Cato said ‘he had rather people should inquire why he had not a statue erected to his memory, than why he had.’
Plutarch (Political Precepts).
CHAMOUNI AND RYDAL.
Wordsworth lived at Rydal Mount. These verses were published in Macmillan’s, 1879.
“Nor something fairer far.” In Sir F. Younghusband’s Kashmir (1911) there is another suggestion, supplementary to this: “There came upon me this thought, which doubtless has occurred to many another besides myself—why the scene should so influence me and yet make no impression on the men about me. Here were men with far keener eyesight than my own, and around me were animals with eyesight keener still.... Clearly it is not the eye, but the soul that sees. But then comes the still further reflection: what may there not be staring me straight in the face which I am as blind to as the Kashmir stags are to the beauties amidst which they spend their entire lives? The whole panorama may be vibrating with beauties man has not yet the soul to see. Some already living, no doubt, see beauties that we ordinary men cannot appreciate. It is only a century ago that mountains were looked upon as hideous. And in the long centuries to come may we not develop a soul for beauties unthought of now? Undoubtedly we must. And often in reverie on the mountains I have tried to imagine what still further loveliness they may yet possess for men.”
He that dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind, fixed and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth best avert the dolours of death.
Bacon.
As Dr. Johnson said; “In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.”
“En Angleterre,” said a cynical Dutch diplomatist, “numéro deux va chez numéro un, pour s’en glorifier auprès de numéro trois.”
(In England, Number Two goes to Number One’s house in order to boast about it to Number Three.)
Laurence Oliphant (Piccadilly).
Our ideas, like the children of our youth, often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are fast approaching—where, though the brass and marble may remain, the inscriptions are effaced by time and the imagery moulders away.
John Locke (1632-1704).
What makes such a passage attractive is its use of poetic imagery; and yet Locke had no regard for poetry. See next quotation.
If these may be any reasons against children’s making Latin themes at school, I have much more to say, and of more weight, against their making verses—verses of any sort. For if he has no genius to Poetry, ’tis the most unreasonable thing in the world to torment a child and waste his time about that which can never succeed; and if he have a poetic vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the world that the father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks the parents should labour to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may be; and I know not what reason a father can have to wish his son a poet, who does not desire to have him bid defiance to all other callings and business.... For it is very seldom seen that any one discovers mines of gold or silver in Parnassus.... Poetry and Gaming usually go together.... If, therefore, you would not have your son the fiddle to every jovial company, without whom the Sparks could not relish their wine, nor know how to pass an afternoon idly; if you would not have him to waste his time and estate to divert others, and contemn the dirty acres left him by his ancestors, I do not think you will very much care he should be a Poet.
John Locke (1632-1704) (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693).
Locke was writing during the dreary Dryden period, when poetry had so greatly degenerated since the brilliant Elizabethan epoch. He himself evidently had no interest in poetry. We know that he did not appreciate Milton (whose Paradise Lost appeared in 1667, when Locke was in his prime).
Compare with the above quotation p. 357.
INDWELLING.
As in other cases mentioned in the Preface, I find that these lines, so familiar in my day, appear to be unknown to younger men.
ON BLACKSTONE’S COMMENTARIES.
In taking leave of our Author (Sir William Blackstone) I finish gladly with this pleasing peroration: a scrutinizing judgment, perhaps, would not be altogether satisfied with it; but the ear is soothed by it, and the heart is warmed.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (A Fragment of Government).
I think it worth while quoting from my notes this amusing piece of sarcasm aimed by a young man of twenty-eight at the most renowned legal writer of the time. A Fragment of Government (1776), the first of Bentham’s works, not only showed the utter folly of Blackstone’s praise of the English constitution, but also laid the foundation of political science. (The passage, which the quotation refers to, is in Sec. 2 of the Introduction to the Commentaries, “Thus far as to the right of the supreme power to make law ... public tranquillity.”)
Not only was the English constitution a subject of eulogy in Bentham’s day, but also English law, then in a most barbarous state, was alleged to be the perfection of human reason! Through the efforts of this great and original thinker many dreadful abuses were removed, but it is a remarkable illustration of the blind strength of English conservatism that his wise counsel has not yet been followed in many exceedingly important directions.
In the seventy-eighty period, with which this book mainly deals there was a strong agitation for law reform, which had some results.
It was the boast of Augustus, that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble. But how much nobler will be our Sovereign’s boast when he shall have it to say that he found law dear, and left it cheap; found it a sealed book—left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich—left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression—left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence!
Lord Brougham (1778-1868) (Speech in Parliament, 1828).
It would indeed be a proud boast—but not one of these objects has yet been achieved.
When Lord Ellenborough was trying one of the Government charges against Horne Tooke, he found occasion to praise the impartial manner in which justice is administered. “In England, Mr. Tooke, the law is open to all men, rich or poor.” “Yes, my lord,” answered the prisoner, “and so is the London Tavern.”
Henry S. Leigh (Jeux d’Esprit).
The same story is told in Rogers’ Table Talk, but a different judge is named. (Probably both are wrong, but it is immaterial.) The London Tavern was where Horne Tooke’s Constitutional Society met, and must have been often referred to during the trial; but of course the meaning simply is that the throne of justice cannot be approached with an empty purse.
Revenons à nos moutons.
(Let us return to our sheep.)
(La Farce de Maistre Pierre Patelin, Anon. 15 Cent.).
