industrious
modern community, where very few indeed are persons of leisure, and the
mass to be considered has not leisure, but is bound, for its own great
good, and for the great good of the world at large, to plain labour and
to industrial pursuits, and the education in question tends necessarily
to make men dissatisfied with these pursuits and unfitted for them!
That is what is said. So far I must defend Plato, as to plead that his
view of education and studies is in the general, as it seems to me,
sound enough, and fitted for all sorts and conditions of men, whatever
their pursuits may be. "An intelligent man," says Plato, "will prize
those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness,
and wisdom, and will less value the others." I cannot consider _that_ a
bad description of the aim of education, and of the motives which should
govern us in the choice of studies, whether we are preparing ourselves
for a hereditary seat in the English House of Lords or for the pork
trade in Chicago.
Still I admit that Plato's world was not ours, that his scorn of trade
and handicraft is fantastic, that he had no conception of a great
industrial community such as that of the United States, and that such a
community must and will shape its education to suit its own needs. If
the usual education handed down to it from the past does not suit it, it
will certainly before long drop this and try another. The usual
education in the past has been mainly literary. The question is whether
the studies which were long supposed to be the best for all of us are
practically the best now; whether others are not better. The tyranny of
the past, many think, weighs on us injuriously in the predominance given
to letters in education. The question is raised whether, to meet the
needs of our modern life, the predominance ought not now to pass from
letters to science; and naturally the question is nowhere raised with
more energy than here in the United States. The design of abasing what
is called "mere literary instruction and education," and of exalting
what is called "sound, extensive, and practical scientific knowledge,"
is, in this intensely modern world of the United States, even more
perhaps than in Europe, a very popular design, and makes great and rapid
progress.
I am going to ask whether the present movement for ousting letters from
their old predominance in education, and for transferring the
predominance in education to the natural sciences; whether this brisk
and flourishing movement ought to prevail, and whether it is likely that
in the end it really will prevail. An objection may be raised which I
will anticipate. My own studies have been almost wholly in letters, and
my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight and
inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my
curiosity. A man of letters, it will perhaps be said, is not competent
to discuss the comparative merits of letters and natural science as
means of education. To this objection I reply, first of all, that his
incompetence if he attempts the discussion but is really incompetent for
it, will be abundantly visible; nobody will be taken in; he will have
plenty of sharp observers and critics to save mankind from that danger.
But the line I am going to follow is, as you will soon discover, so
extremely simple, that perhaps it may be followed without failure even
by one who for a more ambitious line of discussion would be quite
incompetent.
Some of you may possibly remember a phrase of mine which has been the
object of a good deal of comment; an observation to the effect that in
our culture, the aim being _to know ourselves and the world_, we have,
as the means to this end, _to know the best which has been thought and
said in the world._ A man of science, who is also an excellent writer
and the very prince of debaters, Professor Huxley, in a discourse at the
opening of Sir Josiah Mason's College at Birmingham, laying hold of this
phrase, expanded it by quoting some more words of mine, which are these:
"The civilised world is to be regarded as now being, for intellectual
and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action
and working to a common result; and whose members have for their proper
outfit a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one
another. Special local and temporary advantages being put out of
account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual
sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this
programme."
Now on my phrase, thus enlarged, Professor Huxley remarks that when I
speak of the above-mentioned knowledge as enabling us to know ourselves
and the world, I assert _literature_ to contain the materials which
suffice for thus making us know ourselves and the world. But it is not
by any means clear, says he, that after having learned all which ancient
and modern literatures have to tell us, we have laid a sufficiently
broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life, that knowledge of
ourselves and the world, which constitutes culture. On the contrary,
Professor Huxley declares that he finds himself "wholly unable to admit
that either nations or individuals will really advance, if their outfit
draws nothing from the stores of physical science. An army without
weapons of precision, and with no particular base of operations, might
more hopefully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a man, devoid of
a knowledge of what physical science has done in the last century, upon
a criticism of life."
This shows how needful it is for those who are to discuss any matter
together, to have a common understanding as to the sense of the terms
they employ,--how needful, and how difficult. What Professor Huxley
says, implies just the reproach which is so often brought against the
study of _belles lettres_, as they are called: that the study is an
elegant one, but slight and ineffectual; a smattering of Greek and Latin
and other ornamental things, of little use for any one whose object is
to get at truth, and to be a practical man. So, too, M. Renan talks of
the "superficial humanism" of a school course which treats us as if we
were all going to be poets, writers, preachers, orators, and he opposes
this humanism to positive science, or the critical search after truth.
And there is always a tendency in those who are remonstrating against
the predominance of letters in education, to understand by letters
_belles lettres_, and by _belles lettres_ a superficial humanism, the
opposite of science or true knowledge.
But when we talk of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, for instance,
which is the knowledge people have called the humanities, I for my part
mean a knowledge which is something more than a superficial humanism,
mainly decorative. "I call all teaching _scientific_," says Wolf, the
critic of Homer, "which is systematically laid out and followed up to
its original sources. For example: a knowledge of classical antiquity is
scientific when the remains of classical antiquity are correctly studied
in the original languages." There can be no doubt that Wolf is perfectly
right; that all learning is scientific which is systematically laid out
and followed up to its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is
scientific.
When I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, therefore, as a help
to knowing ourselves and the world, I mean more than a knowledge of so
much vocabulary, so much grammar, so many portions of authors in the
Greek and Latin languages; I mean knowing the Greeks and Romans, and
their life and genius, and what they were and did in the world; what we
get from them, and what is its value: That, at least, is the ideal; and
when we talk of endeavouring to know Greek and Roman antiquity, as a
help to knowing ourselves and the world, we mean endeavouring so to know
them as to satisfy this ideal, however much we may still fall short of
it.
The same also as to knowing our own and other modern nations, with the
like aim of getting to understand ourselves and the world. To know the
best that has been thought and said by the modern nations, is to know,
says Professor Huxley, "only what modern _literatures_ have to tell us;
it is the criticism of life contained in modern literature." And yet
"the distinctive character of our times," he urges, "lies in the vast
and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge."
And how, therefore, can a man, devoid of knowledge of what physical
science has done in the last century, enter hopefully upon a criticism
of modern life?
Let us, I say, be agreed about the meaning of the terms we are using. I
talk of knowing the best which has been thought and uttered in the
world; Professor Huxley says this means knowing _literature_. Literature
is a large word; it may mean everything written with letters or printed
in a book. Euclid's _Elements_ and Newton's _Principia_ are thus
literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is literature.
But by literature Professor Huxley means _belles lettres_. He means to
make me say, that knowing the best which has been thought and said by
the modern nations is knowing their _belles lettres_ and no more. And
this is no sufficient equipment, he argues, for a criticism of modern
life. But as I do not mean, by knowing ancient Rome, knowing merely more
or less of Latin _belles lettres_, and taking no account of Rome's
military, and political, and legal, and administrative work in the
world; and as, by knowing ancient Greece, I understand knowing her as
the giver of Greek art, and the guide to a free and right use of reason
and to scientific method, and the founder of our mathematics and physics
and astronomy and biology,--I understand knowing her as all this, and
not merely knowing certain Greek poems, and histories, and treatises,
and speeches,--so as to the knowledge of modern nations also. By knowing
modern nations, I mean not merely knowing their _belles lettres_, but
knowing also what has been done by such men as Copernicus, Galileo,
Newton, Darwin. "Our ancestors learned," says Professor Huxley, "that
the earth is the centre of the visible universe, and that man is the
cynosure of things terrestrial; and more especially was it inculcated
that the course of nature has no fixed order, but that it could be, and
constantly was, altered." But for us now, continues Professor Huxley,
"the notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by
our forefathers are no longer credible. It is very certain that the
earth is not the chief body in the material universe, and that the world
is not subordinated to man's use. It is even more certain that nature is
the expression of a definite order, with which nothing interferes."
"And yet," he cries, "the purely classical education advocated by the
representatives of the humanists in our day gives no inkling of all
this!"
In due place and time I will just touch upon that vexed question of
classical education; but at present the question is as to what is meant
by knowing the best which modern nations have thought and said. It is
not knowing their _belles lettres_ merely which is meant. To know
Italian _belles lettres_ is not to know Italy, and to know English
_belles lettres_ is not to know England. Into knowing Italy and England
there comes a great deal more, Galileo and Newton amongst it. The
reproach of being a superficial humanism, a tincture of _belles
lettres_, may attach rightly enough to some other disciplines; but to
the particular discipline recommended when I proposed knowing the best
that has been thought and said in the world, it does not apply. In that
best I certainly include what in modern times has been thought and said
by the great observers and knowers of nature.
There is, therefore, really no question between Professor Huxley and me
as to whether knowing the great results of the modern scientific study
of nature is not required as a part of our culture, as well as knowing
the products of literature and art. But to follow the processes by which
those results are reached, ought, say the friends of physical science,
to be made the staple of education for the bulk of mankind. And here
there does arise a question between those whom Professor Huxley calls
with playful sarcasm "the Levites of culture," and those whom the poor
humanist is sometimes apt to regard as its Nebuchadnezzars.
The great results of the scientific investigation of nature we are
agreed upon knowing, but how much of our study are we bound to give to
the processes by which those results are reached? The results have their
visible bearing on human life. But all the processes, too, all the items
of fact by which those results are reached and established, are
interesting. All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the
knowledge of nature is interesting to all men. It is very interesting
to know, that, from the albuminous white of the egg, the chick in the
egg gets the materials for its flesh, bones, blood, and feathers; while,
from the fatty yolk of the egg, it gets the heat and energy which enable
it at length to break its shell and begin the world. It is less
interesting, perhaps, but still it is interesting, to know that when a
taper burns, the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water.
Moreover, it is quite true that the habit of dealing with facts, which
is given by the study of nature, is, as the friends of physical science
praise it for being, an excellent discipline. The appeal, in the study
of nature, is constantly to observation and experiment; not only is it
said that the thing is so, but we can be made to see that it is so. Not
only does a man tell us that when a taper burns the wax is converted
into carbonic acid and water, as a man may tell us, if he likes, that
Charon is punting his ferry boat on the river Styx, or that Victor Hugo
is a sublime poet, or Mr. Gladstone the most admirable of statesmen; but
we are made to see that the conversion into carbonic acid and water does
actually happen. This reality of natural knowledge it is, which makes
the friends of physical science contrast it, as a knowledge of things,
with the humanist's knowledge, which is, they say, a knowledge of words.
And hence Professor Huxley is moved to lay it down that, "for the
purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education
is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education." And a
certain President of the Section for Mechanical Science in the British
Association is, in Scripture phrase, "very bold," and declares that if a
man, in his mental training, "has substituted literature and history for
natural science, he has chosen the less useful alternative." But whether
we go these lengths or not, we must all admit that in natural science
the habit gained of dealing with facts is a most valuable discipline,
and that every one should have some experience of it.
More than this, however, is demanded by the reformers. It is proposed to
make the training in natural science the main part of education, for
the great majority of mankind at any rate. And here, I confess, I part
company with the friends of physical science, with whom up to this point
I have been agreeing. In differing from them, however, I wish to proceed
with the utmost caution and diffidence. The smallness of my own
acquaintance with the disciplines of natural science is ever before my
mind, and I am fearful of doing these disciplines an injustice. The
ability and pugnacity of the partisans of natural science make them
formidable persons to contradict. The tone of tentative inquiry, which
befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I
would wish to take and not to depart from. At present it seems to me,
that those who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they call it, the
chief place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one
important thing out of their account: the constitution of human nature.
But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all
recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the
simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of
science will, I am sure, be willing to allow their due weight.
Deny the facts altogether, I think, he hardly can. He can hardly deny,
that when we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the
building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct,
the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power
of social life and manners--he can hardly deny that this scheme, though
drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific
exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter.
Human nature is built up by these powers; we have the need for them all.
When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims of them all, we shall
then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness, with
wisdom. This is evident enough, and the friends of physical science
would admit it.
But perhaps they may not have sufficiently observed another thing:
namely, that the several powers just mentioned are not isolated, but
there is, in the generality of mankind, a perpetual tendency to relate
them one to another in divers ways. With one such way of relating them I
am particularly concerned now. Following our instinct for intellect and
knowledge, we acquire pieces of knowledge; and presently, in the
generality of men, there arises the desire to relate these pieces of
knowledge to our sense for conduct, to our sense for beauty,--and there
is weariness and dissatisfaction if the desire is balked. Now in this
desire lies, I think, the strength of that hold which letters have upon
us.
All knowledge is, as I said just now, interesting; and even items of
knowledge which from the nature of the case cannot well be related, but
must stand isolated in our thoughts, have their interest. Even lists of
exceptions have their interest. If we are studying Greek accents, it is
interesting to know that _pais_ and _pas_, and some other monosyllables
of the same form of declension, do not take the circumflex upon the last
syllable of the genitive plural, but vary, in this respect, from the
common rule. If we are studying physiology, it is interesting to know
that the pulmonary artery carries dark blood and the pulmonary vein
carries bright blood, departing in this respect from the common rule,
for the division of labour between the veins and the arteries. But every
one knows how we seek naturally to combine the pieces of our knowledge
together, to bring them under general rules, to relate them to
principles; and how unsatisfactory and tiresome it would be to go on
forever learning lists of exceptions, or accumulating items of fact
which must stand isolated.
Well, that same need of relating our knowledge, which operates here
within the sphere of our knowledge itself, we shall find operating,
also, outside that sphere. We experience, as we go on learning and
knowing,--the vast majority of us experience,--the need of relating what
we have learned and known to the sense which we have in us for conduct,
to the sense which we have in us for beauty.
A certain Greek prophetess of Mantineia in Arcadia, Diotima by name,
once explained to the philosopher Socrates that love, and impulse, and
bent of all kinds, is, in fact, nothing else but the desire in men that
good should forever be present to them. This desire for good, Diotima
assured Socrates, is our fundamental desire, of which fundamental desire
every impulse in us is only some one particular form. And therefore this
fundamental desire it is, I suppose,--this desire in men that good
should be forever present to them,--which acts in us when we feel the
impulse for relating our knowledge to our sense for conduct and to our
sense for beauty. At any rate, with men in general the instinct exists.
Such is human nature. And the instinct, it will be admitted, is
innocent, and human nature is preserved by our following the lead of its
innocent instincts. Therefore, in seeking to gratify this instinct in
question, we are following the instinct of self-preservation in
humanity.
But, no doubt, some kinds of knowledge cannot be made to directly serve
the instinct in question, cannot be directly related to the sense for
beauty, to the sense for conduct. These are instrument-knowledges; they
lead on to other knowledges, which can. A man who passes his life in
instrument-knowledges is a specialist. They may be invaluable as
instruments to something beyond, for those who have the gift thus to
employ them; and they may be disciplines in themselves wherein it is
useful for every one to have some schooling. But it is inconceivable
that the generality of men should pass all their mental life with Greek
accents or with formal logic. My friend Professor Sylvester, who is one
of the first mathematicians in the world, holds transcendental doctrines
as to the virtue of mathematics, but those doctrines are not for common
men. In the very Senate House and heart of our English Cambridge I once
ventured, though not without an apology for my profaneness, to hazard
the opinion that for the majority of mankind a little of mathematics,
even, goes a long way. Of course this is quite consistent with their
being of immense importance as an instrument to something else; but it
is the few who have the aptitude for thus using them, not the bulk of
mankind.
The natural sciences do not, however, stand on the same footing with
these instrument-knowledges. Experience shows us that the generality of
men will find more interest in learning that, when a taper burns, the
wax is converted into carbonic acid and water, or in learning the
explanation of the phenomenon of dew, or in learning how the circulation
of the blood is carried on, than they find in learning that the genitive
plural of _pais_ and _pas_ does not take the circumflex on the
termination. And one piece of natural knowledge is added to another, and
others are added to that, and at last we come to propositions so
interesting as Mr. Darwin's famous proposition that "our ancestor was a
hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably
arboreal in his habits." Or we come to propositions of such reach and
magnitude as those which Professor Huxley delivers, when he says that
the notions of our forefathers about the beginning and the end of the
world were all wrong and that nature is the expression of a definite
order with which nothing interferes.
Interesting, indeed, these results of science are, important they are,
and we should all of us be acquainted with them. But what I now wish you
to mark is, that we are still, when they are propounded to us and we
receive them, we are still in the sphere of intellect and knowledge. And
for the generality of men there will be found, I say, to arise, when
they have duly taken in the proposition that their ancestor was "a hairy
quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in
his habits," there will be found to arise an invincible desire to relate
this proposition to the sense in us for conduct, and to the sense in us
for beauty. But this the men of science will not do for us, and will
hardly even profess to do. They will give us other pieces of knowledge,
other facts, about other animals and their ancestors, or about plants,
or about stones, or about stars; and they may finally bring us to those
great "general conceptions of the universe, which are forced upon us
all," says Professor Huxley, "by the progress of physical science." But
still it will be _knowledge_ only which they give us; knowledge not put
for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty,
and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and
therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while,
unsatisfying, wearying.
Not to the born naturalist, I admit. But what do we mean by a born
naturalist? We mean a man in whom the zeal for observing nature is so
uncommonly strong and eminent, that it marks him off from the bulk of
mankind. Such a man will pass his life happily in collecting natural
knowledge and reasoning upon it, and will ask for nothing, or hardly
anything, more. I have heard it said that the sagacious and admirable
naturalist whom we lost not very long ago, Mr. Darwin, once owned to a
friend that for his part he did not experience the necessity for two
things which most men find so necessary to them,--religion and poetry;
science and the domestic affections, he thought, were enough. To a born
naturalist, I can well understand that this should seem so. So absorbing
is his occupation with nature, so strong his love for his occupation,
that he goes on acquiring natural knowledge and reasoning upon it, and
has little time or inclination for thinking about getting it related to
the desire in man for conduct, the desire in man for beauty. He relates
it to them for himself as he goes along, so far as he feels the need;
and he draws from the domestic affections all the additional solace
necessary. But then Darwins are extremely rare. Another great and
admirable master of natural knowledge, Faraday, was a Sandemanian. That
is to say, he related his knowledge to his instinct for conduct and to
his instinct for beauty, by the aid of that respectable Scottish
sectary, Robert Sandeman. And so strong, in general, is the demand of
religion and poetry to have their share in a man, to associate
themselves with his knowing, and to relieve and rejoice it, that
probably, for one man amongst us with the disposition to do as Darwin
did in this respect, there are at least fifty with the disposition to do
as Faraday.
Education lays hold upon us, in fact, by satisfying this demand.
Professor Huxley holds up to scorn mediaeval education, with its neglect
of the knowledge of nature, its poverty even of literary studies, its
formal logic devoted to "showing how and why that which the Church said
was true must be true." But the great mediaeval universities were not
brought into being, we may be sure, by the zeal for giving a jejune and
contemptible education. Kings have been their nursing fathers, and
queens have been their nursing mothers, but not for this. The mediaeval
universities came into being, because the supposed knowledge, delivered
by Scripture and the Church, so deeply engaged men's hearts, by so
simply, easily, and powerfully relating itself to their desire for
conduct, their desire for beauty. All other knowledge was dominated by
this supposed knowledge and was subordinated to it, because of the
surpassing strength of the hold which it gained upon the affections of
men, by allying itself profoundly with their sense for conduct, their
sense for beauty.
But now, says Professor Huxley, conceptions of the universe fatal to the
notions held by our forefathers have been forced upon us by physical
science. Grant to him that they are thus fatal, that the new conceptions
must and will soon become current everywhere, and that every one will
finally perceive them to be fatal to the beliefs of our forefathers. The
need of humane letters, as they are truly called, because they serve the
paramount desire in men that good should be forever present to
them,--the need of humane letters to establish a relation between the
new conceptions, and our instinct for beauty, our instinct for conduct,
is only the more visible. The middle age could do without humane
letters, as it could do without the study of nature, because its
supposed knowledge was made to engage its emotions so powerfully. Grant
that the supposed knowledge disappears, its power of being made to
engage the emotions will of course disappear along with it,--but the
emotions themselves, and their claim to be engaged and satisfied, will
remain. Now if we find by experience that humane letters have an
undeniable power of engaging the emotions, the importance of humane
letters in a man's training becomes not less, but greater, in proportion
to the success of modern science in extirpating what it calls "mediaeval
thinking."
Have humane letters, then, have poetry and eloquence, the power here
attributed to them of engaging the emotions, and do they exercise it?
And if they have it and exercise it, _how_ do they exercise it, so as to
exert an influence upon man's sense for conduct, his sense for beauty?
Finally, even if they both can and do exert an influence upon the senses
in question, how are they to relate to them the results,--the modern
results,--of natural science? All these questions may be asked. First,
have poetry and eloquence the power of calling out the emotions? The
appeal is to experience. Experience shows that for the vast majority of
men, for mankind in general, they have the power. Next, do they exercise
it? They do. But then, _how_ do they exercise it so as to affect man's
sense for conduct, his sense for beauty? And this is perhaps a case for
applying the Preacher's words: "Though a man labor to seek it out, yet
he shall not find it; yea, further, though a wise man think to know it,
yet shall he not be able to find it."[21] Why should it be one thing, in
its effect upon the emotions, to say, "Patience is a virtue," and quite
another thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to say with Homer,
[Greek: tlaeton gar Moirai thumon thesan anthropoisin--[22]]
"for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of
men"? Why should it be one thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to
say with philosopher Spinoza, _Felicitas in eo consistit quod homo suum
esse conservare potest_--"Man's happiness consists in his being able to
preserve his own essence," and quite another thing, in its effect upon
the emotions, to say with the Gospel, "What is a man advantaged, if he
gain the whole world, and lose himself, forfeit himself?" How does this
difference of effect arise? I cannot tell, and I am not much concerned
to know; the important thing is that it does arise, and that we can
profit by it. But how, finally, are poetry and eloquence to exercise the
power of relating the modern results of natural science to man's
instinct for conduct, his instinct for beauty? And here again I answer
that I do not know _how_ they will exercise it, but that they can and
will exercise it I am sure. I do not mean that modern philosophical
poets and modern philosophical moralists are to come and relate for us,
in express terms, the results of modern scientific research to our
instinct for conduct, our instinct for beauty. But I mean that we shall
find, as a matter of experience, if we know the best that has been
thought and uttered in the world, we shall find that the art and poetry
and eloquence of men who lived, perhaps, long ago, who had the most
limited natural knowledge, who had the most erroneous conceptions about
many important matters, we shall find that this art, and poetry, and
eloquence, have in fact not only the power of refreshing and delighting
us, they have also the power,--such is the strength and worth, in
essentials, of their authors' criticism of life,--they have a
fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable
of wonderfully helping us to relate the results of modern science to our
need for conduct, our need for beauty. Homer's conceptions of the
physical universe were, I imagine, grotesque; but really, under the
shock of hearing from modern science that "the world is not subordinated
to man's use, and that man is not the cynosure of things terrestrial," I
could, for my own part, desire no better comfort than Homer's line which
I quoted just now,
[Greek: tlaeton gar Moirai thumon thesan anthropoisin--]
"for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of
men!"
And the more that men's minds are cleared, the more that the results of
science are frankly accepted, the more that poetry and eloquence come to
be received and studied as what in truth they really are,--the criticism
of life by gifted men, alive and active with extraordinary power at an
unusual number of points;--so much the more will the value of humane
letters, and of art also, which is an utterance having a like kind of
power with theirs, be felt and acknowledged, and their place in
education be secured.
Let us therefore, all of us, avoid indeed as much as possible any
invidious comparison between the merits of humane letters, as means of
education, and the merits of the natural sciences. But when some
President of a Section for Mechanical Science insists on making the
comparison, and tells us that "he who in his training has substituted
literature and history for natural science has chosen the less useful
alternative," let us make answer to him that the student of humane
letters only, will, at least, know also the great general conceptions
brought in by modern physical science; for science, as Professor Huxley
says, forces them upon us all. But the student of the natural sciences
only, will, by our very hypothesis, know nothing of humane letters; not
to mention that in setting himself to be perpetually accumulating
natural knowledge, he sets himself to do what only specialists have in
general the gift for doing genially. And so he will probably be
unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more incomplete than
the student of humane letters only.
I once mentioned in a school report, how a young man in one of our
English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in _Macbeth_
beginning,
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?
turned this line into, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" And I
remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of
our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one
hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that a
good paraphrase for
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?
was, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" If one is driven to choose, I
think I would rather have a young person ignorant about the moon's
diameter, but aware that "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" is bad,
than a young person whose education had been such as to manage things
the other way.
Or to go higher than the pupils of our national schools. I have in my
mind's eye a member of our British Parliament who comes to travel here
in America, who afterwards relates his travels, and who shows a really
masterly knowledge of the geology of this great country and of its
mining capabilities, but who ends by gravely suggesting that the United
States should borrow a prince from our Royal Family, and should make him
their king, and should create a House of Lords of great landed
proprietors after the pattern of ours; and then America, he thinks,
would have her future happily and perfectly secured. Surely, in this
case, the President of the Section for Mechanical Science would himself
hardly say that our member of Parliament, by concentrating himself upon
geology and mineralogy, and so on, and not attending to literature and
history, had "chosen the more useful alternative."
If then there is to be separation and option between humane letters on
the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other, the great majority
of mankind, all who have not exceptional and overpowering aptitudes for
the study of nature, would do well, I cannot but think, to choose to be
educated in humane letters rather than in the natural sciences. Letters
will call out their being at more points, will make them live more.
I said that before I ended I would just touch on the question of
classical education, and I will keep my word. Even if literature is to
retain a large place in our education, yet Latin and Greek, say the
friends of progress, will certainly have to go. Greek is the grand
offender in the eyes of these gentlemen. The attackers of the
established course of study think that against Greek, at any rate, they
have irresistible arguments. Literature may perhaps be needed in
education, they say; but why on earth should it be Greek literature? Why
not French or German? Nay, "has not an Englishman models in his own
literature of every kind of excellence?" As before, it is not on any
weak pleadings of my own that I rely for convincing the gainsayers; it
is on the constitution of human nature itself, and on the instinct of
self-preservation in humanity. The instinct for beauty is set in human
nature, as surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the
instinct for conduct. If the instinct for beauty is served by Greek
literature and art as it is served by no other literature and art, we
may trust to the instinct of self-preservation in humanity for keeping
Greek as part of our culture. We may trust to it for even making the
study of Greek more prevalent than it is now. Greek will come, I hope,
some day to be studied more rationally than at present; but it will be
increasingly studied as men increasingly feel the need in them for
beauty, and how powerfully Greek art and Greek literature can serve this
need. Women will again study Greek, as Lady Jane Grey did; I believe
that in that chain of forts, with which the fair host of the Amazons are
now engirdling our English universities,--I find that here in America,
in colleges like Smith College in Massachusetts, and Vassar College in
the State of New York, and in the happy families of the mixed
universities out West,--they are studying it already.
_Defuit una mihi symmetria prisca_,--"The antique symmetry was the one
thing wanting to me," said Leonardo da Vinci; and he was an Italian. I
will not presume to speak for the Americans, but I am sure that, in the
Englishman, the want of this admirable symmetry of the Greeks is a
thousand times more great and crying than in any Italian. The results
of the want show themselves most glaringly, perhaps, in our
architecture, but they show themselves, also, in all our art. _Fit
details strictly combined, in view of a large general result nobly
conceived_; that is just the beautiful _symmetria prisca_ of the Greeks,
and it is just where we English fail, where all our art fails. Striking
ideas we have, and well-executed details we have; but that high symmetry
which, with satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we seldom
or never have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not
come from single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a
gateway there;--no, it arose from all things being perfectly combined
for a supreme total effect. What must not an Englishman feel about our
deficiencies in this respect, as the sense for beauty, whereof this
symmetry is an essential element, awakens and strengthens within him!
what will not one day be his respect and desire for Greece and its
_symmetria prisca_, when the scales drop from his eyes as he walks the
London streets, and he sees such a lesson in meanness as the Strand, for
instance, in its true deformity! But here we are coming to our friend
Mr. Ruskin's province, and I will not intrude upon it, for he is its
very sufficient guardian.
And so we at last find, it seems, we find flowing in favor of the
humanities the natural and necessary stream of things, which seemed
against them when we started. The "hairy quadruped furnished with a tail
and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits," this good fellow
carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop
into a necessity for humane letters. Nay, more: we seem finally to be
even led to the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in
his nature, also, a necessity for Greek.
And therefore, to say the truth, I cannot really think that humane
letters are in much actual danger of being thrust out from their leading
place in education, in spite of the array of authorities against them at
this moment. So long as human nature is what it is, their attractions
will remain irresistible. As with Greek, so with letters generally:
they will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more rationally, but
they will not lose their place. What will happen will rather be that
there will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too
many; there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and
false tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading
place. If they lose it for a time, they will get it back again. We shall
be brought back to them by our wants and aspirations. And a poor
humanist may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit
the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and
their present favor with the public, to be far greater than his own, and
still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on
behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have
to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science,
and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can
conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane
letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater
results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the
need in him for beauty.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 20: From "Discourses in America," 1885.]
[Footnote 21: From Ecclesiastes, viii. 17.]
[Footnote 22: From the "Iliad," xxiv. 49.]
HOW TO READ[23]
FREDERIC HARRISON
It is the fashion for those who have any connection with letters to
expatiate on the infinite blessings of literature, and the miraculous
achievements of the press: to extol, as a gift above price, the taste
for study and the love of reading. Far be it from me to gainsay the
inestimable value of good books, or to discourage any man from reading
the best; but I often think that we forget that other side to this
glorious view of literature--the misuse of books, the debilitating waste
of brain in aimless, promiscuous, vapid reading, or even, it may be, in
the poisonous inhalation of mere literary garbage and bad men's worst
thoughts.
For what can a book be more than the man who wrote it? The brightest
genius seldom puts the best of his own soul into his printed page; and
some famous men have certainly put the worst of theirs. Yet are all men
desirable companions, much less teachers, able to give us advice, even
of those who get reputation and command a hearing? To put out of the
question that writing which is positively bad, are we not, amidst the
multiplicity of books and of writers, in continual danger of being drawn
off by what is stimulating rather than solid, by curiosity after
something accidentally notorious, by what has no intelligible thing to
recommend it, except that it is new? Now, to stuff our minds with what
is simply trivial, simply curious, or that which at best has but a low
nutritive power, this is to close our minds to what is solid and
enlarging, and spiritually sustaining. Whether our neglect of the great
books comes from our not reading at all, or from an incorrigible habit
of reading the little books, it ends in just the same thing. And that
thing is ignorance of all the greater literature of the world. To
neglect all the abiding parts of knowledge for the sake of the
evanescent parts is really to know nothing worth knowing. It is in the
end the same, whether we do not use our minds for serious study at all,
or whether we exhaust them by an impotent voracity for desultory
"information"--a thing as fruitful as whistling. Of the two evils I
prefer the former. At least, in that case, the mind is healthy and open.
It is not gorged and enfeebled by excess in that which cannot nourish,
much less enlarge and beautify our nature.
