f+83 
 
A NIRVANA TRILOGY: 
 
 THREE ESSAYS 
 On the Career a?id the Literary Labours of 
 
 JAMES THOMSON, 
 
 Author of " The City of Dreadful Night." 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MACCALL 
 
 I. THE LAUREATE OF PESSIMISM. 
 II. THE MAN AND THE ARTIST. 
 III. THE ESSAYIST AND THE CRITIC. 
 
 London : 
 WATTS & Co., 17, JOHNSON'S COURT, E.C. 
 
A NIRVANA TRILOGY: 
 
 THREE ESSAYS 
 On the Career and the Literary Labours of 
 
 JAMES THOMSON, 
 
 Atithor of " The City of Dreadful Night." 
 
 WILLIAM MACCALL 
 
 I. THE LAUREATE OF PESSIMISM. 
 II. THE MAN AND THE ARTIST. 
 III. THE ESSAYIST AND THE CRITIC. 
 
 London : 
 WATTS & Co., 1.7, JOHNSON'S COURT, E.C. 
 
• • • ' 
 
 • •• •••••••• • • • 
 
 •v.: :;:•.•:• ;••;..: /.'•....• 
 
PROLOGUE. 
 
 The first of these essays appeared in the Republican, edited 
 by Mr. George Standring ; the second and the third in the 
 Secular Review, edited by Mr. William Stewart Ross. Instead 
 of essays, I might call them threnodies, for they are cries of 
 lamentation more than calm, judicial pronouncements. 
 
 To bring the Buddhist Nirvana and the Greek Trilogy 
 together may seem an unnatural and even preposterous 
 combination. But the drama of James Thomson's existence 
 was threefold : that of the man, that of the poet, that of the 
 mere literary labourer — the saddest in some respects of the 
 three, though apparently the least sad. Beyond and above 
 the drama, however, was the vision, was the void of some- 
 thing neither life nor death — something far more deep and 
 awful than that which men vaguely and helplessly call 
 mystery. With weird, miraculous instinct, the old Indian 
 religions and philosophies pierced to this something ; but 
 unable to give it a name or to portray its attributes, they 
 clothed it in a gorgeous garment of myth and poetry. 
 Buddhism went profounder, far profounder, but ended by 
 vulgarising what it began by adoring. From remotest ages 
 the tragedy of the universe had been seen and felt ; but 
 what had not been felt or seen was that the universe itself 
 is a tragedy ; that not merely is existence cursed with evil, 
 but that existence itself is an evil. We cannot escape from 
 
 886284 
 
iv Prologue. 
 
 the evil, because we cannot annihilate the universe ; we 
 cannot even annihilate ourselves. Besides, were we to throw 
 away the burden and the despair of our own life, we know 
 that we should leave behind the scene and the source of 
 unspeakable misery. And to a noble soul, more wounded 
 by the spectacle than by the experience of wretchedness, 
 how awful is the thought that the sin and the sorrow are 
 eternal, and that what has ever been must ever be ! In 
 Nirvana, through the path of transmigration, he finds solace 
 and peace, not for himself alone, but for all creatures. 
 Here the degrading idea of enjoyment so prominent in 
 nearly all theological systems has no place ; there is simply 
 the dream of a higher and higher perfection. I have 
 attempted to complete Ideal Buddhism and to enrich its 
 Nirvana apocalypse by the doctrine of Panontism, including 
 as development the polarisation of instinct. Universal 
 Being unconsciously, impulsively, irresistibly seeks a home 
 and a country. It bursts into consciousness, but encounters 
 there only madness and pain. Forthwith it longs and 
 desperately strives to return to unconsciousness. But all 
 it can achieve is to give to countless births the bounty and 
 the balm of sleep. The sleep of creatures is the imperfect 
 unconsciousness of Universal Being. How gladly would 
 Universal Being itself slumber ! Yet in the coming eter- 
 nities and immensities there is for Universal Being and for 
 its essential principle called by man God a Nirvana as well 
 as for the creatures ; a state alike removed from conscious- 
 ness and unconsciousness, from life and from death ; a 
 slumberous ecstasy. 
 
 The ethical significance of Nirvana was in James Thom- 
 son's whole existence; the metaphysical suggestiveness of 
 Nirvana he did not see. It was hidden from him by his 
 
Prologue. v 
 
 training and by the whole course of his destiny. Never- 
 theless, he was one of Nirvana's grandest apostles, and as 
 such should he be honoured and revered, even if his literary 
 renown were to vanish like a vapour. Yet to his literary 
 renown I am not indifferent. Exceedingly should I rejoice 
 if any word of mine helped to extend it. For, though he 
 cared little enough for fame, he was one of the honest, 
 earnest toilers in the vast literary fields of whom, in these 
 days of follicularian pretentiousness, there are so few. 
 Furthermore should I rejoice if I induced some one com- 
 petent for the task, and taking a sympathetic interest in 
 James Thomson, to become his biographer. The letters of 
 James Thomson were as admirable as his poems ; and there 
 must be many in the hands of his friends which would 
 greatly enrich a biography. His friends lovingly recall the 
 charm of his conversation, and his published letters would 
 be his conversation with all the world. 
 
 WILLIAM MACCALL. 
 December, 1886. 
 
A NIRVANA; TRILOGY. 
 
 i. 
 THE LAUREATE OF PESSIMISM. 
 
 A dozen years ago or more I called at the office of Mr. 
 Charles Bradlaugh, who introduced me to a gentleman acting 
 at the time as his clerk. The clerk proved to be James 
 Thomson, in whose writings I had taken an interest without 
 knowing anything of his career except that he had been, like 
 me and Mr. Bradlaugh, a dragoon. He and I exchanged 
 a few hurried but cordial words. This was our first, our 
 last, our only meeting. I often yearned to clasp the hand 
 of my gifted countryman again ; but the delight was denied 
 me. In the summer of 1874 James Thomson, of his own 
 accord, commenced a correspondence with me. He was 
 induced to do so from discovering that with a Scottish 
 family living in London, and which had been very kind to 
 him in his boyhood, I had long been intimate. From 
 the beginning of October, 1833, until the beginning of 
 October, 1834, I was Unitarian Minister at Greenock. 
 After I left Greenock a lady that had been a member 
 of my congregation married a gentleman who settled in 
 London, prospered, and retired to the neighbourhood of 
 the great city. This gentleman and this lady are still living. 
 It was at their house, and as the playmate of their children, 
 that James Thomson spent his happiest days. Those days 
 he seemed in his letters to me never tired of recalling. I 
 often pressed him to renew his relations with the hospitable 
 friends of his childhood, who were as willing as in the past 
 to welcome him. But his constitutional shyness, or some 
 other cause, hindered him from gratifying a desire which 
 evidently stirred his being very deeply. 
 
