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I.
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT
TIME.
Many objections have been made to a proposition which, in some remarks
of mine on translating Homer, I ventured to put forth; a proposition
about criticism, and its importance at the present day. I said: “Of the
literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in
general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical
effort; the endeavor, in all branches of knowledge, theology,
philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it
really is.” I added, that owing to the operation in English literature
of certain causes, “almost the last thing for which one would come to
English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most
desires,—criticism;” and that the power and value of English literature
was thereby impaired. More than one rejoinder declared that the
importance I here assigned to criticism was excessive, and asserted the
inherent superiority of the creative effort of the human spirit over its
critical effort. And the other day, having been led by a Mr. Shairp’s
excellent notice of Wordsworth[2] to turn again to his biography, I
found, in the words of this great man, whom I, for one, must always
listen to with the profoundest respect, a sentence passed on the
critic’s business, which seems to justify every possible disparagement
of it. Wordsworth says in one of his letters:—
“The writers in these publications” (the Reviews), “while they prosecute
their inglorious employment, cannot be supposed to be in a state of mind
very favorable for being affected by the finer influences of a thing so
pure as genuine poetry.”
And a trustworthy reporter of his conversation quotes a more elaborate
judgment to the same effect:—
“Wordsworth holds the critical power very low, infinitely lower than the
inventive; and he said to-day that if the quantity of time consumed in
writing critiques on the works of others were given to original
composition, of whatever kind it might be, it would be much better
employed; it would make a man find out sooner his own level, and it
would do infinitely less mischief. A false or malicious criticism may do
much injury to the minds of others, a stupid invention, either in prose
or verse, is quite harmless.”
Footnote 2:
I cannot help thinking that a practice, common in England during the
last century, and still followed in France, of printing a notice of
this kind,—a notice by a competent critic,—to serve as an introduction
to an eminent author’s works, might be revived among us with
advantage. To introduce all succeeding editions of Wordsworth, Mr.
Shairp’s notice might, it seems to me, excellently serve; it is
written from the point of view of an admirer, nay, of a disciple, and
that is right; but then the disciple must be also, as in this case he
is, a critic, a man of letters, not, as too often happens, some
relation or friend with no qualification for his task except affection
for his author.
It is almost too much to expect of poor human nature, that a man capable
of producing some effect in one line of literature, should, for the
greater good of society, voluntarily doom himself to impotence and
obscurity in another. Still less is this to be expected from men
addicted to the composition of the “false or malicious criticism” of
which Wordsworth speaks. However, everybody would admit that a false or
malicious criticism had better never have been written. Everybody, too,
would be willing to admit, as a general proposition, that the critical
faculty is lower than the inventive. But is it true that criticism is
really, in itself, a baneful and injurious employment; is it true that
all time given to writing critiques on the works of others would be much
better employed if it were given to original composition, of whatever
kind this may be? Is it true that Johnson had better have gone on
producing more _Irenes_ instead of writing his _Lives of the Poets_;
nay, is it certain that Wordsworth himself was better employed in making
his Ecclesiastical Sonnets than when he made his celebrated Preface, so
full of criticism, and criticism of the works of others? Wordsworth was
himself a great critic, and it is to be sincerely regretted that he has
not left us more criticism; Goethe was one of the greatest of critics,
and we may sincerely congratulate ourselves that he has left us so much
criticism. Without wasting time over the exaggeration which Wordsworth’s
judgment on criticism clearly contains, or over an attempt to trace the
causes,—not difficult, I think, to be traced,—which may have led
Wordsworth to this exaggeration, a critic may with advantage seize an
occasion for trying his own conscience, and for asking himself of what
real service at any given moment the practice of criticism either is or
may be made to his own mind and spirit, and to the minds and spirits of
others.
The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True; but in
assenting to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind.
