[7] Even in Rome, where the purple (whatever colour that might have
been) is usually imagined to be the symbol of regal state--and
afterwards their improved arts of dyeing, and improved materials, became
so splendid that it was made so--white had always been the colour of a
monarchy. ['A white linen band was the simple badge of Oriental royalty'
(Merivale's 'History of Rome,' ii., p. 468).--ED.]
[8] This was the case even with the Homeric Greeks. Mr. Gladstone makes
a point of this (see 'Juventus Mundi,' p. 429): 'The privates of the
army are called by the names of _laos_, the people; _demos_, the
community; and _pleth[=u]s_, the multitude. But no notice is taken
throughout the poem of the exploits of any soldier below the rank of an
officer. Still, all attend the Assemblies. On the whole, the Greek host
is not so much an army, as a community in arms.' Even the common people,
not only in cities but in camps, assembled to hear the deliberations of
the chiefs.--ED.
_VII. THE JEWS AS A SEPARATE PEOPLE._
The argument for the separation and distinct current of the Jews,
flowing as they pretend of the river Rhone through the Lake of
Geneva--never mixing its waters with those which surround it--has been
by some infidel writers defeated and evaded by one word; and here, as
everywhere else, an unwise teacher will seek to hide the answer. Yet how
infinitely better to state it fully, and then show that the evasion has
no form at all; but, on the contrary, powerfully argues the
inconsistency and incapacity of those who urge it. For instance, I
remember Boulanger, a French infidel, whose work was duly translated by
a Scotchman, answers it thus: What is there miraculous in all this? he
demands. Listen to me, and I will show you in two minutes that it rests
upon mere show and pure delusion. How is it, why is it, that the Jews
have remained a separate people? Simply from their usages, in the first
place; but, secondly, still more from the fact that these usages, which
with other peoples exist also in some representative shape, with _them_
modify themselves, shift, alter, adapt themselves to the climate or to
the humour or accidents of life amongst those amidst whom chance has
thrown them; whereas amongst the Jews every custom, the most trivial, is
also part of their legislation; and their legislation is also their
religion. (Boulanger, by the way, is far from expressing that objection
so clearly as I have here done; but this is his drift and purpose, so
far as he knew how to express it.) Take any other people--Isaurians,
Athenians, Romans, Corinthians--doubtless all these and many others have
transmitted their blood down to our ages, and are now living amongst us
by representation. But why do we not perceive this? Why do the Athenians
seem to have perished utterly? Simply for this reason: they were a
plastic, yielding, unobstinate race. An Athenian lived in a port of
Italy, married an Italian woman; thence threw out lines of descent to
Milan, thence to Paris; and because his Attic usages were all local,
epichorial, and tied to a particular mythology which has given way, or
to a superstition which is defunct, or to a patriotic remembrance which
has vanished with the land and the sympathy that supported it; hence,
and upon other similar arguments, the Athenian has long since melted
into the mass with which he was intermixed; he was a unit attached to a
vast overpowering number from another source, and into that number he
has long since been absorbed; he was a drop in a vast ocean, and long
ago he has been confounded with the waters that did not differ, except
numerically, from his own. But the Jews are an obstinate, bigoted
people; and they have maintained their separation, not by any overruling
or coercing miracle, but in a way perfectly obvious and palpable to
themselves--obvious by its operation, obvious in its remedy. They would
not resign their customs. Upon these ordinances, positive and negative,
commanding and forbidding many peculiar rites, consecrating and
desecrating many common esculent articles, these Jews have laid the
stress and emphasis of religion. They would not resign them; they did
not expect others to adopt them--not in any case; _à fortiori_ not from
a degraded people. And hence, not by any mysterious operation of
Providential control, arose their separation, their resolute refusal to
blend with other races.
This is the infidel's attempt to rebut, to defeat, utterly to confound,
the argumentative force of this most astonishing amongst all historical
pictures that the planet presents.
The following is the answer:
It is forgotten that along with the Jews there is another people
concerned as illustrations of the same prophetic fatality--of that same
inevitable eye, that same perspective of vision, which belonged to those
whose eyes God had opened. The Arabs, as children of a common ancestor,
ought not to be forgotten in this sentence upon their brother nation.
