Bride the queen, she loved not the world;She floated on the waves of the worldAs the sea-bird floats upon the billow.Such sleep she slept as the mother sleepsIn the far land of her captivity,Mourning for her child at home.
Bride the queen, she loved not the world;She floated on the waves of the worldAs the sea-bird floats upon the billow.Such sleep she slept as the mother sleepsIn the far land of her captivity,Mourning for her child at home.
Bride the queen, she loved not the world;
She floated on the waves of the world
As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.
Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps
In the far land of her captivity,
Mourning for her child at home.
What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage!
The poetical 'Life of St. Patrick,' too, is full of fine, wild, natural imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and leaving a gigantic footprint on a rock from which he sprang back into heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature of the spot; as it is first told, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy; but in the later prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again, when Patrick is described, as the after-apostle, raising the dead Celts to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force, and we have a long weary list of literal deaths and literal raisings. So in many ways the freshness and individuality was lostwith time. The larger saints swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits; chasms were supplied by an ever ready fancy; and, like the stock of good works laid up for general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready when any defect was to be supplied. So it was that, after the first impulse, the progressive life of a saint rolled on like a snowball down a mountain side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend, appropriate or inappropriate—sometimes real jewels of genuine old tradition, sometimes the débris of the old creeds and legends of heathenism; and on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and was dashed in pieces on the Reformation.
One more illustration shall serve as evidence of what the really greatest, most vigorous, minds in the twelfth century could accept as possible or probable, which they could relate (on what evidence we do not know) as really ascertained facts. We remember something of St. Anselm: both as a statesman and as a theologian, he was unquestionably among the ablest men of his time alive in Europe. Here is a story which Anselm tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran. The saint, with thirty of his companions, was preaching within the frontiers of a lawless Pagan prince; and, disregarding all orders to be quiet or to leave the country, continued to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the ears of the prince himself. Things took their natural course. Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers was sent, and the saint and his little band were decapitated. The scene of the execution was a wood, and the heads and trunks were left lying there for the wolves and the wild birds.
But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the Church in the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by Divine Providence to preserve the bodies of these saints from profanation. The trunk of Kieran rose from the ground, and selecting first his own head, and carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of his companions, giving each body its own head, he dug graves for them and buried them, and last of all buried himself.
But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the Church in the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by Divine Providence to preserve the bodies of these saints from profanation. The trunk of Kieran rose from the ground, and selecting first his own head, and carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of his companions, giving each body its own head, he dug graves for them and buried them, and last of all buried himself.
It is even so. So it stands written in a life claiming Anselm's authorship; and there is no reason why the authorship should not be his. Out of the heart come the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the intellect or the understanding.Men are not good or bad, noble or base—thank God for it!—as they judge well or ill of the probabilities of nature, but as they love God and hate the devil. And yet the story is instructive. We have heard grave good men—men of intellect and influence—with all the advantages of modern science, learning, experience; men who would regard Anselm with sad and serious pity; yet tell us stories, as having fallen within their own experience, of the marvels of mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is ridiculous) as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.
Mutato nomine, de teFabula narratur.
Mutato nomine, de teFabula narratur.
Mutato nomine, de te
Fabula narratur.
We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and turn away and straightway forget what manner of men we are. The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.
FOOTNOTES:[Z]Written in 1850.
[Z]Written in 1850.
[Z]Written in 1850.
1850.
From St. Anselm to Mr. Emerson, from the 'Acta Sanctorum' to the 'Representative Men;' so far in seven centuries we have travelled. The races of the old Ideals have become extinct like the Preadamite Saurians; and here are our new pattern specimens on which we are to look, and take comfort and encouragement to ourselves.
The philosopher, the mystic, the poet, the sceptic, the man of the world, the writer; these are the present moral categories, thesumma generaof human greatness as Mr. Emerson arranges them. From every point of view an exceptionable catalogue. They are all thinkers, to begin with, except one: and thought is but a poor business compared to action. Saints did not earn canonisation by the number of their folios; and if the necessities of the times are now driving our best men out of action into philosophy and verse-making, so much the worse for them and so much the worse for the world. The one pattern actor, 'the man of the world,' is Napoleon Bonaparte, not in the least a person, as we are most of us at present feeling, whose example the world desires to see followed. Mr. Emerson would have done better if he had kept to his own side of the Atlantic. He is paying his own countrymen but a poor compliment by coming exclusively to Europe for his heroes; and he would be doing us in Europe more real good by a great deal if he would tell us something of the backwoodsmen in Kentucky and Ohio. However, to let that pass; it is not our business here to quarrel either with him or his book; and the book stands at the head of our article rather because it presents a very noticeable deficiency of which its writer is either unaware or careless.
