In 1877 Blake was little appreciated. (I remember only that in our children’s books we had “Tiger, Tiger burning bright”—and it was a strange thing to include in such books a poem which raises the problems of the existence of evil and the nature of God). Hence it will be evident why so keen a student of poetry as Hodgson did not couple Blake with Cowper as a precursor of the Romantic Revival. As a matter of fact Blake had more of the “Romantic” spirit than Cowper, and really preceded him, for the poor verse that Cowper published the year before Blake’s Poetical Sketches need not be considered. While still in his teens Blake wrote (“To the Muses”):
Curiously enough Gray also had in him an element of the Romantic which he suppressed. It is very remarkable that in his Elegy (published 1751) he cut out the following verse:
Slightly altered verbally to admit of quotation.
MEDITATIONS OF A HINDU PRINCE
MEDITATION OF A HINDU PRINCE AND SCEPTIC
The preceding poem by Lyall had the same title as these verses, “Meditation of a Hindu Prince and Sceptic” when first published in the Cornhill, September, 1877. I was fully convinced, for reasons that would take too long to set out here, that these verses were by Hodgson. But Mrs. Piper, the well-known trance-medium, says that Hodgson gave her a copy signed with other initials than his, and that she is sure he was not the author. She has mislaid the copy she refers to. In view of this statement I must not attribute the verses to Hodgson, although I cannot but doubt whether Mrs. Piper’s recollection is correct.
The present writer ... was seated in a railway-carriage, five minutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certain waggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, and quite close to the window at which he sat. The cattle wore a much-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient, melancholy eyes,—for, as before mentioned, there was no space to speak of intervening,—a feeling of puzzlement arose in his mind.... The much-enduring animals in the trucks opposite had unquestionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world; of objects they had some unknown cognizance; but he could not get behind the melancholy eye within a yard of him and look through it. How, from that window, the world shaped itself, he could not discover, could not even fancy; and yet, staring on the animals, he was conscious of a certain fascination in which there lurked an element of terror. These wild, unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned together, lived, could choose between this thing and the other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could even love and hate; and gazing into a placid, heavy countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a yard away, he was conscious of an obscure and shuddering recognition of a life akin so far with his own. But to enter into that life imaginatively, and to conceive it, he found impossible. Eye looked upon eye, but the one could not flash recognition on the other; and, thinking of this, he remembers, with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came,—what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could be elicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there were indeed a point at which man and ox could meet and compare notes? Suppose some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye? Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would make a sudden dash into vegetarianism!
Alexander Smith (On the Importance of Man to Himself).
Does not this give the reason why we do not eat dogs and horses? We, more than other nations, recognize in the horse, as well as in the dog, a life and intelligence akin to our own. We also believe that both animals reciprocate the affection we feel towards them. (Coleridge in Table Talk says: “The dog alone, of all brute animals, has a στοργή or affection upwards to man.”)
When I am playing with my Cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her? We entertaine one another with mutual apish trickes: If I have my houre to begin or to refuse, so hath she hers.
Montaigne (Bk. II, ch. 12).
“My life did—and does—smack sweet”—see note p. 236.
THE LAMB
Who can wrestle against Sleep? Yet is that giant very gentleness.
Martin Tupper (Of Beauty).
ON A FINE MORNING
This is not in the Selected Poems. It is interesting as showing Mr. Hardy in an optimistic mood.
Of two opposite methods of action, do you desire to know which should have the preference? Calculate their effects in pleasures and pains, and prefer that which promises the greater sum of pleasures.
Think not that a man will so much as lift up his little finger on your behalf, unless he sees his advantage in it.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).
These cold-blooded and repulsive aphorisms are typical of Bentham’s Utilitarian philosophy, from which all sense of duty and moral aspiration were excluded. It is strange that these views should be held by a great thinker who was himself of benevolent character. Such a doctrine could not have survived to my time, had it not been supplemented by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who gave a different place to the humanist element. While still adhering to Bentham’s doctrine that there is no good but pleasure and no evil but pain, he introduced as the higher forms of pleasure those derived from the wish for self-culture and the desire to satisfy our mental and moral aims. He gave priority to all the sympathetic and altruistic motives that govern our actions. Whereas Bentham held that all pleasures were equal and could be counted in one column, Mill said that they differed in quality, that they could no more be added up in one column than pounds, shillings and pence; that, in fact, there is no equivalent for a higher pleasure in any quantity of a lower one. This was typical of Mill’s sincerity: but he did not see that his additions were fatal to Bentham’s doctrine and to hedonism generally. How, for instance, is a higher pleasure to be known for a higher? In what respect is an intellectual pleasure or the satisfaction of doing one’s duty of higher quality than the gratification of the senses? To ascertain this it is necessary to pass from the pleasure itself to the thing that gives the pleasure or, in other words, to the character that finds the pleasure. Many illustrations of this might be given. In one of Sir Alfred Lyall’s poems, which is founded on fact, an Englishman who has been captured by Arabs has no religious belief; his loved ones are waiting his return; he can save his life if he will only repeat the Mahomedan formula; if he dies no one will know of his self-sacrifice: yet he decides to die for the honour of England. However, Bentham’s careful calculus of equal pleasures and pains, “push-pin” being “worth as much as poetry,”[18] came to an end through Mill, and Mill at once made way for Spencer on the one hand, and T. H. Green on the other; both of these rejected the calculation of pleasures or happiness as the standard of right either for the individual or the greatest number. In all directions the low moral stage of philosophic thought represented by Benthamism has been passed through and forgotten. We no longer hold the belief that the only sphere of Government is to protect our persons and property, but follow loftier ideals; and in art and poetry we look for higher aims than mere luxury and sensuous pleasure.
