"This opens upon us an ampler view in which the subject deserves
to be considered, and a relation still more direct and close
between the Christian religion and the passion of love. What is
the distinguishing character of Hebrew literature, which
separates it by so broad a line of demarcation from that of
every ancient people? Undoubtedly the sentiment of _erotic
devotion_ which pervades it. Their poets never represent the
Deity as an impassive principle, a mere organizing intellect,
removed at infinite distance from human hopes and fears. He is
for them a being of like passions with themselves,[41]
_requiring heart for heart, and capable of inspiring affection
because capable of feeling and returning it_. Awful indeed are
the thunders of his utterance and the clouds that surround his
dwelling-place; very terrible is the vengeance he executes on
the nations that forget him: but to his chosen people, and
especially to the men 'after his own heart,' whom he anoints
from the midst of them, his 'still, small voice' speaks in
sympathy and loving-kindness. Every Hebrew, while his breast
glowed with patriotic enthusiasm at those promises, which he
shared as one of the favored race, had a yet deeper source of
emotion, from which gushed perpetually the aspirations of prayer
and thanksgiving. He might consider himself alone in the
presence of his God; the single being to whom a great revelation
had been made, and over whose head an 'exceeding weight of
glory' was suspended. For him the rocks of Horeb had trembled,
and the waters of the Red Sea were parted in their course. The
word given on Sinai with such solemn pomp of ministration was
given to his own individual soul, and brought him into immediate
communion with his Creator. That awful Being could never be put
away from him. He was about his path, and about his bed, and
knew all his thoughts long before. _Yet this tremendous,
enclosing presence was a presence of love. It was a manifold,
everlasting manifestation of one deep feeling--a desire for
human affection._[42] Such a belief, while it enlisted even
pride and self-interest on the side of piety, had a direct
tendency to excite the best passions of our nature. Love is not
long asked in vain from generous dispositions. A Being, never
absent, but standing beside the life of each man with ever
watchful tenderness, and recognized, though invisible, in every
blessing that befell them from youth to age, became naturally
the object of their warmest affections. Their belief in him
could not exist without producing, as a necessary effect, that
profound impression _of passionate individual attachment_ which
in the Hebrew authors always mingles with and vivifies their
faith in the Invisible. All the books of the Old Testament are
breathed upon by this breath of life. Especially is it to be
found in that beautiful collection, entitled the Psalms of
David, which remains, after some thousand years, perhaps the
most perfect form in which the religious sentiment of man has
been embodied.
[41] "An unfortunate reference (Acts xiv. 15), for the apostle's
declaration is, that he and his brethren were of 'like
passions" (James v. 17);--liable to the same imperfections
and mutations of thought and feeling as other men, and as
the Lystrans supposed their gods to be; while the God
proclaimed by him to them is not so. And _that_ God is the
God of the Jews as well as of the Christians; for there is
but _one_ God. Hallam's thought is an important and just
one, but not developed with his usual nice accuracy."
For this note, as for much else, I am indebted to my father,
whose powers of compressed thought I wish I had inherited.
[42] Abraham "was called the friend of God;" "with him (Moses)
will I (Jehovah) speak mouth to mouth, even
apparently,"--"as a man to his friend;" David was "a man
after mine own heart."
"But what is true of Judaism is yet more true of Christianity:
'_matre pulchra filia pulchrior_.' In addition to all the
characters of Hebrew Monotheism, _there exists in the doctrine
of the Cross a peculiar and inexhaustible treasure for the
affectionate feelings_. The idea of the {Theanthropos}, the God
whose goings forth have been from everlasting, yet visible to
men for their redemption as an earthly, temporal creature,
living, acting, and suffering among themselves, then (which is
yet more important) transferring to the unseen place of his
spiritual agency the same humanity he wore on earth, so that the
lapse of generations can in no way affect the conception of his
identity; this is the most powerful thought that ever addressed
itself to a human imagination. It is the {pou sto}, which alone
was wanted to move the world. Here was solved at once the great
problem which so long had distressed the teachers of mankind,
how to make _virtue the object of passion_, and to secure at
once the warmest enthusiasm in the heart with the clearest
perception of right and wrong in the understanding. The
character of the blessed Founder of our faith became an abstract
of morality to determine the judgment, _while at the same time
it remained personal, and liable to love_. The written word and
established church prevented a degeneration into ungoverned
mysticism, but the predominant principle of vital religion
always remained that of self-sacrifice to the Saviour. Not only
the higher divisions of moral duties, but the simple, primary
impulses of benevolence, were subordinated to this new absorbing
passion. The world was loved 'in Christ alone.' The brethren
were members of his mystical body. All the other bonds that had
fastened down the spirit of the universe to our narrow round of
earth were as nothing in comparison to this golden chain of
suffering and self-sacrifice, which at once riveted the heart of
man to one who, like himself, was acquainted with grief. _Pain
is the deepest thing we have_ in our nature, and union through
pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any
other."[43]
[43] This is the passage referred to in Henry Taylor's delightful
_Notes from Life_ ("Essay on Wisdom"):--
"Fear, indeed, is the mother of foresight: spiritual fear,
of a foresight that reaches beyond the grave; temporal fear,
of a foresight that falls short; but without fear there is
neither the one foresight nor the other; and as pain has
been truly said to be 'the deepest thing in our nature,' so
is it fear that will bring the depths of our nature within
our knowledge. A great capacity of _suffering_ belongs to
genius; and it has been observed that an alternation of
joyfulness and dejection is quite as characteristic of the
man of genius as intensity in either kind." In his _Notes
from Books_, p. 216, he recurs to it:--"'Pain,' says a
writer whose early death will not prevent his being long
remembered, 'pain is the deepest thing that we have in our
nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real
and more holy than any other.'"
