ENGLISH PROSE
A SERIES OF RELATED ESSAYS FOR THE DISCUSSION AND PRACTICE
OF THE ART OF WRITING
SELECTED AND EDITED
BY
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROE, PH.D.
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
AND
GEORGE ROY ELLIOTT, PH.D.
OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE
1913
PREFACE
The selections in the present volume, designed primarily for the
discussion and practice in college classes of the art of composition,
have been arranged under a scheme which the editors believe to be new.
There are nine related groups. Each successive group represents a
different phase of life, beginning with character and personality, and
concluding with art and literature. The whole together, as the table of
contents will show, thus presents a body of ideas that includes
practically all the great departments of human thought and interest.
It is evident that certain ideals of teaching composition underlie the
scheme. The editors believe heartily with Pater that "the chief stimulus
of good style is to possess a full, rich, complex matter to grapple
with". Instruction in writing, it is to be feared, too often neglects
this sound doctrine and places an emphasis upon formal matters that
seems disproportionate, especially when form is made to appear as a
thing apart. Form and content go together and one must not suffer at the
expense of the other. But a sustained interest in the ways and means of
correct expression is aroused only when the student feels that he has
something to express. Instructors often contend indeed that the ideas of
undergraduates are far to seek, and that most of the time in the
class-room is therefore best spent upon formal exercises and drill. The
editors do not share this view. They believe that there is no class of
people more responsive to new ideas and impressions than college
students, and none more eager, when normally stimulated, to express
themselves in writing. They have therefore aimed to present a series of
related selections that would arouse thought and provoke oral discussion
in the class-room, as well as furnish suitable models of style. In most
cases the pieces are too long to be adequately handled in one class
hour. A live topic may well be discussed for several hours, until its
various sides have been examined and students are awakened to the many
questions at issue. The editors have aimed, also, to supply selections
so rich and vital in content that instructors themselves will feel
challenged to add to the class discussion from their own knowledge and
experience, and so turn a stream of fresh ideas upon "stock notions".
Thus English composition, which in many courses in our larger
institutions is now almost the only non-special study, can be made a
direct means of liberalization in the meaning and art of life, as well
as an instrument for correct and effective writing.
The present volume therefore differs from others in the same field. Many
recent collections contain pieces too short and unrelated to satisfy the
ideals suggested above--ideals which, the editors feel sure, are held by
an increasing number of teachers. And older and newer collections alike
have been constructed primarily with the purpose of illustrating the
conventional categories,--description, narration, exposition. Teachers
of composition everywhere are becoming distrustful of an arrangement
which is frankly at variance with the actual practice of writing, and
are of the opinion that it is better to set the student to the task of
composition without confining him too narrowly to one form of discourse.
The editors have deliberately avoided, however, the other extreme, which
is reflected in one or two recent volumes, of choosing pieces of one
type to the exclusion of all others. In collections of this kind variety
in form and subject-matter is fully as important as richness of content.
Instructors who believe in the use of the types of discourse as the most
practicable means of instruction, will find all the types liberally
represented in the present volume. And in order to meet their
requirements even more adequately, the editors have included two short
stories at the end, as examples of narration with a plot.
Much attention has been given to the suggestions at the end of the
volume with the aim of making them practically serviceable and, at the
same time, as free as possible from duplication of class work. This aim,
the editors came to believe, could best be attained by providing for
each group of selections definite suggestions of theme-subjects to be
derived by the student from supplementary readings closely related to
that group.
F.W.R.
G.R.E.
MADISON, WISCONSIN,
May, 1913.
