Part 26 (2/2)

”By aid of a large portion of mother's wit, Paine, though an unlearned man, saw the absurdity of the Christian religion.” Mother's wit, indeed!

Wit from his mother the earth--the earthy and material wit of the _flesh_ and its l.u.s.ts. One ounce of mother-wit may be worth a pound of learning, but a grain of the Father's wisdom is worth a ton of mother-wit--yea! of both together.

[Sidenote: OF EDUCATION]

”O it is but an infant! 'tis but a child! he will be better as he grows older.” ”O! she'll grow ashamed of it. This is but waywardness.” Grant all this--that _they_ will _out_grow these particular actions, yet with what HABITS of _feeling_ will they arrive at youth and manhood?

Especially with regard to obedience, how is it possible that they should struggle against the boiling pa.s.sions of youth by means of obedience to their own conscience who are to meet the dawn of conscience with the broad meridian of disobedience and habits of self-willedness? Besides, when are the rebukes, the chastis.e.m.e.nts to commence? Why! about nine or ten, perhaps, when, for the father at least, [the child] is less a plaything--when, therefore, anger is not healed up in its mind, either by its own infant versatility and forgetfulness, or by after caresses--when everything is remembered individually, and sense of injustice felt. For the boy very well remembers the different treatment when he was a child; but what has been so long permitted becomes a right to him. Far better, in such a case, to have them sent off to others--a strict schoolmaster--than to breed that contradiction of feeling toward the same person which subverts the very _principle_ of our impulses.

Whereas, in a tender, yet obedience-exacting and improvement-enforcing education, though very gradually, and by small doses at a time, yet always going on--yea! even from a twelvemonth old--at six or seven the child really has outgrown all things that annoy, just at the time when, as the charm of infancy begins to diminish, they would begin really to annoy.

[Sidenote: THE DANGERS OF ADAPTING TRUTH TO THE MINDS OF THE VULGAR]

There are, in every country, times when the few who know the truth have clothed it for the vulgar, and addressed the vulgar in the vulgar language and modes of conception, in order to convey any part of the truth. This, however, could not be done with safety, even to the _illuminati_ themselves in the first instance; but to their successors, habit gradually turned lie into belief, partial and _stagnate_ truth into ignorance, and the teachers of the vulgar (like the Franciscan friars in the South of Europe) became a part of the vulgar--nay, because the laymen were open to various impulses and influences, which their instructors had built out (compare a brook in open air, liable to rainstreams and rills from new-opened fountains, to the same running through a mill guarded by sluice-gates and back-water), they became the vulgarest of the vulgar, till, finally, resolute not to detach themselves from the mob, the mob at length detaches itself from them, and leaves the mill-race dry, the moveless, rotten wheels as day-dormitories for bats and owls, and the old grindstones for wags and scoffers of the taproom to whet their wits on.

[Sidenote: POETRY AND PROSE]

When there are few literary men, and the vast 999999/10000000 of the population are ignorant, as was the case of Italy from Dante to Metastasio, _from causes I need not here put down, there will be a poetical language_; but that a poet ever uses a word as poetical--that is, formally--which he, in the same mood and thought, would not use in prose or conversation, Milton's Prose Works will a.s.sist us in disproving. But as soon as literature becomes common, and critics numerous in any country, and a large body of men seek to express themselves habitually in the most precise, sensuous, and impa.s.sioned words, the difference as to mere words ceases, as, for example, the German prose writers. Produce to me _one_ word out of Klopstock, Wieland, Schiller, Goethe, Voss, &c., which I will not find as frequently used in the most energetic prose writers. The sole difference in style is that poetry demands a severe keeping--it admits nothing that prose may not often admit, but it oftener rejects. In other words, it presupposes a more continuous state of pa.s.sion. _N.B._--Provincialisms of poets who have become the supreme cla.s.sics in countries one in language but under various states and governments have aided this false idea, as, in Italy, the Tuscanisms of Dante, Ariosto, and Alfieri, foolishly imitated by Venetians, Romans, and Neapolitans. How much this is against the opinion of Dante, see his admirable treatise on ”Lingua Volgare n.o.bile,” the first, I believe, of his prose or _prose and verse_ works; for the ”Convito” and ”La Vita Nuova” are, one-third, in metre.

[Sidenote: WORLDLY WISE]

I would strongly recommend Lloyd's ”State Worthies” [_The Statesmen and Favourites of England since the Reformation._ By David Lloyd. London, 1665-70] as the manual of every man who would rise in the world. In every twenty pages it recommends contradictions, but he who cannot reconcile them for himself, and discover which suits his plan, can never rise in the world. _N.B._--I have a mind to draw a complete character of a worldly-wise man out of Lloyd. He would be highly-finished, useful, honoured, popular--a man revered by his children, his wife, and so forth. To be sure, he must not expect to be _beloved_ by _one_ proto-friend; and, if there be truth in reason or Christianity, he will go to h.e.l.l--but, even so, he will doubtless secure himself a most respectable place in the devil's chimney-corner.

[Sidenote: HINTS FOR ”THE FRIEND”]

The falseness of that so very common opinion, ”Mathematics, aye, that is something! that has been useful--but metaphysics!” Now fairly compare the two, what each has really done.

But [be thou] only concerned to find out truth, which, on what side soever it appears, is always _victory_ to every honest mind.

Christianity, too (as well as Platonism and the school of Pythagoras), has its esoteric philosophy, or why are we forbidden to cast pearls before swine? But who are the swine? Are they the poor and despised, the unalphabeted in worldly learning? O, no! the rich whose hearts are steeled by ignorance of misery and habits of receiving slavish obedience--the dropsical learned and the St. Vitus' [bewitched]

sciolist.

In controversy it is highly useful to know whether you are really addressing yourself to an opponent or only to partisans, with the intention of preserving them firm. Either is well, but they should never be commingled.

In her letter to Lord Willoughby Queen Elizabeth hath the word ”eloign.”

There is no exact equivalent in modern use. Neither ”withdraw” or ”absent” are precisely synonymous.

We understand Nature just as if, at a distance, we looked at the image of a person in a looking-gla.s.s, plainly and fervently discoursing, yet what he uttered we could decipher only by the motion of the lips or by his mien.

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