These six predicables, as the logician would call them, what are they? Are theyultimate generarefusing to be classified farther? or is there any other larger type of greatness under which they fall? In the naturalist's catalogue, poet, sceptic, and the rest will all be classified as men—man being an intelligible entity. Has Mr. Emerson any similar clear idea of great man or good man? If so, where is he? what is he? It is desirable that we should know. Men will not get to heaven because they lie under one or other of these predicables. What is that supreme type of character which is in itself good or great, unqualified with any fartherdifferentia? Is there any such? and if there be, where is the representative of this? It may be said that the generic man exists nowhere in an ideal unity—that if considered at all, he must be abstracted from the various sorts of men, black and white, tame or savage. So if we would know what a great man or a good man means, we must look to some specific line in which he is good, and abstract our general idea. And that is very well, provided we know what we are about; provided we understand, in our abstracting, how to get the essential idea distinctly out before ourselves, without entangling ourselves in the accidents. Human excellence, after all the teaching of the last eighteen hundred years, ought to be something palpable by this time. It is the one thing which we are all taught to seek and to aim at forming in ourselves; and if representative men are good for anything at all, it can only be, not as they represent merely curious combinations of phenomena, but as they illustrate us in a completely realised form, what we are, every single one of us, equally interested in understanding. It is not the 'great man' as 'man of the world' that we care for, but the 'man of the world' as a 'great man'—which is a very different thing. Having to live in this world, how to live greatly here is the question for us; not, how, being great, we can cast our greatness in a worldly mould. There may be endless successful 'men of the world' who are mean or little enough all the while; and the Emersonian attitude will confuse success with greatness, or turn our ethics into a chaos of absurdity. So it is with everything which man undertakes and works in. Life has grown complicated; and for one employment in old times there are a hundred now. But it is nottheywhich are anything, butwe. We are theend, they are but the means, the material—like the clay, or the marble, or the bronze in which the sculptor carves his statue. Theformis everything; and what is the form? From nursery to pulpit every teacher rings on the one note—be good, be noble, be men. What is goodness then? and what is nobleness? and where are the examples? We do not say that there are none. God forbid! That is not what we are meaning at all. If the earth had ceased to bear men pleasant in God's sight, it would have passed away like the cities in the plain. But who are they? which are they? how are we to know them? They are our leaders in this life campaign of ours. If we could see them, we would follow them, and save ourselves many and many a fall, and many an enemy whom we could have avoided, if we had known of him. It cannot be that the thing is so simple, when names of highest reputation are wrangled over, and such poor counterfeits are mobbed with applauding followers. In art and science we can detect the charlatan, but in life we do not recognise him so readily—we do not recognise the charlatan, and we do not recognise the true man. Rajah Brooke is alternately a hero or a pirate; and fifty of the best men among us are likely to have fifty opinions on the merits of Elizabeth or Cromwell.
But surely, men say, the thing is simple. The commandments are simple. It is not that people do not know, but that they will not act up to what they know. We hear a great deal of this in sermons, and elsewhere; and of course, as everybody's experience will tell him, there is a great deal too much reason why we should hear of it. But there are two sorts of duty, positive and negative; what we ought to do, and what we ought not to do. To the latter of these, conscience is pretty much awake; but by cunningly concentrating its attention on one side of the matter, conscience has contrived to forget altogether that any other sort exists at all. 'Doing wrong' is breaking a commandment which forbids us to do some particular thing. That is all the notion which in common language is attached to the idea. Do not kill, steal, lie, swear, commit adultery, or break the Lord's day—these are the commandments; very simple, doubtless, and easy to be known. But, after all, what are they? They are no more than the very first and rudimental conditions of goodness. Obedience to these is not morethan a small part of what is required of us; it is no more than the foundation on which the superstructure of character is to be raised. To go through life, and plead at the end of it that we have not broken any of these commandments, is but what the unprofitable servant did, who kept his talent carefully unspent, and yet was sent to outer darkness for his uselessness. Suppose these commandments obeyed—what then? It is but a small portion of our time which, we will hope, is spent in resisting temptation to break them. What are we to do with the rest of it? Or suppose them (and this is a high step indeed) resolved into love of God and love of our neighbour. Suppose we know that it is our duty to love our neighbour as ourselves. What are we to do, then, for our neighbour, besides abstaining from doing him injury? The saints knew very well whattheywere to do; but our duties, we suppose, lie in a different direction; and it does not appear that we have found them. 'We have duties so positive to our neighbour,' says Bishop Butler, 'that if we give more of our time and of our attention to ourselves and our own matters than is our just due, we are taking what is not ours, and are guilty of fraud.' What does Bishop Butler mean? It is easy to answer generally. In detail, it is not only difficult, it is impossible to answer at all. The modern world says—'Mind your own business, and leave others to take care of theirs;' and whoever among us aspires to more than the negative abstaining from wrong, is left to his own guidance. There is no help for him, no instruction, no modern ideal which shall be to him what the heroes were to the young Greek or Roman, or the martyrs to the middle age Christian. There is neither track nor footprint in the course which he will have to follow, while, as in the old fairy tale, the hillside which he is climbing is strewed with black stones mocking at him with their thousand voices. We have no moral criterion, no idea, no counsels of perfection; and surely this is the reason why education is so little prosperous with us; because the only education worth anything is the education of character, and we cannot educate a character unless we have some notion of what we would form. Young men, as we know, are more easily led than driven. It is a very old story that to forbid this and that (so curious and contradictory is our nature) is to stimulate a desire to do it. But place before a boy afigure of a noble man; let the circumstances in which he has earned his claim to be called noble be such as the boy himself sees round himself; let him see this man rising over his temptation, and following life victoriously and beautifully forward, and, depend on it, you will kindle his heart as no threat of punishment here or anywhere will kindle it.
People complain of the sameness in the 'Lives of the Saints.' It is that very sameness which is the secret of their excellence. There is a sameness in the heroes of the 'Iliad;' there is a sameness in the historical heroes of Greece and Rome. A man is great as he contends best with the circumstances of his age, and those who fight best with the same circumstances, of course grow like each other. And so with our own age—if we really could have the lives of our best men written for us (and written well, by men who knew what to look for, and what it was on which they should insist), they would be just as like as each other too, and would for that reason be of such infinite usefulness. They would not be like the old Ideals. Times are changed; they were one thing, we have to be another—their enemies are not ours. There is a moral metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lineament of form or feature remains identical; yet surely not because less is demanded of us—not less, but more—more, as we are again and again told on Sundays from the pulpits; if the preachers would but tell us in what that 'more' consists. The loftiest teaching we ever hear is, that we are to work in the spirit of love; but we are still left to generalities, while action divides and divides into ever smaller details. It is as if the Church said to the painter or to the musician whom she was training, you must work in the spirit of love and in the spirit of truth; and then adding, that the Catholic painting or the Catholic music was what he wasnotto imitate, supposed that she had sent him out into the world equipped fully for his enterprise.