CONTENTS
I. THE PERSONAL LIFE.
1. Self-Reliance...............RALPH WALDO EMERSON
2. Early Education
at Herne Hill.............JOHN RUSKIN
3. A Crisis in My
Mental History............JOHN STUART MILL
4. Old China...................CHARLES LAMB
II. EDUCATION.
5. What is Education?..........THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
6. Knowledge Viewed in
Relation to Learning .....JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
7. Literature and Science......MATTHEW ARNOLD
8. How to Read.................FREDERIC HARRISON
III. RECREATION AND TRAVELS.
9. On Going a Journey..........WILLIAM HAZLITT
10. Regrets of a Mountaineer....LESLIE STEPHEN
IV. SOCIAL LIFE AND MANNERS.
11. Behavior....................RALPH WALDO EMERSON
12. Manners and Fashion.........HERBERT SPENCER
13. Talk and Talkers............ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
V. PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
14. The Social Value
of the College-bred.......WILLIAM JAMES
15. The Law of
Human Progress............HENRY GEORGE
16. The Morals of Trade.........HERBERT SPENCER
VI. SCIENCE.
17. The Physical Basis
of Life...................THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
18. Mental Powers of
Men and Animals...........CHARLES DARWIN
19. The Importance of Dust......ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
VII. NATURE.
20. The Battle of the Ants......HENRY DAVID THOREAU
21. A Windstorm
in the Forests............JOHN MUIR
22. Walden Pond.................HENRY DAVID THOREAU
23. Extracts from
Modern Painters...........JOHN RUSKIN
VIII. CONDUCT AND INNER LIFE.
24. The Stoics.. .............WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY
25. Enthusiasm of Humanity......JOHN ROBERT SEELEY
26. Loyalty and Insight.........JOSIAH ROYCE
IX. LITERATURE AND ART.
27. Poetry for Poetry's Sake.... A.C. BRADLEY
28. Greek Tragedy................G. LOWES DICKINSON
29. Shakespeare..................THOMAS CARLYLE
30. Charles Lamb.................WALTER PATER
31. Dr. Heidegger's Experiment...NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
32. Markheim.....................ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS.
With some topics for Discussion and Composition.
ENGLISH PROSE
SELF-RELIANCE[1]
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. Always the soul hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil
is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own
thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is
true for all men,--that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it
shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the
outmost--and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of
the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the
highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at
naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they
thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the
firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his
thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than
this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on
the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good
sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall
be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the
wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to
him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given
to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until
he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes
much impression on him, and another none. It is not without
preestablished harmony, this sculpture in the memory. The eye was placed
where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.
Bravely let him speak the utmost syllable of his confession. We but half
express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us
represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good
issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work
made manifest by cowards. It needs a divine man to exhibit anything
divine. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his
work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall
give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the
attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no
hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the
place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so,
and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying
their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working
through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now
men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny;
and not pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution,
but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay under
the Almighty effort let us advance on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and
behavior of children, babes, and even brutes. That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their
mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in
their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all
conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the
adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty
and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it
enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand
by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak
to you and me. Hark! in the next room who spoke so clear and emphatic?
Good Heaven! it is he! it is that very lump of bashfulness and phlegm
which for weeks has done nothing but eat when you were by, and now rolls
out these words like bell-strokes. It seems he knows how to speak to his
contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us
seniors very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as
much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the
healthy attitude of human nature. How is a boy the master of
society!--independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on
such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their
merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting,
silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about
consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict.
You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it were
clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or
spoken with éclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or
the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his
account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into
his neutral, godlike independence! Who can thus lose all pledge and,
having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased,
unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable, must
always engage the poet's and the man's regards. Of such an immortal
youth the force would be felt. He would utter opinions on all passing
affairs, which being seen to be not private but necessary, would sink
like darts into the ear of men and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and
inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a
joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing
of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture
of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is
its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and
customs.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity
of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the
suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was
prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with
the deaf old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do
with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my
friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from
above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the
devil's child, I will live then from the devil." No law can be sacred to
me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my
constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry
himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular
and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to
badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent
and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I
ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If
malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an
angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me
with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, "Go love
thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that
grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this
incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar
is spite at home." Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth
is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some
edge to it,--else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached,
as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and
whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius
calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, _Whim_. I hope
it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in
explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude
company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they _my_ poor? I
tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the
dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I
do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual
affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be;
but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of
fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
stand; alms to sots, and the thousandfold Relief Societies;--though I
confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a
wicked dollar, which by-and-by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good
action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a
fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are
done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I
do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a
life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it
should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it
should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and
not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an
alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine. I ask primary evidence that you
are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know
that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those
actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a
privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be,
I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of
my fellows any secondary testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This
rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for
the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder
because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty
better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the
world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the
great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect
sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is
that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression
of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead
Bible Society, vote with a great party either for the Government or
against it, spread your table like base housekeepers,--under all these
screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And of
course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your
thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce
yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-bluff is this game of
conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument. I hear a
preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the
institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly
can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this
ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no
such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but
at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister?
He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest
affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities
of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars,
authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth
is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the
real four: so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where
to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in
the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one
cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine
expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does
not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the
foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company
where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not
interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low
usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, and make
the most disagreeable sensation; a sensation of rebuke and warning which
no brave young man will suffer twice.
