Part 18 (1/2)

Christianity changed nothing in this essential bent of Hebraism to set doing above knowing. Self-conquest, self-devotion, the following not our own individual will, but the will of G.o.d, _obedience_, is the fundamental idea of this form, also, of the discipline to which we have attached the general name of Hebraism. Only, as the old law and the network of prescriptions with which it enveloped human life were evidently a motive-power not driving and searching enough to produce the result aimed at,--patient continuance in well-doing, self-conquest,-- Christianity subst.i.tuted for them boundless devotion to that inspiring and affecting pattern of self-conquest offered by Jesus Christ; and by the new motive-power, of which the essence was this, though the love and admiration of Christian churches have for centuries been employed in varying, amplifying, and adorning the plain description of it, Christianity, as St. Paul truly says, ”establishes the law,”[437] and in the strength of the ampler power which she has thus supplied to fulfill it, has accomplished the miracles, which we all see, of her history.

So long as we do not forget that both h.e.l.lenism and Hebraism are profound and admirable manifestations of man's life, tendencies, and powers, and that both of them aim at a like final result, we can hardly insist too strongly on the divergence of line and of operation with which they proceed. It is a divergence so great that it most truly, as the prophet Zechariah says, ”has raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece!”[438] The difference whether it is by doing or by knowing that we set most store, and the practical consequences which follow from this difference, leave their mark on all the history of our race and of its development. Language may be abundantly quoted from both h.e.l.lenism and Hebraism to make it seem that one follows the same current as the other towards the same goal. They are, truly, borne towards the same goal; but the currents which bear them are infinitely different. It is true, Solomon will praise knowing: ”Understanding is a well-spring of life unto him that hath it.”[439] And in the New Testament, again, Jesus Christ is a ”light,”[440] and ”truth makes us free.”[441] It is true, Aristotle will undervalue knowing: ”In what concerns virtue,” says he, ”three things are necessary--knowledge, deliberate will, and perseverance; but, whereas the two last are all-important, the first is a matter of little importance.”[442] It is true that with the same impatience with which St. James enjoins a man to be not a forgetful hearer, but a _doer of the work_,[443] Epictetus[444] exhorts us to _do_ what we have demonstrated to ourselves we ought to do; or he taunts us with futility, for being armed at all points to prove that lying is wrong, yet all the time continuing to lie. It is true, Plato, in words which are almost the words of the New Testament or the Imitation, calls life a learning to die.[445] But underneath the superficial agreement the fundamental divergence still subsists. The understanding of Solomon is ”the walking in the way of the commandments”; this is ”the way of peace,” and it is of this that blessedness comes. In the New Testament, the truth which gives us the peace of G.o.d and makes us free, is the love of Christ constraining us[446] to crucify, as he did, and with a like purpose of moral regeneration, the flesh with its affections and l.u.s.ts, and thus establis.h.i.+ng, as we have seen, the law. The moral virtues, on the other hand, are with Aristotle but the porch[447] and access to the intellectual, and with these last is blessedness. That partaking of the divine life, which both h.e.l.lenism and Hebraism, as we have said, fix as their crowning aim, Plato expressly denies to the man of practical virtue merely, of self-conquest with any other motive than that of perfect intellectual vision. He reserves it for the lover of pure knowledge, of seeing things as they really are,--the[Greek: philomathhaes][448]

Both h.e.l.lenism and Hebraism arise out of the wants of human nature, and address themselves to satisfying those wants. But their methods are so different, they lay stress on such different points, and call into being by their respective disciplines such different activities, that the face which human nature presents when it pa.s.ses from the hands of one of them to those of the other, is no longer the same. To get rid of one's ignorance, to see things as they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in their beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which h.e.l.lenism holds out before human nature; and from the simplicity and charm of this ideal, h.e.l.lenism, and human life in the hands of h.e.l.lenism, is invested with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy; they are full of what we call sweetness and light.

