The devil has made the stuff of our life and God makes the hem.
Victor Hugo (By the King’s Command).
I think, I said, I can make it plain that there are at least six personalities distinctly to be recognized as taking part in a dialogue between John and Thomas.
Three Johns: The real John—known only to his Maker. John’s ideal John—never the real one, and often very unlike him. Thomas’s ideal John—never the real John, nor John’s John, but often very unlike either.
Three Thomases: The real Thomas. Thomas’s ideal Thomas. John’s ideal Thomas.
Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a platform balance; but the other two are just as important in the conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks from the point of view of this ideal. Thomas, again, believes him to be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore he is, so far as Thomas’s attitude in the conversation is concerned, an artful rogue, though really simple and stupid. The same conditions apply to the three Thomases. It follows that, until a man can be found who knows himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself as others see him, there must be at least six persons engaged in every dialogue between two. Of these the least important, philosophically speaking, is the one that we have called the real person. No wonder two disputants often get angry, when there are six of them talking and listening all at the same time.
(A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made by a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable little known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the meantime he had eaten the peaches.)
O. W. Holmes (Autocrat of the Breakfast Table).
A HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER.
In line (1) the reference is to the old doctrine that the guilt of Adam and Eve’s “original sin” tainted all generations of man; (3) “run,” ran; (8) his sin—the example he has set—is the door which opened to others the way of sin.
In this fine poem there are puns. In the last verse one pun is on the words “Son” and “Sun,” Christ being the “Sun of righteousness who arises with healing in his wings” (Malachi iv, 2). Also in the fifth, eleventh, and seventeenth lines, the play is on the last word “done” and the poet’s name Donne, which was pronounced dun.[17] (It was occasionally written Dun, Dunne, or Done: see Grierson’s Poems of John Donne, Vol. II, pp. lvii, lxxvii, lxxxvii, 8 and 12. Contrariwise, the adjective “dun,” dull-brown, was spelt donne in the poet’s time.) We are accustomed only to the jocular use of puns, but here there is a serious intention to give two meanings to one expression. Such a use of puns was one of the “quaint conceits” of that period of our literature, and it is found also in serious Persian poetry.
Very likely female pelicans like so to bleed under the selfish little beaks of their young ones: it is certain that women do. There must be some sort of pleasure, which we men don’t understand, which accompanies the pain of being scarified.
Thackeray (Pendennis).
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
George Eliot (Felix Holt).
LET IT BE THERE.
Every man hath his gift, one a cup of wine, another heart’s blood.
Hafiz.
Some poets sing of wine or sensuous enjoyment, but Hafiz pours out his heart’s blood in song. Presumably wine and blood are contrasted because of their similar appearance.
The devil could drive woman out of Paradise; but the devil himself cannot drive the Paradise out of a woman.
G. MacDonald (Robert Falconer).
THE PULLEY
“The Pulley” because by the desire for rest after toil and tribulation God draws man up to Himself.
(Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in November, 1859.) At the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860 Huxley had on Thursday, June 28, directly contradicted Professor Owen’s statement that a gorilla’s brain differed more from a man’s than it did from the brain of the lowest of the Quadrumana (apes, monkeys, and lemurs). He was thus marked out as the champion of evolution. On the Saturday, although the public were not admitted, the members crowded the room to suffocation, anxious to hear the brilliant controversialist, Bishop Wilberforce, take part in the debate. An unimportant paper was read bearing upon Darwinism, and a discussion followed. The Bishop, inspired by Owen, began his speech. He spoke in dulcet tones, persuasive manner, and with well-turned periods, but ridiculing Darwin badly and Huxley savagely. “In a light, scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution: rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to Huxley, with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey.”
As he said this, Huxley turned to his neighbour and said, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands!” On rising to speak, he first gave a forcible and eloquent reply to the scientific part of the Bishop’s argument. Then “he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words—words, which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. “He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor: but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.” No one doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat.” (Macmillan’s, 1898.) There is no verbatim report of this incident, but the varying accounts agree in outline.
(Extracted from Life of Huxley.)
One object of this book is to bring back the memories of the seventy-eighties—and of overwhelming interest at the time was the alleged conflict between religion and science. Through Darwin’s great discovery and Herbert Spencer’s world-wide extension of the evolution theory, so much was found covered by law that men were blinded to the fact that the essential question of causality, lying behind all law, was still untouched.