They through Ishmael, the Jews through Isaac, and more immediately
through Israel the son of Isaac, were two diverging branches of one
original stem; and to both was pronounced a corresponding doom--a
sentence which argued in both a principle of duration and
self-propagation, that is memorable in any race. The children of Ishmael
are the Arabs of the desert. Their destiny as a roving robber nation,
and liable to all men's hands, as they indifferently levied spoil on
all, was early pronounced. And here, again, we see at once how it will
be evaded: it is the desert, it is the climate, it is the solemnity of
that unchanging basis, which will secure the unchanging life of its
children. But it is remarkable enough that Gibbon and other infidels,
kicking violently against this standing miracle (because, if not so in
itself, yet, according to Bishop Butler's just explanation concerning
miraculous _per de_-_rivationem_ as recording a miraculous power of
vision), have by oscillation clung to the fixture of basis, and rejected
it; for now Gibbon denies that the Arabs have held this constant tenor
of life; they have changed it, he asserts, in large and notorious cases.
Well, then, if they have, then at once falls to the ground this alleged
overruling coercion _a priori_ of the climate and the desert. Climate
and desert do not necessarily coerce them, if in large and notorious
cases they have failed to do so. So feels Gibbon; and, by an instinct of
timidity, back he flies to the previous evasion--to the natural
controlling power of climate and soil, admitting the Scriptural fact,
but seeking for it an unscriptural ground, as before he had flown in
over-precipitate anxiety to the denial of the Scriptural fact, but in
that denial involving a withdrawal of the unscriptural ground.
The sceptics in that instance show their secret sense of a preference
from the distracted eagerness with which they fly backwards and
forwardwise between two reciprocally hostile evasions.
The answer I reserve, and meantime I remark:
Secondly, that, supposing this answer to have any force, still it meets
only one moiety of the Scriptural fatality; viz., the dispersion of the
Jews--the fact that, let them be gathered in what numbers they might,
let them even be concentrated by millions, therefore in the literal
sense _not_ dispersed, yet in the political sense universally
understood, they would be dispersed, because never, in no instance,
rising to be a people, _sui juris_, a nation, a distinct community,
known to the public law of Europe as having the rights of peace and war,
but always a mere accident and vagrant excess amongst nations, not
having the bare rights of citizenship; so far from being a nation, not
being an acknowledged member of any nation. This exquisite
dispersion--not ethnographic only, but political--is that half of the
Scriptural malediction which the Boulanger answer attempts to meet; but
the other half--that they should be 'a byword, an astonishment,'
etc.--is entirely blinked. Had the work even prospered, it would still
have to recommence. The Armenians are dispersed through all Eastern
lands, so are the Arabs; even the descendants of Ali are found severed
from their natal soil; but they are not therefore dispersed: they have
endured no general indignities.
Thirdly, it does not meet the fact of the Jewish _existence_ in any
shape, whether as a distinct or an amalgamated people. There is no doubt
that many races of men, as of brute animals, have been utterly
extinguished. In cases such as those of the Emim, or Rethinim, a race
distinguished by peculiar size, so as to be monstrous in comparison with
other men, this extinction could more readily be realized; or in the
case of a nation marked, as Herodotus records, by a slighter texture of
scale, the extinction might be ascertained by the physiologist; but no
doubt it has often occurred, precisely as a family is extinguished, or
as certain trees (for example, the true golden pippin) are observed to
die off, not by local influences only, but by a decay attacking the very
principle of their existence. Of many ancient races it is probable
enough that no blood directly traced from them could at this day be
searched by the eye of God. Families arise amongst the royal lineage of
Europe that suddenly, like a lamp fitfully glowing up just the moment
before it expires, throw off, as by some final effort, a numerous
generation of princes and princesses; then suddenly all contract as
rapidly into a single child, which perishing, the family is absolutely
extinct. And so must many nations have perished, and so must the Jews
have been pre-eminently exposed to perish, from the peculiar, fierce,
and almost immortal, persecutions which they have undergone, and the
horrid frenzies of excited mobs in cruel cities of which they have stood
the brunt.