It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free
creative activity, is the highest function of man; it is proved to be so
by man’s finding in it his true happiness. But it is undeniable, also,
that men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in
other ways than in producing great works of literature or art; if it
were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true
happiness of all men. They may have it in well-doing, they may have it
in learning, they may have it even in criticizing. This is one thing to
be kept in mind. Another is, that the exercise of the creative power in
the production of great works of literature or art, however high this
exercise of it may rank, is not at all epochs and under all conditions
possible; and that therefore labor may be vainly spent in attempting it,
which might with more fruit be used in preparing for it, in rendering it
possible. This creative power works with elements, with materials; what
if it has not those materials, those elements, ready for its use? In
that case it must surely wait till they are ready. Now, in literature,—I
will limit myself to literature, for it is about literature that the
question arises,—the elements with which the creative power works are
ideas; the best ideas on every matter which literature touches, current
at the time. At any rate we may lay it down as certain that in modern
literature no manifestation of the creative power not working with these
can be very important or fruitful. And I say _current_ at the time, not
merely accessible at the time; for creative literary genius does not
principally show itself in discovering new ideas, that is rather the
business of the philosopher. The grand work of literary genius is a work
of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift
lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual
and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds
itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in
the most effective and attractive combinations,—making beautiful works
with them, in short. But it must have the atmosphere, it must find
itself amidst the order of ideas, in order to work freely; and these it
is not so easy to command. This is why great creative epochs in
literature are so rare, this is why there is so much that is
unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of real genius; because,
for the creation of a master-work of literature two powers must concur,
the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not
enough without the moment; the creative power has, for its happy
exercise, appointed elements, and those elements are not in its own
control.
Nay, they are more within the control of the critical power. It is the
business of the critical power, as I said in the words already quoted,
“in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art,
science, to see the object as in itself it really is.” Thus it tends, at
last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can
profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not
absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to
make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society,
the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth
everywhere; out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of
literature.
Or, to narrow our range, and quit these considerations of the general
march of genius and of society,—considerations which are apt to become
too abstract and impalpable,—every one can see that a poet, for
instance, ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in
poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex
things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great
critical effort behind it; else it must be a comparatively poor, barren,
and short-lived affair. This is why Byron’s poetry had so little
endurance in it, and Goethe’s so much; both Byron and Goethe had a great
productive power, but Goethe’s was nourished by a great critical effort
providing the true materials for it, and Byron’s was not; Goethe knew
life and the world, the poet’s necessary subjects, much more
comprehensively and thoroughly than Byron. He knew a great deal more of
them, and he knew them much more as they really are.
It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our
literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it in
fact something premature; and that from this cause its productions are
doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied
and do still accompany them to prove hardly more lasting than the
productions of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes
from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without
sufficient materials to work with. In other words, the English poetry of
the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of
creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of
matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet
so wanting in completeness and variety. Wordsworth cared little for
books, and disparaged Goethe. I admire Wordsworth, as he is, so much
that I cannot wish him different; and it is vain, no doubt, to imagine
such a man different from what he is, to suppose that he _could_ have
been different. But surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an
even greater poet than he is,—his thought richer, and his influence of
wider application,—was that he should have read more books, among them,
no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him.
But to speak of books and reading may easily lead to a misunderstanding
here. It was not really books and reading that lacked to our poetry at
this epoch; Shelley had plenty of reading, Coleridge had immense
reading. Pindar and Sophocles—as we all say so glibly, and often with so
little discernment of the real import of what we are saying—had not many
books; Shakespeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar
and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a
current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the
creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh
thought, intelligent and alive. And this state of things is the true
basis for the creative power’s exercise, in this it finds its data, its
materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the
world are only valuable as they are helps to this. Even when this does
not actually exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct a
kind of semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge and
intelligence in which he may live and work. This is by no means an
equivalent to the artist for the nationally diffused life and thought of
the epochs of Sophocles or Shakespeare; but, besides that it may be a
means of preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many
share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of great value. Such
an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the long and widely-combined
critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe, when he lived and worked.
There was no national glow of life and thought there as in the Athens of
Pericles or the England of Elizabeth. That was the poet’s weakness. But
there was a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and
unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans. That was his strength.
