[1] “Wave your hand; the motion which has apparently ceased is taken
up by the air, from the air by the walls of the room, etc., and so
by direct and re-acting waves, continually comminuted, but never
destroyed.”—_Grove’s Correlation of Physical Forces._
[2] The Candidate, Lord Sandwich.
[3] See on the scope of the words ἐπιθυμῶν χορτασθῆναι (St. Luke xvi.
21), _Analecta Theologica_ (Rev. W. Trollope’s) _in loc._
[4] Earlier in the tale there is a touch to remind us of Lear on the
heath:
“‘Know you his conduct?’ ‘Yes, indeed, I know,
And how he wanders in the wind and snow;
Safe in our rooms the threatening storm we hear,
But he feels strongly what we faintly fear.’”
[5] Plentiful illustrations might be drawn from Plutarch to the same
effect. There is Mutius Scævola, for instance, addressing Porsenna: “Your
threatenings I regarded not, but am subdued by your generosity.” There
is Porsenna himself, who, as Publicola found, could not be quelled by
dint of arms, but whom he converted into a friend to Rome, by “the gentle
arts of persuasion.” There is young Alexander, afterwards to be, or to be
called, the Great, whose astute father saw that he did not easily submit
to authority, because he would not be forced to anything, but that he
might be led to his duty by the gentler hand of reason; and therefore, as
a wise father, who knew his own son, Philip took the method of persuasion
rather than of command.
What Plutarch says of the gentler hand of reason, reminds us of Swift’s
account of the _Houyhnhnms_, that “they have no conception how a rational
creature can be compelled, but only advised or exhorted.” And by the
way, Swift remarks in a letter on England’s harsh rule over the Irish,
“Supposing even the size of a native’s understanding just equal to that
of a dog or a horse, I have often seen these two animals civilized by
rewards at least as much as by punishments.”
But to return to Plutarch. There is his Flaminius, again, whose
appointment to the command in the war with Macedon, he calls very
fortunate for Rome, since what was required was “a general who did not
want to do everything by force and violence, but rather by gentleness and
persuasion.” As Claudian says, _Peragit tranquilla potestas quad violenta
nequit_.
Fear, observes Adam Smith, is in almost all cases a wretched instrument
of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any
order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency. “To
attempt to terrify them, serves only to irritate their bad humours, and
to confirm them in an opposition which more gentle usage perhaps might
easily induce them, either to soften, or to lay aside altogether.”
[6] The history of Latin Christianity supplies abundant examples, more or
less pertinent. Columban and his disciples are characterized as having
had little of the gentle and winning perseverance of missionaries:
they had been accustomed to dictate to trembling sovereigns; and their
haughty and violent demeanour provoked the pagans, instead of weaning
them from their idolatries (iii. 106). So of Boniface (v. 167): it was
in the tone of a master that he commanded the world to peace, a tone
which provoked resistance. “It was not by persuasive influence, which
might lull the conflicting passions of men, and enlighten them as to
their real interests.” Contrast with these the temper and policy of Pope
Eugenius III. (iii. 407), whose “skilful and well-timed use of means more
becoming the head of Christendom than arms and excommunications, wrought
wonders in his favour;” and who, by his gentleness and charity, gradually
supplanted the senate in the attachment of the Roman people: “the fierce
and intractable people were yielding to this gentler influence.” On a
later page we come across the able portraiture of our Henry II., as drawn
by a churchman who was warning Becket as to the formidable adversary he
had undertaken to oppose: “He will sometimes be softened by humility and
patience, but will never submit to compulsion,” etc. Ariste _a raison_
when he counsels Geronte, in Gresset’s “Le Méchant,” as the _bien plus
sage_ course of dealing with a difficult subject,
“Que vous le rameniez par raison, par douceur,
Que d’aller opposer la colère à l’humeur.”
[7] “Such access as Protestantism has gained to the minds of the
Catholics in Ireland, it owes, not to the thunders of any missionary
Boanerges, but to men like the [late] Archbishop of Dublin [Whately],
and the Dean of Elphin, who have taken a very different course, and
presented Protestant Christianity to their neighbours in a very different
form.”—_Saturday Review_, xi. 71.