8 A Nirvana Trilogy. 
 
 James Thomson's letters to me were frank, fresh, courageous, 
 perfectly unaffected. They had the ease, the pungency, the 
 artistic finish by which all his prose writings are charac- 
 terised. If, as some say, his moral being had suffered a 
 tragical wrench, his beautiful intellectual symmetry was not 
 thereby affected. I am always provoked to fiercest anger 
 when the Pharisees sii. in judgment on the noble souls of 
 whom this wretcned earth of ours is not worthy. There 
 was a grim sincerity in James Thomson : no affectations of 
 any kind. It is a teirible thing to be born artist and battler 
 too. Perchance the first so born was Dante ; and he has 
 had numerous children. James Thomson was one of them. 
 Thomson had many brothers : Leopardi was his dearest 
 brother. With instinctive Dantesque logic, James Thomson 
 v , saw that the sins and sorrows of the community are the sins 
 / and sorrows of the universe. Hence his worship of Death, 
 and his Promethean defiance of the gods. His fate vindi- 
 cated his philosophy. Just when his powers were ripening, 
 just when he was giving promise of sublimest achievement, 
 just when his genius was beginning to be recognised and 
 admired, he was struck down. 
 
 It is a curious fact that the first Scottish James Thomson 
 and the second Scottish James Thomson both died in their 
 forty-eighth year. This is the only point of resemblance ; 
 for the first James Thomson, the bard of the " Seasons," 
 sojourned all through life in his own Castle of Indolence. 
 On the contrary, the second James Thomson dwelt in the 
 universe as if it had been an Inquisition. In him and 
 around him instruments of torture were multiplied. Yet, 
 when at the end of February I received my last letter from 
 him, he appeared to have escaped for a time from the 
 dungeons and despairs of the Inquisition, and to be glad- 
 dened for an instant by the sun. He was living at some 
 hospitable abode in Leicestershire, seemed to be almost 
 hopeful and happy, and half ashamed to be, for the first 
 time since boyhood, happy and hopeful. His death on 
 June 3rd, 1882, was a great surprise and a great sorrow to 
 me, though I doubt not that he entered Nirvana, his true 
 home, with eager and ecstatic feet. 
 
 Born on November 23rd, 1834, at Port Glasgow, James 
 Thomson was, like another of my correspondents, John 
 Sterling, a child of the Clyde ; and to me, as a native of 
 
The Laureate of Pessimism. 9 
 
 Largs and a child of the Clyde, they were both the more 
 interesting on that account. It was the doom of all the three 
 to be heretics, though in very different fashions. It was the 
 doom of all the three to labour in fragmentary and fruitless 
 modes. Of Sterling I have spoken long ago, when publishing 
 his letters to me. Of myself I need not now speak. Of 
 James Thomson I have little to utter, except my regard and 
 regret. Every man is compacted of complicated and con- 
 flicting elements ; every man, therefore, is an enigma, not 
 merely to others, but to himself. The more complicated 
 and conflicting the elements, the more of course there is of 
 external inconsistency. Yet how usual it is to take external 
 consistency as sole and supreme test of character ! 
 
 What must strike us all as the chief thing in James 
 Thomson is his pessimism ; and in calling him the Laureate 
 of Pessimism I indicate his literary aspiration and the 
 moral significance of his life. To others before him , 
 pessimism was a sentiment or a system ; to James ThomsonX* 
 it was a passion — a passion bursting not into wild cries, but 
 into most melodious speech. Pessimism needs no justification. 
 We seek and we find in the universe that which corresponds 
 to our own nature. If we are ourselves consummately 
 miserable, we are irresistibly attracted by the spectacle of 
 misery, and we are driven to believe either that there is no 
 God, or that he is a malignant monster, or that he is im- 
 pelled to create and to destroy by instinctive necessity. 
 What is history ? A long tragedy. Have we any reason to 
 believe that human destiny can ever essentially change, or 
 that the future can be brighter and better than the past ? 
 With increasing knowledge has there not always been in- 
 creasing pain ? Must we not hate or despise man when we 
 do not pity him ? What but lies are the words of the theo- 
 logians ? And what but sophistries and pedantries are the 
 words of the sages ? The sorrows of the community, the 
 woes of humanity, are mirrored in our own afflictions ; and 
 the more we feel the glory of the universe the more we are 
 inclined to contrast with it wretchedness and wrong, the 
 wounds that can never be healed, the pangs that can never 
 be soothed, the injustice that can never be overthrown. 
 Carlyle, who outgrew not his Calvinistic culture, clung to 
 the savage Jehovah of the Hebrews : a God half-gloomy 
 pedagogue, half-ferocious executioner ; a God smiting with- 
 
io A Nirvana Trilogy. 
 
 out mercy the workers of iniquity. This stern but just God 
 is a figment to which nothing in reality corresponds ; and 
 still remoter from reality is the God of such optimists as 
 Leibnitz. 
 
 All of us who have to battle as reformers and to suffer 
 as martyrs have a double vocation : to assail what is false in 
 human systems, corrupt and cruel in human institutions, 
 and to protest against the monstrosities, the murders, the 
 madnesses, with which the universe abounds. Others may 
 have fulfilled the first part of the vocation more valiantly 
 and victoriously than James Thomson. None ever fulfilled 
 the second part so intensely, so exuberantly, or with such 
 magnificent audacity. Yet he struck no rash, no random 
 blows. For years he had been a soldier, and in learning 
 obedience to an external discipline he had, at the same 
 time, learned submission to an internal rule. His onsets 
 have all a rhythmical clangour. But, in the pauses of the 
 march, and of the music, we hear a still small voice saying 
 unto us that he is alone in the universe, and that he longs 
 to die. That his pessimism was morbid cannot be denied. 
 v But when the community is itself one huge disease, one vast 
 leprosy, where is health to be found? Religion should 
 arise as a healer and a helper. Yet how can religion be a 
 physician and a sustainer when itself foul and feeble from 
 every imaginable plague? The makers of systems in our 
 own days, such as Comte, seem determined to build not 
 only with the stones of sepulchres, but with the bones of the 
 dead, and in the midst of multitudes stricken with the pesti- 
 lence. Thomson's contempt for new systems was more 
 bitter than his hatred of expiring theologies. He knew that 
 nothing could save the theologies, but that new systems 
 v would cover the earth with swarms of delusions, hindering 
 the renovation of man's moral and spiritual life. 
 
 It is as a martyr more than as a poet that James Thomson 
 should be honoured, Laureate of Pessimism though he was. 
 The demon of hypochondriasis had laid hold upon him at 
 an early date. From that demon his most tragical pangs 
 came. His life of poverty and pain and disenchantment 
 and pessimistic despair he could have born with the courage 
 of a Spartan, the silence of a Stoic, and, I may add, with 
 the reserve and undemonstrativeness of a Scotsman. But 
 to sink into an abyss far ghastlier than Dante's Hell, and to 
 
The Laureate of Pessimism. 1 1 
 
 have no change except a change of torments, and to have 
 dreads more awful than the torments, was a doom which 
 could be neither confessed nor consoled, and which only a 
 sudden poetical gleam from time to time disclosed. It is a 
 fallacy to believe that it is men constitutionally sombre, 
 habitually sad, who are the supreme sufferers. They are as 
 little oppressed by the gloom as the inhabitant of the Arctic 
 region is by the cold and leaden atmosphere. The supreme > 
 sufferers are the men who have a profound relish of exist- 
 ence. Evermore they have to go forth into the desert, after 
 plucking the flowers and the fruits of Paradise. Standing 
 on the mountain peak, and gazing into the sunny infinite, 
 they are, unwarned, enveloped in the snowstorm or smitten 
 by the thunderbolt. 
 
