Brantwood, 14th May, 1876.
Those of my readers who have followed me as far as I have hitherto gone
in our careful reading of the Pentateuch, must, I think, have felt with
me, in natural consequence of this careful reading, more than hitherto,
the life and reality of the record; but, in the degree of this new
life, new wonderfulness, and difficult credibility! For it is always
easy to imagine that we believe what we do not understand; and often
graceful and convenient to consent in the belief of others, as to what
we do not care about. But when we begin to know clearly what is told,
the question if it be fable or fact becomes inevitable in our minds;
and if the fact, once admitted, would bear upon our conduct, its
admission can no longer be made a matter of mere social courtesy.
Accordingly, I find one of my more earnest readers already asking me,
privately, if I really believed that the hail on Good Friday last had
been sent as a punishment for national sin?—and I should think, and
even hope, that other of my readers would like to ask me, respecting
the same passage, whether I believed that the sun ever stood still?
To whom I could only answer, what I answered some time since in my
paper on Miracle for the Metaphysical Society, (‘Contemporary Review’)
that the true miracle, to my mind, would not be in the sun’s standing
still, but IS in its going on! We are all of us being swept down to
death in a sea of miracle; we are drowned in wonder, as gnats in a
Rhine whirlpool: unless we are worse,—drowned in pleasure, or sloth, or
insolence.
Nevertheless, I do not feel myself in the least called upon to believe
that the sun stood still, or the earth either, during that pursuit at
Ajalon. Nay, it would not anywise amaze me to find that there never had
been any such pursuit—never any Joshua, never any Moses; and that the
Jews, “taken generally,” as an amiable clerical friend told me from his
pulpit a Sunday or two ago, “were a Christian people.”
But it does amaze me—almost to helplessness of hand and thought—to find
the men and women of these days careless of such issue; and content, so
that they can feed and breathe their fill, to eat like cattle, and
breathe like plants, questionless of the Spirit that makes the grass to
grow for them on the mountains, or the breeze they breathe on them, its
messengers, or the fire that dresses their food, its minister. Desolate
souls, for whom the sun—beneath, not above, the horizon—stands still
for ever.
‘Amazed,’ I say, ‘almost to helplessness of hand and thought’—quite
literally of both. I was reading yesterday, by Fors’ order, Mr. Edward
B. Tylor’s idea of the Greek faith in Apollo: “If the sun travels along
its course like a glittering chariot, forthwith the wheels, and the
driver, and the horses are there;” [43] and Mr. Frederick Harrison’s
gushing article on Humanity, in the ‘Contemporary Review’; and a letter
about our Cotton Industry, (hereafter to be quoted, [44]) and this
presently following bit of Sir Philip Sidney’s 68th Psalm;—and my hands
are cold this morning, after the horror, and wonder, and puzzlement of
my total Sun-less-day, and my head is now standing still, or at least
turning round, giddy, instead of doing its work by Shrewsbury clock;
and I don’t know where to begin with the quantity I want to say,—all
the less that I’ve said a great deal of it before, if I only knew where
to tell you to find it. All up and down my later books, from ‘Unto This
Last’ to ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ and again and again throughout ‘Fors,’ you
will find references to the practical connection between physical and
spiritual light—of which now I would fain state, in the most
unmistakable terms, this sum: that you cannot love the real sun, that
is to say physical light and colour, rightly, unless you love the
spiritual sun, that is to say justice and truth, rightly. That for
unjust and untrue persons, there is no real joy in physical light, so
that they don’t even know what the word means. That the entire system
of modern life is so corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice
and untruth, carried to the point of not recognising themselves as
either—for as long as Bill Sykes knows that he is a robber, and Jeremy
Diddler that he is a rascal, there is still some of Heaven’s light left
for both—but when everybody steals, cheats, and goes to church,
complacently, and the light of their whole body is darkness, how great
is that darkness! And that the physical result of that mental vileness
is a total carelessness of the beauty of sky, or the cleanness of
streams, or the life of animals and flowers: and I believe that the
powers of Nature are depressed or perverted, together with the Spirit
of Man; and therefore that conditions of storm and of physical
darkness, such as never were before in Christian times, are developing
themselves, in connection also with forms of loathsome insanity,
multiplying through the whole genesis of modern brains.