And what comes of this? Emersonianism has come, modern hagiology has come, and Ainsworth novels and Bulwer novels, and a thousand more unclean spirits. We have cast out the Catholic devil, and the Puritan has swept the house and garnished it; but as yet we do not see any symptoms showing of a healthy incoming tenant, and there may be worse states than Catholicism. If we wanted proofof the utter spiritual disintegration into which we have fallen, it would be enough that we have no biographies. We do not mean that we have no written lives of our fellow-creatures; there are enough and to spare. But not any one is there in which the ideal tendencies of this age can be discerned in their true form; not one, or hardly any one, which we could place in a young man's hands, with such warm confidence as would let us say of it—'Read that; there is a man—such a man as you ought to be; read it, meditate on it; see what he was, and how he made himself what he was, and try and be yourself like him.' This, as we saw lately, is what Catholicism did. It had its one broad type of perfection, which in countless thousands of instances was perpetually reproducing itself—a type of character not especially belonging to any one profession; it was a type to which priest and layman, knight or bishop, king or peasant, might equally aspire: men of all sorts aspired to it, and men of all sorts attained to it; and as fast as she had realised them (so to say), the Church took them in her arms, and held them up before the world as fresh and fresh examples of victory over the devil. This is what that Church was able to do, and it is what we cannot do; and yet, till we can learn to do it, no education which we can offer has any chance of prospering. Perfection is not easy; it is of all things most difficult; difficult to know and difficult to practise. Rules of life will not do; even if our analysis of life in all its possible forms were as complete as it is in fact rudimentary, they would still be inefficient. The philosophy of the thing might be understood, but the practice would be as far off as ever. In life, as in art, and as in mechanics, the only profitable teaching is the teaching by example. Your mathematician, or your man of science, may discourse excellently on the steam engine, yet he cannot make one; he cannot make a bolt or a screw. The master workman in the engine-room does not teach his apprentice the theory of expansion, or of atmospheric pressure; he guides his hand upon the turncock, he practises his eye upon the index, and he leaves the science to follow when the practice has become mechanical. So it is with everything which man learns to do; and yet for the art of arts, the trade of trades, forlife, we content ourselves with teaching our children the catechism and the commandments; we preach them sermons on thegood of being good, and the evil of being evil; in our higher education we advance to the theory of habit and the freedom of the will; and then, when failure follows failure,ipsa experientia reclamante, we hug ourselves with a complacent self-satisfied reflection that the fault is not ours, that all which men could do we have done. The freedom of the will!—as if a blacksmith would ever teach a boy to make a horseshoe, by telling him he could make one if he chose.
In setting out on our journey through life, we are like strangers set to find their way across a difficult and entangled country. It is not enough for us to know that others have set out as we set out, that others have faced the lions in the path and overcome them, and have arrived at last at the journey's end. Such a knowledge may give us heart—but the help it gives is nothing beyond teaching us that the difficulties are not insuperable. It is thetrack, which these others, these pioneers of godliness, have beaten in, that we cry to have shown us; not a mythic 'Pilgrim's Progress,' but a real path trodden in by real men. Here is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be climbed; here is a morass or a river, and there is a bridge in one place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in this forest, and wild beasts in that; the tracks cross and recross, and, as in the old labyrinth, only one will bring us right. The age of the saints has passed; they are no longer any service to us; we must walk in their spirit, but not along their road; and in this sense we say, that we have no pattern great men, no biographies, no history, which are of real service to us. It is the remarkable characteristic of the present time, as far as we know—a new phenomenon since history began to be written; one more proof, if we wanted proof, that we are entering on another era. In our present efforts at educating, we are like workmen setting about to make a machine which they know is to be composed of plates and joints, and wheels and screws and springs:—they temper their springs, and smooth their plates, and carve out carefully their wheels and screws, but having no idea of the machine in its combination, they either fasten them together at random, and create some monster of disjointed undirected force, or else pile the finished materials into a heap together, and trust to some organic spirit in themselves which will shape them into unity. We do not know what we would beat—make our children into men, says one—but what sort of men? The Greeks were men, so were the Jews, so were the Romans, so were the old Saxons, the Normans, the Duke of Alva's Spaniards, and Cromwell's Puritans. These were all men, and strong men too; yet all different, and all differently trained. 'Into Christian men,' say others: but the saints were Christian men; yet the modern Englishmen have been offered the saints' biographies, and have with sufficient clearness expressed their opinion of them.
Alas! in all this confusion, only those keen-eyed children of this world find their profit; their idea does not readily forsake them. In their substantial theory of life, the business of man in it is to get on, to thrive, to prosper, to have riches in possession. They will have their little ones taught, by the law of demand, what will fetch its price in the market; and this is clear, bold, definite, straightforward—and therefore it is strong, and works its way. It works and will prevail for a time; for a time—but not for ever, unless indeed religion be all a dream, and our airy notions of ourselves a vision out of which our wise age is the long-waited-for awakening.
It would be a weary and odious business to follow out all the causes which have combined to bring us into our present state. Many of them lie deep down in the roots of humanity, and many belong to that large system of moral causation which works through vast masses of mankind—which, impressing peculiar and necessary features on the eras as they succeed, leaves individuals but a limited margin within which they may determine what they will be. One cause, however, may be mentioned, which lies near the surface, and which for many reasons it may be advantageous to consider. At first thought it may seem superficial and captious; but we do not think it will at the second, and still less at the third.