 It is said that James Thomson was the most charming of 
 companions, playful and witty and enjoying j and doubtless 
 no one could be more social and sympathetic. But the 
 moment he was alone the demon of hypochondriasis and 
 all kindred and attendant demons seized him and tore and 
 crushed him in the darkness of his insane phantasy. To 
 him was allotted just so much pleasure as tempted him to 
 live on. There are many in these days who are tortured as 
 he was tortured, but who have not his solaces, few and 
 transient as they were. In our pharisaical community, 
 which is always canting loathsomely or idiotically about 
 religion, but which has not a particle of religious life, there 
 are silent saints, unregarded martyrs, not a few. They tread 
 with weary and bleeding feet their Gethsemane, and do not 
 shrink from, but long for their Calvary, because it is to 
 bring them deliverance. It is they to whom, though he 
 had never seen their faces, James Thomson appealed. And 
 it is they from whom the redemption of the world is to 
 come, if the world is to be redeemed at all. 
 
 In my own very imperfect way I have proclaimed Indi- 
 viduality and the Insurrection of the Individual. But that 
 Individuality and that Insurrection have the Eternal Christ 
 behind and the Eternal Prometheus before. The Laureate of 
 Pessimism, though a son of Dante, was, moreover, a soldier 
 of the Eternal Prometheus. Others have spoken, perchance 
 others are better entitled to speak, of Thomson's exquisite 
 literary skill. Of him as the soldier of the Eternal Prome- 
 theus no one has so clearly the right and the duty to speak 
 
12 A Nirvana Trilogy. 
 
 as I have. Yea, my brother ! Thou wast in sundry respects 
 braver than I ; and in some things thou didst suffer more 
 than I ; but how much my aspirations, my despairs, my 
 whole destiny resemble thine ! To the extent that thou 
 wast more a literary artist than I, was thou less a sufferer ; 
 for art is always to the artist a delight. Thou, a martyr, 
 sleepest beside the grave of a martyr. Austin Holyoake 
 had not thine anguish of imagination, had a solid grasp of 
 reality ; but he was true and brave, and loving in word and 
 deed like thee. They who say that in this world everything 
 breaks, everything passes, everything is effaced, everything 
 is replaced, are not wholly wrong. But of you who can 
 take the place, ye two valiant ones, whose aspirations were 
 so noble and whose life was so pure ? 
 
 [nly, 1882. 
 
II. 
 
 THE MAN AND THE ARTIST * 
 
 It is unfortunate for the reputation of James Thomson 
 that he should chiefly have been spoken of as a Freethinker. 
 A bigot once asked me what name I assumed to distinguish 
 myself from orthodox believers. I replied that, when a man 
 turns heretic, he has so many names given him that he 
 does not need to take any. Freethinker I have certainly 
 never called myself: I have felt, I have known, that all 
 thought is free — the thought of the most abject, superstitious 
 slave as well as of the boldest negationist. Moreover, 
 thought comes to me because I exist, not existence because 
 I think. What I am is the sum of my activities ; my chief 
 characteristic is that I am a man. I claim as brothers not 
 the thinkers, for I am a thoughtless creature — the verdict 
 upon me by my father and mother, confirmed by my whole 
 career — but the heroes, the men who have made the noblest, 
 the divinest use of their manhood. I have no ambition to 
 stand apart from my fellows and boastfully to proclaim that 
 I am wiser than they : it would be far easier for me to 
 prove to them — if, indeed, they needed any proof — that I 
 am an incomparable fool. It is my free, spontaneous, 
 natural life in the universe that alone concerns me ; and, as 
 I have said a thousand times, I make war on false doctrines 
 no further than they impede my march. Eccentricity has 
 no charms for me — above all, intellectual eccentricity. On 
 the contrary, I seek the centre — strive towards the centre. 
 But the mortals who vaunt of being Freethinkers deem 
 intellectual singularity a supreme merit. Our bond, how- 
 
 * A Voice From the Nile, and Other Poems. By the late James 
 Thomson. With a Memoir of the Author, by Bertram DobelL 
 (London : Reeves & Turner, 196. Strand.) 1884. 
 
14 A Nirva?ia Trilogy. 
 
 ever, with our fellows is an eminently human bond, and is 
 little affected by intellectual conditions. As a social being, 
 I surrender myself to the flow of emotion, to the glow of 
 phantasy. Compared herewith, all the creeds, heterodox 
 or orthodox, sink into insignificance. In a certain sense, 
 the great Greek dramatists might be designated Freethinkers, 
 for the atmosphere of liberty was indispensable to their 
 majestic creations. And, in the same sense, Socrates was 
 a Freethinker, and Plato and Lucretius and Cicero. But 
 the Greek and Roman poets and philosophers and orators 
 would have scorned to be named Freethinkers in the modern 
 sense of the word. On the human basis was raised the 
 sublime structure of the patriotic and the ethical. Indeed, 
 to view, to parade, Freethinking as a thing apart is a pitiful 
 pedantry. You may, if you like, represent Shakespeare as 
 a Freethinker ; for, by humanising the heart, he has done 
 more to liberalise the mind of England than all the 
 champions of Freethought. In kindred fashion, Moliere 
 was far more grandly than Voltaire the emancipator of the 
 French soul. Even Voltaire himself was indebted for his 
 vast empire as an emancipationist, not to his satirical and 
 polemical, but to his purely literary, productions. His 
 assaults on Christianity were appropriations and adaptations 
 more or less skilful from the works of the English Deists. 
 Those who have gone patiently and conscientiously through 
 the whole utterances of this witty and brilliant writer must 
 confess that he is often dull, especially where we might 
 expect to find him for ever sparkling — in his correspondence. 
 It was his exclusively literary productions that took the 
 intellect of France, the intellect of Europe, captive. By in- 
 comparable mockery, Voltaire, in his " Candide," dethroned 
 Leibnitzian optimism and every imaginable theodicasa ; 
 nevertheless, the satirical treatment and the satirical purpose 
 are subordinated to the human interest. 
 
 Indeed, Freethought is a manifest misnomer applied to 
 the profound spiritual movement of the eighteenth century. 
 This century was eminently the period of Humanism, and 
 of this Humanism the high priest was Rousseau. Those 
 in that age whom we familiarly but erroneously call Free- 
 thinkers looked with no favour on the intellectual emanci- 
 pation of the multitude ; for they regarded doubt as an 
 intellectual monopoly, scorn as an intellectual luxury. In 
 
The Man and the Artist. 15 
 
 truth, the humanism of the eighteenth corresponded to, and 
 was in a large measure the outcome of, the Renaissance of 
 the fifteenth century. Protestantism thwarted, marred, the 
 Renaissance. The reign of dogmatism began, and the Bible 
 was exalted into a fetich. 
 
 But just when the Middle Ages came to an end, and the 
 peculiar life of the Middle Ages perished, a new world was 
 revealed to the enthusiasm and enterprise of mankind. 
 Catholic unity was completely, was irreparably broken ; but 
 a new unity arose — the unity of scientific speculation, of 
 commercial daring, of colonial conquest. That unity is 
 still to the nations what Catholic unity was to them in the 
 mediaeval period. 
 
