because he seems to be an ill-used one. By the way, here is a
combination which escaped the Roman moralist: _Vir bonus_, says he,
_malâ fortunâ compositus_, is a spectacle for the gods. Yet what is that
case, the case of a man matched in duel with the enmity of a malicious
fellow-creature--naturally his inferior, but officially having means to
oppress him? No man is naturally or easily roused to anger by a blind
abstraction like Fortune; and therefore he is under no temptation to
lose his self-command. He sustains no trial that can make him worthy of
a divine contemplation. Amongst all the extravagancies of human nature,
never yet did we hear of a person who harboured a sentiment of private
malice against Time for moving too rapidly, or against Space for being
infinitely divisible. Even animated annoyers, if they are without spite
towards ourselves, we regard with no enmity. No man in all history, if
we except the twelfth Cæsar, has nourished a deadly feud against
flies[54]: and if Mrs. Jameson allowed a sentiment of revenge to nestle
in her heart towards the Canadian mosquitoes, it was the race and not
the individual parties to the trespass on herself against whom she
protested. Passions it is, human passions, intermingling with the wrong
itself that envenom the sense of wrong. We have ourselves been caned
severely in passing through a wood by the rebound, the recalcitration we
may call it, of elastic branches which we had displaced. And passing
through the same wood with a Whitehaven dandy of sixty, now in _Hades_,
who happened to wear a beautiful wig from which on account of the heat
he had removed his hat, we saw with these eyes of ours one of those same
thickets which heretofore had been concerned in our own caning,
deliberately lift up, suspend, and keep dangling in the air for the
contempt of the public that auburn wig which was presumed by its wearer
to be simular of native curls. The ugliness of that death's head which
by this means was suddenly exposed to daylight, the hideousness of that
grinning skull so abruptly revealed, may be imagined by poets. Neither
was the affair easily redressed: the wig swung buoyantly in the playful
breezes: to catch it was hard, to release it without injuring the
tresses was a matter of nicety: ladies were heard approaching from Rydal
Mount: the dandy was agitated: he felt himself, if seen in this
condition, to be a mere _memento mori_: for the first time in his life,
as we believe, he blushed on meeting our eye: he muttered something, in
which we could only catch the word 'Absalom': and finally we extricated
ourselves from the cursed thicket barely in time to meet the ladies.
Here were insufferable affronts: greater cannot be imagined: wanton
outrages on two inoffensive men: and for ourselves, who could have
identified and sworn to one of the bushes as an accomplice in _both_
assaults, it was not easy altogether to dismiss the idea of malice. Yet,
because this malice did not organize and concentrate itself in an eye
looking on and genially enjoying our several mortifications, we both
pocketed the affronts. All this we say to show Mr. Bennett how fully we
do justice to his situation, and allow for the irritation natural to
such cases as his, where the loss is clothed with contumely, and the
wrong is barbed by malice. But, for all _that_, we do not think such
confidential communications of ill-usage properly made to the public.
In fact, this querulous temper of expostulation, running through the
book, disfigures its literary aspect. And possibly for our own comfort
we might have turned away from a feature of discontent so gloomy and
painful, were it not that we are thus accidentally recalled to a
grievance in our Eastern administrations upon which we desire to enter a
remark. Life is languid, the blood becomes lazy, at the extremities of
our bodily system, as we ourselves know by dolorous experience under the
complaint of _purpura_; and analogously we find the utility of our
supreme government to droop and languish before it reaches the Indian
world. Hence partly it is (for nearer home we see nothing of the kind),
that foreign adventurers receive far too much encouragement from our
British Satraps in the East. To find themselves within 'the regions of
the morn,' and cheek to cheek with famous Sultans far inferior in power
and substantial splendour, makes our great governors naturally proud.
They are transfigured by necessity; and, losing none of their justice or
integrity, they lose a good deal of their civic humility. In such a
state they become capable of flattery, apt for the stratagems of foreign
adulation. We know not certainly that Mr. Bennett's injuries originated
in that source; though we suspect as much from the significant stories
which he tells of interloping foreigners on the pension list in Ceylon.
