L’ENVOI
A great sea-song; we are on board passing through scene after scene and feeling the very movement of the ship and its gear.
The Quakers have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I can not help smiling at the conceit, that, if the taste of a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason).
This quotation reminds me of an interesting passage in Professor Bateson’s Presidential Address to the British Association at Melbourne in 1914. Although it has not a very close connection with the quotation the reader will not object to my giving it a place here:—
“Everyone must have a preliminary sympathy with the aims of eugenists both abroad and at home. Their efforts at the least are doing something to discover and spread truth as to the physiological structure of society. The spread of such organizations, however, almost of necessity suffers from a bias towards the accepted and the ordinary, and if they had power it would go hard with many ingredients of society that could be ill-spared. I notice an ominous passage in which even Galton, the founder of eugenics, feeling perhaps some twinge of his Quaker ancestry, remarks that ‘as the Bohemianism in the nature of our race is destined to perish, the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind.’ It is not the eugenists who will give us what Plato has called ‘divine releases from the common ways.’ If some fancier with the catholicity of Shakespeare would take us in hand, well and good; but I would not trust Shakespeares, meeting as a committee. Let us remember that Beethoven’s father was an habitual drunkard and that his mother died of consumption. From the genealogy of the patriarchs also we learn—what may very well be the truth—that the fathers of such as dwell in tents, and of all such as handle the harp or organ, and the instructor of every artificer in brass or iron—the founders, that is to say, of the arts and the sciences—came in direct descent from Cain, and not in the posterity of the irreproachable Seth, who is to us, as he probably was also in the narrow circle of his own contemporaries, what naturalists call a nomen nudum.”
Nomen nudum is a bare name without further particulars, but Donne, no doubt on the authority of Josephus (I. 2.3), attributes Astronomy to Seth (“The Progresse of the Soule”):—
Donne (1573-1631) is “vext” with Astronomy, presumably because at that time Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo (1564-1642) were affirming the Copernican system and making other discoveries supposed to be dangerous to religion.
A SONNET
“Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,” is Wordsworth’s fine sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland.
It is certainly extraordinary how the great poet at times dropped into the most prosaic language and commonplace verse. This, however, was only in his earlier poems and only in a few of those poems. His theory at that time was that poetic language should be natural, such as used by ordinary men, and not essentially different from prose. Actually, however, at the root of the matter was his want of any sense of humour. Only so can we account for his beginning a poem “Spade! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands,” or writing absurdly babyish verses. The one instance on record in which he did apparently exhibit a grotesque kind of humour was in a verse of Peter Bell:—
But this he no doubt wrote quite seriously and without any idea that the verse was humorous. Shelley placed this verse at the head of his parody of Peter Bell, and Wordsworth omitted it from the poem after 1819.
It is, perhaps, true that no one at any time longs for death; and that our desire is for “more life and fuller.” But men have for various reasons longed to die, though they may not have longed for death. There are those to whom the remainder of life will be one torment of pain to themselves and a continuous mental distress to their friends; and there have been men of firm religious belief who desired to pass into a nobler life beyond the grave. Again, Richard Hodgson definitely assured me in 1897 that he wished to die. He was absolutely satisfied with the evidence of survival after death, which he had had in connection with the Society for Psychical Research; and his desire was to “pass over” and be with the friends with whom for years he had been in communication. Hodgson was incapable of saying anything insincere.
Remember what Simonides said—that he never repented that he had held his tongue, but often that he had spoken.
Plutarch (Morals).
Not the truth of which a man is or believes himself to be possessed, but the earnest efforts which he has made to attain truth, make the worth of the man. For it is not through the possession of, but through the search for truth, that he develops those powers in which alone consists his ever-growing perfection. Possession makes the mind stagnant, indolent, proud.
If God held in His right hand all truth, and in His left the ever-living desire for truth—although with the condition that I should remain in error for ever—and if He said to me “Choose,” I should humbly bow before His left hand, and say “Father, give; pure truth is for Thee alone.”
Lessing (1729-1781) Wolfenbüttel Fragments
When Lessing wrote this famous passage he was contending that criticism should be absolutely free in regard to religious, as to all other, subjects. “The argument on which he chiefly relies is that the Bible cannot be considered necessary to a belief in Christianity, since Christianity was a living and conquering power before the New Testament in its present form was recognised by the church. The true evidence for what is essential in Christianity, he contends, is its adaptation to the wants of human nature; hence the religious spirit is undisturbed by the speculations of the boldest thinkers.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica).
The light of every soul burns upward. Let us allow for atmospheric disturbance.