 But man's primordial yearnings are unchangeable, inex- 
 tinguishable ; and this shows the folly and the falsehood of 
 sociology and of its jargon about developments. Religion, 
 dethroned from its domain of rite and of symbol, found 
 compensating empire in music, in painting, and in poetry. 
 It was natural that, when men were rushing to new worlds 
 across the waves, and astronomy was miraculously unveiling 
 new worlds in the heavens, the first modern philosophy 
 worthy of the name should be predominantly realistic. 
 Such was Baconianism. It is not the subtle Descartes, but 
 the far more grandly and variously gifted Bacon, whom we 
 must regard as the founder of modern philosophy. And it 
 is through the unfoldings of Baconianism, and not through 
 the impulse given by Italian thinkers in the sixteenth 
 century, or by Cartesianism in the seventeenth, or by Pro- 
 testantism, which really all through has been a hindrance 
 rather than a help, that liberty of investigation has continued 
 to be victorious. 
 
 The bold metaphysical visions of the last hundred years 
 in Germany were inspired by the East and by ancient 
 Greece, and had only an apparent originality. But after 
 the French Revolution a fresh element came into play, or 
 rather there was the fresh apocalypse of an element which 
 goes back to the remotest times — the disharmony of man 
 with himself, with the community, and with the universe. 
 In the oldest traditions, in the oldest literatures, you find 
 it. After troubling the German heart, interesting the 
 German intellect, it found fantastic expression in Shelley — 
 mad, passionate, sublime expression in Byron. It gave birth 
 
1 6 A Nirvana Trilogy. 
 
 to what has been called the Literature of Despair, which 
 curiously ran beside that Literature of Joy of which Scott 
 was the representative. But to describe Shelley and Byron 
 as Freethinkers because they battled with the Fates and the 
 Furies, and Zeus and inexorable Necessity, would be 
 supremely ridiculous ; and equally ridiculous would it be to 
 describe Leopardi and Heine and James Thomson as Free- 
 thinkers. Belonging to a healthy age, Shelley and Byron 
 were as healthy as the age itself. There was nothing morbid 
 in their fiercest blasphemies, in their most daring denials. 
 Appertaining to an unhealthy age, James Thomson was still 
 more unhealthy than the age. The spiritual unhealthiness 
 of Leopardi and Heine had little to do with the age, and 
 was the result of bodily torment and prostration. Both of 
 them had been born not many years after Byron and Shelley. 
 It has been said of Leopardi that, since Pascal, there has 
 been no example of so great an intelligence so cruelly 
 oppressed by the infirmities of the body. And it is a curious 
 point of likeness between the two illustrious sufferers that 
 Pascal died just after, and Leopardi just before, completing 
 the thirty-ninth year. Leopardi is one of the sublimest 
 figures in history. Among the Sons of Death he occupies 
 the foremost place. In Heine there was a large vein of 
 ignobleness — so large, indeed, that his countrymen are 
 ashamed of him, and prophesy that, except a few of his 
 best lyrics, none of his productions can survive. It is odd 
 that, while Heine is overrated in France, and still more 
 overrated in England, there is a tendency in his country to 
 scorn him as a somewhat heartless persifleur. Leopardi 
 and Heine are the two men with whom James Thomson 
 acknowledged most of spiritual kindredness. His conscious 
 or unconscious brotherhood with Leopardi exalted Thomson ; 
 that with Heine dragged him down. It was the fraternity 
 of sorrow — of the sorrow that sends its wail in response to 
 the eternal moan of the universe — which brought Thomson 
 near to Leopardi j it is what we may call his sympathetic 
 intellectuality which made Heine his companion and coun- 
 sellor. How much grander Thomson was when, with 
 Leopardi, he lamented than when, with Heine, he scoffed 
 and cursed ! Because, in the one case, he was an actor in 
 the eternal, the universal tragedy ; in the other he varied 
 buffoonery with malediction, from imitation, from reminis- 
 
The Man and the Artist. 17 
 
 cence, from the desperate attempt to fling out of sight for a 
 moment his misery. 
 
 Thomson was not naturally a mocker — had not naturally 
 the faculties of a satirist. His humour is not opulent ; his 
 wit is forced. Of the delicate irony which may be named 
 the fragrance of despair, and which all the Sons of Death 
 possess, he was a consummate master. If it is wrong to 
 give prominence to Thomson as a Freethinker in the narrow, 
 pedantic, prosaic sectarian sense of the word, grievous harm 
 is done to his memory by the republication of his satirical 
 pieces, and by the extravagant laudations lavished on them 
 by those who do not seem to know what the essence of true 
 satire is ; for satire, when not an overflow of geniality and 
 animal spirits, as in Rabelais, must have the intensity of 
 passion, as in Juvenal. Far nobler service to Thomson's 
 abiding reputation has been done by Mr. Bertram Dobell 
 in the gift to the world of a fresh volume of Thomson's 
 poetry. Mr. Dobell's biography of Thomson is admirable. 
 It is very modestly written \ it is merciful, most tender to 
 Thomson, without being disloyal to truth. 
 
 The year Thomson was born I, when Unitarian minister 
 at Greenock, sometimes preached at Port Glasgow, which is 
 two miles higher up the river Clyde than Greenock. Occa- 
 sionally, since Thomson's death, a strange mystical ques- 
 tioning has throbbed in my heart : whether among the 
 hearers of my perfervid harangues at Port Glasgow was a 
 meek, sweet woman, who carried with her a divine treasure 
 — the unborn poet. If she listened to my outbursts of 
 youthful enthusiasm, did these enrich that life which was 
 still hidden from the gaze of men, but which was destined 
 to be a light to lighten the Gentiles ? Everything in the 
 universe is a mystery j and why on this one mystery should 
 
 I not dwell and revere it as holy ? 
 
 The volume for which we are indebted to Mr. Dobell 
 contains some of Thomson's finest poems — for instance, 
 
 II Insomnia." I approached the volume in no critical spirit, 
 but rather with brotherly love and with that religious awe 
 which we owe to all genius. To examine in detail the 
 contents of the volume is not my present purpose. I doubt 
 whether I have any fitness for minute, for analytical criti- 
 cism ; and I must content myself with recording the chief 
 impressions that the volume made on my mind. First of 
 
1 8 A Nirvana Trilogy. 
 
 all, it struck me, and probably it has struck others, that the 
 earliest of Thomson's poems manifest the same stylistic or 
 artistic mastery as the latest. Herefrom it is obvious that, 
 from the outset, Thomson had made style a special study. 
 Probably his military training, his occupations as a military 
 schoolmaster, had here a potent influence. The habit of 
 submission to military discipline, and of obeying and en- 
 
 f forcing military exactitude, made for Thomson order and 
 symmetry the equivalents of the beautiful. Of course, there 
 was the instinct of art j but the art gradually taught itself to 
 be subject to military bondage and regulation. Take this 
 fact in connection with the deplorable circumstance that 
 Thomson's boyhood and youth were cheerless and repressed 
 — that he had not the free, spontaneous life of those fated 
 to be great poets; such as Shakespeare and Goethe and 
 Scott. Thus it came to pass that the gifted poet Thomson 
 was always transcended by Thomson the accomplished 
 artist, except in the lofty pessimistic utterances, when the 
 man was more than the poet, the poet more than the artist. 
 Except in those pessimistic utterances also, Thomson, in 
 
 V his longer and more earnest poems, is vague and monoto- 
 nous. There is a lack of passion and individuality. Herein 
 Thomson is a striking contrast to his countryman Burns, 
 who is all individuality and all passion. In Thomson's 
 lighter poems, which are often very charming, not passion 
 or individuality, but phantasy, plays the chief part. In 
 poetry perfection of form is a good thing ; but it is only 
 richness of substance which can keep poetry alive from 
 generation to generation. Now, in Thomson's poems the 
 perfection of form is always admirable : when, however, we 
 
 y expect the brilliant hues and the sweet music to lead us to 
 a noble banquet, the banquet is not set before us. Of 
 many of Shelley's poems the same thing may be said. 
 