LIFE
Life is compared to the brief fall of a dewdrop, the Indian’s unconscious sleep while his boat hastens to destruction; but life also is Hope, Intellect, Beauty, and Physical Enjoyment.
PEU DE CHOSE ET PRESQUE TROP.
This haunting little lyric is a literary curiosity from one point of view. In spite of expostulations from the author (a Belgian poet), and repeated public statements by others from time to time, the poem is constantly being wrongly attributed to one or another of the French poets. It appeared in Le Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, 1887, but had probably been written and published some years before that date. In the Nineteenth Century, September, 1893, William Sharp pointed out that the poem was always being attributed to the wrong author—even Andrew Lang being one of the culprits. The author himself wrote to The Literary World of June 3, 1904, to the same effect. The subject was again spoken of in Notes and Queries, January 5, 1907, when the author’s letter was republished. London Truth also brought the matter up at one time, and probably the same fact has been publicly pointed out elsewhere a hundred times—but the poem continues to be attributed to the wrong author! In the Dictionary of Foreign Phrases and Classical Quotations, by H. P. Jones, published so recently as 1913, the verses are ascribed to Alfred de Musset.
There is a third verse, which reads like an answer or retort to the other two:
(Life is such As God made it, And, just as it is, ... It suffices!)
One of the writers to Notes and Queries quotes the following lines:
(You enter, you cry, and that is life: you yawn, you go out, and that is death.)
A very strange, fantastic world—where each one pursues his own golden bubble, and laughs at his neighbour for doing the same. I have been thinking how a moral Linnæus would classify our race.
Author not traced.
TWO LOVERS
This sentiment has been expressed by many different authors. Some friends of mine have as their favourite motto, “I have had many troubles in my life, and most of them never happened.”
The six quotations above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 85).
Whatever else may or may not work on through eternity, we are bound to believe that the love, which moved the Father to redeem the world at such infinite cost, must work on, while there is one pang in the universe, born of sin, which can touch the Divine pity, or one wretched prodigal in rags and hunger far from the home and the heart of God.
Rev. Baldwin Brown.
Canon Farrar is not happy in his rejoinder to the argument that to cast a doubt on the endlessness of punishment is to invalidate the argument for the endlessness of bliss, since both rest on exactly the same Biblical sanction. There are three replies, cumulatively exhaustive, which he has failed to adduce.... (Firstly, evil and temptation are banished from heaven; Second, the two arguments do not rest on the same Biblical sanction) ... Thirdly, the difference of the two eternities, heaven and hell, consists in the presence or absence of God. Let us put α for each of those eternities or aeons, and θ to denote Him. The assertion of the equality of the two, then, is that α + θ = α - θ, which can stand only if θ = 0, the postulate of atheism.
Rev. R. F. Littledale, D.C.L.
Both these passages come from an Article in the Contemporary for April, 1878.
As this book is partly intended to revive the memories of forty years ago, I include these out of the passages in my commonplace book which refer to the intense struggle that then raged over the question of Eternal Punishment. Surely no other word, since the world began, raised so tremendous an issue, created such conflict and caused so much heart-burning as the one word αἰώνιος.
(Liddell and Scott, 1901, gives the following meanings for αἰώνιος: lasting for an age, perpetual, everlasting, eternal.)
I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of Hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place. I have so fixed my contemplations on Heaven, that I have almost forgot the Idea of Hell, and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one, than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a perfect Hell, and needs, methinks, no addition to compleat our afflictions. That terrible term hath never detained me from sin, nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear GOD, yet am not afraid of Him: His Mercies make me ashamed of my sins, before His Judgments afraid thereof.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (Religio Medici).
Ne nous imaginons pas que l’enfer consiste dans ces étangs de feu et de soufre, dans ces flammes éternellement dévorantes, dans cette rage, dans ce désespoir, dans cet horrible grincement de dents. L’enfer, si nous l’entendons, c’est péché même: l’enfer, c’est d’être éloigné de Dieu.
Bossuet (1627-1704).
(Let us not imagine that hell consists in those lakes of fire and brimstone, in those eternally-devouring flames, in that rage, in that despair, in that horrible gnashing of teeth. Hell, if we understand it aright, is sin itself: hell consists in being banished from God.)
... Sir Henry Wotton’s celebrated answer to a priest in Italy, who asked him, “Where was your religion to be found before Luther?” “My religion was to be found there—where yours is not to be found now—in the written word of God.” In Selden’s Table Talk we have the following more witty reply made to the same question: “Where was America an hundred or six score years ago?”
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, VIII, 176.
I do not wish to introduce sectarian questions, but these answers are interesting and clever. The next quotation is pro-Catholic.
During the horrible time of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, a French priest and a Jew became very intimate friends. The priest, very anxious for the future welfare of his friend, urged him to be received into the church: and the Jew promised to earnestly consider this advice. The priest, however, gave up all hope on learning that the Jew was called by his business to Rome, where he would see the unutterably monstrous life of the Pope and clergy. To his surprise the Jew on his return announced that he wished to be baptized, saying that a religion, which could still exist in spite of such abominations, must be the true religion.
Author not traced.
I noted this from an old French book, but the real story must be the earlier one of Boccaccio (1315-1375). Alexander Borgia was Pope, 1492-1503.
I verily believe that, if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have strength and energy enough to stick it into a Dissenter.
Sydney Smith.
Shortly before his death in 1844 he gave this as a singular proof of his declining strength! (See Memoir by his daughter, Lady Holland).