Decoration.
The love we have for Genius is to common love what the fire on the altar is to the fire on the hearth. We cherish it not for warmth or for service, but for an offering, as the expression of our worship.
Decoration.
All love not responded to and accepted is a species of idolatry. It is like the worship of a dumb beautiful image we have ourselves set up and deified,but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sympathy. No!—though we should consume our own hearts on the altar. Our love of God would be idolatry if we did not believe in his love for us—his responsive love.
Decoration.
In the same moment that we begin to speculate on the possibility of cessation or change in any strong affection that we feel, even from that moment we may date its death: it has become thefetchof the living love.
Decoration.
“Motives,” said Coleridge, “imply weakness, and the reasoning powers imply the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act from impulse alone.” This is the sort of angel which Angelico da Fiesole conceived and represented, andheonly.
Again:—“If a man’s conduct can neither be ascribed to the angelic or the bestial within him, it must be fiendish. Passion without appetite isfiendish.”
And, he might have added, appetite without passion,bestial. Love in which is neither appetite nor passion isangelic. The union of all is human; and according as one or other predominates, does thehuman being approximate to the fiend, the beast, or the angel.
Decoration.
Idon’tmean to say that principle is not a finer thing than passion; but passions existed before principles: they came into the world with us; principles are superinduced.
There are bad principles as well as bad passions; and more bad principles than bad passions. Good principles derive life, and strength, and warmth from high and good passions; but principles do not give life, they only bind up life into a consistent whole. One great fault in education is, the pains taken to inculcate principles rather than to train feelings. It is as if we took it for granted that passions couldonlybe bad, and are to be ignored or repressed altogether,—the old mischievous monkish doctrine.
Decoration.
Itis easy to be humble where humility is a condescension—easy to concede where we know ourselves wronged—easy to forgive where vengeance is in our power.
Decoration.
“You and I,” saidH. G., yesterday, “are alike in this:—both of us so abhor injustice, that we are ready to fight it with a broomstick if we can find nothing better!”
Decoration.
“Thewise onlypossessideas—the greater part of mankind arepossessed bythem. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual.” This paragraph from Coleridge sounds like atruismuntil we have felt itstruth.
“LaVolonté, en se déréglant, devient passion; cette passion continuée se change en habitude, et faute de résister à cette habitude elle se transforme en besoin.”—St. Augustin. Which may be rendered—“out of the unregulated will, springspassion, out of passion gratified,habit; out of habits unresisted,necessity.” This, also, is one of the truths which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them,truisms—and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt.
Decoration.
IwishI could realise what you call my “grandidea of being independent of the absent.” I have not a friend worthy the name, whose absence is not pain and dread to me;—death itself is terrible only as it is absence. At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life diverges from mine—whose dwelling house is far off;—with whom I am united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and interests by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a double life; absence, in its anxiouslonging, and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.
“La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment où ils meurent, mais de celui où nous cessons de vivre avec eux;” or, it might rather be said,pour eux; but I think this arises from a want either offaithorfaithfulness.
“La peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse! c’est la plus commune et la plus barbare des profanations;les mères ne la connaissent pas!”—And why? Because the mostfaithfullove is the love of the mother for her child.
Decoration.
Atdinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith personally, becausemy nature feels the want of the artistic and imaginative inhisnature; but see what he has done for humanity, for society, for liberty, for truth,—for us women! What has Theodore Hook done that has not perished with him? Even as wits—and I have been in company with both—I could not compare them; but they say the wit of Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men—the strongest proof that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.
It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the good things at which you had laughed. Few men—wits by profession—ever said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.
Decoration.
“Whenwe would show any one that he is mistaken our best course is to observe on what side he considers the subject,—for his view of it is generally right onthisside,—and admit to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole of the case.”—Pascal.
Decoration.
“Weshould reflect,” says Jeremy Taylor, preaching against ambition, “that whatever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious persons is not so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and unregarded on the pavement of heaven.”
Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good argument against the sin he denounces. The star is inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or our ambition is only that which we consider with hope asaccessible. That we look up to the stars not desiring, not aspiring, but only loving—therein lies our hearts’ truest, holiest, safestdevotionas contrasted withambition.