 I might greatly enlarge on the preceding rapid hints ; but 
 it is not necessary. They are intended for those who revere 
 and love James Thomson, not for gainsayers ; and they may 
 explain why Thomson, though he has enthusiastic adorers, 
 has not become popular, and may never gain popularity. 
 Though he received no part of his education in learned 
 academies, Thomson is as an author too academical. I 
 might sum up in these words : it is his tragic doom as a 
 man which makes the artist, James Thomson, interesting to 
 
The Man and the Artist. 19 
 
 us j and it is because the artist is interesting to us that we 
 clasp the poet to our breast. 
 
 Such men as James Thomson I never presume to judge 
 as men. Each of them is what the Germans would call- a 
 heimathlos — a homeless one ; a heimathlos in society, a 
 heimathlos in immensity. They seek a home, and they 
 find it not until Nirvana receives them into its merciful 
 bosom. 
 
 That Thomson should have sought refuge from pain and 
 gloom in intemperance we may lament ; but why should we 
 condemn ? If Carlyle is to be pardoned for fighting 
 against dyspepsia with tobacco, why should Thomson be 
 anathematised for striving to vanguish hypochondriasis 
 with strong drink ? Why scourge as a crime what should 
 be pitied as a disease ? Let the Pharisees howl their idiotic 
 and cruel howl ; let them declare that Thomson's sin and 
 misery and phrenzy sprang from his Scepticism. Of course, 
 if he had believed in the Atonement, he would have worn 
 the blue ribbon, married a rich deacon's daughter, and been 
 unspeakably happy ! The unanimous testimony of all his 
 friends is that Thomson was pure, noble, loving, most love- 
 able. But, moreover, I believe that, in his deepest nature, 
 Thomson was religious — religious with a religion that 
 Pharisees can never know or feel. In jest I have some- 
 times said that I was the only religious man ever born in 
 Scotland. But what I said in jest I could easily prove to 
 be the truth. I am proud, and have reason to be proud, of 
 my country ; for the grand battle which Scotland fought, 
 and successfully fought, for its independence has no parallel 
 in the history of the world. But I have long ceased to 
 believe that my countrymen are a religious people. Alfred 
 Maury, a French writer of great ability, has shown that the 
 religious ideas of the Semitic race had the aridity and the 
 sterility of the desert ; that the Semitic race never got 
 beyond, never rose higher than, a naked Monotheism. All 
 thoughtful and impartial persons have arrived at the same 
 conclusion. Now, the only real religion my countrymen 
 have ever had is the heritage of superstitions they received 
 from the Celts. My countrymen have 'never been Chris- 
 tians except in name. But they have taken as religion the 
 arid and sterile faith which the Hebrews offered them, and 
 in the grim Caledonian grasp the faith has grown harder 
 
20 A Nirvana Trilogy. 
 
 and sterner through the icy North wind blowing from the 
 barren moorland. Now, from my earliest days I was 
 stirred by mystical instincts, which yearned for, which 
 sought, field and food, but in vain. In truth, I was an 
 Oriental born in the North, and my dreams and darings 
 were ever of a pilgrimage to the native region of my soul. 
 After weary wanderings in Rationalistic wildernesses, I 
 thought that I had found this region in what I was in the 
 habit of calling poetic and passionate Pantheism. Going a 
 step further, I, for want of a better designation, characterise 
 my polymorphous and polychromatic faith as Mystical 
 Panontism. Now, as a Mystical Panontist, and believing 
 that the mysterious can only be represented by rite and 
 symbol, only adored by sublime silence, must I not deem 
 the theological system of Scotland more destitute of the true 
 and rich religious elements than a ready-reckoner? If, 
 after saying that I was the only religious man ever born in 
 Scotland, I made an exception, it would be in favour of 
 him whom I have named the Laureate of Pessimism. 
 When he flung from him one article of his theological creed 
 after another it was not doubt which was busy with him : 
 he was travelling, like me, towards the Benares of his soul. 
 This makes me the more regret that, by false friends, 
 Thomson should have been exhibited to envenomed foes 
 as a scoffer, a blasphemer, when verily, as poet, as man he 
 was a priest of the Infinite. Lessing, that radiant 'and 
 valiant athlete, said that to what he himself had uttered 
 gymnastically — that is, polemically — he might not be always 
 willing to give dogmatic recognition. Now, in this clear 
 and forcible saying of one of the clearest, most robust, and 
 resolute intellects, there is implied, or suggested, a pro- 
 found truth. It is this : that we should estimate every 
 man, not by his negative, but by his positive side, and that 
 even his negative side is important and interesting only so 
 far as it embosoms positive qualities. This is how I myself 
 wish to be estimated, and it is how habitually I estimate 
 others. It is how James Thomson ought to be judged, 
 whose positive side was so much larger, so much more 
 luminous, than his negative side. But here the talk of 
 judgment has a dangerous resemblance to pedantry. Poor, 
 wrung and weary heart, what matters it how we judge thee ? 
 From Homer downwards, have not all men proclaimed all 
 
The Man and the Artist. 21 
 
 men to be frail and fugitive even as the leaves ? As the 
 leaves, we are fresh and comely for a season, and then we 
 fade and fall, and are driven about by the winds till we 
 mingle with the elements. Nothing seems immortal but 
 the autocrator, the polycrator of the universe, and, half- 
 tearfully, he laughs at our visions of immortality. Perchance 
 he envies us the privilege of death j for it must be an awful 
 thing to live on from eternity, and to behold woe, most 
 tragic woe, wherever there are the hot pulses of life. 
 
 December, 1884. 
 
III. 
 
 THE ESSAYIST AND THE CRITIC* 
 
 The pious and beautiful loyalty of Mr. Bertram Dobell to 
 the memory of his gifted and unfortunate friend, James 
 Thomson, is worthy of supreme praise. By the publication 
 of the present volume I am induced and enabled to com- 
 plete my discourses, which some of the malevolent may 
 perchance call my rhapsodies, on a son of Genius who was 
 also a son of Death. 
 
 Thomson was an essayist and a critic as well as a poet. 
 Nothing but adverse fate hindered him from being a most 
 charming essayist. All the qualities of the best essayists he 
 possessed. To write well, however, the essayist should be 
 able to write at his ease, and to take a kindly view of men 
 and things. For what, in lack of sunshine, Thomson did 
 as an essayist let us be grateful, regretting that one who had 
 such various and abounding capabilities was always over- 
 shadowed by the presence or the presentiment of despair. 
 
