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Lorsque le document est trop grand pour Atre reproduit en un seul cliche, 11 est fiimA A partir de I'angle supArieur gauche, de gauche A droite. et de haut en bas, an prenant la nombra d'images nAcessaire. Las diagrammes suivants iliustrent la mAthoda. arrata to peiure, m d n 32X • 2 3 1 2 3 f 4 5 6 1 > \ COMMONPLACE BOOK OF y ( t m Ua \ t V\ LOl A COMMONPLACE , BOOK OK J» C^oujfets, M^mmtB, anb Jfaiuifs, ORIGINAL AND SELECTED. PAKT I. — K T II I C S A N 1> C H A U A C T K l«. PARTto. — LITKIIATUKE AND A K T, ^BY MRS. JAMESON. CTu peudeohaque chose, el rittudutont.-ri'.afiano:!!':.- ' - - Montaiok^ '« WVxi^ lUustraftons unb ^tcjjings. LONDON- LONGMAN, BROWN, GRKEN, AND LONGMANS. .> V 1854. '■'y I "H- vt MUST (he coni lame se lore. i)lace be earner )est to It wouU rence h lightly ;rew u[ PREFACE. MOST be allowed to say a few words in explanation of [he contents of thjs little volume, which is truly what its lame sets forth— -a book of commonplaces, and nothing lore. If I havftiiever, in any work I have ventured to i>lace before the|)ublic, aspired to teach, (being myself a mrne't' in all things,) at least I have hitherto done my l>est to deserve the indulgence I have met with ; and |t would pain me if it could be supposed that such indul- gence had rendered me presumptuous or careless. For many years I have been accustomed to make a lemorandam of any thought which might come across le — (if pen and paper were at hand), and to mark (and remark) any passage in a book which excited either a bympathetic or an antagonistic feeling. This collection )f notes accumulated insensibly from day to day. The irolumes on Shakspeare's Women, on Sacred and Legendary irt, and various other productions, sprung from seed thus lightly and casually sown, which, I hardly know how, jrew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, with A 3 VI PttKPACE. I a beginning, a middle, and an end. But wliat was to be done with the fragments which remained — without be- ginning, and without end — links of a hidden or a broken chain? Whether to preserve them or destroy them became a question, and one I could not answer for myself. In allowing a portion of them to go forth to the world in their original form, as unconnected frngments, I have been guided by the wishes of others, who deemed it not wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path, some- times devious enough, of an " inquiring spirit," even by the little pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way side. V -<; A book so supremely egotisticaljind subjective can do good only in one way. It may, like conversation with a friend, open up sources of sympathy and reflection $ excite to argument, agreement, or disagreement ; and, like every spontaneous utterance of thought out of an earnest mind, suggest far higher and better thoughts than any to be found here, to higher and more productive minds. If I had not the humble hope of such a possible result, instead of sending these memoranda to the printer, I sliould have thrown them into the fire ; for I lack that (creative faculty which can work up the teachings of heart-sorrow and world-experience into attractive forms of fiction or of art; and having no intention of leaving any such memorials to be published after my death, they must iiave gone into the fire as the only alternative left. The passages from books are not, strictly speaking, selected; they are not given here on any principle of clioicc, but simply because that by some process of assimi- lation they became a part of the individual mind. They " found w/e," — to borrow Coleridge's expression, — " found me in some depth of my being ;" I did not " find them.*^ PREFACE. vii For the rest, nil those passages which are marked by inverted commas must be regarded as borrowed, though I lave not always been able to give my authority. All )as3age8 not so marked are, I dare not say, original or lew, but at least the unstudied expression of a free dis- jursive mind. Fruits, not advisedly plucked, but which the variable winds have shaken from the tree ; some ripe, some " harsh and crude." Wordsworth's famous poem of " The Happy Warrior " j(of which a new application will be found at page 87. )» lis supposed by Mr. De Quincey to have been first Isuggested by the character of Nelson. It has since been ■applied to Sir Charles Napier (the Indian General), as [well as to the Duke of Wellington ; all which serves Ito illustrate my position, that the lines in question are jequally applicable to any man or any woman whose moral [standard is irrespective of selfishness and expediency. With regard to the fragment on Sculpture, it may be [necessary to state that it was written in 1848. The first three paragraphs were inserted in the Art Journal for April, 1849. It was intended to enlarge the whole into a comprehensive essay on " Subjects fitted for Artistic [Treatment;" but this being now impossible, the frag- [ ment is given as originally written ; others may think jit out, and apply it better than I shall live to do. v f^;^ j^^ _...,. September, 1854. ^ . '- ft< .j / if »-n r»<.-# »,. '**-C > *2 «. r W. T-*<. tr <..«y. J w ^ CONTENTS. PART I. (Irttiirs anil Cliarnrtrr. raJ If ruicAL FragbientsJ Vanity - Truths and Traisnis Beauty and Use • What is Soul ? - The Philosophy of Happiness Cheerftdncss a Virtue - Intellect tatd Sympathy - Old Letters - ^ The Point of Honour . Looking up . Authors Thought and Theory Impulse and Consideration Principle and Expediency Personality of the Evil Principle The Catholic Spirit Death-beds l'ag«' 1 a 5 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 15 16 17 18 19 20 CONTENTS. Thoughts on a Sermon - Love and Fear of God - Social Opinion - - - fialzac - - - - Political Celibacy . . - Landor's Wise Sayings - Justice and Generosity - Roman Catholic Converts Stealing and Borrowing Good and Bad - • - Italian Proverb. Greek Saying Silent Grief Past and Future Suicide. Countenance - Progress and Progression Happiness in Suffering - Life in the Future Strength. Youth Moral Suffering The Secret of Peace Motives and Impulses - Principle and Passion - Dominant Ideas - - - Absence and Death Sydney Smith. Theodore Hook Werther and Childe Harold Money Obligations Charity. Truth Women. Men - Compensation for Sorrow Religion. Avarico Genius, Mind - Hieroglyphical Colours - 1 Page - 21 li c - 23 V - 24 ^^^1 N - 24 -v|n^| Si - 25 p - 26 ^ - 27 D - 28 '^H T - 29 A > 29 A \ ■ 30 81 C F \ - ■ 32 P /■ • - 33 J< . 34 C 35 «l B ■ 36 1 L ■ 37 -V^H 1 ^ ■ 38 ' ^ • 41 ?;^y ' 'I > 42 G ■ 43 .^ S - 44 I - 45 9 F " -*« 9 \ " *^. m E - &i wl S ■53 ^ I - 55 J 'J ' ^^ m A Ri ' ^^ J The - 5^ :1 Poet - 59 ^ - 60 1 CONTENTS. ^ ..x Page 21 23 24 24 25 26 27 28 29 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 51 53 55 56 57 68 59 60 Character - - - . . Value of Words - - - - - Nature and Art - - - - Spirit and Form - . > . Penal Retribution. The Church Woman's Patriotism .... Doubt. Curiosity - - - . Tieck. Coleridge - - . . Application of a Bon Mot of Talleyrand Adverse Individualities - - • . Conflict in Love - - - . French Expressions .... Practical and Contemplative Life Joanna Baillie. Macaulay's Ballads Cunning - Browning's Paracelsus .... Men, Women, and Children Letters - - .... Madame de Stael. Deja ... Thought too firee - - . . Good Qualities, not Virtues - - . Sense and Fantasy - • - . Use the Present - - . . Facts - - Wise Sayings ---... Pestilence of Falsehood - - . . Signs instead of Words. Relations with the World Milton's Adam and Eve ... Thoughts, sundry .... Revelation of Childhood 'he Indian Hunter and the Fiue ; an AiUgory - 'OETICAL FllAOMENTS - . . xi 61 62 64 67 68 70 71 71 73 74 76 77 78 80 80 81 84 100 103 105 106 107 108 109 111 112 113 115 116 117 147 152 xii CONTENTS. Crtralagtcal. The Hermit and the Minstrel - Pandemonium - - ' - Southey on the Religious Orders Forms in Religion — Image Worship Religious Differences Expansive Christianity - NOTKS FROM VARIOUS SeRMONS : — A Roman Catholic Sermon Another - - - . Church of England Sermon Another - Dissenting Sermon Father Taylor of Boston - f 1 B ^^ Page m ^' 155 v< 158 1 Dt 162 J M( 164 m Ph 165 T^ Mo 169 1 Mu 172 1 Upw En 176 ; Ch 178 1 Shi 181 "1 187 i Th 188 \ W< PART 11. iittmtnrc aiih Slrt Notes from Books: — Dr. Arnold - . - Niebuhr - - - - Lord Bacon - - - Chateaubriand - - - Bishop Cumberland Comte's Philosophy Goethe - - - - Hazlitt's " Liber Amoris " Francis Horner, " The Nightingale " Thackeray's " English Humourists " Notes on Art : — Analogies f- 198 220 230 240 247 250 261 263 267 271 276 i( i I 4 CONTENTS. > xiii f^' ■ " " " I Page Definition of Art . - 279 Page M No Patriotic Art - . 280 - 155 ^ Verse and Colour - - 280 • 158 :9 Dutch Pictures - " " •• - 281 - 162 fl Morals in Art - - . 283 - 164 :mt Physiognomy of Hands - - - 288 - 165 fl -^' '• 169 fl Mozart and Chopin - - 289 Music . - - - . 293 Rachel, the Actress - . 294 - 172 fl English and German Actresses - - 298 j' ' ^^^ fl Character of Imogen - - 303 ¥ ' ^^^ fl Shakspeare.Club - . 305 % - 181 fl " Maria Maddalena" - - - . ^ 305 ^ \ --IS? fl The Artistic Nature - " • ^ 307 - 188 fl Woman's Criticism ■* * a , 309 Artistic Influences - . . . 310 The Greek Aphrodite - - . 311 i|B Love, in the Greek Tragedy - ^ 312 Wilkie's Life and Letters - . . . 313 Wilhelm Schadow - - . 317 ''^>^^^B Artist Life - - . . 321 Materialism in Art - - . • 323 " ^^^ '9b A Fragment on Sculpture, and on certain Characters in --'- - 220 'fl History and Poetry, considered as Subjects for Modern - 230 fl Art - - • 326 - 240 fl Helen of Troy - - - . , 332 - 247 fl Penelope — liHodamia - ^ 336 - 250 fl Hippolytus - . . . 339 ■ 261 M Iphigenia - * « . 343 - 263 fl Eve - - - ^ 347 - 267 -M Adam • . _ ^ 350 ■ 2"^ m Angels - - - , . 351 '^M Miriam — Ruth - - . 354 - 276 M Christ— Solomon — David . 355 xiv CONTENTS. Ilagar — Rebecca — Rachel — Queen of Sheba Lady Godiva - - - - Joan of Arc - - . - Characters from Shakspeare Characters from Spenser From Milton. The Lady — Comus — Satan From the Italian and Modern Poets 'i'l LIST OF ETCHINGS, i 1. Out of my garden. '."".''".'. 2. Fruits and Flowers. After an old drawing. 3. Virgin Martyrs. Thought. Memory. Fancy. After Bene- detto da Matera. V 4 La Fille du Feu. From a sketch by Von ^hwind. 5. Harmony. 6. La Penserosa. After Ambrogio Lorenzetto. 7. Laus Dei. Angel after Hans Hemling. 8. Eve and Cain. After Steinle. 9. Study. After an old print. ' 10. The Parcic, From a sketch by Carstens. 11. Antique Owlet. In Goethe's collection at Weimar. *,^* The woodcuts are inserted to divide the paragraphs and sub- jects, and are ornamental rather than illustrative. ba - Page - 356 - 357 - 359 f^ - 364 - 36fi - 367 • 370 ^ A [pA^T a, mar. jraphs and sub- cy. After Bene- wind. U\m m\ €\nu\n. itliitKl ^r a gill tuts. ICON says, how wisely 1 that " there is often as beat vanity in withdrawing and retiring men's ^nceit8 from the world, as in obtruding them." ttreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of Itra modesty. When I see people haunted by the lea of self, — spreading their hands before their jes lest they meet the reflection of it in every ler face, as if the world were to them like a B ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. Ill I French drcawing-rooin, panelled with looking glass, — always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind i them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of con- sciousness, miscalled modesty, — always on their I defence against compliments, or mistaking sympathy for compliment, which is as great an error, and a| more vulgar one than mistaking flattery for sym- pathy, — when I see all this, as I have seen it, I am ] inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of thei character, or to what is worse, a total want of sim- plicity. To some characters fame is like an intoxi- j eating cup placed to the lips, — they do well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their hea^. But to others, fame is " love disguised," the love that! answers to love, in its widest most exalted sense. It | seems to me, that we should all bring the best that | is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which \ God has given us), and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity, — if not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So will the! pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and t&ey willl not heed if those who can bring nothing or will' brine: nothing, unless they can blaze like a beacon, call out " VANITY !" (/ a.*-*-<.''<^**-'0 v ^r-^*^-^*^- ' '^ illiii TRUTHS AND TRUISMS. 9. There are truths which, by perpetual repetition, Lve subsided into passive truisms, till, in some )ment of feeling or experience, they kindle into Inviction, start to life and light, and the truism kcomes again a vital truth. fl 3. [It is well that we obtain what we require at the japest possible rate ; yet those who cheapen goods, beat down the price of a good article, or buy in jference to what is good and genuine of its kind inferior article at an inferior price, sometimes do ich mischief. Not only do they discourage the )ductiou of a better article, but if they be anxious )ut the education of the lower classes they undo kh one hand what they do with the other; they sourage the mere mechanic and the production of [at may be produced without effort of mind and pout education, and they discourage and wrong skilled workman for whom education has done [ch more and whose education has cost much more. ivery work so merely and basely mechanical, ^t a man can throw into it no part of his own life /■ c < llv b ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. !'! A* i il and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the human being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his understanding, and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate the work- 1 man ; and this is not the case with very cheap pro- duction of any kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.) Since this was written the same idea has been carried out, with far more eloquent reasoning, ina| noble passage which I have just found in Mr. Rus- kin's last volume of "The Stones of Venice" (the I Sea Stories). As I do not always subscribe to hia theories of Art, I am the more delighted with this] anticipation of a moral agreement between us. " We have much studied and much perfected ofl late, the great civilised invention of the division ofl labour, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly I speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men: I — divided into mere segments of men, — broken into! small fragments and crumbs of life ; so that all thel little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is noti enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself! in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.! Now, it is a good and desirable thing truly to makel many pins in a day, but if we could only see withi what crystal sand their points are polished — sand of| human soul, much to be magnified before it can bel BEAUTY AND USE, discerned for what it ia, — we should think there mio'ht be some loss in it also; and the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities^ louder than their furnace-blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men, — we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but- to brighten, to I strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages ; and all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads, can be met only in one way, — not by teaching nor Ipreaching ; for to teach them is but to show them Itheir misery; and to preach to them — if we do Inothing more than preach, — is to mock at it. It [can be met only by a right understanding on the [part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good Ifor men, raising them and making them happy ; by la determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty lor cheapness, as is to be got only by the degradation lof the workman, and by equally determined demand Ifor the products and results of a healthy and en- Inobling labour." .... " We are always in these days trying to separate jthe two (intellect and work). We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always kvorking ; and we call one a gentleman and the )ther an operative : whereas, the workman ought to je often thinking, and the thinker often working, c 2 I 1 \l,< III n y I 11! ETIIIOAIi PRAOMKNT8. \ and both hIiohUI be pjcntlcmcn in the best senHc. It is only by labour that thought can bo made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity." Wordsworth, however, had said the same thinj,' before cither of us : " Our life is turn'd Out of her course wherever man is made An offeriug or a sacrifice. — a tool Or implement, — a passiye thing employed • As a brute mean, without acknowledgment Of common right or interest in the end, Used or abused as selfishness may prompt. ' Say what can follow for a rational soul Perverted thus, but weakness in all good And strength in evil ? " And this leads us to the consideration of another mistake, analogous with the above, but referable in its results chiefly to the higher, or what Mr. Ruskin j calls the thinking, classes of the community. It is not good for us to have all that we value | of worldly material things in the form of money. It is the most vulgar form in which value can be in- vested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful things are better; but even jewels and trinkets are| WHAT IS BOTTL? Loiuctimca to be preferred to mere.hard money. Lauds liind toncments are good, as involving duties; but Igtill what is valuable in the market sense should Lometiincs take the ideal and the beautiful form, and |bc dear and lovely and valuable for its own sake as well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I think the character would be apt to deteriorate when ill its material possessions take the form of money, md when money becomes valuable for its own Bake, or as the mere instrument or representative )f power. , '[in 4. We are told in a late account of Laura Bridge- lan, the blind, deaf, and dumb girl, that her istructor once endeavoured to explain the difference fetween the material and the immaterial, and used le word " soul." She interrupted to ask, " What soul?" " That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves, " " And aches?" she added eagerly. c 3 ii! ■I i i' i I ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. I Avas reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell's Life of Johnson that " it is a theory which every one knows to he false in fact, that virtue in real Hfe is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery." i I should say that all my experience teaches me that | the position is not false but true: that virtue does] produce happiness, and vice does produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. Byj happiness, we do not necessarily mean a state of worldly prosperity. By virtue, we do not mean a| series of good actions which may or may not be re- warded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence ofl virtue. Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual ; sense of right, and the habitual courage to act up to | that sense of right, combined with benevolent sym- pathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This! union of the highest conscience and the highest sym- j pathy fulfils my notion of virtue. Strength is essen- tial to it; weakness incompatible with it. Where: virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are predominant ; the whole being is in that state ofl harmony which I call happiness. Pain may reach it, 1 passion may disturb it, but there is always a glimpse I of blue sky above our head ; as we ascend in dignity of being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God. And vice is necessarily misery : (or that fluctuation; THE PHILOSOPHY OF HAPPINESS. it fluctuation! )f principle, that diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs falsehood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with the absence of the benevolent propensities, — these constitute misery as a state of being. The most iiiscrable person I ever met with in my life had [2,000/. a year ; a cunning mind, dexterous to com- pass its own ends ; very little conscience, not enough, )ne would have thought, to vex with any retributive )ang ; but it was the absence of goodness that made the misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The )erpetual kicking against the pricks, the unreason- ible exigeance with regard to things, without any high Standard with regard to persons, — these made the misery. I can speak of it as misery who had it daily In my sight for five long years. I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to Jail them so, with Carlyle on this point. It appeared |;o me that he confounded happiness with pleasure, rith self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering [corn the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so galled : he styled this philosophy of happiness " the bhilosophy of the frying-pan." But this was like Ihe reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is blenty of sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensa- pon, is, as tlie world goes, something to thank God )r. I should be one of the last to undervalue it ; hope I am one of the last to live for it ; and pain c 4 10 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. is pain, a great evil, which I do not like either to inflict or suffer. But happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure — is as sublime a thing as virtue itself, indivisible from it; and imder this point of view it seems a perilous mistake to separate them. holy, and a virtue. Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God's blessed sunshine — Tristi fummo neV aer dolce ; and in some of the ancient Christian systems of virtues and vices, 1 ', , . Melancholy is unholy, and a vice; Cheerfulness is t>^vt«i),A/"^4,<*f moral health and goodness to consist in "a con- stant quick sense of felicity, and a noble satisfac- tion." What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our Redeemer, have had, though it has become too customary to place him before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow ! Why should he be always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant head of | ii-ij! INTELLECT AND SYMPATHY. 11 Christ in Rjiphael's Transfiguration should rather be our ideal of Him who came " to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." 6. A PROFOUND intellect is weakened and narrowed in general power and influence by a limited range of sympathies. I think this is especially true of C : excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half the good he might do, because his sympathies are so confined. And then he wants gentleness : he does not seem to acknowledge that " the wisdom that is from above is gentW He is a man who carries his bright intellect as a light in a dark-lantern ; he sees only the objects on which he chooses to throw that blaze of light : those he sees vividly, but, as it were, exclusively. All other things, though lying near, are dark, because perversely he xoill not throw the liglit of his mind upon them. -.-I^' 1' 18 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. .7. WiLHELM VON HuMBOLDT says, " Old letters lose their vitality." Not true. It is because they retain their vitality that it is so dangerous to keep some letters, — so wicked to burn others, y iri -y^" o-^^J-'^' V; U^ ^ . You must listen to this, for it is well and strongly put: — " When we meet with an instance of this kind (the allusion is to Count Leopardi), in which the possession of God's choicest natural gifts of genius, knowledge, feeling, is combined with a blindness to His crowning mercy {i. e. our redemption through Christ,) it is wicked to deny, — it is weak to ex- plain it away. It is weaker still to attempt to get rid of it by attenuating the truth of Revelation in order to force it into a kind of resemblance to some sentiment on which an exaggerated and inflated strength is put, in order, as it were, to meet it halfway from the other side. That is to destroy what is really needful for us, — the integrity of II' i III THE POINT OF HONOUR. 13 the Gospel, — in order to do what is not needful, and is commonly wrong ; namely, to pass a judg- ment on our fellow-creatures. Never let it be for- gotten that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single human being of which other men have such a knowledge, — its ultimate grounds, — its surround- ing incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits, as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive uulgment." — Quarterly Review. 9. A MAN thinks himself, and is thought by others to be insulted when another man gives him the lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once, or only to be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not considered in the same unpardonable light by herself or others, — is indeed a slight thing. Now, whence this difference ? Is not truth as dear to a woman as to a man ? Is the virtue itself, or the reputation of it, less necessary to the woman than to the man? If not, what causes this distinction, — one so injurious to the morals of both sexes ? \ 14 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. ^i^-►^. I i t.i 10. It is good for us to look up, morally and mentally. If I were tired I would get some help to hold my head up, as Moses got some one to hold up his arms while he prayed. It. ' \H( i ^>- ^ 'i* " Ce qui est moins que moi m'eteint et m'assommc ; I - i«^ V- ^ ce qui est a cote de moi m'ennuie et me fatigue. 11 ' .si ' " % ' "'y ^ ^^6 cc n.^i ^®* au-dessus de moi qui me sou- 1 f*'* tienne et m'arrache a moi-meme." !«• 11. Ill There is an order of writers who, with oharac- ters perverted or hardened through long practice of AUTHORS. - THOUGHT AND THEORY. 15 1 assomme ; iii'uiuityj yet possess an inherent divine senne of the Uood and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, SO that men's hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which lives not in the heart of the I writer, — only in his head. And there is another class of writers who are ex- Icellent in the social relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who, intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious, — who are never weary of hiolding up before us finished representations of folly [and rascality. Now, which is the worst of these? the former, I who do mischief by making us mistrust the good? lor the latter, who degrade us by making us familiar Iwith evil ? f'^r; 12 " Thought and theory," said Wordsworth, " must )i icede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or klieory.'' 16 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. I' .t Yes, and no. What we act has its consequences on earth. What we thinky its consequences in hea- ven. It is not without reason that action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old rhymester hath it: " He that good thinketh good may do, And God will help him there unto ; For was never good work wrought, Without beginning of good thought." i il The result of impulse is the positive ; the result of consideration the negative. The positive is es- sentially and abstractedly better than the negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the most expedient. On ray observing how often I had had reason to re- gret not having followed the first impulse, o. G. said, " In good minds the first impulses are generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry, for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive, our second thoughts to the negative ; and I have no respect for the negative, — it. is the vulgar side of every thing." 'i! II rii PRINCIPLE AND EXPEDIENCY. 17 Oil the other hand, it must be conceded, that one who stands endowed with great power and with great responsihilities in the midst of a thousand duties and interests, can no longer take things in this simple fashion ; for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets, perhaps, some rock, and splits upon it ; it recoils on the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the impulse to do good here becomes injury therey and we are forced to calculate results ; we cannot trust to them. I HAVE not sought to deduce my principles from conventional notions of expediency, but have be- lieved that out of the steady adherence to certain fixed principles, the right and the expedient must ensue, and I believe it still. The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods. It requires merely passive courage and strength to resist, and in some cases to overcome evil. But it requires more — it needs bravery and self-reliance and surpassing faith — to act out the true inspirations of your intelligence and the true impulses of your heart. .v^lf iv- :r«i^^ I llllil 18 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. Out of the attempt to hamioni^c our actual llfel with our aspirations, our experience with our faitli,! we make poetry, — or, it may be, religion. used the phrase " stu?if/ into heroism ^^^ ii^| Shelley said, " cradled into poetry i"* by wrong. 13. Coleridge calls the personal existence of the| Evil Principle, " a mere fiction, or, at best, an alle- gory supported by a few popular phrases and figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically by the I Evangelists." And he says, that "the existence of a personal, intelligent. Evil Being, the counterpart and antagonist of God, is in direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ. * Shal\\ there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done itf Amos, iii. 6. * / make peace and create eviV—\ Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the deep mystery of the abyss j of God." Do our theologians go with him here? I think I THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT. Id ir :ictiial lift ^^Kt : yet, as a theologian, Coleridge is constantly th our f!iitli,^Kpej^lc(l to by Churchmen. 3? I think 3 14. |« We find (in the Epistle of St. Taul to the Co- itliians), every where instilled as the essence of all ell-being and well-doing, (without which the wisest liblic and political constitution is but a lifeless for- ila, and the highest powers of individual endow- jnt profitless or pernicious,) the spirit of a divine [mpathy with the happiness and rights, — with the fcculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments of other ^nds, which alone, whether in the family or in the inrch, can impart unity and effectual working to- ither for good in the communities of men." I" The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of sedoni to the whole human race." — Thomas Dis- irses on St. PauVs Epiitle to the Corinthians. [And this is the true Catholic spirit, — the spirit |d the teaching of Paul, — in contradistinction to Roman Catholic spirit, — the spirit and tendency Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no Bpect for individuality except in so far as it can i I m imprison this indiviclmility within a creed, or use to a purpose. 15. Du. Baillie once said that " all his observation! of death-beds inclined him to believe that nature in- tended that we should go out of the world as uncon-' scions as we came into it." " In all ray experience,'! he added, " I have not seen one instance in fifty tol the contrary." Yet even in such a large experience the occur- rence of "one instance in fifty to the contrary' would invalidate the assumption that such was tliel law of nature (or " nature's intention," which, if itl means any thing, means the same). The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced by I sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one! to be conscious of the immediate transition from t!ie| waking to the sleeping state. -*'-^^T^^^" THOUGHTS ON A 8RRMON. tl t 'i I < t ' 16. (Thoughts on n Sermon.) He is really sublime, this man ! with his faith in I" the religion of pain," and "the deification of sorrow !" But is he therefore right ? What has he preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence, all the earnestness of conviction ? that ** pain is the life of God as shown forth in Christ;" — "that we are to be crucified to the world and the world to us." This Iperpetual presence of a crucified God between us and a pitying redeeming Christ, leads many a mourner to the belief that this world is all a Gol- gotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify each lother. Is this the law under which we are to live and strive ? The missionary Bridaine accused him- self of sin in that he had preached fasting, penance, and the chastisements of God to wretches steeped I in poverty and dying of hunger ; and is there not a similar cruelty and misuse of power in the servants of Him who came to bind up the broken-hearted, D 2 .1 .' I' ! II I ; i.fi I 'I.I i! n 23 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. •when they preach the necessity, or at least the theory, of moral pain to those whose hearts are] aching from moral evil ? Surely there is a great difference between tke] resignation or the endurance of a truthful, faithful, loving, hopeful spirit, and this dreadful theology of j suffering as the necessary and appointed state of things ! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while most miserable, I will believe in happiness; even while I do or suffer evil, I will believe in goodness ;| even while my eyes see not through tears, I will be- lieve in the existence of what I do not see — that God I is benign, that nature is fair, that the world is not made as a prison or a penance. "While I stand lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return of I the unfailing dawn, — even though my soul be amazed into such a blind perplexity that I know not on which side to look for it, and ask " where is the East? and whence the day spring?" For the East I holds its wonted place, and the light is withheld onlyj till its appointed time. God so strengthen me that I may think of painj and sin only as accidental apparent discords in liisl great harmonious scheme of good ! Then I am ready! — I will take up the cross, and bear it bravely, while! I must; but I will lay it down when I can, and in| any case I will never lay it on another. LOVE AND FEAR OF GOD. 2.'l 17. If I fear God it is because I love him, and believe in his love ; I cannot conceive myself as standing in fear of any spiritual or human being in whose love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersonation of Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may devour, the image brings to me no fear, only intense disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his love for me that I fear to offend ajrainst God ; it is because of his love that his dis- pleasure must be terrible. And with regard to human beings, only the being I love has the power to give me pain or inspire me with fear ; only those in whose love I believe, have the power to injure me. Take away my love, and you take away my fear : take away their love, and you take; away the power to do me any harm which can reach me in the sources of life and feeling. 2t ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. iN;: I 18. Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There ure foolish people who regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defianceT seize it by the blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to carve out their own purposes. While we were discussing Balzac's celebrity as a romance writer, she (o. G.") said, with a shudder: " His laurels are steeped in the tears of women, — every truth he tells has been wrung in tortures from some woman's heart." POLITICAL. 25 19. Sill Walter Scott, writing in 1831, seems to rcard it as a terrible misfortune that the wliole buv-lier class in Scotland should be gradually pre- |)uring for representative reform. " I mean," he t^ays, " the middling and respectable classes : when ji borough reform comes, which, perhaps, cannot long be delayed, ministers will no longer return a member for Scotland from the towns." " The gentry," he adds, " will abide longer by sound principles, for they are needy, and desire advancement for them- selves, and appointments for their sons and so on. But tliirf is a very hollow dependence, and those who sin- cerely hold ancient opinions are waxing old," &c. &c. With a great deal more, showing the strange moral confusion which his political bias had caused in his otherwise clear head and honest mind. The sound principles, then, by which educated people are to abide, — over the decay of which he laments, — are such as can only be upheld by the most vulgar self- interest ! If a man should utter openly such senti- ments in these days, what should we think of him ? In the order of absolutism lurk the elements of change and destruction. In the unrest of freedom, the spirit of change and progress. D 4 20 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. l:^F '! ! 20. " A SINGLE life," said Bacon, " doth well witli churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool." Certainly there are men whose charities are limited, if not dried up, by their concentrated do- mestic anxieties and relations. But there are others whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier and warmer, through the strength of their domestic affections. Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordain- ing men as clergymen in places where they had been bom or brought up, or in the midst of their own relatives : " Their habits, their manners, their talk, their acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me say even their domestic affections, naturally draw them one way, while their professional obligations point out another." If this were true universally, or even generally, it would be a strong argument in favour of the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy, which certainly is one element, and not the least of I their power. LANDOR'S WISE SAYINGS. 21. Landor says truly : " Love is a secondary passion those who love most, a primary in those who love bast : he who is inspired by it in the strongest de- ree is inspired by honour in a greater." " Whatever is worthy of being loved for anyj ling is worthy to be preserved." ' Again : — " Those are the worst of suicides who )Iuntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their m fame, when God hath commanded them to Land on high for an example." " Weak motives," he says, ** are sufficient for kak minds; whenever we see a mind which we ?lieved a stronger than our own moved habitually what appears inadequate, we may be certain that lerc is — to bring a metaphor from the forest — more than root.'''' Here is another sentence from the same writer — jch In wise sayings: — " Plato would make wives common to abolish 28 ETHICAL FRAGMEXTS. selfishness; the very mischief which, above all others, it would directly and immediately bring forth. There is no selfishness where there is a wife and family. There the house is lighted up by mutual charities ; everything achieved for them is a victory ; every- thing endured a triumph. How many vices are sup- pressed that there may be no bad example I How many exertions made to recommend and Inculcate a good one ! " True : and I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to con- verge into egotism, of which I could show you many arid notable examples. All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side. This your mere worldly people do not seem to know, and therein make the sorriest and the vulgarest of all mistakes. . " Pour etre assez bo7i il faut '"etre troj) ;" we all need more mercy than we deserve. ROMAN CATHOLIC CONVERTS. 29 How often in this world the actions that we con- ilcnin are the result of sentiments that we love and o})iuion8 that we admire I 23. A. observed in reference to some of her friends who had gone over to the Roman Catholic Clmrch, " that the peace and comfort which they had sought and found in that mode of faith was like the drugged sleep in comparison with the natural jsleep: necessary, healing perhaps, where there is disease and unrest, not otherwise." li !M'vr»!i.Kki •' 27. It was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, that " speech was like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in packs" (?. e. rolled up or packed up). Dryden had evidently this passage in his mind when he wrote those beauti- ful lines : " Speech is the light, the morning of the mind ; It spreads the beauteous images abroad, Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul." Here the comparison of Themistocles, happy in itself, is expanded into a vivid poetical image. ETHICAL PRA0MENT8. i4 28. *' TnosE are the killing griefs that do not speak," is true of some, not all characters. There are natures in which the killing grief finds utterance while it kills ; moods in which we cry aloud, " as the beast crieth, expansive not appealing." That is my o>vn nature: so in grief or in joy, I say as the birds sing: "Unci wenn derMensch in seiner Qual verstummt, Gab mir cin Got zu sagen was icli leide ! " c li 29. Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted from the world! — yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted in the world ! I,H- VAST AND FUTURE. 30. EvKitYTiiiNCr that ever has been, from the be- o-inning of the world till now, belongs to us, is ours, is even a part of us. We belong to the future, and gjiiill be a part of it. Therefore the sympathies of all are in the past ; only the poet and the prophet sympathise with the future. When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, ''I am a part of all that I have seen," it ought to be rather the converse, — " What I have seen becomes a part of nie." H 31. In what regards policy — government — the interest of the many is sacrificed to the few ; in what regards society, the morals and happiness of individuals are sacrificed to the many. KTIIICAL FRAGMENTS. 82. We spoke to-nigUt of the cowardice, the crime of a particular suicide: o. o. agreed as to this instance, but added : " There is a different aspect under wliicli suicide might be regarded. It is not always, I think, / from a want of religion, or in a spirit of defiance, or a want of confidence in God that we quit life. It is ■' as if we should flee to the feet of the Almighty and \ embrace his knees, and exclaim, * O my father I take me home ! I have endured as long as it was possible; I can endure no more, so I come to you I ' " Of an amiable man with a disagreeable expression- less face, she said : " His countenance ahvays gives me the idea of matter too strong, too hard for the soul to pierce through. It is as a plaster mask which I long to break (making the gesture Avith her hand), that I may see the countenance of his heart, for that must be beautiful ! " I'ROORESa AND PBOORE88TON, W. Carlyle said to me : ♦* I want to sec some insti- itution to teach a man the truth, the worth, the i beauty, the heroism of whicli his present existence is capable; where 's the use of sending liim to study [what the Greeks and Romans did, and said, and j wrote ? Do ye think the Greeks and Romans would I have been what they were, if they had just only U lulled what the Phoenicians did before them?" I I ghoukl have answered, had I dared : " Yet perhaps I the Greeks and Romans would not have been what they were if the Egyptians and Phoenicians had not been before them." A 34, • Can there be progress which is not progression — I which does not leave a past from which to start — on which to rest our foot when we spring forward? No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or obliterates the traces of the road through which he has Itravelled, or pulls down the memorials he has built [by the way side. We cannot get on without link- ling our present and our future with our past. All reaction is destructive — all progress conservative. / 36 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. I) M When we have destroyed that which the past built up, what reward have we ? — we are forced to fall back, and have to begin anew. " Novelty," as Lord Bacon says, " cannot be content to add, but it must! deface." For tlus very reason novelty is not progress, k as the French would try to persuade themselves and us. We gain nothing by defacing and trampling I down the idols of the past to set up new ones in their places — let it be sufficient to leave them behind us, measuring our advance by keeping them in sight. m 35. m E was compassionating to-day the old and the invalided ; those whose life is prolonged in s[)iti of suffering ; and she seemed, even out of the excc^> of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out ot; the world ; but it is a mistake in reasoning and feel- ing. She does not know how much of happiness may I consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and| even with mental suffering. LIFE IN THE FUTURE. 37 36. « Renoncez dans votre ame, et renoncez y ferme- ; nient, une fols pour toutes, a vouloir vous connaitre au-clelti de cette existence passagere qui vous est I imposee, et vous redeviendrez agreable a Dieu, utile I aiix autres hommeSj tranquille avec vous-memes." This does not mean " renounce hope or faith in the future." No ! But renounce that perpetual craving ' after a selfish interest in the unrevealed future life which takes the true relish from the duties and the pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life which is not a continuation of this : to anticipate in ihat future life, another life, a different life ; what is it but to call in doubt our individual identity ? If we pray, " O teach us where and what is peace !" would not the answer be, " In the grave ye shall have it — not before ? " Yet is it not strange that those who believe most absolutely in an after- life, yet think of the grave as peace ? Now, if we carry this life with us — and what other life can we cany with us, unless we cease to be ourselves — how shall there be peace ? .,«p^» As to the future, my soul, like Cato's, " shrinks I back upon herself and startles at destruction ; " but T do not think of my own destruction, rather of that A. n ' m \ B 2 i •!' : 11 :' "' j l' ■liiij t ' w il ■1 j 38 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. which I love. That I should cease to be is not very intolerable ; but that what I love, and do now in my soul possess, should cease to be — there is the pang, the terror I I desire that which I love to be im- mortal, whether I be so myself or not. Is not the idea which most men entertain of another, of an eternal life, merely a continuation of this present existence under pleasanter conditions? We cannot conceive another state of existence,— we only fancy we do so. \ ■xl^^: K,!^^ " I CONCEIVE that in all probability we have immortality already. Most men seem to divide life and immortality, making them two distinct things, when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is immortality but a continuation of life — life which is already our own ? We ha\ e, then, begun our inmior- tality even now." " For the same reason, or, rather, through the same want of reasoning by which we make life and immortality two (distinct things), do we make time and eternity two, which like the others are really one and the same. As immortality is but the continua- tion of life, so eternity is but the continuation of STRENGTH. — YOUTH. 89 time; and what we call time is only that part of eternity in which we exist woia" — The Neio Philo- sophy. ^:- 37. Strength does not consist only in the more or the less. There are different sorts of strength as well as (lifFerent degrees : — The strength of marble to resist; the streiu :h of steel to oppose; the strength of the fine g'^i. v ich you can twist round your finger, but whicn can bear the force of innumerable pounds without breaking. f 1 38. Goethe used to say, that while intellectual attain- ment is progressive, it is difficult to be as good when we are old, as we were when young. Dr. Johnson has expressed the same thing. Then are we to assume, that to do good effectively E 3 40 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. and wisely is the privilege of age and experience? To be good, through faith in goodness, the privilege of the young ? To preserve our faith in goodness with an ex- tended knowledge of evil, to preserve the tenderness of our pity after long contemplation of pain, and the warmth of our charity after long experience of false- hood, is to be at once good and wise — to underistaml and to love each other as the angels who look down upon us from heaven. !! 'I We can sometimes love what we do not urdorstand, but it is impossible completely to understand wliat we do not love. I OBSERVE, that in our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for wliat they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot helji. MORAL SUFFERING. 41 « Whence springs the greatest degree of moral suffering ? " was a question debated this evening, but not settled. It was argued that it would depend on tlie texture of character, its more or less conscien- tiousness, susceptibility, or strength. I thought from two sentiments — from jealousy y that is, the sense of 51 wrong endured, in one class of characters; from remorse, that is, from the sense of a wrong inflicted, in another. ■ i9 '14 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. And, he might have added, appetite without passion, bestial. Love in which is neither appetite nor passion is angelic. The union of all is human; and according as one or other predominates, does the human being approximate to the fiend, the beast, or the angel. (2- os. sioHi out of passion gratified, habit; out of habits unresisted, necessity.''^ This, also, is one of the truths which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them, truisms — and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt. I WISH I could realise what you call my ^^ grand idea of being.independent of the absent." I have not a friend worthy the name, whose absence is not pain and dread to me ; — death itself is terrible only as it is absence. At some moments, if I could, I woiUd cease to love those who are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life diverges from mine — whose dwelling place is far off; — with whom I am united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and interests, by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a double life; absence, in its anxious longing, and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death. " La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment THEODORB HOOK AND SYDNEY SMITH. 47 on ilu nicurcnt, luaia de ccliii (>i\ nous ccssoiih dc vivrc avcc cux ; " or, it miglit rather be said, pour cux ; but I think tbiis arises from a want either of faith or faithfulness. "La penr des morts est une abominable faiblesse I c'cst la plus commune et la plus barbare des profana- tions; les meres ne la comiaisseut pas ! ^' — And why? Becnusc the most faithful love is the love of the mother for her child. f .ill 46. At dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to place Theodore Hook abovfi **^vdney Smith. I fought with all my might against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and imaginative in his nature ; but see what he has done for huma- nity, for society, for liberty, for truth, — for us !ti 1 1 It ! I il lirit ■r'::^ 48 FTlIICATi FRAGMENTS. women I What has Theodore Hook done that has not perished with liim ? Even as wits — and I have been in company with both — I could not compare them; but they say the wit of Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men — the strongest proof that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its brilliant vehicle : the value of ten thousand poundr sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond. It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society of Sydney Smith you only re- membered how much you had laughed, not the good things at which you had laughed. Few men — wits by profession — ever said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith. 47. " When we would show any one that he is mis- taken, our best course is to observe on what side he considers the subject, — for his view of it is gene- AMBITION. 40 rally right on tlda nidc, — and admit to him that he in ri"ht so far. lie will be satisfied with this ac- knowledgment, that ho waf» not wrong in his judg- ment, hut only inadvertent in not looking at the whole of the case." — Pascal. .'- ' "^■ 48. " We should reflect," says Jeremy Taylor, preach- ing against ambition, "that whatever tempts the pride and vanity of amlntious persons is not so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and unregarded on the pavement of heaven." Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good argument against the sin he denounces. The star is inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or our ambi- tion is only that which we consider with hope as «c- cessible. That we look up to the stars not desir^T-g-, not aspiring, but only loving — therein lir i our hearts' truest, holiest, safest devotion its contrasted with ambition. It is the " desire of the moth for the star," that leads to its burning itself in the candle. 