There is a sad pleasure,--_non ingrata amaritudo_, and a sort of
meditative tenderness, in contemplating the little life of this "dear
youth," and in letting the mind rest upon these his earnest thoughts; to
watch his keen and fearless, but child-like spirit, moving itself
aright--going straight onward "along the lines of limitless
desires"--throwing himself into the very deepest of the ways of God, and
striking out as a strong swimmer striketh out his hands to swim; to see
him "mewing his mighty youth, and kindling his undazzled eye at the
fountain itself of heavenly radiance:"
"Light intellectual, and full of love,
Love of true beauty, therefore full of joy,
Joy, every other sweetness far above."
It is good for every one to look upon such a sight, and as we look, to
love. We should all be the better for it; and should desire to be
thankful for, and to use aright a gift so good and perfect, coming down
as it does from above, from the Father of lights, in whom alone there is
no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
Thus it is, that to each one of us the death of Arthur Hallam--his
thoughts and affections--his views of God, of our relations to Him, of
duty, of the meaning and worth of this world, and the next,--where he
now is, have an individual significance. He is bound up in our bundle of
life; we must be the better or the worse of having known what manner of
man he was; and in a sense less peculiar, but not less true, each of us
may say,
----"The tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."
----"O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!"
"God gives us love! Something to love
He lends us; but when love is grown
To ripeness, that on which it throve
Falls off, and love is left alone:
"This is the curse of time. Alas!
In grief we are not all unlearned;
Once, through our own doors Death did pass;
One went, who never hath returned.
"This star
Rose with us, through a little arc
Of heaven, nor having wandered far,
Shot on the sudden into dark.
"Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace;
Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul,
While the stars burn, the moons increase,
And the great ages onward roll.
"Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet,
Nothing comes to thee new or strange,
Sleep, full of rest from head to feet;
Lie still, dry dust, secure of change."
_Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella._--Go in peace, soul beautiful and
blessed.
"O man greatly beloved, go thou thy way till the end, for thou shalt
rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days."--DANIEL.
* * * * *
"Lord, I have viewed this world over, in which thou hast set me; I have
tried how this and that thing will fit my spirit, and the design of my
creation, and can find nothing on which to rest, for nothing here doth
itself rest, but such things as please me for a while, in some degree,
vanish and flee as shadows from before me. Lo! I come to Thee--the
Eternal Being--the Spring of Life--the Centre of rest--the Stay of the
Creation--the Fulness of all things. I join myself to Thee; with Thee I
will lead my life, and spend my days, with whom I aim to dwell forever,
expecting, when my little time is over, to be taken up ere long into thy
eternity."--JOHN HOWE, _The Vanity of Man as Mortal_.
_Necesse est tanquam immaturam mortem ejus defleam: si tamen fas est aut
flere, aut omnino mortem vocare, qua tanti juvenis mortalitas magis
finita quam vita est. Vivit enim, vivetque semper, atque etiam latius in
memoria hominum et sermone versabitur, postquam ab oculis recessit._
* * * * *
The above notice was published in 1851. On sending to Mr. Hallam a copy
of the _Review_ in which it appeared, I expressed my hope that he would
not be displeased by what I had done. I received the following kind and
beautiful reply:--
"WILTON CRESCENT, _Feb. 1, 1851._
"DEAR SIR,--It would be ungrateful in me to feel any displeasure
at so glowing an eulogy on my dear eldest son Arthur, though
after such a length of time, so unusual, as you have written in
the _North British Review_. I thank you, on the contrary, for
the strong language of admiration you have employed, though it
may expose me to applications for copies of the _Remains_, which
I have it not in my power to comply with. I was very desirous to
have lent you a copy, at your request, but you have succeeded
elsewhere.
"You are probably aware that I was prevented from doing this by
a great calamity, very similar in its circumstances to that I
had to deplore in 1833--the loss of another son, equal in
virtues, hardly inferior in abilities, to him whom you have
commemorated. This has been an unspeakable affliction to me, and
at my advanced age, seventy-three years, I can have no resource
but the hope, in God's mercy, of a reunion with them both. The
resemblance in their characters was striking, and I had often
reflected how wonderfully my first loss had been repaired by the
substitution, as it might be called, of one so closely
representing his brother. I send you a brief Memoir, drawn up by
two friends, with very little alteration of my own.--I am, Dear
Sir, faithfully yours, HENRY HALLAM.
"DR. BROWN,
"Edinburgh."
* * * * *
The following extracts, from the _Memoir of Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam_
mentioned above, which has been appended to a reprint of his brother's
_Remains_ (for private circulation), form a fitting close to this
memorial of these two brothers, who were "lovely and pleasant in their
lives," and are now by their deaths not divided:--
"But few months have elapsed since the pages of _In Memoriam_
recalled to the minds of many, and impressed on the hearts of
all who perused them, the melancholy circumstances attending the
sudden and early death of Arthur Henry Hallam, the eldest son of
Henry Hallam, Esq. Not many weeks ago the public journals
contained a short paragraph announcing the decease, under
circumstances equally distressing, and in some points remarkably
similar, of Henry Fitzmaurice, Mr. Hallam's younger and only
remaining son. No one of the very many who appreciate the
sterling value of Mr. Hallam's literary labors, and who feel a
consequent interest in the character of those who would have
sustained the eminence of an honorable name; no one who was
affected by the striking and tragic fatality of two such
successive bereavements, will deem an apology needed for this
short and imperfect Memoir.
"Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, the younger son of Henry Hallam,
Esq., was born on the 31st of August 1824; he took his second
name from his godfather, the Marquis of Lansdowne.... A habit of
reserve, which characterized him at all periods of life, but
which was compensated in the eyes of even his first companions
by a singular sweetness of temper, was produced and fostered by
the serious thoughtfulness ensuing upon early familiarity with
domestic sorrow.
"'He was gentle,' writes one of his earliest and closest
school-friends, 'retiring, thoughtful to pensiveness,
affectionate, without envy or jealousy, almost without
emulation, impressible, but not wanting in moral firmness. No
one was ever more formed for friendship. In all his words and
acts he was simple, straightforward, true. He was very
religious. Religion had a real effect upon his character, and
made him tranquil about great things, though he was so nervous
about little things.'
"He was called to the bar in Trinity Term, 1850, and became a
member of the Midland Circuit in the summer. Immediately
afterwards he joined his family in a tour on the Continent. They
had spent the early part of the autumn at Rome, and were
returning northwards, when he was attacked by a sudden and
severe illness, affecting the vital powers, and accompanied by
enfeebled circulation and general prostration of strength. He
was able, with difficulty, to reach Siena, where he sank rapidly
through exhaustion, and expired on Friday, October 25. It is to
be hoped that he did not experience any great or active
suffering. He was conscious nearly to the last, and met his
early death (of which his presentiments, for several years, had
been frequent and very singular) with calmness and fortitude.
There is reason to apprehend, from medical examination, that his
life would not have been of very long duration, even had this
unhappy illness not occurred. But for some years past his health
had been apparently much improved; and, secured as it seemed to
be by his unintermitted temperance, and by a carefulness in
regimen which his early feebleness of constitution had rendered
habitual, those to whom he was nearest and dearest had, in great
measure, ceased to regard him with anxiety. His remains were
brought to England, and he was interred, on December 23d, in
Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, by the side of his brother, his
sister, and his mother.
"For continuous and sustained thought he had an extraordinary
capacity, the bias of his mind being decidedly towards
analytical processes; a characteristic which was illustrated at
Cambridge by his uniform partiality for analysis, and
comparative distaste for the geometrical method, in his
mathematical studies. His early proneness to dwell upon the more
recondite departments of each science and branch of inquiry has
been alluded to above. It is not to be inferred that, as a
consequence of this tendency, he blinded himself, at any period
of his life, to the necessity and the duty of practical
exertion. He was always eager to act as well as speculate; and,
in this respect, his character preserved an unbroken consistency
and harmony from the epoch when, on commencing his residence at
Cambridge, he voluntarily became a teacher in a parish
Sunday-school, for the sake of applying his theories of
religious education, to the time when, on the point of setting
forth on his last fatal journey, he framed a plan of obtaining
access, in the ensuing winter, to a large commercial
establishment, in the view of familiarizing himself with the
actual course and minute detail of mercantile transactions.
"Insensibly and unconsciously he had made himself a large number
of friends in the last few years of his life: the painful
impression created by his death in the circle in which he
habitually moved, and even beyond it, was exceedingly
remarkable, both for its depth and extent. For those united with
him in a companionship more than ordinarily close, his
friendship had taken such a character as to have almost become a
necessity of existence. But it was upon his family that he
lavished all the wealth of his disposition--affection without
stint, gentleness never once at fault, considerateness reaching
to self-sacrifice:--
"Di cio si biasmi il debolo intelletto
E' l'parlar nostro, che non ha valore
Di ritrar tutto cio che dice amore.
H. S. M.
F. L."
_EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES._
{Proton chorton, eita stachyn, eita plere siton en to stachui}.
One of the chief sins of our time is hurry: it is helter-skelter, and
devil take the hind-most. Off we go all too swift at starting, and we
neither run so fast nor so far as we would have done, had we taken it
_cannily_ at first. This is true of a boy as well as of a blood colt.
Not only are boys and colts made to do the work and the running of
full-grown men and horses, but they are hurried out of themselves and
their _now_, and pushed into the middle of next week where nobody is
wanting them, and beyond which they frequently never get.
The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their
wholesome, their entire growth, for health is just the development of
the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the
blade--then the ear--then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear;
and thus, as Dr. Temple wisely says, "not to forget wisdom in teaching
knowledge." If the blade be forced, and usurp the capital it inherits;
if it be robbed by you its guardian of its birthright, or squandered
like a spendthrift, then there is not any ear, much less any corn; if
the blade be blasted or dwarfed in our haste and greed for the full
shock and its price, we spoil all three. It is not easy to keep this
always before one's mind, that the young "idea" is in a young body, and
that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be
cared for than what is vainly called accomplishment. We are preparing
him to run his race, and accomplish _that_ which is one of his chief
ends; but we are too apt to start him off at his full speed, and he
either bolts or breaks down--the worst thing for him generally being to
win. In this way a child or boy should be regarded much more as a mean
than as an end, and his cultivation should have reference to this; his
mind, as old Montaigne said, should be forged, as well as--indeed, I
would say, rather than--furnished, fed rather than filled,--two not
always coincident conditions. Now exercise--the joy of interest, of
origination, of activity, of excitement--the play of the
faculties,--this is the true life of a boy, not the accumulation of mere
words. Words--the coin of thought--unless as the means of buying
something else, are just as useless as other coin when it is hoarded;
and it is as silly, and in the true sense as much the part and lot of a
_miser_, to amass words for their own sakes, as to keep all your guineas
in a stocking and never spend them, but be satisfied with every now and
then looking greedily at them and making them chink. Therefore it is
that I dislike--as indeed who doesn't?--the cramming system. The great
thing with knowledge and the young is to secure that it shall be their
own--that it be not merely external to their inner and real self, but
shall go _in succum et sanguinem_; and therefore it is, that the
self-teaching that a baby and a child give themselves remains with them
forever--it is of their essence, whereas what is given them _ab extra_,
especially if it be received mechanically, without relish, and without
any energizing of the entire nature, remains pitifully useless and
_wersh_. Try, therefore, always to get the resident teacher _inside the
skin_, and who is forever giving his lessons, to help you and be on your
side.