 As a critic Thomson had few equals ; to the Greek sense 
 of symmetry and moderation he joined richer sympathies 
 than those flowing from the Hellenic life. A true critic 
 should be catholic and creative ; and catholic and creative 
 not many, except the great German critics, have been. The 
 true critic should be free from preferences and prejudices ; 
 whereby it does not follow that he should be destitute of 
 geniality. Far from it ; geniality always makes better what 
 is good. Nearly all English criticism in these days tends 
 towards monstrous exaggeration and ridiculous hero-worship; 
 but in general it is as unjust in its blame as it is extravagant 
 
 * Shelley : A Poem ; with other Writings Relating to Shelley. By 
 the late James Thomson (B. V.). To which is added an Essay on the 
 Poems of William Blake, by the same Author. (Printed for private 
 circulation by Charles Whittingham & Co. at the Chiswick Press.) 1884. 
 
The Essayist and the Critic. 23 
 
 in its praise. This sort of thing was made fashionable by 
 Macaulay, who can scarcely be called a critic at all, if 
 perfect fairness is deemed indispensable. Compare, for 
 instance, Macaulay's furious assault on Bacon with the 
 profound, the merciful, the just estimate by Kuno Fischer 
 in his admirable work on a man whose moral nature did not 
 climb to a throne beside the throne of his imperial intellect, 
 but who was far from being so base, so bad, as Pope the 
 malignant and Macaulay the rhetorical would have us 
 believe. Carlyle called Macaulay's talk a Niagara of 
 commonplace. And Macaulay's writings deserve not, on the 
 whole, a more nattering, name. But, to diversify common- 
 place, declamation and paradox are needful ; and of these 
 Macaulay made very lavish use. Herein his imitators, the 
 follicularians, follow him. They, however, do what he 
 certainly did not : they affect omniscience. Without being 
 a man of profound erudition, Macaulay had read enor- 
 mously, and he had a most retentive memory. So that with 
 whatever he spoke of he had an acquaintance more or less 
 intimate. But his disciples, furnished, armed, with chaotic 
 scraps of superficial information, would have the credulous 
 reader believe that they know all things and a few others. 
 Their mind is a marine store ; but they boast to the universe 
 that it is a museum of art. If they make, as they con- 
 tinually make, the grossest blunders, not many can detect 
 these ; and whoso detects them simply laughs and passes 
 on. Pretentious sciolism, ludicrous exaggeration, imbecile 
 hero-worship— such are the characteristics of the criticism 
 by which the English mind is influenced and guided. That 
 there is also criticism of a higher order it would be unfair 
 to deny ; but it has little sway in the English literary 
 commonwealth. 
 
 From all the faults of the ordinary English critic James 
 Thomson was free, one excepted. He was prone to exalt 
 the hero into the demigod, the demigod into the god. This 
 idolatry led, of course, to exclusiveness. If you wish to 
 worship fitly the god whom you have chosen or created, 
 you are compelled to raise round his temple a lofty wall 
 to keep the temple sacred and to repel the intrusion of the 
 vulgar. 
 
 This volume is mainly occupied with Shelley. It contains 
 a poem on Shelley, very beautiful, but very vague ; some 
 
 / 
 
24 A Nirvana Trilogy. 
 
 interesting notes and short essays on Shelley ; and a corres- 
 pondence between James Thomson and William Michael 
 Rossetti, of which Shelley is the subject. There is also an 
 essay, written in 1861, on the poems of William Blake, 
 which, if not more weighty in thought, is more massive in 
 style than any other production of James Thomson with 
 which I am acquainted. Now, in days long gone by I was a 
 warm admirer of Shelley, just as in days long gone by I was 
 an enthusiastic adorer of Byron. But I gradually discovered 
 that, if I were in everything else to have catholicity, married 
 to earnestness, I must have it in my literary tastes and 
 sympathies. It seems to me absurd, and, if not degrading, 
 debilitating, that one man, however gifted, should be wor- 
 shipped as the central sun of another man's existence. 
 There are Carlyle Societies, Ruskin Clubs, and so on. I 
 believe that, at a particular house in Hampstead, ladies and 
 gentlemen congregate every Sunday to sing the praises and to 
 interpret the writings of Robert Browning. Wherein does 
 all this differ from the sectarianism of the conventicle ? Why 
 reprobate or ridicule the submission of the mediaeval mind 
 to Aristotle, yet prostrate the soul before a fashionable 
 author? Carlyle was a good man, a perfervid thinker, a 
 great pictorial writer ; denounced hypocrisies, urged his 
 brethren to be honest, true, and brave. Let us honour 
 him j let us be grateful to him ; but why exalt him into a 
 deity ? Ruskin is supposed to be an incomparable critic 
 and interpreter of art j when, however, he leaves art he, for 
 the most part, talks egregious nonsense. And just because 
 he talks egregious nonsense has he so many fanatical 
 adherents. If a man is eloquent on pictures, does it follow 
 that he must be divinely inspired on every other subject ? 
 But it is on those subjects of which he knows least, or of 
 which he is absolutely ignorant, that Ruskin is fondest of 
 discoursing. And the more oracular he is on such subjects 
 the more ready are silly women and sillier men to rush 
 into idiotic Ruskinian fetichism. Browning's writings, with 
 the exception of extracts in periodicals, I have not read. 
 The extracts persuaded me that Browning is what may be 
 called a conundrum poet ; that he strives to be as obscure, 
 as enigmatical, and as singular as possible. And doubtless, 
 if all his rhymes are riddles, idle men and women may find 
 amusement in guessing what they mean. But why should 
 
The Essayist and the Critic. 25 
 
 the guessers elevate their childish occupation into a religion ? 
 Even if conundrum poetry were the most wonderful thing 
 in the universe, has no one except Robert Browning written 
 conundrum poetry ? If you give your whole being to 
 Robert Browning as the chief conundrum poet, how can 
 you have time and mind for the immense range of poetical 
 creation, from Sophocles down to Goethe, or for that over- 
 flow of universal life of which poetry is only one of the 
 elements? No, my brothers and sisters; better than the 
 idolatry of an individual, however inspired and illustrious, 
 is it that each man and each woman should strive to be 
 heroic and holy. By being heroic we best glorify heroes ; 
 by being holy we best adore saints. 
 
 In reference to certain authors, and especially to Shelley, 
 James Thomson carried his worship to excess, and thus his 
 vision was blinded. As man, Shelley was by no means 
 faultless. As far as the facts are ascertainable, his treatment 
 of his first wife must have been horribly heartless. When 
 we contemplate Shelley's character and doings we feel as if 
 we were in the presence of a Hellenic divinity. It was in 
 the world, fresh and young and lovely, which Schiller has so 
 grandly depicted in his " Gods of Greece," that Shelley lived. 
 He was in perennial affinity with the elementary forces ; he 
 felt himself to be a portion of them. For nature he cared 
 far more than for man. All human institutions, all human 
 systems, and pre-eminently the English, he hated, because 
 they warred with Nature. But when we speak of Nature it 
 is our dream of Nature that we mean. Shelley dreamed 
 himself into the Hellenic dream of the universe. The 
 Hellenic life was too joyous to be spontaneously, abound- 
 ingly compassionate. As a Hellenic divinity, entwined with, 
 revealing, symbolising, the whole Hellenic life, Shelley could 
 be, and in the case of his first wife was, coldly cruel. 
 Thoroughly to appreciate Shelley, both as a man and as a 
 poet, it is indispensable to have been steeped, as he himself 
 was steeped, in the Hellenic nurture and culture. Conse- 
 quently, though it is easy to rave and rhapsodise about him, 
 few have had the training, even if they have the faculty, 
 for estimating him impartially and yet genially. There 
 was a richer, tenderer love in the heart of Byron than in 
 the heart of Shelley. Byron had intense individuality. It 
 was man as man that interested and was dear to him. 
 