1(1 1 ' 50 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. I il; 11 The brow stamped " with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow," is a strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor's. He says truly: "It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as men bring upon them- selves and suffer willingly." And again : " Wliat will not tender women suffer to hide their shame!" What indeed ! And again : " Nothing is intolerable that is necessary." And again : " Nothing is to be esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions." There is not one of these ethical sentences which might not be treated as a text and expounded, open- ing into as many " branches" of consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a fallacy, as it seems to me ; — others a deeper, wider, and more awful signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he uttered them. 49. The same reasons which rendered Goethe's " Wcr- ther" so popular, so passionately admired at the time WERTHER AND CHILDE HAROLD. 51 it ai)pcarcd — jtist .ifter the seven years' war, — helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It Avas not the individuality of " Werther," nor the individu- ality of " Childe Harold" which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading power, — a part of the life of their contemporaries. It was because in both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of feeling pre-existent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was made visible and audible as if by an electric force ; words and forms were given to a dif- fused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy morbid excitement. " Werther " and "Childe Harold" will never perish; because, tliough they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there will always be, unhappily, individual minds and hearts to respond to the individuality. Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own ex- pression, " curdled " a whole world of meaning into the compass of one line : — " The starry Galileo and his woes." " The blind old man of Ohio's rocky isle." Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an #i 'ill ;l 1- % if: m ii ETHICAL PRAOMENTS. idea. Such lines are picturesque. And I rcnicniber another, from Thomson, I think : — " Placed far amid the melancholy main." In general, where words arc used in description, the objects and ideas flow with the words in succes. sion. But in each of these lines the mind takes in a wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at once, as the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and action, and figures, foreground and background, all at once. That is the reason I call such lines pic- turesque. .50. I HAVE a great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness — especially in my own sex, — yet fed that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation, through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength; for those whose refinement and softness of nature mingling with high intellectual power and tlic capacity for strong passion, present to me a prob- lem to solve, which, when solved, I take to my heart. The question is not, which of the two diversities of MONEY OBLIGATIONS. 6» cliiuacter be the highest and best, but which is m'^st synipiithetic with my own. il^ 51. C told me, that some time ago, when poor Bethune the Scotch poet first became known, and Avas in great hardship, C himself had collected a little smn (about 30/.), and ::ent it to him through his publishers. Bethune wrote back to refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he had head and hands, he would not accept charity. C w^rote to him in answer, still anonymously, arguing against the principle, as founded in false pride, &c. Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found un- touched, — left with a friend to be returned to the donors ! This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely constituted minds feel with regard to pecuniary obli- gation, — my own utter rej)ugnance to it, even from the hands of those I most love, — makes one sad to think of It gives one such a miserable impression of our social humanity ! Goethe makes the same remark in the " Wilhelm f2 r ' i t:',!l \\\\ ■ I §! H '4 :i!, •■* r^ -'i M ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. Meister : " — " Es ist sonderbar welch ein wundcrliclies Bedcnken man sich macht, Geld von Frcimden uiul Gonnern anzunehmen, von denen man jcde andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude empfangen wiirde." C^^^ 52. (e In the celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius Areopageta, the angels of Love hold the first place, the angels of Light the second, and the Thrones and Dominations the third. Among terrestrials, the Intellects, which act through the imagination upon the heart of man — i.e. poets and artists — may be accounted first in order; the merely scientific in- tellects the second ; and the merely ruling intellects— those which apply themselves to the government of mankind, without the aid of either science or ima- gination — will not be disparaged if they are placed last." All government, all exercise of power — no matter in what form — which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of God, and shall not stand. CHARITY. - TRUTH, fiS " A time Avill come when the operations of charity Avill no longer be carried on by machinery, relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by human creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise." — IVestminster Revieic. 53. " Those writers who never go further into a sub- ject than is compatible with making what they say indisputably clear to man, woman, and child, may be the lights of this age, but they will not be the lights of another." " It is not always necessary that truth should take a bodily form, ~ a material palpable form. It is sometimes better that it should dwell around us spiritually, creating harmony, — sounding through the air like the solemn sweet tone of a bell." F 3 ■fflii n 00 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. 54. WoMKN are inclined to full in love with priests and physicians, because of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and physical maladies. Thoy believe in the presence of real \nty, real sympathy, where the tone and look of each have become merely habitual and conventional, — I may say professional. On the other hand, women are inclined to fall in love with criminal and miserable men out of the pity which in our sex is akin to love, and out of the power of bestowing comfort or love. " Car les femmes ont un instinct celeste pour le malheur." So, in the first instance, they love from gratitude or faith; in the last, from compassion or hope. 55. « Men of all countries," says Sir James Mack- intosh, " appear to be more alike in their best qualities than the pride of civilisation would be willing to allow." And in their ivorst. The distinction between savage and civilised humanity lies not in the (jtia- litieSj but the habits. COMPENSATION FOR SORROW. 57 Coleridge notices "the increase in modern times of vicious associations with things in themselves in- different," as a sign of unhealthiness in taste, in feel- iiiLS in conscience. The truth of this remark is particularly illustrated in the French literature of tlie last century. " And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss and unpayable, but the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates a revolution in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or a style of liv- ing, and allows the formation of new influences that prove of the first importance during the next years." — Emerson. F 4 08 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. 56. Religion, in a general ^ense, is properly tlic comprehension and acknowledgment of an unseen spiritual power and the soul's allegiance to it ; and Christianity, in its particular sense, is the com- prehension and appreciation of the personal character of Christ, and the heart's allegiance to that. 57. Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals. It is an intellectual form of sensuality, inas- much as it is the passion for the acquisition, the enjoy- ment in the possession, of a palpable, tangible, selfish pleasure ; and it would have the same tendency to unspiritualise, to degrade, and to harden the higher faculties that a course of grosser sensualism would have to corrupt the lower faculties. Both dull the edffc of all that is fine aud tender within us. GENIUS. -MIND. fll» 58. A KINO or a prince becomes! by accident a part of liij^tory. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity. ifir^* As what we call Genius arises out of the dispro- portionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonising with it the rest of the character. " Though it burn our house down, who does not venerate fire ? " says the Hindoo proverb. .f^ ^Z. •^ 59. An elegant mind informing a graceful person is like a spirit lamp in an alabaster vase, shedding round its own softened radiance and heightening the beauty of its medium. An elegant mind in a plain ungraceful person is like the same lamp enclosed in a vase of bronze ; we may, if we approach near enough, rejoice in its influence, though we may not behold its radiance. > 11 I i ]': , .■[ w m ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. - ->v^^ .^-^■rs..- Landor, in a passage I was reading to-day, spenks of a language of criticism, in which qualities shoiikl be graduated by colours ; " as, tor instance, p?irplc might cx})res8 grandeur and majesty of thought; scarlet, vigour of expression ; pink, liveliness ; (/reen, elegant and equable composition, and so on." Blue, then, might express contemplative power? yelloic, wit ? violet, tenderness ? and so on. 60. I QUOTED to A. the saying of a sceptical philo- sopher : " The world is but one enormous will, constantly rushing into life." " Is that," she responded quickly, " another new name for God ? " 61. ( A DEATH-BED repentance has become proverbial ) for its fruitlessness, and a death-bed forgiveness is? CHARACTER. et equally 80. They who wait till their own dcath-betl to make reparation, or till their adversary's death- bed to grant absolution, seem to me much upon a par in regard to the moral, as well as the religious, failure. 62. A CHARACTER endued with a large, vivacious, active intellect and a limited range of sympathies, generally remains immature. We can grow wise only through the experience which reaches us through our sym- pathies and becomes a part of our life. All other experience may be gain, but it remains in a manner extraneous, adds to our possessions without adding to our strength, and sharpens our implements with- out increasing our capacity to use them. Not always those who have the quickest, keenest perception of character are the best to deal with it, and perhaps for that very reason. Before we can influence or deal with mind, contemplation must be lost in sympathy, observation must be merged in love. I ' kii-'l i-JM '-' 'i! ( ' ' '.\ KTHICAL FRA(!Mi;XTM. 63. Montaigne, in his eloquent tirade agninst melan- choly, observes that the Italians have the sanic word, Tri&tezziiy for melancholy and for malignity or wickedness. The noun IVisto, " a wretch," has tlic double sense of our English word corresponding witli the French noun miserable. So Judas Iscariot is called quel tristo. Our word " wretchedness " is not, however, used in the double sense of tristezza. -"^ -oi-'^-b -.v 67 " In the early ages of faith, the sj^irit of Christianity glided into and gave a new significance to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms of heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of Christianity, for in that case the spirit would have burst through such extraneous formulae, and set them aside at once and for ever." '^i. -> . o 08 s , ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. 68. Question^".. In the execution of the penal statutes, can the individual interest of the convict be reconciled with the interest of society ? or must the good of the convict and the good of society be considered ns inevitably and necessarily opposed ? — the one sacri- ficed to the other, and at the best only a compromise possible ? This is a question pending at present, and will require wise heads to decide it. How would Christ have decided it? When He set the poor accused woman free, was He considering the good of the cul- prit or the good of society? and how far are we bound to follow His example? If He consigned the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it for atonement or retribution, punishment or penance ? and how far are we bound to follow His example ? 69. I MARKED the following passage in Montaigne as most curiously applicable to these present times, in so far as our religious contests are concerned ; and I leave it in his quaint old French. " C'est un effet de la Providence divine de pcr- mettre sa saincte Eglise etre agitee, comme nous la LIBERTY. voyons, de tant de troubles et d'orages, pour eveiller par ce contraste les dmes pies et les ravoir de roisivetc et du sommeil ou les avait plongees une si longue tranquillite. Si nous contrepaisons la perte que nous avons faite par le nc.nbre de ceux qui se sont devoyes, au gain qui nous vient par nous etre remis en haleine, ressuscite notre zcle et nos forces a Toccasion de ce combat, je ne sais si I'utilite ne sur- morite point le dommage." rf»fc,y 70. " They (the friends of Cassiup'i were divided in opinion, — some holding that servitude was the ex- treme of evils, and others that tyranny was better than civil war." Unhappy that nation, wherever it may be, where the question is yet pending between servitude and civil war! such a nation might be driven to solve the problem after the manner of Casgius — with the dagger's point. " Surely," said Moore, " it is wrong for the lovers of liberty to identify the principle of resistance to power with such an odious j irson as the devi) ! " ■/: V. 2 ^ BRAAew, •mm 70 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. f I 71. (( Wheke the question is of a great deal of good to ensue from a small injustice, men must pursue tlic things which are just in present, and leave the future to Divine Providence." This 80 simple rule of right is seldom attended to as a rule of life till we are placed in some strait In which it is forced upon us. (I '! M 72. A woman's patriotism is more of a sentiment than a man's, — more passionate: it is only an extension of the domestic affections, and with her la patrie i^ only an enlargement of home. In the same manner, a woman's idea of fame is alv'ays a more extended sympathy, and is much more of a presence than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is only the echo — fainter and more distant — of the voice of love. COLERIDGE. - TIECK. n 73. " La doute s'introduit dans Tame qui reve, la foi descend dans Tame qui souffre." The reverse is equally true, — and judging from my own experience, I should say oftener true. ^ titr.:. 74. '• La curiosite est si voisine a la perfidie qu'clle pent enlaidir lea plus beaux visages." 75. When I told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I had just received the sad but not unexpected news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with emotion, " A great spirit has passed away from the earth, and has left no adequate memorial of its greatness." Speaking of him afterwards, he said, " Coleridge possessed the creative and inventive spirit of poetry, not the productive ; he thought too much to produce, — G 3 til ' .* 72 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. the analytical power interfered with the genius: Others with more active faculties seized and worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter Scott and Lord Byron borrowed the first idea of the form and spirit of their narrative poems from Coleridge's * Christabelle.'" This judgment of one great poet and critic passed on another seemed to me worth preserving. 76. Coleridge says, " In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly." He might have gone farther, and added: In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness. In religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanati- cism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil. In another place he says, — " Talent lying in the understanding is often in- herited; genius, being the action of reas. and imagination, rarely or never." SARA COLEBIDOE. - TALLEYRAND. 78 There seems confusion here, for genius lies not in the amount of intellect — it is a quality of the intellect apart from quantity. And the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent com- hines and uses; genius combines and creates. Of Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said, very truly and beautifidly, " that like her father she had the controversial intellect without the controversial spirit. ^^ 77. We all remember the famous hon mot of Talley- rand. When seated between Madame de Stael and ]\Iadame Recamier, and pouring forth gallantry, first at the feet of one then of the other, Madame de Stael suddenly asked him if she and Madame Recamier fell into the river, which of the two he would save first ? " Madame," replied Talleyrand, " je crois que vous pouvez nager ! " Now we will match this pretty hon mot with one far prettier, and founded on it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one day G 4 ruHMMMMNRlnhk. I t :r 'l • ! i V, i '. 