Now in children, as we all know, _he_ works chiefly through the senses.
The quantity of accurate observation--of induction, and of deduction too
(both of a much better quality than most of Mr. Buckle's); of reasoning
from the known to the unknown; of inferring; the nicety of appreciation
of the like and the unlike, the common and the rare, the odd and the
even; the skill of the rough and the smooth--of form, of appearance, of
texture, of weight, of all the minute and deep philosophies of the touch
and of the other senses,--the amount of this sort of objective knowledge
which every child of eight years has acquired--especially if he can play
in the lap of nature and out of doors--and acquired for life, is, if we
could only think of it, marvellous beyond any of our mightiest marches
of intellect. Now, could we only get the knowledge of the school to go
as sweetly and deeply and clearly into the vitals of the mind as this
self-teaching has done, and this is the paradisiac way of it, we should
make the young mind grow as well as learn, and be in understanding a man
as well as in simplicity a child; we should get rid of much of that
dreary, sheer endurance of their school-hours--that stolid lending of
ears that do not hear--that objectless looking without ever once seeing,
and straining their minds without an aim; alternating, it may be, with
some feats of dexterity and effort, like a man trying to lift himself in
his own arms, or take his head in his teeth, exploits as dangerous, as
ungraceful, and as useless, except to glorify the showman and bring
wages in, as the feats of an acrobat.
But you will ask, how is all this to be avoided if everybody must know
how far the sun is from _Georgium Sidus_, and how much of phosphorus is
in our bones, and of ptyalin and flint in human spittle--besides some
10,000 times 10,000 other things which we must be told and try to
remember, and which we cannot prove not to be true, but which I decline
to say we _know_.
But _is_ it necessary that everybody should know everything? Is it not
much more to the purpose for every man, when his turn comes, to be able
to _do_ something; and I say, that other things being equal, a boy who
goes bird-nesting, and makes a collection of eggs, and knows all their
colors and spots, going through the excitements and glories of getting
them, and observing everything with a keenness, an intensity, an
exactness, and a permanency, which only youth and a quick pulse, and
fresh blood and spirits combined, can achieve,--a boy who teaches
himself natural history in this way, is not only a healthier and happier
boy, but is abler in mind and body for entering upon the great game of
life, than the pale, nervous, bright-eyed, feverish, "interesting" boy,
with a big head and a small bottom and thin legs, who is the "captain,"
the miracle of the school; dux for his brief year or two of glory, and,
_if he live_, booby for life. I am, of course, not going in for a
complete _curriculum_ of general ignorance; but I am for calling the
attention of teachers to drawing out the minds, the energies, the hearts
of their pupils through their senses, as well as pouring in through
these same apertures the general knowledge of mankind, the capital of
the race, into this one small being, who it is to be hoped will contrive
to forget much of the mere words he has unhappily learned.
For we may say of our time in all seriousness, what Sydney Smith said in
the fulness of his wisdom and his fun, of the pantologic master of
Trinity--Science is our _forte_; omniscience is our _foible_. There is
the seed of a whole treatise, a whole organon in this joke; think over
it, and let it simmer in your mind, and you will feel its significance
and its power. Now, what is _science_ so called to every 999 men in
1000, but something that the one man tells them he has been told by some
one else--who may be one among say 50,000--is true, but of the truth of
which these 999 men (and probably even the teaching thousandth man) can
have no direct test, and, accordingly, for the truth or falsehood of
which they, by a law of their nature, which rejects what has no savor
and is superfluous, don't care one fig. How much better, how much
dearer, and more precious in a double sense, because it has been bought
by themselves,--how much nobler is the knowledge which our little
friend, young Edward Forbes, "that marvellous boy," for instance--and
what an instance!--is picking up, as he looks into everything he sees,
and takes photographs upon his retina--the _camera lucida_ of his
mind--which never fade, of every midge that washes its face as a cat
does, and preens its wings, every lady-bird that alights on his knee,
and folds and unfolds her gauzy pinions under their spotted and glorious
lids. How more real is not only this knowledge, but this little
knowledger in his entire nature, than the poor being who can maunder
amazingly the entire circle of human science at second, or it may be,
twentieth hand!
There are some admirable, though cursory remarks on "Ornithology as a
Branch of Liberal Education," by the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, the
great Greek scholar, in a pamphlet bearing this title, which he read as
a paper before the last meeting of the British Association in Aberdeen.