But there is much more than this. Even to those who resolutely avoid the
idleness of reading what is trivial, a difficulty is presented--a
difficulty every day increasing by virtue even of our abundance of
books. What are the subjects, what are the class of books we are to
read, in what order, with what connection, to what ultimate use or
object? Even those who are resolved to read the better books are
embarrassed by a field of choice practically boundless. The longest
life, the greatest industry, joined to the most powerful memory, would
not suffice to make us profit from a hundredth part of the world of
books before us. If the great Newton said that he seemed to have been
all his life gathering a few shells on the shore, whilst a boundless
ocean of truth still lay beyond and unknown to him, how much more to
each of us must the sea of literature be a pathless immensity beyond our
powers of vision or of reach--an immensity in which industry itself is
useless without judgment, method, discipline; where it is of infinite
importance what we can learn and remember, and of utterly no importance
what we may have once looked at or heard of. Alas! the most of our
reading leaves as little mark even in our own education as the foam that
gathers round the keel of a passing boat! For myself, I am inclined to
think the most useful help to reading is to know what we should not
read, what we can keep out from that small cleared spot in the
overgrown jungle of "information," the corner which we can call our
ordered patch of fruit-bearing knowledge. The incessant accumulation of
fresh books must hinder any real knowledge of the old; for the
multiplicity of volumes becomes a bar upon our use of any. In literature
especially does it hold--that we cannot see the wood for the trees.
How shall we choose our books? Which are the best, the eternal,
indispensable books? To all to whom reading is something more than a
refined idleness these questions recur, bringing with them the sense of
bewilderment; and a still, small voice within us is for ever crying out
for some guide across the Slough of Despond of an illimitable and
ever-swelling literature. How many a man stands beside it, as uncertain
of his pathway as the Pilgrim, when he who dreamed the immortal dream
heard him "break out with a lamentable cry; saying, what shall I do?"
And this, which comes home to all of us at times, presses hardest upon
those who have lost the opportunity of systematic education, who have to
educate themselves, or who seek to guide the education of their young
people. Systematic reading is but little in favour even amongst studious
men; in a true sense it is hardly possible for women. A comprehensive
course of home study, and a guide to books, fit for the highest
education of women, is yet a blank page remaining to be filled.
Generations of men of culture have laboured to organise a system of
reading and materials appropriate for the methodical education of men in
academic lines. Teaching equal in mental calibre to any that is open to
men in universities, yet modified for the needs of those who must study
at home, remains in the dim pages of that melancholy volume entitled
_Libri valde desiderati._[24]
I do not aspire to fill one of those blank pages; but I long to speak a
word or two, as the Pilgrim did to Neighbour Pliable, upon the glories
that await those who will pass through the narrow wicket-gate. On this,
if one can find anything useful to say, it may be chiefly from the
memory of the waste labour and pitiful stumbling in the dark which fill
up so much of the travail that one is fain to call one's own education.
We who have wandered in the wastes so long, and lost so much of our
lives in our wandering, may at least offer warnings to younger
wayfarers, as men who in thorny paths have borne the heat and burden of
the day might give a clue to their journey to those who have yet a
morning and a noon. As I look back and think of those cataracts of
printed stuff which honest compositors set up, meaning, let us trust, no
harm, and which at least found them in daily bread,--printed stuff which
I and the rest of us, to our infinitely small profit, have consumed with
our eyes, not even making an honest living of it, but much impairing our
substance,--I could almost reckon the printing press as amongst the
scourges of mankind. I am grown a wiser and a sadder man, importunate,
like that Ancient Mariner, to tell each blithe wedding guest the tale of
his shipwreck on the infinite sea of printers' ink, as one escaped by
mercy and grace from the region where there is water, water, everywhere,
and not a drop to drink.
A man of power, who has got more from books than most of his
contemporaries, once said: "Form a habit of reading, do not mind what
you read; the reading of better books will come when you have a habit of
reading the inferior." We need not accept this _obiter dictum_[25] of
Lord Sherbrooke. A habit of reading idly debilitates and corrupts the
mind for all wholesome reading; the habit of reading wisely is one of
the most difficult habits to acquire, needing strong resolution and
infinite pains; and reading for mere reading's sake, instead of for the
sake of the good we gain from reading, is one of the worst and commonest
and most unwholesome habits we have. And so our inimitable humorist has
made delightful fun of the solid books,--which no gentleman's library
should be without,--the Humes, Gibbons, Adam Smiths, which, he says, are
not books at all, and prefers some "kindhearted play-book," or at times
the _Town and County Magazine_. Poor Lamb has not a little to answer
for, in the revived relish for garbage unearthed from old theatrical
dungheaps. Be it jest or earnest, I have little patience with the
Elia-tic philosophy of the frivolous. Why do we still suffer the
traditional hypocrisy about the dignity of literature--literature, I
mean, in the gross, which includes about equal parts of what is useful
and what is useless? Why are books as books, writers as writers, readers
as readers, meritorious, apart from any good in them, or anything that
we can get from them? Why do we pride ourselves on our powers of
absorbing print, as our grandfathers did on their gifts in imbibing
port, when we know that there is a mode of absorbing print which makes
it impossible that we can ever learn anything good out of books?
Our stately Milton said in a passage which is one of the watchwords of
the English race, "as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book." But
has he not also said that he would "have a vigilant eye how Bookes
demeane themselves, as well as men; and do sharpest justice on them as
malefactors"?... Yes! they do kill the good book who deliver up their
few and precious hours of reading to the trivial book; they make it dead
for them; they do what lies in them to destroy "the precious life-blood
of a master-spirit, imbalm'd and treasured up on purpose to a life
beyond life;" they "spill that season'd life of man preserv'd and stor'd
up in Bookes." For in the wilderness of books most men, certainly all
busy men, _must_ strictly choose. If they saturate their minds with the
idler books, the "good book," which Milton calls "an immortality rather
than a life," is dead to them: it is a book sealed up and buried.
It is most right that in the great republic of letters there should be
freedom of intercourse and a spirit of equality. Every reader who holds
a book in his hand is free of the inmost minds of men past and present;
their lives both within and without the pale of their uttered thoughts
are unveiled to him; he needs no introduction to the greatest; he
stands on no ceremony with them; he may, if he be so minded, scribble
"doggrel" on his Shelley, or he may kick Lord Byron, if he please, into
a corner. He hears Burke perorate, and Johnson dogmatise, and Scott tell
his border tales, and Wordsworth muse on the hillside, without the leave
of any man, or the payment of any toll. In the republic of letters there
are no privileged orders or places reserved. Every man who has written a
book, even the diligent Mr. Whitaker, is in one sense an author; "a
book's a book although there's nothing in't;" and every man who can
decipher a penny journal is in one sense a reader. And your "general
reader," like the grave-digger in Hamlet, is hail-fellow with all the
mighty dead; he pats the skull of the jester; batters the cheek of lord,
lady, or courtier; and uses "imperious Caesar" to teach boys the Latin
declensions.
But this noble equality of all writers--of all writers and of all
readers--has a perilous side to it. It is apt to make us indiscriminate
in the books we read, and somewhat contemptuous of the mighty men of the
past. Men who are most observant as to the friends they make, or the
conversation they share, are carelessness itself as to the books to whom
they entrust themselves, and the printed language with which they
saturate their minds. Yet can any friendship or society be more
important to us than that of the books which form so large a part of our
minds and even of our characters? Do we in real life take any pleasant
fellow to our homes and chat with some agreeable rascal by our
firesides, we who will take up any pleasant fellow's printed memoirs, we
who delight in the agreeable rascal when he is cut up into pages and
bound in calf?
If any person given to reading were honestly to keep a register of all
the printed stuff that he or she consumes in a year--all the idle tales
of which the very names and the story are forgotten in a week, the
bookmaker's prattle about nothing at so much a sheet, the fugitive
trifling about silly things and empty people, the memoirs of the
unmemorable, and lives of those who never really lived at all--of what
a mountain of rubbish would it be the catalogue: Exercises for the eye
and the memory, as mechanical as if we set ourselves to learn the names,
ages, and family histories of every one who lives in our own street, the
flirtations of their maiden aunts, and the circumstances surrounding the
birth of their grandmother's first baby.
It is impossible to give any method to our reading till we get nerve
enough to reject. The most exclusive and careful amongst us will (in
literature) take boon companions out of the street, as easily as an
idler in a tavern. "I came across such and such a book that I never
heard mentioned," says one, "and found it curious, though entirely
worthless." "I strayed on a volume by I know not whom, on a subject for
which I never cared." And so on. There are curious and worthless
creatures enough in any pot-house all day long; and there is incessant
talk in omnibus, train, or street by we know not whom, about we care not
what. Yet if a printer and a bookseller can be induced to make this
gabble as immortal as print and publication can make it, then it
straightway is literature, and in due time it becomes "curious."
I have no intention to moralise or to indulge in a homily against the
reading of what is deliberately evil. There is not so much need for this
now, and I am not discoursing on the whole duty of man. I take that part
of our reading which by itself is no doubt harmless, entertaining, and
even gently instructive. But of this enormous mass of literature how
much deserves to be chosen out, to be preferred to all the great books
of the world, to be set apart for those precious hours which are all
that the most of us can give to solid reading? The vast proportion of
books are books that we shall never be able to read. A serious
percentage of books are not worth reading at all. The really vital books
for us we also know to be a very trifling portion of the whole. And yet
we act as if every book were as good as any other, as if it were merely
a question of order which we take up first, as if any book were good
enough for us, and as if all were alike honourable, precious, and
satisfying. Alas! books cannot be more than the men who write them; and
as a fair proportion of the human race now write books, with motives and
objects as various as human activity, books, as books, are entitled _a
priori_, until their value is proved, to the same attention and respect
as houses, steam-engines, pictures, fiddles, bonnets, and other products
of human industry. In the shelves of those libraries which are our
pride, libraries public or private, circulating or very stationary, are
to be found those great books of the world _rari nantes in gurgite
vasto_,[26] those books which are truly "the precious life-blood of a
master-spirit." But the very familiarity which their mighty fame has
bred in us makes us indifferent; we grow weary of what every one is
supposed to have read; and we take down something which looks a little
eccentric, some worthless book, on the mere ground that we never heard
of it before.
Thus the difficulties of literature are in their way as great as those
of the world, the obstacles to finding the right friends are as great,
the peril is as great of being lost in a Babel of voices and an
ever-changing mass of beings. Books are not wiser than men, the true
books are not easier to find than the true men, the bad books or the
vulgar books are not less obtrusive and not less ubiquitous than the bad
or vulgar men are everywhere; the art of right reading is as long and
difficult to learn as the art of right living. Those who are on good
terms with the first author they meet, run as much risk as men who
surrender their time to the first passer in the street; for to be open
to every book is for the most part to gain as little as possible from
any. A man aimlessly wandering about in a crowded city is of all men the
most lonely; so he who takes up only the books that he "comes across" is
pretty certain to meet but few that are worth knowing.
Now this danger is one to which we are specially exposed in this age.
Our high-pressure life of emergencies, our whirling industrial
organisation or disorganisation have brought us in this (as in most
things) their peculiar difficulties and drawbacks. In almost everything
vast opportunities and gigantic means of multiplying our products bring
with them new perils and troubles which are often at first neglected.
Our huge cities, where wealth is piled up and the requirements and
appliances of life extended beyond the dreams of our forefathers, seem
to breed in themselves new forms of squalor, disease, blights, or risks
to life such as we are yet unable to master. So the enormous
multiplicity of modern books is not altogether favourable to the knowing
of the best. I listen with mixed satisfaction to the paeans that they
chant over the works which issue from the press each day: how the books
poured forth from Paternoster Row might in a few years be built into a
pyramid that would fill the dome of St. Paul's. How in this mountain of
literature am I to find the really useful book? How, when I have found
it, and found its value, am I to get others to read it? How am I to keep
my head clear in the torrent and din of works, all of which distract my
attention, most of which promise me something, whilst so few fulfil that
promise? The Nile is the source of the Egyptian's bread, and without it
he perishes of hunger. But the Nile may be rather too liberal in his
flood, and then the Egyptian runs imminent risk of drowning.
And thus there never was a time, at least during the last two hundred
years, when the difficulties in the way of making an efficient use of
books were greater than they are to-day, when the obstacles were more
real between readers and the right books to read, when it was
practically so troublesome to find out that which it is of vital
importance to know; and that not by the dearth, but by the plethora of
printed matter. For it comes to nearly the same thing whether we are
actually debarred by physical impossibility, from getting the right book
into our hand, or whether we are choked off from the right book by the
obtrusive crowd of the wrong books; so that it needs a strong character
and a resolute system of reading to keep the head cool in the storm of
literature around us. We read nowadays in the market-place--I would
rather say in some large steam factory of letter-press, where damp
sheets of new print whirl round us perpetually--if it be not rather some
noisy book-fair where literary showmen tempt us with performing dolls,
and the gongs of rival booths are stunning our ears from morn till
night. Contrast with this pandemonium of Leipsic and Paternoster Row the
sublime picture of our Milton in his early retirement at Horton, when,
musing over his coming flight to the epic heaven, practising his
pinions, as he tells Diodati, he consumed five years of solitude in
reading the ancient writers--"_Et totum rapiunt me, mea vita,
libri_."[27]
Who now reads the ancient writers? Who systematically reads the great
writers, be they ancient or modern, whom the consent of ages has marked
out as classics: typical, immortal, peculiar teachers of our race? Alas!
the _Paradise Lost_ is lost again to us beneath an inundation of
graceful academic verse, sugary stanzas of ladylike prettiness, and
ceaseless explanations in more or less readable prose of what John
Milton meant or did not mean, or what he saw or did not see, who married
his great-aunt, and why Adam or Satan is like that, or unlike the other.
We read a perfect library about the _Paradise Lost_, but the _Paradise
Lost_ itself we do not read.
I am not presumptuous enough to assert that the larger part of modern
literature is not worth reading in itself, that the prose is not
readable, entertaining, one may say highly instructive. Nor do I pretend
that the verses which we read so zealously in place of Milton's are not
good verses. On the contrary, I think them sweetly conceived, as musical
and as graceful as the verse of any age in our history. A great deal of
our modern literature is such that it is exceedingly difficult to
resist it, and it is undeniable that it gives us real information. It
seems perhaps unreasonable to many to assert that a decent readable book
which gives us actual instruction can be otherwise than a useful
companion and a solid gain. Possibly many people are ready to cry out
upon me as an obscurantist for venturing to doubt a genial confidence in
all literature simply as such. But the question, which weighs upon me
with such really crushing urgency is this: What are the books that in
our little remnant of reading time it is most vital for us to know? For
the true use of books is of such sacred value to us that to be simply
entertained is to cease to be taught, elevated, inspired by books;
merely to gather information of a chance kind is to close the mind to
knowledge of the urgent kind.
Every book that we take up without a purpose is an opportunity lost of
taking up a book with a purpose--every bit of stray information which we
cram into our heads without any sense of its importance, is for the most
part a bit of the most useful information driven out of our heads and
choked off from our minds. It is so certain that information, i.e., the
knowledge, the stored thoughts and observations of mankind, is now grown
to proportions so utterly incalculable and prodigious, that even the
learned whose lives are given to study can but pick up some crumbs that
fall from the table of truth. They delve and tend but a plot in that
vast and teeming kingdom, whilst those whom active life leaves with but
a few cramped hours of study can hardly come to know the very vastness
of the field before them, or how infinitesimally small is the corner
they can traverse at the best. We know all is not of equal value. We
know that books differ in value as much as diamonds differ from the sand
on the seashore, as much as our living friend differs from a dead rat.
We know that much in the myriad-peopled world of books--very much in all
kinds--is trivial, enervating, inane, even noxious. And thus, where we
have infinite opportunities of wasting our efforts to no end, of
fatiguing our minds without enriching them, of clogging the spirit
without satisfying it, there, I cannot but think, the very infinity of
opportunities is robbing us of the actual power of using them. And thus
I come often, in my less hopeful moods, to watch the remorseless
cataract of daily literature which thunders over the remnants of the
past, as if it were a fresh impediment to the men of our day in the way
of systematic knowledge and consistent powers of thought, as if it were
destined one day to overwhelm the great inheritance of mankind in prose
and verse.
I remember, when I was a very young man at college, that a youth, in no
spirit of paradox, but out of plenary conviction, undertook to maintain
before a body of serious students, the astounding proposition that the
invention of printing had been one of the greatest misfortunes that had
ever befallen mankind. He argued that exclusive reliance on printed
matter had destroyed the higher method of oral teaching, the
dissemination of thought by the spoken word to the attentive ear. He
insisted that the formation of a vast literary class looking to the
making of books as a means of making money, rather than as a social
duty, had multiplied books for the sake of the writers rather than for
the sake of the readers; that the reliance on books as a cheap and
common resource had done much to weaken the powers of memory; that it
destroyed the craving for a general culture of taste, and the need of
artistic expression in all the surroundings of life. And he argued,
lastly, that the sudden multiplication of all kinds of printed matter
had been fatal to the orderly arrangement of thought, and had hindered a
system of knowledge and a scheme of education.
I am far from sharing this immature view. Of course I hold the invention
of printing to have been one of the most momentous facts in the whole
history of man. Without it universal social progress, true democratic
enlightenment, and the education of the people would have been
impossible, or very slow, even if the cultured few, as is likely, could
have advanced the knowledge of mankind without it. We place Gutenberg
amongst the small list of the unique and special benefactors of
mankind, in the sacred choir of those whose work transformed the
conditions of life, whose work, once done, could never be repeated. And
no doubt the things which our ardent friend regarded as so fatal a
disturbance of society were all inevitable and necessary, part of the
great revolution of mind through which men grew out of the mediaeval
incompleteness to a richer conception of life and of the world.
Yet there is a sense in which this boyish anathema against printing may
become true to us by our own fault. We may create for ourselves these
very evils. For the art of printing has not been a gift wholly unmixed
with evils; it must be used wisely if it is to be a boon to man at all;
it entails on us heavy responsibilities, resolution to use it with
judgment and self-control, and the will to resist its temptations and
its perils. Indeed, we may easily so act that we may make it a clog on
the progress of the human mind, a real curse and not a boon. The power
of flying at will through space would probably extinguish civilisation
and society, for it would release us from the wholesome bondage of place
and rest. The power of hearing every word that had ever been uttered on
this planet would annihilate thought, as the power of knowing all
recorded facts by the process of turning a handle would annihilate true
science. Our human faculties and our mental forces are not enlarged
simply by multiplying our materials of knowledge and our facilities for
communication. Telephones, microphones, pantoscopes, steam-presses, and
ubiquity-engines in general may, after all, leave the poor human brain
panting and throbbing under the strain of its appliances, no bigger and
no stronger than the brains of the men who heard Moses speak, and saw
Aristotle and Archimedes pondering over a few worn rolls of crabbed
manuscript. Until some new Gutenberg or Watt can invent a machine for
magnifying the human mind, every fresh apparatus for multiplying its
work is a fresh strain on the mind, a new realm for it to order and to
rule.
And so, I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our
age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed
material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organise
our knowledge, to systematise our reading, to save, out of the
relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest--this
is a necessity, unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at
last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up
is, in the infinity of knowledge, to know nothing. To read the first
book we come across, in the wilderness of books, is to learn nothing. To
turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically
indifferent to all that is good.
But this warns me that I am entering on a subject which is far too big
and solemn. It is plain that to organise our knowledge, even to
systematise our reading, to make a working selection of books for
general study, really implies a complete scheme of education. A scheme
of education ultimately implies a system of philosophy, a view of man's
duty and powers as a moral and social being--a religion. Before a
problem so great as this, on which readers have such different ideas and
wants, and differ so profoundly on the very premises from which we
start, before such a problem as a general theory of education, I prefer
to pause. I will keep silence even from good words. I have chosen my own
part, and adopted my own teacher. But to ask men to adopt the education
of Auguste Comte, is almost to ask them to adopt Positivism itself.
Nor will I enlarge on the matter for thought, for foreboding, almost for
despair, that is presented to us by the fact of our familiar literary
ways and our recognised literary profession. That things infinitely
trifling in themselves: men, events, societies, phenomena, in no way
otherwise more valuable than the myriad other things which flit around
us like the sparrows on the housetop, should be glorified, magnified,
and perpetuated, set under a literary microscope and focussed in the
blaze of a literary magic-lantern--not for what they are in themselves,
but solely to amuse and excite the world by showing how it can be
done--all this is to me so amazing, so heart-breaking, that I forbear
now to treat it, as I cannot say all that I would.
The Choice of Books is really the choice of our education, of a moral
and intellectual ideal, of the whole duty of man. But though I shrink
from any so high a theme, a few words are needed to indicate my general
point of view in the matter.
In the first place, when we speak about books, let us avoid the
extravagance of expecting too much from books, the pedant's habit of
extolling books as synonymous with education. Books are no more
education than laws are virtue; and just as profligacy is easy within
the strict limits of law, a boundless knowledge of books may be found
with a narrow education. A man may be, as the poet saith, "deep vers'd
in books, and shallow in himself." We need to know in order that we may
feel rightly and act wisely. The thirst after truth itself may be pushed
to a degree where indulgence enfeebles our sympathies and unnerves us in
action. Of all men perhaps the book-lover needs most to be reminded that
man's business here is to know for the sake of living, not to live for
the sake of knowing.
A healthy mode of reading would follow the lines of a sound education.
And the first canon of a sound education is to make it the instrument to
perfect the whole nature and character. Its aims are comprehensive, not
special; they regard life as a whole, not mental curiosity; they have to
give us, not so much materials, as capacities. So that, however moderate
and limited the opportunity for education, in its way it should be
always more or less symmetrical and balanced, appealing equally in turn
to the three grand intellectual elements--imagination, memory,
reflection: and so having something to give us in poetry, in history, in
science, and in philosophy.
And thus our reading will be sadly one-sided, however voluminous it be,
if it entirely close to us any of the great types and ideals which the
creative instinct of man has produced, if it shut out from us either
the ancient world, or other European poetry, as important almost as our
own. When our reading, however deep, runs wholly into "pockets," and
exhausts itself in the literature of one age, one country, one type,
then we may be sure that it is tending to narrow or deform our minds.
And the more it leads us into curious byways and nurtures us into
indifference for the beaten highways of the world, the sooner we shall
end, if we be not specialists and students by profession, in ceasing to
treat our books as the companions and solace of our lifetime, and in
using them as the instruments of a refined sort of self-indulgence.
A wise education, and so judicious reading, should leave no great type
of thought, no dominant phase of human nature, wholly a blank. Whether
our reading be great or small, so far as it goes, it should be general.
If our lives admit of but a short space for reading, all the more reason
that, so far as may be, it should remind us of the vast expanse of human
thought, and the wonderful variety of human nature. To read, and yet so
to read that we see nothing but a corner of literature, the loose
fringe, or flats and wastes of letters, and by reading only deepen our
natural belief that this island is the hub of the universe, and the
nineteenth century the only age worth notice, all this is really to call
in the aid of books to thicken and harden our untaught prejudices. Be it
imagination, memory, or reflection that we address--that is, in poetry,
history, science, or philosophy, our first duty is to aim at knowing
something at least of the best, at getting some definite idea of the
mighty realm whose outer rim we are permitted to approach.
But how are we to know the best; how are we to gain this definite idea
of the vast world of letters? There are some who appear to suppose that
the "best" are known only to experts in an esoteric way, who may reveal
to inquirers what schoolboys and betting-men describe as "tips." There
are no "tips" in literature; the "best" authors are never dark horses;
we need no "crammers" and "coaches" to thrust us into the presence of
the great writers of all time. "Crammers" will only lead us wrong. It is
a thing far easier and more common than many imagine, to discover the
best. It needs no research, no learning, and is only misguided by
recondite information. The world has long ago closed the great assize of
letters and judged the first places everywhere. In such a matter the
judgment of the world, guided and informed by a long succession of
accomplished critics, is almost unerring. When some Zoilus finds
blemishes in Homer, and prefers, it may be, the work of some Apollonius
of his own discovering, we only laugh. There may be doubts about the
third and fourth rank; but the first and the second are hardly open to
discussion. The gates which lead to the Elysian fields may slowly wheel
back on their adamantine hinges to admit now and then some new and
chosen modern. But the company of the masters of those who know, and in
especial degree of the great poets, is a roll long closed and complete,
and they who are of it hold ever peaceful converse together.
Hence we may find it a useful maxim that, if our reading be utterly
closed to the great poems of the world, there is something amiss with
our reading. If you find Milton, Dante, Calderon, Goethe, so much
"Hebrew-Greek" to you; if your Homer and Virgil, your Moliere and Scott,
rest year after year undisturbed on their shelves beside your school
trigonometry and your old college text-books; if you have never opened
the _Cid, the Nibelungen, Crusoe_, and _Don Quixote_ since you were a
boy, and are wont to leave the Bible and the Imitation for some wet
Sunday afternoon--know, friend, that your reading can do you little real
good. Your mental digestion is ruined or sadly out of order. No doubt,
to thousands of intelligent educated men who call themselves readers,
the reading through a Canto of _The Purgatorio_, or a Book of the
_Paradise Lost_, is a task as irksome as it would be to decipher an
ill-written manuscript in a language that is almost forgotten. But,
although we are not to be always reading epics, and are chiefly in the
mood for slighter things, to be absolutely unable to read Milton or
Dante with enjoyment, is to be in a very bad way. Aristophanes,
Theocritus, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Moliere are often as light as the
driven foam; but they are not light enough for the general reader. Their
humour is too bright and lovely for the groundlings. They are, alas!
"classics," somewhat apart from our everyday ways; they are not banal
enough for us; and so for us they slumber "unknown in a long night,"
just _because_ they are immortal poets, and are not scribblers of
to-day.
When will men understand that the reading of great books is a faculty to
be acquired, not a natural gift, at least not to those who are spoiled
by our current education and habits of life? _Ceci tuera cela_,[28] the
last great poet might have said of the first circulating library. An
insatiable appetite for new novels makes it as hard to read a
masterpiece as it seems to a Parisian boulevardier to live in a quiet
country. Until a man can truly enjoy a draft of clear water bubbling
from a mountain side, his taste is in an unwholesome state. And so he
who finds the Heliconian spring insipid should look to the state of his
nerves. Putting aside the iced air of the difficult mountain tops of
epic, tragedy, or psalm, there are some simple pieces which may serve as
an unerring test of a healthy or a vicious taste for imaginative work.
If the _Cid_, the _Vita Nuova_, the _Canterbury Tales_, Shakespeare's
_Sonnets_, and _Lycidas_ pall on a man; if he care not for Malory's
_Morte d'Arthur_ and the _Red Cross Knight_; if he thinks _Crusoe_ and
the _Vicar_ books for the young; if he thrill not with _The Ode to the
West Wind_, and _The Ode to a Grecian Urn_; if he have no stomach for
_Christabel_ or the lines written on _The Wye above Tintern Abbey_, he
should fall on his knees and pray for a cleanlier and quieter spirit.
The intellectual system of most of us in these days needs "to purge and
to live cleanly." Only by a course of treatment shall we bring our minds
to feel at peace with the grand pure works of the world. Something we
ought all to know of the masterpieces of antiquity, and of the other
nations of Europe. To understand a great national poet, such as Dante,
Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is to know other types of human
civilisation in ways which a library of histories does not sufficiently
teach. The great masterpieces of the world are thus, quite apart from
the charm and solace they give us, the master instruments of a solid
education.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 23: From "The Choice of Books," 1891. Printed here by
permission of The Macmillan Company.]
[Footnote 24: Books intensely desired.]
[Footnote 25: Thing said in passing.]
[Footnote 26: Floating scattered on the vast abyss.]
[Footnote 27: "And here my books--my life--absorb me whole," Cowper's
translation of Milton's Latin Epistle to Diodati.]
[Footnote 28: This will destroy that.]
ON GOING A JOURNEY[29]
WILLIAM HAZLITT
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I
like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors,
nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when
alone.
"The fields his study, nature was his book."
I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am
in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for
criticising hedge-rows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to
forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this
purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I
like more elbow-room, and fewer encumbrances. I like solitude, when I
give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for
------"a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet."
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do
just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all
impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much
more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space
to muse on indifferent matters, where Contemplation
"May plume her feathers and let grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd,"
that I absent myself from the town for a while, without feeling at a
loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a friend in a postchaise
or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale
topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence. Give
me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet,
a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner--and then
to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone
heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder
rolling cloud, I plunge into my past being, and revel there, as the
sunburnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his
native shore. Then long-forgotten things, like "sunken wrack and sumless
treasuries," burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and
be myself again. Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at
wit or dull commonplaces, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart
which alone is perfect eloquence. No one likes puns, alliterations,
antitheses, arguments, and analysis better than I do; but I sometimes
had rather be without them. "Leave, oh, leave me to my repose!" I have
just now other business in hand, which would seem idle to you, but is
with me "very stuff of the conscience." Is not this wild rose sweet
without a comment? Does not this daisy leap to my heart set in its coat
of emerald. Yet if I were to explain to you the circumstance that has so
endeared it to me, you would only smile. Had I not better then keep it
to myself, and let it serve me to brood over, from here to yonder craggy
point, and from thence onward to the far-distant horizon? I should be
but bad company all that way, and therefore prefer being alone. I have
heard it said that you may, when the moody fit comes on, walk or ride on
by yourself, and indulge your reveries. But this looks like a breach of
manners, a neglect of others, and you are thinking all the time that you
ought to rejoin your party. "Out upon such half-faced fellowship," say
I. I like to be either entirely to myself, or entirely at the disposal
of others; to talk or be silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable
or solitary. I was pleased with an observation of Mr. Cobbett's that "he
thought it a bad French custom to drink our wine with our meals, and
that an Englishman ought to do only one thing at a time." So I cannot
talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing and lively conversation
by fits and starts. "Let me have a companion of my way," says Sterne,
"were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." It
is beautifully said: but in my opinion, this continual comparing of
notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the
mind, and hurts the sentiment. If you only hint what you feel in a kind
of dumb show, it is insipid: if you have to explain it, it is making a
toil of a pleasure. You cannot read the book of nature, without being
perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of
others. I am for the synthetical method on a journey, in preference to
the analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to
examine and anatomise them afterwards. I want to see my vague notions
float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have
them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I like
to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone,
or in such company as I do not covet. I have no objection to argue a
point with any one for twenty miles of measured road, but not for
pleasure. If you remark the scent of a beanfield crossing the road,
perhaps your fellow-traveller has no smell. If you point to a distant
object, perhaps he is short-sighted, and has to take out his glass to
look at it. There is a feeling in the air, a tone in the colour of a
cloud which hits your fancy, but the effect of which you are unable to
account for. There is then no sympathy, but an uneasy craving after it,
and a dissatisfaction which pursues you on the way, and in the end
probably produces ill humour. Now I never quarrel with myself, and take
all my own conclusions for granted till I find it necessary to defend
them against objections. It is not merely that you may not be of accord
on the objects and circumstances that present themselves before
you--these may recall a number of objects, and lead to associations too
delicate and refined to be possibly communicated to others. Yet these I
love to cherish, and sometimes still fondly clutch them, when I can
escape from the throng to do so. To give way to our feelings before
company, seems extravagance or affectation; and on the other hand, to
have to unravel this mystery of our being at every turn, and to make
others take an equal interest in it (otherwise the end is not answered)
is a task to which few are competent. We must "give it an understanding,
but no tongue." My old friend C----, however, could do both. He could go
on in the most delightful explanatory way over hill and dale, a summer's
day, and convert a landscape into a didactic poem or a Pindaric ode. "He
talked far above singing." If I could so clothe my ideas in sounding and
flowing words, I might perhaps wish to have some one with me to admire
the swelling theme; or I could be more content, were it possible for me
still to hear his echoing voice in the woods of All-Foxden. They had
"that fine madness in them which our first poets had;" and if they could
have been caught by some rare instrument, would have breathed such
strains as the following.
