Illustration: Two griffins
"Health is the first good lent to men,A gentle disposition then,Next competence by no by ways,Lastly with friends to enjoy one's days."
Herrick.
Illustration: Banner of two birds
i.—hospitality.
Evelyn writes of the manners and architecture of his times: "'Tis from the want of symmetry in our buildings, decorum in our houses, that the irregularity of our humors and affections may be shrewdly discerned." But not every builder is gifted with the genius and personal qualities to harmonize the apartments to the dispositions of the inmates. I confess to a partiality for the primitive style of architecture commended by Evelyn, and question whether in our refinements on these we have not foregone comforts and amenities essential to true hospitality. What shall make good to us the ample chimney-piece of his day, with the courtesies it cherished, the conversation, the cheer, the entertainments? Very welcome were the spacious yards and hospitable door-knockers on those ancestral mansions, fast disappearing from our landscape, supplanted by edifices and surroundings more showy and pretentious; yet, with all their costliness, looking somewhat asquint on the visitor, as if questioning his right to enter them; and, when admitted, seem unfamiliar, solitary, desolate, with their elaborate decorations and furnishings. Can we not build an elegant comfort, convenience, ease, into the walls and apartments, rendering the mansion an image of the nobilities becoming the residence of noblemen? To what end the house, if not for conversation, kindly manners, the entertainment of friendships, the cordialities that render the house large, and the ready receptacle of hosts and guests? If one's hospitalities fail to bring out the better qualities of his company, he fails of being the noble host, be his pretensions what they may. Let him entertain the dispositions, the genius, of his guests, the conversation being the choicer banquet; for, without baits for these, what were the table but a manger, alike wanting in elegancy as in hospitality, and the feast best taken in silence as an animal qualification, and no more.
What solitude like those homes where no home is, no company, no conversation, into which one enters with dread, and from which he departs with sadness, as from the sight of hostile tribes bordering on civilization, strangers to one another, and of mixed bloods! \Civility has not completed its work if it leave us unsocial, morose, insultable. Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.
"Oh wretched and too solitary, heWho loves not his own company;He'll find the weight of it many a day,Unless he call in sin and vanity,To help to bear it away."
The surest sign of age is loneliness. While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot be old, whatever his years may number.
Perhaps those most prize society who find the best in solitude, being equal to either; strong enough to enjoy themselves aside from companies they would gladly meet and repay by a freedom from prejudices and scruples in which these share and pride themselves, yet whose exclusiveness thrusts them out of their own houses and themselves also.
"It ever hath been known,They others' virtues scorn who doubt their own."
If solitude makes us love ourselves, society gives us to others, peopling what were else a solitude. It takes us out of ourselves as from a multitude to partake of closer intimacies and satisfactions. Alone and apart, however well occupied, we lose the elasticity and dignity that come from sympathy with the aims and prospects of others. Nor has any been found equal to uninterrupted solitude. Our virtues need the enamel of intercourse. Exalting us above our private piques, prejudices, egotisms, into the commonwealth of charities, good company makes us catholic, courteous, sane; we retire from it with a new estimate of ourselves and of mankind. If intercourse have not this wholesome effect, it is dissipating and best shunned. Nor is fellowship possible without a certain delicacy and respect of diffidence. There hides a natural piety in this personal grace, while nothing good comes of brass, from whose embrasures there vollies forth but impudence, insolence, defiance. But the more influential powers are attended by a bashful genius, and step forth from themselves with a delicacy of boldness alike free from any blemishes of egotism or pretence. Nor do we accept as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without this ornament. A fine genius has the timidity, the graces of a virgin nature, whose traits are as transparent in the boldest flights of imagination as discernible in the stateliest tread of reason, the play of fancy: a pleasing hesitancy, a refrain, setting off the more boldly by such graceful carriage, the natural graces due to beauty and truth; and bearing down all else by its charming persuasions.
Affinities tell. Every one is not for every one; nor any one good enough to flatter or scorn any; the kindly recognition being due to the meanest; even the humblest conferring a certain respect by his call. Yet one might as properly entertain every passing vagary in the presence chamber of his memory as every vagrant visitor seeking his acquaintance. Introductions are of small account. What are one's claims, a glance detects; if ours, he stays, and house and heart are his by silent understanding. If not ours, nor we his, the way is plain. He leaves presently as a traveller the innkeeper's door, an inmate for his meal only and the night.
The heroic bearing is always becoming. Egotists of the amiable species, one kindly considers. But the sour malcontents, devastators of one's time and patience,—what to do with such? Summon your fairest sunshine forthwith: give your visitor's humors no quarters from the shafts; smite him with the kindly radiance for dissipating his melancholy, and so send him away the wholesomer, the sweeter for the interview, if not a convert to the sun's catholicism, the courtesies due to civility and good fellowship. So when X, your worst sample approaches, meet him blandly at your door, and ask him civilly to leave his dog outside. But if he persist in bringing him along into your parlor, never hesitate on setting the cur forthwith upon his master though you should find him at your throat straightways. It were giving your visitor the warmest reception possible under the circumstances, and an interview very memorable to all parties. One need not fear dealing his compliments short and significant on the occasion; the deer running down the dogs for a wonder.