Difficulties are kept out of view, and the beauty and rationalness of the ideal have all our thoughts. ”The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he _is_ perfecting himself,”[449]--this account of the matter by Socrates, the true Socrates of the _Memorabilia_, has something so simple, spontaneous, and unsophisticated about it, that it seems to fill us with clearness and hope when we hear it. But there is a saying which I have heard attributed to Mr. Carlyle about Socrates--a very happy saying, whether it is really Mr. Carlyle's or not,--which excellently marks the essential point in which Hebraism differs from h.e.l.lenism. ”Socrates,”

this saying goes, ”is terribly _at ease in Zion_.” Hebraism--and here is the source of its wonderful strength--has always been severely preoccupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in Zion; of the difficulties which oppose themselves to man's pursuit or attainment of that perfection of which Socrates talks so hopefully, and, as from this point of view one might almost say, so glibly. It is all very well to talk of getting rid of one's ignorance, of seeing things in their reality, seeing them in their beauty; but how is this to be done when there is something which thwarts and spoils all our efforts?

This something is _sin_; and the s.p.a.ce which sin fills in Hebraism, as compared with h.e.l.lenism, is indeed prodigious. This obstacle to perfection fills the whole scene, and perfection appears remote and rising away from earth, in the background. Under the name of sin, the difficulties of knowing oneself and conquering oneself which impede man's pa.s.sage to perfection, become, for Hebraism, a positive, active ent.i.ty hostile to man, a mysterious power which I heard Dr. Pusey[450]

the other day, in one of his impressive sermons, compare to a hideous hunchback seated on our shoulders, and which it is the main business of our lives to hate and oppose. The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it. As h.e.l.lenism speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve, so Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, of awakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of this kind. It is obvious to what wide divergence these differing tendencies, actively followed, must lead. As one pa.s.ses and repa.s.ses from h.e.l.lenism to Hebraism, from Plato to St. Paul, one feels inclined to rub one's eyes and ask oneself whether man is indeed a gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a n.o.ble and divine nature; or an unhappy chained captive, laboring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death.

Apparently it was the h.e.l.lenic conception of human nature which was unsound, for the world could not live by it. Absolutely to call it unsound, however, is to fall into the common error of its Hebraizing enemies; but it was unsound at that particular moment of man's development, it was premature. The indispensable basis of conduct and self-control, the platform upon which alone the perfection aimed at by Greece can come into bloom, was not to be reached by our race so easily; centuries of probation and discipline were needed to bring us to it.

Therefore the bright promise of h.e.l.lenism faded, and Hebraism ruled the world. Then was seen that astonis.h.i.+ng spectacle, so well marked by the often-quoted words of the prophet Zechariah, when men of all languages and nations took hold of the skirt of him that was a Jew, saying:--”_We will go with you, for we have heard that G.o.d is with you_.”[451] And the Hebraism which thus received and ruled a world all gone out of the way and altogether become unprofitable, was, and could not but be, the later, the more spiritual, the more attractive development of Hebraism.

It was Christianity; that is to say, Hebraism aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, not by obedience to the letter of a law, but by conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example. To a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refused themselves nothing, it showed one who refused himself everything;--”_my Saviour banished joy!_”[452] says George Herbert. When the _alma Venus_, the life-giving and joy-giving power of nature, so fondly cherished by the pagan world, could not save her followers from self-dissatisfaction and ennui, the severe words of the apostle came bracingly and refres.h.i.+ngly: ”Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because of these things cometh the wrath of G.o.d upon the children of disobedience.”[453] Through age after age and generation after generation, our race, or all that part of our race which was most living and progressive, was _baptized into a death_; and endeavored, by suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin. Of this endeavor, the animating labors and afflictions of early Christianity, the touching asceticism of mediaeval Christianity, are the great historical manifestations. Literary monuments of it, each in its own way incomparable, remain in the _Epistles_ of St. Paul, in St. Augustine's _Confessions_, and in the two original and simplest books of the _Imitation_.[454]