------"Here be woods as green
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet
As when smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled stream, with flow'rs as many
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any;
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,
Arbours o'ergrown with woodbine, caves and dells;
Choose where thou wilt, while I sit by and sing,
Or gather rushes to make many a ring
For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love,
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she convey'd him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest."------
FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS.
Had I words and images at command like these, I would attempt to wake
the thoughts that lie slumbering on golden ridges in the evening clouds:
but at the sight of nature my fancy, poor as it is, droops and closes up
its leaves, like flowers at sunset. I can make nothing out on the
spot:--I must have time to collect myself.--
In general, a good thing spoils out-of-door prospects: it should be
reserved for Table-talk. L---- is for this reason, I take it, the worst
company in the world out of doors; because he is the best within. I
grant, there is one subject on which it is pleasant to talk on a
journey; and that is, what one shall have for supper when we get to our
inn at night. The open air improves this sort of conversation or
friendly altercation, by setting a keener edge on appetite. Every mile
of the road heightens the flavour of the viands we expect at the end of
it. How fine it is to enter some old town, walled and turreted, just at
the approach of nightfall, or to come to some straggling village, with
the lights streaming through the surrounding gloom; and then after
inquiring for the best entertainment that the place affords, to "take
one's ease at one's inn!" These eventful moments in our lives' history
are too precious, too full of solid, heartfelt happiness to be frittered
and dribbled away in imperfect sympathy. I would have them all to
myself, and drain them to the last drop: they will do to talk of or to
write about afterwards. What a delicate speculation it is, after
drinking whole goblets of tea,
"The cups that cheer, but not inebriate,"
and letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to sit considering what we
shall have for supper--eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions,
or an excellent veal-cutlet! Sancho[30] in such a situation once fixed
upon cow-heel; and his choice, though he could not help it, is not to be
disparaged. Then in the intervals of pictured scenery and Shandean
contemplation, to catch the preparation and the stir in the
kitchen--_Procul, O procul este profani!_[31] These hours are sacred to
silence and to musing, to be treasured up in the memory, and to feed the
source of smiling thoughts hereafter. I would not waste them in idle
talk; or if I must have the integrity of fancy broken in upon, I would
rather it were by a stranger than a friend. A stranger takes his hue and
character from the time and place; he is a part of the furniture and
costume of an inn. If he is a Quaker, or from the West Riding of
Yorkshire, so much the better. I do not even try to sympathise with him,
and he breaks no squares. I associate nothing with my travelling
companion but present objects and passing events. In his ignorance of me
and my affairs, I in a manner forget myself. But a friend reminds one of
other things, rips up old grievances, and destroys the abstraction of
the scene. He comes in ungraciously between us and our imaginary
character. Something is dropped in the course of conversation that gives
a hint of your profession and pursuits; or from having some one with you
that knows the less sublime portions of your history, it seems that
other people do. You are no longer a citizen of the world: but your
"unhoused free condition is put into circumscription and confine." The
_incognito_ of an inn is one of its striking privileges--"lord of one's
self, uncumber'd with a name." Oh! it is great to shake off the trammels
of the world and of public opinion--to lose our importunate, tormenting,
everlasting personal identity in the elements of nature, and become the
creature of the moment, clear of all ties--to hold to the universe only
by a dish of sweet-breads, and to owe nothing but the score of the
evening--and no longer seeking for applause and meeting with contempt,
to be known by no other title than _the Gentleman in the parlour_! One
may take one's choice of all characters in this romantic state of
uncertainty as to one's real pretensions, and become indefinitely
respectable and negatively rightworshipful. We baffle prejudice and
disappoint conjecture; and from being so to others, begin to be objects
of curiosity and wonder even to ourselves. We are no more those
hackneyed commonplaces that we appear in the world: an inn restores us
to the level of nature, and quits scores with society! I have certainly
spent some enviable hours at inns--sometimes when I have been left
entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some metaphysical problem,
as once at Witham-common, where I found out the proof that likeness is
not a case of the association of ideas--at other times, when there have
been pictures in the room, as at St. Neot's (I think it was) where I
first met with Gribelin's engravings of the Cartoons, into which I
entered at once, and at a little inn on the borders of Wales, where
there happened to be hanging some of Westall's drawings, which I
compared triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the admired
artist) with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over the Severn,
standing up in the boat between me and the twilight--at other times I
might mention luxuriating in books, with a peculiar interest in this
way, as I remember sitting up half the night to read Paul and Virginia,
which I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater, after being drenched in the
rain all day; and at the same place I got through two volumes of Madame
D'Arblay's Camilla. It was on the tenth of April, 1798, that I sat down
to a volume of the New Eloise, at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle
of sherry and a cold chicken. The letter I chose was that in which St.
Preux describes his feelings as he first caught a glimpse from the
heights of the Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought with me as
a _bon bouche_[32], to crown the evening with. It was my birthday, and I
had for the first time come from a place in the neighbourhood to visit
this delightful spot. The road to Llangollen turns off between Chirk
and Wrexham; and on passing a certain point, you come all at once upon
the valley, which opens like an amphitheatre, broad, barren hills rising
in majestic state on either side, with "green upland swells that echo to
the bleat of flocks" below, and the river Dee babbling over its stony
bed in the midst of them. The valley at this time "glittered green with
sunny showers," and a budding ash-tree dipped its tender branches in the
chiding stream. How proud, how glad I was to walk along the high road
that overlooks the delicious prospect, repeating the lines which I have
just quoted from Mr. Coleridge's poems! But besides the prospect which
opened beneath my feet, another also opened to my inward sight, a
heavenly vision, on which were written, in letters large as Hope could
make them, these four words, LIBERTY, GENIUS, LOVE, VIRTUE; which have
since faded into the light of common day, or mock my idle gaze.
"The beautiful is vanished, and returns not."
Still I would return some time or other to this enchanted spot; but I
would return to it alone. What other self could I find to share that
influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the fragments of which I
could hardly conjure up to myself, so much have they been broken and
defaced! I could stand on some tall rock, and overlook the precipice of
years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going
shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named. Where is he now? Not
only I myself have changed; the world, which was then new to me, has
become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O
sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness as thou then wert; and thou
shalt always be to me the river of Paradise, where I will drink of the
waters of life freely!
There is hardly any thing that shows the short-sightedness or
capriciousness of the imagination more than travelling does. With change
of place we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feelings. We can by
an effort indeed transport ourselves to old and long-forgotten scenes,
and then the picture of the mind revives again; but we forget those that
we have just left. It seems that we can think but of one place at a
time. The canvas of the fancy is but of a certain extent, and if we
paint one set of objects upon it, they immediately efface every other.
We cannot enlarge our conceptions, we only shift our point of view. The
landscape bares its bosom to the enraptured eye, we take our fill of it,
and seem as if we could form no other image of beauty or grandeur. We
pass on, and think no more of it: the horizon that shuts it from our
sight, also blots it from our memory like a dream. In travelling through
a wild barren country, I can form no idea of a woody and cultivated one.
It appears to me that all the world must be barren, like what I see of
it. In the country we forget the town, and in town we despise the
country. "Beyond Hyde Park," says Sir Fopling Flutter, "all is a
desert." All that part of the map that we do not see before us is a
blank. The world in our conceit of it is not much bigger than a
nutshell. It is not one prospect expanded into another, county joined to
county, kingdom to kingdom, lands to seas, making an image voluminous
and vast;--the mind can form no larger idea of space than the eye can
take in at a single glance. The rest is a name written in a map, a
calculation of arithmetic. For instance, what is the true signification
of that immense mass of territory and population, known by the name of
China, to us? An inch of paste-board on a wooden globe, of no more
account than a China orange! Things near us are seen of the size of
life: things at a distance are diminished to the size of the
understanding. We measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend
the texture of our own being only piecemeal. In this way, however, we
remember an infinity of things and places. The mind is like a mechanical
instrument that plays a great variety of tunes, but it must play them in
succession. One idea recalls another, but it at the same time excludes
all others. In trying to renew old recollections, we cannot as it were
unfold the whole web of our existence; we must pick out the single
threads. So in coming to a place where we have formerly lived and with
which we have intimate associations, every one must have found that the
feeling grows more vivid the nearer we approach the spot, from the mere
anticipation of the actual impression: we remember circumstances,
feelings, persons, faces, names, that we had not thought of for years;
but for the time all the rest of the world is forgotten!
To return to the question I have quitted above. I have no objection to
go to see ruins, aqueducts, pictures, in company with a friend or a
party, but rather the contrary, for the former reason reversed. They are
intelligible matters, and will bear talking about. The sentiment here is
not tacit, but communicable and overt. Salisbury Plain is barren of
criticism, but Stonehenge will bear a discussion antiquarian,
picturesque, and philosophical. In setting out on a party of pleasure,
the first consideration always is where we shall go to; in taking a
solitary ramble, the question is what we shall meet with by the way.
"The mind is its own place;" nor are we anxious to arrive at the end of
our journey. I can myself do the honours indifferently well to works of
art and curiosity. I once took a party to Oxford with no mean
_eclat_--showed them that seat of the Muses at a distance,
"With glistering spires and pinnacles adorn'd"--
descanted on the learned air that breathes from the grassy quadrangles
and stone walls of halls and colleges--was at home in the Bodleian; and
at Blenheim quite superseded the powdered Ciceroni that attended us, and
that pointed, in vain with his wand to commonplace beauties in matchless
pictures.--As another exception to the above reasoning, I should not
feel confident in venturing on a journey in a foreign country without a
companion. I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my own
language. There is an involuntary antipathy in the mind of an Englishman
to foreign manners and notions that requires the assistance of social
sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from home increases, this
relief, which was at first a luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite.
A person would almost feel stifled to find himself in the deserts of
Arabia without friends and countrymen: there must be allowed to be
something in the view of Athens or old Rome that claims the utterance of
speech; and I own that the Pyramids are too mighty for any single
contemplation. In such situations, so opposite to all one's ordinary
train of ideas, one seems a species by one's self, a limb torn off from
society, unless one can meet with instant fellowship and support.--Yet I
did not feel this want or craving very pressing once, when I first set
my foot on the laughing shores of France. Calais was peopled with
novelty and delight. The confused, busy murmur of the place was like oil
and wine poured into my ears; nor did the mariners' hymn, which was sung
from the top of an old crazy vessel in the harbour, as the sun went
down, send an alien sound into my soul. I only breathed the air of
general humanity. I walked over "the vine-covered hills and gay regions
of France," erect and satisfied; for the image of man was not cast down
and chained to the foot of arbitrary thrones: I was at no loss for
language, for that of all the great schools of painting was open to me.
The whole is vanished like a shade. Pictures, heroes, glory, freedom,
all are fled: nothing remains but the Bourbons and the French
people!--There is undoubtedly a sensation in travelling into foreign
parts that is to be had nowhere else: but it is more pleasing at the
time than lasting. It is too remote from our habitual associations to be
a common topic of discourse or reference, and, like a dream or another
state of existence, does not piece into our daily modes of life. It is
an animated but a momentary hallucination. It demands an effort to
exchange our actual for our ideal identity; and to feel the pulse of our
old transports revive very keenly, we must "jump" all our present
comforts and connections. Our romantic and itinerant character is not
to be domesticated. Dr. Johnson remarked how little foreign travel added
to the facilities of conversation in those who had been abroad. In fact,
the time we have spent there is both delightful and in one sense
instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial, downright
existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same, but
another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out
of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So
the poet somewhat quaintly sings,
"Out of my country and myself I go."
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves
for a while from the ties and objects that recall them: but we can be
said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I
should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in
travelling abroad, if I could any where borrow another life to spend
afterwards at home!
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 29: From "Table-Talk," 1821-2.]
[Footnote 30: Sancho Panza, a character in Cervantes' romance, "Don
Quixote."]
[Footnote 31: Aloof, O keep aloof, ye uninitiated!]
[Footnote 32: A titbit.]
THE REGRETS OF A MOUNTAINEER[33]
LESLIE STEPHEN
I have often felt a sympathy, which almost rises to the pathetic, when
looking on at a cricket-match or boat-race. Something of the emotion
with which Gray regarded the "distant spires and antique towers" rises
within me. It is not, indeed, that I feel very deeply for the fine
ingenuous lads who, as somebody says, are about to be degraded into
tricky, selfish Members of Parliament. I have seen too much of them.
They are very fine animals; but they are rather too exclusively animal.
The soul is apt to be in too embryonic a state within these cases of
well-strung bone and muscle. It is impossible for a mere athletic
machine, however finely constructed, to appeal very deeply to one's
finer sentiments. I can scarcely look forward with even an affectation
of sorrow for the time when, if more sophisticated, it will at least
have made a nearer approach to the dignity of an intellectual being. It
is not the boys who make me feel a touch of sadness; their approaching
elevation to the dignity of manhood will raise them on the whole in the
scale of humanity; it is the older spectators whose aspect has in it
something affecting. The shaky old gentleman, who played in the days
when it was decidedly less dangerous to stand up to bowling than to a
cannon-ball, and who now hobbles about on rheumatic joints, by the help
of a stick; the corpulent elder, who rowed when boats had gangways down
their middle, and did not require as delicate a balance as an acrobat's
at the top of a living pyramid--these are the persons whom I cannot see
without an occasional sigh. They are really conscious that they have
lost something which they can never regain; or, if they momentarily
forget it, it is even more forcibly impressed upon the spectators. To
see a respectable old gentleman of sixty, weighing some fifteen stone,
suddenly forget a third of his weight and two-thirds of his years, and
attempt to caper like a boy, is indeed a startling phenomenon. To the
thoughtless, it may be simply comic; but, without being a Jaques, one
may contrive also to suck some melancholy out of it.
Now, as I have never caught a cricket-ball, and, on the contrary, have
caught numerous crabs in my life, the sympathy which I feel for these
declining athletes is not due to any great personal interest in the
matter. But I have long anticipated that a similar day would come for
me, when I should no longer be able to pursue my favourite sport of
mountaineering. Some day I should find that the ascent of a zigzag was
as bad as a performance on the treadmill; that I could not look over a
precipice without a swimming in the head; and that I could no more jump
a crevasse than the Thames at Westminster. None of these things have
come to pass. So far as I know, my physical powers are still equal to
the ascent of Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau. But I am no less effectually
debarred--it matters not how--from mountaineering. I wander at the foot
of the gigantic Alps, and look up longingly to the summits, which are
apparently so near, and yet know that they are divided from me by an
impassable gulf. In some missionary work I have read that certain South
Sea Islanders believed in a future paradise where the good should go on
eating for ever with insatiable appetites at an inexhaustible banquet.
They were to continue their eternal dinner in a house with open
wickerwork sides; and it was to be the punishment of the damned to crawl
outside in perpetual hunger and look in through the chinks as little
boys look in through the windows of a London cookshop. With similar
feelings I lately watched through a telescope the small black dots,
which were really men, creeping up the high flanks of Mont Blanc or
Monte Rosa. The eternal snows represented for me the Elysian fields,
into which entrance was sternly forbidden, and I lingered about the spot
with a mixture of pleasure and pain, in the envious contemplation of my
more fortunate companions.
I know there are those who will receive these assertions with civil
incredulity. Some persons assume that every pleasure with which they
cannot sympathise is necessarily affectation, and hold, as a particular
case of that doctrine, that Alpine travellers risk their lives merely
from fashion or desire of notoriety. Others are kind enough to admit
that there is something genuine in the passion, but put it on a level
with the passion for climbing greased poles. They think it derogatory to
the due dignity of Mont Blanc that he should be used as a greased pole,
and assure us that the true pleasures of the Alps are those which are
within reach of the old and the invalids, who can only creep about
villages and along high-roads. I cannot well argue with such detractors
from what I consider a noble sport. As for the first class, it is
reduced almost to a question of veracity. I say that I enjoy being on
the top of a mountain, or, indeed, halfway up a mountain; that climbing
is a pleasure to me, and would be so if no one else climbed and no one
ever heard of my climbing. They reply that they don't believe it. No
more argument is possible than if I were to say that I liked eating
olives, and some one asserted that I really eat them only out of
affectation. My reply would be simply to go on eating olives; and I hope
the reply of mountaineers will be to go on climbing Alps. The other
assault is more intelligible. Our critics admit that we have a pleasure;
but assert that it is a puerile pleasure--that it leads to an irreverent
view of mountain beauty, and to oversight of that which should really
most impress a refined and noble mind. To this I shall only make such an
indirect reply as may result from a frank confession of my own regrets
at giving up the climbing business--perhaps for ever. I am sinking, so
to speak, from the butterfly to the caterpillar stage, and, if the
creeping thing is really the highest of the two, it will appear that
there is something in the substance of my lamentations unworthy of an
intellectual being. Let me try. By way of preface, however, I admit that
mountaineering, in my sense of the word, is a sport. It is a sport
which, like fishing or shooting, brings one into contact with the
sublimest aspects of nature; and, without setting their enjoyment before
one as an ultimate end or aim, helps one indirectly to absorb and be
penetrated by their influence. Still it is strictly a sport--as strictly
as cricket, or rowing, or knurr and spell--and I have no wish to place
it on a different footing. The game is won when a mountain-top is
reached in spite of difficulties; it is lost when one is forced to
retreat; and, whether won or lost, it calls into play a great variety of
physical and intellectual energies, and gives the pleasure which always
accompanies an energetic use of our faculties. Still it suffers in some
degree from this undeniable characteristic, and especially from the
tinge which has consequently been communicated to narratives of mountain
adventures. There are two ways which have been appropriated to the
description of all sporting exploits. One is to indulge in fine writing
about them, to burst out in sentences which swell to paragraphs, and in
paragraphs which spread over pages; to plunge into ecstasies about
infinite abysses and overpowering splendours, to compare mountains to
archangels lying down in eternal winding-sheets of snow, and to convert
them into allegories about man's highest destinies and aspirations. This
is good when it is well done. Mr. Ruskin has covered the Matterhorn, for
example, with a whole web of poetical associations, in language which,
to a severe taste, is perhaps a trifle too fine, though he has done it
with an eloquence which his bitterest antagonists must freely
acknowledge. Yet most humble writers will feel that if they try to
imitate Mr. Ruskin's eloquence they will pay the penalty of becoming
ridiculous. It is not every one who can with impunity compare Alps to
archangels. Tall talk is luckily an object of suspicion to Englishmen,
and consequently most writers, and especially those who frankly adopt
the sporting view of the mountains, adopt the opposite scheme: they
affect something like cynicism; they mix descriptions of scenery with
allusions to fleas or to bitter beer; they shrink with the prevailing
dread of Englishmen from the danger of overstepping the limits of the
sublime into its proverbial opposite; and they humbly try to amuse us
because they can't strike us with awe. This, too, if I may venture to
say so, is good in its way and place; and it seems rather hard to these
luckless writers when people assume that, because they make jokes on a
mountain, they are necessarily insensible to its awful sublimities. A
sense of humour is not incompatible with imaginative sensibility; and
even Wordsworth might have been an equally powerful prophet of nature if
he could sometimes have descended from his stilts. In short, a man may
worship mountains, and yet have a quiet joke with them when he is
wandering all day in their tremendous solitudes.
Joking, however, is, it must be admitted, a dangerous habit. I freely
avow that, in my humble contributions to Alpine literature, I have
myself made some very poor and very unseasonable witticisms. I confess
my error, and only wish that I had no worse errors to confess. Still I
think that the poor little jokes in which we mountaineers sometimes
indulge have been made liable to rather harsh constructions. We are
accused, in downright earnest, not merely of being flippant, but of an
arrogant contempt for all persons whose legs are not as strong as our
own. We are supposed seriously to wrap ourselves in our own conceit, and
to brag intolerably of our exploits. Now I will not say that no
mountaineer ever swaggers: the quality called by the vulgar "bounce" is
unluckily confined to no profession. Certainly I have seen a man
intolerably vain because he could raise a hundred-weight with his little
finger; and I dare say that the "champion bill-poster," whose name is
advertised on the walls of this metropolis, thinks excellence in
bill-posting the highest virtue of a citizen. So some men may be silly
enough to brag in all seriousness about mountain exploits. However, most
lads of twenty learn that it is silly to give themselves airs about mere
muscular eminence; and especially is this true of Alpine
exploits--first, because they require less physical prowess than almost
any other sport, and secondly, because a good amateur still feels
himself the hopeless inferior of half the Alpine peasants whom he sees.
You cannot be very conceited about a game in which the first clodhopper
you meet can give you ten minutes' start in an hour. Still a man writing
in a humorous vein naturally adopts a certain bumptious tone, just as
our friend "Punch" ostentatiously declares himself to be omniscient and
infallible. Nobody takes him at his word, or supposes that the editor of
"Punch" is really the most conceited man in all England. But we poor
mountaineers are occasionally fixed with our own careless talk by some
outsider who is not in the secret. We know ourselves to be a small sect,
and to be often laughed at; we reply by: assuming that we are the salt
of the earth, and that our amusement is the first and noblest of all
amusements. Our only retort to the good-humoured ridicule with which we
are occasionally treated is to adopt an affected strut, and to carry it
off as if we were the finest fellows in the world. We make a boast of
our shame, and say, if you laugh we must crow. But we don't really mean
anything: if we did, the only word which the English language would
afford wherewith to describe us would be the very unpleasant antithesis
to wise men, and certainly I hold that we have the average amount of
common sense. When, therefore, I see us taken to task for swaggering, I
think it a trifle hard that this merely playful affectation of
superiority should be made a serious fault. For the future I would
promise to be careful, if it were worth avoiding the misunderstanding of
men who won't take a joke. Meanwhile, I can only state that when Alpine
travellers indulge in a little swagger about their own performances and
other people's incapacity, they don't mean more than an infinitesimal
fraction of what they say, and that they know perfectly well that when
history comes to pronounce a final judgment upon the men of the time, it
won't put mountain-climbing on a level with patriotism, or even with
excellence in the fine arts.
The reproach of real _bona fide_ arrogance is, so far as I know, very
little true of Alpine travellers. With the exception of the necessary
fringe hanging on to every set of human beings--consisting of persons
whose heads are weaker than their legs--the mountaineer, so far as my
experience has gone, is generally modest enough. Perhaps he sometimes
flaunts his ice-axes and ropes a little too much before the public eye
at Chamonix, as a yachtsman occasionally flourishes his nautical costume
at Cowes; but the fault may be pardoned by those not inexorable to human
weaknesses. This opinion, I know, cuts at the root of the most popular
theory as to our ruling passion. If we do not climb the Alps to gain
notoriety, for what purpose can we possibly climb them? That same
unlucky trick of joking is taken to indicate that we don't care much
about the scenery; for who, with a really susceptible soul, could be
facetious under the cliffs of Jungfrau or the ghastly precipices of the
Matterhorn? Hence people who kindly excuse us from the blame of
notoriety-hunting generally accept the "greased-pole" theory. We are, it
seems, overgrown schoolboys, who, like other schoolboys, enjoy being in
dirt, and danger, and mischief, and have as much sensibility for natural
beauty as the mountain mules. And against this, as a more serious
complaint, I wish to make my feeble protest, in order that my
lamentations on quitting the profession may not seem unworthy of a
thinking being.
Let me try to recall some of the impressions which mountaineering has
left with me, and see whether they throw any light upon the subject. As
I gaze at the huge cliffs where I may no longer wander, I find
innumerable recollections arise--some of them dim, as though belonging
to a past existence; and some so brilliant that I can scarcely realise
my exclusion from the scenes to which they belong. I am standing at the
foot of what, to my mind, is the most glorious of all Alpine
wonders--the huge Oberland precipice, on the slopes of the Faulhorn or
the Wengern Alp. Innumerable tourists have done all that tourists can do
to cocknify (if that is the right derivative from cockney) the scenery;
but, like the Pyramids or a Gothic cathedral, it throws off the taint of
vulgarity by its imperishable majesty. Even on turf strewn with
sandwich-papers and empty bottles, even in the presence of hideous
peasant-women singing "Stand-er auf" for five centimes, we cannot but
feel the influence of Alpine beauty. When the sunlight is dying off the
snows, or the full moon lighting them up with ethereal tints, even
sandwich-papers and singing women may be forgotten. How does the memory
of scrambles along snow aretes, of plunges--luckily not too deep--into
crevasses, of toil through long snowfields, towards a refuge that seemed
to recede as we advanced--where, to quote Tennyson with due alteration,
to the traveller toiling in immeasurable snow--
Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill
The chalet sparkles like a grain of salt;--
how do such memories as these harmonise with the sense of superlative
sublimity?
One element of mountain beauty is, we shall all admit, their vast size
and steepness. That a mountain is very big, and is faced by
perpendicular walls of rock, is the first thing which strikes everybody,
and is the whole essence and outcome of a vast quantity of poetical
description. Hence the first condition towards a due appreciation of
mountain scenery is that these qualities should be impressed upon the
imagination. The mere dry statement that a mountain is so many feet in
vertical height above the sea, and contains so many tons of granite, is
nothing. Mont Blanc, is about three miles high. What of that? Three
miles is an hour's walk for a lady--an eighteen-penny cab-fare--the
distance from Hyde Park Corner to the Bank--an express train could do it
in three minutes, or a racehorse in five. It is a measure which we have
learnt to despise, looking at it from a horizontal point of view; and
accordingly most persons, on seeing the Alps for the first time, guess
them to be higher, as measured in feet, than they really are. What,
indeed, is the use of giving measures in feet to any but the scientific
mind? Who cares whether the moon is 250,000 or 2,500,000 miles distant?
Mathematicians try to impress upon us that the distance of the fixed
stars is only expressible by a row of figures which stretches across a
page; suppose it stretched across two or across a dozen pages, should we
be any the wiser, or have, in the least degree, a clearer notion of the
superlative distances? We civilly say, "Dear me!" when the astronomer
looks to us for the appropriate stare, but we only say it with the
mouth; internally our remark is, "You might as well have multiplied by a
few more millions whilst you were about it." Even astronomers, though
not a specially imaginative race, feel the impotence of figures, and try
to give us some measure which the mind can grasp a little more
conveniently. They tell us about the cannon-ball which might have been
flying ever since the time of Adam, and not yet have reached the
heavenly body, or about the stars which may not yet have become visible,
though the light has been flying to us at a rate inconceivable by the
mind for an inconceivable number of years; and they succeed in producing
a bewildering and giddy sensation, although the numbers are too vast to
admit of any accurate apprehension.
We feel a similar need in the case of mountains. Besides the bare
statement of figures, it is necessary to have some means for grasping
the meaning of the figures. The bare tens and thousands must be clothed
with some concrete images. The statement that a mountain is 15,000 feet
high is, by itself, little more impressive, than that it is 3,000; we
want something more before we can mentally compare Mont Blanc and
Snowdon. Indeed, the same people who guess of a mountain's height at a
number of feet much exceeding the reality, show, when they are
cross-examined, that they fail to appreciate in any tolerable degree the
real meaning of the figures. An old lady one day, about 11 A.M.,
proposed to walk from the Aeggischhorn to the Jungfrau-Joch, and to
return for luncheon--the distance being a good twelve hours' journey for
trained mountaineers. Every detail of which the huge mass is composed is
certain to be underestimated. A gentleman the other day pointed out to
me a grand ice-cliff at the end of a hanging glacier, which must have
been at least 100 feet high, and asked me whether that snow was three
feet deep. Nothing is more common than for tourists to mistake some huge
pinnacle of rock, as big as a church tower, for a traveller. The rocks
of the Grands Mulets, in one corner of which the chalet is hidden, are
often identified with a party ascending Mont Blanc; and I have seen
boulders as big as a house pointed out confidently as chamois. People
who make these blunders must evidently see the mountains as mere toys,
however many feet they may give them at a random guess. Huge overhanging
cliffs are to them steps within the reach of human legs; yawning
crevasses are ditches to be jumped; and foaming waterfalls are like
streams from penny squirts. Everyone knows the avalanches on the
Jungfrau, and the curiously disproportionate appearance of the little
puffs of white smoke, which are said to be the cause of the thunder; but
the disproportion ceases to an eye that has learnt really to measure
distance, and to know that these smoke-puffs, represent a cataract of
crashing blocks of ice.
Now the first merit of mountaineering is that it enables one to have
what theologians would call an experimental faith in the size of
mountains--to substitute a real living belief for a dead intellectual
assent. It enables one, first, to assign something like its true
magnitude to a rock or snow-slope; and, secondly, to measure that
magnitude in terms of muscular exertion instead of bare mathematical
units. Suppose that we are standing upon the Wengern Alp; between the
Moench and the Eiger there stretches a round white bank, with a curved
outline, which we may roughly compare to the back of one of Sir E.
Landseer's lions. The ordinary tourists--the old man, the woman, or the
cripple, who are supposed to appreciate the real beauties of Alpine
scenery--may look at it comfortably from their hotel. They may see its
graceful curve, the long straight lines that are ruled in delicate
shading down its sides, and the contrast of the blinding white snow with
the dark blue sky above; but they will probably guess it to be a mere
bank--a snowdrift, perhaps, which has been piled by the last storm. If
you pointed out to them one of the great rocky teeth that projected from
its summit, and said that it was a guide, they would probably remark
that he looked very small, and would fancy that he could jump over the
bank with an effort. Now a mountaineer knows, to begin with, that it is
a massive rocky rib, covered with snow, lying at a sharp angle, and
varying perhaps from 500 to 1,000 feet in height. So far he might be
accompanied by men of less soaring ambition; by an engineer who had been
mapping the country, or an artist who had been carefully observing the
mountains from their bases. They might learn in time to interpret
correctly the real meaning of shapes at which the uninitiated guess at
random. But the mountaineer can go a step further, and it is the next
step which gives the real significance to those delicate curves and
lines. He can translate the 500 or 1,000 feet of snow-slope into a more
tangible unit of measurement. To him, perhaps, they recall the memory of
a toilsome ascent, the sun beating on his head for five or six hours,
the snow returning the glare with still more parching effect; a stalwart
guide toiling all the weary time, cutting steps in hard blue ice, the
fragments hissing and spinning down the long straight grooves in the
frozen snow till they lost themselves in the yawning chasm below; and
step after step taken along the slippery staircase, till at length he
triumphantly sprang upon the summit of the tremendous wall that no human
foot had scaled before. The little black knobs that rise above the edge
represent for him huge impassable rocks, sinking on one side in scarped
slippery surfaces towards the snow-field, and on the other stooping in
one tremendous cliff to a distorted glacier thousands of feet below. The
faint blue line across the upper neve, scarcely distinguishable to the
eye, represents to one observer nothing but a trifling undulation; a
second, perhaps, knows that it means a crevasse; the mountaineer
remembers that it is the top of a huge chasm, thirty feet across, and
perhaps ten times as deep, with perpendicular sides of glimmering blue
ice, and fringed by thick rows of enormous pendent icicles. The marks
that are scored in delicate lines, such as might be ruled by a diamond
on glass, have been cut by innumerable streams trickling in hot weather
from the everlasting snow, or ploughed by succeeding avalanches that
have slipped from the huge upper snowfields above. In short, there is no
insignificant line or mark that has not its memory or its indication of
the strange phenomena of the upper world. True, the same picture is
painted upon the retina of all classes of observers; and so Porson and a
schoolboy and a peasant might receive the same physical impression from
a set of black and white marks on the page of a Greek play; but to one
they would be an incoherent conglomeration of unmeaning and capricious
lines, to another they would represent certain sounds more or less
corresponding to some English words; whilst to the scholar they would
reveal some of the noblest poetry in the world, and all the associations
of successful intellectual labour. I do not say that the difference is
quite so great in the case of the mountains; still I am certain that no
one can decipher the natural writing on the face of a snow-slope or a
precipice who has not wandered amongst their recesses, and learnt by
slow experience what is indicated by marks which an ignorant observer
would scarcely notice. True, even one who sees a mountain for the first
time may know that, as a matter of fact, a scar on the face of a cliff
means, for example, a recent fall of a rock; but between the bare
knowledge and the acquaintance with all which that knowledge
implies--the thunder of the fall, the crash of the smaller fragments,
the bounding energy of the descending mass--there is almost as much
difference as between hearing that a battle has been fought and being
present at it yourself. We have all read descriptions of Waterloo till
we are sick of the subject; but I imagine that our emotions on seeing
the shattered well of Hougomont are very inferior to those of one of the
Guard who should revisit the place where he held out for a long day
against the assaults of the French army.