It is not only interesting as a piece of natural history, and a touching
cooeperation of father and son in the same field--the one on the banks of
his own beautiful Dee and among the wilds of the Grampians, the other
among the Himalayas and the forests of Cashmere; the son having been
enabled, by the knowledge of his native birds got under his father's
eye, when placed in an unknown country to recognize his old feathered
friends, and to make new ones and tell their story; it is also valuable
as coming from a man of enormous scholarship and knowledge--the most
learned physician of his time--who knew Aristotle and Plato, and all
those old fellows, as we know Maunder or Lardner--a hard-working country
surgeon, who was ready to run at any one's call--but who did not despise
the modern enlightenments of his profession, because they were not in
Paulus Agineta; though, at the same time, he did not despise the
admirable and industrious Paul because he was not up to the last
doctrine of the nucleated cell, or did not read his Hippocrates by the
blaze of Paraffine; a man greedy of all knowledge, and welcoming it from
all comers, but who, at the end of a long life of toil and thought, gave
it as his conviction that one of the best helps to true education, one
of the best counteractives to the necessary mischiefs of mere scientific
teaching and information, was to be found in getting the young to teach
themselves some one of the natural sciences, and singling out
ornithology as one of the readiest and most delightful for such a life
as his.
I end these intentionally irregular remarks by a story. Some years ago I
was in one of the wildest recesses of the Perthshire Highlands. It was
in autumn, and the little school supported mainly by the Chief, who
dwelt all the year round in the midst of his own people, was to be
examined by the minister, whose native tongue, like that of his flock,
was Gaelic, and who was as awkward and ineffectual, and sometimes as
unconsciously indecorous, in his English, as a Cockney is in his kilt.
It was a great occasion: the keen-eyed, firm-limbed, brown-cheeked
little fellows were all in a buzz of excitement as we came in, and
before the examination began every eye was looking at us strangers as a
dog looks at his game, or when seeking it; they knew everything we had
on, everything that could be known through their senses. I never felt
myself so studied and scrutinized before. If any one could have examined
them upon what they thus mastered, Sir Charles Trevelyan and John Mill
would have come away astonished, and, I trust, humble. Well then, the
work of the day began; the mill was set a-going, and what a change! In
an instant their eyes were like the windows of a house with the blinds
down; no one was looking out; everything blank; their very features
changed--their jaws fell, their cheeks flattened, they drooped and
looked ill at ease--stupid, drowsy, sulky--and getting them to speak, or
think, or in any way to energize, was like trying to get any one to come
to the window at three of a summer morning, when, if they do come, they
are half awake, rubbing their eyes and growling. So with my little
Celts. They were like an idle and half asleep collie by the fireside, as
contrasted with the collie on the hill and in the joy of work; the form
of dog and boy are there--he, the self of each, was elsewhere (for I
differ from Professor Ferrier in thinking that the dog _has_ the reflex
ego, and is a very knowing being.) I noticed that anything they really
knew roused them somewhat; what they had merely to transmit or pass
along, as if they were a tube through which the master blew the pea of
knowledge into our faces, was performed as stolidly as if they were
nothing but a tube.
At last the teacher asked where Sheffield was, and was answered; it was
then pointed to by the dux, as a dot on a skeleton map. And now came a
flourish. "What is Sheffield famous for?" Blank stupor, hopeless
vacuity, till he came to a sort of sprouting Dougal Cratur--almost as
wee, and as glegg, and as tousy about the head, as my own Kintail
terrier, whom I saw at that moment through the open door careering after
a hopeless rabbit, with much benefit to his muscles and his wind--who
was trembling with keenness. He shouted out something which was liker
"cutlery" than anything else, and was received as such amid our
rapturous applause. I then ventured to ask the master to ask small and
red Dougal what cutlery was; but from the sudden erubescence of his
pallid, ill-fed cheek, and the alarming brightness of his eyes, I
twigged at once that _he_ didn't himself know what it meant. So I put
the question myself, and was not surprised to find that not one of them,
from Dougal up to a young strapping shepherd of eighteen, knew what it
was.
I told them that Sheffield was famous for making knives, and scissors,
and razors, and that cutlery meant the manufacture of anything that
cuts. Presto! and the blinds were all up, and eagerness, and _nous_, and
brains at the window. I happened to have a Wharncliffe, with "Rodgers
and Sons, Sheffield," on the blade. I sent it round, and finally
presented it to the enraptured Dougal. Would not each one of those boys,
the very boobiest there, know that knife again when they saw it, and be
able to pass a creditable competitive examination on all its ins and
outs? and wouldn't they remember "cutlery" for a day or two! Well, the
examination over, the minister performed an oration of much ambition and
difficulty to himself and to us, upon the general question, and a great
many other questions, into which his Gaelic subtilty fitted like the
mists into the hollows of Ben-a-Houlich, with, it must be allowed, a
somewhat similar tendency to confuse and conceal what was beneath; and
he concluded with thanking the Chief, as he well might, for his generous
support of "this aixlent CEMETERY of aedication." Cemetery indeed! The
blind leading the blind, with the ancient result; the dead burying their
dead.
Now, not greater is the change we made from that low, small, stifling,
gloomy, mephitic room, into the glorious open air, the loch lying asleep
in the sun, and telling over again on its placid face, as in a dream,
every hill and cloud, and birch and pine, and passing bird and cradled
boat; the Black Wood of Rannoch standing "in the midst of its own
darkness," frowning out upon us like the Past disturbed, and far off in
the clear ether, as in another and a better world, the dim Shepherds of
Etive pointing, like ghosts at noonday, to the weird shadows of
Glencoe;--not greater was this change, than is that from the dingy,
oppressive, weary "cemetery" of mere word-knowledge to the open air, the
light and liberty, the divine infinity and richness of nature and her
teaching.
