IN THE TWILIGHT.
I am especially pleased with their freundin (the German word meaning a female friend), which unlike the amica of the Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now I know it will be said that a friend is already something more than a friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a female; but this I deny—in that sense at least in which the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a sister—nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
S. T. Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, Letter to a Lady).
Coleridge also says: “The qualities of the sexes correspond. The man’s courage is loved by the woman, whose fortitude again is coveted by the man. His vigorous intellect is answered by her infallible tact. Can it be true what is so constantly affirmed, that there is no sex in souls?—I doubt it, I doubt it exceedingly.”—Table Talk.
But surely Coleridge might have found the best proof of his contention in the nature of children, the small boy who fights with his fists, plays with tin soldiers and despises “girls,” and the girl-child who loves her doll and her pretty clothes. See next quotation.
Francis Thompson is one of the “difficult” poets who repay study. Here he says that, in the young girl, sex appears in a less complex form than in the woman and, just as Perseus could safely look at the reflection on his shield of the fatal Medusa’s head, so we can freely view womanhood in the girl-child. Nothing conceals her open, innocent, feminine nature. She is the Dryad, the Nymph who lives in the tree and is born and dies with it, but is as yet unconscious of the tree, that is, of her sex. Her “young sex is yet but in her soul,” and is like the juice of the grape which has not yet fermented into wine, or the calm air which sleeps undisturbed. The mystery of womanhood, which attracts and yet, in its own protection, repulses man, will not come to her until after the changes of years. It is the Aphrodite lying in unawakened beauty before she rises as a goddess from the sea. (“Facilely” appears to have the strained meaning “easy to understand” or “simply”; the word “gated,” “confined,” is a curious use of a university word: the Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate, who has misbehaved, may be “gated” for a period, i.e., confined to the precincts of his own college.) “The dragon to its own Hesperides”—the Hesperides were maidens who guarded the golden apples of love and fruitfulness, which Earth had given to Hera on her marriage to Zeus. The maidens were protected by a dragon. Here the dragon is the maiden’s own sensitive reserve and self-protecting nature, which enable her to protect herself. (“Conchèd,” Aphrodite is lying in her shell.)
Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer when once we know them.
Alexander Pope.
Compare the ancient with the modern world; “Look on this picture, and on that.” One broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the epithet “holy.” In other words, there were not more than one or two, if any, who besides being virtuous in their actions were possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice regarded even a vicious thought with horror. Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth is, that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country since the time of Christ where a century has passed without exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has Christ failed? or can Christianity die?
Sir J. R. Seeley (Ecce Homo).
The quotation from Hamlet should read, “Look here, upon this picture, and on this.”
DAY
I shall be old and ugly one day, and I shall look for man’s chivalrous help, but I shall not find it. The bees are very attentive to the flowers till their honey is done, and then they fly over them.
Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm).
There are some of us who in after years say to Fate “Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.”
Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm).
Il n’a jamais fait couler larmes à personne sauf à sa mort.
(He never caused any one to shed tears, except at his death.)
B. Seebohm’s Life of Grellet.
Epitaph on Pétion, President of Hayti about 1816.
... that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.
George Eliot (Middlemarch).
If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—I say there is a third, and that is ignorance, when one is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.
George Eliot (Romola—Nello speaking).
George Eliot is quoting the Latin proverb, Amor tussisque non celantur. It is also found in George Herbert’s Jacula Prudentum, 1640. The same proverb appears with all sorts of variations, “love and a sneeze,” “love and smoke,” “love and a red nose,” “love and poverty,” etc., being the things that cannot be hidden. “Love and murder will out” (Congreve, The Double Dealer, Act IV, 2). (I took these instances from some collection of proverbs.)
“You remember Tom Martin, Neddy? Bless my dear eyes,” said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and gazing abstractedly out of the grated window before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth; “it seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox-under-the-hill, by the wharf there. I think I can see him now, a-coming up the Strand between the two street-keepers, a little sobered by his bruising, with a patch o’ winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and that ’ere lovely bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a-following at his heels. What a rum thing Time is, ain’t it, Neddy?”
Charles Dickens (Pickwick Papers).
Mr. Roker is a turnkey in the Fleet prison.
THE COURTIN’
What is the life of man? Is it not to turn from side to side? From sorrow to sorrow? To button up one cause of vexation and unbutton another?
Sterne (Tristram Shandy).