As I correct this sheet for press, I chance, by Fors’ order, in a
prayer of St. John Damascene’s to the Virgin, on this, to me, very
curious and interesting clause: “Redeem me from the dark metamorphosis
of the angels, rescuing me from the bitter law-giving of the farmers of
the air, and the rulers of the darkness.”
“τῆς σκοτεινῆς με τῶν διαμόνων λυτρου μέτημορφῆς, (I am not answerable
either for Damascene Greek, or for my MS. of it, in 1396,) τοῦ
πικροτάτου λογοθεσίου τῶν τελωνῶν τοῦ ἀέρος καὶ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ
σκότους ἐξαίρουσα.”
And now—of this entangling in the shrine of half born and half-sighted
things, see this piece of Sir Philip Sidney’s psalm. I want it also for
the bit of conchology at the end. The italics are mine.
“And call ye this to utter what is just,
You that of justice hold the sov’raign throne?
And call yee this to yield, O sonnes of dust,
To wronged brethren ev’ry one his own?
O no: it is your long malicious will
Now to the world to make by practice known,
With whose oppression you the ballance fill,
Just to your selves, indiff’rent else to none.
But what could they, who ev’n in birth declin’d,
From truth and right to lies and injuries?
To shew the venom of their cancred mynd
The adder’s image scarcely can suffice.
Nay, scarce the aspick may with them contend,
On whom the charmer all in vaine applies
His skillful’st spells: aye, missing of his end,
While shee self-deaf, and unaffected lies.
Lord, crack their teeth, Lord, crush Thou these lions’ jawes,
Soe lett them sinck as water in the sand:
When deadly bow their aiming fury drawes,
Shiver the shaft, ere past the shooter’s hand.
So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile,
Or as the embrio, whose vitall band
Breakes ere it holdes, and formlesse eyes doe faile
To see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.”
‘Dishoused’ snail! That’s a bit, observe, of Sir Philip’s own natural
history, perfecting the image in the psalm, “as a snail which melteth.”
The ‘housed’ snail can shelter himself from evil weather, but the poor
houseless slug, a mere slimy mass of helpless
blackness,—shower-begotten, as it seems,—what is to become of it when
the sun is up!
Not that even houseless snails melt,—nor that there’s anything about
snails at all in David’s psalm, I believe, both Vulgate and LXX. saying
‘wax’ instead, as in Psalms lxviii. 2, xcvii. 5, etc.; but I suppose
there’s some reptilian sense in the Hebrew, justifying our translation
here—all the more interesting to me because of a puzzle I got into in
Isaiah, the other day; respecting which, lest you should fancy I’m too
ready to give up Joshua and the sun without taking trouble about them,
please observe this very certain condition of your Scriptural studies:
that if you read the Bible with predetermination to pick out every text
you approve of—that is to say, generally, any that confirm you in the
conceit of your own religious sect,—that console you for the
consequences of your own faults,—or assure you of a pleasant future
though you attend to none of your present duties—on these terms you
will find the Bible entirely intelligible, and wholly delightful: but
if you read it with a real purpose of trying to understand it, and
obey; and so read it all through, steadily, you will find it, out and
out, the crabbedest and most difficult book you ever tried; horribly
ill written in many parts, according to all human canons; totally
unintelligible in others; and with the gold of it only to be got at by
a process of crushing in which nothing but the iron teeth of the
fiercest and honestest resolution will prevail against its adamant.
For instance, take the 16th of Isaiah. Who is to send the Lamb? why is
the Lamb to be sent? what does the Lamb mean? There is nothing in the
Greek Bible about a Lamb at all, nor is anybody told to send anything.
But God says He will send something, apostolically, as reptiles!
Then, are the daughters of Moab the outcasts, as in the second verse,
or other people, as in the fourth? How is Moab’s throne to be
established in righteousness, in the tabernacle of David, in the fifth?