It is the “desireof the moth for the star,” that leads to its burning itself in the candle.
Decoration.
Thebrow stamped “with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow,” is a strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor’s.
He says truly: “It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly.” And again: “What will not tender women suffer to hide their shame!” What indeed! And again: “Nothing is intolerable that is necessary.” And again: “Nothing is to be esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions.”
There is not one of these ethical sentences which might not be treated as a text and expounded, opening into as many “branches” of consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a fallacy, as it seems to me;—others a deeper, wider,and more awful signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he uttered them.
Decoration.
Thesame reasons which rendered Goethe’s “Werther” so popular, so passionately admired at the time it appeared—just after the seven years’ war,—helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It was not the individuality of “Werther,” nor the individuality of “Childe Harold” which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading power,—apartof the life of their contemporaries. It was because in both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of feeling preexistent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was made visible and audible as if by an electric force; words and forms were given to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy moral excitement. “Werther” and “Childe Harold” will never perish; because, though they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there will always be, unhappily, individual minds and hearts to respond to the individuality.
Decoration.
Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own expression, “curdled” a whole world of meaning into the compass of one line:—
“The starry Galileo and his woes.”“The blind old man of Chio’s rocky isle.”
“The starry Galileo and his woes.”“The blind old man of Chio’s rocky isle.”
Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an idea. Such lines arepicturesque. And I remember another, from Thomson, I think:—
“Placed far amid the melancholy main.”
“Placed far amid the melancholy main.”
In general, where words are used in description, the objects and ideas flow with the words in succession. But in each of these lines the mind takes in a wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at once, as the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and action, and figures, fore-ground and background, all at once. That is the reason I call such linespicturesque.
Decoration.
Ihavea great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness—especially in my own sex,—yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation, through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength; for those whose refinement and softness of nature mingling with high intellectual power and the capacity for strong passion, present to me a problem to solve, which, when solved, I take to my heart. The question is not, which of the two diversities of character be the highest and best, but which is most sympathetic with my own.
Decoration.
C—— told me, that some time ago, when poor Bethune the Scotch poet first became known, and was in great hardship, C—— himself had collected a little sum (about 30l.), and sent it to him through his publishers. Bethune wrote back to refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he had head and hands, he would not acceptcharity. C—— wrote to him in answer, still anonymously, arguingagainst the principle, as founded in false pride, &c. Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found untouched,—left with a friend to be returned to the donors!
This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely constituted minds feel with regard to pecuniary obligation,—my own utter repugnance to it, even from the hands of those I most love,—makes one sad to think of. It gives one such a miserable impression of our social humanity!
Goethe makes the same remark in the Wilhelm Meister:—“Es ist sonderbar welch ein wunderliches Bedenken man sich macht, Geld von Freunden und Gönnern anzunehmen, von denen man jede andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude empfangen würde.”
Decoration.
“Inthe celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius Areopageta, the angels of Love hold the first place, the angels of Light the second, and theThrones and Dominations the third. Among terrestrials, the Intellects, which act through the imagination upon the heart of man—i. e.poets and artists—may be accounted first in order; the merely scientific intellects the second; and the merely ruling intellects—those which apply themselves to the government of mankind, without the aid of either science or imagination—will not be disparaged if they are placed last.”
All government, all exercise of power—no matter in what form—which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of God, and shall not stand.
“A time will come when the operations of charity will no longer be carried on by machinery, relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by human creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise.”—Westminster Review.
Decoration.
“Thosewriters who never go further into a subject than is compatible with making what they say indisputably clear to man, woman, and child, may bethe lights ofthisage, but they will not be the lights ofanother.”
“It is not always necessary that truth should take a bodily form,—a material palpable form. It is sometimes better that it should dwell around us spiritually, creating harmony,—sounding through the air like the solemn sweet tone of a bell.”
Decoration.
