Volume I Part 16 (1/2)

Charles was a sincere believer but not an earnest believer of the Roman Catholic faith. James was both sincere and preternaturally earnest.

_The Reformation._--This seems to show two things: 1st, that a deep searching and 'sagacious-from-afar' spirit of morality can mould itself under the prompting of Christianity, such as could not have grown up under Paganism. For it was the abominations in point of morality (_en fait de moralite?_)--indulgences, the confessional, absolution, the prevalence of a mere ritual--the usurpation of forms--these it was which Rome treated violently; and if she draw in her horns for the present, still upon any occasion offering, upon the cloud of peril pa.s.sing away, clearly she would renew her conduct. It was a tendency violently and inevitably belonging to the Roman polity combined with the Roman interest, unless, perhaps, as permanently controlled by a counter-force. 2ndly, the synthesis of this curative force is by apposition of parts separately hardly conscious of the danger or even of their own act. For we cannot suppose the vast body of opposition put forward was so under direct conscious appreciation of the evil and by an adequate counter-action--doubtless it was by sympathy with others having better information. These last burned more vividly as the evil was fiercer. That more vivid sympathy drew increase of supporters.

_Memorandum._--In my historical sketches not to forget the period of woe, _anterior_ to the Siege of Jerusalem, which Josephus describes as occurring in all the Grecian cities, but which is so unaccountably overlooked by historians.

The rule is to speak like the foolish, and think like the wise, and therefore I agree to call our worthy old mother 'little'--our 'little island'--as that seems to be the prevailing notion; otherwise I myself consider Great Britain rather a tall island. A man is not called short because some few of his countrymen happen to be a trifle taller; and really I know but of two islands, among tens of thousands counted up by gazetteers on our planet, that are taller; and I fancy, with such figures as theirs, they are neither of them likely to think of any rivals.h.i.+p with our dear old mother. What island, for instance, would choose to be such a great fat beast as Borneo, as broad as she is long, with no apology for a waist? Talk of lacing too tight, indeed! I'm sure Borneo does not injure herself in that way. Now our mother, though she's old, and has gone through a world of trouble in her time, is as jimp about the waist as a young la.s.s of seventeen. Look at her on any map of Europe, and she's quite a picture. It's an old remark that the general outline of the dear creature exactly resembles a lady sitting. She turns her back upon the Continent, no doubt, and that's what makes those foreigneering rascals talk so much of her pride. But she _must_ turn her back upon somebody, and who is it that should have the benefit of her countenance, if not those people in the far West that are come of her own blood? They say she's 'tetyy' also. Well, then, if she is, you let her alone, good people of the Continent. She'll not meddle with you if you don't meddle with her. She's kind enough, and, as to her person, I do maintain that she's quite tall enough, rather thin, it's true, but, on the whole, a bonny, elegant, dear old fighting mamma.

_Mora Alexandrina._--Note on Middleton's affected sneer. A villa of Cicero's, where probably the usual sound heard would be the groans of tormented slaves, had been changed for the cells of Christian monks. Now mark: what the hound Middleton means is, how shocking to literary sensibilities that where an elegant master of Latinity had lived, there should succeed dull, lazy monks, writing (if they wrote at all) in a barbarous style, and dreaming away their lives in torpor. Now permit me to pause a little. This is one of those sneers which Paley[38] and Bishop Butler[39] think so unanswerable, that we must necessarily lie down and let the sneer ride rough-shod over us all. Let us see, and for this reason, reader, do not grudge a little delay, especially as you may 'skip' it.

Dr. Conyers ought to have remembered, in the first place, that the villa could not long remain in the hands of Cicero. Another owner would succeed, and then the chances would be that the sounds oftenest ascending in the hour of sunset or in the cool of the dawn would be the shrieks of slaves under torture. By their own poor miserable fare contrasted with the splendour reeking around them, these slaves had a motive, such as our tenderly-treated (often pampered) servants can never know the strength of, for breaking the seal of any wine cask. From the anecdote told of his own mother by the wretched Quintus Cicero, the foul brother of Marcus, it appears that generally there was some encouragement to do this, on the chance of 'working down' on the master that the violated seal had been amongst the casks legitimately opened.

