opinions and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a
theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having
much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of,
the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle. I never, indeed, wavered
in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct,
and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be
attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I
thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own
happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind,
even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an
ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the
way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to
make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken _en passant_, without
being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are
immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinising
examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it,
as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your
self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise
fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you
breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either
forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal
questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life.
And I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a
moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment, that is,
for the great majority of mankind.
The other important change which my opinions at this: time underwent,
was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime
necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the
individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the
ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being
for speculation and for action.
I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed
to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be
nourished and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an instant,
lose sight of, or undervalue, that part of the truth which I had seen
before; I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to
consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition
both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had
consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of
cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the
faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of
the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and
philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an
increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental
to that object.
I now began to find meaning in the things which I had read or heard
about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture.
But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal
experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from
childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which
(and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting
enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated
kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement
gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost
height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of
music I had often experienced; but like all my pleasurable
susceptibilities it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had sought
relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide
had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward
by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this time first
became acquainted with Weber's Oberon, and the extreme pleasure which I
drew from its delicious melodies did me good, by showing me a source of
pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was
much impaired by the thought, that the pleasure of music (as is quite
true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with
familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed
by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then
state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life,
that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of
musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two
semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways,
of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed
to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room
for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had
done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This
source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the
philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It
was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the
only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way
honourable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could
not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I
thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in
general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own.
I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the
question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could
succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free
and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no
longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.
And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this
for human happiness in general my dejection must continue; but that if I
could see such an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure;
content as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the
general lot.
This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading
Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important
event in my life. I took up the collection of his poems from curiosity,
with no expectation of mental relief from it, though I had before
resorted to poetry with that hope. In the worst period of my depression,
I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try whether a
poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser
feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no
good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet's state of mind was
too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all
pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the
good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing
which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them
which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from
the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his
Laras. But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition,
Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into the Excursion two or
three years before, and found little in it; and I should probably have
found as little, had I read it at this time. But the miscellaneous
poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was
added in the latter part of the author's life), proved to be the precise
thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.
In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one
of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural
objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for
much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one
of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty
over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's
poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which,
owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty.
But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had
merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott
does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape
does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a
medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward
beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under
the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the
feelings which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source
of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasures, which could be
shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or
imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the
physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn
what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater
evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better
and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly been,
even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper
and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his
did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent
happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only
without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the
common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight
which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there
was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the
conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic,
"Intimations of Immortality:" in which, along with more than his usual
sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand
imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had
similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first
freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had
sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now
teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely,
emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.
I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic
merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with
the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures,
possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are
precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation
Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically
far more poets than he.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: From Chapter V of the Autobiography, 1874.]
OLD CHINA[4]
CHARLES LAMB
I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any
great house, I inquire for the china-closet, and next for the
picture-gallery. I cannot defend the order of preference, but by saying
that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of
our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to
mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to; but
I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced
into my imagination.
I had no repugnance then--why should I now have?--to those little,
lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, under the notion of men and
women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element in that world before
perspective--a china tea-cup.
I like to see my old friends, whom distance cannot diminish, figuring up
in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on _terra firma_
still--for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue,
which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, had made to spring up
beneath their sandals.
I love the men with women's faces, and women, if possible, with still
more womanish expressions.
Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a
salver--two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And
here the same lady, or another--for likeness is identity on tea-cups--is
stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this
calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle
of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the
midst of a flowery mead--a furlong off on the other side of the same
strange stream!
Further on--if far or near can be predicated of their world--see horses,
trees, pagodas, dancing the hays.[5]
Here--a cow and rabbit couchant, and coextensive--so objects show, seen
through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay.
I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson (which we
are old-fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon), some
of these _speciosa miracula_[6] upon a set of extraordinary old blue
china (a recent purchase) which we were now for the first time using;
and could not help remarking, how favourable circumstances had been to
us of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes with
trifles of this sort--when a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the
brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in
Bridget.
"I wish the good old times would come again," she said, "when we were
not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was a
middle state,"--so she was pleased to ramble on,--"in which I am sure we
were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you
have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When
we coveted a cheap luxury (and, oh! how much ado I had to get you to
consent in those times!) we were used to have a debate two or three days
before, and to weigh the _for_ and _against_, and think what we might
spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon, that should be an
equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that
we paid for it.
"Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till
your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and all
because of that folio _Beaumont and Fletcher_, which you dragged home
late at night from Barker's in Covent-garden? Do you remember how we
eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and
had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the
Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be
too late--and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his
shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bed-ward) lighted
out the relic from his dusty treasures--and when you lugged it home,
wishing it were twice as cumbersome--and when you presented it to
me--and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (_collating_ you
called it)--and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with
paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till
daybreak--was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat
black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed,
since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity
with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit--your old
corbeau--for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to
pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen--or sixteen
shillings was it?--a great affair we thought it then--which you had
lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that
pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old
purchases now.