I know thy heart by heart.
P. J. Bailey (Festus).
HERBERT SPENCER’S “FIRST PRINCIPLES.”
Mr. Spencer’s genesis of the universe from chaos to the Crimean War ... For our own part, we must confess that this new book of Genesis appears to us no more credible than the old.
J. Martineau (Science, Nescience, and Faith).
JAMES MILL.
Did the facts of consciousness stand, as he represents them, his method would work. He satisfactorily explains—the wrong human nature.
J. Martineau (Essay on John Stuart Mill).
(Referring to those who insist on the practical as against the theoretical.) This solitary term (“practical”) serves a large number of persons as a substitute for all patient and steady thought; and, at all events, instead of meaning that which is useful as opposed to that which is useless, it constantly signifies that of which the use is grossly and immediately palpable, as distinguished from that of which the usefulness can only be discerned after attention and exertion.
Sir Henry Maine.
(Men are) dragged along the physiological history, because easy to conceive, and baffled by the spiritual, because it has no pictures to help it.
J. Martineau (Hours of Thought, I, 100).
As psychology comprises all our sensibilities, pleasures, affections, aspirations, capacities, it is thought on that ground to have a special nobility and greatness, and a special power of evoking in the student the feelings themselves. The mathematician, dealing with conic sections, spirals, and differential equations, is in danger of being ultimately resolved into a function or a co-efficient: the metaphysician, by investigating conscience, must become conscientious; driving fat oxen is the way to grow fat.
Alexander Bain (1818-1903) (Contemporary Review, April 1877).
There is a crude absurd materialism abroad which hasn’t yet learned the fundamental difference between Mind and Matter. It is altogether incomprehensible how any material processes can beget sensations and feelings and thoughts; it is altogether incomprehensible how you arose or I arose. Listen to Spencer:—“Were we compelled to choose between the alternatives of translating mental phenomena into physical phenomena, or of translating physical phenomena into mental phenomena, the latter alternative would seem the more preferable of the two.... Hence though of the two it seems easier to translate so-called Matter into so-called Spirit, than to translate so-called Spirit into so-called Matter (which latter is, indeed, wholly impossible), yet no translation can carry us beyond our symbols.”
Richard Hodgson (Letter, March 21, 1880).
Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?
Malvolio. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion?
Malvolio. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.
Clown. Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness.
Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, IV, 2).
As the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, “That, that is, is.”
Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, IV, 2).
WHAT IS LOVE?
The passion which unites the sexes ... is the most compound, and therefore the most powerful of all the feelings. Added to the purely physical elements of it are, first, those highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty.... With this there is united the complex sentiment which we term affection—a sentiment which, as it can exist between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an independent sentiment.... Then there is the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence.... There comes next the feeling called love of approbation. To be preferred above all the world, and that by one admired above all others, is to have the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous experience.... Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment from, and sway over, another is a proof of power which cannot fail agreeably to excite the amour propre. Yet again, the proprietary feeling has its share in the general activity: there is the pleasure of possession—the two belong to each other. Once more, the relation allows of an extended liberty of action. Towards other persons a restrained behaviour is requisite. Round each there is a subtle boundary that may not be crossed—an individuality on which none may trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is gratified. Finally there is an exaltation of the sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by another’s sympathetic participation; and the pleasures of another are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling, forming the nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation, of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. These, all greatly exalted, and severally tending to reflect their excitements on one another, unite to form the mental state we call Love.
Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, 3rd Ed., Vol. I, 487).
The heading is, of course, mine—not Spencer’s.
WHAT AM I?
The aggregate of feelings and ideas, constituting the mental I, have not in themselves the principle of cohesion holding them together as a whole; but the I which continuously survives as the subject of these changing states is that portion of the Unknowable Power, which is statically conditioned in (my particular one of those) special nervous structures pervaded by a dynamically-conditioned portion of the Unknowable Power called energy.
Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, 3rd Ed., Vol. II, 504).
The heading and words in brackets are mine. As the reader may at any time be asked “What are you?” it would be well to be ready with a simple reply.
New truths, old truths! sirs, there is nothing new possible to be revealed to us in the moral world; we know all we shall ever know: and it is for simply reminding us, by their various respective expedients, how we do know this and the other matter, that men get called prophets, poets, and the like. A philosopher’s life is spent in discovering that, of the half-dozen truths he knew when a child, such an one is a lie, as the world states it in set terms; and then, after a weary lapse of years, and plenty of hard-thinking, it becomes a truth again after all, as he happens to newly consider it and view it in a different relation with the others: and so he restates it, to the confusion of somebody else in good time. As for adding to the original stock of truths,—impossible!