But this we _do_ know, that, from impulses easily deciphered, foreigners
creep into favour where an Englishman would not; and why? For two
reasons: 1st, because a foreigner _must_ be what is meant by 'an
adventurer,' and in his necessity he is allowed to find his excuse;
2ndly, because an Englishman, attempting to play the adulatory
character, finds an obstacle to his success in the standard of his own
national manners from which it requires a perpetual effort to wean
himself: whereas the oily and fluent obsequiousness found amongst
Italians and Frenchmen makes the transition to a perfect Phrygian
servility not only more easy to the artist, and less extravagantly
palpable, but more agreeable in the result to his employer. This cannot
be denied, and therefore needs no comment. But, as to the other reason,
viz., that a foreigner _must_ be an adventurer, allow us to explain.
Every man is an adventurer, every man is _in sensu strictissimo_
sometimes a knave.
You might imagine the situation of an adventurer who had figured
virtually in many lives, to resemble that of the late revered Mr. Prig
Bentham, when sitting like a contrite spider at the centre of his
'panopticon'; all the lines, which meet in a point at his seat, radiate
outwards into chambers still widening as they increase their distance.
This _may_ be an image of an adventurer's mind when open to compunction,
but generally it is exactly reversed; he sees the past sections of his
life, however spacious heretofore, crowding up and narrowing into
vanishing points to his immediate eye. And such also they become for the
public. The villain, who walks, like Æneas at Carthage, shrouded in
mist, is as little pursued by any bad report for his forgotten misdeeds
as he is usually by remorse. In the process of losing their relation to
any known and visible person, acts of fraud, robbery, murder, lose all
distinct place in the memory. Such acts are remembered only through
persons. And hence it is that many interesting murders, worthy to become
cabinet gems in a museum of such works, have wasted their sweetness on
the desert air even in our time, for no other reason than that the
parties concerned did not amplify their proportions upon the public eye;
the sufferers were perhaps themselves knaves; and the doers had
retreated from all public knowledge into the mighty crowds of London or
Glasgow.
This excursus, on the case of adventurers who run away from their own
crimes into the pathless wildernesses of vast cities, may appear
disproportionate. But excuse it, reader, for the subject is interesting;
and with relation to our Eastern empire it is peculiarly so. Many are
the anecdotes we could tell, derived from Oriental connections, about
foreign scamps who have first exposed the cloven foot when inextricably
connected with political intrigues or commercial interests, or possibly
with domestic and confidential secrets. The dangerousness of their
characters first began to reveal itself after they had become dangerous
by their present position.
Mr. Bennett mentions one lively illustration of this in the case of a
foreigner, who had come immediately from the Cape of Good Hope; so far,
but not farther, he could be traced. And what part had he played at the
Cape? The illustrious one of private sentinel, with a distant prospect
perhaps of rising to be a drum-major. This man--possibly a refugee from
the bagnio at Marseilles, or from the Italian galleys--was soon allowed
to seat himself in an office of £1,000 per annum. For what? For which of
his vices? Our English and Scottish brothers, honourable and educated,
must sacrifice country, compass land and sea, face a life of storms,
with often but a slender chance of any result at all from their pains,
whilst a foreign rascal (without any allegation of merit in his favour)
shall at one bound, by planting his servility in the right quarter and
at the fortunate hour, vault into an income of 25,000 francs per
annum; the money, observe, being national money--yours, ours,
everybody's--since at that period Ceylon did not pay her own expenses.
Now, indeed, she does, and furnishes beside, annually, a surplus of
£50,000 sterling. But still, we contend that places of trust, honour,
and profit, won painfully by British blood, are naturally and rightfully
to be held in trust as reversions for the children of the family. To
return, however, and finish the history of our scamp, it happened that
through the regular action of his office, and in part perhaps through
some irregular influence or consideration with which his station
invested him, he became the depositary of many sums saved laboriously
by poor Ceylonese. These sums he embezzled; or, as a sympathizing
countryman observed of a similar offence in similar circumstances, he
'gave an irregular direction to their appropriation.' You see, he could
not forget his old Marseilles tricks. This, however, was coming it too
strong for his patron, who in spite of his taste for adulation was a
just governor. Our poor friend was summoned most peremptorily to account
for the missing dollars; and because it did not occur to him that he
might plead, as another man from Marseilles in another colony had done,
'that the white ants had eaten the dollars,' he saw no help for it but
to cut his throat, and cut his throat he did. This being done, you may
say that he had given such a receipt as he could, and had entitled
himself to a release. Well, we are not unmerciful; and were the case of
the creditors our own, we should not object. But we remark, besides the
private wrong, a posthumous injury to the British nation which this
foreigner was enabled to commit; and it was twofold: he charged the
pension-list of Ceylon with the support of his widow, in prejudice of
other widows left by our meritorious countrymen, some of whom had died
in battle for the State; and he had attainted, through one generation at
least, the good faith of our nation amongst the poor ignorant
Cinghalese, who cannot be expected to distinguish between true
Englishmen and other Europeans whom English governors may think proper
to exalt in the colony.