In the England of the first quarter of this century there was neither a
national glow of life and thought, such as we had in the age of
Elizabeth, nor yet a culture and a force of learning and criticism such
as were to be found in Germany. Therefore the creative power of poetry
wanted, for success in the highest sense, materials and a basis; a
thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it.
At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the
French Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of
genius equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive
time of Greece, or out of that of the Renascence, with its powerful
episode the Reformation. But the truth is that the stir of the French
Revolution took a character which essentially distinguished it from such
movements as these. These were, in the main, disinterestedly
intellectual and spiritual movements; movements in which the human
spirit looked for its satisfaction in itself and in the increased play
of its own activity. The French Revolution took a political, practical
character. The movement, which went on in France under the old _régime_
from 1700 to 1789, was far more really akin than that of the Revolution
itself to the movement of the Renascence; the France of Voltaire and
Rousseau told far more powerfully upon the mind of Europe than the
France of the Revolution. Goethe reproached this last expressly with
having “thrown quiet culture back.” Nay, and the true key to how much in
our Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is this!—that they had their source
in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind. The
French Revolution, however,—that object of so much blind love and so
much blind hatred,—found undoubtedly its motive-power in the
intelligence of men, and not in their practical sense; this is what
distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the First’s
time. This is what makes it a more spiritual event than our Revolution,
an event of much more powerful and world-wide interest, though
practically less successful; it appeals to an order of ideas which are
universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational?
1642 asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it
according to conscience? This is the English fashion, a fashion to be
treated, within its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its
success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in
one place is not law in another; what is law here to-day is not law even
here to-morrow; and as for conscience, what is binding on one man’s
conscience is not binding on another’s. The old woman who threw her
stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles’s Church at
Edinburgh obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race may be
permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are
absolute, unchanging, of universal validity; _to count by tens is the
easiest way of counting_—that is a proposition of which every one, from
here to the Antipodes, feels the force; at least I should say so if we
did not live in a country where it is not impossible that any morning we
may find a letter in the _Times_ declaring that a decimal coinage is an
absurdity. That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an
enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent zeal for making its
prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how
little of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into
the motives which alone, in general, impel great masses of men. In spite
of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the
crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution
derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it
took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a
multitude for these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is—it
will probably long remain—the greatest, the most animating event in
history. And as no sincere passion for the things of the mind, even
though it turn out in many respects an unfortunate passion, is ever
quite thrown away and quite barren of good, France has reaped from tiers
one fruit—the natural and legitimate fruit though not precisely the
grand fruit she expected: she is the country in Europe where _the
people_ is most alive.
But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical
application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an
Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours.
And all we are in the habit of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal
of truth. Ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves cannot
be too much lived with; but to transport them abruptly into the world of
politics, and practice, violently to revolutionize this world to their
bidding,—that is quite another thing. There is the world of ideas and
there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the
one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed. A member
of the House of Commons said to me the other day: “That a thing is an
anomaly, I consider to be no objection to it whatever.” I venture to
think he was wrong; that a thing is an anomaly _is_ an objection to it,
but absolutely and in the sphere of ideas: it is not necessarily, under
such and such circumstances, or at such and such a moment, an objection
to it in the sphere of politics and practice. Joubert has said
beautifully: “C’est la force et le droit qui règlent toutes choses dans
le monde; la force en attendant le droit.” (Force and right are the
governors of this world; force till right is ready.) _Force till right
is ready_; and till right is ready, force, the existing order of things,
is justified, is the legitimate ruler. But right is something moral, and
implies inward recognition, free assent of the will; we are not ready
for right,—_right_, so far as we are concerned, _is not ready_,—until we
have attained this sense of seeing it and willing it. The way in which
for us it may change and transform force, the existing order of things,
and become, in its turn, the legitimate ruler of the world, should
depend on the way in which, when our time comes, we see it and will it.