Womenare inclined to fall in love with priests and physicians, because of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and physical maladies. They believe in the presence of real pity, real sympathy, where the tone and look of each have become merely habitual and conventional,—I may say professional. On the other hand, women are inclined to fall in love with criminal and miserable men out of the pity which in our sex is akin to love, and out of the power of bestowing comfort or love. “Car les femmes out un instinct céleste pour le malheur.” So, in the first instance,they love from gratitude or faith; in the last, from compassion or hope.
Decoration.
“Menof all countries,” says Sir James Mackintosh, “appear to be more alike in their best qualities than the pride of civilisation would be willing to allow.”
And in theirworst. The distinction between savage and civilised humanity lies not in thequalities, but thehabits.
Coleridgenotices “the increase in modern times of vicious associations with things in themselves indifferent,” as a sign of unhealthiness in taste, in feeling, in conscience.
The truth of this remark is particularly illustrated in the French literature of the last century.
Decoration.
“Andyet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss and unpayable, but the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates a revolution in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or a style of living, and allows the formation of new influences that prove of the first importance during the next years.”—Emerson.
Decoration.
Religion, in its general sense, is properly the comprehension and acknowledgment of an unseen spiritual power and the soul’s allegiance toit; andChristianity, in its particular sense, is the comprehension and appreciation of the personal character of Christ, and the heart’s allegiance to that.
Decoration.
Avariceis to the intellect whatsensualityis to the morals. It is an intellectual form of sensuality, inasmuch as it is the passion for the acquisition, the enjoyment in the possession, of a palpable, tangible, selfish pleasure; and it would have the same tendency to unspiritualise, to degrade, and to harden the higher faculties that a course of grosser sensualism would have to corrupt the lower faculties. Both dull the edge of all that is fine and tender within us.
Decoration.
Akingor a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
Decoration.
As what we call Genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonising with it the rest of the character.
“Though it burn our house down, who does not venerate fire?” says the Hindoo proverb.
Decoration.
Anelegant mind informing a graceful person is like a spirit lamp in an alabaster vase, shedding round its own softened radiance and heightening the beauty of its medium. An elegant mind in a plain ungraceful person is like the same lamp enclosed in a vase of bronze; we may, if we approach near enough, rejoice in its influence, though we may not behold its radiance.
Decoration.
Landor, in a passage I was reading to-day, speaks of a language of criticism, in which qualities should be graduated by colours; “as, for instance,purplemight express grandeur and majesty of thought;scarlet, vigour of expression;pink, liveliness;green, elegant and equable composition, and so on.”
Blue, then, might express contemplative power?yellow, wit?violet, tenderness? and so on.
Decoration.
IquotedtoA.the saying of a sceptical philosopher: “The world is but one enormousWILL, constantly rushing into life.”
“Is that,” she responded quickly, “another new name for God?”
Decoration.
Adeath-bedrepentance has become proverbial for its fruitlessness, and a death-bed forgivenessequally so. They who wait till their own death-bed to make reparation, or till their adversary’s death-bed to grant absolution, seem to me much upon a par in regard to the moral, as well as the religious, failure.
Decoration.
Acharacterendued with a large, vivacious, active intellect and a limited range of sympathies, generally remains immature. We can growwiseonly through the experience which reaches us through our sympathies and becomes a part of our life. All other experience may be gain, but it remains in a manner extraneous, adds to our possessions without adding to our strength, and sharpens our implements without increasing our capacity to use them.
Not always those who have the quickest, keenest, perception of character are the best to deal with it, and perhaps for that very reason. Before we can influence or deal with mind, contemplation must be lost in sympathy, observation must be merged in love.
Decoration.
Montaigne, in his eloquent tirade against melancholy, observes that the Italians have the same word,Tristezza, for melancholy and for malignity or wickedness. The nounTristo, “a wretch,” has the double sense of our English word corresponding with the French nounmisérable. So Judas Iscariot is calledquel tristo. Our word “wretchedness” is not, however, used in the double sense oftristezza.
Decoration.
“On ne considère pas assez les paroles comme des faits:” that was well said!
Since for the purpose of circulation and intercommunication we are obliged to coin truth into words, we should be careful not to adulterate the coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard of significance and value, that it may be reconvertible into the truth it represents.