For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And
therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders
look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If
this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own
he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the
multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause,--disguise no god,
but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is
the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate
and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to
brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and
prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But
when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when
the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute
force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it
needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a
trifle of no concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a
reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no
other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath
to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you
have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a
new day. Trust your emotion. In your metaphysics you have denied
personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come,
yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape
and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the
harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great
soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his
shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with
packthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day
in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said
to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be
misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad
then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates,
and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and
every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.
I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are
rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and
Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it
matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or
Alexandrian stanza;--read it forward, backward, or across, it still
spells the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God
allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect
or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though
I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound
with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave
that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass
for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that
they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not
see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever variety of actions,
so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the
actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties
are lost sight of when seen at a little distance, at a little height of
thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a
zigzag line of a hundred tacks. This is only microscopic criticism. See
the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the
average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will
explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.
Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.
Greatness always appeals to the future. If I can be great enough now to
do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to
defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances
and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the
foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the
majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the
imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories
behind. There they all stand and shed an united light on the advancing
actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels to every man's
eye. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity
into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable
to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We
worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it
homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is
self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate
pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan
fife. Let us bow and apologize never more. A great man is coming to eat
at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to
please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it
kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth
mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of
custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all
history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving
wherever moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time or place,
but is the center of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures
you and all men and all events. You are constrained to accept his
standard. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else,
or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing
else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that
he must make all circumstances indifferent--put all means into the
shade. This: all great men are and do. Every true man is a cause, a
country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully
to accomplish his thought;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a
procession. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman
Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his
genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An
institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, the Reformation, of
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson.
Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves
itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest
persons.
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a
bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him. But the man
in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the
force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he
looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book has an alien
and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seems to say like
that, "Who are you, sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice,
petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take
possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me,
but I am to settle its claim to praise. That popular fable of the sot
who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's
house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his
waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured
that he had been insane--owes its popularity to the fact that it
symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot,
but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true
prince.
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination
makes fools of us, plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and
estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small
house and common day's work: but the things of life are the same to
both: the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to
Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they
wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day as
followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act
with original views, the luster will be transferred from the actions of
kings to those of gentlemen.
The world has indeed been instructed by its kings, who have so
magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal
symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful
loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or
the great proprietor to walk among them, by a law of his own, make his
own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not
with money but with honor, and represent the Law in his person, was the
hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of
their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is
the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax,
without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into
trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, the
essence of virtue, and the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity or
Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later
teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which
analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense
of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not
diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but
one with them and proceedeth obviously from the same source whence their
life and being also proceedeth. We first share the life by which things
exist and afterward see them as appearances in nature and forget that we
have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the fountain
of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man
wisdom, of that inspiration of man which cannot be denied without
impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which
makes us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth. When we
discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but
allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to
pry into the soul that causes--all metaphysics, all philosophy is at
fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man
discerns between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary
perceptions. And to his involuntary perceptions: he knows a perfect
respect is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that
these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. All my
wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving;--the most trivial
reverie, the faintest native emotion, are domestic and divine.
Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as
of opinions, or rather much more readily; for they do not distinguish
between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or
that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a
trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time all
mankind,--although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For
my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he
should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world
with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from
the center of the present thought; and new date and new create the
whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, then old
things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now,
and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made
sacred by relation to it,--one thing as much as another. All things are
dissolved to their center by their cause, and in the universal miracle
petty and particular miracles disappear. This is and must be. If
therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward
to the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in
another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which
is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into
whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the
past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of
the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye
maketh, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is
night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing
more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say
"I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before
the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make
no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they
are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is
simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before
a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower
there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is
satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time
to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present,
but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that
surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy
and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet
hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what
David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on
a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the
sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men
of talents and character they chance to see,--painfully recollecting the
exact words they spoke; afterward, when they come into the point of view
which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are
willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good
when occasion comes. So was it with us, so will it be, if we proceed. If
we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to
be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be
as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far off remembering
of the intuition: That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to
say it, is this: When good is near you, when you have life in
yourself,--it is not by any known or appointed way; you shall not
discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man;
you shall not hear any name;--the way, the thought, the good, shall be
wholly strange and new. It shall exclude all other being. You take the
way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its fugitive
ministers. There shall be no fear in it. Fear and hope are alike
beneath it. It asks nothing. There is somewhat low even in hope. We are
then in vision. There is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor
properly joy. The soul is raised over passion. It seeth identity and
eternal causation. It is a perceiving that Truth and Right are. Hence it
becomes a Tranquillity out of the knowing that all things go well. Vast
spaces of nature; the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; vast intervals of
time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel
underlay that former state of life and circumstances, as it does
underlie my present and will always all circumstances, and what is
called life and what is called death.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: From Essays, First Series, 1841; the second half of the
essay has here been omitted.]