[8] Gently soothing.
[9] Another type of mind, deficient in the higher attributes of
independence, is often feverishly eager to sink its sense of individual
responsibility by seeking what is called “rest in the Church.” Dr.
Bungener represents his Julian, when committed to the Bastile, as rather
rejoicing at than terrified by the despotism of the hand laid upon him;
and in the same way, on taking holy orders, he, being “subdued in heart,
enslaved in mind, tired of being his own master, only to create his own
torments,” flatters himself that he gives the Church complete power over
his faculties at the same time that he gives her plenary power over his
actions.
To the baser sort, remarks Sir James Stephen, no yoke is so galling
as that of self control, no deliverance so welcome as that of being
handsomely rid of free agency. “With such men mental slavery readily
becomes a habit, a fashion, and a pride. To the abject many the
abdication of self-government is a willing sacrifice.”
One of our acutest essayists on social subjects comments on the readiness
of a man to exult in the fact that he has done something which he cannot
undo, and has pledged himself to a course from which he cannot draw back,
as more commonly the sign of a weak than of a strong nature. “The comfort
of plunging right into the stream is unspeakable to anybody who has been
accustomed to stand shivering and irresolute on the bank.” When a person
of this sort, it is justly observed, has brought himself to take the
plunge, his exultation and fearlessness are wonderful: the knowledge that
the Rubicon is crossed, and the die cast, seems to relieve him from the
necessity of further resolution. “He has set in motion a machine which
will of itself wind off results and consequences for him without more
ado on his own part; and this is an order of release from the demands of
circumstances upon his will, for which he cannot be too thankful.”
[10] When at Bologna he used to visit the Campo Santo, the sexton of
which was a favourite of his, and the “beautiful and innocent face” of
whose daughter of fifteen, he used to contrast with the skulls that
peopled several cells there—and particularly with that of one skull dated
1766, “which was once covered (the tradition goes) by the most lovely
features of Bologna—noble and rich.”
[11] Not to be forgotten, however, is the suggestive rejoinder of
Mercury, that Menippus would have been as easily fooled as the rest of
them, had he but seen, not that grinning skull, but the living face that
once concealed it.
[12] In the book called “God’s Acre; or, Historical Notices relating to
Churchyards,” there is a loathsome story of a Mr. Thompson, of Worcester,
who baited his angling-hook with part of the corrupted form of King John,
and carried the fish he caught with it in triumph through the streets.
[13] “Et puisque le monde n’est qu’une comédie, il faut prendre la queue
lapin et l’épée de bois comme les autres.”—Lettres de Chaulieu, ed. 1850.
[14] Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” April 29, 1783.
[15] In the etymological sense, now practically obsolete, of misbeliever.
[16] Perhaps a better version of perhaps the same story is that of the
young Dauphin exclaiming to his right reverend preceptor, when some book
mentioned a king as having died, “Quoi donc, les rois meurent-ils?”
“Quelquefois, monseigneur,” was the reply—ironical, or parasitical, as
may be.
[17] John Asgill distinguished himself by maintaining in a treatise now
forgotten, that death is no natural necessity, and that to escape it is
within the range of the humanly practicable. But Asgill’s biography, like
every other, has for a last page the inevitable “And he died.”
[18] That is, “Let thy spirit (goste), not thy appetite, lead thee.” In
St. Peter’s words, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.”
[19] St. Augustine, Lyra, Bellarmine, and others, are chargeable with
this judgment and sentence.
[20] “Fortunately these things are known to Him, from whom no secrets are
hidden; and let us rest in the assurance that His judgments are not as
ours.”—_Rogers’s Italy._
[21] The friends spoken of were Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth. The scene
was the eastern shore of Grasmere. The date of the poem is 1800.