Now to an old mountaineer the Oberland cliffs are full of memories; and,
more than this, he has learnt the language spoken by every crag and
every wave of glacier. It is strange if they do not affect him rather
more powerfully than the casual visitor who has never been initiated by
practical experience into their difficulties. To him, the huge buttress
which runs down from the Moench is something more than an irregular
pyramid, purple with white patches at the bottom and pure white at the
top. He fills up the bare outline supplied by the senses with a thousand
lively images. He sees tier above tier of rock, rising in a gradually
ascending scale of difficulty, covered at first by long lines of the
debris that have been splintered by frost from the higher wall, and
afterwards rising bare and black and threatening. He knows instinctively
which of the ledges has a dangerous look--where such a bold mountaineer
as John Lauener might slip on the polished surface, or be in danger of
an avalanche from above. He sees the little shell-like swelling at the
foot of the glacier crawling down the steep slope above, and knows that
it means an almost inaccessible wall of ice; and the steep snowfields
that rise towards the summit are suggestive of something very different
from the picture which might have existed in the mind of a German
student, who once asked me whether it was possible to make the ascent
on a mule.
Hence, if mountains owe their influence upon the imagination in a great
degree to their size and steepness, and apparent inaccessibility--as no
one can doubt that they do, whatever may be the explanation of the fact
that people like to look at big, steep, inaccessible objects--the
advantages of the mountaineer are obvious. He can measure those
qualities on a very different scale from the ordinary traveler. He
measures the size, not by the vague abstract term of so many thousand
feet, but by the hours of labour, divided into minutes--each separately
felt--of strenuous muscular exertion. The steepness is not expressed in
degrees, but by the memory of the sensation produced when a snow-slope
seems to be rising up and smiting you in the face; when, far away from
all human help, you are clinging like a fly to the slippery side of a
mighty pinnacle in mid air. And as for the inaccessibility, no one can
measure the difficulty of climbing a hill who has not wearied his
muscles and brain in struggling against the opposing obstacles. Alpine
travellers, it is said, have removed the romance from the mountains by
climbing them. What they have really done is to prove that there exists
a narrow line by which a way may be found to the top of any given
mountain; but the clue leads through innumerable inaccessibilities;
true, you can follow one path, but to right and left are cliffs which no
human foot will ever tread, and whose terrors can only be realised when
you are in their immediate neighbourhood. The cliffs of the Matterhorn
do not bar the way to the top effectually, but it is only by forcing a
passage through them that you can really appreciate their terrible
significance.
Hence I say that the qualities which strike every sensitive observer are
impressed upon the mountaineer with tenfold force and intensity. If he
is as accessible to poetical influences as his neighbours--and I don't
know why he should be less so--he has opened new avenues of access
between the scenery and his mind. He has learnt a language which is but
partially revealed to ordinary men. An artist is superior to an
unlearned picture-seer, not merely because he has greater natural
sensibility, but because he has improved it by methodical experience;
because his senses have been sharpened by constant practice, till he can
catch finer shades of colouring, and more delicate inflexions of line;
because, also, the lines and colours have acquired new significance, and
been associated with a thousand thoughts with which the mass of mankind
has never cared to connect them. The mountaineer is improved by a
similar process. But I know some sceptical critics will ask, does not
the way in which he is accustomed to regard mountains rather deaden
their poetical influence? Doesn't he come to look at them as mere
instruments of sport, and overlook their more spiritual teaching? Does
not all the excitement of personal adventure and the noisy apparatus of
guides, and ropes, and axes, and tobacco, and the fun of climbing,
rather dull his perceptions and incapacitate him from perceiving
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills?
Well, I have known some stupid and unpoetical mountaineers; and, since I
have been dismounted from my favourite hobby, I think I have met some
similar specimens among the humbler class of tourists. There are
persons, I fancy, who "do" the Alps; who look upon the Lake of Lucerne
as one more task ticked off from their memorandum book, and count up the
list of summits visible from the Goernergrat without being penetrated
with any keen sense of sublimity. And there are mountaineers who are
capable of making a pun on the top of Mont Blanc--and capable of nothing
more. Still I venture to deny that even punning is incompatible with
poetry, or that those who make the pun can have no deeper feeling in
their bosoms which they are perhaps too shamefaced to utter.
The fact is that that which gives its inexpressible charm to
mountaineering is the incessant series of exquisite natural scenes,
which are for the most part enjoyed by the mountaineer alone. This is, I
am aware, a round assertion; but I will try to support it by a few of
the visions which are recalled to me by these Oberland cliffs, and which
I have seen profoundly enjoyed by men who perhaps never mentioned them
again, and probably in describing their adventures scrupulously avoided
the danger of being sentimental.
Thus every traveller has occasionally done a sunrise, and a more
lamentable proceeding than the ordinary view of a sunrise can hardly be
imagined. You are cold, miserable, breakfastless; have risen shivering
from a warm bed, and in your heart long only to creep into bed again. To
the mountaineer all this is changed. He is beginning a day full of the
anticipation of a pleasant excitement. He has, perhaps, been waiting
anxiously for fine weather, to try conclusions with some huge giant not
yet scaled. He moves out with something of the feeling with which a
soldier goes to the assault of a fortress, but without the same
probability of coming home in fragments; the danger is trifling enough
to be merely exhilatory, and to give a pleasant tension to the nerves;
his muscles feel firm and springy, and his stomach--no small advantage
to the enjoyment of scenery--is in excellent order. He looks at the
sparkling stars with keen satisfaction, prepared to enjoy a fine sunrise
with all his faculties at their best, and with the added pleasure of a
good omen for his day's work. Then a huge dark mass begins to mould
itself slowly out of the darkness, the sky begins to form a background
of deep purple, against which the outline becomes gradually more
definite; one by one, the peaks catch the exquisite Alpine glow,
lighting up in rapid succession, like a vast illumination; and when at
last the steady sunlight settles upon them, and shows every rock and
glacier, without even a delicate film of mist to obscure them, he feels
his heart bound, and steps out gaily to the assault--just as the people
on the Rigi are giving thanks that the show is over and that they may
go to bed. Still grander is the sight when the mountaineer has already
reached some lofty ridge, and, as the sun rises, stands between the day
and the night--the valley still in deep sleep, with the mists lying
between the folds of the hills, and the snow-peaks standing out clear
and pale white just before the sun reaches them, whilst a broad band of
orange light runs all round the vast horizon. The glory of sunsets is
equally increased in the thin upper air. The grandest of all such sights
that live in my memory is that of a sunset from the Aiguille du Goute.
The snow at our feet was glowing with rich light, and the shadows in our
footsteps a vivid green by the contrast. Beneath us was a vast
horizontal floor of thin level mists suspended in mid air, spread like a
canopy over the whole boundless landscape, and tinged with every hue of
sunset. Through its rents and gaps we could see the lower mountains, the
distant plains, and a fragment of the Lake of Geneva lying in a more
sober purple. Above us rose the solemn mass of Mont Blanc in the richest
glow of an Alpine sunset. The sense of lonely sublimity was almost
oppressive, and although half our party was suffering from sickness, I
believe even the guides were moved to a sense of solemn beauty.
These grand scenic effects are occasionally seen by ordinary travellers,
though the ordinary traveller is for the most part out of temper at 3
A.M. The mountaineer can enjoy them, both because his frame of mind is
properly trained to receive the natural beauty, and because he alone
sees them with their best accessories, amidst the silence of the eternal
snow, and the vast panoramas visible from the loftier summits. And he
has a similar advantage in most of the great natural phenomena of the
cloud and the sunshine. No sight in the Alps is more impressive than the
huge rocks of a black precipice suddenly frowning out through the chasms
of a storm-cloud. But grand as such a sight may be from the safe
verandahs of the inn at Grindelwald, it is far grander in the silence of
the Central Alps amongst the savage wilderness of rock and snow.
Another characteristic effect of the High Alps often presents itself
when one has been climbing for two or three hours, with nothing in sight
but the varying wreaths of mist that chased each other monotonously
along the rocky ribs up whose snow-covered backbone we were laboriously
fighting our way. Suddenly there is a puff of wind, and looking round we
find that we have in an instant pierced the clouds, and emerged, as it
were, on the surface of the ocean of vapour. Beneath us stretches for
hundreds of miles the level fleecy floor, and above us shines out clear
in the eternal sunshine every mountain, from Mont Blanc to Monte Rosa
and the Jungfrau. What, again, in the lower regions, can equal the
mysterious charm of gazing from the edge of a torn rocky parapet into an
apparently fathomless abyss, where nothing but what an Alpine traveller
calls a "strange formless wreathing of vapour" indicates the storm-wind
that is raging below us? I might go on indefinitely recalling the
strangely impressive scenes that frequently startle the traveller in the
waste upper world; but language is feeble indeed to convey even a
glimmering of what is to be seen to those who have not seen it for
themselves, whilst to them it can be little more than a peg upon which
to hang their own recollections. These glories, in which the mountain
Spirit reveals himself to his true worshippers, are only to be gained by
the appropriate service of climbing--at some risk, though a very
trifling risk, if he is approached with due form and ceremony--into the
furthest recesses of his shrines. And without seeing them, I maintain
that no man has really seen the Alps.
The difference between the exoteric and the esoteric school of
mountaineers may be indicated by their different view of glaciers. At
Grindelwald, for example, it is the fashion to go and "see the
glaciers"--heaven save the mark! Ladies in costumes, heavy German
professors, Americans doing the Alps at a gallop, Cook's tourists, and
other varieties of a well-known genus, go off in shoals and see--what?
A gigantic mass of ice, strangely torn with a few of the exquisite blue
crevasses, but denied and prostrate in dirt and ruins. A stream foul
with mud oozes out from the base; the whole mass seems to be melting
fast away; the summer sun has evidently got the best of it in these
lower regions, and nothing can resist him but the great mounds of
decaying rock that strew the surface in confused lumps. It is as much
like the glacier of the upper regions as the melting fragments of snow
in a London street are like the surface of the fresh snow that has just
fallen in a country field. And by way of improving its attractions a
perpetual picnic is going on, and the ingenious natives have hewed a
tunnel into the ice, for admission to which they charge certain
centimes. The unlucky glacier reminds me at his latter end of a wretched
whale stranded on a beach, dissolving into masses of blubber, and hacked
by remorseless fishermen, instead of plunging at his ease in the deep
blue water. Far above, where the glacier begins his course, he is seen
only by the true mountaineer. There are vast amphitheatres of pure snow,
of which the glacier known to tourists is merely the insignificant
drainage, but whose very existence they do not generally suspect. They
are utterly ignorant that from the top of the icefall which they visit
you may walk for hours on the eternal ice. After a long climb you come
to the region where the glacier is truly at its noblest; where the
surface is a spotless white; where the crevasses are enormous rents
sinking to profound depths, with walls of the purest blue; where the
glacier is torn and shattered by the energetic forces which mould it,
but has an expression of superabundant power, like a full stream
fretting against its banks and plunging through the vast gorges that it
has hewn for itself in the course of centuries. The bases of the
mountains are immersed in a deluge of cockneyism--fortunately a shallow
deluge--whilst their summits rise high into the bracing air, where
everything is pure and poetical.
The difference which I have thus endeavoured to indicate is more or
less traceable in a wider sense. The mountains are exquisitely
beautiful, indeed, from whatever points of view we contemplate them; and
the mountaineer would lose much if he never saw the beauties of the
lower valleys, of pasturages deep in flowers, and dark pine-forests with
the summits shining from far off between the stems. Only, as it seems to
me, he has the exclusive prerogative of thoroughly enjoying one--and
that the most characteristic, though by no means only, element of the
scenery. There may be a very good dinner spread before twenty people;
but if nineteen of them were teetotalers, and the twentieth drank his
wine like a man, he would be the only one to do it full justice; the
others might praise the meat or the fruits, but he would alone enjoy the
champagne; and in the great feast which Nature spreads before us (a
stock metaphor, which emboldens me to make the comparison), the high
mountain scenery acts the part of the champagne. Unluckily, too, the
teetotalers are very apt, in this case also, to sit in judgment upon
their more adventurous neighbours. Especially are they pleased to carp
at the views from high summits. I have been constantly asked, with a
covert sneer, "Did it repay you?"--a question which involves the
assumption that one wants to be repaid, as though the labour were not
itself part of the pleasure, and which implies a doubt that the view is
really enjoyable. People are always demonstrating that the lower views
are the most beautiful; and at the same time complaining that
mountaineers frequently turn back without looking at the view from the
top, as though that would necessarily imply that they cared nothing for
scenery. In opposition to which I must first remark that, as a rule,
every step of an ascent has a beauty of its own, which one is quietly
absorbing even when one is not directly making it a subject of
contemplation, and that the view from the top is generally the crowning
glory of the whole.
It will be enough if I conclude with an attempt to illustrate this last
assertion: and I will do it by still referring to the Oberland. Every
visitor with a soul for the beautiful admires the noble form of the
Wetterhorn--the lofty snow-crowned pyramid rising in such light and yet
massive lines from its huge basement of perpendicular cliffs. The
Wetterhorn has, however, a further merit. To my mind--and I believe most
connoisseurs of mountain tops agree with me--it is one of the most
impressive summits in the Alps. It is not a sharp pinnacle like the
Weisshorn, or a cupola like Mont Blanc, or a grand rocky tooth like the
Monte Rosa, but a long and nearly horizontal knife-edge, which, as seen
from either end, has of course the appearance of a sharp-pointed cone.
It is when balanced upon this ridge--sitting astride of the knife-edge
on which one can hardly stand without giddiness--that one fully
appreciates an Alpine precipice. Mr. Justice Wills has admirably
described the first ascent, and the impression it made upon him, in a
paper which has become classical for succeeding adventurers. Behind you
the snow-slope sinks with perilous steepness towards the wilderness of
glacier and rock through which the ascent has lain. But in front the ice
sinks with even greater steepness for a few feet or yards. Then it
curves over and disappears, and the next thing that the eye catches is
the meadowland of Grindelwald, some 9,000 feet below. I have looked down
many precipices, where the eye can trace the course of every pebble that
bounds down the awful slopes, and where I have shuddered as some
dislodged fragment of rock showed the course which, in case of accident,
fragments of my own body would follow. A precipice is always, for
obvious reasons, far more terrible from above than from below. The
creeping, tingling sensation which passes through one's limbs--even when
one knows oneself to be in perfect safety--testifies to the thrilling
influence of the sight. But I have never so realised the terrors of a
terrific cliff as when I could not see it. The awful gulf which
intervened between me and the green meadows struck the imagination by
its invisibility. It was like the view which may be seen from the ridge
of a cathedral roof, where the eaves have for their immediate
background the pavement of the streets below; only this cathedral was
9,000 feet high. Now, any one standing at the foot of the Wetterhorn may
admire their stupendous massiveness and steepness; but, to feel their
influence enter in the very marrow of one's bones, it is necessary to
stand at the summit, and to fancy the one little slide down the short
ice-slope, to be followed apparently by a bound into clear air and a
fall down to the houses, from heights where only the eagle ventures to
soar.
This is one of the Alpine beauties, which, of course, is: beyond the
power of art to imitate, and which people are therefore apt to ignore.
But it is not the only one to be seen on the high summits. It is often
said that these views are not "beautiful"--apparently because they won't
go into a picture, or, to put it more fairly, because no picture: can in
the faintest degree imitate them. But without quarrelling about words, I
think that, even if "beautiful" be not the most correct epithet, they
have a marvellously stimulating effect upon the imagination. Let us look
round from this wonderful pinnacle in mid air, and note one or two of
the most striking elements of the scenery.
You are, in the first place, perched on a cliff, whose presence is the
more felt because it is unseen. Then you are in a region over which
eternal silence is brooding. Not a sound ever comes there, except the
occasional fall of a splintered fragment of rock, or a layer of snow; no
stream is heard trickling, and the sounds of animal life are left
thousands of feet below. The most that you can hear is some mysterious
noise made by the wind eddying round the gigantic rocks; sometimes a
strange flapping sound, as if an unearthly flag were shaking its
invisible folds in the air. The enormous tract of country over which
your view extends--most of it dim and almost dissolved into air by
distance--intensifies the strange influence of the silence. You feel the
force of the line I have quoted from Wordsworth--
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
None of the travellers whom you can see crawling at your feet has the
least conception of what is meant by the silent solitudes of the High
Alps. To you, it is like a return to the stir of active life, when,
after hours of lonely wandering, you return to hear the tinkling of the
cow-bells below; to them the same sound is the ultimate limit of the
habitable world.
Whilst your mind is properly toned by these influences, you become
conscious of another fact, to which the common variety of tourists is
necessarily insensible. You begin to find out for the first time what
the mountains really are. On one side, you look back upon the huge
reservoirs from which the Oberland glaciers descend. You see the vast
stores from which the great rivers of Europe are replenished, the
monstrous crawling masses that are carving the mountains into shape, and
the gigantic bulwarks that separate two great quarters of the world.
From below these wild regions are half invisible; they are masked by the
outer line of mountains; and it is not till you are able to command them
from some lofty point that you can appreciate the grandeur of the huge
barriers, and the snow that is piled within their folds. There is
another half of the view equally striking. Looking towards the north,
the whole of Switzerland is couched at your feet; the Jura and the Black
Forest lie on the far horizon. And then you know what is the nature of a
really mountainous country. From below everything is seen in a kind of
distorted perspective. The people of the valley naturally think that the
valley is everything--that the country resembles old-fashioned maps,
where a few sporadic lumps are distributed amongst towns and plains. The
true proportions reveal themselves as you ascend. The valleys, you can
now see, are nothing but narrow trenches scooped out amidst a tossing
waste of mountain, just to carry off the drainage. The great ridges run
hither and thither, having it all their own way, wild and untamable
regions of rock or open grass or forest, at whose feet the valleys exist
on sufferance. Creeping about amongst the roots of the hills, you half
miss the hills themselves; you quite fail to understand the massiveness
of the mountain chains, and, therefore, the wonderful energy of the
forces that have heaved the surface of the world into these distorted
shapes. And it is to a half-conscious sense of the powers that must have
been at work that a great part of the influence of mountain scenery is
due. Geologists tell us that a theory of catastrophes is
unphilosophical; but, whatever may be the scientific truth, our minds
are impressed as though we were witnessing the results of some
incredible convulsion. At Stonehenge we ask what human beings could have
erected these strange grey monuments, and in the mountains we
instinctively ask what force can have carved out the Matterhorn, and
placed the Wetterhorn on its gigantic pedestal. Now, it is not till we
reach some commanding point that we realise the amazing extent of
country over which the solid ground has been shaking and heaving itself
in irresistible tumult.
Something, it is true, of this last effect may be seen from such
mountains as the Rigi or the Faulhorn. There, too, one seems to be at
the centre of a vast sphere, the earth bending up in a cup-like form to
meet the sky, and the blue vault above stretching in an arch majestical
by its enormous extent. There you seem to see a sensible fraction of the
world at your feet. But the effect is far less striking when other
mountains obviously look down upon you; when, as it were, you are
looking at the waves of the great ocean of hills merely from the crest
of one of the waves themselves, and not from some lighthouse that rises
far over their heads; for the Wetterhorn, like the Eiger, Moench, and
Jungfrau, owes one great beauty to the fact that it is on the edge of
the lower country, and stands between the real giants and the crowd of
inferior, though still enormous, masses in attendance upon them. And, in
the next place, your mind is far better adapted to receive impressions
of sublimity when you are alone, in a silent region, with a black sky
above and giant cliffs all round; with a sense still in your mind, if
not of actual danger, still of danger that would become real with the
slightest relaxation of caution, and with the world divided from you by
hours of snow and rock.
I will go no further, not because I have no more to say, but because
descriptions of scenery soon become wearisome, and because I have, I
hope, said enough to show that the mountaineer may boast of some
intellectual pleasures; that he is not a mere scrambler, but that he
looks for poetical impressions, as well as for such small glory as his
achievements may gain in a very small circle. Something of what he gains
fortunately sticks by him: he does not quite forget the mountain
language; his eye still recognises the space and the height and the
glory of the lofty mountains. And yet there is some pain in wandering
ghostlike among the scenes of his earlier pleasures. For my part, I try
in vain to hug myself in a sense of comfort. I turn over in bed when I
hear the stamping of heavily nailed shoes along the passage of an inn
about 2 A.M. I feel the skin of my nose complacently when I see others
returning with a glistening tight aspect about that unluckily prominent
feature, and know that in a day or two it will be raw and blistered and
burning. I think, in a comfortable inn at night, of the miseries of
those who are trying to sleep in damp hay, or on hard boards of chalets,
at once cold and stuffy and haunted by innumerable fleas. I congratulate
myself on having a whole skin and unfractured bones, and on the small
danger of ever breaking them over an Alpine precipice. But yet I
secretly know that these consolations are feeble. It is little use to
avoid early rising and discomfort, and even fleas, if one also loses the
pleasures to which they were the sauce--rather too _piquante_ a sauce
occasionally, it must be admitted. The philosophy is all very well which
recommends moderate enjoyment, regular exercise, and a careful avoidance
of risk and over-excitement. That is, it is all very well so long as
risk and excitement and immoderate enjoyment are out of your power; but
it does not stand the test of looking on and seeing them just beyond
your reach. In time, no doubt, a man may grow calm; he may learn to
enjoy the pleasures and the exquisite beauties of the lower
regions--though they, too, are most fully enjoyed when they have a
contrast with beauties of a different, and pleasures of a keener
excitement. When first debarred, at any rate, one feels like a balloon
full of gas, and fixed by immovable ropes to the prosaic ground. It is
pleasant to lie on one's back in a bed of rhododendrons, and look up to
a mountain top peering at one from above a bank of cloud; but it is
pleasantest when one has qualified oneself for repose by climbing the
peak the day before and becoming familiar with its terrors and its
beauties. In time, doubtless, one may get reconciled to anything; one
may settle down to be a caterpillar, even after one has known the
pleasures of being a butterfly; one may become philosophical, and have
one's clothes let out; and even in time, perhaps--though it is almost
too terrible to contemplate--be content with a mule or a carriage, or
that lowest depth to which human beings can sink, and for which the
English language happily affords no name, a _chaise a porteurs:_ and
even in such degradation the memory of better times may be pleasant; for
I doubt much whether it is truth the poet sings--
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
Certainly, to a philosophical mind, the sentiment is doubtful. For my
part, the fate which has cut me off, if I may use the expression, in the
flower of my youth, and doomed me to be a non-climbing animal in future,
is one which ought to exclude grumbling. I cannot indicate it more
plainly, for I might so make even the grumbling in which I have already
indulged look like a sin. I can only say that there are some very
delightful things in which it is possible to discover an infinitesimal
drop of bitterness, and that the mountaineer who undertakes to cut
himself off from his favourite pastime, even for reasons which he will
admit in his wildest moods to be more than amply sufficient, must expect
at times to feel certain pangs of regret, however quickly they may be
smothered.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 33: From "The Playground of Europe," 1871.]
BEHAVIOR[34]
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The soul which animates nature is not less significantly published in
the figure, movement, and gesture of animated bodies, than in its last
vehicle of articulate speech. This silent and subtle language is
Manners; not _what_, but _how_. Life expresses. A statue has no tongue,
and needs none. Good tableaux do not need declamation. Nature tells
every secret once. Yes, but in man she tells it all the time, by form,
attitude, gesture, mien, face, and parts of the face, and by the whole
action of the machine. The visible carriage or action of the individual,
as resulting from his organization and his will combined, we call
manners. What are they but thought entering the hands and feet,
controlling the movements of the body, the speech and behavior?
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg.
Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius
or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a
rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details
adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a
depth to the morning meadows. Manners are very communicable: men catch
them from each other. Consuelo, in the romance, boasts of the lessons
she had given the nobles in manners, on the stage: and, in real life,
Talma taught Napoleon the arts of behavior. Genius invents fine manners,
which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and, by the advantage
of a palace, better the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they
have learned into a mode.
The power of manners is incessant,--an element as unconcealable as
fire. The nobility cannot in any country be disguised, and no more in a
republic or a democracy than in a kingdom. No man can resist their
influence. There are certain manners which are learned in good society,
of that force, that, if a person have them, he or she must be
considered, and is everywhere welcome, though without beauty, or wealth,
or genius. Give a boy address and accomplishments, and you give him the
mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes. He has not the trouble of
earning or owning them; they solicit him to enter and possess. We send
girls of a timid, retreating disposition to the boarding-school, to the
riding-school, to the ballroom, or wheresoever they can come into
acquaintance and nearness of leading persons of their own sex; where
they might learn address, and see it near at hand. The power of a woman
of fashion to lead, and also to daunt and repel, derives from their
belief that she knows resources and behaviors not known to them; but
when these have mastered her secret, they learn to confront her, and
recover their self-possession.
Every day bears witness to their gentle rule. People who would obtrude,
now do not obtrude. The mediocre circle learns to demand that which
belongs to a high state of nature or of culture. Your manners are always
under examination, and by committees little suspected,--a police in
citizen's clothes,--but are awarding or denying you very high prizes
when you least think of it.
We talk much of utilities,--but 'tis our manners that associate us. In
hours of business, we go to him who knows, or has, or does this or that
which we want, and we do not let our taste or feeling stand in the way.
But this activity over, we return to the indolent state, and wish for
those we can be at ease with; those who will go where we go, whose
manners do not offend us, whose social tone chimes with ours. When we
reflect on their persuasive and cheering force; how they recommend,
prepare, and draw people together; how, in all clubs, manners make the
members; how manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth; that, for
the most part, his manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries
manners; when we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what
high lessons and inspiring tokens of character they convey; and what
divination is required in us, for the reading of this fine telegraph; we
see what range the subject has, and what relations to convenience,
power, and beauty.
Their first service is very low,--when they are the minor morals; but
'tis the beginning of civility,--to make us, I mean, endurable to each
other. We prize them for their rough-plastic, abstergent force; to get
people out of the quadruped state; to get them washed, clothed, and set
up on end; to slough their animal husks and habits; compel them to be
clean; overawe their spite and meanness, teach them to stifle the base,
and choose the generous expression, and make them know how much happier
the generous behaviors are.
Bad behavior the laws cannot reach. Society is invested with rude,
cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and
whom a public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by
the sense of all, can reach;--the contradictors and railers at public
and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a
dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house
by barking him out of sight;--I have seen men who neigh like a horse
when you contradict them, or say something which they do not
understand;--then the overbold, who make their own invitation to your
hearth; the persevering talker, who gives you his society in large,
saturating doses; the pitiers of themselves,--a perilous class; the
frivolous Asmodeus, who relies on you to find him in ropes of sand to
twist; the monotones; in short, every stripe of absurdity;--these are
social inflictions which the magistrate cannot cure or defend you from,
and which must be intrusted to the restraining force of custom, and
proverbs, and familiar rules of behavior impressed on young people in
their school-days.
In the hotels on the banks of the Mississippi, they print, or used to
print, among the rules of the house, that "No gentleman can be permitted
to come to the public table without his coat;" and in the same country,
in the pews of the churches, little placards plead with the worshipper
against the fury of expectoration. Charles Dickens self-sacrificingly
undertook the reformation of our American manners in unspeakable
particulars. I think the lesson was not quite lost; that it held bad
manners up, so that the churls could see the deformity. Unhappily, the
book had its own deformities. It ought not to need to print in a reading
room a caution to strangers not to speak loud; nor to persons who look
over fine engravings, that they should be handled like cobwebs and
butterflies' wings; nor to persons who look at marble statues, that they
shall not smite them with canes. But, even in the perfect civilization
of this city, such cautions are not quite needless in the Athenaeum and
City Library.
Manners are factitious, and grow out of circumstances as well as out of
character. If you look at the pictures of patricians and of peasants, of
different periods and countries, you will see how well they match the
same classes in our towns. The modern aristocrat not only is well drawn
in Titian's Venetian doges, and in Roman coins and statues, but also in
the pictures which Commodore Perry brought home of dignitaries in Japan.
Broad lands and great interests not only arrive to such heads as can
manage them, but form manners of power. A keen eye, too, will see nice
gradations of rank, or see in the manners the degree of homage the party
is wont to receive. A prince who is accustomed every day to be courted
and deferred to by the highest grandees, acquires a corresponding
expectation, and a becoming mode of receiving and replying to this
homage.
There are always exceptional people and modes. English grandees affect
to be farmers. Claverhouse is a fop, and, under the finish of dress, and
levity of behavior, hides the terror of his war. But Nature and Destiny
are honest, and never fail to leave their mark, to hang out a sign for
each and for every quality. It is much to conquer one's face, and
perhaps the ambitious youth thinks he has got the whole secret when he
has learned that disengaged manners are commanding. Don't be deceived by
a facile exterior. Tender men sometimes have strong wills. We had, in
Massachusetts, an old statesman, who had sat all his life in courts and
in chairs of state, without overcoming an extreme irritability of face,
voice, and bearing: when he spoke, his voice would not serve him; it
cracked, it broke, it wheezed, it piped;--little cared he; he knew that
it had got to pipe, or wheeze, or screech his argument and his
indignation. When he sat down, after speaking, he seemed in a sort of
fit, and held on to his chair with both hands: but underneath all this
irritability was a puissant will, firm and advancing, and a memory in
which lay in order and method, like geologic strata, every fact of his
history, and under the control of his will.
Manners are partly factitious, but, mainly, there must be capacity for
culture in the blood. Else all culture is vain. The obstinate prejudice
in favor of blood, which lies at the base of the feudal and monarchical
fabrics of the old world, has some reason in common experience. Every
man,--mathematician, artist, soldier, or merchant,--looks with
confidence for some traits and talents in his own child, which he would
not dare to presume in the child of a stranger. The Orientalists are
very orthodox on this point. "Take a thorn-bush," said the emir
Abdel-Kader, "and sprinkle it for a whole year with water, it will yield
nothing but thorns. Take a date-tree, leave it without culture, and it
will always produce dates. Nobility is the date-tree, and the Arab
populace is a bush of thorns."
A main fact in the history of manners is the wonderful expressiveness of
the human body. If it were made of glass, or of air, and the thoughts
were written on steel tablets within, it could not publish more truly
its meaning than now. Wise men read very sharply all your private
history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature
is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like
Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement. They
carry the liquor of life flowing up and down in these beautiful bottles,
and announcing to the curious how it is with them. The face and eyes
reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is, what aims it has. The
eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul, or through how many forms it
has already ascended. It almost violates the proprieties, if we say
above the breath here what the confessing eyes do not hesitate to utter
to every street passenger.
Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far seems imperfect. In
Siberia, a late traveller found men who could see the satellites of
Jupiter with their unarmed eye. In some respects the animals excel us.