What are his lies not to be, in the sixth? And why is he to howl for
himself, in the seventh? Ask any of the young jackanapes you put up to
chatter out of your pulpits, to tell you even so much as this, of the
first half-dozen verses! But above all, ask them who the persons are
who are to be sent apostolically as reptiles?
Meanwhile, on the way to answer, I’ve got a letter, [45] not from a
jackanapes, but a thoroughly learned and modest clergyman, and old
friend, advising me of my mistake in April Fors, in supposing that
Rahab, in the 89th Psalm, means the harlot. It is, he tells me, a
Hebrew word for the Dragon adversary, as in the verse “He hath cut
Rahab, and wounded the Dragon.” That will come all the clearer and
prettier for us, when we have worked it out, with Rahab herself and
all; meantime, please observe what a busy creature she must have
been—the stalks of her flax in heaps enough to hide the messengers!
doubtless also, she was able to dye her thread of the brightest
scarlet, a becoming colour. [46]
Well, I can’t get that paper of Mr. Frederick Harrison’s out of my
head; chiefly because I know and like its writer; and I don’t like his
wasting his time in writing that sort of stuff. What I have got to say
to him, anent it, may better be said publicly, because I must write it
carefully, and with some fulness; and if he won’t attend to me, perhaps
some of his readers may. So I consider him, for the time, as one of my
acquaintances among working men, and dedicate the close of this letter
to him specially.
My dear Harrison,—I am very glad you have been enjoying yourself at
Oxford; and that you still think it a pretty place. But why, in the
name of all that’s developing, did you walk in those wretched old
Magdalen walks? They’re as dull as they were thirty years ago. Why
didn’t you promenade in our new street, opposite Mr. Ryman’s? or under
the rapturous sanctities of Keble? or beneath the lively new zigzag
parapet of Tom Quad?—or, finally, in the name of all that’s human and
progressive, why not up and down the elongating suburb of the married
Fellows, on the cock-horse road to Banbury?
However, I’m glad you’ve been at the old place; even though you wasted
the bloom of your holiday-spirits in casting your eyes, in that too
childish and pastoral manner, “round this sweet landscape, with its
myriad blossoms and foliage, its meadows in their golden glory,” etc.;
and declaring that all you want other people to do is to “follow out in
its concrete results this sense of collective evolution.” Will you only
be patient enough, for the help of this old head of mine on stooping
shoulders, to tell me one or two of the inconcrete results of separate
evolution?
Had you done me the honour to walk through my beautifully developing
schools, you would have found, just outside of them, (turned out
because I’m tired of seeing it, and want something progressive) the
cast of the Elgin Theseus. I am tired thereof, it is true; but I don’t
yet see my way, as a Professor of Modern Art, to the superseding it. On
the whole, it appears to me a very satisfactory type of the human form;
arrived at, as you know, two thousand and two hundred years ago. And
you tell me, nevertheless, to “see how this transcendent power of
collective evolution holds me in the hollow of its hand!” Well, I hope
I am handsomer than the Theseus; it’s very pleasant to think so, but it
did not strike me before. May I flatter myself it is really your candid
opinion? Will you just look at the “Realization of the (your?) Ideal,”
in the number of ‘Vanity Fair’ for February 17th, 1872, and confirm me
on this point?
Granting whatever advance in the ideal of humanity you thus conclude, I
still am doubtful of your next reflection. “But these flowers and
plants which we can see between the cloisters, and trellised round the
grey traceries—” (My dear boy, what have you to do with cloisters or
traceries? Leave that business to the jackdaws; their loquacious and
undeveloped praise is enough for such relics of the barbarous past. You
don’t want to shut yourself up, do you? and you couldn’t design a
tracery, for your life; and you don’t know a good one from a bad one:
what in the name of common sense or common modesty do you mean by
chattering about these?) “What races of men in China, Japan, India,
Mexico, South America, Australasia, first developed their glory out of
some wild bloom?” Frankly, I don’t know—being in this no wiser than
you; but also I don’t care: and in this carelessness am wiser than you,
because I do know this—that if you will look into the Etruscan room of
the British Museum, you will find there an Etruscan Demeter of—any time
you please—B.C., riding on a car whose wheels are of wild roses: that
the wild rose of her time is thus proved to be precisely the wild rose
of my time, growing behind my study on the hillside; and for my own
part, I would not give a spray of it for all Australasia, South
America, and Japan together. Perhaps, indeed, apples have improved
since the Hesperides’ time; but I know they haven’t improved since I
was a boy, and I can’t get a Ribston Pippin, now, for love or money.