Does it seem cold and unhandsome, this specular survey of persons? Yet all hearts crave eyes whereby to measure themselves. And what better foil for one's egotism than this reflection of himself in the mirror of another's appreciation? The frank sun withholds his beams from none for any false delicacy. Nor till one rejoices in being helped to discern excellence in another, desiring to comprehend and compliment his own therein, is he freed from the egotism that excludes him from the best benefits one can bestow. Happy if we have dissolved our individualism in the fluent affections, and so made intercourse possible and delightful between us.
"We have three friends most useful to us; a sincere friend, a faithful friend, a friend that hears every thing, examines what is told him, and speaks little. But we have three also whose friendship is pernicious; a hypocrite, a flatterer, and a great talker. Contract friendship with the man whose heart is upright and sincere, who loves to learn and can teach you something in his turn. And in what part of the world soever thou chance to spend thy life, correspond with the wisest and associate with the best."
ii.—conversation.
Good humor, flowing spirits, a sprightly wit, are essentials of good discourse. Add genial dispositions, graceful elocution, and to these accomplishments diffidence as the flower of the rest. There can be no eloquence where these are wanting. Any amount of sense, of logic, matter, leaves the discourse incomplete, interest flags, and disappointment ensues. None has command of himself till he can wield his powers sportfully, life sparkling from all his gifts and taking captive alike speaker and hearer, as they were docile children of his genius and surprised converts for the moment. "And I," says Socrates, "through my youth often change my mind, but looking to you and apprehending that you speak the things that are divine, I think so too." If one cannot inspire faith in what he says, no arts avail. Earnestness, sincerity, are orators whose persuasions are irresistible; they hold all gifts in fusion, magnetize, divinize, harmonize all. Good conversation is lyrical: a pentecost of tongues, touching the chords of melody in all minds, it prompts to the best each had to give, to better than any knew they had, what none claims as his own, as if he were the organ of some invisible player behind the scenes. What abandonments, reserves, which no premeditation, no cunning could have checked or called forth. What chasms are spanned with a trope, what pits forded, summits climbed, prospects commanded, perspectives gained,—the tour of the spheres made at a glance, a sitting; the circle coming safely out of the adventure. All men talk, few converse; of gossip we have enough, of argument more than enough, rhetoric, debate—omit these, speak from the heart to the heart underlying all differences, and we have conversation. For disputing there is the crowd; for ruminating, the woods; the clubs for wit and the superficial fellowship.
Companionableness comes by nature. For though culture may mellow and refine, it cannot give the flush of nobility to the current wherein ride our credentials for the posts of persuasion and of power. We meet magically, and pass with sounding manners; else encounter repulses, strokes of fate; temperament telling against temperament, precipitating us into vortices from which the nimblest finds no escape. We pity the person who shows himself unequal to the occasion; the scholar, for example, whose intellect is so exacting, so precise, that he cannot meet his company otherwise than critically; cannot descend to meet, through the senses or the sentiments, that common level where intercourse is possible with most. We pity him the more, who, from caprice or confusion can meet through these only. Still more, the case of him who can meet neither as sentimentalist nor idealist, or, rather, not at all in a human way. Intellect interblends with sentiment in the companionable mind, wit with humor. We detain the flowing tide at the cost of lapsing out of perception into memory, into the limbo of fools. Excellent people wonder why they cannot meet and converse. They cannot. No. Their wits have ebbed away, and left them helpless. Why, but because of hostile temperaments, states of animation? The personal magnetism finds no conductor. One is individual, the other is individual no less. Individuals repel. Persons meet. And only as one's personality is sufficiently overpowering to dissolve the other's individualism, can the parties flow together and become one. But individuals have no power of the sort. They are two, not one, perhaps many. Prisoned within themselves by reason of their egotism, like animals, they stand aloof, are separate even when they touch; are solitary in any company, having none in themselves. But the freed personal mind meets all, is apprehended by all, by the least cultivated, the most gifted; magnetizes all; is the spell-binder, the liberator of every one. We speak of sympathies, antipathies, fascinations, fates, for this reason.
Illustration: Leaf scroll
"So great a happiness do I esteem it to be loved, that I really fancy every blessing both from gods and men ready to descend spontaneously upon him who is loved."—Xenophon.
Illustration: Banner with swans
i.—persons.
It was a charming fancy of the Pythagoreans to exchange names when they met that so they might partake of the virtues each admired in the other. And knowing the power of names they used only such as were musical and pleasing. The compliment thus bestowed upon the sentiment of friendship is most deserved, and suggestive of the magic of its influence at every age, throughout every period of our existence; our life, properly speaking, opening with the birth of fancy and the affections, and maintaining its freshness only as we are under their sway. A friendship formed in childhood, in youth,—by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood,—becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. What aspirations it awakens! what prospects! To what advantages, adventures, sacrifices, successes, does it not lead its votaries! What if these early unions are sometimes less tempered with discretion than those formed later, if they maintain their freshness and open out sure prospects of an endless future? He surely has no future who is without friends to share it with him, and is wasting an existence meant to give him that assurance. With this sentiment there comes every felicity into the breasts of those who partake of it. How large the dividend of delight! how diffusive! We are the richer for every outlay. We dip our pitchers in these fountains to come away overspilling with satisfaction. And had we a thousand friends, every spring within us would gush forth at the touch of these wands of tenderness, and the days pass as uncounted moments in their company.
"O friend, the bosom said,Through thee alone the sky is arched,Through thee the rose is red;All things through thee take nobler form,And look beyond the earth,And is the millround of our fateA sunpath in thy worth:Me, too, thy nobleness has taughtTo master my despair;The fountains of my hidden life,Are through thy friendship fair."