74 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. loitcrinjT on the banka of the Isar, in the Enjijlish garden at Munich, by the side of the beaiitit'.il Madame de V., then the object of his devoted uu- miration. For a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for wh(>in, vaurien as he was, he had ever shown the strongest filial love and respect. Afterwards, as they wandered on, he began to pour forth his soul to the lady of his love with all the eloquence of passion. Suddenly she turned and said to hhn, " If ydiir mother and myself were both to fall into this river, whom would you save first?" " My mother!" he instantly replied: and then, look- ing at her expressively, immediately added, " To save yuu first would be as If I were to save myself first!" -'^^ "'; .^JK% ^ IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I 1^ 1^ 1 2.2 iif 1^ IIIIIM 1.8 L25 IIIIII.4 mil 1.6 V] <^ /] ^a 7 "4V^ x^ 7 Photographic Sdences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716)872-4503 m w ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. viduality of others. In some characters we meet with, toleration is a principle of the reason, and intolerance a quality of the mind, and then the whole being strikes a discord. 79. If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more. It is as if the principle, that conflict is a necessary law of progress, were applicable even to love. For there is no love like that which has roused up the intensest feelings of our nature, — revealed us to ourselves, like light- ning suddenly disclosing an abyss, — yet has survived all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord and all the terror of such a revelation. 80. F. HAS much, much to learn I Through power, through passion, through feeling we do much, but only through observation, reflection, and sympathy we learn much ; hence it is that minds highly gifted often remain immature. Artist minds especially, so long as they live only or chiefly for their art, their '). FRENCH EXPEE88IONS. 77 faculties bent on creating or representing, remain immature on one side — the reasoning and reflecting side of the character. 81. Said a Frenchman of his adversary, " 11 se croit / superieure a moi de toute la hauteur de sa betise I " \ There is a mingled felicity, politeness, and acrimony j in this phrase quite untranslatable. • * It is a pity that we have no words to express the French distinction between rever and revasser. The one implies meditation on a definite subject : the other the abandonment of the mind to vague dis- cussion, aimless thoughts. / '■^t;«r«-— ■ 82. It seems to me that the conversation of the first iH m i 78 ■\\ ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. converger in the world would tire me, pall on me at last, where I am not sure of the sincerity. Talk without truth is the hollow brass ; talk without love is like the tinkling cymbal, and where it does not tinkle it gingles, and where it does not gingle, it jars. 'hld^^^J:^^ 83. There are few things more striking, more inter- esting to a tAioughtful mind, than to trace through all the poetry, literature, and art of the Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction between the practical and the contemplative life. This was, no doubt, suggested and kept in view by the one grand division of the whole social community into those who were devoted to the religious profession (an immense proportion of both sexes) and those who were not. All through Dante, all through the productions of mediaeval art, we find this pervading idea ; and we must understand it well and keep it in mind, or we shall never be able to appre- hend the entire beauty and meaning of certain PRACTICAL AND CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE. 79 religious groups in scul{)ture and painting, and the significance of the characters introduced. Thus, in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative life. In the New Testament, Martha and Mary figure in the same allegorical sense ; and among the saints we always find St. Catherine and St. Clara patronising the religious and contemplative life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula preside over the military or secular existence. It was a part, and a very important part, of that beautiful and expressive symbolism through which art in all its forms spoke to the popular mind. For myself, I have the strongest admiration for the practical, but the strongest sympathy with the contemplative life. I bow to Leah and to Martha, but my love is lor Rachel and for Mary. 84. Bettina does not describe nature, she informs it with her own life : she seems to live in the elements, to exist in the fire, the air, the water, like a sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate nature, she is nature ; sihe is like the bird in the air, the fish m Tc*n w '^i; 1 «0 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. in the sea, the squirrel in the wood. It is one thing to describe nature, and quite another unconsciously 80 to inform nature with a portion of our own life. i K. 85. Joanna Baillie had a great admiration of Ma- caulay's Roman Ballads. " But," said some one, " do you really account them as poetry ? " She replied, " They are poetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music I" ^^^^ 86. All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase " profound cunning " has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet hate dissembling, but a " cunning mind " emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That " pleasure in deceiving and apt- ness to be deceived " usually go together, was one of the wise sayings of the wisest of men. v PARACELSUS. 81 87. It was a saying of Paracelsus, that " Those who would understand the courses of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in man:" meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come to this conclusion only late in life. Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracel- sus, — a poem in which there is such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuri- ance of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence, that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and Wordsworth, — represents his aspiring philosopher as at first im- pelled solely by the appetite to know. He asks nothing of men, he despises them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like fashion. , :vsi /"" ^ii ; M ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. B', .• r i independent of their sympathy, scorning their ap- plause, using them like instruments, cheating them like children,— all for their good; but it will not do. In Aprile, " who would love infinitely, and be be- loved," is figured the type of the poet-nature, de- siring only beauty, resolving all into beauty ; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the reflecting, the inquiring mind, desiring only knowledge, resolving all into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vam. I too have sought to know as thou to love, Excluding love as thou refused'st knowledge ; Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake ! * * * * * Are we not halves of one dissever'd world, Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?- Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower, Love —until both are saved!" -Never ! After all, perhaps, only the same old world- renowned myth in another form — the marriage of Cupid and Psyche ; Love and Intelligence long parted, long-suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosona of him wlio knows; and Paracelsus, who began with a self- COLONIES. sufficing scorn of his kind, dies a baffled and de- graded man in the arms of him who loves; — yet wiser in his fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of humanity so long as humanity is content to be human; to love as well as to know ; — to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire. 88. Lord Bacon says : " I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in a pure soil ; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others : for else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation." (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James i. me plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.) He adds, " It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant" (?.(?. colo- nise). And it is only now that our politicians are beginning to discover and act upon this great moral 1^1 84 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. M :' m '^': truth and obvious fitncsa of things I — like Bacon, adopting practically, and from mere motives of ex- pediency, a principle they would theoretically ahjuro! Because in real life we cannot, or do not, re- concile the high theory with the low practice, we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous, and our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought to do just the reverse. Many would say, if they spoke the truth, that it had cost them a life-long effort to unlearn what they had been taught. For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so through social conventionalism the conscience becomes blinded to positive immo- rality. It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard for men high and the moral standard for women low, or vice versa. This has appeared to me the very commonest of all mistakes in men and women who have lived much in the world, hut fatal nevertheless, and in three ways; first, as distorting the moral ideal, so far as it exists in the conscience ; secondly, as perplexing the bounds, practically, of right and wrong; t and princ mises, am is fatal i eistency a practically Akin t belief thai virtues ai itself, but masculine in which individual character I firmly b extended, which are considerec purity, th duty, and passions. as a natu A man du'cct trut tl MEN AND WOMEN. 95 wrong ; thirdly, as being at variance with the spirit and principles of Christianity. Admit these pro- mises, and it follows inevitably that such a mistake is fatal in the last degree, as disturbing the con- sistency and the elevation of the character, morally, practically, religiously. Akin to this mistake, or identical with it, is the belief that there are essential masculine and feminine virtues and vices. It is not, in fact, the quality itself, but the modification of the quality, which is masculine or feminine : and on the manner or degree in which these are balanced and combined in the individual, depends the perfection of that individual character — its approximation to that of Christ. I firmly believe that as the influences of religion are extended, and as civilisation advances, those qualities which are now admired as essentially /em/w2«e will be considered as essentially human, such as gentleness, purity, the more unselfish and spiritual sense of duty, and the dominance of the affections over the passions. This is, perhaps, what BufFon, speaking as a naturalist, meant, when he said that with the progress of humanity, " Les races se feminisent ;" at least I understand the phrase in this sense. A man who requires from his own sex manly direct truth, and laughs at the cowardly subterfuges H 2 lU M ETHICAL FttAOMENTS. i -i and small arts of women as being feminine; — a woman who rcquirca from her own sex tendernej-s and purity, and thinks ruffianinm and sensuality pardonable in a man as being masculine ^ — these have repudiated the Christian standard of morals which Christ, in his own person, bequeathed to us — that standard which we have accoi)ted as Christians — theoretically at least — and which makes no dis- tinction between " the highest, holiest manhood,' and the highest, holiest womanhood. I might illustrate this position not only scriptu- rally but philosophically, by quoting the axiom of the Greek philosopher Antisthenes, the disciple of Socrates, — " The virtue of the man and the woman is the same ;" which shows a perception of the moral truth, a sort of anticipation of the Christian doc- trine, even in the pagan times. But I prefer an illustration which is at once practical and poeti- cal, and plain to the most prejudiced among men or women. Every reader of Wordsworth will recollect, if he does not know by heart, the poem entitled "The Happy Warrior." It has been quoted often as an epitome of every manly, soldierly, and elevated quality. I have heard it applied to the Duke of Wellington. Those who make the experiment of merely substituting the word woman for the word warrior, and changing the feminine for the mas- MEN AND WUMKN. cul'uo pronoun, will find that it rcado c(iuully well; that alnioiit from beginning to end it is literally M applicable to the one sex as to the other. As tliutj: — '.*'^'^-*^ Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train ! Turns that necessity to glorious gain ; In face of these doth exercise a power Which is our human nature's highest dower Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves Of their bad influence, and their good receives ; By objects, which might force the soul to abitt« Her feeling, rendered more compassionate ; Is placable — because occasions rise So often that demand such sacrifice ; More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure As tempted more ; more able to endure. As more exposed to suffering and distress ; Thence, also, more alive to tenderness. 'Tis she whose law is reason ; who depends Upon that law as on the best of friends ; Whence in a state where men are tempted still To evil for a guard against worse ill, H 3 \ \ 88 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. V / And what in quality or act is best, Doth seldom on a right foundation rest, She fixes good on good alone, and owes ^ To virtue every triumph that she knows/ Who, if she rise to station of command. Rises by open means ; and there will stand On honourable terms, or else retire, ****** Who comprehends her trust, and to the same Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim ; And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state ; Whom they must follow ; on whose head must fall Like showers of manna, if they come at all : Whose powers shed round her in the common strife Or mild concerns of ordinary life, A constant influence, a peculiar grace ; But who, if she be called upon to face Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined Great issues, good or bad for human kind, Is happy as a lover ; and attired With sudden brightness, like to one inspired ; And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what she foresaw ; Or if an unexpected call succeed. Come when it will, is equal to the need ! In all these fifty-six lines there is only one line which cannot be feminised in its significance, — that which I have filled up with asterisks, and which is totally at variance with our ideal of A HArrv Woman. It is the line — " And in himself possess his own desire/' No woman could exist happily or virtuously in such complete independence of all external affection? MEN AND WOMEN. 8» as these words express. " Her desire is to her hus- band," — this is the sort of subjection prophesied for the daughters of Eve. A woman doomed to exist without this earthly rest for her affections, does not " in herself possess her own desire ;" she turns towards God; and if she does not make her life a life of worship, she makes it a life of charity, (which in itself is worship,) or she dies a spiritual and a moral death. Is it much better with the man who concentrates his aspirations in himself? I should think not. Swift, as a man and a writer, is one of those who had least sympathy with women ; and I have some- times thought that the exaggeration, even to mor- bidity, of the coarse and the cruel in his character, arose from this want of sympathy ; but his strong sense showed him the one great moral truth as regards the two sexes, and gave him the courage to avow it. He says, " I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman which is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and gentleness of nature ; nor do I know one vice o^ folly which is not equally detestable in both." Then, remarking that cowardice is an iinfirmity generally allowed to \>'onien, he wonders that they should fancy it be- H 4 il 90 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. coming or graceful, or think it worth improving by affectation, particularly as it is generally allied to cruelty. Here is a passage from one of Humboldt's letters, which I have seen quoted with sympathy and ad- miration, as applied to the manly character only : — • " Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The man who suffers himself to be deceived and carried away by his own weakness, may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a good man; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a woman, for a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of man." Now we will take this bit of moral philosophy, and, without the slightest alteration of the context, apply it to the female character. " Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth. The woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away by her own weakness may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a good woman ; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a man, for the truly beautiful and purely manly nature i t MEN AND WOMEN. # should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of woman." After reading the above extracts, does it not seem clear, that by the exclusive or emphatic use of certain phrases and epithets, as more applicable to one sex than to the other, we have introduced a most un- christian confusion into the conscience, and have prejudiced it early against the acceptance of the larger truth ? It might seem, that where we reject the distinc- tion between masculine and feminine virtues, one and the same type of perfection should suffice for the two sexes ; yet it is clear that the moment we come to consider the personality, the same type will not suffice : and it is worth consideration that when we place before us the highest type of manhood, as exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the father, but as the son ; and if we think of the most perfect type of womanhood, we never can exclude the mother. Montaigne deals with the whole question in his own homely straightforward fashion : — "Je dis que les males et les femelles sont jettes en meme moule ; sauf I'institution et I'usage la difference n'y est pas grande. Platon appelle indifferemment les uns et les autres a la societe de touts etudes^ mm 1 li rl i m I' A I .' I' 1^=^ 1*1 / w m ' h 1 i If ■I ^4" 92 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. exercises, charges, et vocations guerrieres et paisibles en sa republique, et le philosophe Antisthenes otait toute distinction entre leur vertu et la notre. II est bien plus aisd d'accuser un sexe que d'excuser I'autre : c'est ce qu'on dit, * le fourgon se moque de la poele.'" Not that I agree with Plato, — rather would leave all the fighting, military and political, if there must be fighting, to the men. Among the absurdities talked about women, one hears, perhaps, such an aphorism as the following, quoted with a sort of ludicrous complacency, — " The woman's strength consists in her weakness!" as if it were not the weakness of a woman which makes her in her violence at once so aggravating and so con- temptible, in her dissimulation at once so shallow and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so cowardly and so cruel. I SHOULD not say, from my experience of my own sex, that a woman's nature is flexible and impressible, though her feelings are. I know very few instances of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior woman, whereas I know twenty — fifty — of a very MEN AND WOMEN. 