In the farce, a cloth merchant, who is suing his shepherd for stolen sheep, discovers also that the attorney on the other side is a man who had robbed him of some cloth. Dropping the charge against the shepherd, he begins accusing the lawyer of his offence; and, to recall him to the point, the judge impatiently interrupts him with Sus revenons à nos moutons, “Come, let us get back to our sheep.”
Compare Martial VI, 19: “My suit has nothing to do with assault, or battery, or poisoning, but is about three goats, which, I complain, have been stolen by my neighbour. This the judge desires to have proved to him; but you, with swelling words and extravagant gestures, dilate on the Battle of Cannae, the Mithridatic war, and the perjuries of the insensate Carthaginians, the Syllae, the Marii, and the Mucii. It is time, Postumus, to say something about my three goats.”
The reference to the French play I owe to King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations.
(The wife of a poor man deserted him for another man, and he married again. On being convicted for bigamy Mr. Justice Maule sentenced him as follows:) Prisoner at the bar: You have been convicted of the offence of bigamy, that is to say, of marrying a woman while you had a wife still alive, though it is true she has deserted you and is living in adultery with another man. You have, therefore, committed a crime against the laws of your country, and you have also acted under a very serious misapprehension of the course which you ought to have pursued. You should have gone to the ecclesiastical court and there obtained against your wife a decree a mensa et thoro. You should then have brought an action in the courts of common law and recovered, as no doubt you would have recovered, damages against your wife’s paramour. Armed with these decrees, you should have approached the legislature and obtained an Act of Parliament which would have rendered you free and legally competent to marry the person whom you have taken on yourself to marry with no such sanction. It is quite true that these proceedings would have cost you many hundreds of pounds, whereas you probably have not as many pence. But the law knows no distinction between rich and poor. The sentence of the court upon you, therefore, is that you be imprisoned for one day, which period has already been exceeded, as you have been in custody since the commencement of the assizes.
Sir W. H. Maule (1788-1858).
This fine piece of irony, well known to lawyers, materially helped to end the old bad state of the law of divorce. We need more men of the same stamp to draw attention to other abuses.
Is this pleading causes, Cinna? Is this speaking eloquently to say nine words in ten hours? Just now you asked with a loud voice for four more clepsydrae.[26] What a long time you take to say nothing, Cinna!
Martial VIII, 7.
In Racine’s comedy, Les Plaideurs, Act III, Sc. III, a prolix advocate begins his speech by referring to the Creation of the world. “Avocat, passons au déluge” (Let us get along to the Deluge), says the judge. See also The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Sc. I:—
Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing; more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them; and, when you have them, they are not worth the search.
“There’s nae place like hame,” quoth the de’il, when he found himself in the Court o’ Session.
Scottish Proverb.
I understand that the original wording was “‘Hame’s hamely,’ quoth the de’il, etc.” Perhaps the only English Institution which the Hindu appreciates is that of English Law—but not as a system of Justice. To his acute mind it is a remarkably clever and most ingenious gambling game. It is said that two Hindus will even fabricate mutual complaints, the one against the other, to bring before the Courts—and that it is almost equivalent to a patent of nobility to have had a case taken to the Privy Council. The following incident actually happened to a friend of mine who was Resident in a Native State. Sitting in his judicial capacity he reproved a Hindu gentleman for his excessive litigiousness. The latter retorted that it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black; that he had seen the Resident put his rupees on the totalisator the day before; and the British race-course wasn’t a bit more of a gamble than the British Law Courts. For his part he preferred to have his flutter on the latter.
BALDER’S RETURN TO EARTH[27]
I retain this extract from Buchanan’s poem for the reason set out in the preface.
I have “Compensation” as the title of these verses, but it must surely be incorrect. If a man passes through life unrecognised by kindred souls, it is the reverse of ‘compensation’ to him if he also fails to recognise other sympathetic natures.
The author is, or was, an American Catholic priest.
ALL SUNG
Mr. le Gallienne was not the first to complain that poetic subjects were exhausted. A recent Spectator quotes the following from Choerilus, a Samian poet of the Fifth Century, B.C. (2,000 years before Shakespeare): “Happy was the follower of the muses in that time, when the field was still virgin soil. But now when all has been divided up and the arts have reached their limits, we are left behind in the race, and, look where’er we may, there is no room anywhere for a new-yoked chariot to make its way to the front.” (St. John Thackeray, Anthologia Graeca).
Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes and seems to authenticate your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job.
Robert Alfred Vaughan (1823-1857) (Hours with the Mystics).
If this fine writer had lived, much might have been expected of him. He is one of the many instances of “the fatal thirty-fours and thirty-sevens.”
The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant and grows; arrives at the quadruped and walks; arrives at the man and thinks.
Emerson (Uses of Great Men).
HIAWATHA’S PHOTOGRAPHING
It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man’s death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too,—as if it were comparatively a light thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother who has to climb the whole toilsome steep with us, and all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey.
George Eliot (Janet’s Repentance).
It has been said by Schiller, in his letters on aesthetic culture, that the sense of beauty never farthered the performance of a single duty.
Although this gross and inconceivable falsity will hardly be accepted by any one in so many terms, seeing that there are few so utterly lost but that they receive, and know that they receive, at certain moments, strength of some kind, or rebuke from the appealings of outward things; and that it is not possible for a Christian man to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from stone, flower, leaf or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky; though I say this falsity is not wholly and in terms admitted, yet it seems to be partly and practically so in much of the doing and teaching even of holy men, who in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on his giving of bread, and raiment, and health (which he gives to all inferior creatures), they require us not to thank him for that glory of his works which he has permitted us alone to perceive: they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even; they dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight.[29]
John Ruskin (Modern Painters, III, I, XV).