[22] On the “false humility” which shrinks from all censure or
reprobation of what is evil, under cover of the text “judge not, that ye
be not judged,”—as if it were the intent of that text, not to warn us
against rash, presumptuous, and uncharitable judgments, but absolutely to
forbid our taking account of the distinction between right and wrong,—see
Sir Henry Taylor’s essay on Humility and Independence in his valuable
“Notes from Life.” The man of true humility, we are there taught, will
come to the task of judgment, on serious occasions, not lightly or
unawed, but praying to have “a right judgment in all things;” and whilst
exercising that judgment in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will
feel that to judge his brother is a duty and not a privilege; and he will
judge him in sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of that fallen nature
of which he is himself part and parcel. (See “Notes from Life” (1847),
pp. 46, _sqq._)
[23] Were we all turned inside out, however, Mr. Trollope elsewhere
surmises, some of us might find “our shade of brown to be very
dark.”—_The Bertrams_, chap. xix.
[24] The avoidance of moral _estimate_, on the other hand, is imputed
to an insufficient sense of the duty incumbent on all of us to form
determinate estimates of men and actions, if only as bearing on our own
conduct in life. (See “W. C. Roscoe’s Essays,” vol. ii., p. 308.)
[25] Owen Meredith: “The Artist.”
[26] “Cleon,” by Robert Browning.
[27] Completed. _Finis coronat opus._ Children and fools, it has been
observed, should not see a work that is half done, they not having the
sense to make out what the artist is designing. “The whole of this world
that we see, is a work half done; and thence fools are apt to find fault
with Providence.”—ARCHBISHOP WHATELY.
[28] Sonnets, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Perplexed Music.”
[29] He is said to have emptied two baskets of figs and of eggs, which
he swallowed alternately, and the repast was concluded with marrow and
sugar. In one of his pilgrimages to Mecca, Soliman is asserted to have
eaten, at a single meal, seventy pomegranates, a kid, six fowls, and a
huge quantity of the grapes of Tayaf. “If,” says Gibbon, “the bill of
fare be correct, we must admire the appetite rather than the luxury of
the sovereign of Asia.”—_Hist. Rom. Empire_, ch. lii.
[30] A broken-down old schoolmaster bore witness to Dr. Chalmers’ _modus
operandi_. “Many a pound-note has the doctor given me, and he always did
the thing as if he were afraid that any person should see him. May God
reward him!”—Hanna’s “Life of Chalmers,” chap. i.
[31] The case of St. Peter was expressly within the preacher’s view. “It
is shocking, doubtless, to allow ourselves even to admit that this is
possible; yet no one knowing human nature from men and not from books,
will deny that this might befall even a brave and true man. St. Peter
was both; yet this was his history. In a crowd, suddenly, the question
was put directly, ‘This man also was with Jesus of Nazareth?’ Then a
prevarication—a lie: and yet another.”—_Sermon on the Restoration of the
Erring._
[32] Froude, “History of Reign of Elizabeth,” vol. ii., pp. 126, 215,
226, 277, 278.
[33] Mr. Thackeray incidentally opposes the quasi-apologists for
smuggling on the ground that it is a complicated tissue of lying. In his
very last and unfinished work, he makes a good old rector allow that to
run an anker of brandy may seem no monstrous crime; but when men engage
in these lawless ventures, who knows how far the evil will go? “I buy
ten kegs of brandy from a French fishing-boat, I land it under a lie
on the coast, I send it inland ever so far, and all my consignees lie
and swindle. I land it, and lie to the revenue officer. Under a lie
(that is, a mutual secrecy), I sell it to the landlord of the Bell at
Maidstone, say.... My landlord sells it to a customer under a lie. We
are all engaged in crime, conspiracy, and falsehood; nay, if the revenue
looks too closely after us, we out with our pistols, and to crime and
conspiracy add murder. Do you suppose men engaged in lying every day
will scruple about a false oath in a witness-box? Crime engenders crime,
sir.”—_Denis Duval_, chap. vii.
[34] From Sir Walter Scott we might gather numerous examples and
aphorisms to the purpose. “It’s a sair judgment on a man,” says
Ratcliffe, in the “Heart of Mid-Lothian,” “when he has once gane sae
far wrang as I hae dune”—the present thief-taker being in fact an
ex-thief—that never a bit “he can be honest, try’t whilk way he will.”
The career of Effie Deans, anon Lady Staunton, in the same story, is a
practical sermon on the same text. “I drag on,” she owns, “the life of
a miserable impostor, indebted for the marks of regard I receive to a
tissue of deceit and lies, which the slightest accident may unravel.”