Protestantism, and even Anglo-Protestantism, has not been without its great men. In their first fierce struggle for existence, these creeds gave birth to thousands whose names may command any rank in history. But alone of all forms of religion, past or present, and we will add (as we devoutly hope), to come (for in her present form, at least, the Church of England cannot long remain), Protestantism knows not what to do with her own offspring; she is unable to give them open and honourable recognition. Entangled inspeculative theories of human depravity, of the worthlessness of the best which the best men can do, Protestantism is unable to say heartily of any one, 'Here is a good man to be loved and remembered with reverence.' There are no saints in the English Church. The English Church does not pretend to saints. Her children may live purely, holily, and beautifully, but her gratitude for them must be silent; she may not thank God for them—she may not hold them up before her congregation. They may or they may not have been really good, but she may not commit herself to attributing a substantial value to the actions of a nature so corrupt as that of man. Among Protestants, the Church of England is the worst, for she is not wholly Protestant. In the utterness of the self-abnegation of the genuine Protestant there is something approaching the heroic. But she, ambitious of being Catholic as well as Protestant, like that old Church of evil memory which would be neither hot nor cold, will neither wholly abandon merit, nor wholly claim it; but halts on between two opinions, claiming and disclaiming, saying and in the next breath again unsaying. The Oxford student being asked for the doctrine of the Anglican Church on good works, knew the rocks and whirlpools among which an unwary answer might involve him, and steering midway between Scylla and Charybdis, replied, with laudable caution, 'a few of them would not do a man any harm.' It is scarcely a caricature of the prudence of the Articles. And so at last it has come to this with us. The soldier can raise a column to his successful general; the halls of the law courts are hung round with portraits of the ermined sages; Newton has his statue, and Harvey and Watt, in the academies of the sciences; and each young aspirant after fame, entering for the first time upon the calling which he has chosen, sees high excellence highly honoured; sees the high career, and sees its noble ending, marked out each step of it in golden letters. But the Church's aisles are desolate, and desolate they must remain. There is no statue for the Christian. The empty niches stare out like hollow eye-sockets from the walls. Good men live in the Church and die in her, whose story written out or told would be of inestimable benefit, but she may not write it. She may speak of goodness, but not of the good man; as she may speak of sin, but may not censure the sinner. Her positionis critical; the Dissenters would lay hold of it. She may not do it, but she will do what she can. She cannot tolerate an image indeed, or a picture of her own raising; she has no praise to utter at her children's graves, when their lives have witnessed to her teaching. But if others will bear the expense and will risk the sin, she will offer no objection. Her walls are naked. The wealthy ones among her congregation may adorn them as they please; the splendour of a dead man's memorial shall be, not as his virtues were, but as his purse; and his epitaph may be brilliant according as there are means to pay for it. They manage things better at the museums and the institutes.
Let this pass, however, as the worst case. There are other causes at work besides the neglect of churches; the neglect itself being as much a result as a cause. There is a common dead level over the world, to which churches and teachers, however seemingly opposite, are alike condemned. As it is here in England, so it is with the American Emerson. The fault is not in them, but in the age of which they are no more than the indicators. We are passing out of old forms of activity into others new and on their present scale untried; and how to work nobly in them is the one problem for us all. Surius will not profit us, nor the 'Mort d'Arthur.' Our calling is neither to the hermitage nor to the round table. Our work lies now in those peaceful occupations which, in ages called heroic, were thought unworthy of noble souls. In those it was the slave who tilled the ground, and wove the garments. It was the ignoble burgher who covered the sea with his ships, and raised up factories and workshops; and how far such occupations influenced the character, how they could be made to minister to loftiness of heart, and high and beautiful life, was a question which could not occur while the atmosphere of the heroic was on all sides believed so alien to them. Times have changed. The old hero worship has vanished with the need of it; but no other has risen in its stead, and without it we wander in the dark. The commonplaces of morality, the negative commandments, general exhortations to goodness, while neither speaker nor hearer can tell what they mean by goodness—these are all which now remain to us; and thrown into a life more complicated than any which the earth has yet experienced, we are left to wind ourway through the labyrinth of its details without any clue except our own instincts, our own knowledge, our own hopes and desires.
We complain of generalities; we will not leave ourselves exposed to the same charge. We will mention a few of the thousand instances in which we cry for guidance and find none; instances on which those who undertake to teach us ought to have made up their minds.
On the surface at least of the Prayer-book, there seems to be something left remaining of the Catholic penitential system. Fasting is spoken of and abstinence, and some form or other of self-inflicted self-denial is necessarily meant. This thing can by no possibility be unimportant, and we may well smile at the exclusive claims of a church to the cure of our souls, who is unable to say what she thinks about it. Let us ask her living interpreters then, and what shall we get for an answer? either no answer at all, or contradictory answers; angrily, violently, passionately, contradictory. Among the many voices, what is a young man to conclude? He will conclude naturally according to his inclination; and if he chooses right, it will most likely be on a wrong motive.
Again,courageis, on all hands, considered as an essential of high character. Among all fine people, old and modern, wherever we are able to get an insight into their training system, we find it a thing particularly attended to. The Greeks, the Romans, the old Persians, our own nation till the last two hundred years, whoever of mankind have turned out good for anything anywhere, knew very well, that to exhort a boy to be brave without training him in it, would be like exhorting a young colt to submit to the bridle without breaking him in. Step by step, as he could bear it, the boy was introduced to danger, till his pulse ceased to be agitated, and he became familiarised with peril as his natural element. It was a matter of carefully considered, thoroughly recognised, and organised education. But courage nowadays is not a paying virtue. Courage does not help to make money, and so we have ceased to care about it; and boys are left to educate one another by their own semi-brutal instincts, in this, which is perhaps the most important of all features in the human character. Schools, as far as the masters are concerned with them, are places for teachingGreek and Latin—that, and nothing more. At the universities, fox-hunting is, perhaps, the only discipline of the kind now to be found, and fox-hunting, by forbidding it and winking at it, the authorities have contrived to place on as demoralising a footing as ingenuity could devise.[AA]
To pass from training to life. A boy has done with school and college; he has become a man, and has to choose his profession. It is the one most serious step which he has yet taken. In most cases, there is no recalling it. He believes that he is passing through life to eternity; that his chance of getting to heaven depends on what use he makes of his time; he prays every day that he may be delivered from temptation; it is his business to see that he does not throw himself into it. Now, every one of the many professions has a peculiar character of its own, which, with rare exceptions, it inflicts on those who follow it. There is the shopkeeper type, the manufacturer type, the lawyer type, the medical type, the clerical type, the soldier's, the sailor's. The nature of a man is
Like the dyer's hand,Subdued to what it works in;
Like the dyer's hand,Subdued to what it works in;
Like the dyer's hand,
Subdued to what it works in;
and we can distinguish with ease, on the slightest intercourse, to what class a grown person belongs. It is to be seen in his look, in his words, in his tone of thought, his voice, gesture, even in his hand-writing; and in everything which he does. Every human employment has its especial moral characteristic, its peculiar temptations, its peculiar influences—of a subtle and not easily analysed kind, and only to be seen in their effects. Here, therefore—here, if anywhere, we want Mr. Emerson with his representatives, or the Church with her advice and warning. But, in fact, what attempt do we see to understand any of this, or even to acknowledge it; to master the moral side of the professions; to teach young men entering them what they are to expect, what to avoid, or what to seek? Where are the highest types—the pattern lawyer, and shopkeeper, and merchant? Are they all equally favourable to excellence of character? Do they offer equal opportunities? Which best suits this disposition, and which suits that? Alas! character is little thought of in the choice. It is rather, whichshall I best succeed in? Where shall I make most money? Suppose an anxious boy to go for counsel to his spiritual mother; to go to her, and ask her to guide him. Shall I be a soldier? he says. What will she tell him? This and no more—you may, without sin. Shall I be a lawyer, merchant, manufacturer, tradesman, engineer? Still the same answer. But which is best? he demands. We do not know: we do not know. There is no guilt in either; you may take which you please, provided you go to church regularly, and are honest and good. If he is foolish enough to persist further, and ask, in what goodness and honesty consist inhis especial department(whichever he selects), he will receive the same answer; in other words, he will be told to give every man his due and be left to find out for himself in what 'his due' consists. It is like an artist telling his pupil to put the lights and shadows in their due places, and leaving it to the pupil's ingenuity to interpret such instructive directions.