How handsome our friends are! Say they were not moulded at the celestial potteries, we paint them fair behind the plain exterior they wear to indifferent eyes, and as they appear in our gallery of enamels. For who has not seen the plainest features light with a beauty the eyes had not conceived at the rise of a tender sentiment? a lively thought, the recollection of a noble deed, effacing every trace of ancestral meanness; the friend we love all there without blemish or spot, the image we clasp to our breast and cannot forget.
Spectral and cold, indeed, were life surveyed from the senses alone, not from the soul, wanting the enthusiasm that persons inspire, the faith which exalts us above ourselves, giving us friends to love, and a God to adore. We enter heaven through the gates of friendship. 'Tis by some supreme fellowship that we complete ourselves, and are united to our kind.
I esteem friendship the fairest as the eldest of religious faiths, being the worship of the unseen through the seen, and excusing many superstitions coloring the need of a personal object of worship. The love and service rendered to persons symbolizes love and service due the Supreme Person; and he must be pronounced deficient in piety who fails of winning the noblest of victories,—a friend. A need of the heart, the best of our life is embosomed in others, much of it taken upon trust in some one or more whom we call by tender names, and whose words accost us with persuasions irresistible. How affectionately one name is pronounced throughout a revering Christendom, because it symbolizes man's friend,—that fairest word in the human vocabulary.
"Fair flowery name, in none like theeAnd thy nectareal fragrancy,Hourly there meetsA universal synod of all sweets,By whom it is defined thus:That no perfumeMay yet presumeTo pass for odoriferous,But such alone whose sacred pedigreeCan prove itself some kin, sweet name, to thee."
We crave objects abreast and above us. And are bereft of ourselves without such. Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs. The passionless laws that sway our unseen Personality are not made lovely to us till thus clothed in human attributes and brought near to our hearts, person embracing person. Not someItin our friends, but the sentiment that transfigures theItintoHim, intoHer,—this alone makes them ours personally and beloved. Theists in our faith, we pay our vows to the Friend in our friend, thus becoming personally One with the Three, and alone no longer.
Nor elsewise man shall fellow meet,In public place, in converse sweet,In holy aisles, at market gate,In learning's halls, or courts of state,Nor persons properly shall find,Save in the commonwealth of Mind;Fair forms herein their souls intrude,Peopling what else were solitude.
Persons are love's world. Our Paradise is too fair to be planted out of our breasts. We chase the fleeing beauty all our lives long;
"Nor is there near so brisk a fireIn fruition, as desire;The niggard sense, too poor for bliss,Pays us but dully with what is."
On, onwards, ever onwards are we led. Our Edens abreast of us journeying with ever-opening prospects in the distance.
the chase.
O'er earth and seas,In sunshine, shade,Blest Beauty crossed,Nor stopt nor stayed,Nor temples took,Nor idols hewed,Apart she dweltIn solitude.In solitude, Heart said:"Where find the maid?My bride's a fugitive,From sight doth live,And hearts are hunters of the game,Pursuers of the sameThrough every passing form,The Beauty that all eyes do seek,All eyes do but deform;The love our faithless lips would speakDies on the listless air,Nature befriends us not,Nor hearthside doth prepareIn all her ample plot;Life's but illusion,Cunning confusion;Flings shadows pale about our path,She shadow is, and nothing hath;Eyes are divorced from seeing,Hearts cloven clean from being;My bride I cannot find,My love I cannot bind;The thousand fair ones of our sphere,Fond, false ones all, nor mine, nor dear;The ParadiseI would surprise,From all my following flies,And I'm a thousand infidelities;There's none for meIn all I see;Surely the Fair One bides not here,Where dwells she, where, in any sphere?""In any sphere?"Love whispered: "Where, where, if not here?Here in thy breast the maiden find,Ideas sole imparadise the mind;Here heart's hymeneals begin,Here's ours and only ours housed here within:Through parting gates of human kindEnter thou blest the Unseen Mind."
O'er earth and seas,In sunshine, shade,Blest Beauty crossed,Nor stopt nor stayed,Nor temples took,Nor idols hewed,Apart she dweltIn solitude.
In solitude, Heart said:"Where find the maid?My bride's a fugitive,From sight doth live,And hearts are hunters of the game,Pursuers of the sameThrough every passing form,The Beauty that all eyes do seek,All eyes do but deform;The love our faithless lips would speakDies on the listless air,Nature befriends us not,Nor hearthside doth prepareIn all her ample plot;Life's but illusion,Cunning confusion;Flings shadows pale about our path,She shadow is, and nothing hath;Eyes are divorced from seeing,Hearts cloven clean from being;My bride I cannot find,My love I cannot bind;The thousand fair ones of our sphere,Fond, false ones all, nor mine, nor dear;The ParadiseI would surprise,From all my following flies,And I'm a thousand infidelities;There's none for meIn all I see;Surely the Fair One bides not here,Where dwells she, where, in any sphere?"
"In any sphere?"Love whispered: "Where, where, if not here?Here in thy breast the maiden find,Ideas sole imparadise the mind;Here heart's hymeneals begin,Here's ours and only ours housed here within:Through parting gates of human kindEnter thou blest the Unseen Mind."
ii.—woman.
