“Do they call ungratefulness a virtue?”

Poor lovable Charles Lamb! When he wrote this he was only twenty-one years of age, he had already been himself confined in an asylum, and now his sister in a moment of madness had killed her mother. When afterwards he was allowed to take care of Mary, he had still to take her back to the asylum from time to time, as a fresh attack of mania began to manifest itself. The picture of the weeping brother and sister on their way to the asylum is dreadfully sad. The passage seems interesting because of Lamb’s reference to Wesley.

Madeline is lying asleep in bed—but the last line could be used in quite another sense as prettily expressing rejuvenation.

Autres temps, autres moeurs! Aldrich was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, when he wrote these lines.

Matthew Arnold says of this: “No, it is not all; but it is true, deeply true, and we have deep need to know it.... To see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth, and Keats knew it. ‘What the Imagination seizes on as Beauty must be Truth,’ he says in prose.”

The scene is in the Island of Trinidad, off the coast of Brazil.

(Mr. T. R. Glover in The Jesus of History points out that when Christ said “Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations” (Luke xxii, 26), He meant that the disciples had helped Him by their fidelity.)

The following is from Professor Hobhouse’s Questions of War and Peace, repeating what he had set out at length in his Development and Purpose (I take the quotation from The Spectator review, as the book is not yet procurable in Australia):

“I think, therefore, that we must go back into ourselves for faith, and away from ourselves into the world for reason. The deeper we go into ourselves the more we throw off forms and find the assurance not only that the great things exist, but that they are the heart of our lives, and, since after all we are of one stock, they must be at the heart of your lives as well as mine. You say there are bad men and wars and cruelties and wrong, I say all these are the collision of undeveloped forms. What is the German suffering from but a great illusion that the State is something more than man, and that power is more than justice! Strip him of this and he is a man like yourself, pouring out his blood for the cause that he loves, and that you and I detest. Probe inwards, then, and you find the same spring of life everywhere and it is good. Look outwards, and you find, as you yourself admit the slow movement towards a harmony which just means that these impulses of primeval energy come, so to say, to understand one another. Every form they take as they grow will provoke conflict, perish, and be cast aside until the whole unites, and there you have the secret of your successive efforts and failures which yet leave something behind them. God is not the creator who made the world in six days, rested on the seventh and saw that it was good. He is growing in the actual evolution of the world.”

This poem was written before Blake was fourteen years of age.

The five quotations above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 85).

This is from the author’s “Purple and Gold,” a book of poems published in Melbourne (Thomas C. Lothian, publisher).

Compare the well-known lines by George MacDonald:

The suggestion that we are the result of God’s thought appears elsewhere in MacDonald, as in Robert Falconer:

If God were thinking me—ah! But if He be only dreaming me, I shall go mad.

And in The Marquis of Lossie:

I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.

Checkle = chuckle.

Often ascribed to the Earl of Rochester. See Notes and Queries July 18, 1896.

Mr. Edmunds, when this was written in 1880, was a young English poet and spiritualist, but has since settled in Philadelphia. He has written a number of works, the principal being Buddhist and Christian Gospels now First Compared from the Originals.

In 1883 he was cataloguing a library at Sunderland, and came across books on the Alps, etc., by a Rev. Leslie Stephen. He wrote to the publishers to find out if they were by the same writer as the Leslie Stephen who had written on Ethics. Sir (then Mr.) Leslie Stephen had just been appointed Clark Lecturer at Cambridge. He replied to Edmunds, “I am one person,” adding that he had given up holy orders. Edmunds replied:

See note to previous quotation. This poem was written in 1883.

Although I preserved these verses, I may add that I had no interest whatever in spiritualism, permeated as it was with childishness and fraud. But, nevertheless, it (together with the so-called “Theosophy”) led to the happy result that the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882. Although spiritualism did good in this way, its unhappy associations do harm to the Society and hamper it in the important work it has carried on during the last thirty-eight years. Popular prejudice continues to associate it with the old spiritualism, and in consequence no proper attention is paid to its intensely interesting and most valuable investigations. For example, there are, apart from Public Libraries and Universities, only six members or associates in the whole of Australia! And yet, besides important work in other directions, it must be admitted by any open-minded person that the evidence collected by the Society that the dead (by telepathy or otherwise) communicate with the living is unanswerable.

This refers to the French proverb, “Il ne faut pas vendre la peau de l’ours avant de l’avoir tué,” or, as we say, “Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.”