Therefore for other people enamored of their own newly discerned right,
to attempt to impose it upon us as ours, and violently to substitute
their right for our force, is an act of tyranny, and to be resisted. It
sets at naught the second great half of our maxim, _force till right is
ready_. This was the grand error of the French Revolution; and its
movement of ideas, by quitting the intellectual sphere and rushing
furiously into the political sphere, ran, indeed, a prodigious and
memorable course, but produced no such intellectual fruit as the
movement of ideas of the Renascence, and created, in opposition to
itself, what I may call an _epoch of concentration_. The great force of
that epoch of concentration was England; and the great voice of that
epoch of concentration was Burke. It is the fashion to treat Burke’s
writings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered by the
event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and
prejudice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the
violence and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Burke’s
view was bounded, and his observation therefore at fault. But on the
whole, and for those who can make the needful corrections, what
distinguishes these writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful,
philosophical truth. They contain the true philosophy of an epoch of
concentration, dissipate the heavy atmosphere which its own nature is
apt to engender round it, and make its resistance rational instead of
mechanical.
But Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings
thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought. It is
his accident that his ideas were at the service of an epoch of
concentration, not of an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic
that he so lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up
within him, that he could float even an epoch of concentration and
English Tory politics with them. It does not hurt him that Dr. Price and
the Liberals were enraged with him; it does not even hurt him that
George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness
is that he lived in a world which neither English Liberalism nor English
Toryism is apt to enter;—the world of ideas, not the world of catchwords
and party habits. So far is it from being really true of him that he “to
party gave up what was meant for mankind,” that at the very end of his
fierce struggle with the French Revolution, after all his invectives
against its false pretensions, hollowness, and madness, with his sincere
conviction of its mischievousness, he can close a memorandum on the best
means of combating it, some of the last pages he ever wrote,—the
_Thoughts on French Affairs_, in December 1791,—with these striking
words:—
“The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be
where power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good
intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I
believe, forever. It has given me many anxious moments for the last two
years. _If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of
men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw
that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who
persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear
rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs
of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and
obstinate._”
That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the
finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature. That
is what I call living by ideas: when one side of a question has long had
your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear
all around you no language but one, when your party talks this language
like a steam-engine and can imagine no other,—still to be able to think,
still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought
to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to be unable to
speak anything _but what the Lord has put in your mouth_. I know nothing
more striking, and I must add that I know nothing more un-English.
For the Englishman in general is like my friend the Member of
Parliament, and believes, point-blank, that for a thing to be an anomaly
is absolutely no objection to it whatever. He is like the Lord Auckland
of Burke’s day, who, in a memorandum on the French Revolution, talks of
“certain miscreants, assuming the name of philosophers, who have
presumed themselves capable of establishing a new system of society.”
The Englishman has been called a political animal, and he values what is
political and practical so much that ideas easily become objects of
dislike in his eyes, and thinkers “miscreants,” because ideas and
thinkers have rashly meddled with politics and practice. This would be
all very well if the dislike and neglect confined themselves to ideas
transported out of their own sphere, and meddling rashly with practice;
but they are inevitably extended to ideas as such, and to the whole life
of intelligence; practice is everything, a free play of the mind is
nothing. The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being
a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential
provider of elements without which a nation’s spirit, whatever
compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of
inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman’s thoughts. It is noticeable
that the word _curiosity_, which in other languages is used in a good
sense, to mean, as a high and fine quality of man’s nature, just this
disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its
own sake,—it is noticeable, I say, that this word has in our language no
sense of the kind, no sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. But
criticism, real criticism is essentially the exercise of this very
quality. It obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that
is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics,
and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they
approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations
whatever. This is an instinct for which there is, I think, little
original sympathy in the practical English nature, and what there was of
it has undergone a long benumbing period of blight and suppression in
the epoch of concentration which followed the French Revolution.
But epochs of concentration cannot well endure forever; epochs of
expansion, in the due course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of
expansion seems to be opening in this country. In the first place all
danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice
has long disappeared; like the traveler in the fable, therefore, we
begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with a long peace,
the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though
in infinitesimally small quantities at a time, with our own notions.