_VIII. 'WHAT IS TRUTH?' THE JESTING PILATE SAID--A FALSE GLOSS._
It is true that Pilate could not be expected fully to comprehend an idea
which was yet new to man; Christ's words were beyond his depth. But,
still, his natural light would guide him thus far--that, although he had
never heard of any truth which rose to that distinction, still, if any
one class of truth should in future come to eclipse all other classes of
truth immeasurably, as regarded its practical results, as regarded some
dark dependency of human interests, in that case it would certainly
merit the distinctive name of 'The Truth.' The case in which such a
distinction would become reasonable and available was one utterly
unrealized to his experience, not even within the light of his
conjectures as to its special conditions; but, still, as a general
possibility it was conceivable to his understanding; though not
comprehensible, yet apprehensible. And in going on to the next great
question, to the inevitable question, 'What _is_ the truth?' Pilate had
no thought of jesting. Jesting was the last thing of which his
impassioned mood in that great hour was capable. Roman magistrates of
supreme rank were little disposed to jesting on the judgment-seat
amongst a refractory and dangerous people; and of Pilate in particular,
every word, every effort, every act, demonstrate that he was agitated
with new instincts and misgivings of some shadowy revelation opening
upon man, that his heart was convulsed with desponding anxiety in the
first place to save the man who appeared the depositary of this
revelation, but who, if, after all, only a sublime lunatic, was, at the
very least, innocent of all offence. It must have struck all close
observers of early Christianity how large a proportion of the new
converts lay amongst Roman officers, or (to speak more adequately)
amongst Romans of high rank, both men and women. And for that there was
high reason. In the advance of civilization, and in the corresponding
decay of idolatrous religions, there was fast arising a new growth of
cravings amongst men. Mythological and desperately immoral religions,
that spoke only to the blind sense of power, had been giving way through
the three previous centuries to a fearful extent. They had receded from
the higher natures of both Greece and Rome as the sea has locally
receded from many shores of the earth. Such natures were left 'miserably
bare'; the sense of dependency by any tie upon the invisible world, or
at least upon the supernatural world, had decayed, and unless this
painful void were filled up by some supplementary bond in the same
direction, a condition of practical atheism must take place, such as
could not but starve and impoverish in human nature those yearnings
after the infinite which are the pledges of all internal grandeur. But
this dependency could not be replaced by one of the same vicious nature.
Into any new dependency a new element must be introduced. The sense of
insufficiency would be renewed in triple strength if merely the old
relations of weakness to power, of art to greater art, of intellect to
higher intellect, of less to more within the same exact limits as to
kind of excellence, should be rehearsed under new names or improved
theogonies. Hitherto, no relation of man to divine or demoniac powers
had included the least particle or fraction or hint of any moral
element; nor was such an element possible in that dependency, for
profound reasons.
_IX. WHAT SCALIGER SAYS ABOUT THE EPISTLE TO JUDE._
Before any canon was settled, many works had become current in Christian
circles whose origin was dubious. The traditions about them varied
locally. Some, it is alleged, that would really have been entitled to a
canonical place, had been lost by accident; to some, which still
survived, this place had been refused upon grounds that might not have
satisfied _us_ of this day, if we had the books and the grounds of
rejection before us; and, finally, others, it is urged, have obtained
this sacred distinction with no right to it. In particular, the Second
Epistle of St. Peter, the Second of St. Jude, the Epistle of St. James,
and the three of St. John, are denounced as supposititious in the
'Scaligerana.' But the writer before us is wrong in laying any stress on
the opinions there expressed. They bear the marks of conversational
haste and of Scaligeran audacity. What is the objection made, for
instance, to 'in quibus sunt mira, quæ non _videntur_ esse Apostolica'?