"Virtue sureWere blind as fortune, should she choose the poorRough cottage man to live in, and despiseTo dwell in woman's stately edifice;Woman's approved the fairer sex, and weMean men repent our pedigree.Why choose the father's name, when we may takeThe mother's a more honor'd blood to make,Woman's of later, though of nobler birth,For she of man was made, man made of earth,The son of dust, and though her sin did breedHis fall, again she raised him in her seed;Who had he not her blest creation seen,An Anchorite in Paradise had been."
Pythagoras said that only good things were to be predicted of women, since they were the mothers of ornaments, of conversation and of confidence, and that he who invented names, perceiving that women were adapted to piety and friendship, gave to each of their ages the name of some Deity—to a maiden, Core, or Proserpine, to a bride Nymphe, to a mother, Mater, to a grandmother, according to the Dorian dialect, Maia. And in accordance with the like persuasion the oracles were always unfolded into light by women. Tacitus tells us that the Northern nations also held women in high esteem, "believing ladies had something divine about them." And this faith has descended to men of the Saxon name, the best regarding her as endowed with magical properties, the type of the highest culture the advanced nations have attained. Endowed with magnetic gifts; by necessity of sex, a realist and diviner, she lives nearest the cardinal facts of existence, instinct with the mysteries of love and fate; a romance ever attaching itself to her name and destiny. Entering the school of sensibility with life, she seizes personal qualities by a subtlety of logic overleaping all deductions of the slower reason; her divinations touching the quick of things as if herself were personally part of the chemistry of life itself. We cannot conceive her as distinct, distant, unrelated, she seems so personal, concrete, so near; yet can never come quite up to her discernments, nor gainsay their delicacy and truthfulness. Then constancy, fidelity, fortitude, kindness, gratitude, grace, courtesy, discretion, taste, conversation, the adornments of life, were bare names without the splendor of illustration of which the history of the sex affords so many brilliant examples. It seems as if in moulding his world the Creator reserved his choicest work till the last, and consummated his art in her endowments. Shall our sex confess to some slight in not having been mingled more freely of her essence, that so we too might have had access to the crypts into which she is privileged by birthright to enter? Hers is the way of persuasion, of service, forbearance:
"If thou dost anything confer that's sweet,In me a grateful relish it shall meet,But if thy bounties thou dost take away,The least repining word I will not say."
As there was only solitude till she brought company, conversation, civility, so stooping still to conquer, she is fast gaining ascendancy over passions and prejudices that have held her subservient and their victim. Can we doubt the better rule will be furthered indefinitely by a partnership in power thus intimate and acknowledged by States? What ideal republics have fabled, ours is to be. Nor need we fear the boldest experiments which the moral sense of the best women conceive and advocate. Certainly liberty is in danger of running into license while woman is excluded from exercising political as well as social restraint upon its excesses. Nor is the state planted securely till she possess equal privileges with man of forming its laws and taking a becoming part in their administration. No jury of men, however honorable or wise, are equal to pronounce upon questions relating to woman; questions involving considerations that concern the whole structure, not only of society, but of humanity itself. The public morals are insecure till the family is chastely planted, the state guarded by the continency of its male members.
A man defines his standing at the court of chastity by his views of women. He cannot be any man's friend nor his own if not hers. Either nature dealt coldly by him in his descent, else he is the victim of vices which his passions have inflamed till they have their own way with him.
"They meet but with unwholesome springs,And summers which infectious are;They hear but when the mermaid sings,And only see the falling starWho ever dareAffirm no woman chaste and fair."
The very name of woman becomes soiled if we seek to be related to her by the coarse ties of appetite, instead of the tender threads of affection, the charm of ideas. There are pleasures for keeping as enjoying,—for using delicately, the zest lasting long, the more affluent when tasted with moderation and seldom.
"Who can to love more rich gift makeThan to love's self, for love's own sake?Love, that imports in every sense delight,Is fancied in the soul, not appetite:Why love among the virtues is scarce knownIs that love is them all contract in one."
iii.—family.
"How fruitful may the smallest circle growWhen we the secret of its culture know."
Here is room enough, however humble and unfurnished, for the most expansive friendships, the purest delights, the noblest labors; for where women are, there open forth all possibilities of culture.
Here high o'er head of spiteful fate,Jove cradles safe the ideal state.
"A married life is most beautiful. For what other thing can be such an ornament to a family as the association of husband and wife? For it must not be said that sumptuous edifices, walls covered with pictures, and piazzas adorned with stones,—so admired by those who are ignorant of the Good; nor yet painted windows, myrtle walks; nor anything else which is the subject of astonishment to the stupid,—are the ornaments of a family. But the beauty of a household consists in the conjunction of man and wife who are united to each other by destiny, are consociated to the gods who preside over nuptials, births, and houses; and who accord, indeed, with each other, and have all things in common as far as to their bodies, or rather their souls themselves;—who exercise a becoming authority over their house and servants, are properly solicitous about the education of their children and pay an attention to the necessaries of life, which is neither expensive nor negligent, but moderate and appropriate. For what can be better and more excellent, as the most admirable Homer says,
'Than when at home the husband and the wifeUnanimously live.'"
the goblet.
