Part 32 (1/2)
[Sidenote: THE MEED OF PRAISE]
There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, whether bard, musician, or artist, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-building or incubation--a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. Alas! alas! alas!
[Sidenote: THE GREAT UNKNOWN]
Anonymity is now an artifice to acquire celebrity, as a black veil is worn to make a pair of bright eyes more conspicuous.
[Sidenote: BOOK-LEARNING FOR LEGISLATORS]
For the same reasons that we cannot now act by impulses, but must think, so now must every legislator be a man of sound book-learning, because he cannot, if he would, think or act from the simple dictates of unimproved but undepraved common sense. Newspapers, reviews, and the conversation of men who derive their opinions from newspapers and reviews will secure for him artificial opinions, if he does not secure them for himself from purer and more authentic sources. There is now no such being as a country gentleman. Like their relation, the Dodo, the race is extinct, or if by accident one has escaped, it belongs to the Museum, not to active life, or the purposes of active life.
[Sidenote: THEISM AND ATHEISM]
The more I read and reflect on the arguments of the truly philosophical theists and atheists, the more I feel convinced that the ultimate difference is a moral rather than an intellectual one, that the result is an x y z, an acknowledged insufficiency of the known to account for itself, and, therefore, a something unknown--that to which, while the atheist leaves it a blank in the understanding, the theist dedicates his n.o.blest feelings of love and awe, and with which, by a moral syllogism, he connects and unites his conscience and actions. For the words goodness and wisdom are clearly only reflexes of the effect, just as when we call the unknown cause of cold and heat by the name of its effects, and _know_ nothing further. For if we mean that a Being like man, with human goodness and intellect, only magnified, is the cause, that is, that the First Cause is an immense man (as according to Swedenborg and Zinzendorf), then come the insoluble difficulties of the incongruity of qualities whose very essence implies finiteness, with a Being _ex hypothesi_ infinite.
[Sidenote: THE MIND'S EYE]
An excellent instance of the abstraction [from objects of the sense]
that results from the attention converging to any one object, is furnished by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, dabs, crusts, and smears of paints in the laboratory of a Raphael, or a Claude Lorraine, or a Van Huysum, or any other great master of the beautiful and becoming. In like manner, the mud and clay in the modelling hand of a Chantrey--what are they to him whose total soul is awake, in his eye as a subject, and before his eye as some ideal of beauty _objectively_?
The various objects of the senses are as little the objects of _his_ senses, as the ink with which the ”Lear” was written, existed in the consciousness of a Shakspere.
[Sidenote: A LAND OF BLISS]
The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of rapid unceasing motion before the humble-bee within the flowering bells and cups--and the eagle _level_ with the clouds, himself a cloudy speck, surveys the vale from mount to mount. From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flowers or the water-lilies in the stiller pool below.
[Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY]
The defect of Archbishop Leighton's reasoning is the taking eternity for a sort of time, a _baro major_, a baron of beef or quarter of lamb, out of which and off which time is cut, as a brisket or shoulder--while, even in common discourse, without any design of sounding the depth of the truth or of weighing the words expressing it in the hair-balance of metaphysics, it would be more convenient to consider eternity the _simul et totum_ as the _ant.i.theton_ of time.
[Sidenote: THE LITERARY STERILITY OF ISLAMISM]
The extraordinary florency of letters under the Spanish Caliphate in connection with the character and capabilities of Mohammedanism has never yet been treated as its importance requires. Halim II, founder of the University of Cordova, and of numerous colleges and libraries throughout Spain, is said to have possessed a library of six hundred thousand MSS., the catalogue filling forty-four volumes. Nor were his successors behind him in zeal and munificence. That the prime article of Islamism, the uni-personality of G.o.d, is one cause of the downfall, say rather of the merely meteoric existence of their literary age, I am persuaded, but the exclusive scene (in Spain) suggests many interesting views. With a learned cla.s.s Mohammedanism could not but pa.s.s into Deism, and Deism never did, never can, establish itself as a religion. It is the doctrine of the tri-unity that connects Christianity with philosophy, gives a positive religion a specific interest to the philosopher, and that of redemption to the moralist and psychologist.
Predestination, in the plenitude, in which it is equivalent to fatalism, was the necessary alternative and _succedaneum_ of Redemption, and the Incarnation the only preservative against pantheism on one side, and anthropomorphism on the other. The Persian (Europeans in Asia) form of Mohammedanism is very striking in this point of view.
[Sidenote: THE SPIRIT OF A PEOPLE]
It is not by individual character that an individual can derive just conclusions respecting a community or an age. Conclusions so drawn are the excuse of selfish, narrow and pusillanimous statesmen, who, by dwelling on the kindred baseness or folly of the persons with whom they come in immediate contact, lose all faith in human nature, ignorant that even in these a spark is latent which would light up and consume the worthless overlay in a national moment. The spirit of a race is the character of a people, the sleep or the awakening of which depends on a few minds, pre-ordained for this purpose, and sometimes by the mere removal of the dead weight of a degenerate Court or n.o.bility pressing on the spring. So I doubt not would it be with the Turks, were the Porte and its seraglio conquered by Russia. But the spirit of a race ought never to be supposed extinct, but on the other hand no more or other ought to be expected than the race contains in itself. The true cause of the irrecoverable fall of Rome is to be found in the fact, that Rome was a city, a handful of men that multiplied its subjects incomparably faster than its citizens, so that the latter were soon dilute and lost in the former. On a similar principle colonists in modern times degenerate by _excision_ from their race (the ancient colonies were _buds_). This, I think, applies to the Neapolitans and most of the Italian States. A nest of republics keep each other alive; but a patchwork of princ.i.p.alities has the effect of excision by insulation, or rather by compressure. How long did the life of Germany doze under these ligatures! Yet did we not _despair wrongfully_ of the people? The spirit of the race survived, of which literature was a part. Hence I dare not despair of Greece, because it has been barbarised and enslaved, but not split up into puny independent governments under Princes of their own race. The Neapolitans have always been a conquered people, and degenerates in the original sense of the word, _de genere_--they have lost their race, though what it was is uncertain. Lastly, the individual in all things is the prerogative of the divine knowledge. What it is, our eyes can see only by what it has in common, and this can only be seen in communities where neither excision, nor ligature, nor commixture exists. Despotism and superst.i.tion will not extinguish the character of a race, as Russia testifies. But again, take care to understand that character, and expect no other fruit than the root contains in its nature.
[Sidenote: THE FLIGHT OF MOHAMMED]
Had I proceeded, in concert with R. Southey, with the ”Flight and Return of Mohammed,” [1799] I had intended to introduce a disputation between Mahomet, as the representative of unipersonal Theism with the Judaico-Christian machinery of angels, genii, and prophets, an idolater with his G.o.ds, heroes, and spirits of the departed mighty, and a fetish-wors.h.i.+pper who adored the invisible alone, and held no religion common to all men or any number of men other than as they chanced at the same moment to be acted on by the same influence--even as when a hundred ant-hills are in motion under the same burst of suns.h.i.+ne. And, still, chiefly for the sake of the last scheme, I should like to do something of the kind. My enlightened fetish-divine would have been an Okenist, a zoo-magnetist and (a priest of) the night-side of Nature.