Cases such as these, it is well known to the learned in that matter,
have been but too frequent in our Eastern colonies; and we do assert
that any single case of that nature is too much by one. Even where the
question is merely one of courtesy to science or to literature, we
complain heavily, not at all of that courtesy, but that by much too
great a preponderance is allowed to the pretensions of foreigners.
Everybody at Calcutta will recollect the invidious distinctions
(invidious upon contrast) paid by a Governor-General some years ago to a
French _savant_, who came to the East as an itinerant botanist and
geologist on the mission of a Parisian society. The Governor was Lord
William Bentinck. His Excellency was a radical, and, being such, could
swallow 'homage' by the gallon, which homage the Frenchman took care to
administer. In reward he was publicly paraded in the _howdah_ of Lady
William Bentinck, and caressed in a way not witnessed before or since.
Now this Frenchman, after visiting the late king of the Sikhs at Lahore,
and receiving every sort of service and hospitality from the English
through a devious route of seven thousand miles (treatment which in
itself we view with pleasure), finally died of liver complaint through
his own obstinacy. By way of honour to his memory, the record of his
three years' wanderings has been made public. What is the expression of
his gratitude to the English? One service he certainly rendered us: he
disabused, if _that_ were possible, the French of their silly and most
ignorant notions as to our British government in India and Ceylon: he
could do no otherwise, for he had himself been astounded at what he saw
as compared with what he had been taught to expect. Thus far he does us
some justice and therefore some service, urged to it by his bitter
contempt of the French credulity wherever England is slandered. But
otherwise he treats with insolence unbounded all our men of science,
though his own name has made little impression anywhere: and, in his
character of traveller he speaks of himself as of one laying the
foundation-stone of any true knowledge with regard to India. In
particular he dismisses with summary contempt the Travels of Bishop
Heber--not very brilliant perhaps, but undoubtedly superior both in
knowledge and in style to his own. Yet this was the man selected for
_fêting_ by the English Governor-General; as though courtesy to a
Frenchman could not travel on any line which did not pass through a
mortifying slight to Englishmen.
3.--GILLMAN'S COLERIDGE.
Variation on the opening of 'Coleridge and Opium-eating.'
What is the deadest thing known to philosophers? According to popular
belief, it is a door-nail. For the world says, 'Dead as a door-nail!'
But the world is wrong. Dead may be a door-nail; but deader and most
dead is Gillman's Coleridge. Which fact in Natural History we
demonstrate thus: Up to Waterloo it was the faith of every child that a
sloth took a century for walking across a street. His mother, if she
'knew he was out,' must have had a pretty long spell of uneasiness
before she saw him back again. But Mr. Waterton, Baptist of a new
generation in these mysteries, took that conceit out of Europe: the
sloth, says he, cannot like a snipe or a plover run a race neck and neck
with a first-class railway carriage; but is he, therefore, a slow coach?
By no means: he would go from London to Edinburgh between seedtime and
harvest. Now Gillman's Coleridge, vol. i., has no such speed: it has
taken six years to come up with those whom chiefly it concerned. Some
dozen of us, Blackwood-men and others, are stung furiously in that book
during the early part of 1838; and yet none of us had ever perceived the
nuisance or was aware of the hornet until the wheat-fields of 1844 were
white for the sickle. In August of 1844 we saw Gillman.
4.--WHY SCRIPTURE DOES NOT DEAL WITH SCIENCE ('PAGAN ORACLES').