The important and thrilling incident referred to above took place in 1860, when I was two years old, but it was still an absorbing topic thirteen or fourteen years later, and is one of my most vivid recollections.
Wilberforce (1805-1873) was a great Churchman and, indeed, has been said to be the greatest prelate of his age, although his nickname “Soapy Sam” led to a popular depreciation of his merits. (This epithet originally meant that he was evasive on certain questions, but it took a further meaning from his persuasive eloquence.) In this instance he meddled with a subject of which he was ignorant. Owen, who instigated him to make this attack on Darwin and Huxley had at first welcomed the theory of evolution, but quailed before the orthodox indignation against the necessary extension of that theory to the origin of man. Huxley (1825-1895) was thirty-five years of age when he thus showed himself a strong debater and a power in the scientific world.
On tracing the line of life backwards, we see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical condition. We come at length to those organisms which I have compared to drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water. We reach the protogenes of Haeckel, in which we have “a type distinguishable from a fragment of albumen only by its finely granular character.” Can we pause here? We break a magnet and find two poles in each of its fragments. We continue the process of breaking; but however small the parts, each carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. And when we can break no longer, we prolong the intellectual vision to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do something similar in the case of life?... Believing, as I do, in the continuity of nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By a necessity engendered and justified by science I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.
(Referring to the question of inquiring into the mystery of our origin). Here, however, I touch a theme too great for me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled by the loftiest minds, when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.
John Tyndall.
The italics are mine.
As in the preceding quotation the subject is the alleged conflict between religion and science, which occupied so large a space in our life and thought in the seventies and eighties. The above are the two passages from Tyndall’s presidential address at the Belfast meeting of the British Association in 1874, which caused an immense sensation. The Belfast Address, like Huxley’s smashing reply to Bishop Wilberforce, was useful in showing that all scientific questions must be considered with an open mind, free of theological bias, and also in adding testimony to the importance and value of Darwin’s investigation. Although fifteen years had passed since The Origin of Species was published, this was still necessary. (At that very time Professor McCoy, afterwards Sir Frederick McCoy, F.R.S., when lecturing at the Melbourne University to his students, of whom I was one, was still making inane jokes about evolution and our monkey cousins.)
But, while the world was in ferment over the question of man’s alleged kinship with the monkey, there came the further startling fact that the President of the British Association also proclaimed his belief in materialism and, inferentially, that there was no life after death. Englishmen had not before realized how widely materialism had spread through England and Europe. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that a majority at least of the leading thinkers had become materialists.
In travelling outside science into metaphysics, Tyndall betrayed a lamentable ignorance of the latter—a parallel case to that of Bishop Wilberforce when he attempted to meddle with science. Martineau, referring to the first quotation above, wrote: “There is no magic in the superlatively little to draw from the universe its last secret. Size is but relative, magnified or dwindled by a glass, variable with the organ of perception: to one being, the speck which only the microscope can show us may be a universe; to another, the solar system but a molecule; and in the passing from the latter to the former you reach no end of search or beginning of things. You merely substitute a miniature of nature for its life-size without at all showing whence the features arise.”
THE NEW GOSPEL
As in the two preceding quotations, the subject is the supposed conflict of religion and science. Haeckel (born 1834, recently dead) was the most ruthless of all the biologists in accounting for evolution and all progress by a struggle for existence. Renan (1823-1892), the French writer, whose love of Christianity survived his belief in it, speaks of the passing away of the old faith as “the golden glory of the dying day,” and says that in its death it will be more beautiful than in its life, when it led to passion, persecution and war. The penultimate verse refers to the time when temporal power was removed from the church, and she reverted to the humility, and also the beauty, of primitive Christianity when it came in its morning glory from the East.
The fact that these fine verses are by the great philologist and archæologist, Professor Sayce, who has not publicly appeared in the rôle of a poet, adds greatly to their interest. The few verses he has published have mostly appeared over the initials “A.H.S.” in the old Academy (the present periodical is a different concern), and he was not known to the public as the author.