We cannot change our time, nor would we if we could. It is God's time as
well as ours. And our time is emphatically that for achieving and
recording and teaching man's dominion over and insight into matter and
its forces--his subduing the earth; but let us turn now and then from
our necessary and honest toil in this neo-Platonic cavern where we win
gold and renown, and where we often are obliged to stand in our own
light, and watch our own shadows as they glide, huge and misshapen,
across the inner gloom; let us come out betimes with our gold, that we
may spend it and get "goods" for it, and when we can look forth on that
ample world of daylight which we can never hope to overrun, and into
that overarching heaven where, amid clouds and storms, lightning and
sudden tempest, there is revealed to those who look for them, lucid
openings into the pure, deep empyrean, "as it were the very body of
heaven in its clearness;" and when, best of all, we may remember Who it
is who stretched out these heavens as a tent to dwell in, and on whose
footstool we may kneel, and out of the depths of our heart cry aloud,--
_Te Deum veneramur,
Te Sancte Pater!_
we shall return into our cave, and to our work, all the better of such a
lesson, and of such a reasonable service, and dig none the worse.
Science which ends in itself, or still worse, returns upon its maker,
and gets him to worship himself, is worse than none; it is only when it
makes it more clear than before who is the Maker and Governor, not only
of the objects, but of the subjects of itself, that knowledge is the
mother of virtue. But this is an endless theme. My only aim in these
desultory hints is to impress parents and teachers with the benefits of
the _study_, the personal engagement--with their own hands and eyes, and
legs and ears--in some form or another of natural history, by their
children and pupils and themselves, as counteracting evil, and doing
immediate and actual good. Even the immense activity in the
Post-Office-stamp line of business among our youngsters has been of
immense use in many ways, besides being a diversion and an interest. I
myself came to the knowledge of Queensland, and a great deal more,
through its blue twopenny.
If any one wishes to know how far wise and clever and patriotic men may
occasionally go in the way of giving "your son" a stone for bread, and a
serpent for a fish,--may get the nation's money for that which is not
bread, and give their own labor for that which satisfies no one;
industriously making sawdust into the shapes of bread, and chaff into
the appearance of meal, and contriving, at wonderful expense of money
and brains, to show what can be done in the way of feeding upon
wind,--let him take a turn through certain galleries of the Kensington
Museum.
"Yesterday forenoon," writes a friend, "I went to South Kensington
Museum. It is really an absurd collection. A great deal of valuable
material and a great deal of perfect rubbish. The analyses are even
worse than I was led to suppose. There is an ANALYSIS OF A MAN. First, a
man contains so much water, and there you have the amount of water in a
bottle; so much albumen, and there is the albumen; so much phosphate of
lime, fat, haematin, fibrine, salt, etc., etc. Then in the next case so
much carbon; so much phosphorus--a bottle with sticks of phosphorus; so
much potassium, and there is a bottle with potassium; calcium, etc. They
have not bottles of oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, etc., but they have
cubical pieces of wood on which is written 'the quantity of oxygen in
the human body would occupy the space of 170 (_e. g._) cubes of the size
of this,' etc., etc." What earthly good can this do any one?
No wonder that the bewildered beings whom I have seen wandering through
these rooms, yawned more frequently and more desperately than I ever
observed even in church.
So then, cultivate observation, energy, handicraft, ingenuity, _outness_
in boys, so as to give them a pursuit as well as a study. Look after the
blade, and don't coax or crush the ear out too soon, and remember that
the full corn in the ear is not due till the harvest, when the great
School breaks up, and we must all dismiss and go our several ways.
VAUGHAN'S POEMS, &c.
{Hosa esti prosphile--tauta logizesthe}.--ST. PAUL.
"What do you think of Dr. Channing, Mr. Coleridge?" said a brisk young
gentleman to the mighty discourser, as he sat next him at a small
tea-party. "Before entering upon that question, sir," said Coleridge,
opening upon his inquirer those 'noticeable gray eyes,' with a vague and
placid stare, and settling himself in his seat for the night, "I must
put you in possession of my views, _in extenso_, on the origin,
progress, present condition, future likelihoods, and absolute essence of
the Unitarian controversy, and especially the conclusions I have, upon
the whole, come to on the great question of what may be termed the
philosophy of religious difference." In like manner, before telling our
readers what we think of Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, or of "V.," or of
Henry Ellison, the Bornnatural, or of E. V. K., it would have been very
pleasant (to ourselves) to have given, _in extenso_, our views _de Re
Poetica_, its nature, its laws and office, its means and ends; and to
have made known how much and how little we agreed on these points with
such worthies as Aristotle and Plato, Horace and Richard Baxter,
Petronius Arbiter and Blaise Pascal, Ulric von Huetten and Boileau,
Hurdis and Hurd, Dr. Arnold and Montaigne, Harris of Salisbury and his
famous uncle, Burke and "John Buncle," Montesquieu and Sir Philip
Sidney, Dr. Johnson and the two Wartons, George Gascoyne and Spenser's
friend Gabriel Harvey, Puttenham and Webbe, George Herbert and George
Sand, Petrarch and Pinciano, Vida and Julius Caesar Scaliger, Pontanus
and Savage Landor, Leigh Hunt and Quinctilian, or Tacitus (whichever of
the two wrote the Dialogue _De Oratoribus_, in which there is so much of
the best philosophy, criticism, and expression), Lords Bacon and Buchan
and Dr. Blair, Dugald Stewart and John Dryden, Charles Lamb and
Professor Wilson, Vinet of Lausanne and John Foster, Lord Jeffrey and
the two brothers Hare, Drs. Fuller and South, John Milton and Dr. Drake,
Dante and "Edie Ochiltree," Wordsworth and John Bunyan, Plutarch and
Winkelman, the Coleridges, Samuel, Sara, Hartley, Derwent, and Henry
Nelson, Sir Egerton Bridges, Victor Cousin and "the Doctor," George Moir
and Madame de Stael, Dr. Fracastorius and Professor Keble, Martinus
Scriblerus and Sir Thomas Browne, Macaulay and the Bishop of Cloyne,
Collins and Gray and Sir James Mackintosh, Hazlitt and John Ruskin,
Shakspeare and Jackson of Exeter, Dallas and De Quincey, and the six
Taylors, Jeremy, William, Isaac, Jane, John Edward, and Henry. We would
have had great pleasure in quoting what these famous women and men have
written on the essence and the art of poetry, and to have shown how
strangely they differ, and how as strangely at times they agree. But as
it is not related at what time of the evening our brisk young gentleman
got his answer regarding Dr. Channing, so it likewise remains untold
what our readers have lost and gained in our not fulfilling our somewhat
extensive desire.