_That_ is itself more strange as a criticism than anything in the
epistles _can_ be for its doctrine. The only thing tending to a reason
for the summary treatment is that the Eastern Church does not
acknowledge them for canonical. But opinions quoted from _ana_ are
seldom of any authority; indeed, I have myself too frequently seen the
unfaithfulness of such reports. The reporter, as he cannot decently be
taking notes at the time of speaking, endeavours afterwards to recall
the most interesting passages by memory. He forgets the context; what
introduced--what followed to explain or modify the opinions. He supplies
a conjectural context of his own, and the result is a romance. But if
the reporter were even accurate, so much allowance must be made for the
license of conversation--its ardour, its hurry, and its frequent
playfulness--that when all these deductions are made, really not a
fraction remains that one can honestly carry to account. Besides, the
elder Scaliger was drunk pretty often, and Joe seems rather 'fresh' at
times.
Upon consideration, it may be as well to repeat what it is that Scaliger
is reported to have said:
'The Epistle of Jude is not _his_, as neither is that of James, nor the
_second_ of Peter, in all which are strange things that seem (seem--mark
that!) far enough from being Apostolical. The three Epistles of John are
not from John the Apostle. The second of Peter and Jude belong to a
later age. The Eastern Church does not own them, neither are they of
evangelical authority. They are unlearned, and offer no marks of Gospel
majesty. As regards their internal value, believe them I may say that I
do, but it is because they are in no ways hostile to _us_.'
Now, observe, the grounds of objection are purely æsthetical, except in
the single argument from the authority of the Eastern Church. What does
he mean by 'unlearned,' or wanting 'majesty,' or containing 'strange
things'? Were ever such vague puerilities collected into one short
paragraph? This is pure impertinence, and _Phil_. deserves to be
privately reprimanded for quoting such windy chaff without noting and
protesting it as colloquial. But what I wish the reader to mark--the
[Greek: tho hepimhythion]--is, that suppose the two Scaligers amongst
the Christian Fathers engaged in fixing the canon: greater learning you
cannot have; neither was there, to a dead certainty, one tenth part as
much amongst the canon-settlers. Yet all this marvellous learning fumes
away in boyish impertinence. It confounds itself. And every Christian
says, Oh, take away this superfluous weight of erudition, that, being so
rare a thing, cannot be wanted in the broad highways of religion. What
we _do_ want is humility, docility, reverence for God, and love for man.
These are sown broadcast amongst human hearts. Now, these apply
themselves to the _sense_ of Scripture, not to its grammatical niceties.
But if so, even that case shows indirectly how little could depend upon
the mere verbal attire of the Bible, when the chief masters of verbal
science were so ready to go astray--riding on the billows so imperfectly
moored. In the _ideas_ of Scripture lies its eternal anchorage, not in
its perishable words, which are shifting for ever like quicksands, as
the Bible passes by translation successively into every spoken language
of the earth.
What then?--'What then?' retorts the angry reader after all this, 'why
then, perhaps, there may be a screw loose in the Bible.' True, there
may, and what is more, some very great scholars take upon them to assert
that there is. Yet, still, what then? The two possible errors open to
the Fathers of our canon, to the men upon whom rested the weighty task
of saying to all mankind what should be Bible, and what should be _not_
Bible, of making and limiting that mighty world, are--that they may
have done that which they ought _not_ to have done, and, secondly, left
undone that which they ought to have done. They may have admitted
writers whom they ought to have excluded; and they may have excluded
writers whom they ought to have admitted. This is the extent of their
possible offences, and they are supposed by some critics to have
committed both. But suppose that they _have_, still I say--what then?
What is the nature of the wrong done to us by the worst mistake ascribed
to them? Let us consider. It is supposed by some scholars that we have
in the New Testament as it now stands a work written by Apollos, viz.,
the Epistle to the Romans. Yet, if so, the error amounts only to a
misnomer. On the other hand, there are Epistles on which has been
charged the same error in relation to the name of the author, and the
more important error of thoughts unbecoming to a Christian in authority:
for instance, the Epistle of St. James. This charge was chiefly urged by
a very intemperate man, and in a very intemperate style. I notice it as
being a case which _Phil_. has noticed. But _Phil_. merits a gentle rap
on his knuckles for the inconsideration with which he has cited a charge
made and reported with so much levity. He quotes it from the
'Scaligerana.' Now, what right upon such a subject has any man to quote
such an authority? The reasons against listening with much attention to
the 'Scaligerana' are these:
First, the Scaligers, both father and son, were the two most impudent
men that ever walked the planet. I should be loath to say so ill-natured
a thing as that their impudence was equal to their learning, because
that forces every man to say, 'Ah, then, what impudent fellows they
must have been!' It is kinder and juster to say that their learning was
at least equal to their impudence, for _that_ will force every man to
exclaim, 'Ah, if so, what prodigies of learning they must have been!'