It is still more important to realize that the exposure of children was a recognized practice also among the Greeks, and that no one, not even Plato, their noblest philosopher, saw anything wrong in it. It is only by letting the mind dwell on such facts as these, until their significance is fully appreciated, that we can realize the width and depth of the great gulf that separates the Pagan and the Christian, the ancient and the modern world. Take this one fact only: imagine the Greek father looking at his helpless babe and coldly deciding that to rear it will be inconvenient,[24] or that there are already enough children to divide the inheritance, or that the child is sickly or deformed, or that its person offends his idea of beauty—and then consigning his own offspring to slavery, prostitution, or death! (The child would either die or be picked up to be reared for some such purpose.) Even in the very imperfect state of our own civilization, we at least have children’s hospitals and crèches, and are inflamed with righteous rage when even an unknown baby is ill-treated. (We, indeed, go further, and have laws and societies for prevention of cruelty to animals.)

The consideration of such a fact leads us also to inquire as to the relations of husband and wife, seeing that the woman would have at least the affection for her offspring that is common among the lower animals. We then find that the modern chivalrous idea of womanhood was unknown to the Greeks; the wife was not educated, and was considered an inferior being; she was married mainly in order to provide sons to carry out certain ritual observances necessary for the father’s welfare after death; she was kept in an almost Eastern seclusion (and therefore had to improve her pallid complexion by paint); she would associate mainly with the children and slaves. We also find that fidelity of the husband to the wife was neither required nor esteemed; and that there was little marital love or family life. (Plato in his model Republic would abolish both the latter, for there was to be promiscuity of women, and all children were to be brought up by the State.)

Considering further this practice of exposing children, we realize that it indicates the want of pity for the helpless and suffering, which is seen among the lower animals (but with exceptions even among them). From this we may reasonably infer that the Greeks would show little humanity in treating other helpless or suffering people, the sick or distressed, dependents or slaves, conquered enemies or others in their power. (In this respect, however, they, as an intellectual people, would subject themselves to and be controlled by necessary social laws and practical considerations; and also, as a fact, they at times showed generosity to a valiant foe.) Again we can infer that, where even the spirit of mercy was so wanting, the gospel of love could not possibly exist, and that the Greeks lived on a far lower moral plane than ours. These questions are far too large to discuss in this book, and I must leave them to be dealt with elsewhere.

But, even from this very small portion of the available evidence, we can arrive at three resulting facts: First, that when in translations from the Greek we find such words as “kindness,” “love,” “morality,” “purity,” “virtue,” “religion,” etc., they have for us a far larger and higher content than the Greek words in the original; secondly, that therefore, the reader must get incorrect impressions of Greek literature and thought; and, thirdly, that truly marvellous as the Greeks were in art and literature, the current conception of them as a noble-minded and refined people is erroneous.

In referring to the Greeks, one needs to limit the people and period, and I am referring to the great age of the Attic or Athenian Greeks, say the Fifth Century, B.C. There would, of course, be gradations of character among them, and, no doubt, some would be kind-hearted, others would have affection for their wives, and so on. But this can only be assumption, for there is little in their literature to support it. This will be seen if the evidence adduced by Mr. Livingstone (“The Greek Genius,” pp. 117-122) is carefully and critically examined. (His references to Homer, who lived in a far distant age must be omitted.) Also the fact that Herodotus, in the course of his narrative, tells us that some men of another state had a moment of compassion for a baby whom they were about to slay, does not prove in the slightest degree that he was himself humane. The wording of Mr. Livingstone’s translation, p. 118, “It happened by a divine chance that the baby smiled, etc.,” would appear to confirm this view of his; but the Greek words simply mean that a god by chance intervened. Knowing what we do of the Greek gods, that intervention would certainly not be actuated by any kindly feeling towards the infant—the object presumably was that the child should live to fulfil the destiny prophesied by the Delphic Oracle. (Herodotus was a typical Greek to whom the world was peopled with gods, and he sees them constantly interposing in human affairs.) As regards the exposure of children, the point is that it was a recognized and common practice, duly sanctioned by law, and never condemned by any writer. Indeed Plato and Aristotle definitely approve of it, and in Plato’s Ideal Republic the weakly and deformed children were to be killed by the State.

As regards the current conception of the Greeks, Shelley in his “Preface to Hellas” describes them as “those glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our kind.” Similar statements could be gathered from innumerable English and European writers.