Then, too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and
brutalizing influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to
me indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to
lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man,
after he has made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine
what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind,
and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure. I grant it
is mainly the privilege of faith, at present, to discern this end to our
railways, our business, and our fortune-making; but we shall see if,
here as elsewhere, faith is not in the end the true prophet. Our ease,
our traveling, and our unbounded liberty to hold just as hard and
securely as we please to the practice to which our notions have given
birth, all tend to beget an inclination to deal a little more freely
with these notions themselves, to canvass them a little, to penetrate a
little into their real nature. Flutterings of curiosity, in the foreign
sense of the word, appear amongst us, and it is in these that criticism
must look to find its account. Criticism first; a time of true creative
activity, perhaps,—which, as I have said, must inevitably be preceded
amongst us by a time of criticism,—hereafter, when criticism has done
its work.
It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly
discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field
now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to
take. The rule may be summed up in one word,—_disinterestedness_. And
how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from what
is called “the practical view of things;” by resolutely following the
law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all
subjects which it touches. By steadily refusing to lend itself to any of
those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas, which
plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought
often to be attached to them, which in this country at any rate are
certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which criticism
has really nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply
to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its
turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its
business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but
its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of
practical consequences and applications, questions which will never fail
to have due prominence given to them. Else criticism, besides being
really false to its own nature, merely continues in the old rut which it
has hitherto followed in this country, and will certainly miss the
chance now given to it. For what is at present the bane of criticism in
this country? It is that practical considerations cling to it and stifle
it. It subserves interests not its own. Our organs of criticism are
organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them
those practical ends are the first thing and the play of mind the
second; so much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecution of
those practical ends is all that is wanted. An organ like the _Révue des
Deux Mondes_, having for its main function to understand and utter the
best that is known and thought in the world, existing, it may be said,
as just an organ for a free play of the mind, we have not. But we have
the _Edinburgh Review_, existing as an organ of the old Whigs, and for
as much play of the mind as may suit its being that; we have the
_Quarterly Review_, existing as an organ of the Tories, and for as much
play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the _British Quarterly
Review_, existing as an organ of the political Dissenters, and for as
much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the _Times_,
existing as an organ of the common, satisfied, well-to-do Englishman,
and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that. And so on
through all the various fractions, political and religious, of our
society; every fraction has, as such, its organ of criticism, but the
notion of combining all fractions in the common pleasure of a free
disinterested play of mind meets with no favor. Directly this play of
mind wants to have more scope, and to forget the pressure of practical
considerations a little, it is checked, it is made to feel the chain. We
saw this the other day in the extinction, so much to be regretted, of
the _Home and Foreign Review_. Perhaps in no organ of criticism in this
country was there so much knowledge, so much play of mind; but these
could not save it. The _Dublin Review_ subordinates play of mind to the
practical business of English and Irish Catholicism, and lives. It must
needs be that men should act in sects and parties, that each of these
sects and parties should have its organ, and should make this organ
subserve the interests of its action; but it would be well, too, that
there should be a criticism, not the minister of these interests, not
their enemy, but absolutely and entirely independent of them. No other
criticism will ever attain any real authority or make any real way
towards its end,—the creating a current of true and fresh ideas.
It is because criticism has so little kept in the pure intellectual
sphere, has so little detached itself from practice, has been so
directly polemical and controversial, that it has so ill accomplished,
in this country, its best spiritual work; which is to keep man from a
self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him
towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in
itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things. A polemical
practical criticism makes men blind even to the ideal imperfection of
their practice, makes them willingly assert its ideal perfection, in
order the better to secure it against attack: and clearly this is
narrowing and baneful for them. If they were reassured on the practical
side, speculative considerations of ideal perfection they might be
brought to entertain, and their spiritual horizon would thus gradually
widen. Sir Charles Adderly says to the Warwickshire farmers:
“Talk of the improvement of breed! Why, the race we ourselves represent,
the men and women, the old Anglo-Saxon race, are the best breed in the
whole world.... The absence of a too enervating climate, too unclouded
skies, and a too luxurious nature, has produced so vigorous a race of
people and has rendered us so superior to all the world.”