93 inferior woman ruling a superior man. If he love her, the chances are that she will in the end weaken and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man he makes her miserable, but he seldom governs her mind, or vulgarises her nature, and if there be love on his side the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him. The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of high intellectual endowments morally perverted; for in a woman's nature there is such a necessity to approve where she admires, and to believe where she loves, — a devotion compounded of love and fiiith is so much a part of her being, — that while the instincts remain true and the feelings uncor- rupted, the conscience and the will may both be led far astray. Thus fell " our general mother," — type of her sex, — overpowered, rather than deceived, by the colossal intellect,— half serpent, half angelic. Coleridge speaks, and with a just indignant scorn, of those who consider chastity as if it were a thing — a thing which might be lost or kept by external accident — a thing of which one might be robbed, instead of a state of being. According to law and custom, the chastity of Woman is as the property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it. \ \ 94 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. \>i i 'I Hi rather than to God and her own conscience. What- ever people may say, such is the common, the social, the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of Oriental barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at the best, to a low standard of morality, in both sexes. This idea of property in the woman survives still in our present social state, particularly among the lower orders, and is one cause of the ill treat- ment of wives. All those who are particularly acquainted with the manners and condition of the people will testify to this; namely, that when a child or any weaker individual is ill treated, those standing by will interfere and protect the victim; but if the sufferer be the wife 'of the oppressor, it is a point of etiquette to look on, to take no part in the fray, and to leave the brute man to do what he likes " with his own ." Even the victim herself, if she be not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such an interference with the dignity and the rights of her owner. Like the poor woman in the " Medecin malgre lui : " — " Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui veut empecher les maris de battre leurs femmes I — et si je veux qu'il me batte, moi?" — and so ends by giving her defender a box on the ear. " Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et la society ont semes sur les pas de la femme, la seule MEN AND WOMEN. V» .A condition de repos pour elle est de s'entourer de barrieres que les passions ne puissent franchir; in- capable de s'approprier I'existence, elle est toujours semblable sL la Chinoise dont les pieds ont ^te mutil^s et pour laquelle toute liberte est un leurre, toute espace ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant que I'education ait donne aux femmes leur veritable place, malheur k celles qui brisent les lisses accoutumees I pour elles I'independance ne sera, comme la gloire, qu'un deuil eclatant du bonheur!" — B. Constant, This also is one of those common-places of well- sounding eloquence, in which a fallacy is so wrapt up in words we have to dig it out. If this be true, it is true only so long as you compress the feet and compress the intellect, — no longer. Here is another : — " L'exp^rience lui avait appris que quel que fut leur age, ou leur caractere, toutes les femmes vivaient avec le meme reve, et qu'elles avaient toutes au fond du coeur un roman commence dont elles attendaient jusqu'a la mort le heros, comme les juifs attendenty le Messie." ' r This "roman commence," (et qui ne finit jamais), is true as regards women who are idle, and who have not replaced dreams by duties. And what are the " barrieres " which passion cannot overleap, from the moment it has subjugated the will ? How fine, how true that scene in Calderon's " Magico Prodigioso," I I ki i\ v " ' }\ 7 ■/ 9» ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. where Jnstlna conquers the fiend only by not con- senting to ill I " This agony Of passion which aflSicts my heart and soul May sweep imagination in its storm ; The will is firm." And the baffled demon shrinks back, — " Woman, thou hast subdued me Only by not owning thyself subdued ! " I A FRIEND of mine was once using some mincing elegancies of language to describe a high degree of moral turpitude, when a man near her interposed, with stern sarcasm, " Speak out I Give things their proper names ! Half words are the perdition of women l f» " I OBSERVE," said Sydney Smith, " that generally i about the age of forty, women get tired of being /I •v; nit MEN AND WOMEN. W virtuous and men of being honest." This was said and received with a laugh as one of his good things ; but, like many of his good things, how dreadfully triJcf^And why? because, ^c«ero%, education has made the virtue of the woman and the honesty of the man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the inward life. "•*«r Dante, in his lowest hell, has placed those who have betrayed women ; and in the lowest deep of the lowest deep those who have betrayed trust. Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of utterly stupifying and brutifying lower minds, gives to natures more sensitively or more powerfully or- ganised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is an awful relation between animal blood-thirstiness and the proneness to sensuality, and in some sensual- ists a sort of feline propensity to torment and lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to devour. Mi,f ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. \ " La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n'a jamais rtJussi, quoique souvcnt cssay^e ; la tentative de se servir des passions humaines, et particuliere- ment de Tamour pour conduire I'homm'e a la vertu. Dans cette route I'homme s'arrete toujours en chemin. L'amour inspire beaucoup de bons sentiments — le courage, le d^vouement, le sacrifice des biens et de la vie ; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-m^me, et c'est hi que la faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits." — St. Marc'Girardin, «* I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is true — or, if true, it is true of the mere passion, not of love in its highest phase, which is self-sacrificing, which has its essence in the capability of self-sacri- fice. " Love was given, Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end ; For this the passion to excess was driven, That se//" might be annull'd." 4' In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear, there is a strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to hate ; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such intense haters. n'ii MEN. WOMEN, CHILDREN. Our present social opinion says to the man, " You may be a vulgar brutal sensualist, and use the basest means to attain the basest ends ; but so long as you do not offend against conventional good manners you shall be held blameless." And to the woman it says, « You shall be guilty of nothing but of yielding to the softest impulses of tenderness, of relenting pity ; but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be punished as the most desperate criminal." /-A_?IC^_. (( It is worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in different constitutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy with the feeling of others."— Dr. Hol- land. Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will doubt the accuracy of this remark, though from the high authority of one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have seen an infant in its mother's amis, before it could speak, begin to I i'l 100 ». » ETHICAL PRA0MENT8. whimper anil cry when it looked up in her tiico, which was disturbed and bathed with tears ; and that has tUways appeared to me an exquisite touch of most truthful nature in Wordsworth's description of the desolation of Margaret : — •' Her little child Had from its mother caught the trick of grief, And sighed amid its playthings." •C'rT? 89. " Letteus," said Sir James Mackintosh, " must not be on a subject. Lady Mary Wortley's letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not business, and must never appear to be occupation; — nor must letters." " A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever sex. The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigne's genius are exquisitely charin- V V • t'llCC, id tlisit ich of iion of " must letters mirablc meeting rsation, discuss, ess, and ►r must ct in a lise to a aces of cliarni- MAOAME I)l!) STAtlL. 1M ing, but the philosophy and t»lorjucnco of Madumu de Stttcl arc above the dis»tiiirtion8 of sex," 90. Op the wars between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, Madame de Stacl once said with most ad- mirable and prophetic sense : — " It is a contest be- tween a man who is the enemy of liberty, and a system which is equally its enemy." But it is easier to get rid of a man than of a system : witness the Russians, who assassinate their czars one after an- other, but cannot get rid of their system. 91. The Empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war with Sweden commanded tlie old Hetman of the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland. " If the Emperor, your father," said the Iletman, " had taken my advice, your Majesty would not now I 2 n M IM ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. have been annoyed by the Swedes." " What was your advice?" asked the Empress. " To put all the nobility to death, and transplant the people into Russia." " But that," said the Empress, " would have been cruel!" " I do not see that," he replied quietly ; " they are all dead now, and they would only have been dead if my advice had been taken." Something strangely comprehensive and unanswer- able in this barbarian logic ! vf |:i .i:S?:E? It was the Abbe Boileau who said of the Jesuits, that they had lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue. The same witty ecclesiastic being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a pinch of snuff, and answered gravely, " Why, for fear the bishops should read me !" 93. When Talleyrand once visited a certain repro- bate friend of his, who w as ill of cholera, the pationt UEJA. 103 exclaimed in his agony, " Je sens les tourmens do I'enfer!" « Deja?" said Talleyrand. Much in a word ! I remember seeing a pretty French vaudeville wherein a lady is by some accident or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover she has rejected. She frets at the contretemps. He makes use of the occasion to plead his cause. The cruel fair one will not relent. Still he pleads — still she turns away. At length they are interrupted. " Deja!" exclaims the lady, in an accent we may suppose to be very different from that of Talleyrand ; and on the intonation of this one word, pronounced as only an accomplished French actress could pro- nounce it, depends the denouement of the piece. 94. Louis XVI. sent a distinguished physician over to England to inquire into the management of our hospitals. He praised them much, but added, " II y manque deux choses ; nos cures et nos hospitalieres ; " tliat is, he felt the want of the religious element in the official and medical treatment of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at present and will be supplied. I 3 i ! ht •■ 11 '. 1 m Kj 1 1 !'"' ii':: f . \ ■ i : 1 1 Li lal ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. 95. Those who have the largest horizon of thoiiglit, the most extended vision in regard to the relation of things, are not remarkable for self-reliance and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly and clearly, is more sure of himself, and more direct in his dealings with circumstances and with others, than a man whose many-sided capacity embraces an immense extent of objects and objections, — just as, they say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses his path, and is less likely to shy. ^ .-^ ■:?;:rl 96. What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by chang- ing the frame of the mind, for the moment realises itself ^t, J .■#**'w'^^^ /ni'i'W'-.. THOUGHT TOO FREE. 105 97. There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel. 98. There are moments when the liberty of the inner life, opposed to the trammels of the outer, becomes too oppressive : moments when we wish that our mental horizon were less extended, thought less free ; when we long to put the discursive soul into a narrow path like a railway, and force it to run on in a straight line to some determined goal. 99. If the deepest and best affections which God has irivcn us sometimes brood over the heart like doves of peace, — they sometimes suck out our life-blood like vampires. '^ - - ^ O-' ('- -•^"^ ^<*- ^* I 4 I ilr ill'' ! ■ .1 i! _ir ' j£ ^j^j^ ^ relish in his mouth — as if he tasted them ' — as if he possessed them, v r .-' ' ^ps 101. There are many good qualities, and valuable ones too, which hardly deserve the name of virtues. The word Virtue was synonymous in the old lime with valour, and seems to imply contest ; not merely passive goodness, but active resistance to evil, I wonder sometimes why it is that we so continually hear the phrase, " a virtuous woman," and scarcely ever that of a " virtuous man," except in poetry or from the pulpit, 102. li,^ A LIE, though it be killed and dead, can stinj sometimes, — like a dead wasp^ ^^ .^^*'t»^«-<::*/^ «,/ /"- ul I../ SENSE AND PHANTASY. 107 103. " On me dit toute la joumee clans le mondc, telle opinion, telle idee, sont reques. On ne salt done pas qii'en fait d'opinion et d'idees j'aime beaucoiip inieux les Glioses qui sont yejettees que celles qui sont revues?" f)p: J- it-c-t.Mt'f-- - e/- ^^i^yt ' ^^c tr^j^^j ,. K. /c^ <^-<^ r ^ i/ 104. " Sense can support herself handsomely in most -=i&0<^ countries on some eighteenpence a day, but for "° '^^/*"'5 phantasy, planets and solar systems will not suffice." .1 ' ^j / And thence do you infer the superiority of sense ./ -'/ over phantasy ? Shallow reasoning ! God who made the soul of man of sufficient capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby a foretaste of our immortality. /V,V1 M' r I: ■* I i.»»m H I iKi i wiwgwiii j i w iip imm wamuM fi Ill -A 108 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. ■% m ■ X I 'I ,* 105. " Faith in the hereafter is as necessary for the intellectual as the moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence." — Southey. Goethe did not think so. " Genutzt dem Augen- blick," " Use the present," was his favourite maxim ; and always this notion of sacrificing or slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to he the most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past and lay the foundation for the future. 106. " Je allseitigen, je individueller," is a beautiful significant phrase, quite untranslateable, used, I think, by liahel (Madame Varnhagen). It means that the more tiic mind can multiply :ti every sid* its capacities of thinking and feeling, the more indi- vidual, the more original, that mind becomes. FACTS. - MOR/IL SYMPATHIES. IW 107. " I WONDER," said c, " that facts should be called stubborn things." I wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent a fact into twenty different forms. " II n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi facilement que les fiiits," — Nothing so tractable as facts, — said Ben- jamin Constant, True ; so long as facts are only ma- terial, — or as one should say, mere matter of fact, — you can modify them to a purpose, turn them upside down and inside out ; but once vivify a fact with a feeling, and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing. 108. Every human being is born to influence some other human being ; or many, or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the sympathies, rather than of the intellect. , . u^y\ M.a J M. ■■,,<.. u ' It was said, and very beautifully said, that " one man's wit becomes all men's wisdom." Even more true is it that one man's virtue becomes a standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men. i..