The birds have a longer sight, beside the advantage by their wings of a
higher observatory. A cow can bid her calf, by secret signal, probably
of the eye, to run away, or to lie down and hide itself. The jockeys say
of certain horses, that "they look over the whole ground." The outdoor
life, and hunting, and labor, give equal vigor to the human eye. A
farmer looks out at you as strong as the horse; his eye-beam is like the
stroke of a staff. An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun,
or can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams
of kindness, it can make the heart dance with joy.
The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. When a thought strikes us,
the eyes fix, and remain gazing at a distance; in enumerating the names
of persons or of countries, as France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, the eyes
wink at each new name. There is no nicety of learning sought by the
mind, which the eyes do not vie in acquiring. "An artist," said Michael
Angelo, "must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye;"
and there is no end to the catalogue of its performances, whether in
indolent vision (that of health and beauty) or in strained vision (that
of art and labor).
Eyes are bold as lions,--roving, running, leaping, here and there, far
and near. They speak all languages. They wait for no introduction; they
are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither
poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but
intrude, and come again, and go through and through you, in a moment of
time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul
into another through them! The glance is natural magic. The mysterious
communication established across a house between two entire strangers
moves all the springs of wonder. The communication by the glance is in
the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the
bodily symbol of identity of nature. We look into the eyes to know if
this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a
faithful confession what inhabitant is there. The revelations are
sometimes terrific. The confession of a low, usurping devil is there
made, and the observer shall seem to feel the stirring of owls, and
bats, and horned hoofs, where he looked for innocence and simplicity.
'Tis remarkable, too, that the spirit that appears at the windows of the
house does at once invest himself in a new form of his own to the mind
of the beholder.
The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage,
that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the
world over. When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a
practised man relies on the language of the first. If the man is off his
center, the eyes show it. You can read in the eyes of your companion,
whether your argument hits him, though his tongue will not confess it.
There is a look by which a man shows he is going to say a good thing,
and a look when he has said it. Vain and forgotten are all the fine
offers and offices of hospitality, if there is no holiday in the eye.
How many furtive inclinations avowed by the eye, though dissembled by
the lips! One comes away from a company, in which, it may easily happen,
he has said nothing, and no important remark has been addressed to him,
and yet, if in sympathy with the society he shall not have a sense of
this fact, such a stream of life has been flowing into him, and out from
him, through the eyes. There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more
admission into the man than blue-berries. Others are liquid and
deep,--wells that a man might fall into;--others are aggressive and
devouring, seem to call out the police, take all too much notice, and
require crowded Broadways, and the security of millions, to protect
individuals against them. The military eye I meet, now darkly sparkling
under clerical, now under rustic brows. 'Tis the city of Lacedaemon;
'tis a stack of bayonets. There are asking eyes, asserting eyes,
prowling eyes; and eyes full of fate,--some of good, and some of
sinister omen. The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in
beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a victory achieved in the
will before it can be signified in the eye. 'Tis very certain that each
man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense
scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man
should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. Whoever looked on
him would consent to his will, being certified that his aims were
generous and universal. The reason why men do not obey us, is because
they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.
If the organ of sight is such a vehicle of power, the other features
have their own. A man finds room in the few square inches of the face
for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his
history, and his wants. The sculptor, and Winckelmann, and Lavater, will
tell you how significant a feature is the nose; how its forms express
strength or weakness of will, and good or bad temper. The nose of Julius
Caesar, of Dante, and of Pitt, suggest "the terrors of the beak." What
refinement, and what limitations, the teeth betray! "Beware you don't
laugh," said the wise mother, "for then you show all your faults."
Balzac left in manuscript a chapter, which he called "_Theorie de la
demarche_,"[35] in which he says: "The look, the voice, the respiration,
and the attitude or walk, are identical. But, as it has not been given
to man, the power to stand guard, at once, over these four different
simultaneous expressions of his thought, watch that one which speaks out
the truth, and you will know the whole man."
Palaces interest us mainly in the exhibition of manners, which, in the
idle and expensive society dwelling in them, are raised to a high art.
The maxim of courts is, that manner is power. A calm and resolute
bearing, a polished speech, an embellishment of trifles, and the art of
hiding all uncomfortable feeling, are essential to the courtier: and
Saint Simon, and Cardinal de Retz, and Roederer, and an encyclopaedia of
_Memoires_, will instruct you, if you wish, in those potent secrets.
Thus, it is a point of pride with kings to remember faces and names. It
is reported of one prince, that his head had the air of leaning
downwards, in order not to humble the crowd. There are people who come
in ever like a child with a piece of good news. It was said of the late
Lord Holland, that he always came down to breakfast with the air of a
man who had just met with some signal good-fortune. In _Notre Dame_, the
grandee took his place on the dais, with the look of one who is thinking
of something else. But we must not peep and eavesdrop at palace-doors.
Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others. A scholar may
be a well-bred man, or he may not. The enthusiast is introduced to
polished scholars in society, and is chilled and silenced by finding
himself not in their element. They all have somewhat which he has not,
and, it seems, ought to have. But if he finds the scholar apart from his
companions, it is then the enthusiast's turn, and the scholar has no
defence, but must deal on his terms. Now they must fight the battle out
on their private strengths. What is the talent of that character so
common,--the successful man of the world,--in all marts, senates, and
drawing-rooms? Manners: mariners of power; sense to see his advantage,
and manners up to it. See him approach his man. He knows that troops
behave as they are handled at first;--that is his cheap secret; just
what happens to every two persons who meet on any affair,--one
instantly perceives that he has the key of the situation, that his will
comprehends the other's will, as the cat does the mouse; and he has only
to use courtesy, and furnish good-natured reasons to his victim to cover
up the chain, lest he be shamed into resistance.
The theater in which this science of manners has a formal importance is
not with us a court, but dress-circles, wherein, after the close of the
day's business, men and women meet at leisure, for mutual entertainment,
in ornamented drawing-rooms. Of course, it has every variety of
attraction and merit; but, to earnest persons, to youths or maidens who
have great objects at heart, we cannot extol it highly. A well-dressed,
talkative company, where each is bent to amuse the other,--yet the
high-born Turk who came hither fancied that every woman seemed to be
suffering for a chair; that all the talkers were brained and exhausted
by the deoxygenated air; it spoiled the best persons: it put all on
stilts. Yet here are the secret biographies written and read. The aspect
of that man is repulsive; I do not wish to deal with him. The other is
irritable, shy, and on his guard. The youth looks humble and manly: I
choose him. Look on this woman. There is not beauty, nor brilliant
sayings, nor distinguished power, to serve you; but all see her gladly;
her whole air and impression are healthful. Here come the
sentimentalists, and the invalids. Here is Elise, who caught cold in
coming into the world, and has always increased it since. Here are
creep-mouse manners, and thievish manners. "Look at Northcote," said
Fuseli; "he looks like a rat that has seen a cat." In the shallow
company, easily excited, easily tired, here is the columnar Bernard: the
Alleghanies do not express more repose than his behavior. Here are the
sweet following eyes of Cecile: it seemed always that she demanded the
heart. Nothing can be more excellent in kind than the Corinthian grace
of Gertrude's manners, and yet Blanche, who has no manners, has better
manners than she; for the movements of Blanche are the sallies of a
spirit which is sufficient for the moment, and she can afford to
express every thought by instant action.
Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise
men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who
do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is
very swift in its instincts, and, if you do not belong to it, resists
and sneers at you; or quietly drops you. The first weapon enrages the
party attacked; the second is still more effective, but is not to be
resisted, as the date of the transaction is not easily found. People
grow up and grow old under this infliction, and never suspect the truth,
ascribing the solitude which acts on them very injuriously to any cause
but the right one.
The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Necessity is the law of all
who are not self-possessed. Those who are not self-possessed, obtrude,
and pain us. Some men appear to feel that they belong to a Pariah caste.
They fear to offend, they bend and apologize, and walk through life with
a timid step. As we sometimes dream that we are in a well-dressed
company without any coat, so Godfrey acts ever as if he suffered from
some mortifying circumstance. The hero should find himself at home,
wherever he is; should impart comfort by his own security and
good-nature to all beholders. The hero is suffered to be himself. A
person of strong mind comes to perceive that for him an immunity is
secured so long as he renders to society that service which is native
and proper to him,--an immunity from all the observances, yea, and
duties, which society so tyrannically imposes on the rank and file of
its members. "Euripides," says Aspasia, "has not the fine manners of
Sophocles; but,"--she adds good-humoredly, "the movers and masters of
our souls have surely a right to throw out their limbs as carelessly as
they please on the world that belongs to them, and before the creatures
they have animated."[36]
Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste. Friendship
should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into
corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually
command. Here comes to me Roland, with a delicacy of sentiment leading
and inwrapping him like a divine cloud or holy ghost. Tis a great
destitution to both that this should not be entertained with large
leisures, but, contrariwise, should be balked by importunate affairs.
But through this lustrous varnish the reality is ever shining. 'Tis hard
to keep the _what_ from breaking through this pretty painting of the
_how_. The core will come to the surface. Strong will and keen
perception overpower old manners and create new; and the thought of the
present moment has a greater value than all the past. In persons of
character, we do not remark manners, because of their instantaneousness.
We are surprised by the thing done, out of all power to watch the way of
it. Yet nothing is more charming than to recognize the great style which
runs through the actions of such. People masquerade before us in their
fortunes, titles, offices, and connections, as academic or civil
presidents, or senators, or professors, or great lawyers, and impose on
the frivolous, and a good deal on each other, by these fames. At least,
it is a point of prudent good manners to treat these reputations
tenderly, as if they were merited. But the sad realist knows these
fellows at a glance, and they know him; as when in Paris the chief of
the police enters a ballroom, so many diamonded pretenders shrink and
make themselves as inconspicuous as they can, or give him a supplicating
look as they pass. "I had received," said a sybil, "I had received at
birth the fatal gift of penetration:"--and these Cassandras are always
born.
Manners impress as they indicate real power. A man who is sure of his
point, carries a broad and contented expression, which everybody reads.
And you cannot rightly train one to an air and manner, except by making
him the kind of man of whom that manner is the natural expression.
Nature for ever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect, is
seen to be done for effect; what is done for love, is felt to be done
for love. A man inspires affection and honor, because he was not lying
in wait for these. The things of a man for which we visit him, were done
in the dark and the cold. A little integrity is better than any career.
So deep are the sources of this surface-action, that even the size of
your companion seems to vary with his freedom of thought. Not only is he
larger, when at ease, and his thoughts generous, but everything around
him becomes variable with expression. No carpenter's rule, no rod and
chain, will measure the dimensions of any house or house-lot: go into
the house: if the proprietor is constrained and deferring, 'tis of no
importance how large his house, how beautiful his grounds,--you quickly
come to the end of all; but if the man is self-possessed, happy, and at
home, his house is deep-founded, indefinitely large and interesting, the
roof and dome buoyant as the sky. Under the humblest roof, the commonest
person in plain clothes sits there massive, cheerful, yet formidable,
like the Egyptian colossi.
Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, nor Champollion has set
down the grammar-rules of this dialect, older than Sanscrit; but they
who cannot yet read English, can read this. Men take each other's
measure when they meet for the first time,--and every time they meet.
How do they get this rapid knowledge, even before they speak, of each
other's power and dispositions? One would say, that the persuasion of
their speech is not in what they say,--or, that men do not convince by
their argument,--but by their personality, by who they are, and what
they said and did heretofore. A man already strong is listened to, and
everything he says is applauded. Another opposes him with sound
argument, but the argument is scouted, until by-and-by it gets into the
mind of some weighty person; then it begins to tell on the community.
Self-reliance is the basis of behavior, as it is the guaranty that the
powers are not squandered in too much demonstration. In this country,
where school education is universal, we have a superficial culture, and
a profusion of reading and writing and expression. We parade our
nobilities in poems and orations, instead of working them up into
happiness. There is a whisper out of the ages to him who can understand
it,--"Whatever is known to thyself alone, has always very great value."
There is some reason to believe, that, when a man does not write his
poetry, it escapes by other vents through him, instead of the one vent
of writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have often
nothing poetical about them except their verses. Jacobi said that, "when
a man has fully expressed his thought, he has somewhat less possession
of it." One would say, the rule is,--What a man is irresistibly urged to
say, helps him and us. In explaining his thought to others, he explains
it to himself: but when he opens it for show, it corrupts him.
Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are their
literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new
importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist
begins to penetrate the surface, and treats this part of life more
worthily. The novels used to be all alike, and had a quite vulgar tone.
The novels used to lead us on to a foolish interest in the fortunes of
the boy and girl they described. The boy was to be raised from a humble
to a high position. He was in want of a wife and a castle, and the
object of the story was to supply him with one or both. We watched
sympathetically, step by step, his climbing, until, at last, the point
is gained, the wedding day is fixed, and we follow the gala procession
home to the castle, when the doors are slammed in our face, and the poor
reader is left outside in the cold, not enriched by so much as an idea,
or a virtuous impulse.
But the victories of character are instant, and victories for all. Its
greatness enlarges all. We are fortified by every heroic anecdote. The
novels are as useful as Bibles, if they teach you the secret, that the
best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or
perfect understanding between sincere people. 'Tis a French definition
of friendship, _rien que s'entendre_, good understanding. The highest
compact we can make with our fellow is,--"Let there be truth between us
two for evermore." That is the charm in all good novels, as it is the
charm in all good histories, that the heroes mutually understand, from
the first, and deal loyally, and with a profound trust in each other. It
is sublime to feel and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or
write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of
remembrance: I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus or thus, I know
it was right.
In all the superior people I have met, I notice directness, truth spoken
more truly, as if everything of obstruction, of malformation, had been
trained away. What have they to conceal? What have they to exhibit?
Between simple and noble persons, there is always a quick intelligence:
they recognize at sight, and meet on a better ground than the talents
and skills they may chance to possess, namely, on sincerity and
uprightness. For, it is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he
is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man
that stands by himself, the universe stands by him also. It is related
of the monk Basle, that, being excommunicated by the Pope, he was, at
his death, sent in charge of an angel to find a fit place of suffering
in hell; but, such was the eloquence and good-humor of the monk, that,
wherever he went, he was received gladly, and civilly treated, even by
the most uncivil angels: and, when he came to discourse with them,
instead of contradicting or forcing him, they took his part, and adopted
his manners: and even good angels came from far to see him, and take up
their abode with him. The angel that was sent to find a place of torment
for him, attempted to remove him to a worse pit, but with no better
success; for such was the contented spirit of the monk, that he found
something to praise in every place and company, though in hell, and made
a kind of heaven of it. At last the escorting angel returned with his
prisoner to them that sent him, saying, that no phlegethon could be
found that would burn him; for that, in whatever condition, Basle
remained incorrigibly Basle. The legend says, his sentence was remitted,
and he was allowed to go into heaven, and was canonized as a saint.
There is a stroke of magnanimity in the correspondence of Bonaparte with
his brother Joseph, when the latter was King of Spain, and complained
that he missed in Napoleon's letters the affectionate tone which had
marked their childish correspondence. "I am sorry," replies Napoleon,
"you think you shall find your brother again only in the Elysian Fields.
It is natural that at forty he should not feel towards you as he did at
twelve. But his feelings towards you have greater truth and strength.
His friendship has the features of his mind."
How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic
manners! We will pardon them the want of books, of arts, and even of the
gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them! Here is a lesson
which I brought along with me in boyhood from the Latin School, and
which ranks with the best of Roman anecdotes. Marcus Scaurus was accused
by Quintus Varius Hispanus, that he had excited the allies to take arms
against the Republic. But he, full of firmness and gravity, defended
himself in this manner: "Quintus Varius Hispanus alleges that Marcus
Scaurus, President of the Senate, excited the allies to arms: Marcus
Scaurus, President of the Senate, denies it. There is no witness. Which
do you believe, Romans?" "_Utri creditis, Quirites?_" When he had said
these words, he was absolved by the assembly of the people.
I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty;
that give the like exhilaration, and refine us like that; and, in
memorable experiences, they are suddenly better than beauty, and make
that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception,
the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show self-control:
you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word;
and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. Then they
must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of
complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not
pain around us. 'Tis good to give a stranger a meal, or a night's
lodging. 'Tis better to be hospitable to his good meaning and thought,
and give courage to a companion. We must be as courteous to a man as we
are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good
light. Special precepts are not to be thought of: the talent of
well-doing contains them all. Every hour will show a duty as paramount
as that of my whim just now; and yet I will write it,--that there is one
topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals,
namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept,
or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I
beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the
morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts,
by corruption and groans. Come out in the azure. Love the day. Do not
leave the sky out of your landscape. The oldest and the most deserving
person should come very modestly into any newly awaked company,
respecting the divine communications, out of which all must be presumed
to have newly come. An old man who added an elevating culture to a large
experience of life, said to me, "When you come into the room, I think I
will study how to make humanity beautiful to you."
As respects the delicate question of culture, I do not think that any
other than negative rules can be laid down. For positive rules, for
suggestion, nature alone inspires it. Who dare assume to guide a youth,
a maid, to perfect manners?--the golden mean is so delicate,
difficult,--say frankly unattainable. What finest hands would not be
clumsy to sketch the genial precepts of the young girl's demeanor? The
chances seem infinite against success; and yet success is continually
attained. There must not be secondariness, and 'tis a thousand to one
that her air and manner will at once betray that she is not primary, but
that there is some other one or many of her class, to whom she
habitually postpones herself. But nature lifts her easily, and without
knowing it, over these impossibilities, and we are continually surprised
with graces and felicities not only unteachable, but undescribable.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 34: Chapter V of "The Conduct of Life," 1860.]
[Footnote 35: Theory of gait and demeanor.]
[Footnote 36: From Landor's "Pericles and Aspasia."]
MANNERS AND FASHION[37]
HERBERT SPENCER
Some who shun drawing-rooms do so from inability to bear the restraints
prescribed by a genuine refinement, and they would be greatly improved
by being kept under these restraints. But it is not less true that, by
adding to the legitimate restraints, which are based on convenience and
a regard for others, a host of factitious restraints based only on
convention, the refining discipline, which would else have been borne
with benefit, is rendered unbearable, and so misses its end. Excess of
government invariably defeats itself by driving away those to be
governed. And if over all who desert its entertainments in disgust
either at their emptiness or their formality, society thus loses its
salutary influence--if such not only fail to receive that moral culture
which the company of ladies, when rationally regulated, would give them,
but, in default of other relaxation, are driven into habits and
companionships which often end in gambling and drunkenness; must we not
say that here, too, is an evil not to be passed over as insignificant?
Then consider what a blighting effect these multitudinous preparations
and ceremonies have upon the pleasures they profess to subserve. Who, on
calling to mind the occasions of his highest social enjoyments, does not
find them to have been wholly informal, perhaps impromptu? How
delightful a picnic of friends, who forget all observances save those
dictated by good nature! How pleasant the little unpretended gatherings
of book-societies, and the like; or those purely accidental meetings of
a few people well known to each other! Then, indeed, we may see that "a
man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." Cheeks flush, and eyes
sparkle. The witty grow brilliant, and even the dull are excited into
saying good things. There is an overflow of topics; and the right
thought, and the right words to put it in, spring up unsought. Grave
alternates with gay: now serious converse, and now jokes, anecdotes, and
playful raillery. Everyone's best nature is shown, everyone's best
feelings are in pleasurable activity; and, for the time, life seems well
worth having.
Go now and dress for some half-past eight dinner, or some ten o'clock
"at home;" and present yourself in spotless attire, with every hair
arranged to perfection. How great the difference! The enjoyment seems in
the inverse ratio of the preparation. These figures, got up with such
finish and precision, appear but half alive. They have frozen each other
by their primness; and your faculties feel the numbing effects of the
atmosphere the moment you enter it. All those thoughts, so nimble and so
apt awhile since, have disappeared--have suddenly acquired a
preternatural power of eluding you. If you venture a remark to your
neighbour, there comes a trite rejoinder, and there it ends. No subject
you can hit upon outlives half a dozen sentences. Nothing that is said
excites any real interest in you; and you feel that all you say is
listened to with apathy. By some strange magic, things that usually give
pleasure seem to have lost all charm.
You have a taste for art. Weary of frivolous talk, you turn to the
table, and find that the book of engravings and the portfolio of
photographs are as flat as the conversation. You are fond of music. Yet
the singing, good as it is, you hear with utter indifference; and say
"Thank you" with a sense of being a profound hypocrite. Wholly at ease
though you could be, for your own part, you find that your sympathies
will not let you. You see young gentlemen feeling whether their ties are
properly adjusted, looking vacantly round, and considering what they
shall do next. You see ladies sitting disconsolately, waiting for some
one to speak to them, and wishing they had the wherewith to occupy their
fingers. You see the hostess standing about the doorway, keeping a
factitious smile on her face, and racking her brain to find the
requisite nothings with which to greet her guests as they enter. You see
numberless traits of weariness and embarrassment; and, if you have any
fellow-feeling, these cannot fail to produce a feeling of discomfort.
The disorder is catching; and do what you will you cannot resist the
general infection. You struggle against it; you make spasmodic efforts
to be lively; but none of your sallies or your good stories do more than
raise a simper or a forced laugh: intellect and feeling are alike
asphyxiated. And when, at length, yielding to your disgust, you rush
away, how great is the relief when you get into the fresh air, and see
the stars! How you "Thank God, that's over!" and half resolve to avoid
all such boredom for the future!
What, now, is the secret of this perpetual miscarriage and
disappointment? Does not the fault lie with all these needless
adjuncts--these elaborate dressings, these set forms, these expensive
preparations, these many devices and arrangements that imply trouble and
raise expectation? Who that has lived thirty years in the world has not
discovered that Pleasure is coy; and must not be too directly pursued,
but must be caught unawares? An air from a street-piano, heard while at
work, will often gratify more than the choicest music played at a
concert by the most accomplished musicians. A single good picture seen
in a dealer's window, may give keener enjoyment than a whole exhibition
gone through with catalogue and pencil. By the time we have got ready
our elaborate apparatus by which to secure happiness, the happiness is
gone. It is too subtle to be contained in these receivers, garnished
with compliments, and fenced round with etiquette. The more we multiply
and complicate appliances, the more certain are we to drive it away.
The reason is patent enough. These higher emotions to which social
intercourse ministers, are of extremely complex nature; they
consequently depend for their production upon very numerous conditions;
the more numerous the conditions, the greater the liability that one or
other of them will be disturbed, and the emotions consequently
prevented. It takes a considerable misfortune to destroy appetite; but
cordial sympathy with those around may be extinguished by a look or a
word. Hence it follows, that the more multiplied the _unnecessary_
requirements with which social intercourse is surrounded, the less
likely are its pleasures to be achieved. It is difficult enough to
fulfil continuously all the _essentials_ to a pleasurable communion with
others: how much more difficult, then, must it be continuously to fulfil
a host of _non-essentials_ also! It is, indeed, impossible. The attempt
inevitably ends in the sacrifice of the first to the last--the
essentials to the non-essentials. What chance is there of getting any
genuine response from the lady who is thinking of your stupidity in
taking her in to dinner on the wrong arm? How are you likely to have
agreeable converse with the gentleman who is fuming internally because
he is not placed next to the hostess? Formalities, familiar as they may
become, necessarily occupy attention--necessarily multiply the occasions
for mistake, misunderstanding, and jealousy, on the part of one or
other--necessarily distract all minds from the thoughts and feelings
that should occupy them--necessarily, therefore, subvert those
conditions under which only any sterling intercourse is to be had.
And this indeed is the fatal mischief which these conventions entail--a
mischief to which every other is secondary. They destroy those highest
of our pleasures which they profess to subserve. All institutions are
alike in this, that however useful, and needful even, they originally
were, they not only in the end cease to be so, but become detrimental.
While humanity is growing, they continue fixed; daily get more
mechanical and unvital; and by and by tend to strangle what they before
preserved. It is not simply that they become corrupt and fail to act;
they become obstructions. Old forms of government finally grow so
oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of
terror. Old creeds end in being dead formulas, which no longer aid but
distort and arrest the general mind; while the State-churches
administering them, come to be instruments for subsidising conservatism
and repressing progress. Old schemes of education, incarnated in public
schools and colleges, continue filling the heads of new generations with
what has become relatively useless knowledge, and, by consequence,
excluding knowledge which is useful. Not an organisation of any
kind--political, religious, literary, philanthropic--but what, by its
ever-multiplying regulations, its accumulating wealth, its yearly
addition of officers, and the creeping into it of patronage and party
feeling, eventually loses its original spirit, and sinks into a mere
lifeless mechanism, worked with a view to private ends--a mechanism
which not merely fails of its first purpose, but is a positive hindrance
to it.
Thus is it, too, with social usages. We read of the Chinese that they
have "ponderous ceremonies transmitted from time immemorial," which make
social intercourse a burden. The court forms prescribed by monarchs for
their own exaltation, have, in all times and places, ended in consuming
the comfort of their lives. And so the artificial observances of the
dining-room and saloon, in proportion as they are many and strict,
extinguish that agreeable communion which they were originally intended
to secure. The dislike with which people commonly speak of society that
is "formal," and "stiff," and "ceremonious," implies the general
recognition of this fact; and this recognition, logically developed,
involves that all usages of behaviour which are not based on natural
requirements, are injurious. That these conventions defeat their own
ends is no new assertion. Swift, criticising the manners of his day,
says--"Wise men are often more uneasy at the over-civility of these
refiners than they could possibly be in the conversation of peasants and
mechanics."
But it is not only in these details that the self-defeating action of
our arrangements is traceable: it is traceable in the very substance and
nature of them. Our social intercourse, as commonly managed, is a mere
semblance of the reality sought. What is it that we want? Some
sympathetic converse with our fellow-creatures: some converse that shall
not be mere dead words, but the vehicle of living thoughts and
feelings--converse in which the eyes and the face shall speak, and the
tones of the voice be full of meaning--converse which shall make us feel
no longer alone, but shall draw us closer to another, and double our own
emotions by adding another's to them. Who is there that has not, from
time to time, felt how cold and flat is all this talk about politics and
science, and the new books and the new men, and how a genuine utterance
of fellow-feeling outweighs the whole of it? Mark the words of
Bacon:--"For a crowd is not a company, and faces are but a gallery of
pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
If this be true, then it is only after acquaintance has grown into
intimacy, and intimacy has ripened into friendship, that the real
communion which men need becomes possible. A rationally-formed circle
must consist almost wholly of those on terms of familiarity and regard,
with but one or two strangers. What folly, then, underlies the whole
system of our grand dinners, our "at homes," our evening
parties--assemblages made up of many who never met before, many others
who just bow to each other, many others who though familiar feel mutual
indifference, with just a few real friends lost in the general mass! You
need, but look round at the artificial expression of face, to see at
once how it is. All have their disguises on; and how can there be
sympathy between masks? No wonder that in private every one exclaims
against the stupidity of these gatherings. No wonder that hostesses get
them up rather because they must than because they wish. No wonder that
the invited go less from the expectation of pleasure than from fear of
giving offence. The whole thing is a gigantic mistake--an organised
disappointment.
And then note, lastly, that in this case, as in all others, when an
organisation has become effete and inoperative for its legitimate
purpose, it is employed for quite other ones--quite opposite ones. What
is the usual plea put in for giving and attending these tedious
assemblies? "I admit that they are stupid and frivolous enough," replies
every man to your criticisms; "but then, you know, one must keep up
one's connections." And could you get from his wife a sincere answer, it
would be--"Like you, I am sick of these frivolities; but then, we must
get our daughters married." The one knows that there is a profession to
push, a practice to gain, a business to extend: or parliamentary
influence, or county patronage, or votes, or office, to be got:
position, berths, favours, profit. The other's thoughts run upon
husbands and settlements, wives and dowries. Worthless for their
ostensible purpose of daily bringing human beings into pleasurable
relations with each other, these cumbrous appliances of our social
intercourse are now perseveringly kept in action with a view to the
pecuniary and matrimonial results which they indirectly produce.
Who then shall say that the reform of our system of observances is
unimportant? When we see how this system induces fashionable
extravagance, with its entailed bankruptcy and ruin--when we mark how
greatly it limits the amount of social intercourse among the less
wealthy classes--when we find that many who most need to be disciplined
by mixing with the refined are driven away by it, and led into dangerous
and often fatal courses--when we count up the many minor evils it
inflicts, the extra work which its costliness entails on all
professional and mercantile men, the damage to public taste in dress and
decoration by the setting up of its absurdities as standards for
imitation, the injury to health indicated in the faces of its devotees
at the close of the London season, the mortality of milliners and the
like, which its sudden exigencies yearly involve;--and when to all
these we add its fatal sin, that it blights, withers up, and kills that
high enjoyment it professedly ministers to--that enjoyment which is a
chief end of our hard struggling in life to obtain--shall we not
conclude that to reform our system of etiquette and fashion, is an aim
yielding to few in urgency?
There needs, then, a protestantism in social usages. Forms that have
ceased to facilitate and have become obstructive--whether political,
religious, or other--have ever to be swept away; and eventually are so
swept away in all cases. Signs are not wanting that some change is at
hand. A host of satirists, led on by Thackeray, have been for years
engaged in bringing our sham-festivities, and our fashionable follies,
into contempt; and in their candid moods, most men laugh at the
frivolities with which they and the world in general are deluded.
Ridicule has always been a revolutionary agent. That which is habitually
assailed with sneers and sarcasms cannot long survive. Institutions that
have lost their roots in men's respect and faith are doomed; and the day
of their dissolution is not far off. The time is approaching, then, when
our system of social observances must pass through some crisis, out of
which it will come purified and comparatively simple.
How this crisis will be brought about, no one can with any certainty
say. Whether by the continuance and increase of individual protests, or
whether by the union of many persons for the practice and propagation of
some better system, the future alone can decide. The influence of
dissentients acting without cooperation, seems, under the present state
of things, inadequate. Standing severally alone, and having no
well-defined views; frowned on by conformists, and expostulated with
even by those who secretly sympathise with them; subject to petty
persecutions, and unable to trace any benefit produced by their example;
they are apt, one by one, to give up their attempts as hopeless. The
young convention-breaker eventually finds that he pays too heavily for
his nonconformity. Hating, for example, everything that bears about it
any remnant of servility, he determines, in the ardour of his
independence, that he will uncover to no one. But what he means simply
as a general protest, he finds that ladies interpret into a personal
disrespect. Though he sees that, from the days of chivalry downwards,
these marks of supreme consideration paid to the other sex have been but
a hypocritical counterpart to the actual subjection in which men have
held them--a pretended submission to compensate for a real domination;
and though he sees that when the true dignity of women is recognised,
the mock dignities given to them will be abolished, yet he does not like
to be thus misunderstood, and so hesitates in his practice.
In other cases, again, his courage fails him. Such of his
unconventionalities as can be attributed only to eccentricity, he has no
qualms about: for, on the whole, he feels rather complimented than
otherwise in being considered a disregarder of public opinion. But when
they are liable to be put down to ignorance, to ill-breeding, or to
poverty, he becomes a coward. However clearly the recent innovation of
eating some kinds of fish with knife and fork proves the fork-and-bread
practice to have had little but caprice for its basis, yet he dares not
wholly ignore that practice while fashion partially maintains it. Though
he thinks that a silk handkerchief is quite as appropriate for
drawing-room use as a white cambric one, he is not altogether at ease in
acting out his opinion. Then, too, be begins to perceive that his
resistance to prescription brings round disadvantageous results which he
had not calculated upon. He had expected that it would save him from a
great deal of social intercourse of a frivolous kind--that it would
offend the fools, but not the sensible people; and so would serve as a
self-acting test by which those worth knowing would be separated from
those not worth knowing. But the fools prove to be so greatly in the
majority that, by offending them, he closes against himself nearly all
the avenues through which the sensible people are to be reached. Thus he
finds that his nonconformity is frequently misinterpreted; that there
are but few directions in which he dares to carry it consistently out;
that the annoyances and disadvantages which it brings upon him are
greater than he anticipated; and that the chances of his doing any good
are very remote. Hence he gradually loses resolution, and lapses, step
by step, into the ordinary routine of observances.