Of two disciplines laying their main stress, the one, on clear intelligence, the other, on firm obedience; the one, on comprehensively knowing the ground of one's duty, the other, on diligently practising it; the one, on taking all possible care (to use Bishop Wilson's words again) that the light we have be not darkness, the other, that according to the best light we have we diligently walk,--the priority naturally belongs to that discipline which braces all man's moral powers, and founds for him an indispensable basis of character. And, therefore, it is justly said of the Jewish people, who were charged with setting powerfully forth that side of the divine order to which the words _conscience_ and _self-conquest_ point, that they were ”entrusted with the oracles of G.o.d”;[455] as it is justly said of Christianity, which followed Judaism and which set forth this side with a much deeper effectiveness and a much wider influence, that the wisdom of the old pagan world was foolishness[456] compared to it. No words of devotion and admiration can be too strong to render thanks to these beneficent forces which have so borne forward humanity in its appointed work of coming to the knowledge and possession of itself; above all, in those great moments when their action was the wholesomest and the most necessary.

But the evolution of these forces, separately and in themselves, is not the whole evolution of humanity,--their single history is not the whole history of man; whereas their admirers are always apt to make it stand for the whole history. Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism are, neither of them, the _law_ of human development, as their admirers are p.r.o.ne to make them; they are, each of them, _contributions_ to human development,--august contributions, invaluable contributions; and each showing itself to us more august, more invaluable, more preponderant over the other, according to the moment in which we take them, and the relation in which we stand to them. The nations of our modern world, children of that immense and salutary movement which broke up the pagan world, inevitably stand to h.e.l.lenism in a relation which dwarfs it, and to Hebraism in a relation which magnifies it. They are inevitably p.r.o.ne to take Hebraism as the law of human development, and not as simply a contribution to it, however precious. And yet the lesson must perforce be learned, that the human spirit is wider than the most priceless of the forces which bear it onward, and that to the whole development of man Hebraism itself is, like h.e.l.lenism, but a contribution.

Perhaps we may help ourselves to see this clearer by an ill.u.s.tration drawn from the treatment of a single great idea which has profoundly engaged the human spirit, and has given it eminent opportunities for showing its n.o.bleness and energy. It surely must be perceived that the idea of immortality, as this idea rises in its generality before the human spirit, is something grander, truer, and more satisfying, than it is in the particular forms by which St. Paul, in the famous fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians, and Plato, in the _Phaedo_[457] endeavor to develop and establish it. Surely we cannot but feel, that the argumentation with which the Hebrew apostle goes about to expound this great idea is, after all, confused and inconclusive; and that the reasoning, drawn from a.n.a.logies of likeness and equality, which is employed upon it by the Greek philosopher, is over-subtle and sterile. Above and beyond the inadequate solutions which Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism here attempt, extends the immense and august problem itself, and the human spirit which gave birth to it. And this single ill.u.s.tration may suggest to us how the same thing happens in other cases also.

But meanwhile, by alternations of Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism, of a man's intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule. As the great movement of Christianity was a triumph of Hebraism and man's moral impulses, so the great movement which goes by the name of the Renascence[458] was an uprising and reinstatement of man's intellectual impulses and of h.e.l.lenism. We in England, the devoted children of Protestantism, chiefly know the Renascence by its subordinate and secondary side of the Reformation. The Reformation has been often called a Hebraizing revival, a return to the ardor and sincereness of primitive Christianity. No one, however, can study the development of Protestantism and of Protestant churches without feeling that into the Reforrmation, too,--Hebraizing child of the Renascence and offspring of its fervor, rather than its intelligence, as it undoubtedly was,--the subtle h.e.l.lenic leaven of the Renascence found its way, and that the exact respective parts, in the Reformation, of Hebraism and of h.e.l.lenism, are not easy to separate. But what we may with truth say is, that all which Protestantism was to itself clearly conscious of, all which it succeeded in clearly setting forth in words, had the characters of Hebraism rather than of h.e.l.lenism.