If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it isnot understood by the person I address, then I am guilty of using words (in so far as they represent truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead consciously; it is like adulterating coin.
Decoration.
“Common people,” said Johnson, “do not accurately adapt their words to their thoughts, nor their thoughts to the objects;”—that is to say, they neither apprehend truly nor speak truly—and in this respect children, half-educated women, and ill-educated men, are the “common people.”
It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education that we are not sufficiently careful to habituate children to the accurate use of words. Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we looked into the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and modifications of conscious and unconscious lying—as exaggeration, equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation—might be traced to the early misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous, careless tone in which people say sometimes “words—words—mere words!” is unthinking and unwise. It tends to debase the value of that which is the only medium of the inner life between man and man:“Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne tenons les uns aux autres, que par la parole,” said Montaigne.
Decoration.
“Weare happy, good, tranquil, in proportion as our inner life is accessible to the external life, and in harmony with it. When we become dead to the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes of day and night (I do not speak here of the sympathetic influences of our fellow-creatures), then we may call ourselves philosophical, but we are surely either bad or mad.”
“Or perhaps only sad?”
There are moments in the life of every contemplative being, when the healing power of Nature is felt—even as Wordsworth describes it—felt in the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such moments converse, sympathy, the faces, the presence of the dearest, come so near to us, they make usshrink; books, pictures, music, anything, any object which has passed through the medium of mind, and has been in a manner humanised, is felt as an intrusive reflection of the busy, weary, thought-worn self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity, giving us a foretaste of that more diffused disembodied life which may hereafter be ours. Beautiful and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old superstitions which placed a haunting divinity in every grove, and heard a living voice responsive in every murmuring stream.
This present Sunday I set off with the others to walk to church, but it was late; I could not keep up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay them, turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the river brink, and crossed the little bridge and strolled along, pensive yet with no definite or continuous subject of thought. How beautiful it was—how tranquil! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath of air! “And where the dead leaf fell there did it rest;” but so still it was that scarce a single leaf did flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the water’s edge was already encumbered with heaps of decaying foliage. Everywhere around, the autumnal tints prevailed, except in one sheltered place under the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificentlime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not a leaf turned or shed. I stood still opposite, looking on it quietly for a long time. It seemed to me a happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced. Then I turned, for close beside me sounded the soft, interrupted, half-suppressed warble of a bird, sitting on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its tiny weight. Some lines which I used to love in my childhood came into my mind, blending softly with the presences around me.
“The little bird now to salute the mornUpon the naked branches sets her foot,The leaves still lying at the mossy root,And there a silly chirruping doth keep,As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep;Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,And sad for winter, too soon coming on!”Drayton.
“The little bird now to salute the mornUpon the naked branches sets her foot,The leaves still lying at the mossy root,And there a silly chirruping doth keep,As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep;Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,And sad for winter, too soon coming on!”Drayton.
The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn, ran wimpling by; not as I had seen it but a few days before,—rolling tumultuously, the dead leaves whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the mountain torrents, making one think of the kelpies, the water wraiths, and such uncanny things,—but gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low sunlight; even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson clusters over the little pools near the bank, and reflected in them as in a mirror, I remember vividly as a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed tomelt into my life. For such moments we are grateful: we feel then what Godcando for us, and what man can not.—Carolside, November 5th, 1843.
Decoration.
“Inthe early ages of faith, the spirit of Christianity glided into and gave a new significance to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms of heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of Christianity, for in that case the spirit would have burst through such extraneous formulæ, and set them aside at once and for ever.”
Decoration.
Questions. In the execution of the penal statutes, can the individual interest of the convict be reconciled with the interest of society? or must the good of the convict and the good of society be considered as inevitably and necessarily opposed?—the one sacrificed to the other, and at the best only a compromise possible?
This is a question pending at present, and will require wise heads to decide it? How would Christ have decided it? When He set the poor accused woman free, was He considering the good of the culprit or the good of society? and how far are we bound to follow His example? If He consigned the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it for atonement or retribution, punishment or penance? and how far are we bound to follow His example?