Abortive as individual protests thus generally turn out, it may possibly
be that nothing effectual will be done until there arises some organised
resistance to this invisible despotism, by which our modes and habits
are dictated. It may happen, that the government of Manners and Fashion
will be rendered less tyrannical, as the political and religious
governments have been, by some antagonistic union. Alike in Church and
State, men's first emancipations from excess of restriction were
achieved by numbers, bound together by a common creed, or a common
political faith. What remained undone while there were but individual
schismatics or rebels, was effected when there came to be many acting in
concert. It is tolerably clear that these earliest instalments of
freedom could not have been obtained in any other way; for so long as
the feeling of personal independence was weak and the rule strong, there
could never have been a sufficient number of separate dissentients to
produce the desired results. Only in these later times, during which the
secular and spiritual controls have been growing less coercive, and the
tendency towards individual liberty greater, has it become possible for
smaller and smaller sects and parties to fight against established
creeds and laws; until now men may safely stand even alone in their
antagonism.
The failure of individual nonconformity to customs, as above
illustrated, suggests that an analogous series of changes may have to be
gone through in this case also. It is true that the _lex non scripta_
differs from the _lex scripta_ in this, that, being unwritten, it is
more readily altered; and that it has, from time to time, been quietly
ameliorated. Nevertheless, we shall find that the analogy holds
substantially good. For in this case, as in the others, the essential
revolution is not the substituting of any one set of restraints for any
other, but the limiting or abolishing the authority which prescribes
restraints. Just as the fundamental change inaugurated by the
Reformation, was not a superseding of one creed by another, but an
ignoring of the arbiter who before dictated creeds--just as the
fundamental change which Democracy long ago commenced, was not from this
particular law to that, but from the despotism of one to the freedom of
all; so, the parallel change yet to be wrought out in this supplementary
government of which we are treating, is not the replacing of absurd
usages by sensible ones, but the dethronement of that secret,
irresponsible power which now imposes our usages, and the assertion of
the right of all individuals to choose their own usages. In rules of
living, a West-end clique is our Pope; and we are all papists, with but
a mere sprinkling of heretics. On all who decisively rebel, comes down
the penalty of excommunication, with its long catalogue of disagreeable
and, indeed, serious consequences.
The liberty of the subject asserted in our constitution, and ever on the
increase, has yet to be wrested from this subtler tyranny. The right of
private judgment, which our ancestors wrung from the church, remains to
be claimed from this dictator of our habits. Or, as before said, to free
us from these idolatries and superstitious conformities, there has still
to come a protestantism in social usages. Parallel, therefore, as is the
change to be wrought out, it seems not improbable that it may be wrought
out in an analogous way. That influence which solitary dissentients fail
to gain, and that perseverance which they lack, may come into existence
when they unite. That persecution which the world now visits upon them
from mistaking their nonconformity for ignorance or disrespect, may
diminish when it is seen to result from principle. The penalty which
exclusion now entails may disappear when they become numerous enough to
form visiting circles of their own. And when a successful stand has
been made, and the brunt of the opposition has passed, that large amount
of secret dislike to our observances which now pervades society, may
manifest itself with sufficient power to effect the desired
emancipation.
Whether such will be the process, time alone can decide. That community
of origin, growth, supremacy, and decadence which we have found among
all kinds of government, suggests a community in modes of change also.
On the other hand, Nature often performs substantially similar
operations, in ways apparently different. Hence these details can never
be foretold.
Society, in all its developments, undergoes the process of exuviation.
These old forms which it successively throws off, have all been once
vitally united with it--have severally served as the protective
envelopes within which a higher humanity was being evolved. They are
cast aside only when they become hindrances--only when some inner and
better envelope has been formed; and they bequeath to us all that there
was in them of good. The periodical abolitions of tyrannical laws have
left the administration of justice not only uninjured, but purified.
Dead and buried creeds have not carried with them the essential morality
they contained, which still exists, uncontaminated by the sloughs of
superstition. And all that there is of justice and kindness and beauty,
embodied in our cumbrous forms of etiquette, will live perennially when
the forms themselves have been forgotten.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 37: From "Illustrations of Universal Progress," 1864.]
TALK AND TALKERS[38]
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
"Sir, we had a good talk."--JOHNSON.
"As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle
silence."--FRANKLIN.
There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable,
gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an
illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of
time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international
congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public
errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by
day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parliament
but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no
book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance.
Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good
talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life,
freedom, and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking,
comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid,
tentative, continually "in further search and progress;" while written
words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden
dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the
truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can
only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and
may call a spade a spade. It cannot, even if it would, become merely
aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the
solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the
contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering,
like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn
our period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak;
that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the
harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of
pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our
education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any
age and in almost any state of health.
The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind
of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot,
we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a
fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power
of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men and
women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival
mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports
of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All
sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and
selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or
heightened by some element of competition. Now, the relation that has
the least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and
hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among
friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship.
It is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy
that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge of
relations and the sport of life.
A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be
accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the
quarry of two heated minds, springs up like a deer out of the wood. Not
that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and
more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of
conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying
where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is
rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing
prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There is nothing
in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow
it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and
so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be
reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are
other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.
Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal
lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument;
asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and
opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and the
admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of
ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the
vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay
ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we
swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers, once
launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordinary selves, tower
up to the height of their secret pretensions, and give themselves out
for the heroes, brave, pious, musical, and wise, that in their most
shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave for themselves with
words and for a while inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and
theatre, where they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast
with the gods, exulting in Kudos.[39] And when the talk is over, each
goes his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing
clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgy, not in
a moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the _entr'acte_ of an
afternoon performance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a beautiful
green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the
music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate _The
Flying Dutchman_ (for it was that I had been hearing) with a wonderful
sense of life, warmth, well-being, and pride; and the noises of the
city, voices, bells and marching feet, fell together in my ears like a
symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a good talk
lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within
you, the brain still simmering, and the physical earth swimming around
you with the colours of the sunset.
Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life,
rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience,
anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the
whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter
in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental
elevation and abasement--these are the material with which talk is
fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is
proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should
proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It should
keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses
of men, at the level where history, fiction and experience intersect and
illuminate each other. I am I, and You are You, with all my heart; but
conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when, instead
of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit housed in
the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices to corroborate the
story in the face. Not less surprising is the change when we leave off
to speak of generalities--the bad, the good, the miser, and all the
characters of Theophrastus--and call up other men, by anecdote or
instance, in their very trick and feature; or trading on a common
knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the hues of
life. Communication is no longer by words, but by the instancing of
whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, and epochs of history,
in bulk. That which is understood excels that which is spoken in
quantity and quality alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change
hands, as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort
the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a large
common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the
grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo
and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can leave
generalities and begin at once to speak by figures.
Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and that
embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear discussion for
their own sake, but only those which are most social or most radically
human; and even these can only be discussed among their devotees. A
technicality is always welcome to the expert, whether in athletics, art,
or law; I have heard the best kind of talk on technicalities from such
rare and happy persons as both know and love their business. No human
being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes
me suspect we hear too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded
as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the
weather, the dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in
language, and far more human both in import and suggestion than the
stable features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds, and the people
generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often
excitingly presented in literature. But the tendency of all living talk
draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity. Talk is a
creature of the street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last
resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of
gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions; but still gossip,
because it turns on personalities. You can keep no men long, nor
Scotchmen at all, off moral or theological discussion. These are to all
the world what law is to lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities;
the medium through which all consider life, and the dialect in which
they express their judgments. I knew three young men who walked together
daily for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in
cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet
scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects--theology and love.
And perhaps neither a court of love[40] nor an assembly of divines would
have granted their premises or welcomed their conclusions.
Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by
private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the exercise,
and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on any
subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to time,
however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective,
conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an
exploration. A point arises; the question takes a problematical, a
baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively
presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this they strive
with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first
utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a
shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold
they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat's
cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the sense of
joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life
of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far
apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth;
and by the nature of the process, they are always worthily shared.
There is a certain attitude combative at once and deferential, eager to
fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable
man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain
proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable
adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen
questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys to be
instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may wrangle and agree on
equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent; for
without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach
it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort Wherein
pleasure lies.
The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd
Jack. I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so largely the
possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth man
necessary to compound a salad, is a madman to mix it: Jack is that
madman. I know not which is more remarkable: the insane lucidity of his
conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of
method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject
treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles
like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope,
transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling
of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and
flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror.
It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack
it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality and such
wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a
moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with
moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing
to compare with the _vim_ of these impersonations, the strange scale of
language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major
Dyngwell--
"As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument--"
the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos,
each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder
of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging
to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a man of great presence; he
commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of
character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could
be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been
said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical
inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of
talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you
down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of
revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both
conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, and
the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in
these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end
arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves
to make your final union the more unexpected and precious. Throughout
there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear
although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet
concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend
debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of
transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and
then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two
favourites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues
that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we
love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot,
in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full
measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat
from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard
adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass days in an
enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and manners of its
own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and glowing than any real
existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a
theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the
chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you. Jack has the far
finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated
poetry, Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes; the one glances
high like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, with many
changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but
both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched
ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of
contradiction.
Cockshot[41] is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has
been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry,
brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point
about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound
nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-made, or will have one
instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in
your presence. "Let me see," he will say. "Give me a moment. I _should_
have some theory for that." A blither spectacle than the vigour with
which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by
a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas,
as an athlete bends a horseshoe, with a visible and lively effort. He
has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic
gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of the
thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your faith in
these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right enough, durable
even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock-shy--as when idle
people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an hour's
diversion ere, it sinks. Whichever they are, serious opinions or humours
of the moment, he still defends his ventures with indefatigable wit and
spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punishment like a man. He
knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the sake of
talking; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a
thorough "glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his
adversary. Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep.
Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the
driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable
quickness are the qualities by which he lives. Athelred, on the other
hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow
nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to shine
in conversation. You may see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory
jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the
end. And there is something singularly engaging, often instructive, in
the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as well as the
result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his
hours of inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and,
coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the
more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour. There
are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the very grain
of the language; you would think he must have worn the words next his
skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of particular good
things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart
woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often enough, while he
has been wielding the broad-axe; and between us, on this unequal,
division, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known him to battle
the same question night after night for years, keeping it in the reign
of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life with humorous
or grave intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor
taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given moment, when
arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to
those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is even
calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to
condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating but still
judicial, and still faithfully contending with his doubts.
Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion
studied in the "dry light" of prose. Indirectly and as if against his
will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled and
poetic talk of Opalstein. His various and exotic knowledge, complete
although unready sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative flow of
language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is with
some, not _quite_ with me--_proxime accessit_,[42] I should say. He
sings the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine
and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar;
even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more
tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the
Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic
notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has
something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and
he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding
for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the distance. He is not truly
reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war in his
members sometimes divides the man's attention. He does not always,
perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in conversation. He brings
into the talk other thoughts than those which he expresses; you are
conscious that he keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake
off the world, nor quite forget himself. Hence arise occasional
disappointments; even an occasional unfairness for his companions, who
find themselves one day giving too much, and the next, when they are
wary out of season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel is in another
class from any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears in
conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of
which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is
radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop, and
from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours. He seems
not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of interest;
when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit, so polished that the
dull do not perceive it, but so right that the sensitive are silenced.
True talk should have more body and blood, should be louder, vainer and
more declaratory of the man; the true talker should not hold so steady
an advantage over whom he speaks with; and that is one reason out of a
score why I prefer my Purcel in his second character, when he unbends
into a strain of graceful gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In
these moods he has an elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen
Anne. I know another person who attains, in his moments, to the
insolence of a Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve
wrote; but that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric,
for there is none, alas! to give him answer.
One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that the
sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the circle of
common friends. To have their proper weight they, should appear in a
biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good talk is dramatic;
it is like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent
himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk
where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you
were to shift the speeches, round from one to another, there would be
the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason
that talk depends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce
Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk
with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of
man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes
out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar
brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution
of our being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while yet we
have it, and to be grateful for forever.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 38: The first of two papers on this subject written in 1881-2;
reprinted here, by permission of the publishers, from "Memories and
Portraits" in the Biographical Edition of Stevenson's Works, Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1907.]
[Footnote 39: Kudos (Greek): glory.]
[Footnote 40: Court of love: a mediaeval institution for the discussion
of questions of chivalry.]
[Footnote 41: The Late Fleeming Jenkin--Author's note.]
[Footnote 42: Proxime accessit: he comes very close to it.]
THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED[43]
WILLIAM JAMES
Of what use is a college training? We who have had it seldom hear the
question raised--we might be a little nonplussed to answer it offhand. A
certain amount of meditation has brought me to this as the pithiest
reply which I myself can give: The best claim that a college education
can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to
accomplish for you, is this: that it should _help you to know a good man
when you see him_. This is as true of women's as of men's colleges; but
that it is neither a joke nor a one-sided abstraction I shall now
endeavor to show.
What talk do we commonly hear about the contrast between college
education and the education which business or technical or professional
schools confer? The college education is called higher because it is
supposed to be so general and so disinterested. At the "schools" you get
a relatively narrow practical skill, you are told, whereas the
"colleges" give you the more liberal culture, the broader outlook, the
historical perspective, the philosophic atmosphere, or something which
phrases of that sort try to express. You are made into an efficient
instrument for doing a definite thing, you hear, at the schools; but,
apart from that, you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum,
incapable of spreading light. The universities and colleges, on the
other hand, although they may leave you less efficient for this or that
practical task, suffuse your whole mentality with something more
important than skill. They redeem you, make you well-bred; they make
"good company" of you mentally. If they find you with a naturally
boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so, as a technical school
may leave you. This, at least, is pretended; this is what we hear among
college-trained people when they compare their education with every
other sort. Now, exactly how much does this signify?
It is certain, to begin with, that the narrowest trade or professional
training does something more for a man than to make a skillful practical
tool of him--it makes him also a judge of other men's skill. Whether his
trade be pleading at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing, it
develops a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation. He
understands the difference between second-rate and first-rate work in
his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a good job in his own line
as soon as he sees it; and getting to know this in his own line, he gets
a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow, that may, if
circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work,
clean work, finished work; feeble work, slack work, sham work--these
words express an identical contrast in many different departments of
activity. In so far, then, even the humblest manual trade may beget in
one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work generally.
Now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college
training? Is there any broader line--since our education claims
primarily not to be "narrow"--in which we also are made good judges
between what is first-rate and what is second-rate only? What is
especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of the
"humanities," and these are often identified with Greek and Latin. But
it is only as literatures, not as languages, that Greek and Latin have
any general humanity-value; so that in a broad sense the humanities mean
literature primarily, and in a still broader sense the study of
masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. Literature keeps
the primacy; for it not only _consists_ of masterpieces, but is largely
_about_ masterpieces, being little more than an appreciative chronicle
of human master-strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and
history. You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it
historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught
with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which
these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains
grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a
sheet of formulas and weights and measures.
The sifting of human creations!--nothing less than this is what we ought
to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography; what our
colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, not that of
politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts
and conquests are factors that have played their part. Studying in this
way, we learn what type's of activity have stood the test of time; we
acquire standards of the excellent: and durable. All our arts and
sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection on the
part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be,
how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer
sense of what the terms "better" and "worse" may signify in general. Our
critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical. We
sympathize with men's mistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we
feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we
applaud what overcame them.
Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is
unmistakable. What the colleges--teaching humanities by examples which
may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant--should at least
try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguises,
_superiority_ has always signified and may still signify. The feeling
for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable,
the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent--this is what
we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better
part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way
naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. But to have spent
one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and
precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent
out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only
when ticketed and labeled and forced on us by others, this indeed should
be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.
The sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line,
as boring subways is the engineer's line and the surgeon's is
appendicitis. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish
for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a
disgust for cheap-jacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference
of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs
about us. Expertness in this might well atone for some of our
awkwardness at accounts, for some of our ignorance of dynamos. The best
claim we can make for the higher education, the best single phrase in
which we can tell what it ought to do for us, is, then, exactly what I
said: it should enable us to _know a good man when we see him_.
That the phrase is anything but an empty epigram follows from the fact
that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracy like
ours should have its sons and daughters skillful, you see that it is
this line more than any other. "The people in their wisdom"--this is the
kind of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its trial, and
no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. Abounding about us are
pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and violence used to be, but are no
longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. What its critics now
affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. So it
was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world without end.
Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior
from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny; and
the picture papers of the European continent are already drawing Uncle
Sam with the hog instead of the eagle for his heraldic emblem. The
privileged aristocracies of the foretime, with all their iniquities, did
at least preserve some taste for higher human quality and honor certain
forms of refinement by their enduring traditions. But when democracy is
sovereign, its doubters say, nobility will form a sort of invisible
church, and sincerity and refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, and
favor, will have to vegetate on sufferance in private corners. They will
have no general influence. They will be harmless eccentricities.
Now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of
democracy? Nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly
rotted; and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on the
other hand, democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to
admit its failure. Faiths and Utopias are the noblest exercise of human
reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down
fatalistically before the croaker's picture. The best of us are filled
with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error
till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with
beauty. Our better men _shall_ show the way and we _shall_ follow them;
so we are brought round again to the mission of the higher education in
helping us to know the better kind of man whenever we see him.
The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is
now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing
save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and
imitation by the rest of us--these are the sole factors active in human
progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns,
which common people then adopt and follow. _The rivalry of the patterns
is the history of the world_. Our democratic problem thus is statable
in ultra-simple terms: Who are the kind of men from whom our majorities
shall take their cue? Whom shall they treat as rightful leaders? We and
our leaders are the _x_ and the _y_ of the equation here; all other
historic circumstances, be they economical, political, or intellectual,
are only the background of occasion on which the living drama works
itself out between us.
In this very simple way does the value of our educated class define
itself: we more than others should be able to divine the worthier and
better leaders. The terms here are monstrously simplified, of course,
but such a bird's-eye view lets us immediately take our bearings. In our
democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnae
of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the
aristocracy in older countries. We have continuous traditions, as they
have; our motto, too, is _noblesse oblige_; and, unlike them, we stand
for ideal interests solely, for we have no corporate selfishness and
wield no powers of corruption. We ought to have our own
class-consciousness. "Les intellectuels!" What prouder club name could
there be than this one, used ironically by the party of "red blood," the
party of every stupid prejudice and passion, during the anti-Dreyfus
craze, to satirize the men in France who still retained some critical
sense and judgment! Critical sense, it has to be confessed, is not an
exciting term, hardly a banner to carry in processions. Affections for
old habit, currents of self-interest, and gales of passion are the
forces that keep the human ship moving; and the pressure of the
judicious pilot's hand upon the tiller is a relatively insignificant
energy. But the affections, passions, and interests are shifting,
successive, and distraught; they blow in alternation while the pilot's
hand is steadfast. He knows the compass, and, with all the leeways he is
obliged to tack toward, he always makes some headway. A small force, if
it never lets up, will accumulate effects more considerable than those
of much greater forces if these work inconsistently. The ceaseless
whisper of the more permanent ideals, the steady tug of truth and
justice, give them but time, _must_ warp the world in their direction.
This bird's-eye view of the general steering function of the
college-bred amid the driftings of democracy ought to help us to a wider
vision of what our colleges themselves should aim at. If we are to be
the yeast cake for democracy's dough, if we are to make it rise with
culture's preferences, we must see to it that culture spreads broad
sails. We must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into the
wind and sunshine, and let in every modern subject, sure that any
subject will prove humanistic, if its setting be kept only wide enough.
Stevenson says somewhere to his reader: "You think you are just making
this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of
mankind." Well, your technical school should enable you to make your
bargain splendidly; but your college should show you just the place of
that kind of bargain--a pretty poor place, possibly--in the whole policy
of mankind. That is the kind of liberal outlook, of perspective, of
atmosphere, which should surround every subject as a college deals with
it.
We of the colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good
people have about such ancient seats of learning as Harvard. To many
ignorant outsiders, that name suggests little more than a kind of
sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. In Edith Wyatt's
exquisite book of Chicago sketches called "Every One his Own Way," there
is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness, Richard
Elliot and his feminine counterpart--feeble caricatures of mankind,
unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment
unless a printed label gives them leave. Possibly this type of culture
may exist near Cambridge and Boston, there may be specimens there, for
priggishness is just like painters' colic or any other trade disease.
But every good college makes its students immune against this malady, of
which the microbe haunts the neighborhood-printed pages. It does so by
its general tone being too hearty for the microbe's life. Real culture
lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains--under
all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. If a
college, through the inferior human influences that have grown regnant
there, fails to catch the robuster tone, its failure is colossal, for
its social function stops: democracy gives it a wide berth, turns toward
it a deaf ear.
"Tone," to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no
other, and this whole meditation is over questions of tone. By their
tone are all things human either lost or saved. If democracy is to be
saved it must catch the higher, healthier tone. If we are to impress it
with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which we,
in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. It all reverts in the
end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each other
and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a
class, we college graduates should look to it that _ours_ has spreading
power. It ought to have the highest spreading power.
In our essential function of indicating the better men, we now have
formidable competitors outside. _McClure's Magazine,_ the _American
Magazine, Collier's Weekly_, and, in its fashion, the _World's Work_,
constitute together a real popular university along this very line. It
would be a pity if any future historian were to have to write words like
these: "By the middle of the twentieth century the higher institutions
of learning had lost all influence over public opinion in the United
States. But the mission of raising the tone of democracy, which they had
proved themselves so lamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare
enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill and success by a new
educational power; and for the clarification of their human sympathies
and elevation of their human preferences, the people at large acquired
the habit of resorting exclusively to the guidance of certain private
literary adventures, commonly designated in the market by the
affectionate name of ten-cent magazines."
Must not we of the colleges see to it that no historian shall ever say
anything like this? Vague as the phrase of knowing a good man when you
see him may be, diffuse and indefinite as one must leave its
application, is there any other formula that describes so well the
result at which our institutions _ought_ to aim? If they do that, they
do the best thing conceivable. If they fail to do it, they fail in very
deed. It surely is a fine synthetic formula. If our faculties and
graduates could once collectively come to realize it as the great
underlying purpose toward which they have always been more or less
obscurely groping, great clearness would be shed over many of their
problems; and, as for their influence in the midst of our social system,
it would embark upon a new career of strength.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 43: First published in 1908. Reprinted by permission from
_Memories and Studies_, 1911. (Messrs. Longmans, Green and Co.)]
THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS[44]
HENRY GEORGE
What, then, is the law of human progress--the law under which
civilization advances?
It must explain clearly and definitely, and not by vague generalities or
superficial analogies, why, though mankind started presumably with the
same capacities and at the same time, there now exist such wide
differences in social development. It must account for the arrested
civilizations and for the decayed and destroyed civilizations; for the
general facts as to the rise of civilization, and for the petrifying or
enervating force which the progress of civilization has heretofore
always evolved. It must account for retrogression a well as for
progression; for the differences in general character between Asiatic
and European civilizations; for the difference between classical and
modern civilizations; for the different rates at which progress goes on;
and for those bursts, and starts, and halts of progress which are so
marked as minor phenomena. And, thus, it must show us what are the
essential conditions of progress, and what social adjustments advance
and what retard it.
It is not difficult to discover such a law. We have but to look and we
may see it. I do not pretend to give it scientific precision, but merely
to point it out.
The incentives to progress are the desires inherent in human nature--the
desire to gratify the wants of the animal nature, the wants of the
intellectual nature, and the wants of the sympathetic nature; the desire
to be, to know, and to do--desires that short of infinity can never be
satisfied, as they grow by what they feed on.
Mind is the instrument by which man advances, and by which each advance
is secured and made the vantage ground for new advances. Though he may
not by taking thought add a cubit to his stature, man may by taking
thought extend his knowledge of the universe and his power over it, in
what, so far as we can see, is an infinite degree. The narrow span of
human life allows the individual to go but a short distance, but though
each generation may do but little, yet generations, succeeding to the
gain of their predecessors, may gradually elevate the status of mankind,
as coral polyps, building one generation upon the work of the other,
gradually elevate themselves from the bottom of the sea.
Mental power is, therefore, the motor of progress, and men tend to
advance in proportion to the mental power expended in progression--the
mental power which is devoted to the extension of knowledge, the
improvement of methods, and the betterment of social conditions.
Now mental power is a fixed quantity--that is to say, there is a limit
to the work a man can do with his mind, as there is to the work he can
do with his body; therefore, the mental power which can be devoted to
progress is only what is left after what is required for non-progressive
purposes.
These non-progressive purposes in which mental power is consumed may be
classified as maintenance and conflict. By maintenance I mean, not only
the support of existence, but the keeping up of the social condition and
the holding of advances already gained. By conflict I mean not merely
warfare and preparation for warfare, but all expenditure of mental power
in seeking the gratification of desire at the expense of others, and in
resistance to such aggression.
To compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not
depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to
propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force
required for bailing, or any expenditure of force in fighting among
themselves, or in pulling in different directions.
Now, as in a separated state the whole powers of man are required to
maintain existence, and mental power is set free for higher uses only by
the association of men in communities, which permits the division of
labor and all the economies which come with the co-operation of,
increased numbers, association is the first essential of progress.
Improvement becomes possible as men come together in peaceful
association, and the wider and closer the association, the greater the
possibilities of improvement. And as the wasteful expenditure of mental
power in conflict becomes greater or less as the moral law which accords
to each an equality of rights is ignored or is recognized, equality (or
justice) is the second essential of progress.
Thus association in equality is the law of progress. Association frees
mental power for expenditure in improvement, and equality, or justice,
or freedom--for the terms here signify the same thing, the recognition
of the moral law--prevents the dissipation of this power in fruitless
struggles.
Here is the law of progress, which will explain all diversities, all
advances, all halts, and retrogressions. Men tend to progress just as
they come closer together, and by co-operation with each other increase
the mental power that may be devoted to improvement; but just as
conflict is provoked, or association develops inequality of condition
and power, this tendency to progression is lessened, checked, and
finally reversed.
Given the same innate capacity, and it is evident that social
development will go on faster or slower, will stop or turn back,
according to the resistances it meets. In a general way these obstacles
to improvement may, in relation to the society itself, be classed as
external and internal--the first operating with greater force in the
earlier stages of civilization, the latter becoming more important in
the later stages.
Man is social in his nature. He does not require to be caught and tamed
in order to induce him to live with his fellows. The utter helplessness
with which he enters the world, and the long period required for the
maturity of his powers, necessitate the family relation; which, as we
may observe, is wider, and in its extensions stronger, among the ruder
than among the more cultivated peoples. The first societies are
families, expanding into tribes, still holding a mutual blood
relationship, and even when they have become great nations claiming a
common descent.
Given beings of this kind, placed on a globe of such diversified surface
and climate as this, and it is evident that, even with equal capacity,
and an equal start, social development must be very different. The first
limit or resistance to association will come from the conditions of
physical nature, and as these greatly vary with locality, corresponding
differences in social progress must show themselves. The net rapidity of
increase, and the closeness with which men, as they increase, can keep
together, will, in the rude state of knowledge in which reliance for
subsistence must be principally upon the spontaneous offerings of
nature, very largely depend upon climate, soil, and physical
conformation. Where much animal food and warm clothing are required;
where the earth seems poor and niggard; where the exuberant life of
tropical forests mocks barbarous man's puny efforts to control; where
mountains, deserts, or arms of the sea separate and isolate men;
association, and the power of improvement which it evolves, can at first
go but a little way. But on the rich plains of warm climates, where
human existence can be maintained with a smaller expenditure of force,
and from a much smaller area, men can keep closer together, and the
mental power which can at first be devoted to improvement is much
greater. Hence civilization naturally first arises in the great valleys
and table-lands where we find its earliest monuments.
But these diversities in natural conditions, not merely thus directly
produce diversities in social development, but, by producing diversities
in social development, bring out in man himself an obstacle, or rather
an active counterforce, to improvement. As families and tribes are
separated from each other, the social feeling ceases to operate between
them, and differences arise in language, custom, tradition, religion--in
short, in the whole social web which each community, however small or
large, constantly spins. With these differences, prejudices grow,
animosities spring up, contact easily produces quarrels, aggression
begets aggression, and wrong kindles revenge.[45] And so between these
separate social aggregates arises the feeling of Ishmael and the spirit
of Cain, warfare becomes the chronic and seemingly natural relation of
societies to each other, and the powers of men are expended in attack or
defense, in mutual slaughter and mutual destruction of wealth, or in
warlike preparations. How long this hostility persists, the protective
tariffs and the standing armies of the civilized world to-day bear
witness; how difficult it is to get over the idea that it is not theft
to steal from a foreigner, the difficulty in procuring an international
copyright act will show. Can we wonder at the perpetual hostilities of
tribes and clans? Can we wonder that when each community was isolated
from the others--when each, uninfluenced by the others, was spinning its
separate web of social environment, which no individual can escape, that
war should have been the rule and peace the exception? "They were even
as we are."
Now, warfare is the negation of association. The separation of men into
diverse tribes, by increasing warfare, thus checks improvement; while in
the localities where a large increase in numbers is possible without
much separation; civilization gains the advantage of exemption from
tribal war, even when the community as a whole is carrying on warfare
beyond its borders. Thus, where the resistance of nature to the close
association of men is slightest, the counterforce of warfare is likely
at first to be least felt; and in the rich plains where civilization
first begins, it may rise to a great height while scattered tribes are
yet barbarous. And thus, when small, separated communities exist in a
state of chronic warfare which forbids advance, the first step to their
civilization is the advent of some conquering tribe or nation that
unites these smaller communities into a larger one, in which internal
peace is preserved. Where this power of peaceable association is broken
up, either by external assaults or internal dissensions, the advance
ceases and retrogression begins.
But it is not conquest alone that has operated to promote association,
and, by liberating mental power from the necessities of warfare, to
promote civilization. If the diversities of climate, soil, and
configuration of the earth's surface operate at first to separate
mankind, they also operate to encourage exchange. And commerce, which is
in itself a form of association or co-operation, operates to promote
civilization, not only directly, but by building up interests which are
opposed to warfare, and dispelling the ignorance which is the fertile
mother of prejudices and animosities.
And so of religion. Though the forms it has assumed and the animosities
it has aroused have often sundered men and produced warfare, yet it has
at other times been the means of promoting association. A common worship
has often, as among the Greeks, mitigated war and furnished the basis of
union, while it is from the triumph of Christianity over the barbarians
of Europe that modern civilization springs. Had not the Christian Church
existed when the Roman Empire went to pieces, Europe, destitute of any
bond of association, might have fallen to a condition not much above
that of the North American Indians or only received civilization with an
Asiatic impress from the conquering scimiters of the invading hordes
which had been welded into a mighty power by a religion which, springing
up in the deserts of Arabia, had united tribes separated from time
immemorial, and, thence issuing, brought into the association of a
common faith a great part of the human race.