The Reformation was strong, in that it was an earnest return to the Bible and to doing from the heart the will of G.o.d as there written. It was weak, in that it never consciously grasped or applied the central idea of the Renascence,--the h.e.l.lenic idea of pursuing, in all lines of activity, the law and science, to use Plato's words, of things as they really are. Whatever direct superiority, therefore, Protestantism had over Catholicism was a moral superiority, a superiority arising out of its greater sincerity and earnestness,--at the moment of its apparition at any rate,--in dealing with the heart and conscience. Its pretensions to an intellectual superiority are in general quite illusory. For h.e.l.lenism, for the thinking side in man as distinguished from the acting side, the att.i.tude of mind of Protestantism towards the Bible in no respect differs from the att.i.tude of mind of Catholicism towards the Church. The mental habit of him who imagines that Balaam's a.s.s spoke, in no respect differs from the mental habit of him who imagines that a Madonna of wood or stone winked; and the one, who says that G.o.d's Church makes him believe what he believes, and the other, who says that G.o.d's Word makes him believe what he believes, are for the philosopher perfectly alike in not really and truly knowing, when they say _G.o.d's Church_ and _G.o.d's Word_, what it is they say, or whereof they affirm.

In the sixteenth century, therefore, h.e.l.lenism re-entered the world, and again stood in presence of Hebraism,--a Hebraism renewed and purged.

Now, it has not been enough observed, how, in the seventeenth century, a fate befell h.e.l.lenism in some respects a.n.a.logous to that which befell it at the commencement of our era. The Renascence, that great reawakening of h.e.l.lenism, that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are, which in art, in literature, and in physics, produced such splendid fruits, had, like the anterior h.e.l.lenism of the pagan world, a side of moral weakness and of relaxation or insensibility of the moral fibre, which in Italy showed itself with the most startling plainness, but which in France, England, and other countries was very apparent, too. Again this loss of spiritual balance, this exclusive preponderance given to man's perceiving and knowing side, this unnatural defect of his feeling and acting side, provoked a reaction. Let us trace that reaction where it most nearly concerns us.

Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. h.e.l.lenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of h.e.l.lenism. But nothing more strongly marks the essential unity of man, than the affinities we can perceive, in this point or that, between members of one family of peoples and members of another. And no affinity of this kind is more strongly marked than that likeness in the strength and prominence of the moral fibre, which, notwithstanding immense elements of difference, knits in some special sort the genius and history of us English, and our American descendants across the Atlantic, to the genius and history of the Hebrew people. Puritanism, which has been so great a power in the English nation, and in the strongest part of the English nation, was originally the reaction in the seventeenth century of the conscience and moral sense of our race, against the moral indifference and lax rule of conduct which in the sixteenth century came in with the Renascence. It was a reaction of Hebraism against h.e.l.lenism; and it powerfully manifested itself, as was natural, in a people with much of what we call a Hebraizing turn, with a signal affinity for the bent which, was the master-bent of Hebrew life. Eminently Indo-European by its _humor_, by the power it shows, through this gift, of imaginatively acknowledging the multiform aspects of the problem of life, and of thus getting itself unfixed from its own over-certainty, of smiling at its own over-tenacity, our race has yet (and a great part of its strength lies here), in matters of practical life and moral conduct, a strong share of the a.s.suredness, the tenacity, the intensity of the Hebrews.

This turn manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part in shaping our history for the last two hundred years. Undoubtedly it checked and changed amongst us that movement of the Renascence which we see producing in the reign of Elizabeth such wonderful fruits.

Undoubtedly it stopped the prominent rule and direct development of that order of ideas which we call by the name of h.e.l.lenism, and gave the first rank to a different order of ideas. Apparently, too, as we said of the former defeat of h.e.l.lenism, if h.e.l.lenism was defeated, this shows that h.e.l.lenism was imperfect, and that its ascendency at that moment would not have been for the world's good.