I drank delights from every cup,Arts, institutions, I drank up;Athirst, I quaffed life's flowing bowls,And sipped the flavors of all souls.A sparkling cup remained for me,The brimming fount of Family;This I am still drinking,Since, to my thinking,Good wine beads here,Flagons of cheer,Nor laps the soulIn Lethe's bowl.Wine of immortal powerInto my chalice now doth pour;Prevailing wine,Juice of the Nine,Flavored of sods,Vintage of gods;Joyance benignThis wondrous wineEver at call;—Wine maddening none,Wine saddening none,Wine gladdening all,Makes love's cup ruddier glow,Genius and grace its overflow.I drained the drops of every cup,Times, institutions I drank up:Still Beauty pours the enlivening wine,Fills high her glass to me and mine;Her cup of sparkling youth,Of love first found, and loyal truth:I know, again I know,Her fill of life and overflow.
I drank delights from every cup,Arts, institutions, I drank up;Athirst, I quaffed life's flowing bowls,And sipped the flavors of all souls.
A sparkling cup remained for me,The brimming fount of Family;This I am still drinking,Since, to my thinking,Good wine beads here,Flagons of cheer,Nor laps the soulIn Lethe's bowl.
Wine of immortal powerInto my chalice now doth pour;Prevailing wine,Juice of the Nine,Flavored of sods,Vintage of gods;Joyance benignThis wondrous wineEver at call;—Wine maddening none,Wine saddening none,Wine gladdening all,Makes love's cup ruddier glow,Genius and grace its overflow.
I drained the drops of every cup,Times, institutions I drank up:Still Beauty pours the enlivening wine,Fills high her glass to me and mine;Her cup of sparkling youth,Of love first found, and loyal truth:I know, again I know,Her fill of life and overflow.
When I find my friends are not of the same age as when I first knew them, I may conclude myself, not them, to be decaying and losing flavor. Still youth and innocency are the sole solvents of all doubts and infidelities; the faiths of women and children in friendship, ever fresh demonstrations of life's sufficiency and imperishableness. Families never die, since they trace their pedigree to Adam the First, who is of immortal ancestry. First suckled at our mother's breast our faiths survive all subsequent modifications; embrace the friendships we form, and color the whole of life. Our intellectual creed may change; temperament, calling, social position, fortune, sect, may phrase differently the delightful lay she sang to us—its tone still lingers in the memory of our affections, holding the heart loyal, and if trusted to the end takes us triumphantly through life. "Ever the feminine leadeth us on." Every prospect the mother gains is soon commanded by her children: our comforts and satisfactions life-long having the voice and countenance of woman.
iv.—children.
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy."
Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its centre and ornament. Nor is there a paradise planted till the children appear in the foreground to animate and complete the picture. Without these, the world were a solitude, houses desolate, hearts homeless; there were neither perspectives, nor prospects; ourselves were not ourselves, nor were there a future for us:
In their good gifts we hopeful seeThe fairer selves we fain would be.
Socrates comprised all objects of his search in
"Whate'er of good or ill can man befallIn his own house,"
rightly conceiving this to be the seminary of the virtues and foundation of states. There it stands, the ornament of the landscape, and for the human hospitalities: we cannot render it too attractive. Let it be the home of beauty, the haunt of affection, of ideas. Let its chambers open eastward admitting the sunshine for our own and children's sake. Do they not covet the clear sky, delighting in the blue they left so lately, nay cannot wholly leave in coming into nature, whereof they are ever asking news? These gay enthusiasts must run eagerly, and never have enough of it. How soon the clouds clear away from their faces! How sufficient they are to the day, and the joy it brings them! Their poise and plenitude rebuke us.
"Happy those early days when IShined in my angel infancy;Before I taught my soul to woundMy conscience with a sinful sound,Or taught my soul to fancy aughtBut a white celestial thought,Or had the black art to dispenseA several sin to every sense,But felt through all this fleshly dressBright shoots of everlastingness."
Charming pictures these bright boys, confiding girls, as full of promise to themselves as we were at their age; are still, if faithful to the beautiful vision. Why else should the flame pale as we come up into life, we pleasing ourselves nor others more, perhaps despair of maintaining the virtues we espoused so eagerly in our youth? Must we
"When we've enjoyed our ends then lose them,And all our appetites be but as dreamsTo laugh at in our ages?"
If this fresh score of years did not deceive us, shall a life of threescore, with its deeper glances into the mystery, lead us to doubt the longevity of a sentiment of whose imperishableness that life itself is the best evidence we need ask? Are we to be left orphans when taken from nature's arms, robbed of all that made life desirable before? Nature cared for us; Persons failed us, and all unawares we lapsed out of our paradise, its gates barred against us.
"I cannot reach it; and my striving eyeDazzles at it, as at eternity.Were now that chronicle alive,Those white designs which children drive,And the thoughts of each harmless hour,With their content too in my power,Quickly would I make my path even,And by mere playing go to heaven.Dear harmless age, the short, swift spanWhere weeping virtue parts with man;Where love without lust dwells, and bendsWhat way we please, without self-ends:An age of mysteries! which heMust live twice that would God's face see;Where angels guard, and with it play,Angels, which foul men drive away."
"I cannot reach it; and my striving eyeDazzles at it, as at eternity.Were now that chronicle alive,Those white designs which children drive,And the thoughts of each harmless hour,With their content too in my power,Quickly would I make my path even,And by mere playing go to heaven.
Dear harmless age, the short, swift spanWhere weeping virtue parts with man;Where love without lust dwells, and bendsWhat way we please, without self-ends:An age of mysteries! which heMust live twice that would God's face see;Where angels guard, and with it play,Angels, which foul men drive away."