EARLY EDUCATION AT HERNE HILL[2]
JOHN RUSKIN
When I was about four years old my father found himself able to buy the
lease of a house on Herne Hill, a rustic eminence four miles south of
the "Standard in Cornhill"; of which the leafy seclusion remains, in all
essential points of character, unchanged to this day: certain Gothic
splendours, lately indulged in by our wealthier neighbours, being the
only serious innovations; and these are so graciously concealed by the
fine trees of their grounds, that the passing viator remains unappalled
by them; and I can still walk up and down the piece of road between the
Fox tavern and the Herne Hill station, imagining myself four years old.
Our house was the northernmost of a group which stand accurately on the
top or dome of the hill, where the ground is for a small space level, as
the snows are, (I understand), on the dome of Mont Blanc; presently
falling, however, in what may be, in the London clay formation,
considered a precipitous slope, to our valley of Chamouni (or of
Dulwich) on the east; and with a softer descent into Cold Harbor lane on
the west: on the south, no less beautifully declining to the dale of the
Effra, (doubtless shortened from Effrena, signifying the "Unbridled"
river; recently, I regret to say, bricked over for the convenience of
Mr. Biffin, chemist, and others); while on the north, prolonged indeed
with slight depression some half mile or so, and receiving, in the
parish of Lambeth, the chivalric title of "Champion Hill," it plunges
down at last to efface itself in the plains of Peckham, and the rural
barbarism of Goose Green.
The group, of which our house was the quarter, consisted of two
precisely similar partner-couples of houses, gardens and all to match;
still the two highest blocks of buildings seen from Norwood on the crest
of the ridge; so that the house itself, three-storied, with garrets
above, commanded, in those comparatively smokeless days, a very notable
view from its garret windows, of the Norwood hills on one side, and the
winter sunrise over them; and of the valley of the Thames on the other,
with Windsor telescopically clear in the distance, and Harrow,
conspicuous always in fine weather to open vision against the summer
sunset. It had front and back garden in sufficient proportion to its
size; the front, richly set with old evergreens, and well-grown lilac
and laburnum; the back, seventy yards long by twenty wide, renowned over
all the hill for its pears and apples, which had been chosen with
extreme care by our predecessor, (shame on me to forget the name of a
man to whom I owe so much!)--and possessing also a strong old mulberry
tree, a tall white-heart cherry tree, a black Kentish one, and an almost
unbroken hedge, all round, of alternate gooseberry and currant bush;
decked, in due season, (for the ground was wholly beneficent), with
magical splendour of abundant fruit: fresh green, soft amber, and
rough-bristled crimson bending the spinous branches; clustered pearl and
pendent ruby joyfully discoverable under the large leaves that looked
like vine.
The differences of primal importance which I observed between the nature
of this garden, and that of Eden, as I had imagined it, were, that, in
this one, _all_ the fruit was forbidden; and there were no companionable
beasts: in other respects the little domain answered every purpose of
paradise to me; and the climate, in that cycle of our years, allowed me
to pass most of my life in it. My mother never gave me more to learn
than she knew I could easily get learnt, if I set myself honestly to
work, by twelve o'clock. She never allowed anything to disturb me when
my task was set; if it was not said rightly by twelve o'clock, I was
kept in till I knew it, and in general, even when Latin Grammar came to
supplement the Psalms, I was my own master for at least an hour before
half-past one dinner, and for the rest of the afternoon.
My mother, herself finding her chief personal pleasure in her flowers,
was often planting, or pruning beside me, at least if I chose to stay
beside _her_. I never thought of doing anything behind her back which I
would not have done before her face; and her presence was therefore no
restraint to me; but, also, no particular pleasure, for, from having
always been left so much alone, I had generally my own little affairs to
see after; and, on the whole, by the time I was seven years old, was
already getting too independent, mentally, even of my father and mother;
and, having nobody else to be dependent upon, began to lead a very
small, perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life,
in the central point which it appeared to me, (as it must naturally
appear to geometrical animals), that I occupied in the universe.