Yes, they were--absolute monsters of learning, learned monsters. But as
much learning often makes men mad, still more frequently it makes them
furious for assault and battery; to use the American phrase, they grow
'wolfy about the shoulders,' from a periodical itchiness for fighting.
Other men being shy of attacking the Scaligers, it was no fault of
theirs, you know, but a necessity, to attack other men--unless you
expected them to have no fighting at all. It was always a reason with
_them_ for trying a fall with a writer, if they doubted much whether
they had any excuse for hanging a quarrel on.
Secondly, all _ana_ whatever are bad authorities. Supposing the thing
really said, we are to remember the huge privilege of conversation, how
immeasurable is that! You yourself, reader, I presume, when talking,
will say more in an hour than you will stand to in a month. I'm sure _I_
do. When the reins are put into my hands I stick at nothing--headlong I
drive like a lunatic, until the very room in which we are talking, with
all that it inherits, seems to spin round with absolute vertigo at the
extravagances I utter.
Thirdly, but again, was the thing really said? For, as another censure
upon the whole library of _ana_, I can assert--that, if the license of
conversation is enormous, to that people who inhale that gas of
colloquial fermentation seldom mean much above one part in sixty of what
they say, on the other hand the license of reporters is far greater. To
forget the circumstances under which a thing was said is to alter the
thing, to have lost the context, the particular remark in which your
own originated, the mitigations of a harsh sentiment from playfulness of
manner; in short, to drop the _setting_ of the thoughts is oftentimes to
falsify the tendency and value of those thoughts.
NOTE BY THE EDITOR.--The _Phil_. here referred to is the
_Philoleutheros Anglicanus_ of the essay on 'Protestantism,' as
shortened by De Quincey, and with whom De Quincey, in that essay,
deals very effectively and wittily on occasion.
_X. MURDER AS A FINE ART._
(SOME NOTES FOR A NEW PAPER.)
A new paper on Murder as a Fine Art might open thus: that on the model
of those Gentlemen Radicals who had voted a monument to Palmer, etc., it
was proposed to erect statues to such murderers as should by their
next-of-kin, or other person interested in their glory, make out a claim
either of superior atrocity, or, in equal atrocity, of superior
neatness, continuity of execution, perfect preparation or felicitous
originality, smoothness or _curiosa felicitas_ (elaborate felicity). The
men who murdered the cat, as we read in the Newgate Calendar, were good,
but Williams better who murdered the baby. And perhaps (but the hellish
felicity of the last act makes us demur) Fielding was superior. For you
never hear of a fire swallowing up a fire, or a rain stopping a deluge
(for this would be a reign of Kilkenny cats); but what fire, deluge, or
Kilkenny cats could not do, Fielding proposed, viz., to murder the
murderers, to become himself the Nemesis. Fielding was the murderer of
murderers in a double sense--rhetorical and literal. But that was, after
all, a small matter compared with the fine art of the man calling
himself Outis, on which for a moment we must dwell. Outis--so at all
events he was called, but doubtless he indulged in many aliases--at
Nottingham joined vehemently and sincerely, as it seemed, in pursuit of
a wretch taxed with having murdered, twelve years previously, a wife and
two children at Halifax, which wretch (when all the depositions were
before the magistrate) turned out to be the aforesaid Mr. Outis. That
suggests a wide field of speculation and reference.[9]
Note the power of murderers as fine-art professors to make a new start,
to turn the corner, to retreat upon the road they have come, as though
it were new to them, and to make diversions that disarm suspicion. This
they owe to fortunate obscurity, which attests anew the wonderful
compensations of life; for celebrity and power combine to produce
drawbacks.