'Tis sad to consider how long time is consumed in wiping away the stains which had been insinuated into the breast during these earlier years and up to coming manhood,—to what we call the maturity of our powers. Life is too much for most. So much of age, so little youth; living for the most part in the moment, and dating existence by the memory of its burdens. Men think they once were not, and fear the like fate may overtake them, as if time were older than their minds. 'Tis because we always were that we cannot trace our beginnings to the atheism of no-being and resolve ourselves into nothing. Children save us. Rather are we saved by remaining children, as Christ said.
Have we forgotten how things looked to us when we were young; how the dull world the old people lived in seemed to us? 'Twas not ours, nor their dry theism; and our fresh hearts whispered reverently:
"Is not your paradise an Inferno? Please never name it. While in Heaven I speak not of it: I hum that song to myself. Will you spoil my paradise too? Come with me, come, and I will show you Elysium; I know all about it; I am not deceived. I feel it to be solid, safe. It makes good its pledges always. I have a home of all delights—am admitted when I please, while you seem vagabonds and woebegones, bereft of friends, the Friend of friends. Am I to quit my present satisfactions for your promised joys. Unkind! this taking me from my paradise, unless you conduct me to a happier."
"O for the coming of that glorious time,When, prizing knowledge as their noblest wealthAnd best protection, liberal states shall ownAn obligation on their part to teachThem, who are born to serve her and obey;Binding themselves by statute to secureFor all the children whom their soil maintainsThe rudiments of letters; and to informThe mind with moral and religious truthBoth understood and practised—so that noneHowever destitute, be left to dropBy timely culture unsustained, or runInto a wild disorder; or be forcedTo drudge through life without the aidOf intellectual implements and tools;A savage horde among the civilized,A servile band among the lordly free."
Wordsworth.
Illustration: Thistles
i.—modern teaching.
Saxon Alfred decreed that every man who had so much as two hides of land, should bring up his children to learning till they were fifteen years of age at least, that they might be religious and live happily; else, he said, they were but beasts and sots, dangerous to themselves and the state. And the state's true glory lies in its calling forth into fullest exercise and giving scope and right direction to the gifts of its children; seeking out especially and fostering the best born as they rise, and training these for educators of the coming generations. The Parent of parents, the guardian of all gifts born into it, society should neglect none, sequester none from places and honors to which they are entitled by birthright of genius or acquirement. Every child, the gifted by divine right, is sent to cherish and redeem the race; whom to neglect or divert from its aim were base oversight and abuse of the race itself. Far too noble, too precious be any to be used for ends merely secondary, secular, and thus spoiled for their own and God's intents.
Yet simple as this duty seems, society with all its aims and appliances, has not as yet attained the refinement of culture needful to the receiving of a child into its bosom, and of educating it to the full demands of its endowments. With the child comes the seed of states; the family being the nursery of the citizen, the measure of a people's civilization. As the homes, so the state; as the parents, so the children. Nor has society fathered its functions till all children, befriended from the first, are fashioned into the image each is capable of attaining. Other goods are but aids to this end; all are necessary for educating the human being, since the child is the summary of all gifts, and the most precious of all trusts committed to the state for trial and training.
Yet still the decease of gifts follows fast on their birth, and parents are oftener called beside the bier of these children of the sun than to their nuptials or coronation. They hold their jubilees in weeds rather; and the untimeliness of genius is the tragedy of life as of letters. Amidst the sickliness and wane of things, neither poet nor saint survives his laurel for more than a day. Far from treating the human being with anything like the subtlety and skill displayed by the ancient masters, we wait for the first hint of an institution for training youth into the fulness of their powers, by the genial touch of sensibility, the magnetism of thought. Left instead to the superficial culture of the sects, the traditions of the elders, the guidance of worldlings, they slide soon into vague conjectures, run adrift on the sea of doubt, the shoals of expediency, bereft of faith in themselves as in things unseen and ideal.
"See gifted youths rush out to feed on whims;Fashion craves their hours, low hopes their aim,To win not noble women for their brides,But titled slaves, heirs to some teasing caste,For beauty without culture seems mere show;As if great nature laid not on her tintsWith more contrivance than the brush of art;Or schools where grammars hide the place of sense,And shallow stammering drowns the native voice."
Not letters but life chiefly educate if we are educatable. But experience follows oftenest too late for most and too distant from the work to help us directly without an interpreter to assist in making timely use of it. Fortunate will it be, if by instinct and mother wit we take life at first hand, converting it forthwith into thought and habit. Character comes of temperament far more than of acquirement. And the most that culture performs is the drawing forth, fashioning and polishing the natural gifts. But we cannot create what is not inborn. A fine brain is a spiritual endowment, as from the head of Jove sprang Minerva. Centuries of culture pass into pure power; piety and genius are parents of piety and genius. But less discriminating than were the ancient carvers in wood and ivory, who, when they had an order for a head of Hermes, or any ordinary god even, searched carefully for substances adapted to receive the proper form, states attempt to fashion saints and rulers out of any materials that chance brings to hand. Omitting mind, or overriding it in our haste to come at immediate and superficial results, we ignore ideas and principles altogether. Aiming at little we attain little. For while our country opens the freest scope for the exercise of the higher gifts of genius and character, we cherish these but feebly in our public or private training. The highest prizes held forth to youth are not only beneath the aims of a noble ambition, but the stimulus for their attainment is wanting. Even in New England, culture is external, provincial; neglectful of the better parts of body and mind; behind the old countries, that of the ancient states. We cram the memory with the lore of foreign tongues, the understanding with a medley of learning, leaving fancy, imagination, the moral sentiment, mainly to shift for themselves—the forming of the manners, motives, aims and aspirations. Then what substitutes have we, for thefalconry, archery, the hunting, fishing, of earlier and what we deem barbarous times? Yet these were sports, heroic and wholesome, giving a national coloring and strength of character: the wrestling too, throwing the quoit, and other manly games, horsemanship, boating, swimming, were a natural gymnastic for body and mind. War also had its advantages. So the plays and games were schools of genius and valor: the people were refined by contact with the refinements of the best citizens, the guardians of public taste and honor providing hereby a polite and manly culture suited to the needs of the state. Education extended into the age of ripe maturity. Nor was the disciple committed to himself till he became the master. And through life he was prompted by incentives of virtue and fame. The state was venerable, ennobled as it was by the genius and services of great men; great men earning honorably their renown by teaching.