<^ 1 If ■tl 1 ! ■J r. : 1 ■' '' ■ 1 1 r iv 1 !■ ' : f ! 1 'it' ' \ ■''\ |S|>, ' ■''( !/■ 1 K 1 i 1 1 ■;j' i i 1 ; , i I 1 '- ii I • f • i j i J 110 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. t\r y li ;.;» / 109. It is curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet be much more retentive of feel- ings than of facts : for instance, we remember witli ^ucli intense vividness a period of suffering, tliat it seems even to renew itself through the medium of thought; yet, at the same time, we perhaps find difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the causes of that pain. I r ■,t;f h 110. " Truth has never manifested itself to me in such a broad stream of light as seems to be poured upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my mental eye like a vivid, yet small and trembling star in a storm, now appearing for a moment with a beauty that en- raptured, now lost in such clouds, as, had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous clear sight had been a delusion." — Blanco White. Very exquisite, in the aptness as well as poetry of the comparison ! Some walk by daylight, some tm SAYINGS. Ill Avalk by starlight. Those who sec the sun do not sec the stars ; those who see the stars do not see the sun. He says in another place : — " I am averse to too much activity of the Imagin- ation on the future life. I hope to die full of con- fidence that no evil awaits me ; but any picture of a future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of existence were already an insupportable burden on my soul." How characteristic of that lassitude of the soul and sickness of the heart which " asks not happiness, but longs for rest ! " !hl I ill 111. " Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their fame when God hath commanded them to stand on high for an example." V2. Caklyle thus apostrophised a celebrated orator, who abused his gift of eloquence to insincere pur- poses of vanity, self-interest, and expediency : — ;. : M mi I'liit: r- ii .■'*] I ii ^i '■!' \('> I-', i 112 ETHICAL PRA0MENT8. " You blaBplicmoiis scoundrel I God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin-man's bell 1 " 113 I THINK, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosjihere when I suspctt that false- hood, like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks this is too young a feeling, and that as the truth is sure to conquer in the end, it is not worth while to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into every infected hole. Perhaps not. so far as we are our- selves concerned; but we should think of others. While secure in our own antidote, or wise in our own caution, we should not leave the miasma to poison the healthful, or the briars to entangle the unwary. There is no occasion perhaps for Truth to sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every vizor, but neither should she sit self-assured in her tower of strength, leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the blind to fall into. ^=^< (( n SIONS mSTEAT) OF WORDS. \\H 114. " There is a way to separate memory from ima- gination — wo may narrate without painting. I am convinced that the mind can employ certain indis- tinct signs to represent even its most vivid impres- sions; that instead of picture writing, it can use something like algebraic symbols: such is the lan- guage of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has passed, and the wounds it received formerly are skinned over, not healed : — it is a language very opposite to that used by the poet and the novel- writer." — Blanco White. True ; but a language in which the soul can con- verse only with itself; or else a language more con- ventional than words, and like paper as a tender for gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified. There is a proverb we have heard quoted : " Speech is silver, silence is golden." But better is the silver (liifused than the talent of gold buried. ii; However distinguished and gifted, mentally and morally, we find that in conduct and in our external i . \ lit ETHICAL FRA0MENT9. v;f relations with society there is ever a leveUin«:i; in- fluence at work. Seldom in our relations with the world, and in the ordinary conunercc of life, are the best and highest within us brought forth; for the whole system of social intercourse is levelling. As it is said that law knows no distinction of persons but that which it has itself instituted ; so of society it may be said, that it allows of no distinction but those which it can recognise — external distinctions. We hear it said that general society — the world, as it is called — and a public school, arc excellent educators ; because in one the man, in the other the boy, "finds, as the phrase is, his own level." He does not; he finds the level of others. That may be good for those below mediocrity, but for those above it bad: and it is for those we should most care, for if once brought down in early life by the levelling influence of numbers, they seldom rise again, or only partially. Nothing so dangerous as to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what is be- neath us, feeling our superiority to that which wc force ourselves to assimilate to. This has been tlie perdition of many a school-boy and many a man. MlhTONN ADAM AND KVK. lin IK). " II mo emhlc (juo Ic i>liis noble mpi)ort entrc lo (•Kil et la tiu'i'c, Ic plus beau don que Dleu nit fait a riionimo, la pens^e, l'inr*piration, ho decompose en (|uel(]ue 8orte d^s ((u'elle eat descendue dans son nmc. KlIc y vicnt 8im[)le et deninteressec ; il la reproduit ('i)iTompuc par tons Ics interets auxquels il Taasocie ; die lui a 6i6 confiec pour la multiplier a I'avantage i\c tons ; il la public au profit dc son amour-propre." — Madame de Saint- Aulaire. There woidd bo much to say about this, for it is not always, nor generally, amour-propre or interest ; it is the desire of sympathy, which imi>el8 the artist njind to the utterance in words, or the expression in form, of that thought or inspiration which God has sent into his soul. .j*ra ^=^*. I^-^ 117. Milton's Eve is the type of the masculine stand- ard of perfection in woman ; a graceful figure, an abundance of fine hair, nuich "coy submission," and such a dejjrec of unreasoninjv wilfulness as shall risk perdition. And the woman's standard for the man is Adam, who rules and demands subjection, and is so in- dulgent that he gives up to blandishment what he K - ■ 1 ■ 1 ,■ f i ;i t ii 116 ETHICAL FIIAG5IENTS. would refuse to reason, and what his own reason condemns. 118. Every subject whicli excites discussion impels to thought. Every expression of a mind liumbly seek- ing truth, not assuming to have found it, helps the seeker after truth. -r^-^-^^^- 119. ^ As a man just released from the rack stands bruised and broken, — bleeding at every pore, and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to heaven, and says, " God be praised ! I suffer no more ! " because to that past sharp agony the respite comes like peace — like sleep, — so we stand, after some great wrench in our best affections, where they have been torn up by the root ; when the conflict is over, and the tension of the heart-strings is relaxed, then comes a sort of rest, — but of what kind ? 120. To trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire nobly, to think rationally, to will resolutely, and to work earnestly, — may this be mine ! A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 117 121. A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. (FEOM A LETTER.) We are all interested in this great question of popular education ; but I see others much more sanguine than I am. They hope for some im- mediate good result from all that is thought, written, spoken on the subject day after day. I see such results as possible, probable, but far, far off. All this talk is of systems and methods, institutions, school houses, schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school books ; the ways and the means by which we are to instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that which lies in most cases beyond our reach — the spirit sent from God. What do we know of the mystery of child-nature, child-life ? What, indeed, do we know of any life ? All life we acknowledge to be an awful mystery, but child-life we treat as if it were no mys- tery whatever — just so much material placed in our I hands to be fashioned to a certain form according to jour will or our prejudices, — fitted to certain pur- l\ r: i:: K 2 US ETHICAL FRAGJIENTS. rf b 14 ? poses according to our notions of expediency. Till we know how to reverence childhood we shall do no good. Educators commit the same mistake with regard to childhood that theologians commit with regard to our present earthly existence ; thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory to some con- dition of being which is to follow — as if it were something separate from us and to be left behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as in the sight of God this life is also something for its own sake, so in the estimation of Christ, childhood was some- thing for its own sake, — something holy and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it not merely as the germ of something to grow out of it, but as perfect and lovely in itself as the flower which pre- cedes the fruit. We misunderstand childhood, and we misuse it ; we delight in it, and we pamper it ; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it sinfully ; at the best we trifle with it as a plaything which we can pidl to pieces and put together at pleasure — ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we are ! And if Ave are perpetually making the grossest mistakes in the physical and practical management of childhood, how much more in regard to what is spiritual ! What do we know of that which lies in the minds of children ? we know only what we put there. The world of instincts, perceptions, experiences. A REVELATION OP CHILDHOOD. 119 I pleasures, and painn, lying there without self-con- sciousness, — sometimes helplessly mute, sometimes SO imperfectly expressed, that we quite mistake the manifestation — what do we know of all this ? How shall we come at the understanding of it? The child lives, and does not contemplate its own life. It can give no account of that inward, busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and feelings which it is of so much importance that we should know. To lead children by questionings to think about their own identity, or observe their own feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken self-con- sciousness before you awaken conscience is the beginning of incalculable mischief. Introspection is always, as a habit, unhealthy : introspection in childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a knowledge of li^e such as it is when it first gushes from its mysterious fountain head? We cannot re- ascend the stream. We all, however we may re- member the external scenes lived through in our infancy, either do not, or cannot, ccmsult that part of our nature which remains indissolubly connected with the inward life of that time. We so forget it, that we know not how to deal with the child-nature when it comes under our power. We seldom reason about children from natural laws, or psychological data. Unconsciously we confound our matured experience with our memory : we attribute to K 3 il \ \ 1 ij'P ' ;::i i 120 FVrHlCAL rRAG.MRNTS. ; i!'4j children whiit is not possible, exact from them what is impossil)le ; — ignore many things which the child has neither words to express, nor the will nor the power to manifest. The quickness with which children perceive^4he. keenness with which they fiuffer, the tenacity with which they remember, I ! have never seen fully appreciated. What misery * we cause to children, what mischief we do them I by bringing our own minds, habits, artificial pre- 1/ judices and senile experiences, to bear on their young { life, and cramp and overshadow it — it is fearful ! Of all the wronn;s and anomalies that afflict our earth, a sinful childhood, a suffering childhood, are among thi. worst. ye men ! who sit in committees, and are called upon to legislate for children, — for children who are the offspring of diseased or degenerate humanity, or the victims of a yet more diseased society, — do you, when you take evidence from jailors, and police- men, and parish schoolmasters, and doctors of di- vinity, do you ever call up, also, the wise physician, the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother? You have accumulated facts, great blue books full of facts, but till you know in what fixed and uniform ! principles of nature to seek their solution, your facts i remain a dead letter. 1 say nothing here of teaching, though very few in truth understand that lowest part of our duty to A RKVKLATION OF CHILDIIOOI). 121 children. Men, it is generally allowed, teach better tlian women because they have been better taught the things they teach. Women train better than men because of their quick instinctive perceptions and sympathies, and greater tenderness and patience. In schools and in families I would have some things taught by men, and some by women : but we will liere put aside the art, the act of teaching: we will turn aside from the droves of children in national schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the individual child, brought up within the guarded circle of a home or a select school, watched by an intelligent, a consLcientious influence. How shall we deal with that spirit which has come out of nature's hands unless we remember what we were ourselves in the past? What sympathy can we have with that state of being which we regard as unmature, so long as we commit the double mistake of some- times attributing to children motives which could only spring from our adult experience, and some- times denying to them the same intuitive tempers and feelings which actuate and agitate our maturer life ? We do not sufficiently consider that our life is notf/^ made up of separate parts, but is one — is a prolH gressive whole. When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, \/e might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind. R 4 V ■ -i |:i H :1 ■ t i if 122 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. 122. I WILL here put together some recollections of my own child-life ; not because it was in any respect an exceptional or remarkable existence, but for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like that of many children ; at least I have met with many children who throve or suffered from the same or similar unseen causes even under external con- ditions and management every way dissimilar. Facts, therefore, which can be relied on, may be generally useful as hints towards a theory of conduct. What I shall say here shall be simply the truth so far as it goes ; not something between the false and the true, garnished for effect, — not something half- remembered, half-imagined, — but plain, absolute, matter of fact. No; certainly I was not an extraordinary child. I have had something to do with children, and have met with several more remarkable for quickness of talent, and precocity of feeling. If any thing in particular, I believe I was particularly naughty, — at least so it was said twenty times a day. But A REVELATION OP CHILDHOOD. 128 looking back now, I do not think I was particular even in this respect ; I perpetrated not more than the usual amount of mischief — so called — which every lively active child perpetrates between five and ten years old. I had the usual desire to know, and the usual dislike to learn ; the usual love of fairy tales, and hatred of French exercises. But not of what I learned, but of what I did not learn ; not of what they taught me, but of what they could not teach me ; not of what was open, apparent, manageable, but of the under current, the hidden, the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak, and you, my friend, to hear and turn to account, if you will, and how you will. As we grow old the experiences of infancy come back upon us with a strange vividness. There is a period when the over- flowing, tumultuous life of our youth rises up between us and those first years ; but as the torrent subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable gulf to that haunted fairy land which we shall never more approach, and never more forget ! In memory I can go back to a very early age. I perfectly remember being sung to sleep, and can remember even the tune which was sung to me — blessings on the voice that sang it ! I was an affec- tionate, but not, as I now think, a loveable nor an attractive child. I did not, like the little Mozart, i ; ' i '■• 1 !: i 'f ) ■■ i 1, ,.' 