The Fathers grant to the Oracles a real power of foresight and prophecy,
but in all cases explain these supernatural functions out of diabolic
inspiration. Van Dale, on the other hand, with all his Vandalish
followers, treats this hypothesis, both as regards the power itself of
looking into the future and as regards the supposed source of that
power, in the light of a contemptible chimera. They discuss it scarcely
with gravity: indeed, the very frontispiece to Van Dale's book already
announces the repulsive spirit of scoffing and mockery in which he means
to dismiss it; men are there represented in the act of juggling and
coarsely exulting over their juggleries by protruding the tongue or
exchanging collusive winks with accomplices. Now, in a grave question
obliquely affecting Christianity and the course of civilization, this
temper of discussion is not becoming, were the result even more
absolutely convincing than it is. Everybody can see at a glance that it
is not this particular agency of evil spirits which Van Dale would have
found so ridiculous, were it not that he had previously addicted himself
to viewing the whole existence of evil spirits as a nursery fable. Now
it is not our intention to enter upon any speculation so mysterious. It
is clear from the first that no man by human researches can any more
add one scintillation of light to the obscure indications of Scripture
upon this dark question, than he can add a cubit to his stature. We do
not know, nor is it possible to know, what is even likely to be the
exact meaning of various Scriptural passages partly, perhaps, adapted to
the erring preconceptions of the Jews; for never let it be forgotten
that upon all questions alike, which concerned no moral interest of man,
all teachers alike who had any heavenly mission, patriarchs or lawgivers
conversing immediately with God, prophets, apostles, or even the Founder
of our religion Himself, never vouchsafe to reveal one ray of
illumination. And to us it seems the strangest oversight amongst all the
oversights of commentators that, in respect to the Jewish errors as to
astronomy, etc., they should not have seen the broad open doctrine which
vindicates the profound Scriptural neglect of errors however gross in
that quality of speculation. The solution of this neglect is not such as
to leave a man under any excuse for apologizing or shuffling. The
solution is technical, precise, and absolute. It is not sufficient to
say, as the best expounders do generally say, that science, that
astronomy for instance, that geology, that physiology, were not the kind
of truth which divine missionaries were sent to teach; that is true, but
is far short of the whole truth. Not only was it negatively no part of
the offices attached to a divine mission that it should extend its
teaching to merely intellectual questions (an argument which still
leaves the student to figure it as a work not indispensable, not
absolutely to be expected, yet in case it _were_ granted as so much of
advantage, as a _lucro ponatur_), but in the most positive and
commanding sense it _was_ the business of revelation to refuse all
light of this kind. According to all the analogies which explain the
meaning of a revelation, it would have been a capital schism in the
counsels of Providence, if in one single instance it had condescended to
gratify human curiosity by anticipation with regard to any subject
whatever, which God had already subjected to human capacity through the
ample faculties of the human intellect.
5.--VARIATION ON A FAMOUS PASSAGE IN 'THE DAUGHTER OF LEBANON.'
The evangelist, stepping forward, touched her forehead. 'She is mortal,'
he said; and guessing that she was waiting for some one amongst the
youthful revellers, he groaned heavily; and then, half to himself and
half to _her_, he said, 'O flower too gorgeous, weed too lovely, wert
thou adorned with beauty in such excess, that not Solomon in all his
glory was arrayed like thee, no nor even the lily of the field, only
that thou mightest grieve the Holy Spirit of God?' The woman trembled
exceedingly, and answered, 'Rabbi, what should I do? For, behold! all
men forsake me.'
Brief had been the path, and few the steps, which had hurried her to
destruction. Her father was a prince amongst the princes of Lebanon; but
proud, stern, and inflexible.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] 'Against flies'--whence he must have merited the anger of
Beelzebub, whom Syrians held to be the tutelary god of flies; meaning
probably by 'flies' all insects whatever, as the Romans meant by
_passer_ and _passerculus_, all little birds of whatsoever family, and
by _malum_ every fruit that took the shape and size of a ball. How
honoured were the race of flies, to have a deity of the first rank for
their protector, a Cæsar for their enemy! Cæsar made war upon them with
his stylus; he is supposed to have massacred openly, or privately and
basely to have assassinated, more than seven millions of that
unfortunate race, who however lost nothing of that indomitable
pertinacity in retaliating all attacks, which Milton has noticed with
honour in 'Paradise Regained.' In reference to this notorious spirit of
persecution in the last prince of the Flavian house, Suetonius records a
capital repartee: 'Is the Emperor alone?' demanded a courtier. 'Quite
alone.' 'Are you sure? Really now is nobody with him?' Answer: '_Ne
musca quidem._'