'Tis noble minds who noble men create,And they who have great manners form mankind.
Happy the man who wins the confidence of the rising youth of his time. He becomes priest and professor elect without degrees of synods or universities. He shapes the future of the next generation as of the succeeding. A noble artist he cherishes visions of excellence not easily impersonated or spoken. His life and teachings are studies for high ideals.
ii.—socratic dialectic.
The highest end of instruction is to discipline and liberalize mind and character by familiarizing the thoughts with those of the learned and wise. Character is inspired by admiration of character, intellect by participating in intellect. The masters form masters. And had I the choice of my class, I would put Plato's works at once into its hands. And, for a beginning,—say the Alcibiades of the earlier Dialogues. I know of no discipline under the care of a thoughtful instructor so fitting for educating the reason, quickening the moral sense, refining the sensibilities, fashioning the manners, ennobling the character, as exercises in the Socratic dialectic: opening the whole armory of gifts, it sharpens and polishes these for the victories of life. The youth who masters Plato wins fairly his degree alike in humanity and divinity. He has the key to the mysteries, ancient and modern.[C]
Take the following as an example of the pure dialectic method as of metaphysic;
"In what way, asks Socrates, may we attain to know the soul itself with the greatest clearness? for when we know this, it seems we shall know ourselves. Now, in the name of the gods, whether are we not ignorant of the right meanings of that Delphic inscription just now mentioned, 'Know thyself?'"
Alcibiades.What meaning? what have you in your thoughts, Socrates, when you ask the question?
Socrates.I will tell you what I suspect this inscription means, and what particular thing it advises us to do. For a just resemblance of it is, I think, not to be found wherever one pleases, but in only one thing, the sight.
Alcibiades.How do you mean?
Socrates.Consider it jointly with me. Were a man to address himself to the outward human eye, as it were some other man; and were he to give it this counsel, "See yourself," what particular thing should we suppose that he advises the eye to do? Should we not suppose that it was to look at such a thing as that the eye by looking at it, might see itself?
Alcibiades.Certainly we should.
Socrates.What kind of thing then do we think of by looking at which we see things at which we look, and at the same time see ourselves?
Alcibiades.'Tis evident, Socrates, that for this purpose we must look at mirrors and other things of like kind.
Socrates.You are right. And has not the eye itself, with which we see, something of the same kind belonging to it?
Alcibiades.Most certainly it has.
Socrates.You have observed then, that the face of the person who looks in the eye of another person, appears visible to himself in the eye of the person opposite to him, as in a mirror. And we therefore call this the pupil, because it exhibits the image of that person who examines it.
Alcibiades.What you say is true.
Socrates.The eye beholding an eye and looking in the most excellent part of it in that which it sees, may thus see itself?
Alcibiades.Apparently so.
Socrates.But if the eye look at any other part of the man, or at anything whatever, except what this part of the eye happens to be like, it will not see itself.
Alcibiades.It is true.
Socrates.If therefore the eye would see itself, it must look in an eye, and in that place of the eye, too, where the virtue of the eye is naturally seated; and the virtue of the eye is sight.
Alcibiades.I am aware that it is so.
Socrates.Whether then is it not true, my friend Alcibiades, that the soul if she know herself, must look at soul, and especially at that place in the soul in which wisdom, the virtue of the soul, is ingenerated, and also at whatsoever else this virtue of the soul resembles?
Alcibiades.To me, Socrates, it seems true.
Socrates.Do we know of any place in the soul more divine than that which is the seat of knowledge and intelligence?
Alcibiades.We do not.
Socrates.This, therefore, in the soul resembles the divine nature. And a man, looking at this, and realizing all that which is divine and God and wisdom, would gain the most knowledge of himself.
Alcibiades.It is apparent.
Socrates.And to know one's self we acknowledge to be wisdom.
Alcibiades.By all means.
Socrates.Shall we not say, therefore, that as mirrors are clearer, purer, and more splendid than that which is most analogous to a mirror in the eye, in like manner, God is purer and more splendid than that which is best in our soul?
Alcibiades.It is likely, Socrates.
Socrates.Looking therefore at God, we should make use of him as the most beautiful mirror, and among human concerns we should look at the virtue of the soul, and thus by so doing shall we especially see and know our very self.
Alcibiades.Yes.