Yet there is a very important difference between the defeat inflicted on h.e.l.lenism by Christianity eighteen hundred years ago, and the check given to the Renascence by Puritanism. The greatness of the difference is well measured by the difference in force, beauty, significance, and usefulness, between primitive Christianity and Protestantism. Eighteen hundred years ago it was altogether the hour of Hebraism. Primitive Christianity was legitimately and truly the ascendant force in the world at that time, and the way of mankind's progress lay through its full development. Another hour in man's development began in the fifteenth century, and the main road of his progress then lay for a time through h.e.l.lenism. Puritanism was no longer the central current of the world's progress, it was a side stream crossing the central current and checking it. The cross and the check may have been necessary and salutary, but that does not do away with the essential difference between the main stream of man's advance and a cross or side stream. For more than two hundred years the main stream of man's advance has moved towards knowing himself and the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of consciousness; the main impulse of a great part, and that the strongest part, of our nation has been towards strictness of conscience. They have made the secondary the princ.i.p.al at the wrong moment, and the princ.i.p.al they have at the wrong moment treated as secondary. This contravention of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. In all directions our habitual causes of action seem to be losing efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with ourselves. Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life.

EQUALITY[459]

When we talk of man's advance towards his full humanity, we think of an advance, not along one line only, but several. Certain races and nations, as we know, are on certain lines preeminent and representative.

The Hebrew nation was preeminent on one great line. ”What nation,” it was justly asked by their lawgiver, ”hath statutes and judgments so righteous as the law which I set before you this day? Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations which shall hear all these statutes and say: Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people!” The h.e.l.lenic race was preeminent on other lines. Isocrates[460] could say of Athens: ”Our city has left the rest of the world so far behind in philosophy and eloquence, that those educated by Athens have become the teachers of the rest of mankind; and so well has she done her part, that the name of Greeks seems no longer to stand for a race but to stand for intelligence itself, and they who share in our culture are called Greeks even before those who are merely of our own blood.” The power of intellect and science, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners,-- these are what Greece so felt, and fixed, and may stand for. They are great elements in our humanization. The power of conduct is another great element; and this was so felt and fixed by Israel that we can never with justice refuse to permit Israel, in spite of all his shortcomings, to stand for it.

So you see that in being humanized we have to move along several lines, and that on certain lines certain nations find their strength and take a lead. We may elucidate the thing yet further. Nations now existing may be said to feel or to have felt the power of this or that element in our humanization so signally that they are characterized by it. No one who knows this country would deny that it is characterized, in a remarkable degree, by a sense of the power of conduct. Our feeling for religion is one part of this; our industry is another. What foreigners so much remark in us--our public spirit, our love, amidst all our liberty, for public order and for stability--are parts of it too. Then the power of beauty was so felt by the Italians that their art revived, as we know, the almost lost idea of beauty, and the serious and successful pursuit of it. Cardinal Antonelli,[461] speaking to me about the education of the common people in Rome, said that they were illiterate, indeed, but whoever mingled with them at any public show, and heard them pa.s.s judgment on the beauty or ugliness of what came before them,--”_e brutto_,” ”_e bello_,”--would find that their judgment agreed admirably, in general, with just what the most cultivated people would say. Even at the present time, then, the Italians are preeminent in feeling the power of beauty. The power of knowledge, in the same way, is eminently an influence with the Germans. This by no means implies, as is sometimes supposed, a high and fine general culture. What it implies is a strong sense of the necessity of knowing _scientifically_, as the expression is, the things which have to be known by us; of knowing them systematically, by the regular and right process, and in the only real way. And this sense the Germans especially have. Finally, there is the power of social life and manners. And even the Athenians themselves, perhaps, have hardly felt this power so much as the French.