26 A Nirvana Trilogy, 
 
 Nature he passionately adored ; but in no further and in no 
 other fashion than Nature shaped human destiny. Even 
 his very misanthropy proved his opulence of affection ; for 
 from Timon downwards misanthropy has always and only 
 been a great, glowing, generous love, soured or embittered. 
 If Shelley was a Hellenic divinity, Byron was a Scandinavian 
 Viking, with a Viking's wild plenitude of force and his 
 magnanimous impulses. Now, no poet has ever become a 
 catholic poet to whom, even if Nature was much, man was 
 not far more. Suppose we take Homer, Dante, and Shake- 
 speare as the three primordial catholic poets of all times, 
 how overwhelmingly predominant in their productions is the 
 human interest ! ' Dante scarcely glances at Nature at all ; 
 his chief poem is the epic of sorrow and of sin. The 
 worshippers of Shelley, James Thomson included, tell us 
 that a magnificent development, miraculous victories, awaited 
 Shelley if Death, the most jealous, the most envious, of the 
 gods, yet also the most merciful, had not rushed in. This 
 is questionable. The sublime saying in the Fragments of 
 Menander, that whom the gods love dieth young, has to 
 Shelley a special application. All men should die young 
 who, as idealists, dream of an impossible perfection for 
 themselves and mankind, or whose central existence is 
 passionate identification with the eternal youth of the natural 
 world. Without the feeling of identity with that eternal 
 youth Shelley would have been wretched as a man and 
 impotent and erratic as a poet. It was well for Shelley, 
 therefore, that he died young, with the lustre of Nature's 
 eternal youth on his brow and the rapture of Nature's eternal 
 fire in his heart. The Hebe of Spiritual and unseen beauty 
 that Shelley, rushing, flying through the glories of Nature, 
 had longed to clasp, kissed Shelley to sleep. Mourn not, 
 therefore, ye who love Shelley, that he vanished from the 
 earth ere the noon of his life and his renown shone ; rather 
 rejoice. He had in the Mediterranean waves Nature's 
 benison and Hellenic consecration. 
 
 If, in the case of Shelley, we can pardon, and even to a 
 large extent sympathise with, James Thomson's idolatry, 
 this idolatry is far from intelligible and justifiable in other 
 instances and directions, and can only be explained and 
 excused by the supposition that certain books and authors 
 had made a deep impression on him when he was young. 
 
The Essayist and the Critic. 27 
 
 Emerson extravagantly lauded Garth Wilkinson's book on 
 " The Human Body," and James Thomson went still further 
 in laudation, as if Wilkinson were a second Bacon. A 
 really, a nobly-gifted man like Wilkinson suffers from such 
 preposterous praise. 
 
 There is a strange misuse of language in James Thomson's 
 employment of the words mystic and mysticism. When 
 Emerson published his work on " Representative Men," in 
 which we have " Swedenborg the Mystic," I took consider- 
 able pains to demonstrate that, of all men, Swedenborg 
 was the least of a mystic ; that he was a primordial visionary, 
 and that the mystic and the visionary, so far from having 
 anything in common, are flagrant contrasts to each other. 
 The mystic rejoices in the mysterious, adores it for its own 
 sake : where the veil is dark and deep he would make it 
 still darker and deeper. On the contrary, for the visionary 
 there are no veils : the separating wall between the visible 
 and the invisible is broken down. To his phantasy, to his 
 whole soul, these have become one. To Swedenborg the 
 unseen world, instead of being less, was almost more a 
 reality than the seen. I made an extensive excursion into 
 the Swedenborgian wilderness at one time, but found few 
 fountains of divine water, few refreshing fruits. Between 
 thirty and forty years ago I held frequent converse with 
 Swedenborgians, and found them, on the whole, though 
 worthy people, as dreary as Swedenborg's books. Sweden- 
 borgianism is not a quackery like Spiritism ; but it is no 
 less dull. In any case, intelligent Swedenborgians have 
 confessed to me that the distinction I drew between the 
 mystic and the visionary is substantial, accurate, and true ; 
 that Swedenborg himself conceived his celestial apostleship 
 to be a fuller, a richer, a grander revelation of God's 
 mysteries ; and that Emerson and others, by calling Sweden- 
 borg a mystic, prove how little they know of Swedenborg's 
 writings, of his doctrine, and of his mission. 
 
 If James Thomson is mistaken in calling Swedenborg a 
 mystic, he is still more mistaken in naming Jesus of 
 Nazareth " one of the sublimest mystics." There is more 
 here than the misuse of terms ; there is a glaring defiance 
 of facts. Mysteries are repugnant to the clear glance, the 
 simple, direct, rapid perception, the ardent, impetuous 
 imagination of the whole Semitic race. To the Hebrews 
 
28 A Nirvana Trilogy. 
 
 dreams, visions, miracles are familiar ; but not even Jehovah, 
 their God, was a mystery to them : he was a worker of 
 wonders. From Egypt the Hebrews had brought the love 
 of symbolism, and the love was nourished, enlivened, 
 enriched, by the Babylonian exile. Even contact with 
 Greek thought, and through that with profoundest Oriental 
 philosophies, did not affect the simplicity of the Jewish 
 creed, or dispose the Jewish mind more to mystical con- 
 templations. Now, Jesus was not more inclined to mystical 
 emotions and contemplations than his countrymen in general. 
 To him dreams, visions, miracles were what they had been 
 to all the prophets who had gone before him. Through a 
 haze of myth we seize the history of Jesus in the first three 
 Gospels. To idealise Jesus cannot be condemned ; but to 
 modernise, to liberalise him is a different thing. He was 
 enthralled by all the superstitions of his countrymen. 
 Habitually he is spoken of as the founder of a religion. 
 But the idea, the intention, of founding a religion never 
 flashed on his soul. He was unlike his countrymen in 
 nothing but his celestial lovingkindness. Assuredly the 
 mystical held no empire over him, influenced none of his 
 actions. Doubtless the Gospel of John is fragrant with the 
 holiest mysticism. And Jesus is incomparably more interest- 
 ing in this Gospel than in the other three. There are 
 portions of this Gospel, especially the seventeenth chapter, 
 which I have read a thousand times. But cold, disenchant- 
 ing, cruel criticism comes to assure me that we have here 
 the idealised Christ, not the historical Jesus ; a Christ 
 idealised by the subtle and soaring Neoplatonic brain 
 towards the close of the second century. Though my intelli- 
 gence is compelled to accept what criticism reveals, my 
 heart, my phantasy, are not equally obedient. Till my dying 
 hour it is the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel whom I shall 
 continue to love best, continue to enshrine in the Holy of 
 Holies of my breast. 
 