And yet knowing the fascinations that beset gifted young men, one might say to them at parting, as Socrates did to the accomplished Alcibiades, when the latter intimated that he would begin thenceforward to cultivate the science of justice:
"I wish you may persevere. But I am terribly afraid for you; not that I in the least distrust the goodness of your disposition; but perceiving the torrent of the times, I fear you may be borne away with it, in spite of your own resistance and all my endeavors in your aid."
iii.—pythagorean discipline.
Let us see, too, how wisely the great master Pythagoras went to his work.
"He prepared his disciples for learning by many trials; for he did not receive into the number of his associates any who came to him till he had subjected them to various examinations. In the first place, he inquired after what manner they associated with their parents and relations generally; next, he surveyed their unreasonable laughter, their silence, their speaking when it was not proper; and farther, still, what were their desires, their intimacies with their companions, their conversation; how they employed their leisure time, and what were the subjects of their joy and grief. He likewise surveyed their form, their gait, gestures and whole motion of their body, their voice, complexion and physiognomy, considering all these natural indications to be the manifest signs of the unapparent manners of the soul.
Having thus subjected them to this scrutiny, he next suffered them to pass a good while seemingly unobserved by him, that he might the better judge of each one how he was disposed towards stability and a love of learning, and whether he was sufficiently fortified against the flatteries of popularity and false honor and glory. After this, he advised such to maintain a long silence, that he might observe how far they were disposed towards continence in speech, and that most difficult of all victories—the victory over the tongue. Thus practically he made trial of their aptitudes to be educated, for he was as anxious that they should be modest and discreet, as that they should not speak unadvisedly. He likewise directed his attention to every other particular, such as whether they were astonished at the outbreaks of immoderate passion and desire. Nor did he superficially consider how they were affected by these; or whether they were contentious or ambitious, or how they were disposed as to friendship and strife. And if on his surveying all these particulars accurately, they appeared to him endued with worthy manners, he next directed his attention to their facility in learning and memory; first whether they were able to follow what was said with rapidity and perspicuity; and in the next place, whether a certain love and temperance attracted them to the disciplines by which they were taught; whether they loved to learn and to be governed; also how they were disposed as to gentleness, which he called elegance of manners; conceiving all ferocity of temper as hostile to his mode of education. For impudence, shamelessness, intemperance, slothfulness, slowness of learning, unrestrained licentiousness, disgrace and the like, are attendants of savage manners, but the contrary of these are gentleness and mildness.
Of food he held that whatsoever obstructs divination should be shunned. And that the juvenile age should make trial of temperance—this being alone of all the virtues alike adapted to youths and maidens, and comprehends the good both of body and mind, and also the desire for the most excellent studies and pursuits. Boys he thought were especially dear to divinity, and he exhorted women to use words of good omen through the whole of life, and to endeavor that others may predict good things of them. He paid great attention to the health of body and mind, using unction and the bath often, wrestling, leaping with weights in the hands, also pantomimes with a view to strengthening the body, selecting for this purpose opposite exercises.
Music he thought contributed greatly to health, as well as to purifying the heart and manners, and he called it a medicine when he so used it, conceiving that each faculty had its particular melody. He placed in the middle a player on the lyre, and seated around him were those who were able to sing. And when the person struck the lyre, they sang certain pæans, through which they were sure to be delighted, and to become orderly and graceful, and he had melodies devised as remedies against the passions, as anger, despondency, complaint, inordinate desire and the rest, which afforded the greatest relief to these distempers of the soul. He likewise used dancing, walking and conversation.
Rulers, who received their country from the multitude of citizens as a common deposit, were to transmit it faithfully to their posterity as a hereditary possession; their language was to be such as to render them worthy of belief without an oath. And as parents, they were so to manage their domestic affairs as to make the government of them the object of deliberate choice, being kindly disposed towards their offspring, as they were the only animals that were susceptible of moral obedience. And they were to associate with their wives as companions for life, being mindful that other compacts were engraved on tablets and pillars, but those with wives were inserted in children, and that they should endeavor to be beloved by them, not through nature alone, of which they were not the causes, but through choice; for this was voluntary beneficence; they remembering, also, that they received their wives from the vestal hearth with libations, and brought them home as if they were suppliants of the gods themselves.
By orderly conduct and temperance, they were to be examples both to their families and the city in which they lived, revering beautiful and worthy manners, expelling sluggishness from all their actions, opportunity being the chief good in all. Separation of parents and children from one another was the greatest of injuries both to themselves and the State. Youths and virgins were to be educated in labor and exercises conducing to health, using food convenient thereto, and in a temperate and tolerant life. Of things in human life, there were many in which to be late conversant was best. A boy was to be soeducatedand fed, as not to have the desires awakened till the nuptial hour. Parents benefited their children prior to their birth, and were the causes of their good conduct afterwards. Hence the children owed them as many thanks as a dead man would owe to him who should be able to restore him back to life. And they were to associate with one another in such a manner as not be in a state of hostility, and be easily reconciled after any disputes, exhibiting a modesty of behavior to their elders, benevolent dispositions towards parents and love and regard to all deserving these. All who aspired after true glory, were to be such in reality as they wished to appear to be to others. The most pure and unadulterated character was that of him who gave himself to the contemplation and practice of the most beautiful things, and was a lover as well as student of wisdom.
It was by disciplines and inventions like these that he sought to heal and purify the soul, to revive and save its divine part, and thus conduct to the intelligible One its divine Eye, which is better worth saving than ten thousand corporeal eyes: since by its sight alone when thus strengthened and clarified, the truth pertaining to all beings is clearly perceived."
iv.—mother tongue.