For it seems that old Mrs. Cicero's housewifely plan was to seal up all alike, empty and not empty. Consequently with her no such excuse could avail. Which proves that often it _did_ avail, since her stratagem is mentioned as a very notable artifice. What follows? Why, that the slave was doubly tempted: 1st, by the luxury he witnessed; 2ndly, by the impunity on which he might calculate. Often he escaped by sheer weight of metal in lying. Like Chaucer's miller, he swore, when charged with stealing flour, that it was not so. But this very prospect and likelihood of escape was often the very snare for tempting to excesses too flagrant or where secret marks had been fixed. Besides, many other openings there were, according to the individual circ.u.mstances, but this was a standing one, for tempting the poor unprincipled slave into trespa.s.s that irritated either the master or the mistress. And then came those periodical lacerations and ascending groans which Seneca mentions as the best means of telling what o'clock it was in various households, since the punishments were going on just at that hour.

After, when the gracious revolution of Christianity had taught us, and by a memento so solemn and imperishable, no longer to pursue our human wrath, that hour of vesper sanct.i.ty had come, which, by the tendency of the Christian law and according to the degree in which it is observed, is for us a type and a symbol and a hieroglyphic of wrath extinguished, of self-conquest, of charity in heaven and on earth.

Now, the monks, it is supposable, might be commonplace drones. Often, however, they would be far other, transmitters by their copying toils of those very Ciceronian works which, but for them, would have perished.

And pausing duly here, what sense, what propriety would there be in calling on the reader to notice with a shock the profanation of cla.s.sical ground in such an example as this: 'Mark the strange revolutions of ages; there, where once the divine Plato's Academus stood, now rises a huge printing-house chiefly occupied for the last two years in reprinting Plato's works.' Why, really Plato himself would look graciously on that revolution, Master Conyers. But next, the dullest of these monks would hear the Gloria in Excelsis.

Oh, how pitiful it is to hear B---- alleging against Mahomet that he had done no public miracles. What? Would it, then, alter your opinion of Mahomet if he _had_ done miracles? What a proof, how full, how perfect!

That Christianity, in spirit, in power, in simplicity, and in truth, had no more hold over B---- than it had over any Pagan Pontiff in Rome, is clear to me from that. So, then, the argument against Mahomet is not that he wants utterly the meekness--wants? wants? No, that he utterly hates the humility, the love that is stronger than the grave, the purity that cannot be imagined, the holiness as an ideal for man that cannot be approached, the peace that pa.s.seth all understanding, that power which out of a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand grows for ever and ever until it will absorb the world and all that it inherit, that first of all created the terror of death and the wormy grave; but that first and last she might triumph over time--not these, it seems by B----, are the arguments against Mahomet, but that he did not play legerdemain tricks, that he did not turn a cow into a horse!

In which position B---- is precisely on a level with those Arab Sheikhs, or perhaps Mamelukes, whom Napoleon so foolishly endeavoured to surprise by Chinese tricks: 'Aye, all this is very well, but can you make one to be in Cairo and in Damascus at the same moment?' demanded the poor brutalized wretches. And so also for B---- it is nothing. Oh, blind of heart not to perceive that the defect was entirely owing to the age.

Mahomet came to a most sceptical region. There was no semblance or shadow among the Arabs of that childish credulity which forms the atmosphere for miracle. On the contrary, they were a hard, fierce people, and in that sense barbarous; but otherwise they were sceptical, as is most evident from all that they accomplished, which followed the foundation of Islamism. Here lies the delusion upon that point. The Arabs were evidently like all the surrounding nations. They were also much distinguished among all Oriental peoples for courage. This fact has been put on record in (1) the East Indies, where all the Arab troops have proved themselves by far more formidable than twelve times the number of effeminate Bengalese and Mahrattas, etc. (2) At Aden, where as rude fighters without the science of war they have been most ugly customers. (3) In Algeria, where the French, with all advantage of discipline, science, artillery, have found it a most trying and exhausting war. Well, as they are now, so they were before Mahomet, and just then they were ripe for conquest. But they wanted a _combining_ motive and a _justifying_ motive. Mahomet supplied both these. Says he, 'All nations are idolaters; go and thrust them into the mill that they may be transformed to our likeness.'