Decoration.
Imarkedthe following passage in Montaigne as most curiously applicable to the present times, in so far as our religious contests are concerned; and I leave it in his quaint old French.
“C’est un effet de la Providence divine de permettre sa saincte Eglise être agitée, comme nous la voyons, de tant de troubles et d’orages, pour éveillerpar ce contraste les âmes pies et les ravoir de l’oisiveté et du sommeil ou les avail plongées une si longue tranquillité. Si nous contrepèsons la perte que nous avons faite par le nombre de ceux qui se sont dévoyés, au gain qui nous vient par nous être remis en haleine, ressuscité notre zêle et nos forces à l’occasion de ce combat, je ne sais si l’utilité ne surmonte point le dommage.”
Decoration.
“They(the friends of Cassius) were divided in opinion,—some holding that servitude was the extreme of evils, and others that tyranny was better than civil war.”
Unhappy that nation, wherever it may be, where the question is yet pending between servitude and civil war! such a nation might be driven to solve the problem after the manner of Cassius—with the dagger’s point.
“Surely,” said Moore, “it is wrong for the lovers of liberty to identify the principle of resistance to power with such an odious person as the devil!”
Decoration.
“Wherethe the question is of a great deal of good to ensue from a small injustice, men must pursue the things which are just in present, and leave the future to Divine Providence.”
This so simple rule of right is seldom attended to as a rule of life till we are placed in some strait in which it is forced upon us.
Decoration.
Awoman’spatriotism is more of a sentiment than a man’s,—more passionate: it is only an extension of the domestic affections, and with herla patrieis only an enlargement ofhome. In the same manner, a woman’s idea of fame is always a more extended sympathy, and is much more of a presence than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is only the echo—fainter and more distant—of the voice of love.
Decoration.
“Ladoute s’introduit dans l’âme qui rêve, la foi descend dans l’âme qui souffre.”
The reverse is equally true,—and judging from my own experience, I should say oftener true.
Decoration.
“Lacuriosité est si voisine à la perfidie qu’elle peut enlaidir les plus beaux visages.”
Decoration.
WhenI told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I had just received the sad but not unexpected news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with emotion, “A great spirit has passed away from the earth, and has left no adequate memorial of its greatness.” Speaking of him afterwards he said, “Coleridge possessed the creative and inventive spirit of poetry, not the productive; hethoughttoo much toproduce,—the analytical power interfered with the genius: Others with more active faculties seized and worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter Scott and Lord Byron borrowed the first idea of the form and spirit of their narrative poems from Coleridge’s ‘Christabelle.’” This judgment of one great poet and critic passed on another seemed to me worth preserving.
Decoration.
Coleridgesays, “In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”
He might have gone farther, and added: In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness. In religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
Decoration.
In another place he says,—
“Talent lying in the understanding is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.”
There seems confusion here, for genius lies not in the amount of intellect—it is a quality of the intellect apart from quantity. And the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.
Decoration.
Of Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said very truly and beautifully, “that like her father she had the controversialintellectwithout the controversialspirit.”
Decoration.
Weall remember the famousbon motof Talleyrand. When seated between Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier, and pouring forth gallantry, first at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Staël suddenly asked him if she and Madame Récamier fell into the river, which of the two he would save first? “Madame,” replied Talleyrand, “je crois que vous savez nager!” Now we will match this prettybon motwith one far prettier, and founded on it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one dayloitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English garden at Munich, by the side of the beautiful Madame de V., then the object of his devoted admiration. For a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for whom,vaurienas he was, he had ever shown the strongest filial love and respect. Afterwards, as they wandered on, he began to pour forth his soul to the lady of his love with all the eloquence of passion. Suddenly she turned and said to him, “If your mother and myself were both to fall into this river, whom would you save first?” “My mother!” he instantly replied; and then, looking at her expressively, immediately added, “To saveyoufirst would be as if I were to savemyselffirst!”
Decoration.
Ifwe were not always bringing ourselves into comparison with others, we should know them better.