One more instance of an obviously practical kind. Masters, few people will now deny, owe certain duties to their workmen beyond payment at the competition price for their labour, and the workmen owe something to their masters beyond making their own best bargain. Courtesy, on the one side, and respect on the other, are at least due; and wherever human beings are brought in contact, a number of reciprocal obligations at once necessarily arise out of the conditions of their position. It is this question which at the present moment is convulsing an entire branch of English trade. It is this question which has shaken the Continent like an earthquake, and yet it is one which, the more it is thought about, the more clearly seems to refuse to admit of being dealt with by legislation. It is a question for the Gospel and not for the law. The duties are of the kind which it is the business, not of the State, but of the Church, to look to. Why is the Church silent? There are duties; let her examine them, sift them, prove them, and then point them out. Why not—why not? Alas! she cannot, she dare not give offence, and therefore must find none. It is to be feared that we have a rough trial to pass through, before we find our way and understand our obligations. Yet far off we seem to see a time when the lives, the actions of the really great, great good masters, great good landlords, great good working men, will be laid out once more before their severalorders, laid out in the name of God, as once the saints' lives were; and the same sounds shall be heard in factory and in counting-house as once sounded through abbey, chapel, and cathedral aisle—'Look at these men; bless God for them, and follow them.'
And let no one fear that, if such happy time were come, it would result in a tame and weary sameness; that the beautiful variety of individual form would be lost, drilled away in regimental uniformity. Even if it were so, it need not be any the worse for us; we are not told to develope our individualities, we are told to bear fruit. The poor vagabond, with all his individualities about him, if by luck he falls into the hands of the recruiting sergeant, finds himself, a year later, with his red coat and his twelve months' training, not a little the better for the loss of them. But such schooling as we have been speaking of will drill out only such individualities as are of the unworthy kind, and will throw the strength of the nature into the development of the healthiest features in it. Far more, as things now are, we see men sinking into sameness—an inorganic, unwholesome sameness, in which the higher nature is subdued, and themanis sacrificed to the profession. The circumstances of his life are his world; and he sinks under them, he does not conquer them. If he has to choose between the two, God's uniform is better than the world's. The first gives him freedom; the second takes it from him. Only here, as in everything, we must understand the nature of the element in which we work; understand it; understand the laws of it. Throw off the lower laws; the selfish, debasing influences of the profession; obey the higher; follow love, truthfulness, manliness; follow these first, and make the profession serve them; and that is freedom; there is none else possible for man.
Das Gesetz soll nur uns Freiheit geben;
Das Gesetz soll nur uns Freiheit geben;
Das Gesetz soll nur uns Freiheit geben;
and whatever individuality is lost in the process, we may feel assured that the devil has too much to do with, to make us care to be rid of it.
But how to arrive at this? so easy as it is to suggest on paper, so easy to foretell in words. Raise the level of public opinion, we might say; insist on a higher standard; in the economist's language, increase the demand for goodness, andthe supply will follow; or, at any rate, men will do their best. Until we require more of one another, more will not be provided. But this is but to restate the problem in other words. How are we to touch the heart; how to awaken the desire? We believe that the good man, the great man, whatever he be, prince or peasant, is really lovely; that really and truly, if we can only see him, he more than anything will move us; and at least, we have a right to demand that the artificial hindrances which prevent our lifting him above the crowd, shall be swept away. He in his beautiful life is a thousand times more God's witness than any preacher in a pulpit, and his light must not be concealed any more. As we said, what lies in the way of our sacred recognition of great men is more than anything else the Protestant doctrine of good works. We do not forget what it meant when the world first heard of it. It was a cry from the very sanctuary of the soul, flinging off and execrating the accursed theory of merits, the sickening parade of redundant saintly virtues, which the Roman Church had converted into stock, and dispensed for the benefit of the believers. This is not the place to pour out our nausea on so poor, yet so detestable a farce. But it seems with all human matters, that as soon as spiritual truths are petrified into doctrines, it is another name for their death. They die, corrupt, and breed a pestilence. The doctrine of good works was hurled away by an instinct of generous feeling, and this feeling itself has again become dead, and a fresh disease has followed upon it. Nobody (or, at least, nobody good for anything) will lay a claim to merit for this or that good action which he may have done. Exactly in proportion as a man is really good, will be the eagerness with which he will refuse all credit for it; he will cry out, with all his soul, 'Not unto us—not unto us.'