124 KTHICAL FRA(4MJ';NTS, : I'l: ^k I M ask of every one iiroimd me, " Do you love mo?" The instinctive question Avas, rather, " Can I love you?" Yet certainly 1 was not more than six years old when I suffered from the fear of not being loved where I had attached myself, and from the idea that another was preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me. Whether those around me re- garded it as a fit of ill-temper, or a fit of illness, I do not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered me. I knew not the cause, but never forgot the suffering. It left a deeper im- pression than childish passions usually do; and the recollection was so far salutaiy, that in after life 1 guarded myself against the approaches of that hate- ful, deformed, agonising thing which men call jea- lousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has saved me from the demoralising effects of the passion, by a wholesome terror, and even a sort of disgust. With a good temper, there was the capacity of strong, deep, silent resentment, and a vindictive spirit of rather a peculiar kind. I recollect that when one of those set over me inflicted what then apjoeared a most horrible injury and injustice, the thoughts of vengeance haunted my fancy for months: but it was an inverted sort of ven- geance. I imagined the house of my enemy on fire, A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD, lis and rushed through the Unmcs to rescue her. She vviis drowning, and I leaped into the deep water to (h'aw her forth. She was pining in prison, and T Forced bars and bolts to deliver her. If this were magnanimity, it was not the less vengeance ; for, observe, I always fancied evil, and shame, and humi- liation to my adversary ; to myself the role of supe- riority and gratified pride. For several years this sort of burning resentment against wrong done to myself and others, though it took no mean or cruel form, was a source of intense, untold suffering. No one was aware of it. I was left to settle it; and my mind righted itself I hardly know how : not certainly by religious influences — they passed over my mind, and did not at the time sink into it, — and as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either when most needed. And as it fared with me then, so it has been in after life; so it has been, must be, with all those who, in fighting out alone the pitched battle between principle and passion, will accept no intervention between the infinite within them and the infinite above them; so it has been, must be, with all strong natures. Will it be said that victory in the struggle brings increase of strength? It may be so with some who survive the contest ; but then, how many sink ! how many are crippled morally for life ! how many, strengthened in some particular faculties, suffer in losing the harmony of the character \ \ ;: K' 12A ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. lit I I as a whole ! Tliis is one of the points in which the matured mind may help the childish nature at strife with itself. It is impossible to say how far this sort of vindictiveness might have penetrated and hardened into the character, if I had been of a timid or re- tiring nature. It was expelled at last by no outer influences, but by a growing sense of power and self- reliance. In regard to truth — always such a difficulty in education, — I certainly had, as a child, and like most children, confused ideas about it. I had a more distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth, — a mistake into which our conventional morality leads those who educate and those who are educated. I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie was wicked ; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or to the hurt of others, was, according to my infant code of morals, worse than wicked — it was dishonourable. But I had no compunction about telling jettons; — inventing scenes and circumstances, which I re- lated as real, and with a keen sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation of impossibilities. In this respect " Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of the first magnitude," was nothing in comparison to me. I must have been twelve years old before my conscience was first awakened up to a sense of A REVELATION OF CIlILDHOOl). m ich the it strife 118 sort irdened or rc- 3 outer nd selt- lulty in nd like [ a more ■ truth, iiorality lucated. ell a lie •e, or to nt code ourable. Actions ; 1 I re- nipliant a most bilities. hat liar parison before sense of the iiecensity of truth as a principle, as well as its holiness as a virtue. Afterwards, having to set rijjjht the minds of others cleared my own mind on tliis and some other important points. I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but re- member going without food all day, and being sent hungry and exhausted to bed, because I would not do some trifling thing required of me. I think it was to recite some lines I knew by heart. I was punished as wilfully obstinate: but what no one knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was, that after refusing to do what was required, and bearing anger and threats in consequence, I lost the power to do it. I became stone : the will was petri- fied, and I absolutely could not comply. They might have hacked me in pieces before my lips could have unclosed to utterance. The obstinacy was not in the mind, but on the nerves ; and I am persuaded that what we call obstinacy in children, and grown- up people, too, is often something of this kind, and that it may be increased, by mismanagement, by persistence, or what is called firmness, in the con- trolling power, into disease, or something near to it. There was in my childish mind another cause of suffering besides those I have mentioned, less acute, but more permanent and always unacknowledged. > , nil mi m , i.-^V ':.<' ■ i i U'i m : I 11 ■■ i Ill KTIIICAL FRAGMENTS. ^i !'► It was fear — fear of or remedial, of sub- stances commonly used as food or medicine, and the most economical and most beneficial way of applying both, — these should form a part of the system of every girls' school — whether for the higher or the lower classes. At present you shall see a girl study- ing chemistry, and attending Faraday's lectures, who would be puzzled to compound a rice-pudding or a cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work quickly a complicated sum in the Rule of Three, afterwards wasting a fourth of her husband's wages through want of management. In my own case, how much of the practical and the sympathetic in my nature was exhausted in airy visions ! A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD, 185 As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams were composed, I cannot tell you much. I have a remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart, going about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons; or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, which would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where there were to be no tears, no tasks, and no laws, — except those which I made myself, — no caged birds nor tormented kittens. 123. Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries of childhood; let me tell of some of its pleasures equally unguessed and unexpressed. A great, an exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early, instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty. How this went hand in hand with my terrors and reveries, how it could coexist with them, I cannot tell now — it was so ; and if this sympathy with the external, living, beautiful world, had been properly, scientifi- L3 III I i 1 1 ^ ' i ■ i il IBf . I ' ' ^ ' if '! v\ 186 ETHIOAL FRAGMENTS. >xn cally cultivated, and directed to useful definite pur- poses, it would have been the best remedy for much that was morbid : this was not the case, and we were, unhappily for me, too early removed from the coun- try to a town residence. I can remember, how- ever, that in very early years the appearances of nature did truly " haunt me like a passion ; " the stars were to me as the gates of heaven ; the rolling of the wave to the shore, the graceful weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they grew by the wayside; the minute and delicate forms of insects ; the trem- bling shadows of boughs and leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon; these were to me perfect pleasures of which the imagery now in my mind is distinct. Wordsworth's poem of " The DaiFodils," the one beginning — " I wandered lonely as a cloud," may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged, but to me it was a vivid truth, a simple fact ; and if "Wordsworth had been then in my hands I think I must have loved him. It was this intense sense of beauty which gave the first zest to poetry : I loved it, not because it told me what I did not know, but because it helped me to words in which to clothe my own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back the pictures unconsciously hoarded up in my mind. This was what made Thomson's "• Seasons" a favourite A REVELATION 0" CHILDHOOD. 137 book when I first began to read for my own amuse- ment, and before I could understand one half of it : St. Pierre's " Indian Cottage " (" La Chaumiere In- dienne") was also charming, either because it re- flected my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in pictures of an external world quite different from that I inhabited, — palm-trees, elephants, tigers, dark-turbaned men with flowing draperies ; and the " Arabian Nights " completed my Oriental intoxica- tion, which lasted for a long time. I have said little of the impressions left by books, and of my first religious notions. A friend of mine had once the wise idea of collecting together a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by certain books on childish or immature minds : If carried out, it would have been one of the most valuable additions to educational experience ever made. For myself I did not much care about the books put into my hands, nor imbibe much information from them. I had a great taste, I am sorry to say, for forbidden books ; yet it was not the forbidden books that did the mischief, except in their being read furtively. I remember impressions of vice and cruelty from some parts of the Old Testament and Goldsmith's " History of England," which I shudder to recall. Shakspeare was on the forbidden shelf. I had read him all through between seven and ten years old. He never did me any moral h 4 ' 1 ^:. i il'ip '■ ^ K:l ' 1: ^ ill!" :a ■ i :l y ' 1 I :m ii i- ^t . i 1 ' t.'., 1 i t • \ r, 1 " ; i' \ I ii 1 \ 'i '-■!-.■■ ■ {■ \ ' >!■■ ■ j^ Icflj ! i ill / 138 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. mischief. He never soiled my mind with any dis- ordered image. What was exceptionable and coarse in language I passed by without attaching any mean- ing whatever to it. How it might have been if I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen or sixteen, I do not know ; perhaps the occasional coarsenesses and obscurities might have shocked the delicacy or puzzled the intelligence of that sen- sitive and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had no comprehension of what was unseemly ; what might be obscure in words to wordy commentators, was to me lighted up by the idea I found or interpreted for myself — right or wrong. ^ No; I repeat, Shakspeare — bless him I — never did me any moral mischief. Though the Witches in Macbeth troubled me, — though the Ghost in Hamlet terrified me (the picture that is, — for the spirit in Shakspeare was solemn and pathetic, not hideous), — though poor little Arthur cost me an ocean of tears, — yet much that was obscure, and all that was painful and revolting was merged on the whole in the vivid presence of a new, beautiful, vigorous, living world. The plays which I now think the most wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my fancy : Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck me then less than the historical plays, and far less than the Midsummer Night's Dream and Cymbeline. It may be thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a % t' i sal A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 180 character to strike a child, or to be understood by a child : — no ; surely not. To me Falstaff was not witty and wicked — only irresistibly fat and funny; and I remember lying on the ground rolling with laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the Fourth, — the mock play, and the seven men in buckram. But The Tempest and Cymbelinc were the plays I liked best and knew best. Altogether I should say that in my early years books were known to me, not as such, not for their general contents, but for some especial image or picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to my own mind and mixed up with my own life. For example, out of Homer's Odyssey (lent to me by the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and her maidens going down in their chariots to wash their linen : so that when the first time I went to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the pictures through blinding tears, I saw that picture of Rubens, which all remember who have been at Florence, and it flashed delight and refreshment through those remembered childish associations. The Syrens and Polypheme left also vivid pic- tures on my fancy. The Iliad, on the contrary, wearied me, except the parting of Hector and An- dromache, in which the child, scared by its father's dazzling helm and nodding crest, remains a vivid image in my mind from that time. 1 ; - i: i < ' t ! II .- IT i\ i iOi t^^^r 140 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. • The eame parish clerk — a curioua fellow in his way, — lent me also some religious tracts and stories, by Hannah More. It is most certain that more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by all Shakspeare's plays together. These so- called pious tracts first introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the excitements of a vulgar religion, — the fear of being hanged and the fear of hell became coexistent in my mind; and the teaching resolved itself into this, — that it was not by being naughty, but by being found out, that I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world was better! 1 About Religion : — I was taught religion as chil- dren used to be taught it in my younger days, and are taught it still in some cases, I believe — through the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the Bible too early, and too indiscriminately, and too irreverently. Even the New Testament was too early placed in my hands ; too early made a lesson book, as the custom then was. The letter of »,nc Scriptures — the words — were familiarised to me by sermonising and dogmatising, long before I could enter into the spirit. Meantime, happily, another religion was growing up in my heart, which, strangely enough, seemed to me quite apart from that which was taught, — which, indeed, I never in any way regarded as the same which I was taught A REVELATION OP CHILDHOOD. 141 wlieii I atood up wearily on a Sunday to repeat the collect and say the catechism. It was quite another thing. Not only the taught religion and the senti- ment of faith and adoration were never combined, but it never for years entered into my head to com- bine them ; the first remained extraneous, the latter had gradually taken root in my life, even from the moment my mother joined my little hands in prayer. The histories out of the Bible (the Parables espe- cially) were, however, enchanting to me, though my interpretation of them was in some instances the very reverse of correct or orthodox. To my infant conception our Lord was a being who had come down from heaven to make people good, and to tell them beautiful stories. And though no pains were spared to indoctrinate me, and all my pastors and masters took it for granted that my ideas were quite satisfactory, nothing could be more confused and heterodox. It is a common observation that girls of lively talents are apt to grow pert and satirical. I fell into this danger when about ten years old. Sallies at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill- dressed, or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed at and applauded in company, until, without being naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming so from sheer vanity. :X f'/^->. / ! II !■ 141 ETHICAL PRAOMBNTB. The fables which appeal to our higher moral sym- pathies may sometimes do ns much for us as the truths of science. So thought our Saviour when he taught the multitude in parables. A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous Persian scholar, took it into his head to teach me Persian (I was then about seven years old), and I Bet to work with infinite delight and earnestness. All I learned was soon forgotten ; but a few years afterwards, happening to stumble on a volume of Sir William Jones's works — his Persian grammar — it revived my Orientalism, and I began to study it eagerly. Among the exercises given was a Persian fable or poem — one of those traditions of our Lord which are preserved in the East. The beautiful apologue of ** St. Peter and the Cherries," which Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well known example. This fable I allude to was something similar, but I have not met with the original these forty years, and must give it here from memory. " Jesus," says the story, " arrived one evening at the gates of a certain city, and he sent his disciples forward to prepare supper, while he himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the market place. " And he saw at the corner of the market some people gathered together looking at an object on the ground ; and he drew near to see what it might be. A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. \hA !S It was a (lend dofij, with a halter round h'lH neck, by which he appeared to have been draj^j^od throu{i(h the dirt ; and a viler, a more abject, a more unclean thing, never met the eyes of man. " And those who stood by looked on with ab- horrence. "* Faugh!' said one, stopping his nr;.