Anything about Professor Sayce must be interesting to the reader, and I, therefore, need not apologize for mentioning the following incidents, which, I imagine, are known only among his friends. In 1870, during the Franco-German War, Mr. Sayce was ordered to be shot at Nantes as a German spy, and only escaped “by the skin of his teeth.” It was just before Gambetta had flown in his balloon out of Paris, and there was no recognized Government in the country. Nantes was full of fugitives, and bands of Uhlans were in the neighbourhood. Mr. Sayce was arrested when walking round the old citadel examining its walls—not realizing that it was occupied by French troops. Fortunately, some ladies of the garrison came in during his examination to see the interesting young prisoner and, after Mr. Sayce had been placed against the wall and a soldier told off to shoot him, they prevailed upon the Commandant to give him a second examination, which ended in his acquittal.
Mr. Sayce was also among the Carlists in the Carlist war of 1873, and was present at some of the so-called battles which, he says, were dangerous only to the onlookers. He also once had a pitched battle with Bedouins in Syria.
Professor Sayce (he became Professor in 1876) has also the proud distinction of being the only person known to have survived the bite of the Egyptian cerastes asp, which is supposed to have killed Cleopatra. He accidentally trod on the reptile in the desert some three or four miles north of Assouan and was bitten in the leg. Luckily, he happened to be just outside the dahabieh in which he was travelling with three Oxford friends, one of them the late Master of Balliol. The cook had a small pair of red-hot tongs, with which he had been preparing lunch, and Professor Sayce was able to burn the bitten leg down to the bone within two minutes after the accident; thus saving his life at the expense of a few weeks’ lameness.
These are the two last verses of a parody on Byron. In each of the last three lines there is a literary reference. The first, of course, is to the happy-go-lucky Dick Swiveller of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop.
The next reference is to the amusing story about Sir Walter Scott that became known about the time Calverley was writing (1862). Scott, in his description of Melrose Abbey by moonlight (“Lay of the Last Minstrel”) says:
Yet there can be no doubt that he himself had never seen the Abbey by moonlight! He further tells his readers that they can
They, having seen it, can “soothly” (i.e., truthfully) swear to its beauty, which was more than he himself could!
Calverley’s last line is from Sydney Smith’s “Recipe for a Salad”:
This again is an adaptation of Dryden’s “Imitation of Horace” (Book III, Ode 29):
A young handsome priest, who had led a gay life, was moved by pure motives to rescue a beautiful young wife from a dreadful husband, and he travelled with her for three days to Rome. The husband was following with an armed band, the priest was risking disgrace, and the girl was risking death. The mutual danger would in itself tend to draw the fugitives too closely together; but also the girl had shown herself doubly lovable, for the strain and stress had revealed in her a very beautiful nature—just as a midnight thunder-storm opens and draws rich scent from
Coleridge has a similar illustration, “Quarrels of anger ending in tears are favourable to love in its spring tide, as plants are found to grow very rapidly after a thunderstorm with rain”—(Allsop’s Letters, etc., of Coleridge). Coleridge died in 1834, and “The Ring and the Book” was published in 1868-9: it is curious that both poets should have been impressed with a fact that appears to have been only recently recognized. In the seventies Lemström proved that plants thrive under electricity; but I think it is only a few years ago that in some agricultural experiments in Germany it was found that electricity was of no benefit to the crops without rain or other moisture.
The quotation is from the fine judgment which the Pope delivers.
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
Swift (Gulliver’s Travels).
A child of our grandmother Eve, a female, or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.
(Love’s Labour Lost, I, 1.)
The whole World was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman: Man is the whole World, and the Breath of God; Woman the rib and crooked piece of man.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (Religio Medici).
A woman is the most inconsistent compound of obstinacy and self-sacrifice that I am acquainted with.
J. P. F. Richter (Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces).
God made the world in six days, and then he rested. He then made man and rested again. He then made woman and, since then, neither man, woman, nor anything else has rested.
Author not traced.
As sculptors chisel away the marble that hides the statue within, so let “crosses” or afflictions remove the impurities which hide the Christ in us, so that we shall become His image, or not His image, but Himself.
What is experience? A little cottage made with the débris of those palaces of gold and marble which we call our illusions.
Author not traced.
This verse is engraved on Shelley’s own monument in the Priory Church at Christchurch, Hampshire.
A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said, “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.
S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).
This was about 1819. It is pathetic, this meeting of two great poets, Keats who was to die two years afterwards at the early age of twenty-six, and Coleridge, whose few brilliant years of poetic life had long previously ended in slavery to the opium-habit.
THE BALLAD OF JUDAS ISCARIOT