And yet, practically, we all know and feel that between man and man there is an infinite moral difference; one is good, one is bad, another hovers between the two; the whole of our conduct to each other is necessarily governed by a recognition of this fact, just as it is in the analogous question of the will. Ultimately, we are nothing of ourselves; we know that we are but what God has given us grace to be—we did not make ourselves—we do not keep ourselves here—we are but what in the eternal order of Providence we were designed to be—exactly that and nothing else; and yet wetreat each other as responsible; we cannot help it. The most rigid Calvinist cannot eliminate his instincts; his loves and hatreds seem rather to deepen in intensity of colouring as, logically, his creed should lead him to conquer them as foolish. It is useless, it is impossible, to bring down these celestial mysteries upon our earth, to try to see our way by them, or determine our feelings by them; men are good, men are bad, relatively to us and to our understandings if you will, but still really, and so they must be treated.
There is no more mischievous falsehood than to persist in railing at man's nature, as if it were all vile together, as if the best and the worst which comes of it were in God's sight equally without worth. These denunciations tend too fatally to realise themselves. Tell a man that no good which he can do is of any value, and depend upon it he will take you at your word—most especially will the wealthy, comfortable, luxurious man, just the man who has most means to do good, and whom of all things it is most necessary to stimulate to it. Surely we should not be afraid. The instincts which God has placed in our hearts are too mighty for us to be able to extinguish them with doctrinal sophistry. We love the good man, we praise him, we admire him—we cannot help it; and surely it is mere cowardice to shrink from recognising it openly—thankfully, divinely recognising it. If true at all, there is no truth in heaven or earth of deeper practical importance to us; and Protestantism must have lapsed from its once generous spirit, if it persists in imposing a dogma of its own upon our hearts, the touch of which is fatal as the touch of a torpedo to any high or noble endeavours after excellence.
'Drive out nature with a fork, she ever comes running back;' and while we leave out of consideration the reality, we are filling the chasm with inventions of our own. The only novels which are popular among us are those which picture the successful battles of modern men and women with modern life, which are imperfect shadows of those real battles which every reader has seen in some form or other, or has longed to see in his own small sphere. It shows where the craving lies if we had but the courage to meet it; why need we fall back on imagination to create what God has created ready for us? In every department of human life, in the more and the less, there is always one man whois the best, and one type of man which is the best, living and working his silent way to heaven in the very middle of us. Let us find this type then—let us see what it is which makes such men the best, and raise up their excellencies into an acknowledged and open standard, of which they themselves shall be the living witnesses. Is there a landlord who is spending his money, not on pineries and hothouses, but on schools, and washhouses, and drains, who is less intent on the magnificence of his own grand house, than in providing cottages for his people where decency is possible; then let us not pass him by with a torpid wonder or a vanishing emotion of pleasure—rather let us seize him and raise him up upon a pinnacle, that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps, their hearts may prick them; and the world shall learn from what one man has done what they have a right to require that others shall do.
So it might be through the thousand channels of life. It should not be so difficult; the machinery is ready, both to find your men and to use them. In theory, at least, every parish has its pastor, and the state of every soul is or ought to be known. We know not what turn things may take, or what silent changes are rushing on below us. Even while the present organisation remains—but, alas! no—it is no use to urge a Church bound hand and foot in State shackles to stretch its limbs in any wholesome activity. If the teachers of the people really were the wisest and best and noblest men among us, this and a thousand other blessed things would follow from it; till then let us be content to work and pray, and lay our hand to the wheel wherever we can find a spoke to grasp.Corruptio optimi est pessima; the national Church as it ought to be is the soul and conscience of the body politic, but a man whose body has the direction of his conscience we do not commonly consider in the most hopeful moral condition.
FOOTNOTES:[AA]Written 1850.
[AA]Written 1850.
[AA]Written 1850.
Lord Macaulay, in his Essay on Machiavelli, propounds a singular theory. Declining the various solutions which have been offered to explain how a man supposed to be so great could have lent his genius to the doctrine of 'the Prince,' he has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's character, but which, as an exposition of a universal ethical theory, is as questionable as what it is brought forward to explain. We will not show Lord Macaulay the disrespect of supposing that he has attempted an elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that he may have been exercising his genius with a paradox, but the subject is not of the sort in which we can patiently permit such exercises. It is hard work with all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see the road with all plainness as it lies out before us; and clever men must be good enough to find something else to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our eyes with sophistry.
According to this conception of human nature, the basenesses and the excellencies of mankind are no more than accidents of circumstance, the results of national feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and treachery, and lying, and such other 'natural defences of the weak against the strong,' are in themselves neither good nor bad, except as thinking makes them so. They are the virtues of a weak people, and they will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable; they are to the full as compatible with the highest graces and most lofty features of the heart and intellect as any of those opposite so called heroisms which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolise the name. Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may wenot feel for victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding, he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, the free and noble nature of the Moor is wrecked through a single infirmity, by a fiend in the human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago's keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable as Othello's daring appears to us, and Othello himself little better than a fool and a savage. It is but a change of scene, of climate, of the animal qualities of the frame, and evil has become good, and good has become evil. Now, our displeasure with Lord Macaulay is, not that he has advanced a novel and mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in the finely tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric at Athens; and so long as such a phenomenon as a cultivated rogue remains possible among mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any number of philosophical disguises. Seldom or never, however, has it appeared with so little attempt at disguise. It has been left for questionable poets and novelists to idealise the rascal genus; philosophers have escaped into the ambiguities of general propositions, and we do not remember elsewhere to have met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying two whole organic characters, with their vices and virtues in full life and bloom, side by side, asking himself which is best, and answering gravely that it is a matter of taste.
Lord Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors; he has shrunk from no conclusion, and has looked directly into the very heart of the matter; he has struck, as we believe, the very lowest stone of our ethical convictions, and declared that the foundation quakes under it.