A foreigner who lands in Calcutta at an hour which nobody can name, and
endeavours to effect a sneaking entrance at the postern-gate[10] of the
governor-general's palace, _may_ be a decent man; but this we know, that
he has cut the towing-rope which bound his own boat to the great ark of
his country. It may be that, in leaving Paris or Naples, he was simply
cutting the connection with creditors who showed signs of _attachment_
not good for his health. But it may also be that he ran away by the
blaze of a burning inn, which he had fired in order to hide three
throats which he had cut, and nine purses which he had stolen. There is
no guarantee for such a man's character. Have we, then, no such
_vauriens_ at home? No, not in the classes standing favourably for
promotion. The privilege of safe criminality, not liable to exposure, is
limited to classes crowded together like leaves in Vallombrosa; for
_them_ to run away into some mighty city, Manchester or Glasgow, is to
commence life anew. They turn over a new leaf with a vengeance. Many are
the carpenters, bricklayers, bakers' apprentices, etc., who are now
living decently in Bristol, Newcastle, Hull, Liverpool, after marrying
sixteen wives, and leaving families to the care of twelve separate
parishes. That scamp is at this moment circulating and gyrating in
society, like a respectable _te-totum_, though we know not his exact
name, who, if he were pleased to reveal himself in seventeen parts of
this kingdom, where (to use the police language) he has been 'wanted'
for some years, would be hanged seventeen times running, besides putting
seventeen Government rewards into the pockets of seventeen policemen.
Oh, reader, you little know the unutterable romances perpetrated for
ever in our most populous empire, under cloud of night and distance and
utter poverty, Mark _that_--of utter poverty. Wealth is power; but it is
a jest in comparison of poverty. Splendour is power; but it is a joke to
obscurity. To be poor, to be obscure, to be a baker's apprentice or a
tailor's journeyman, throws a power about a man, clothes him with
attributes of ubiquity, _really_ with those privileges of concealment
which in the ring of Gyges were but fabulous. Is it a king, is it a
sultan, that such a man rivals? Oh, friend, he rivals a spiritual power.
Two men are on record, perhaps many more _might_ have been on that
record, who wrote so many books, and perpetrated so many pamphlets, that
at fifty they had forgotten much of their own literary villainies, and
at sixty they commenced with murderous ferocity a series of answers to
arguments which it was proved upon them afterwards that they themselves
had emitted at thirty--thus coming round with volleys of small shot on
their own heads, as the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul's begins to
retaliate any secrets you have committed to its keeping in echoing
thunders after a time, or as Sir John Mandeville under Arctic skies
heard in May all those curses thawing, and exploding like minute-guns,
which had been frozen up in November. Even like those self-replying
authors, even like those self-reverberators in St. Paul's, even like
those Arctic practitioners in cursing, who drew bills and _post obits_
in malediction, which were to be honoured after the death of winter,
many men are living at this moment in merry England who have figured in
so many characters, illustrated so many villages, run away from so many
towns, and performed the central part in so many careers, that were the
character, the village, the town, the career, brought back with all its
circumstances to their memories, positively they would fail to recognise
their own presence or incarnation in their own acts and bodies.
We have all read the story told by Addison of a sultan, who was
persuaded by a dervish to dip his head into a basin of enchanted water,
and thereupon found himself upon some other globe, a son in a poor
man's family, married after certain years the woman of his heart, had a
family of seven children whom he painfully brought up, went afterwards
through many persecutions, walked pensively by the seashore meditating
some escape from his miseries, bathed in the sea as a relief from the
noon-day heat, and on lifting up his head from the waves found himself
lifting up his head from the basin into which that cursed dervish had
persuaded him to dip. And when he would have cudgelled the holy man for
that long life of misery which had, through _his_ means, been inflicted
upon himself, behold! the holy man proved by affidavit that, in this
world, at any rate (where only he could be punishable), the life had
lasted but thirty-three seconds. Even so do the dark careers of many
amongst our obscure and migratory villains from years shrink up to
momentary specks, or, by their very multitude, altogether evanesce.