It is with poetry as with flowers or fruits, and the delicious juices of
meats and fishes, we would all rather have them, and smell them, and
taste them, than hear about them. It is a good thing to know all about a
lily, its scientific ins and outs, its botany, its archaeology, its
aesthetics, even its anatomy and "organic radicals," but it is a better
thing to look at itself, and "consider" it how it grows--
"White, radiant, spotless, exquisitely pure."
It is one thing to know what your peach is, that it is the fruit of a
rosal exogen, and is of the nature of a true drupe, with its carpel
solitary, and its style proceeding from the apex,--that its ovules are
anatropal, and that its _putamen_ separates _sponte sua_ from the
sacrocarp; to know, moreover, how many kinds of peaches and nectarines
there are in the world, and how happy the Canadian pigs must be of an
evening munching the downy odoriferous drupes under the trees, and what
an aroma this must give to the resulting pork,[44]--it is another and a
better thing to pluck the peach, and sink your teeth into its fragrant
flesh. We remember only one exception to this rule. Who has ever yet
tasted the roast pig of reality which came up to the roast pig of
Charles Lamb? Who can forget "that young and tender suckling, under a
moon old, guiltless as yet of the style, with no original speck of the
_amor immunditiae_--the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet
manifest, and which, when prepared aright, is, of all the delicacies in
the _mundus edibilis_, the most delicate--_obsoniorum facile
princeps_--whose fat is not fat, but an indefinable sweetness growing up
toward it--the tender blossoming of fat--fat cropped in the bud--taken
in the shoot--in the first innocence, the cream and quintessence of the
child-pig's yet pure food--the lean not lean, but a kind of animal
manna--_coelestis_--_cibus ille angelorum_--or rather shall we say, fat
and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that
both together make but one ambrosial result." But here, as elsewhere,
the exception proves the rule, and even the perusal of "Original"
Walker's delicious schemes of dinners at Lovegrove's, with flounders
water-zoutched, and iced claret, would stand little chance against an
invitation to a party of six to Blackwall, with "Tom Young of the
Treasury" as Prime Minister.
[44] We are given to understand that peach-fed pork is a poor
pork after all, and goes soon into decomposition. We are not
sorry to know this.
Poetry is the expression of the beautiful--by words--the beautiful of
the outer and of the inner world; whatever is delectable to the eye or
the ear, the every sense of the body and of the soul--it presides over
_veras dulcedines rerum_. It implies at once a vision and a faculty, a
gift and an art. There must be the vivid conception of the beautiful,
and its fit manifestation in numerous language. A thought may be
poetical, and yet not poetry; it may be a sort of mother liquor, holding
in solution the poetical element, but waiting and wanting its
precipitation,--its concentration into the bright and compacted crystal.
It is the very blossom and fragrancy and bloom of all human thoughts,
passions, emotions, language; having for its immediate object--its very
essence--pleasure and delectation rather than truth; but springing from
truth, as the flower from its fixed and unseen root. To use the words of
Puttenham in reference to Sir Walter Raleigh, poetry is a lofty,
insolent (unusual) and passionate thing.
It is not philosophy, it is not science, it is not morality, it is not
religion, any more than red is or ever can be blue or yellow, or than
one thing can ever be another; but it feeds on, it glorifies and exalts,
it impassionates them all. A poet will be the better of all the wisdom,
and all the goodness, and all the science, and all the talent he can
gather into himself, but _qua_ poet he is a minister and an interpreter
of {to kalon}, and of nothing else. Philosophy and poetry are not
opposites, but neither are they convertibles. They are twin sisters;--in
the words of Augustine:--"PHILOCALIA _et_ PHILOSOPHIA _prope similiter
cognominatae sunt, et quasi gentiles inter se videri volunt et sunt. Quid
est enim Philosophia? amor sapientiae. Quid Philocalia? amor
pulchritudinis. Germanae igitur istae sunt prorsus, et eodem parente
procreatae._" Fracastorius beautifully illustrates this in his
"_Naugerius, sive De Poetica Dialogus_." He has been dividing writers,
or composers as he calls them, into historians, or those who record
appearances; philosophers, who seek out causes; and poets, who perceive
and express _veras pulchritudines rerum, quicquid maximum et magnificum,
quicquid pulcherrimum, quicquid dulcissimum_; and as an example, he
says, if the historian describe the ongoings of this visible universe, I
am taught; if the philosopher announce the doctrine of a spiritual
essence pervading and regulating all things, I admire; but if the poet
take up the same theme, and sing--
"_Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentes
Lucentemque globum lunae, titaniaque astra,
Spiritus intus alit; totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet._"
"_Si inquam, eandem rem, hoc pacto referat mihi, non admirabor solum,
sed adamabo: et divinum nescio quid, in animum mihi immissum
existimabo._"
In the quotation which he gives, we at once detect the proper tools and
cunning of the poet: fancy gives us _liquentes campos_, _titania astra_,
_lucentem globum lunae_, and fantasy or imagination, in virtue of its
royal and transmuting power, gives us _intus alit_--_infusa per
artus_--and that magnificent idea, _magno se corpore miscet_--this is
the _divinum nescio quid_--the proper work of the imagination--the
master and specific faculty of the poet--that which makes him what he
is, as the wings make a bird, and which, to borrow the noble words of
the Book of Wisdom, "is more moving than motion,--is one only, and yet
manifold, subtle, lively, clear, plain, quick, which cannot be letted,
passing and going through all things by reason of her pureness; being
one, she can do all things; and remaining in herself, she maketh all
things new."