R. Browning (A Soul’s Tragedy).
The law of equal freedom which Herbert Spencer deduces is binding only upon those who admit both that human happiness is the Divine Will and that we should act in accordance with the Divine Will. Why should I obey this law? Because without such obedience human happiness cannot be complete. Why should I aim at human happiness? Because human happiness is the Divine Will. The inexorable why pursues us here—Why should I aim at the fulfilment of the Divine Will? To this question there seems no satisfactory reply but that it is for my own happiness to do so.
Richard Hodgson (Unpublished Essay, 1879).
I have no ambition to wander into the inane and usurp the sceptre of the dim Hegel, situated Nowhere, with pure Nothing behind him, and pure Being before him, steadfastly and vainly endeavouring with his Werden to stop the sand-flowing of smiling Time.
Richard Hodgson (Early Unpublished Essay).
Werden in Hegel is usually translated “Becoming.” To Hegel the truth of the world is found in life or movement, not in Being which is changeless, but tells and does nothing.
Edwin (afterwards Sir Edwin) Arnold was with Herbert Spencer on a Nile steamer. Spencer was dyspeptic and irritable; Arnold was a nocturnal bird, pacing the deck alone in a long gown and smoking a long pipe. Suddenly appeared a white figure, Spencer in his night-shirt, who in the bad light took Arnold for a sailor (and Arnold did not undeceive him).
“Hi! there!”
“Ay, ay, Sir.”
“What are the men making that noise there forward for?”
“Cleaning the engines, Sir.”
“Just tell them not to make such a row, keeping good Christians from their sleep at this time of night.”
“Ay, ay, Sir.”
(Disappearance of ghost; joke next morning,)
(Told by Arnold to Hodgson, June, 1884).
The great agnostic, usually most precise in his language, describes himself as a “good Christian”!
WILLIAM BLAKE.
The desert of London town—Magna civitas, magna solitudo: “a great city is a great solitude.”
It is strange to think that these verses (and especially the last verse) were written by the pessimist who wrote in all sincerity the terrible lines in Pt. VIII of “The City of Dreadful Night.”
According to Donatus, Virgil wrote a couplet in praise of Cæsar and posted it anonymously on the portals of the palace (31 B.C.). Bathyllus gave himself out as the author of this couplet, and on that account received a present from Cæsar. Next night Sic vos non vobis (“So you not for you”) was found written four times in the same place. The Romans were puzzled as to what was meant by these words, until Virgil came forward and completed the verse—adding a preliminary line, Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores, “I wrote the lines, another wears the bays.”
Shelley in Song to the Men of England wrote as a socialist:
In previous verses he refers to bees, and, of course, the above quotation was in his mind.
This is from C. S. Calverley’s fine translation of the speech of Ajax.
Imitating the now-forgotten Martin Tupper.
Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony.... Even that vulgar and Tavern Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.... There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear as the whole World, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.
Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici).
(Speaking of an Essay on Wordsworth he is about to write for some Melbourne society) I purpose describing briefly the poetic tendencies, or rather the unpoetic tendencies, of the 18th Century, and the new school beginning to manifest itself in Cowper. I shall then refer to W.’s principles—shall banish to a future time the working out of the psychological connection between forms of nature and the human soul—shall banish also the feelings, the elementary feelings, of humanity, which W. drew powerful attention to, and confine myself to pointing out those characteristics in external nature which he took note of. These produce corresponding feelings in the “human,” and some of them are beauty, silence and calm, joyousness, generosity, freedom, grandeur, and Spirituality. These are found in Nature, and W. saw them, and in the growing familiarity with them a man’s soul becomes beautiful, calm, joyous, generous, free, grand, and spiritual. The first ones, of course, all depend on and grow from the last, and the Spirituality is God immanent. This last, as the root of all the others, will merit special attention—it exhibits W.’s poetico-philosophy so far as it regards the work of Nature upon man; and includes too the Platonic Reminiscence business. (Here follows personal chit-chat.) I think we might add the “supreme loftiness of labour” to the foregoing elements in Nature. In the Gipsies (I give both readings)