For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right, and wrong is wrong? People in general accept it on authority; but authority itself must repose on some ulterior basis; and what is that? Are we to say that in morals there is a system of primary axioms, out of which we develope our conclusions, and apply them, as they are needed, to life? It does not appear so. The analogy of morals is rather with art than with geometry. The grace of heaven gives us good men, and gives us beautiful creations; and we, perceivingby the instincts within ourselves that celestial presence in the objects on which we gaze, find out for ourselves the laws which make them what they are, not by comparing them with any antecedent theory, but by careful analysis of our own impressions, by asking ourselves what it is which we admire in them, and by calling that good, and calling that beautiful.
So, then, if admiration be the first fact—if the sense of it be the ultimate ground on which the after temple of morality, as a system, upraises itself—if we can be challenged here on our own ground, and fail to make it good, what we call the life of the soul becomes a dream of a feeble enthusiast, and we moralists a mark for the sceptic's finger to point at with scorn.
Bold and ably-urged arguments against our own convictions, if they do not confuse us, will usually send us back over our ground to re-examine the strength of our positions: and if we are honest with ourselves, we shall very often find points of some uncertainty left unguarded, of which the show of the strength of our enemy will oblige us to see better to the defence. It was not without some shame, and much uneasiness, that, while we were ourselves engaged in this process, full of indignation with Lord Macaulay, we heard a clear voice ringing in our ear, 'Who art thou that judgest another?' and warning us of the presence in our own heart of a sympathy, which we could not 'deny,' with the sadly questionable hero of the German epic, 'Reynard the Fox.' With our vulpine friend, we were on the edge of the very same abyss, if, indeed, we were not rolling in the depth of it. By what sophistry could we justify ourselves, if not by the very same which we had just been so eagerly condemning? And our conscience whispered to us that we had been swift to detect a fault in another, because it was the very fault to which, in our own heart of hearts, we had a latent leaning.
Was it so indeed, then? Was Reineke no better than Iago? Was the sole difference between them, that thevates sacerwho had sung the exploits of Reineke loved the wicked rascal, and entangled us in loving him? It was a question to be asked. And yet we had faith enough in the straight-forwardness of our own sympathies to feel sure that it must admit of some sort of answer. And, indeed, we rapidly foundan answer satisfactory enough to give us time to breathe, in remembering that Reineke, with all his roguery, has no malice in him. It is not in his nature to hate; he could not do it if he tried. The characteristic of Iago is that deep motiveless malignity which rejoices in evil as its proper element—which loves evil as good men love virtue. In calculations on the character of the Moor, Iago despises Othello's unsuspicious trustingness as imbecility, while he hates him as a man because his nature is the perpetual opposite and perpetual reproach of his own. Now, Reineke would not have hurt a creature, not even Scharfenebbe, the crow's wife, when she came to peck his eyes out, if he had not been hungry; and thatγαστρος αναγκη, that craving of the stomach, makes a difference quite infinite. It is true that, like Iago, Reineke rejoices in the exercise of his intellect: the sense of his power and the scientific employment of his time are a real delight to him; but then, as we said, he does not love evil for its own sake; he is only somewhat indifferent to it. If the other animals venture to take liberties with him, he will repay them in their own coin, and get his quiet laugh at them at the same time; but the object generally for which he lives is the natural one of getting his bread for himself and his family; and, as the great moralist says, 'It is better to be bad for something than for nothing.' Badness generally is undesirable; but badness in its essence, which may be called heroic badness, is gratuitous.
But this first thought served merely to give us a momentary relief from our alarm, and we determined we would sift the matter to the bottom, and no more expose ourselves to be taken at such disadvantage. We went again to the poem, with our eyes open, and our moral sense as keenly awake as a genuine wish to understand our feelings could make it. We determined that we would really know what we did feel and what we did not. We would not be lightly scared away from our friend, but neither would we any more allow our judgment to be talked down by that fluent tongue of his; he should have justice from us, he and his biographer, as far as it lay with us to discern justice and to render it.
And really on this deliberate perusal it did seem little less than impossible that we could find any conceivable attribute illustrated in Reineke's proceedings which we could dare to enter in our catalogue of virtues, and not blush to read itthere. What sin is there in the Decalogue in which he has not steeped himself to the lips? To the lips, shall we say? nay, over head and ears—rolling and rollicking in sin. Murder, and theft, and adultery; sacrilege, perjury, lying—his very life is made of them. On he goes to the end, heaping crime on crime, and lie on lie, and at last, when it seems that justice, which has been so long vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron grasp, there is a solemn appeal to heaven, a challenge, a battle ordeal, in which, by means we may not venture even to whisper, the villain prospers, and comes out glorious, victorious, amidst the applause of a gazing world. To crown it all, the poet tells us that under the disguise of the animal name and form the world of man is represented, and the true course of it; and the idea of the book is, that we who read it may learn therein to discern between good and evil, and choose the first and avoid the last. It seemed beyond the power of sophistry to whitewash Reineke, and the interest which still continued to cling to him seemed too nearly to resemble the unwisdom of the multitude, with whom success is the one virtue, and failure the only crime.
It appeared, too, that although the animal disguises were too transparent to endure a moment's reflection, yet that they were so gracefully worn that such moment's reflection was not to be come at without an effort. Our imagination following the costume, did imperceptibly betray our judgment; we admired the human intellect, the ever ready prompt sagacity and presence of mind. We delighted in the satire on the foolishnesses and greedinesses of our own fellow-creatures; but in our regard for the hero we forgot his humanity wherever it was his interest that we should forget it, and while we admired him as a man we judged him only as a fox. We doubt whether it would have been possible, if he had been described as an open acknowledged biped in coat and trousers, to have retained our regard for him. Something or other in us, either real rightmindedness, or humbug, or hypocrisy, would have obliged us to mix more censure with our liking than most of us do in the case as it stands. It may be that the dress of the fox throws us off our guard, and lets out a secret or two which we commonly conceal even from ourselves. When we have to pass an opinion upon bad people, who at the same time are clever andattractive, we say rather what we think that we ought to feel than what we feel in reality; while with Reineke, being but an animal, we forget to make ourselves up, and for once our genuine tastes show themselves freely. Some degree of truth there undoubtedly is in this. But making all allowance for it—making all and over allowance for the trick which is passed upon our senses, there still remained a feeling unresolved. The poem was not solely the apotheosis of a rascal in whom we were betrayed into taking an interest; and it was not a satire merely on the world, and on the men whom the world delight to honour. There was still something which really deserved to be liked in Reineke, and what it was we had as yet failed to discover.