Looking over what we know of the history of the world, we thus see
civilization everywhere springing up where men are brought into
association, and everywhere disappearing as this association is broken
up. Thus the Roman civilization, spread over Europe by the conquests
which insured internal peace, was overwhelmed by the incursions of the
northern nations that broke society again into disconnected fragments;
and the progress that now goes on in our modern civilization began as
the feudal system again began to associate men in larger communities,
and the spiritual supremacy of Rome to bring these communities into a
common relation, as her legions had done before. As the feudal bonds
grew into national autonomies, and Christianity worked the amelioration
of manners, brought forth the knowledge that during the dark days she
had hidden, bound the threads of peaceful union in her all-pervading
organization, and taught association in her religious orders, a greater
progress became possible, which, as men have been brought into closer
and closer association and co-operation, has gone on with greater and
greater force.
But we shall never understand the course of civilization, and the
varied phenomena which its history presents, without a consideration of
what I may term the internal resistances, or counter forces, which arise
in the heart of advancing society, and which can alone explain how a
civilization once fairly started should either come of itself to a halt
or be destroyed by barbarians.
The mental power, which is the motor of social progress, is set free by
association, which is,--what, perhaps, it may be more properly
called,--an integration. Society in this process becomes more complex;
its individuals more dependent upon each other. Occupations and
functions are specialized. Instead of wandering, population becomes
fixed. Instead of each man attempting to supply all of his wants, the
various trades and industries are separated--one man acquires skill in
one thing, and another in another thing. So, too, of knowledge, the body
of which constantly tends to become vaster than one man can grasp, and
is separated into different parts, which different individuals acquire
and pursue. So, too, the performance of religious ceremonies tends to
pass into the hands of a body of men specially devoted to that purpose,
and the preservation of order, the administration of justice, the
assignment of public duties and the distribution of awards, the conduct
of war, etc., to be made the special functions of an organized
government. In short, to use the language in which Herbert Spencer has
defined evolution, the development of society is, in relation to its
component individuals, the passing from an indefinite, incoherent
homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity. The lower the stage
of social development, the more society resembles one of those lowest of
animal organisms which are without organs or limbs, and from which a
part may be cut and yet live. The higher the stage of social
development, the more society resembles those higher organisms in which
functions and powers are specialized, and each member is vitally
dependent on the others.
Now, this process of integration, of the specialization of functions
and powers, as it goes on in society, is, by virtue of what is probably
one of the deepest laws of human nature, accompanied by a constant
liability to inequality. I do not mean that inequality is the necessary
result of social growth, but that it is the constant tendency of social
growth if unaccompanied by changes in social adjustments, which, in the
new conditions that growth produces, will secure equality. I mean, so to
speak, that the garment of laws, customs, and political institutions,
which each society weaves for itself, is constantly tending to become
too tight as the society develops. I mean, so to speak, that man, as he
advances, threads a labyrinth, in which, if he keeps straight ahead, he
will infallibly lose his way, and through which reason and justice can
alone keep him continuously in an ascending path.
For, while the integration which accompanies growth tends in itself to
set free mental power to work improvement, there is, both with increase
of numbers and with increase in complexity of the social organization, a
counter tendency set up to the production of a state of inequality,
which wastes mental power, and, as it increases, brings improvement to a
halt.
To trace to its highest expression the law which thus operates to evolve
with progress the force which stops progress, would be, it seems to me,
to go far to the solution of a problem deeper than that of the genesis
of the material universe--the problem of the genesis of evil. Let me
content myself with pointing out the manner in which, as society
develops, there arise tendencies which check development.
There are two qualities of human nature which it will be well, however,
to first call to mind. The one is the power of habit:--the tendency to
continue to do things in the same way; the other is the possibility of
mental and moral deterioration. The effect of the first in social
development is to continue habits, customs, laws and methods, long after
they have lost their original usefulness, and the effect of the other
is to permit the growth of institutions and modes of thought from which
the normal perceptions of men instinctively revolt.
Now the growth and development of society not merely tend to make each
more and more dependent upon all, and to lessen the influence of
individuals, even over their own conditions, as compared with the
influence of society; but the effect of association or integration is to
give rise to a collective power which is distinguishable from the sum of
individual powers. Analogies, or, perhaps, rather illustrations of the
same law, may be found in all directions. As animal organisms increase
in complexity, there arise, above the life and power of the parts, a
life and power of the integrated whole; above the capability of
involuntary movements, the capability of voluntary movements. The
actions and impulses of bodies of men are, as has often been observed,
different from those which, under the same circumstances, would be
called forth in individuals. The fighting qualities of a regiment may be
very different from those of the individual soldiers. But there is no
need of illustrations. In our inquiries into the nature and rise of
rent, we traced the very thing to which I allude. Where population is
sparse, land has no value; just as men congregate together, the value of
land appears and rises--a clearly distinguishable thing from the values
produced by individual effort; a value which springs from association,
which increases as association grows greater, and disappears as
association is broken up. And the same thing is true of power in other
forms than those generally expressed in terms of wealth.
Now, as society grows, the disposition to continue previous, social
adjustments tends to lodge this collective power, as it arises, in the
hands of a portion of the community; and this unequal distribution of
the wealth and power gained as society advances tends to produce greater
inequality, since aggression grows by what it feeds on, and the idea of
justice is blurred by the habitual toleration of injustice.
In this way the patriarchal organization of society can easily grow
into hereditary monarchy, in which the king is as a god on earth, and
the masses of the people mere slaves of his caprice. It is natural that
the father should be the directing head of the family, and that at his
death the eldest son, as the oldest and most experienced member of the
little community, should succeed to the headship. But to continue this
arrangement as the family expands, is to lodge power in a particular
line, and the power thus lodged necessarily continues to increase, as
the common stock becomes larger and larger, and the power of the
community grows. The head of the family passes into the hereditary king,
who comes to look upon himself and to be looked upon by others as a
being of superior rights. With the growth of the collective power as
compared with the power of the individual, his power to reward and to
punish increases, and so increase the inducements to flatter and to fear
him; until finally, if the process be not disturbed, a nation grovels at
the foot of a throne, and a hundred thousand men toil for fifty years to
prepare a tomb for one of their own mortal kind.
So the war-chief of a little band of savages is but one of their number,
whom they follow as their bravest and most wary. But when large bodies
come to act together, personal selection becomes more difficult, a
blinder obedience becomes necessary and can be enforced, and from the
very necessities of warfare when conducted on a large scale absolute
power arises.
And so of the specialization of function. There is a manifest gain in
productive power when social growth has gone so far that instead of
every producer being summoned from his work for fighting purposes, a
regular military force can be specialized; but this inevitably tends to
the concentration of power in the hands of the military class or their
chiefs. The preservation of internal order, the administration of
justice, the construction and care of public works, and, notably, the
observances of religion, all tend in similar manner to pass into the
hands of special classes, whose disposition it is to magnify their
function and extend their power.
But the great cause of inequality is in the natural monopoly which is
given by the possession of land. The first perceptions of men seem
always to be that land is common property; but the rude devices by which
this is at first recognized--such as annual partitions or cultivation in
common--are consistent with only a low stage of development. The idea of
property, which naturally arises with reference to things of human
production, is easily transferred to land, and an institution which when
population is sparse merely secures to the improver and user the due
reward of his labor, finally, as population becomes dense and rent
arises, operates to strip the producer of his wages. Not merely this,
but the appropriation of rent for public purposes, which is the only way
in which, with anything like a high development, land can be readily
retained as common property, becomes, when political and religious power
passes into the hands of a class, the ownership of the land by that
class, and the rest of the community become merely tenants. And wars and
conquests, which tend to the concentration of political power and to the
institution of slavery, naturally result, where social growth has given
land a value, in the appropriation of the soil. A dominant class, who
concentrate power in their hands, will likewise soon concentrate
ownership of the land. To them will fall large partitions of conquered
land, which the former inhabitants will till as tenants or serfs, and
the public domain, or common lands, which in the natural course of
social growth are left for a while in every country, and in which state
the primitive system of village culture leaves pasture and woodland, are
readily acquired, as we see by modern instances. And inequality once
established, the ownership of land tends to concentrate as development
goes on.
I am merely attempting to set forth the general fact that as a social
development goes on, inequality tends to establish itself, and not to
point out the particular sequence, which must necessarily vary with
different conditions. But this main fact makes intelligible all the
phenomena of petrifaction and retrogression. The unequal distribution of
the power and wealth gained by the integration of men in society tends
to check, and finally to counterbalance, the force by which improvements
are made and society advances. On the one side, the masses of the
community are compelled to expend their mental powers in merely
maintaining existence. On the other side, mental power is expended in
keeping up and intensifying the system of inequality, in ostentation,
luxury, and warfare. A community divided into a class that rules and a
class that is ruled--into the very rich and the very poor--may "build
like giants and finish like jewelers;" but it will be monuments of
ruthless pride and barren vanity, or of a religion turned from its
office of elevating man into an instrument for keeping him down.
Invention may for a while to some degree go on; but it will be the
invention of refinements in luxury, not the inventions that relieve toil
and increase power. In the arcana of temples or in the chambers of court
physicians knowledge may still be sought; but it will be hidden as a
secret thing, or if it dares come out to elevate common thought or
brighten common life, it will be trodden down as a dangerous innovator.
For as it tends to lessen the mental power devoted to improvement, so
does inequality tend to render men adverse to improvement. How strong is
the disposition to adhere to old methods among the classes who are kept
in ignorance by being compelled to toil for a mere existence, is too
well known to require illustration, and on the other hand the
conservatism of the classes to whom the existing social adjustment gives
special advantages is equally apparent. This tendency to resist
innovation, even though it be improvement, is observable in every
special organization--in religion, in law, in medicine, in science, in
trade guilds; and it becomes intense just as the organization is close.
A close corporation has always an instinctive dislike of innovation and
innovators, which is but the expression of an instinctive fear that
change may tend to throw down the barriers which hedge it in from the
common herd, and so rob it of importance and power; and it is always
disposed to guard carefully its special knowledge or skill.
It is in this way that petrifaction succeeds progress. The advance of
inequality necessarily brings improvement to a halt, and as it still
persists or provokes unavailing reactions, draws even upon the mental
power necessary for maintenance, and retrogression begins.
These principles make intelligible the history of civilization.
In the localities where climate, soil, and physical conformation tended
least to separate men as they increased, and where, accordingly, the
first civilizations grew up, the internal resistances to progress would
naturally develop in a more regular and thorough manner than where
smaller communities, which in their separation had developed
diversities, were afterward brought together into a closer association.
It is this, it seems to me, which accounts for the general
characteristics of the earlier civilizations as compared with the later
civilizations of Europe. Such homogeneous communities, developing from
the first without the jar of conflict between different customs, laws,
religions, etc., would show a much greater uniformity. The concentrating
and conservative forces would all, so to speak, pull together. Rival
chieftains would not counterbalance each other, nor diversities of
belief hold the growth of priestly influence in check. Political and
religious power, wealth and knowledge, would thus tend to concentrate in
the same centres. The same causes which tended to produce the hereditary
king and hereditary priest would tend to produce the hereditary artisan
and laborer, and to separate society into castes. The power which
association sets free for progress would thus be wasted, and barriers to
further progress be gradually raised. The surplus energies of the masses
would be devoted to the construction of temples, palaces, and pyramids;
to ministering to the pride and pampering the luxury of their rulers;
and should any disposition to improvement arise among the classes of
leisure it would at once be checked by the dread of innovation. Society
developing in this way must at length stop in a conservatism which
permits no further progress.
How long such a state of complete petrifaction, when once reached, will
continue, seems to depend upon external causes, for the iron bonds of
the social environment which grows up repress disintegrating forces as
well as improvement. Such a community can be most easily conquered, for
the masses of the people are trained to a passive acquiescence in a life
of hopeless labor. If the conquerors merely take the place of the ruling
class, as the Hyksos did in Egypt and the Tartars in China, everything
will go on as before. If they ravage and destroy, the glory of palace
and temple remains but in ruins, population becomes sparse, and
knowledge and art are lost.
European civilization differs in character from civilizations of the
Egyptian type because it springs not from the association of a
homogeneous people developing from the beginning, or at least for a long
time, under the same conditions, but from the association of peoples who
in separation had acquired distinctive social characteristics, and whose
smaller organizations longer prevented the concentration of power and
wealth in one centre. The physical conformation of the Grecian peninsula
is such as to separate the people at first into a number of small
communities. As those petty republics and nominal kingdoms ceased to
waste their energies in warfare, and the peaceable co-operation of
commerce extended, the light of civilization blazed up. But the
principle of association was never strong enough to save Greece from
inter-tribal war, and when this was put an end to by conquest, the
tendency to inequality, which had been combated with various devices by
Grecian sages and statesmen, worked its result, and Grecian valor, art,
and literature became things of the past. And so in the rise and
extension, the decline and fall, of Roman civilization, may be seen the
working of these two principles of association and equality, from the
combination of which springs progress.
Springing from the association of the independent husbandmen and free
citizens of Italy, and gaining fresh strength from conquests which
brought hostile nations into common relations, the Roman power hushed
the world in peace. But the tendency to inequality, checking real
progress from the first, increased as the Roman civilization extended.
The Roman civilization did not petrify as did the homogeneous
civilizations where the strong bonds of custom and superstition that
held the people in subjection probably also protected them, or at any
rate kept the peace between rulers and ruled: it rotted, declined and
fell. Long before Goth or Vandal had broken through the cordon of the
legions, even while her frontiers were advancing, Rome was dead at the
heart. Great estates had ruined Italy. Inequality had dried up the
strength and destroyed the vigor of the Roman world. Government became
despotism, which even assassination could not temper; patriotism became
servility; vices the most foul flouted themselves in public; literature
sank to puerilities; learning was forgotten; fertile districts became
waste without the ravages of war--everywhere inequality produced decay,
political, mental, moral, and material. The barbarism which overwhelmed
Rome came not from without, but from within. It was the necessary
product of the system which had substituted slaves and colonii for the
independent husbandmen of Italy, and carved the provinces into estates
of senatorial families.
Modern civilization owes its superiority to the growth of equality with
the growth of association. Two great causes contributed to this--the
splitting up of concentrated power into innumerable little centers by
the influx of the Northern nations, and the influence of Christianity.
Without the first there would have been the petrifaction and slow decay
of the Eastern Empire, where church and state were closely married and
loss of external power brought no relief of internal tyranny. And but
for the other there would have been barbarism without principle of
association or amelioration. The petty chiefs and allodial lords who
everywhere grasped local sovereignty held each other in check. Italian
cities recovered their ancient liberty, free towns were founded, village
communities took root, and serfs acquired rights in the soil they
tilled. The leaven of Teutonic ideas of equality worked through the
disorganized and disjointed fabric of society. And although society was
split up into an innumerable number of separated fragments, yet the idea
of closer association was always present--it existed in the
recollections of a universal empire; it existed in the claims of a
universal church.
Though Christianity became distorted and alloyed in percolating through
a rotting civilization; though pagan gods were taken into her pantheon,
and pagan forms into her ritual, and pagan ideas into her creed; yet her
essential idea of the equality of men was never wholly destroyed. And
two things happened of the utmost moment to incipient civilization--the
establishment of the papacy and the celibacy of the clergy. The first
prevented the spiritual power from concentrating in the same lines as
the temporal power; and the latter prevented the establishment of a
priestly caste, during a time when all power tended to hereditary form.
In her efforts for the abolition of slavery; in her Truce of God; in her
monastic orders; in her councils which united nations, and her edicts
which ran without regard to political boundaries; in the low-born hands
in which she placed a sign before which the proudest knelt; in her
bishops who by consecration became the peers of the greatest nobles; in
her "Servant of Servants," for so his official title ran, who, by virtue
of the ring of a simple fisherman, claimed the right to arbitrate
between nations, and whose stirrup was held by kings; the Church, in
spite of everything, was yet a promoter of association, a witness for
the natural equality of men; and by the Church herself was nurtured a
spirit that, when her early work of association and emancipation was
well-nigh done--when the ties she had knit had become strong, and the
learning she had preserved had been given to the world--broke the chains
with which she would have fettered the human mind, and in a great part
of Europe rent her organization.
The rise and growth of European civilization is too vast and complex a
subject to be thrown into proper perspective and relation in a few
paragraphs; but in all its details, as in its main features, it
illustrates the truth that progress goes on just as society tends toward
closer association and greater equality. Civilization is co-operation.
Union and liberty are its factors. The great extension of
association--not alone in the growth of larger and denser communities,
but in the increase of commerce and the manifold exchanges which knit
each community together and link them with other though widely separated
communities; the growth of international and municipal law; the advances
in security of property and of person, in individual liberty, and
towards democratic government--advances, in short, towards the
recognition of the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness--it is these that make our modern civilization so much
greater, so much higher, than any that has gone before. It is these that
have set free the mental power which has rolled back the veil of
ignorance which hid all but a small portion of the globe from men's
knowledge; which has measured the orbits of the circling spheres and
bids us see moving, pulsing life in a drop of water; which has opened to
us the antechamber of nature's mysteries and read the secrets of a
long-buried past; which has harnessed in our service physical forces
beside which man's efforts are puny; and increased productive power by a
thousand great inventions.
In that spirit of fatalism to which I have alluded as pervading current
literature, it is the fashion to speak even of war and slavery as means
of human progress. But war, which is the opposite of association, can
aid progress only when it prevents further war or breaks down
antisocial barriers which are themselves passive war.
As for slavery, I cannot see how it could ever have aided in
establishing freedom, and freedom, the synonym of equality is, from the
very rudest state in which man can be imagined, the stimulus and
condition of progress. Auguste Comte's idea that the institution of
slavery destroyed cannibalism is as fanciful as Elia's humorous notion
of the way mankind acquired a taste for roast pig. It assumes that a
propensity that has never been found developed in man save as the result
of the most unnatural conditions--the direst want or the most
brutalizing superstitions[46]--is an original impulse, and that he, even
in his lowest state the highest of all animals, has natural appetites
which the nobler brutes do not show. And so of the idea that slavery
began civilization by giving slave owners leisure for improvement.
Slavery never did and never could aid improvement. Whether the community
consist of a single master and a single slave, or of thousands of
masters and millions of slaves, slavery necessarily involves a waste of
human power; for not only is slave labor less productive than free
labor, but the power of masters is likewise wasted in holding and
watching their slaves, and is called away from directions in which real
improvement lies. From first to last, slavery, like every other denial
of the natural equality of men, has hampered and prevented progress.
Just in proportion as slavery plays an important part in the social
organization does improvement cease. That in the classical world slavery
was so universal, is undoubtedly the reason why the mental activity
which so polished literature and refined art never hit on any of the
great discoveries and inventions which distinguish modern civilization.
No slave-holding people ever were an inventive people. In a
slave-holding community the upper classes may become luxurious and
polished; but never inventive. Whatever degrades the laborer and robs
him of the fruits of his toil stifles the spirit of invention and
forbids the utilization of inventions and discoveries even when made. To
freedom alone is given the spell of power which summons the genii in
whose keeping are the treasures of earth and the viewless forces of the
air.
The law of human progress, what is it but the moral law? Just as social
adjustments promote justice, just as they acknowledge the equality of
right between man and man, just as they insure to each the perfect
liberty which is bounded only by the equal liberty of every other, must
civilization advance. Just as they fail in this, must advancing
civilization come to a halt and recede. Political economy and social
science cannot teach any lessons that are not embraced in the simple
truths that were taught to poor fishermen and Jewish peasants by One who
eighteen hundred years ago was crucified--the simple truths which,
beneath the warpings of selfishness and the distortions of superstition,
seem to underlie every religion that has ever striven to formulate the
spiritual yearnings of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 44: Chapter III, Book X, of "Progress and Poverty;" copyright,
1907, by Henry George, Richard F. George, and Anna G. de Mille. The
chapter is here reprinted by permission of Mr. Henry George, Junior, and
the publishers, Messrs. Doubleday, Page and Company.]
[Footnote 45: How easy it is for ignorance to pass into contempt and
dislike; how natural it is for us to consider any difference in manners,
customs, religion, etc., as proof of the inferiority of those who differ
from us, any one who has emancipated himself in any degree from
prejudice, and who mixes with different classes, may see in civilized
society. In religion, for instance, the spirit of the hymn--
"I'd rather be a Baptist, and wear a shining face,
Than for to be a Methodist and always fall from grace,"
is observable in all denominations. As the English Bishop said,
"Orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is any other doxy," while the
universal tendency is to classify all outside of the orthodoxies and
heterodoxies of the prevailing religion as heathens or atheists. And the
like tendency is observable as to all other differences.--Author's
note.]
[Footnote 46: The Sandwich Islanders did honor to their good chiefs by
eating their bodies. Their bad and tyrannical chiefs they would not
touch. The New Zealanders had a notion that by eating their enemies they
acquired their strength and valor. And this seems to be the general
origin of eating prisoners of war.--Author's note.]
THE MORALS OF TRADE[47]
HERBERT SPENCER
On all sides we have found the result of long personal experience, to be
the conviction that trade is essentially corrupt. In tones of disgust or
discouragement, reprehension or derision, according to their several
natures, men in business have one after another expressed or implied
this belief. Omitting the highest mercantile classes, a few of the less
common trades, and those exceptional cases where an entire command of
the market has been obtained, the uniform testimony of competent judges
is, that success is incompatible with strict integrity. To live in the
commercial world it appears necessary to adopt its ethical code: neither
exceeding nor falling short of it--neither being less honest nor more
honest. Those who sink below its standard are expelled; while those who
rise above it are either pulled down to it or ruined. As, in
self-defence, the civilised man becomes savage among savages; so, it
seems that in self-defence, the scrupulous trader is obliged to become
as little scrupulous as his competitors. It has been said that the law
of the animal creation is--"Eat and be eaten;" and of our trading
community it may be similarly said that its law is--Cheat and be
cheated. A system of keen competition, carried on, as it is, without
adequate moral restraint, is very much a system of commercial
cannibalism. Its alternatives are--Use the same weapons as your
antagonists, or be conquered and devoured.
Of questions suggested by these facts, one of the most obvious is--Are
not the prejudices that have ever been entertained against trade and
traders, thus fully justified? do not these meannesses and
dishonesties, and the moral degradation they imply, warrant the
disrespect shown to men in business? A prompt affirmative answer will
probably be looked for; but we very much doubt whether it should be
given. We are rather of opinion that these delinquencies are products of
the average English character placed under special conditions. There is
no good reason for assuming that the trading classes are intrinsically
worse than other classes. Men taken at random from higher and lower
ranks, would, most likely, if similarly circumstanced, do much the same.
Indeed the mercantile world might readily recriminate. Is it a solicitor
who comments on their misdoings? They may quickly silence him by
referring to the countless dark stains on the reputation of his
fraternity. Is it a barrister? His frequent practice of putting in pleas
which he knows are not valid; and his established habit of taking fees
for work that he does not perform; make his criticism somewhat suicidal.
Does the condemnation come through the press? The condemned may remind
those who write, of the fact that it is not quite honest to utter a
positive verdict on a book merely glanced through, or to pen glowing
eulogies on the mediocre work of a friend while slighting the good one
of an enemy; and may further ask whether those who, at the dictation of
an employer, write what they disbelieve, are not guilty of the serious
offence of adulterating public opinion.
Moreover, traders might contend that many of their delinquencies are
thrust on them by the injustice of their customers. They, and especially
drapers, might point to the fact that the habitual demand for an
abatement of price, is made in utter disregard of their reasonable
profits; and that to protect themselves against attempts to gain by
their loss, they are obliged to name prices greater than those they
intend to take. They might also urge that the strait to which they are
often brought by the non-payment of accounts due from their wealthier
customers, is itself a cause of their malpractices: obliging them, as it
does, to use all means, illegitimate as well as legitimate, for getting
the wherewith to meet their engagements. In proof of the wrongs
inflicted on them by the non-trading classes, they might instance the
well-known cases of large shopkeepers in the West-end, who have been
either ruined by the unpunctuality of their customers, or have been
obliged periodically to stop payment, as the only way of getting their
bills settled. And then, after proving that those without excuse show
this disregard of other men's claims, traders might ask whether they,
who have the excuse of having to contend with a merciless competition,
are alone to be blamed if they display a like disregard in other forms.
Nay, even to the guardians of social rectitude--members of the
legislature--they might use the _tu quoque_ argument: asking whether
bribery of a customer's servant, is any worse than bribery of an
elector? or whether the gaining of suffrages by claptrap
hustings-speeches, containing insincere professions adapted to the taste
of the constituency, is not as bad as getting an order for goods by
delusive representations respecting their quality? No; it seems probable
that close inquiry would show few if any classes to be free from
immoralities that are as great, _relatively to the temptations_, as
those which we have been exposing. Of course they will not be so petty
or so gross where the circumstances do not prompt pettiness or
grossness; nor so constant and organised where the class-conditions have
not tended to make them habitual. But, taken with these qualifications,
we think that much might be said for the proposition that the trading
classes, neither better nor worse intrinsically than other classes, are
betrayed into their flagitious habits by external causes.
Another question, here naturally arising, is--"Are not these evils
growing worse?" Many of the facts we have cited seem to imply that they
are. And yet there are many other facts which point as distinctly the
other way. In weighing the evidence, we must bear in mind, that the much
greater public attention at present paid to such matters, is itself a
source of error--is apt to generate the belief that evils now becoming
recognised, are evils that have recently arisen; when in truth they have
merely been hitherto disregarded, or less regarded. It has been clearly
thus with crime, with distress, with popular ignorance; and it is very
probably thus with trading-dishonesties. As it is true of individual
beings, that their height in the scale of creation may be measured by
the degree of their self-consciousness; so, in a sense, it is true of
societies. Advanced and highly-organised societies are distinguished
from lower ones by the evolution of something that stands for a _social
self-consciousness_--a consciousness in each citizen, of the state of
the aggregate of citizens. Among ourselves there has, happily, been of
late years a remarkable growth of this social self-consciousness; and we
believe that to this is chiefly ascribable the impression that
commercial malpractices are increasing.
Such facts as have come down to us respecting the trade of past times,
confirm this view. In his "Complete English Tradesman," Defoe mentions,
among other manoeuvres of retailers, the false lights which they
introduced into their shops, for the purpose of giving delusive
appearances to their goods. He comments on the "shop rhetorick," the
"flux of falsehoods," which tradesmen habitually uttered to their
customers; and quotes their defence as being that they could not live
without lying. He says, too, that there was scarce a shopkeeper who had
not a bag of spurious or debased coin, from which he gave change
whenever he could; and that men, even the most honest, triumphed in
their skill in getting rid of bad money. These facts show that the
mercantile morals of that day were, at any rate, not better than ours;
and if we call to mind the numerous Acts of Parliament passed in old
times to prevent frauds of all kinds, we perceive the like implication.
As much may, indeed, be safely inferred from the general state of
society.
When, reign after reign, governments debased the coinage, the moral
tone of the middle classes could scarcely have been higher than now.
Among generations whose sympathy with the claims of fellow-creatures was
so weak, that the slave-trade was not only thought justifiable, but the
initiator of it was rewarded by permission to record the feat in his
coat of arms, it is hardly possible that men respected the claims of
their fellow-citizens more than at present. Times characterized by an
administration of justice so inefficient that there were in London nests
of criminals who defied the law, and on all high roads robbers who
eluded it, cannot have been distinguished by just mercantile dealings.
While, conversely, an age which, like ours, has seen so many equitable
social changes thrust on the legislature by public opinion, is very
unlikely to be an age in which the transactions between individuals have
been growing more inequitable. Yet, on the other hand, it is undeniable
that many of the dishonesties we have described are of modern origin.
Not a few of them have become established during the last thirty years;
and others are even now arising. How are the seeming contradictions to
be reconciled?
We believe the reconciliation is not difficult. It lies in the fact that
while the _great_ and _direct_ frauds have been diminishing, the _small_
and _indirect_ frauds have been increasing: alike in variety and in
number. And this admission we take to be quite consistent with the
opinion that the standard of commercial morals is higher than it was.
For, if we omit, as excluded from the question, the penal
restraints--religious and legal--and ask what is the ultimate moral
restraint to the aggression of man on man, we find it to be--sympathy
with the pain inflicted. Now the keenness of the sympathy, depending on
the vividness with which this pain is realised, varies with the
conditions of the case. It may be active enough to check misdeeds which
will cause great suffering; and yet not be active enough to check
misdeeds which will cause but slight annoyance. While sufficiently acute
to prevent a man from doing that which will entail immediate injury on a
given person, it may not be sufficiently acute to prevent him from
doing that which will entail remote injuries on unknown persons. And we
find the facts to agree with this deduction, that the moral restraint
varies according to the clearness with which the evil consequences are
conceived. Many a one who would shrink from picking a pocket does not
scruple to adulterate his goods; and he who never dreams of passing base
coin, will yet be a party to joint-stock-bank deceptions. Hence, as we
say, the multiplication of the more subtle and complex forms of fraud,
is consistent with a general progress in morality; provided it is
accompanied with a decrease in the grosser forms of fraud.
But the question which most concerns us is, not whether the morals of
trade are better or worse than they have been, but rather--why are they
so bad? Why in this civilised state of ours, is there so much that
betrays the cunning selfishness of the savage? Why, after the careful
inculcations of rectitude during education, comes there in afterlife all
this knavery? Why, in spite of all the exhortations to which the
commercial classes listen every Sunday, do they next morning recommence
their evil deeds? What is this so potent agency which almost neutralises
the discipline of education, of law, of religion?
Various subsidiary causes that might be assigned, must be passed over,
that we may have space to deal with the chief cause. In an exhaustive
statement, something would have to be said on the credulity of
consumers, which leads them to believe in representations of impossible
advantages; and something, too, on their greediness, which, ever
prompting them to look for more than they ought to get, encourages the
sellers to offer delusive bargains. The increased difficulty of living
consequent on growing pressure of population, might perhaps come in as a
part cause; and that greater cost of bringing up a family, which results
from the higher standard of education, might be added. But all these are
relatively insignificant. The great inciter of these trading
malpractices is, intense desire for wealth. And if we ask--Why this
intense desire? the reply is--It results from the _indiscriminate
respect paid to wealth_.
To be distinguished from the common herd--to be somebody--to make a
name, a position--this is the universal ambition; and to accumulate
riches, is alike the surest and the easiest way of fulfilling this
ambition. Very early in life all learn this. At school, the court paid
to one whose parents have called in their carriage to see him, is
conspicuous; while the poor boy, whose insufficient stock of clothes
implies the small means of his family, soon has burnt into his memory
the fact that poverty is contemptible. On entering the world, the
lessons that may have been taught about the nobility of self-sacrifice,
the reverence due to genius, the admirableness of high integrity, are
quickly neutralised by experience: men's actions proving that these are
not their standards of respect. It is soon perceived that while abundant
outward marks of deference from fellow-citizens, may almost certainly be
gained by directing every energy to the accumulation of property, they
are but rarely to be gained in any other way; and that even in the few
cases where they are otherwise gained, they are not given with entire
unreserve; but are commonly joined with a more or less manifest display
of patronage. When, seeing this, the young man further sees that while
the acquisition of property is quite possible with his mediocre
endowments, the acquirement of distinction by brilliant discoveries, or
heroic acts, or high achievements in art, implies faculties and feelings
which he does not possess; it is not difficult to understand why he
devotes himself heart and soul to business.
We do not mean to say that men act on the consciously reasoned-out
conclusions thus indicated; but we mean that these conclusions are the
unconsciously-formed products of their daily experience. From early
childhood, the sayings and doings of all around them have generated the
idea that wealth and respectability are two sides of the same thing.