 After the Gospel of John the dreams, the visions, the 
 miracles of the peculiarly Jewish kind resume in the New 
 Testament their ancient sway, proving that the Gospel of 
 John and its mystical Jesus are both anachronisms. Peter 
 has his visions ; the martyr Stephen has his visions ; and 
 Paul has that grand and famous vision which leads to his 
 conversion, and respecting the nature of which there has 
 
The Essayist and the Critic. 29 
 
 been such heated disputation. In his Epistles Paul alludes 
 to his visions, and he speaks of being caught up to the third 
 heaven ; but whether in the body or out of the body he 
 does not know and cannot tell. Yet some may think that 
 the last book in the New Testament is a mystical book. It 
 has no claim, however, to be so characterised. There is in 
 it symbolism of a very fantastic, sometimes very chaotic 
 kind ; but no mysticism. With the exception, then, of the 
 Gospel of John, which is as remote from Hebrew thought, 
 from Jewish feeling, as the utterances of Plotinus, not the 
 faintest trace of the mystical is discernible either in the Old 
 Testament or the New. But vision, in all its various sig- 
 nificances, is supreme, is predominant. As what is called 
 the supernatural is always a development of the natural, we 
 can easily understand why the sight of the Semitic eye 
 became so sharp and powerful, why the vision of the Semitic 
 phantasy was so miraculously keen. The bright air of the 
 desert, the angular outlines of the mountains and of every 
 object, the perils of the nomadic life from men, from beast, 
 from the sudden tempest, cultivated sight in a marvellous 
 manner. And all intellectual and moral progress was but 
 sight of a higher order. The prophet is the seer. Sight 
 begat foresight, but not insight, not intuition. Men looked 
 up from the desert to the heavens ; had conversations with 
 the angels, and also with God j adored the stars because 
 they seemed the eyes of the sky ; but never got beyond 
 what the eye either in its ordinary or its ecstatic state 
 revealed. Hence, though there is great elevation in the 
 Bible, there is no depth, the solitary Gospel of John 
 excepted, with whose appearance the reign of mysticism in 
 the Christian Church began. 
 
 To give Emerson a place among the mystics seems 
 almost as absurd as to assign Swedenborg a throne in the 
 midst of that glorious company. Yet James Thomson says 
 that Emerson's verses, as well as his lectures, are little else 
 than the expression of mystical simplicity ; and that, if he 
 had been gifted with the singing voice, the world would not 
 have had to look to the future for its supreme bard ! Now, 
 Emerson was a laborious manufacturer of phrases, and had 
 as little of spontaneous inspiration as any one who ever 
 wrote. That he committed the monstrous blunder of calling 
 Swedenborg a mystic conclusively shows that there was 
 
30 A Nirvana Trilogy. 
 
 nothing of the mystic in himself. But art thou not jesting, 
 James Thomson, when thou venturest to declare that Emer- 
 son, who was as cool, cautious, and calculating as any of 
 his countrymen, would have been the world's supreme bard 
 but for his lack of music ? Not only had Emerson a narrow 
 escape from being the greatest of all poets, but he is our 
 modern Plato ! Indeed, it seems that actually, or poten- 
 tially, Emerson was the one consummate genius of all 
 ages ! 
 
 Enough, however, of condemnation, though there is room 
 for much more. As an honest critic, James Thomson would 
 not have complained of being honestly criticised. He loved 
 truth, and he never flattered j and, if I were to flatter, I 
 should wrong and insult him. 
 
 Some of Thomson's best productions as a critic are not 
 in this volume, but in "Cope's Tobacco Plant," and I 
 should have been glad if they had been here reproduced. 
 
 Nothing manifests more triumphantly the natural sweet- 
 ness of Thomson's temper, the natural nobleness of his 
 character, than that, as a critic, he never allowed any low 
 motives, any petty spites, any jealousies, envies, to influence 
 him. If he exaggerates, it is in the direction of eulogy, 
 never in that of depreciation. It is easy for the fortunate 
 to be generous ; but it is not easy for the unfortunate to be 
 just. Here is the test of true magnanimity. The magna- 
 nimity James Thomson possessed ; but he never boasted of 
 it. Consider also that while the most sunless poverty, the 
 most bitter pain, were his evermore, evermore also, as I 
 have more than once shown, the gloomiest hypochondriasis 
 was maddening him. What hypochondriasis is, its misery, 
 its insanity, I myself know too well. Its heaviest curse is 
 that it makes our diseased phantasy the sole guide of our 
 conduct, and, especially if we live a lonely life, transfigures 
 all men, and even our best friends, into possible traitors, 
 possible foes. Hypochondriasis is a form of madness, and 
 one of the most dangerous forms to the individual himself, 
 who is the sufferer. He feels as if he had been born 
 merely to be tormented, and as if all the forces of nature 
 were conspiring to mock, to wound, and to crush him. The 
 temptation which haunts him most is the longing by suicide 
 to put an end to his wretchedness. He lingers on, not from 
 love of life, but from the love of child, or wife, or friend, 
 
The Essayist and the Critic. 31 
 
 and from the dream that all the brave have dreamed of 
 man's salvation. Now, except that by instinctive fascination 
 James Thomson gained friends, he had scarcely any solace, 
 giving him strength to bear his manifold tribulations. Yet, 
 notwithstanding all his trials and sorrows, James Thomson 
 could be sublimely just, could hinder his morbid moods 
 from affecting his judgments. It was hypochondriasis, not 
 the inability to bear real troubles, which impelled James 
 Thomson to take into his feverish hand the drunkard's cup. 
 But even the drunkard's madness, added to the madness of 
 hypochondriasis and the cynicism of despair, never made 
 him disloyal to divinest justice. And truly it is in divinest 
 justice that the other divinest virtues must be rooted. 
 Seldom are charities and chivalries, which do not spring 
 from justice, aught but sentimentalities or hypocrisies. 
 Therefore, there is more to be revered in James Thomson 
 than the man of singular genius, than the tenderly loving 
 heart, than the brother of the ideal Prometheus, than the 
 brother of the ideal Christ. We, also, enchanted and em- 
 boldened, behold his valiant and efflulgent countenance as 
 he waves the banner of divinest justice on high. The truly 
 godlike men the world never knows. But, dazzled by 
 fulminating exploits, it exalts one of its idols and calls him 
 great. James Thomson was not a great man ; he was more, 
 much more ; he was a godlike man, godlike in his pleni- 
 tude of pangs, godlike in his hushed and holy heroism, god- 
 like in his inappeasable hunger for the bread of life, which, 
 in the sacramental feasts of Nirvana, has, at last, been set 
 before him. Would that I, thine elder brother, were beside 
 thee, James Thomson, and beside all who uttered when 
 dying the sublime Italian saying, That better than every 
 victory is a beautiful suffering. But I cry Hail ! and not 
 Farewell ! for I must soon depart from a scene where my 
 doom has been more hapless even than thine. 
 
 So closes the third of my funeral orations, the third part 
 of what I may call " A Nirvana Trilogy f which trilogy, 
 however, though referring mainly to the past, may be the 
 prophecy of Nirvanaism as a new religion. 
 
 January, 1885. 
 
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