Voltaire, in a famous pa.s.sage[462] where he extols the age of Louis the Fourteenth and ranks it with the chief epochs in the civilization of our race, has to specify the gift bestowed on us by the age of Louis the Fourteenth, as the age of Pericles, for instance, bestowed on us its art and literature, and the Italian Renascence its revival of art and literature. And Voltaire shows all his acuteness in fixing on the gift to name. It is not the sort of gift which we expect to see named. The great gift of the age of Louis the Fourteenth to the world, says Voltaire, was this: _l'esprit de societe_, the spirit of society, the social spirit. And another French writer, looking for the good points in the old French n.o.bility, remarks that this at any rate is to be said in their favor: they established a high and charming ideal of social intercourse and manners, for a nation formed to profit by such an ideal, and which has profited by it ever since. And in America, perhaps, we see the disadvantages of having social equality before there has been any such high standard of social life and manners formed.

We are not disposed in England, most of us, to attach all this importance to social intercourse and manners. Yet Burke says: ”There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish.” And the power of social life and manners is truly, as we have seen, one of the great elements in our humanization. Unless we have cultivated it, we are incomplete. The impulse for cultivating it is not, indeed, a moral impulse. It is by no means identical with the moral impulse to help our neighbor and to do him good. Yet in many ways it works to a like end. It brings men together, makes them feel the need of one another, be considerate of one another, understand one another. But, above all things, it is a promoter of equality. It is by the humanity of their manners that men are made equal. ”A man thinks to show himself my equal,” says Goethe, ”by being _grob_,--that is to say, coa.r.s.e and rude; he does not show himself my equal, he shows himself _grob_.” But a community having humane manners is a community of equals, and in such a community great social inequalities have really no meaning, while they are at the same time a menace and an embarra.s.sment to perfect ease of social intercourse. A community with the spirit of society is eminently, therefore, a community with the spirit of equality. A nation with a genius for society, like the French or the Athenians, is irresistibly drawn towards equality. From the first moment when the French people, with its congenital sense for the power of social intercourse and manners, came into existence, it was on the road to equality. When it had once got a high standard of social manners abundantly established, and at the same time the natural, material necessity for the feudal inequality of cla.s.ses and property pressed upon it no longer, the French people introduced equality and made the French Revolution. It was not the spirit of philanthropy which mainly impelled the French to that Revolution, neither was it the spirit of envy, neither was it the love of abstract ideas, though all these did something towards it; but what did most was the spirit of society.

The well-being of the many comes out more and more distinctly, in proportion as time goes on, as the object we must pursue. An individual or a cla.s.s, concentrating their efforts upon their own well-being exclusively, do but beget troubles both for others and for themselves also. No individual life can be truly prosperous, pa.s.sed, as Obermann says, in the midst of men who suffer; _pa.s.see au milieu des generations qui souffrent_. To the n.o.ble soul, it cannot be happy; to the ign.o.ble, it cannot be secure. Socialistic and communistic schemes have generally, however, a fatal defect; they are content with too low and material a standard of well-being. That instinct of perfection, which is the master-power in humanity, always rebels at this, and frustrates the work. Many are to be made partakers of well-being, true; but the ideal of well-being is not to be, on that account, lowered and coa.r.s.ened. M.

de Laveleye,[463] the political economist, who is a Belgian and a Protestant, and whose testimony, therefore, we may the more readily take about France, says that France, being the country of Europe where the soil is more divided than anywhere except in Switzerland and Norway, is at the same time the country where material well-being is most widely spread, where wealth has of late years increased most, and where population is least outrunning the limits, which, for the comfort and progress of the working cla.s.ses themselves, seem necessary. This may go for a good deal. It supplies an answer to what Sir Erskine May[464] says about the bad effects of equality upon French prosperity. But I will quote to you from Mr. Hamerton[465] what goes, I think, for yet more.

Mr. Hamerton is an excellent observer and reporter, and has lived for many years in France. He says of the French peasantry that they are exceedingly ignorant. So they are. But he adds: ”They are at the same time full of intelligence; their manners are excellent, they have delicate perceptions, they have tact, they have a certain refinement which a brutalized peasantry could not possibly have. If you talk to one of them at his own home, or in his field, he will enter into conversation with you quite easily, and sustain his part in a perfectly becoming way, with a pleasant combination of dignity and quiet humor.

The interval between him and a Kentish laborer is enormous.”