G. Meredith (Diana of the Crossways).
Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method. According to that, each character is duly marshalled at first, and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that, at the right crises, each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this—and of completeness. But there is another method—the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes, the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls, no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing.
Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm).
This is from the preface to the second edition. This book must be unique, for surely no other girl in her teens has written a book so brilliant in itself and indicating such originality and genius. It is a great loss to literature that the writer became entirely absorbed in South African politics and controversy.
I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.
Alexander Pope.
NIGHT AND DEATH
(See preface.) This sonnet, apart from its great excellence, is a remarkable literary curiosity. By this one poem alone Blanco White achieved a lasting reputation as a poet. The point is that this is his only poem. He certainly had previously written a sonnet of little merit on survival after death, but “Night and Death” was apparently an inspired transfiguration of his earlier effort. It is a startling instance of inspiration coming to a man once only in his life—and then coming in its very highest form. There are other poets, whose work is generally of poor quality, but who have each produced one surprisingly good poem which alone keeps their memory alive. An instance of this is Christopher Smart (1722-1771), who wrote several volumes of verse but only one fine poem, the “Song of David.” Charles Wolfe (1791-1823) is also known only by his “Burial of Sir John Moore,” but his other poems, though forgotten, are said to have had some merit.
The sonnet is also interesting for another reason. White’s family had settled in Spain for two generations, his grandfather having changed his name to Blanco. His mother was Spanish, he was educated in Spain, and became a Spanish priest, and he did not leave for England until 1810, when thirty-five years of age. Yet White’s beautiful thought could hardly be expressed in finer language. There is, however, one defect in the words “fly and leaf and insect.” (William Sharp courageously altered “fly” into “flower.”)
Coleridge thought this “the finest and most grandly conceived sonnet in our language.” Leigh Hunt said that in point of thought it “stands supreme, perhaps, above all in any language: nor can we ponder it too deeply, or with too hopeful a reverence.”
I sleep, I eat and drink, I read and meditate, I walk in my neighbour’s pleasant fields and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights—that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God Himself. And he, that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down upon his little handful of thorns.
Jeremy Taylor.
ONLY SEVEN
(A Pastoral Story, after Wordsworth.)
POSTSCRIPT.
It seems wicked to travesty Wordsworth’s tender little poem, but Leigh’s verses amused us greatly when they appeared. Mark Akenside (1721-1770) is a poet now almost forgotten.
Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in those far-off days which live in us, and transform our perception into love.
George Eliot (Mill on the Floss).
It will be observed that the thought is the same in both passages.
For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.
R. L. Stevenson (Across the Plains).
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.
Alexander Pope.
We have all of us considerable regard for our past self, and are not fond of casting reflections on that respected individual by a total negation of his opinions.
George Eliot (Scenes from Clerical Life).
SAY NOT THE STRUGGLE NOUGHT AVAILETH
The Cynic in society becomes the Pessimist in religion. The large embrace of sympathy, which fails him as interpreter of human life, will no less be wanting when he reads the meaning of the universe. The harmony of the great whole escapes him in his hunt for little discords here and there. He is blind to the august balance of nature, in his preoccupation with some creaking show of defect. He misses the comprehensive march of advancing purpose, because while he himself is in it, he has found some halting member that seems to lag behind. He picks holes in the universal order; he winds through its tracks as a detective, and makes scandals of all that is not to his mind; trusts nothing that he cannot see: and he sees chiefly the exceptional, the dubious, the harsh. The glory of the midnight heavens affects him not, for thinking of a shattered planet or the uninhabitable moon. He makes more of the flood which sweeps the crop away, than of the perpetual river that feeds it year by year. For him the purple bloom upon the hills, peering through the young green woods, does but dress up a stony desert with deceitful beauty; and in the new birth of summer, he cannot yield himself to the exuberance of glad existence for wonder why insects tease and nettles sting. Nothing is so fair, nothing so imposing, as to beguile him into faith and hope.... In selfish minds the same temper resorts to the pettiest reasons for the most desolating thoughts: “If God were good, why should I be born with a club-foot? If the world were justly governed how could my merits be so long overlooked?”
J. Martineau (Hours of Thought, I, 97).
Reverting to this subject later, Martineau says (Hours of Thought II., 354) “Wherever he moves, he empties the space around him of its purest elements; with his low thought he roofs it over from the heavenly light and the sweet air; and then complains of the world as a close-breathed and stifling place.”
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb’s feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.
George Meredith (The Egoist).
Goethe says somewhere there is something in every man for which, if we only knew it, we would hate him. I would prefer to say that there is something in every man for which, if we only knew it, we would love him.
R. Hodgson (Letter).