Consequently, the great idea of the truth, of a truth transcending all available rights on the other side, was foreign to Mahometanism, and any glimmering of this that may seem to be found in it was borrowed, was filched from Christianity.

9.--LITERARY.

The three greatest powers which we know of in moulding human feelings are, first, Christianity; secondly, the actions of men emblazoned by history; and, in the third place, poetry. If the first were represented to the imagination by the atmospheric air investing our planet, which we take to be the most awful laboratory of powers--mysterious, unseen, and absolutely infinite--the second might be represented by the winds, and the third by lightning. Napoleon and Lord Byron have done more mischief to the moral feelings, to the truth of all moral estimates, to the grandeur and magnanimity of man, in this present generation, than all other causes acting together. But how? Simply by throwing human feelings into false combinations. Both of them linked the mean to the grand, the base to the n.o.ble, in a way which often proves fatally inextricable to the poor infirm mind of the ordinary spectator. Here is Napoleon, simply because he wields a vast national machinery, throwing a magic of celerity and power into a particular action which absolutely overpowers the _genus attonitorum_, so that they are reconciled by the dazzle of a splendour not at all _in_ Napoleon, to a baseness which really _is_ in Napoleon. The man that never praised an enemy is shown to this vile mob by the light thrown off from the radiant power of France as the greatest of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his l.u.s.t, seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above.

Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic hero possibly, some n.o.ble quality of courage or perseverance with scorn the most puerile and senseless. p.r.o.ne enough is poor degraded human nature to find something grand in scorn; but, after this arbitrary combination of Lord Byron's, never again does the poor man think of scorn but it suggests to him moral greatness, nor think of greatness but it suggests scorn as its indispensable condition.

Wordsworth is always recording phenomena as they are enjoyed; Coleridge as they reconcile themselves with opposing or conflicting phenomena.

W. W.'s social philosophy is surely shallow. It is true the man who has a shallow philosophy under the guidance of Christianity has a profound philosophy. But this apart, such truths as 'He who made the creature will allow for his frailties,' etc., are commonplace.

_Invention as a Characteristic of Poets._--I happened this evening (Sat.u.r.day, August 3rd, '44) to be saying of W. W. to myself: 'No poet is so free from all cases like this, viz., where all the feelings and spontaneous thoughts which they have acc.u.mulated coming to an end, and yet the case seeming to require more to finish it, or bring it round, like a peal of church bells, they are forced to invent, and form descants on raptures never really felt. Suddenly this suggested that invention, therefore, so far from being a differential quality of poetry, was, in fact, the polar opposite, spontaneousness being the true quality.

_Tragedy._--I believe it is a very useful thing to let young persons cultivate their kind feelings by repeated indulgences. Thus my children often asked when anything was to be paid or given to any person, that they might have the satisfaction of giving it. So I see clearly that young boys or girls allowed to carry abroad their infant brothers and sisters, when the little creature feels and manifests a real dependence upon them in every act and movement, which _matre praesente_ they would not have done, which again seen and felt calls out every latent goodness of the elder child's heart. So again (here I have clipped out the case).

However, feeding rabbits, but above all the action upon women's hearts in the enormous expansion given by the relation to their own children, develops a feeling of tenderness that afterwards sets the model for the world, and would die away, or freeze, or degenerate, if it were generally balked. Now just such an action has tragedy, and if the sympathy with calamities caused to n.o.ble natures by ign.o.bler, or by dark fates, were never opened or moved or called out, it would slumber inertly, it would rust, and become far less ready to respond upon any call being made. Such sensibilities are not consciously known to the possessor until developed.

_Punctuation._--Suppose an ordinary case where the involution of clauses went three deep, and that each was equally marked off by commas, now I say that so far from aiding the logic it would require an immense effort to distribute the relations of logic. But the very purpose and use of points is to aid the logic. If indeed you could see the points at all in this relation

strophe antistrophe 1 2 3 3 2 1 ----, ----, ----, apodosis ----, ----, ----,