This was partly the fault of my father's modesty; and partly of his
pride. He had so much more confidence in my mother's judgment as to such
matters than in his own, that he never ventured even to help, much less
to cross her, in the conduct of my education; on the other hand, in the
fixed purpose of making an ecclesiastical gentleman of me, with the
superfinest of manners, and access to the highest circles of fleshly and
spiritual society, the visits to Croydon, where I entirely loved my
aunt, and young baker-cousins, became rarer and more rare: the society
of our neighbours on the hill could not be had without breaking up our
regular and sweetly selfish manner of living; and on the whole, I had
nothing animate to care for, in a childish way, but myself, some nests
of ants, which the gardener would never leave undisturbed for me, and a
sociable bird or two; though I never had the sense or perseverance to
make one really tame. But that was partly because, if ever I managed to
bring one to be the least trustful of me, the cats got it.
Under these circumstances, what powers of imagination I possessed,
either fastened themselves on inanimate things,--the sky, the leaves,
and pebbles, observable within the walls of Eden,--or caught at any
opportunity of flight into regions of romance, compatible with the
objective realities of existence in the nineteenth century, within a
mile and a quarter of Camberwell Green.
Herein my father, happily, though with no definite intention other than
of pleasing me, when he found he could do so without infringing any of
my mother's rules, became my guide. I was particularly fond of watching
him shave; and was always allowed to come into his room in the morning
(under the one in which I am now writing), to be the motionless witness
of that operation. Over his dressing-table hung one of his own
water-colour drawings, made under the teaching of the elder Nasmyth; I
believe, at the High School of Edinburgh. It was done in the early
manner of tinting, which, just about the time when my father was at the
High School, Dr. Munro was teaching Turner; namely, in gray under-tints
of Prussian blue and British ink, washed with warm colour afterwards on
the lights. It represented Conway Castle, with its Frith, and, in the
foreground, a cottage, a fisherman, and a boat at the water's edge.
When my father had finished shaving, he always told me a story about
this picture. The custom began without any initial purpose of his, in
consequence of my troublesome curiosity whether the fisherman lived in
the cottage, and where he was going to in the boat. It being settled,
for peace' sake, that he _did_ live in the cottage, and was going in the
boat to fish near the castle, the plot of the drama afterwards gradually
thickened; and became, I believe, involved with that of the tragedy of
Douglas, and of the Castle Specter, in both of which pieces my father
had performed in private theatricals, before my mother, and a select
Edinburgh audience, when he was a boy of sixteen, and she, at grave
twenty, a model housekeeper, and very scornful and religiously
suspicious of theatricals. But she was never weary of telling me, in
later years, how beautiful my father looked in his Highland dress, with
the high black feathers.
In the afternoons, when my father returned (always punctually) from his
business, he dined, at half-past four, in the front parlour, my mother
sitting beside him to hear the events of the day, and give counsel and
encouragement with respect to the same;--chiefly the last, for my father
was apt to be vexed if orders for sherry fell the least short of their
due standard, even for a day or two. I was never present at this time,
however, and only avouch what I relate by hearsay and probable
conjecture; for between four and six it would have been a grave
misdemeanour in me if I so much as approached the parlour door. After
that, in summer time, we were all in the garden as long as the day
lasted; tea under the white-heart cherry tree; or in winter and rough
weather, at six o'clock in the drawing-room,--I having my cup of milk,
and slice of bread-and-butter, in a little recess, with a table in front
of it, wholly sacred to me; and in which I remained in the evenings as
an Idol in a niche, while my mother knitted, and my father read to
her,--and to me, so far as I chose to listen.
The series of the Waverley novels, then drawing towards its close, was
still the chief source of delight in all households caring for
literature; and I can no more recollect the time when I did not know
them than when I did not know the Bible; but I have still a vivid
remembrance of my father's intense expression of sorrow mixed with
scorn, as he threw down Count Robert of Paris, after reading three or
four pages; and knew that the life of Scott was ended: the scorn being a
very complex and bitter feeling in him,--partly, indeed, of the book
itself, but chiefly of the wretches who were tormenting and selling the
wrecked intellect, and not a little, deep down, of the subtle dishonesty
which had essentially caused the ruin. My father never could forgive
Scott his concealment of the Ballantyne partnership.
Such being the salutary pleasures of Herne Hill, I have next with deeper
gratitude to chronicle what I owe to my mother for the resolutely
consistent lessons which so exercised me in the Scriptures as to make
every word of them familiar to my ear in habitual music,--yet in that
familiarity reverenced, as transcending all thought, and ordaining all
conduct.