"When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number
of shillings upon that print after Lionardo which we christened the
'Lady Blanch'; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the
money--and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture--was
there no pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but
to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you?
"Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter's bar,
and Waltham, when we had a holiday--holidays and all other fun are gone
now we are rich--and the little handbasket in which I used to deposit
our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad--and how you would pry
about at noon-tide for some decent house, where we might go in and
produce our store--only paying for the ale that you must call for--and
speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to
allow us a tablecloth--and wish for such another honest hostess as Izaak
Walton has described many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when
he went a fishing--and sometimes they would prove obliging enough, and
sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us--but we had cheerful looks
still for one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely
grudging Piscator[7] his Trout Hall? Now, when we go out a day's
pleasuring, which is seldom, moreover, we _ride_ part of the way, and go
into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the
expense, which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance
country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a
precarious welcome.
"You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you
remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw the _Battle of
Hexham_, and the _Surrender of Calais_, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in
the _Children in the Wood_--when we squeezed out our shilling apiece to
sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery--where
you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me--and more
strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me--and the
pleasure was the better for a little shame--and when the curtain drew
up, what cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where
we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or with
Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say that the gallery was the
best place of all for enjoying a play socially; that the relish of such
exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going; that the
company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were
obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on on the
stage, because a word lost would have been a chasm which it was
impossible for them to fill up. With such reflections we consoled our
pride then, and I appeal to you whether, as a woman, I met generally
with less attention and accommodation than I have done since in more
expensive situations in the house? The getting in, indeed, and the
crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad enough,--but there
was still a law of civility to woman recognised to quite as great an
extent as we ever found in the other passages--and how a little
difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat, and the play, afterward!
Now we can only pay our money, and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in
the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough
then--but sight, and all, I think, is gone with our poverty.
"There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they became quite
common--in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear--to have
them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we were
to treat ourselves now--that is, to have dainties a little above our
means, it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that
we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that makes
what I call a treat--when two people living together, as we have done,
now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury, which both like;
while each apologises, and is willing to take both halves of the blame
to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of themselves
in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make much of
others. But now--what I mean by the word--we never _do_ make much of
ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor
of all, but persons as we were, just above poverty.
"I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the
end of the year to make all meet,--and much ado we used to have every
Thirty-first Night of December to account for our exceedings--many a
long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to
make it out how we had spent so much--or that we had not spent so
much--or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year--and
still we found our slender capital decreasing--but then, betwixt ways,
and projects, and compromises of one sort or another and talk of
curtailing this charge, and doing without that for the future--and the
hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were never
poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with 'lusty
brimmers' (as you used to quote it out of _hearty, cheerful Mr.
Cotton_[8], as you called him), we used to welcome in the 'coming
guest.' Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year; no
flattering promises about the new year doing better for us."
Bridget is so sparing of her speech, on most occasions, that when she
gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could
not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear
imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor ---- hundred
pounds a year. "It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we
were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the
excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should
not much mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle with, as we grew
up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened and
knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to
each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain
of. The resisting power, those natural dilations of the youthful spirit,
which circumstances can not straiten--with us are long since passed
away. Competence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry supplement
indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride where we
formerly walked: live better and lie softer--and shall be wise to do
so--than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet
could those days return, could you and I once more walk our thirty miles
a day, could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I be
young to see them, could the good old one shilling gallery days
return--they are dreams, my cousin, now, but could you and I at this
moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside,
sitting on this luxurious sofa--be once more struggling up those
inconvenient staircases, pushed about and squeezed, and elbowed by the
poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers--could I once more hear those
anxious shrieks of yours, and the delicious _Thank God, we are safe_,
which always followed, when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the
first light of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us--I know not
the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be
willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew R----
is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that merry
little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester,
over the head of that pretty insipid half-Madonna-ish chit of a lady in
that very blue summer-house."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: From "Last Essays of Elia," 1833.]
[Footnote 5: The hays: an old English dance.]
[Footnote 6: Speciosa miracula: beautiful marvels.]
[Footnote 7: Piscator: The Angler--the author's spokesman in Walton's
"The Complete Angler."]
[Footnote 8: Charles Cotton, a humorist of the seventeenth century.]
WHAT IS EDUCATION?[9]
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
What is education? Above all things, what is our ideal of a thoroughly
liberal education?--of that education which, if we could begin life
again, we would give ourselves--of that education which, if we could
mould the fates to our own will, we would give our children? Well, I
know not what may be your conceptions upon this matter, but I will tell
you mine, and I hope I shall find that our views are not very
discrepant.
Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one
of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game
of chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary
duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a
notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and
getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a
disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son,
or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a
pawn from a knight?