'Two are better than one,' and we resolved in our difficulty to try what our friends might have to say about it. The appearance of the Wurtemburg animals at the Exhibition came fortunatelyaproposto our assistance: a few years ago it was rare to find a person who had read the Fox Epic; and still more, of course, to find one whose judgment would be worth taking about it. But now the charming figures of Reineke himself, and the Lion King, and Isegrim, and Bruin, and Bellyn, and Hintze, and Grimbart, had set all the world asking who and what they were, and the story began to get itself known. The old editions, which had long slept unbound in reams upon the shelves, began to descend and clothe themselves in green and crimson. Mr. Dickens sent a summary of it round the households of England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and now, at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see whether we are alone in our liking—whether others share in this strange sympathy, or whether it be some unique and monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves.
We set to work, therefore, with all earnestness, feeling our way first with fear and delicacy, as conscious of our own delinquency, to gather judgments which should be wiser than our own, and correct ourselves, if it proved that we required correction, with whatever severity might be necessary. The result of this labour of ours was not a little surprising. We found that women invariably, with that clear moral instinct of theirs, at once utterly reprobated and detested our poor Reynard; detested the hero and detested the bard who sang of him with so much sympathy; while men we found almostinvariably feeling just as we felt ourselves, only with this difference, that we saw no trace of uneasiness in them about the matter. It was no little comfort to us, moreover, to find that the exceptions were rather among the half-men, the would-be extremely good, but whose goodness was of that dead and passive kind which spoke to but a small elevation of thought or activity; while just in proportion as a man was strong, and real, and energetic, was his ability to see good in Reineke. It was really most strange: one near friend of ours—a man who, as far as we knew (and we knew him well), had never done a wrong thing—when we ventured to hint something about roguery, replied, 'You see, he was such a clever rogue, that he had a right.' Another, whom we pressed more closely with that treacherous cannibal feast at Malepartus, on the body of poor Lampe, said off-hand and with much impatience of such questioning, 'Such fellows were made to be eaten.' What could we do? It had come to this;—as in the exuberance of our pleasure with some dear child, no ordinary epithet will sometimes reach to express the vehemence of our affection, and borrowing language out of the opposites, we call him little rogue or little villain, so here, reversing the terms of the analogy, we bestow the fulness of our regard on Reineke because of that transcendently successful roguery.
When we asked our friends how they came to feel as they did, they had little to say. They were not persons who could be suspected of any latent disposition towards evil-doing; and yet though it appeared as if they were falling under the description of those unhappy ones who, if they did not such things themselves, yet 'had pleasure in those who did them,' they did not care to justify themselves. The fact was so:αρχη το ὁτι: it was a fact—what could we want more? Some few attempted feebly to maintain that the book was a satire. But this only moved the difficulty a single step; for the fact of the sympathy remained unimpaired, and if it was a satire we were ourselves the objects of it. Others urged what we said above, that the story was only of poor animals that, according to Descartes, not only had no souls, but scarcely had even life in any original and sufficient sense, and therefore we need not trouble ourselves. But one of two alternatives it seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was fatal to the proposed escape. Either there wasa man hiding under the fox's skin; or else, if real foxes have such brains as Reineke was furnished withal, no honest doubt could be entertained that some sort of conscience was not forgotten in the compounding of him, and he must be held answerable according to his knowledge.
What would Mr. Carlyle say of it, we thought, with his might and right? 'The just thing in the long run is the strong thing.' But Reineke had a long run out and came in winner. Does he only 'seem to succeed?' Who does succeed, then, if he no more than seems? The vulpine intellect knows where the geese live, it is elsewhere said; but among Reineke's victims we do not remember one goose, in the literal sense of goose; and as to geese metaphorical, the whole visible world lies down complacently at his feet. Nor does Mr. Carlyle's expressed language on this very poem serve any better to help us—nay, it seems as if he feels uneasy in the neighbourhood of so strong a rascal, so briefly he dismisses him. 'Worldly prudence is the only virtue which is certain of its reward.' Nay, but there is more in it than that: no worldly prudence would command the voices which have been given in to us for Reineke.
Three only possibilities lay now before us: either we should, on searching, find something solid in the Fox's doings to justify success; or else the just thing was not always the strong thing; or it might be, that such very semblance of success was itself the most miserable failure; that the wicked man who was struck down and foiled, and foiled again, till he unlearnt his wickedness, or till he was disabled from any more attempting it, was blessed in his disappointment; that to triumph in wickedness, and to continue in it and to prosper to the end, was the last, worst penalty inflicted by the divine vengeance.Ἱν' αθανατος η αδικος ων—to go on with injustice through this world and through all eternity, uncleansed by any purgatorial fire, untaught by any untoward consequence to open his eyes and to see in its true accursed form the miserable demon to which he has sold himself—this, of all catastrophes which couldbefalan evil man, was the deepest, lowest, and most savouring of hell, which the purest of the Grecian moralists could reason out for himself,—under which third hypothesis many an uneasy misgiving would vanish away, and Mr. Carlyle's broad aphorism might be accepted by us with thankfulness.
It appeared, therefore, at any rate, to have to come to this—that if we wanted a solution for our sphinx enigma, no Œdipus was likely to rise and find it for us; and that if we wanted help, we must take it for ourselves. This only we found, that if we sinned in our regard for the unworthy animal, we shared our sin with the largest number of our own sex; comforted with the sense of good fellowship, we went boldly to work upon our consciousness; and the imperfect analysis which we succeeded in accomplishing, we here lay before you, whoever you may be, who have felt, as we have felt, a regard which was a moral disturbance to you, and which you will be pleased if we enable you to justify—