Burke and Hare, it is well known, had lost all count of their several
murders; they no more remembered, or could attempt to remember, their
separate victims, than a respectable old banker of seventy-three can
remember all the bills with their indorsements made payable for
half-a-century at his bank; or than Foote's turnpike-keeper, who had
kept all the toll-bar tickets to Kensington for forty-eight years,
pretended to recollect the features of all the men who had delivered
them at his gate. For a time, perhaps, Burke (who was a man of fine
sensibility) had a representative vision of spasms, and struggles, and
convulsions, terminating in a ten-pound note indorsed by Dr. ----. Hare,
on the other hand, was a man of principle, a man that you could depend
upon--order a corpse for Friday, and on Friday you had it--but he had
no feeling whatever. Yet see the unity of result for him and Burke. For
both alike all troublesome recollections gathered into one blue haze of
heavenly abstractions: orders executed with fidelity, cheques on the
bankers to be crossed and passed and cashed, are no more remembered.
That is the acme of perfection in our art.
* * * * *
One great class of criminals I am aware of in past times as having
specially tormented myself--the class who have left secrets, riddles,
behind them. What business has any man to bequeath a conundrum to all
posterity, unless he leaves in some separate channel the solution? This
must have been done in malice, and for the purpose of annoying us, lest
we should have too much proper enjoyment of life when he should have
gone. For nobody knows whether the scoundrel could have solved it
himself--too like in that respect to some charades which, in my boyish
days (but then I had the excuse of youth, which they had not), I not
unfrequently propounded to young ladies. Take this as a specimen: My
first raises a little hope; my second very little indeed; and my whole
is a vast roar of despair. No young lady could ever solve it; neither
could I. We all had to give it up. A charade that only needs an answer,
which, perhaps, some distant generation may supply, is but a half and
half, tentative approach to this. Very much of this nature was the
genius or Daimon (don't say _De_mon) of Socrates. How many thousands of
learned writers and printers have gone to sleep over too profound
attempts to solve _that_, which Socrates ought to have been able to
solve at sight. I am myself of opinion that it was a dram-bottle, which
someone raised a ghost to explain. Then the Entelecheia of Aristotle;
did you ever read about that, excellent reader? Most people fancy it to
have meant some unutterable crotchet in metaphysics, some horrible idea
(lest the police should be after it) without a name; that is, until the
Stagyrite repaired the injustice of his conduct by giving it a pretty
long one. My opinion now, as you are anxious to know it, is, that it was
a lady, a sweetheart of Aristotle's; for what was to hinder Aristotle
having a sweetheart? I dare say Thomas Aquinas, dry and arid as he was,
raised his unprincipled eyes to some Neapolitan beauty, began a sonnet
to some lady's eyebrow, though he might forget to finish it. And my
belief is that this lady, ambitious as Semele, wished to be introduced
as an eternal jewel into the great vault of her lover's immortal
Philosophy, which was to travel much farther and agitate far longer than
his royal pupil's conquests. Upon that Aristotle, keeping her hand,
said: 'My love, I'll think of it.' And then it occurred to him, that in
the very heavens many lovely ladies, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Ariadne,
etc., had been placed as constellations in that map which many
chronologists suppose to have been prepared for the use of the ship
_Argo_, a whole generation before the Trojan war. Berenice, though he
could not be aware of _that_, had interest even to procure a place in
that map for her ringlets; and of course for herself she might have.
Considering which, Aristotle said: 'Hang me! if I don't put her among
the ten Categories!' On after thoughts he put her higher, for an
Entelecheia is as much above a Category as our Padishah Victoria is
above a Turkish sultan. 'But now, Stag,' said the lady (privileged as a
sweetheart she called him _Stag_, though everybody else was obliged to
call him Stagyrite), 'how will they know it's meant for me, Stag?' Upon
which I am sorry to say the philosopher fell to cursing and swearing,
bestowing blessings on his own optics and on posterity's, meaning yours
and mine, saying: 'Let them find it out.' Well, now, you see I _have_
found it out. But that is more than I hope for my crypto-criminals, and
therefore I take this my only way of giving them celebration and
malediction in one breath.