The following is Fracastorius' definition of a man who not only writes
verses, but is by nature a poet: "_Est autem ille natura poeta, qui
aptus est veris rerum pulchritudinibus capi monerique; et qui per illas
loqui et scribere potest_;" and he gives the lines of Virgil,--
"_Aut sicuti nigrum
Ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubat umbra,_"
as an instance of the poetical transformation. All that was merely
actual or informative might have been given in the words _sicuti nemus_,
but fantasy sets to work, and _videte, per quas pulchritudines, nemus
depinxit; addens_ ACCUBAT, ET NIGRUM _crebris ilicibus et_ SACRA UMBRA!
_quam ob rem, recte Pontanus dicebat, finem esse poetae, apposite dicere
ad admirationem, simpliciter, et per universalem bene dicendi ideam_.
This is what we call the _beau ideal_, or {kat' exochen} the ideal--what
Bacon describes as "a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a
more absolute variety than can be found in the nature of things, the
world being in proportion inferior to the soul, and the exhibition of
which doth raise and erect the mind by submitting _the shows of things_
to the desires of the mind." It is "the wondrous and goodly paterne" of
which Spenser sings in his "Hymne in honour of Beautie:"--
"What time this world's great Workmaister did cast
To make al things such as we now behold,
_It seems that he before his eyes had plast_
_A goodly Paterne_, to whose perfect mould
He fashioned them, as comely as he could,
That now so faire and seemly they appeare,
As nought may be amended any wheare.
"That wondrous Paterne wheresoere it bee,
Whether in earth layd up in secret store,
Or else in heaven, that no man may it see
With sinfull eyes, for feare it to deflore,
_Is perfect Beautie_, which all men adore--
_That is the thing that giveth pleasant grace_
_To all things fair._
"For through infusion of celestial powre
_The duller earth it quickneth with delight,_
_And life-full spirits privily doth powre_
_Through all the parts, that to the looker's sight_
_They seeme to please._"
It is that "loveliness" which Mr. Ruskin calls "the signature of God on
his works," the dazzling printings of His fingers, and to the unfolding
of which he has devoted, with so much of the highest philosophy and
eloquence, a great part of the second volume of "Modern Painters."
But we are as bad as Mr. Coleridge, and are defrauding our readers of
their fruits and flowers, their peaches and lilies.
Henry Vaughan, "Silurist," as he was called, from his being born in
South Wales, the country of the _Silures_, was sprung from one of the
most ancient and noble families of the Principality. Two of his
ancestors, Sir Roger Vaughan and Sir David Gam, fell at Agincourt. It is
said that Shakspeare visited Scethrog, the family castle in
Brecknockshire; and Malone guesses that it was when there that he fell
in with the word "Puck." Near Scethrog, there is Cwn-Pooky, or Pwcca,
the Goblin's valley, which belonged to the Vaughans; and Crofton Croker
gives, in his Fairy Legends, a fac-simile of a portrait, drawn by a
Welsh peasant, of a Pwcca, which (whom?) he himself had seen sitting on
a milestone,[45] by the roadside, in the early morning, a very unlikely
personage, one would think, to say,--
"I go, I go; look how I go;
Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow."
[45] We confess to being considerably affected when we look at
this odd little fellow, as he sits there with his innocent
upturned toes, and a certain forlorn dignity and meek
sadness, as of "one who once had wings." What is he? and
whence? Is he a surface or a substance? is he smooth and
warm? is he glossy, like a blackberry? or has he on him "the
raven down of darkness," like an unfledged chick of night?
and if we smoothed him, would he smile? Does that large eye
wink? and is it a hole through to the other side? (whatever
that may be;) and is that a small crescent moon of darkness
swimming in its disc? or does the eye disclose a bright
light from within, where his soul sits and enjoys bright
day? Is he a point of admiration whose head is too heavy, or
a quaver or crotchet that has lost his neighbors, and fallen
out of the scale? Is he an aspiring Tadpole in search of an
idea? What have been and what will be the fortunes of this
our small Nigel (_Nigellus_)? Think of "Elia" having him
sent up from the Goblin Valley, packed in wool, and finding
him lively! how he and "Mary" would doat upon him, feeding
him upon some celestial, unspeakable _pap_, "sweeter than
the lids of Juno's eyes, or Cytherea's breath." How the
brother and sister would croon over him "with murmurs made
to bless," calling him their "tender novice" "in the first
bloom of his nigritude," their belated straggler from the
"rear of darkness thin," their little night-shade, not
deadly, their infantile Will-o'-the-wisp caught before his
sins, their "poor Blot," "their innocent Blackness," their
"dim Speck."