Her sister, on perusing the letter which contains these confessions, is
impressed with such an instance of the staggering condition of those who
have risen to distinction by undue arts, and the “outworks and bulwarks
of fiction and falsehood, by which they are under the necessity of
surrounding and defending their precarious advantages.”
Then again there is old Caleb Balderstone, querulous at being what he
calls “forced” to imperil his soul “wi’ telling ae lee after another
faster than I can count them,”—and elsewhere at the “cost” of “telling
twenty daily lees to a wheen idle chaps and queans, and, what’s waur,
without gaining credence.”
And for another instance we have the titular Earl of Etherington, in “St.
Ronan’s Well,” in the position as of a spider when he perceives that his
deceitful web is threatened with danger, and sits balanced in the centre,
watching every point, and uncertain which he may be called upon first to
defend. “Such is one part, and not the slightest part, of the penance
which never fails to wait on those, who, abandoning the ‘fair play of the
world,’ endeavour to work out their purposes by a process of deception
and intrigue.”
In one of Mr. Disraeli’s earlier fictions, there is a young man whose
frankness is proverbial, but who finds himself involved in a course of
prevarication—due effect being given to its preliminary process, though
“only the commencement of the system of degrading deception which awaited
him.”
But perhaps the most direct and forcible illustration of the subject in
modern fiction, is to be found in the “White Lies” of Mr. Charles Reade,
a work the title of which declares its didactic scope. Rose Beaurépaire
in an unguarded moment equivocates, or tells a white lie, and thereby
hangs the tale. Soon we have her bitterly bewailing the imbroglio in
which she has involved herself and others, and the necessity of fresh
fibs to maintain the meaning and credit of the first. “There is no end to
it,” she sobs despairingly. “It is like a spider’s web: every struggle
to be free but multiplies the fine yet irresistible thread that seems to
bind me.” In the next chapter a significant paragraph intimates, “This
was the last lie the poor entangled wretch had to tell that morning.”
And the penultimate chapter opens with a notice anew of the “fatal
entanglement” into which two high-minded sisters had been led, through
yielding to a natural foible: the desire, namely, to hide everything
painful from those they loved, even at the expense of truth. The author
lays stress on the inextricable complications due to their “amiable
dishonesty,” and he importunes the reader to take notice that after the
first White Lie or two, circumstances overpowered them, and drove them
on against their will. It was no small part, he insists, of all their
misery, that they longed to get back to truth and could not.
[35] In apposition, or opposition, to which, note the bidding and the
demur in Talfourd’s tragedy of “Ion”:—
“_Adrastus._ No; strike at once; my hour is come: in thee
I recognise the minister of Jove,
And, kneeling thus, submit me to his power.
_Ion._ Avert thy face.
_Adras._ No; let me meet thy gaze,” etc.
[36] Deut. xiii. 6. Observe too the seeming climax,—ascending from “thy
brother, the son of thy mother,” through the successive stages of “thy
son, thy daughter,” and “the wife of thy bosom,” to “thy friend, which is
as thine own soul.” As though
“The force of Nature could no further go.”
[37] “If our friends appear to look upon us with little interest, if
our arrival is seen without pleasure, and our departure without regret,
instead of charging them with a deficiency of feeling, we should turn our
scrutiny upon ourselves.”—_Essays on the Formation and Publication of
Opinions_, v. i.
[38] Hartley Coleridge, Sonnets.
[39] That is, if attention be shown him.
[40] Gusts of wind.
[41] See Hanna’s Life of Chalmers, Journal of 1810 and of 1825-6,
_passim_.
[42] “See the well-known print of Mazarin’s death-bed, surrounded by
ladies at cards. According to Grimm, the Maréchale de Luxembourg and
two of her friends played at loto by that of Madame du Deffand till
she expired. But at that time the proceeding was at least thought
singular.”—“Historical Studies,” by Herman Merivale.
[43] “God speaks to children, also, in dreams, and by the oracles that
lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, ... God holds with
children ‘communion undisturbed.’”—“Autobiographic Sketches,” by Thomas
de Quincey, i. 24.