Of Pippins in Devonshire, of cheese in Cheshire, believe me, my good
friend,—though I trust much more than you in the glorified future of
both,—you will find no development in the present scientific day;—of
Asphodel none; of Apples none demonstrable; but of Eves? From the
ductile and silent gold of ancient womanhood to the resonant bronze,
and tinkling—not cymbal, but shall we say—saucepan, of Miss Frances
Power Cobbe, there is an interval, with a vengeance; widening to the
future. You yourself, I perceive, have no clear insight into this
solidified dispersion of the lingering pillar of Salt, which had been
good for hospitality in its day; and which yet would have some honour
in its descendant, the poor gleaning Moabitess, into your modern
windily progressive pillar of Sand, with “career open to it” indeed
other than that of wife and mother—good for nothing, at last, but
burial heaps. But are you indeed so proud of what has been already
achieved? I will take you on your own terms, and study only the
evolution of the Amazonian Virgin. Take first the ancient type of her,
leading the lucent Cobbes of her day, ‘florentes aere catervas.’
“Bellatrix. Non illa colo, calathisve Minervae
Foemineas assueta manus.
Illam omnis tectis agrisqu’ effusa juventus
Turbaque miratur matrum; et prospectat euntem.
Attonitis inhians animis: ut regius ostro
Velet honos leves humeros; ut fibula crinem
Auro internectat; Lyciam ut gerat ipsa pharetram
Et pastoralem praefixa cuspide myrtum.”
With this picture, will you compare that so opportunely furnished me by
the author of the ‘Angel in the House,’ [47] of the modern Camilla, in
“white bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an
Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes.” From this sphere of
Ethiopian aspiration, may not even the divinely emancipated spirit of
Cobbe cast one glance—“Backward, Ho”?
But suppose I grant your Evolution of the Japanese Rose, and the
Virginian Virago, how of other creatures? of other things? I don’t find
the advocates of Evolution much given to studying either men, women, or
roses; I perceive them to be mostly occupied with frogs and lice. Is
there a Worshipful Batrachianity—a Divine Pedicularity?—Stay, I see at
page 874 that Pantheism is “muddled sentiment”; but it was you, my dear
boy, who began the muddling with your Japanese horticulture. Your
Humanity has no more to do with roses than with Rose-chafers or other
vermin; but I must really beg you not to muddle your terms as well as
your head. “We, who have thought and studied,” do not admit that
“humanity is an aggregate of men.” An aggregate of men is a mob, and
not ‘Humanity’; and an aggregate of sheep is a flock, and not Ovility;
and an aggregate of geese is——perhaps you had better consult Mr.
Herbert Spencer and the late Mr. John Stuart Mill for the best modern
expression,—but if you want to know the proper names for aggregates, in
good old English, go and read Lady Juliana’s list in the book of St.
Albans.
I do not care, however, to pursue questions with you of these ‘concrete
developments.’ For, frankly, I conceive myself to know considerably
more than you do, of organic Nature and her processes, and of organic
English and its processes; but there is one development of which, since
it is your special business to know it, and I suppose your pleasure, I
hope you know much more than I do, (whose business I find by no means
forwarded by it, still less my pleasure)—the Development of Law. For
the concrete development of beautifully bewigged humanity, called a
lawyer, I beg you to observe that I always express, and feel, extreme
respect. But for Law itself, in the existent form of it, invented, as
it appears to me, only for the torment and taxation of Humanity, I
entertain none whatsoever. I may be wrong, and I don’t want to be
wrong; and you, who know the law, can show me if I am wrong or not.
Here, then, are four questions of quite vital importance to Humanity,
which if you will answer to me positively, you will do more good than I
have yet known done by Positivism.