This idea, growing with their growth, and strengthening with their
strength, becomes at last almost what we may call an organic conviction.
And this organic conviction it is, which prompts the expenditure of all
their energies in money-making. We contend that the chief stimulus is
not the desire for the wealth itself; but for the applause and position
which the wealth brings. And in this belief, we find ourselves at one
with various intelligent traders with whom we have talked on the matter.
It is incredible that men should make the sacrifices, mental and bodily,
which they do, merely to get the material benefits which money
purchases. Who would undertake an extra burden of business for the
purpose of getting a cellar of choice wines for his own drinking? He who
does it, does it that he may have choice wines to give his guests and
gain their praises. What merchant would spend an additional hour at his
office daily, merely that he might move into a larger house in a better
quarter? In so far as health and comfort are concerned, he knows he will
be a loser by the exchange; and would never be induced to make it, were
it not for the increased social consideration which the new house will
bring him. Where is the man who would lie awake at nights devising means
of increasing his income in the hope of being able to provide his wife
with a carriage, were the use of the carriage the sole consideration? It
is because of the _eclat_ which the carriage will give, that he enters
on these additional anxieties. So manifest, so trite, indeed, are these
truths, that we should be ashamed of insisting on them, did not our
argument require it.
For if the desire for that homage which wealth brings, is the chief
stimulus to these strivings after wealth, then is the giving of this
homage (when given, as it is, with but little discrimination) the chief
cause of the dishonesties into which these strivings betray mercantile
men. When the shopkeeper, on the strength of a prosperous year and
favourable prospects, has yielded to his wife's persuasions, and
replaced the old furniture with new, at an outlay greater than his
income covers--when, instead of the hoped-for increase, the next year
brings a decrease in his returns--when he finds that his expenses are
out-running his revenue; then does he fall under the strongest
temptation to adopt some newly-introduced adulteration or other
malpractice. When, having by display gained a certain recognition, the
wholesale trader begins to give dinners appropriate only to those of ten
times his income, with expensive other entertainments to match--when,
having for a time carried on this style at a cost greater than he can
afford, he finds that he cannot discontinue it without giving up his
position: then is he most strongly prompted to enter into larger
transactions; to trade beyond his means; to seek undue credit; to get
into that ever-complicating series of misdeeds, which ends in
disgraceful bankruptcy. And if these are the facts--the undeniable
facts--then is it an unavoidable conclusion that the blind admiration
which society gives to mere wealth, and the display of wealth, is the
chief source of these multitudinous immoralities.
Yes, the evil is deeper than appears--draws its nutriment from far below
the surface. This gigantic system of dishonesty, branching out into
every conceivable form of fraud, has roots that run underneath our whole
social fabric, and, sending fibres into every house, suck up strength
from our daily sayings and doings. In every dining-room a rootlet finds
food, when the conversation turns on So-and-so's successful
speculations, his purchase of an estate, his probable worth--on this
man's recent large legacy, and the other's advantageous match; for being
thus talked about is one form of that tacit respect which men struggle
for. Every drawing-room furnishes nourishment, in the admiration awarded
to costliness--to silks that are "rich," that is, expensive; to dresses
that contain an enormous quantity of material, that is, are expensive;
to laces that are handmade, that is, expensive; to diamonds that are
rare, that is, expensive; to china that is old, that is, expensive. And
from scores of small remarks and minutiae of behaviour, which, in all
circles, hourly imply how completely the idea of respectability
involves that of costly externals, there is drawn fresh pabulum.
We are all implicated. We all, whether with self-approbation or not,
give expression to the established feeling. Even he who disapproves this
feeling, finds himself unable to treat virtue in threadbare apparel with
a cordiality as great as that which he would show to the same virtue
endowed with prosperity. Scarcely a man is to be found who would not
behave with more civility to a knave in broadcloth than to a knave in
fustian. Though for the deference which they have shown to the vulgar
rich, or the dishonestly successful, men afterwards compound with their
consciences by privately venting their contempt; yet when they again
come face to face with these imposing externals covering worthlessness,
they do as before. And so long as imposing worthlessness gets the
visible marks of respect, while the disrespect felt for it is hidden, it
naturally flourishes.
Hence, then, is it that men persevere in these evil practices which all
condemn. They can so purchase a homage, which if not genuine, is yet, so
far as appearances go, as good as the best. To one whose wealth has been
gained by a life of frauds, what matters it that his name is in all
circles a synonym of roguery? Has he not been conspicuously honoured by
being twice elected mayor of his town? (we state a fact) and does not
this, joined to the personal consideration shown him, outweigh in his
estimation all that is said against him: of which he hears scarcely
anything? When, not many years after the exposure of his inequitable
dealing, a trader attains to the highest civic distinction which the
kingdom has to offer; and that, too, through the instrumentality of
those who best know his delinquency; is not the fact an encouragement to
him, and to all others, to sacrifice rectitude to aggrandisement? If,
after listening to a sermon that has by implication denounced the
dishonesties he has been guilty of, the rich ill-doer finds, on leaving
church, that his neighbours cap to him; does not this tacit approval go
far to neutralise the effect of all he has heard? The truth is, that
with the great majority of men, the visible expression of social opinion
is far the most efficient of incentives and restraints. Let any one who
wishes to estimate the strength of this control, propose to himself to
walk through the streets in the dress of a dustman, or hawk vegetables
from door to door. Let him feel, as he probably will, that he had rather
do something morally wrong than commit such a breach of usage, and
suffer the resulting derision. And he will then better estimate how
powerful a curb to men is the open disapproval of their fellows; and
how, conversely, the outward applause of their fellows is a stimulus
surpassing all others in intensity. Fully realising which facts, he will
see that the immoralities of trade are in great part traceable to an
immoral public opinion.
Let none infer, from what has been said, that the payment of respect to
wealth rightly acquired and rightly used, is deprecated. In its original
meaning, and in due degree, the feeling which prompts such respect is
good. Primarily, wealth is the sign of mental power; and this is always
respectable. To have honestly-acquired property, implies intelligence,
energy, self-control; and these are worthy of the homage that is
indirectly paid to them by admiring their results. Moreover, the good
administration and increase of inherited property, also requires its
virtues; and therefore demands its share of approbation. And besides
being applauded for their display of faculty, men who gain and increase
wealth are to be applauded as public benefactors. For he who as
manufacturer or merchant, has, without injustice to others, realised a
fortune, is thereby proved to have discharged his functions better than
those who have been less successful. By greater skill, better judgment,
or more economy than his competitors, he has afforded the public greater
advantages. His extra profits are but a share of the extra produce
obtained by the same expenditure: the other share going to the
consumers. And similarly, the landowner who, by judicious outlay, has
increased the value (that is, the productiveness) of his estate, has
thereby added to the stock of national capital. By all means, then, let
the right acquisition and proper use of wealth, have their due share of
admiration.
But that which we condemn as the chief cause of commercial dishonesty,
is the _indiscriminate_ admiration of wealth--an admiration that has
little or no reference to the character of the possessor. When, as very
generally happens, the external signs are reverenced, where they signify
no internal worthiness--nay, even where they cover internal
unworthiness; then does the feeling become vicious. It is this idolatry
which worships the symbol apart from the thing symbolised, that is the
root of all these evils we have been exposing. So long as men pay homage
to those social benefactors who have grown rich honestly, they give a
wholesome stimulus to industry; but when they accord a share of their
homage to those social malefactors who have grown rich dishonestly, then
do they foster corruption--then do they become accomplices in all these
frauds of commerce.
As for remedy, it manifestly follows that there is none save a purified
public opinion. When that abhorrence which society now shows to direct
theft, is shown to theft of all degrees of indirectness, then will these
mercantile vices disappear. When not only the trader who adulterates or
gives short measure, but also the merchant who over-trades, the
bank-director who countenances an exaggerated report, and the
railway-director who repudiates his guarantee, come to be regarded as of
the same genus as the pickpocket, and are treated with like disdain;
then will the morals of trade become what they should be.
We have little hope, however, that any such higher tone of public
opinion will shortly be reached. The present condition of things appears
to be, in great measure, a necessary accompaniment of our present phase
of progress. Throughout the civilised world, especially in England, and
above all in America, social activity is almost wholly expended in
material development. To subjugate Nature, and bring the powers of
production and distribution to their highest perfection, is the task of
our age; and probably of many future ages. And as in times when national
defence and conquest were the chief desiderata, military achievement was
honoured above all other things; so now, when the chief desideratum is
industrial growth, honour is most conspicuously given to that which
generally indicates the aiding of industrial growth. The English nation
at present displays what we may call the commercial diathesis; and the
undue admiration for wealth appears to be its concomitant--a relation
still more conspicuous in the worship of "the almighty dollar" by the
Americans. And while the commercial diathesis, with its accompanying
standard of distinction, continues, we fear the evils we have been
delineating can be but partially cured. It seems hopeless to expect that
men will distinguish between that wealth which represents personal
superiority and benefits done to society, from that which does not. The
symbols, the externals, have all the world through swayed the masses;
and must long continue to do so. Even the cultivated, who are on their
guard against the bias of associated ideas, and try to separate the real
from the seeming, cannot escape the influence of current opinion. We
must, therefore, content ourselves with looking for a slow amelioration.
Something, however, may even now be done by vigorous protest against
adoration of mere success. And it is important that it should be done,
considering how this vicious sentiment is being fostered. When we have
one of our leading moralists preaching, with increasing vehemence, the
doctrine of sanctification by force--when we are told that while a
selfishness troubled with qualms of conscience is contemptible, a
selfishness intense enough to trample down every thing in the
unscrupulous pursuit of its ends, is worthy of all admiration--when we
find that if it be sufficiently great, power, no matter of what kind or
how directed, is held up for our reverence; we may fear lest the
prevalent applause of mere success, together with the commercial vices
which it stimulates, should be increased rather than diminished. Not at
all by this hero-worship grown into brute-worship, is society to be made
better; but by exactly the opposite--by a stern criticism of the means
through which success has been achieved; and by according honour to the
higher and less selfish modes of activity.
And happily the signs of this more moral public opinion are already
showing themselves. It is becoming a tacitly-received doctrine that the
rich should not, as in by-gone times, spend their lives in personal
gratification; but should devote them to the general welfare. Year by
year is the improvement of the people occupying a larger share of the
attention of the upper classes. Year by year are they voluntarily
devoting more and more energy to furthering the material and mental
progress of the masses. And those among them who do not join in the
discharge of these high functions, are beginning to be looked upon with
more or less contempt by their own order. This latest and most hopeful
fact in human history--this new and better chivalry--promises to evolve
a higher standard of honour; and so to ameliorate many evils: among
others those which we have detailed. When wealth obtained by
illegitimate means inevitably brings nothing but disgrace--when to
wealth rightly acquired is accorded only its due share of homage, while
the greatest homage is given to those who consecrate their energies and
their means to the noblest ends; then may we be sure that along with
other accompanying benefits, the morals of trade will be greatly
purified.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 47: From "Essays: Moral, Political and Aesthetic," 1864.]
ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE[48]
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
In order to make the title of this discourse generally intelligible, I
have translated the term "Protoplasm," which is the scientific name of
the substance of which I am about to speak, by the words "the physical
basis of life." I suppose that, to many, the idea that there is such a
thing as a physical basis, or matter, of life may be novel--so widely
spread is the conception of life as a something which works through
matter, but is independent of it; and even those who are aware that
matter and life are inseparably connected, may not be prepared for the
conclusion plainly suggested by the phrase, "_the_ physical basis or
matter of life," that there is some one kind of matter which is common
to all living beings, and that their endless diversities are bound
together by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity. In fact, when first
apprehended, such a doctrine as this appears almost shocking to common
sense.
What, truly, can seem to be more obviously different from one another,
in faculty, in form, and in substance, than the various kinds of living
beings? What community of faculty can there be between the
brightly-coloured lichen, which so nearly resembles a mere mineral
incrustation of the bare rock on which it grows, and the painter, to
whom it is instinct with beauty, or the botanist, whom it feeds with
knowledge?
Again, think of the microscopic fungus--a mere infinitesimal ovoid
particle, which finds space and duration enough to multiply into
countless millions in the body of a living fly; and then of the wealth
of foliage, the luxuriance of flower and fruit, which lies between this
bald sketch of a plant and the giant pine of California, towering to the
dimensions of a cathedral spire, or the Indian fig, which covers acres
with its profound shadow, and endures while nations and empires come and
go around its vast circumference. Or, turning to the other half of the
world of life, picture to yourselves the great Finner whale, hugest of
beasts that live, or have lived, disporting his eighty or ninety feet of
bone, muscle, and blubber, with easy roll, among waves in which the
stoutest ship that ever left dockyard would flounder hopelessly; and
contrast him with the invisible animalcules--mere gelatinous specks,
multitudes of which could, in fact, dance upon the point of a needle
with the same ease as the angels of the Schoolmen could, in imagination.
With these images before your minds, you may well ask, what community of
form, or structure, is there between the animalcule and the whale; or
between the fungus and the fig-tree? And, _a fortiori_[49], between all
four?
Finally, if we regard substance, or material composition, what hidden
bond can connect the flower which a girl wears in her hair and the blood
which courses through her youthful veins; or, what is there in common
between the dense and resisting mass of the oak, or the strong fabric of
the tortoise, and those broad disks of glassy jelly which may be seen
pulsating through the waters of a calm sea, but which drain away to mere
films in the hand which raises them out of their element?
Such objections as these must, I think, arise in the mind of every one
who ponders, for the first time, upon the conception of a single
physical basis of life underlying all the diversities of vital
existence; but I propose to demonstrate to you that, notwithstanding
these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity--namely, a unity of
power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial
composition--does pervade the whole living world.
No very abstruse argumentation is needed, in the first place, to prove
that the powers, or faculties, of all kinds of living matter, diverse as
they may be in degree, are substantially similar in kind.
Goethe has condensed a survey of all powers of mankind into the
well-known epigram:--
"Warum treibt sich das Volk so und schreit? Es will sich ernaehren,
Kinder zeugen, und die naehren so gut es vermag.
* * * * *
Weiter bringt es kein Mensch, stell' er sich wie er auch will."[50]
In physiological language this means, that all the multifarious and
complicated activities of man are comprehensible under three categories.
Either they are immediately directed towards the maintenance and
development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the
relative positions of parts of the body, or they tend towards the
continuance of the species. Even those manifestions of intellect, of
feeling, and of will, which we rightly name the higher faculties, are
not excluded from this classification, inasmuch as to every one but the
subject of them, they are known only as transitory changes in the
relative positions of parts of the body. Speech, gesture, and every
other form of human action are, in the long run, resolvable into
muscular contraction, and muscular contraction is but a transitory
change in the relative positions of the parts of a muscle. But the
scheme which is large enough to embrace the activities of the highest
form of life, covers all those of the lower creatures. The lowest plant,
or animalcule, feeds, grows, and reproduces its kind. In addition, all
animals manifest those transitory changes of form which we class under
irritability and contractility; and it is more than probable that when
the vegetable world is thoroughly explored, we shall find all plants in
possession of the same powers, at one time or other of their existence.
I am not now alluding to such phenomena, at once rare and conspicuous,
as those exhibited by the leaflets of the sensitive plants, or the
stamens of the barberry, but to much more widely spread, and at the same
time, more subtle and hidden, manifestions of vegetable contractility.
You are doubtless aware that the common nettle owes its stinging
property to the innumerable stiff and needle-like, though exquisitely
delicate, hairs which cover its surface. Each stinging-needle tapers
from a broad base to a slender summit, which, though rounded at the end,
is of such microscopic fineness that it readily penetrates, and breaks
off in, the skin. The whole hair consists of a very delicate outer case
of wood, closely applied to the inner surface of which is a layer of
semi-fluid matter, full of innumerable granules of extreme minuteness.
This semi-fluid lining is protoplasm, which thus constitutes a kind of
bag, full of a limpid liquid, and roughly corresponding in form with the
interior of the hair which it fills. When viewed with a sufficiently
high magnifying power, the protoplasmic layer of the nettle hair is seen
to be in a condition of unceasing activity. Local contractions of the
whole thickness of its substance pass slowly and gradually from point to
point, and give rise to the appearance of progressive waves, just as the
bending of successive stalks of corn by a breeze produces the apparent
billows of a corn-field.
But, in addition to these movements, and independently of them, the
granules are driven, in relatively rapid streams, through channels in
the protoplasm which seem to have a considerable amount of persistence.
Most commonly, the currents in adjacent parts of the protoplasm take
similar directions; and, thus, there is a general stream up one side of
the hair and down the other. But this does not prevent the existence of
partial currents which take different routes; and sometimes trains of
granules may be seen coursing swiftly in opposite directions within a
twenty-thousandth of an inch of one another; while, occasionally,
opposite streams come into direct collision, and, after a longer or
shorter struggle, one predominates. The cause of these currents seems to
lie in contractions of the protoplasm which bounds the channels in which
they flow, but which are so minute that the best microscopes show only
their effects, and not themselves.
The spectacle afforded by the wonderful energies prisoned within the
compass of the microscopic hair of a plant, which we commonly regard as
a merely passive organism, is not easily forgotten by one who has
watched its display, continued hour after hour, without pause or sign of
weakening. The possible complexity of many other organic forms,
seemingly as simple as the protoplasm of the nettle, dawns upon one; and
the comparison of such a protoplasm to a body with an internal
circulation, which has been put forward by an eminent physiologist,
loses much of its startling character. Currents similar to those of the
hairs of the nettle have been observed in a great multitude of very
different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested that they
probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all young vegetable
cells. If such be the case, the wonderful noonday silence of a tropical
forest is, after all, due only to the dullness of our hearing; and could
our ears catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the
innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we
should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.
Among the lower plants, it is the rule rather than the exception, that
contractility should be still more openly manifested at some periods of
their existence. The protoplasm of _Algae_ and _Fungi_ becomes, under
many circumstances, partially, or completely, freed from its woody case,
and exhibits movements of its whole mass, or is propelled by the
contractility of one, or more, hair-like prolongations of its body,
which are called vibratile cilia. And, so far as the conditions of the
manifestation of the phenomena of contractility have yet been studied,
they are the same for the plant as for the animal. Heat and electric
shocks influence both, and in the same way, though it may be in
different degrees. It is by no means my intention to suggest that there
is no difference in faculty between the lowest plant and the highest, or
between plants and animals. But the difference between the powers of the
lowest plant, or animal, and those of the highest, is one of degree, not
of kind, and depends, as Milne-Edwards long ago so well pointed out,
upon the extent to which the principle of the division of labour is
carried out in the living economy. In the lowest organism all parts are
competent to perform all functions, and one and the same portion of
protoplasm may successfully take on the function of feeding, moving, or
reproducing apparatus. In the highest, on the contrary, a great number
of parts combine to perform each function, each part doing its allotted
share of the work with great accuracy and efficiency, but being useless
for any other purpose.
On the other hand, notwithstanding all the fundamental resemblances
which exist between the powers of the protoplasm in plants and in
animals, they present a striking difference (to which I shall advert
more at length presently), in the fact that plants can manufacture fresh
protoplasm out of mineral compounds, whereas animals are obliged to
procure it ready made, and hence, in the long run, depend upon plants.
Upon what condition this difference in the powers of the two great
divisions of the world of life depends, nothing is at present known.
With such qualifications as arise out of the last-mentioned fact, it may
be truly said that the acts of all living things are fundamentally one.
Is any such unity predicable of their forms? Let us seek in easily
verified facts for a reply to this question. If a drop of blood be drawn
by pricking one's finger, and viewed with proper precautions, and under
a sufficiently high microscopic power, there will be seen, among the
innumerable multitude of little, circular, discoidal bodies, or
corpuscles, which float in it and give it its colour, a comparatively
small number of colourless corpuscles, of somewhat larger size and very
irregular shape. If the drop of blood be kept at the temperature of the
body, these colourless corpuscles will be seen to exhibit a marvellous
activity, changing their forms with great rapidity, drawing in and
thrusting out prolongations of their substance, and creeping about as if
they were independent organisms.
The substance which is thus active is a mass of protoplasm, and its
activity differs in detail, rather than in principle, from that of the
protoplasm of the nettle. Under sundry circumstances the corpuscle dies
and becomes distended into a round mass, in the midst of which is seen a
smaller spherical body, which existed, but was more or less hidden, in
the living corpuscle, and is called its _nucleus_. Corpuscles of
essentially similar structure are to be found in the skin, in the lining
of the mouth, and scattered through the whole framework of the body.
Nay, more: in the earliest condition of the human organism, in that
state in which it has but just become distinguishable from the egg in
which it arises, it is nothing but an aggregation of such corpuscles,
and every organ of the body was, once, no more than such an aggregation.
Thus a nucleated mass of protoplasm turns out to be what may be termed
the structural unit of the human body. As a matter of fact, the body, in
its earliest state, is a mere multiple of such units; and in its perfect
condition, it is a multiple of such units, variously modified.
But does the formula which expresses the essential structural character
of the highest animal cover all the rest, as the statement of its powers
and faculties covered that of all others? Very nearly. Beast and fowl,
reptile and fish, mollusk, worm, and polype, are all composed of
structural units of the same character, namely, masses of protoplasm
with a nucleus. There are sundry very low animals, each of which,
structurally, is a mere colourless blood-corpuscle, leading an
independent life. But, at the very bottom of the animal scale, even this
simplicity becomes simplified, and all the phenomena of life are
manifested by a particle of protoplasm without a nucleus. Nor are such
organisms insignificant by reason of their want of complexity. It is a
fair question whether the protoplasm of those simplest forms of life,
which people an immense extent of the bottom of the sea, would not
outweigh that of all the higher living beings which inhabit the land put
together. And in ancient times, no less than at the present day, such
living beings as these have been the greatest of rock builders.
What has been said of the animal world is no less true of plants.
Imbedded in the protoplasm at the broad, or attached, end of the nettle
hair, there lies a spheroidal nucleus. Careful examination further
proves that the whole substance of the nettle is made up of a repetition
of such masses of nucleated protoplasm, each contained in a wooden case,
which is modified in form, sometimes into a woody fibre, sometimes into
a duct or spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen grain, or an ovule.
Traced back to its earliest state, the nettle arises as the man does, in
a particle of nucleated protoplasm. And in the lowest plants, as in the
lowest animals, a single mass of such protoplasm may constitute the
whole plant, or the protoplasm may exist without a nucleus.
Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how is one mass of
non-nucleated protoplasm to be distinguished from another? why call one
"plant" and the other "animal"?
The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, plants and animals
are not separable, and that, in many cases, it is a mere matter of
convention whether we call a given organism an animal or a plant. There
is a living body called _Aethalium septicum_, which appears upon
decaying vegetable substances, and, in one of its forms, is common upon
the surfaces of tan-pits. In this condition it is, to all intents and
purposes, a fungus, and formerly was always regarded as such; but the
remarkable investigations of De Bary have shown that, in another
condition, the _Aethalium_ is an actively locomotive creature, and takes
in solid matters, upon which, apparently, it feeds, thus exhibiting the
most characteristic feature of animality. Is this a plant; or is it an
animal? Is it both; or is it neither? Some decide in favour of the last
supposition, and establish an intermediate kingdom, a sort of biological
No Man's Land for all these questionable forms. But, as it is admittedly
impossible to draw any distinct boundary line between this no man's land
and the vegetable world on the one hand, or the animal on the other, it
appears to me that this proceeding merely doubles the difficulty which,
before, was single.
Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is
the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains
clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick
or sun-dried clod.
Thus it becomes clear that all living powers are cognate, and that all
living forms are fundamentally of one character. The researches of the
chemist have revealed a no less striking uniformity of material
composition in living matter.
In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigation can tell
us little or nothing, directly, of the composition of living matter,
inasmuch as such matter must needs die in the act of analysis,--and upon
this very obvious ground, objections, which I confess seem to me to be
somewhat frivolous, have been raised to the drawing of any conclusions
whatever respecting the composition of actually living matter, from that
of the dead matter of life, which alone is accessible to us. But
objectors of this class do not seem to reflect that it is also, in
strictness, true that we know nothing about the composition of any body
whatever, as it is. The statement that a crystal of calc-spar consists
of carbonate of lime, is quite true, if we only mean that, by
appropriate processes, it may be resolved into carbonic acid and
quicklime. If you pass the same carbonic acid over the very quicklime
thus obtained, you will obtain carbonate of lime again; but it will not
be calc-spar, nor anything like it. Can it, therefore, be said that
chemical analysis teaches nothing about the chemical composition of
calc-spar? Such a statement would be absurd; but it is hardly more so
than the talk one occasionally hears about the uselessness of applying
the results of chemical analysis to the living bodies which have yielded
them.
One fact, at any rate, is out of reach of such refinements, and this is,
that all the forms of protoplasm which have yet been examined contain
the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very
complex union, and that they behave similarly towards several reagents.
To this complex combination, the nature of which has never been
determined with exactness, the name of Protein has been applied. And if
we use this term with such caution as may properly arise out of our
comparative ignorance of the things for which it stands, it may be truly
said that all protoplasm is proteinaceous, or, as the white, or albumen,
of an egg is one of the commonest examples of a nearly pure proteine
matter, we may say that all living matter is more or less albuminoid.
Perhaps it would not yet be safe to say that all forms of protoplasm are
affected by the direct action of electric shocks; and yet the number of
cases in which the contraction of protoplasm is shown to be affected by
this agency increases every day.
Nor can it be affirmed with perfect confidence, that all forms of
protoplasm are liable to undergo that peculiar coagulation at a
temperature of 40 deg.-50 deg. Centigrade, which has been called
"heat-stiffening," though Kuehne's beautiful researches have proved this
occurrence to take place in so many and such diverse living beings, that
it is hardly rash to expect that the law holds good for all.
Enough has, perhaps, been said, to prove the existence of a general
uniformity in the character of the protoplasm, or physical basis, of
life, in whatever group of living beings it may be studied. But it will
be understood that this general uniformity by no means excludes any
amount of special modifications of the fundamental substance. The
mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters,
though no one doubts that, under all these Protean changes, is one and
the same thing.
And now, what is the ultimate fate, and what the origin, of the matter
of life?
Is it, as some of the older naturalists supposed, diffused throughout
the universe in molecules, which are indestructible and unchangeable in
themselves; but, in endless transmigration, unite in innumerable
permutations, into the diversified forms of life we know? Or, is the
matter of life composed of ordinary matter, differing from it only in
the manner in which its atoms are aggregated? Is it built up of ordinary
matter, and again resolved into ordinary matter when its work is done?
Modern science does not hesitate a moment between these alternatives.
Physiology writes over the portals of life--
"Debemur morti nos nostraque,"[51]
with a profounder meaning than the Roman poet attached to that
melancholy line. Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus
or oak, worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and
is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always
dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it
died.
In the wonderful story of the _Peau de Chagrin_, the hero becomes
possessed of a magical wild ass' skin, which yields him the means of
gratifying all his wishes. But its surface represents the duration of
the proprietor's life; and for every satisfied desire the skin shrinks
in proportion to the intensity of fruition, until at length life and the
last handbreath of the _peau de chagrin_, disappear with the
gratification of a last wish.
Balzac's studies had led him over a wide range of thought and
speculation, and his shadowing forth of physiological truth in this
strange story may have been intentional. At any rate, the matter of life
is a veritable _peau de chagrin_, and for every vital act it is somewhat
the smaller. All work implies waste, and the work of life results,
directly or indirectly, in the waste of protoplasm.
Every word uttered by a speaker costs him some physical loss; and, in
the strictest sense, he burns that others may have light--so much
eloquence, so much of his body resolved into carbonic acid, water, and
urea. It is clear that this process of expenditure cannot go on forever.
But, happily, the protoplasmic _peau de chagrin_ differs from Balzac's
in its capacity of being repaired, and brought back to its full size,
after every exertion.
For example, this present lecture, whatever its intellectual worth to
you, has a certain physical value to me, which is, conceivably,
expressible by the number of grains of protoplasm and other bodily
substance wasted in maintaining my vital processes during its delivery.
My _peau de chagrin_ will be distinctly smaller at the end of the
discourse than it was at the beginning. By and by, I shall probably have
recourse to the substance commonly called mutton, for the purpose of
stretching it back to its original size. Now this mutton was once the
living protoplasm, more or less modified, of another animal--a sheep. As
I shall eat it, it is the same matter altered, not only by death, but by
exposure to sundry artificial operations in the process of cooking.
But these changes, whatever be their extent, have not rendered it
incompetent to resume its old functions as matter of life. A singular
inward laboratory, which I possess, will dissolve a certain portion of
the modified protoplasm; the solution so formed will pass into my
veins; and the subtle influences to which it will then be subjected will
convert the dead protoplasm into living protoplasm, and transubstantiate
sheep into man.
Nor is this all. If digestion were a thing to be trifled with, I might
sup upon lobster, and the matter of life of the crustacean would undergo
the same wonderful metamorphosis into humanity. And were I to return to
my own place by sea, and undergo shipwreck, the crustacean might, and
probably would, return the compliment, and demonstrate our common nature
by turning my protoplasm into living lobster. Or, if nothing better were
to be had, I might supply my wants with mere bread, and I should find
the protoplasm of the wheat-plant to be convertible into man with no
more trouble than that of the sheep, and with far less, I fancy, than
that of the lobster.
Hence it appears to be a matter of no great moment what animal, or what
plant, I lay under contribution for protoplasm, and the fact speaks
volumes for the general identity of that substance in all living beings.
I share this catholicity of assimilation with other animals, all of
which, so far as we know, could thrive equally well on the protoplasm of
any of their fellows, or of any plant; but here the assimilative powers
of the animal world cease. A solution of smelling-salts in water, with
an infinitesimal proportion of some other saline matters, contains all
the elementary bodies which enter into the composition of protoplasm;
but, as I need hardly say, a hogshead of that fluid would not keep a
hungry man from starving, nor would it save any animal whatever from a
like fate. An animal cannot make protoplasm, but must take it ready-made
from some other animal, or some plant--the animal's highest feat of
constructive chemistry being to convert dead protoplasm into that living
matter of life which is appropriate to itself.
Therefore, in seeking for the origin of protoplasm, we must eventually
turn to the vegetable world. A fluid containing carbonic acid, water,
and nitrogenous salts, which offers such a Barmecide feast[52] to the
animal, is a table richly spread to multitudes of plants; and, with a
due supply of only such materials, many a plant will not only maintain
itself in vigour, but grow and multiply until it has increased a
million-fold, or a million million-fold, the quantity of protoplasm
which it originally possessed; in this way building up the matter of
life, to an indefinite extent, from the common matter of the universe.
Thus, the animal can only raise the complex substance of dead protoplasm
to the higher power, as one may say, of living protoplasm; while the
plant can raise the less complex substances--carbonic acid, water, and
nitrogenous salts--to the same stage of living protoplasm, if not to the
same level. But the plant also has its limitations. Some of the fungi,
for example, appear to need higher compounds to start with; and no known
plant can live upon the uncompounded elements of protoplasm. A plant
supplied with pure carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, phosphorus,
sulphur, and the like, would as infallibly die as the animal in his bath
of smelling-salts, though it would be surrounded by all the constituents
of protoplasm. Nor, indeed, need the process of simplification of
vegetable food be carried so far as this, in order to arrive at the
limit of the plant's thaumaturgy. Let water, carbonic acid, and all the
other needful constituents be supplied except nitrogenous salts, and an
ordinary plant will still be 
English Prose A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice / Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931