Part 28 (2/2)

[Sidenote: SELF-ABSORPTION AND SELFISHNESS]

One source of calumny (I say _source_, because _allophoby_ from _heautopithygmy_ is the only proper _cause_) may be found in this--every man's life exhibits two sorts of selfishness, those which are and those which are not objects of his own consciousness. _A_ is thinking, perhaps, of some plan in which he may benefit another, and during this absorption consults his own little bodily comforts blindly--occupies the best place at the fire-side, or asks at once, ”Where am I to sit?”

instead of first inquiring after the health of another. Now the error lies here, that _B_, in complaining of _A_, first takes for granted either that these are acts of conscious selfishness in _A_, or, if he allows the truth, yet considers them just as bad (and so perhaps they may be in a certain sense), but _forgets_ that his own life presents the same, judges of his own life exclusively by his own consciousness, that of another by conscious and unconscious in a lump. A monkey's anthropomorph att.i.tudes we take for anthropic.

[Sidenote: SELF-ADVERTISING PHILANTHROPY]

Try not to become disgusted with active benevolence, or despondent because there is a _philanthropy-trade_. It is a sort of benefit-club of virtue, supported by the contributions of paupers in virtue, founded by genuine enthusiasts who gain a reputation for the thing--then slip in successors who know how to avail themselves of the influence and connections derived thereby--quite gratuitous, however, and bustling-active--but yet _bribe high_ to become the unpaid physicians of the dispensary at St. Luke's Hospital, and bow and sc.r.a.pe and intrigue, Carlyleise and Knappise for it. And such is the [case with regard to]

the slave trade. The first abolitionists were the good men who laboured when the thing seemed desperate--it was virtue for its own sake. Then the quakers, Granville Sharp, etc.--then the restless spirits who are under the action of tyrannical oppression from images, and, gradually, mixed vanity and love of power with it--the politicians + saints = Wilberforce. Last come the Scotchmen--and Brougham is now canva.s.sing more successfully for the seat of Wilberforce, who retires with great honour and regret, from infirmities of age and _enoughness_. It is just as with the great original benefactors and founders of useful plans, Raleigh, Sir Hugh Middleton, etc.--men of genius succeeded by sharpers, but who often can better carry on what they never could have first conceived--and this, too, by their very want of those qualities and virtues which were necessary to the discovery.

[Sidenote: ”BUT LOVE IS INDESTRUCTIBLE”]

All mere pa.s.sions, like spirits and apparitions, have their hour of c.o.c.k-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no _mere_ pa.s.sion; and it is a test of its being love, that no reason can be a.s.signed _why_ it should disappear. Shall we not always, in this life at least, remain _animae dimidiatae_?--must not the moral reason always hold out the perfecting of each by union of both as good and lovely?

With reason, therefore, and conscience let love vanish, but let these vanish only with our being.

[Sidenote: THE FEINT OF THE SLEEPLESS]

The sick and sleepless man, after the dawn of the fresh day, is fain to watch the smoke now from this and then from the other chimney of the town from his bed-chamber, as if willing to borrow from others that sense of a new day, of a discontinuity between the yesterday and the to-day which his own sensations had not afforded. [Compare Wordsworth's ”Blessed Barrier Between Day and Day,” Wordsworth's Third Sonnet to Sleep, _Poetical Works_, 1889, 354.]

[Sidenote: FIRST THOUGHTS AND FRIENDs.h.i.+P]

O what wisdom could I _talk_ to a YOUTH of genius and genial-heartedness! O how little could I teach! and yet, though despairing of success, I would attempt to enforce:--”Whenever you meet with a person of undoubted talents, more especially if a woman, and of apparent goodness, and yet you feel uncomfortable, and urged against your nature, and, therefore, probably in vain, to be on your guard--then take yourself to task and enquire what strong reason, moral or prudential, you have to form any intimacy or even familiarity with that person. If you after this (or moreover) detect any falsehood, or, what amounts to the same, p.r.o.neness and quickness to look into, to a.n.a.lyse, to find out and represent evil or weakness in others (however this may be disguised even from the person's own mind by _candour_, [in] pointing out the good at the same time, by affectation of speculative truth, as psychologists, or of telling you all their thoughts as open-hearted friends), then let no reason but a strong and coercive one suffice to make you any other than as formal and distant acquaintance as circ.u.mstances will permit.” And am I not now suffering, in part, for forcing my feelings into slavery to my notions, and intellectual admiration for a whole year and more with regard to ---- ? [So the MS.]

If I played the hypocrite to myself, can I blame my fate that he has, at length, played the deceiver to me? Yet, G.o.d knows! I did it most virtuously!--not only without vanity or any self-interest of however subtle a nature, but from humility and a true delight in finding excellence of any kind, and a disposition to fall prostrate before it.

[Sidenote: MILTON'S BLANK VERSE]

To understand fully the mechanism, in order fully to feel the incomparable excellence of Milton's metre, we must make four tables, or a fourfold compartment, the first for the feet, single and composite, for which the whole twenty-six feet of the ancients will be found necessary; the second to note the construction of the feet, whether from different or from single words--for who does not perceive the difference to the ear between--

”Inextricable disobedience” and

”To love or not: in this we stand or fall”--

yet both lines are composed of five iambics? The third, of the strength and position, the concentration or diffusion of the _emphasis_. Fourth, the length and position of the pauses. Then compare his narrative with the harangues. I have not noticed the ellipses, because they either do not affect the rhythm, or are not ellipses, but are comprehended in the feet.

[Sidenote: APHORISMS OR PITHY SENTENCES]

Shall I compare man to a clockwork Catamaran, destined to float on in a meaner element for so many moments or hours, and then to explode, scattering its _involucrum_ and itself to ascend into its proper element?

I am persuaded that we love what is above us more than what is under us.

Money--paper money--peace, war. How comes it that all men in all companies are talking of the depreciation, etc. etc.--and yet that a discourse on transubstantiation would not be a more withering sirocco than the attempt to explain philosophically the true cure and causes of that which interests all so vehemently?

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