Mr. Roebuck says to the Sheffield cutlers:
“I look around me and ask what is the state of England? Is not property
safe? Is not every man able to say what he likes? Can you not walk from
one end of England to the other in perfect security? I ask you whether,
the world over or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I
pray that our unrivaled happiness may last.”
Now obviously there is a peril for poor human nature in words and
thoughts of such exuberant self-satisfaction, until we find ourselves
safe in the streets of the Celestial City.
“Das wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blicke
Der vorwärts sieht, wie viel noch übrig bleibt—”
says Goethe; “the little that is done seems nothing when we look forward
and see how much we have yet to do.” Clearly this is a better line of
reflection for weak humanity, so long as it remains on this earthly
field of labor and trial.
But neither Sir Charles Adderley nor Mr. Roebuck is by nature
inaccessible to considerations of this sort. They only lose sight of
them owing to the controversial life we all lead, and the practical form
which all speculation takes with us. They have in view opponents whose
aim is not ideal, but practical; and in their zeal to uphold their own
practice against these innovators, they go so far as even to attribute
to this practice an ideal perfection. Somebody has been wanting to
introduce a six-pound franchise, or to abolish church-rates, or to
collect agricultural statistics by force, or to diminish local
self-government. How natural, in reply to such proposals, very likely
improper or ill-timed, to go a little beyond the mark and to say
stoutly, “Such a race of people as we stand, so superior to all the
world! The old Anglo-Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world! I
pray that our unrivaled happiness may last! I ask you whether, the world
over or in past history, there is anything like it?” And so long as
criticism answers this dithyramb by insisting that the old Anglo-Saxon
race would be still more superior to all others if it had no
church-rates, or that our unrivaled happiness would last yet longer with
a six-pound franchise, so long will the strain, “The best breed in the
whole world!” swell louder and louder, everything ideal and refining
will be lost out of sight, and both the assailed and their critics will
remain in a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly unvital, a sphere in
which spiritual progression is impossible. But let criticism leave
church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit,
without a single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with
our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper
immediately after reading Mr. Roebuck:—
“A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl
named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young
illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly
Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.”
Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of
Sir Charles Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are
those few lines! “Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole
world!”—how much that is harsh and ill-favored there is in this best!
_Wragg!_ If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of “the best in the
whole world,” has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our
race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual
perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous
names,—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were
luckier in this respect than “the best race in the world;” by the
Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And “our unrivaled
happiness;”—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes
with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,—how
dismal those who have seen them will remember;—the gloom, the smoke, the
cold, the strangled illegimate child! “I ask you whether, the world over
or in past history, there is anything like it?” Perhaps not, one is
inclined to answer; but at any rate, in that case, the world is very
much to be pitied. And the final touch,—short, bleak and inhuman: _Wragg
is in custody_. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivaled
happiness; or (shall I say?) the superfluous Christian name lopped off
by the straightforward vigor of our old Anglo-Saxon breed! There is
profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this; criticism serves the
cause of perfection by establishing them. By eluding sterile conflict,
by refusing to remain in the sphere where alone narrow and relative
conceptions have any worth and validity, criticism may diminish its
momentary importance, but only in this way has it a chance of gaining
admittance for those wider and more perfect conceptions to which all its
duty is really owed. Mr. Roebuck will have a poor opinion of an
adversary who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring
under his breath, _Wragg is in custody_; but in no other way will these
songs of triumph be induced gradually to moderate themselves, to get rid
of what in them is excessive and offensive, and to fall into a softer
and truer key.
It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am
thus prescribing for criticism, and that, by embracing in this manner
the Indian virtue of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical
life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it
may be, but it is the only proper work of criticism. The mass of mankind
will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very
inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas
reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as
much as saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will
find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by this small
circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get
current at all. The rush and roar of practical life will always have a
dizzying and attracting effect upon the most collected spectator, and
tend to draw him into its vortex; most of all will this be the case
where that life is so powerful as it is in England. But it is only by
remaining collected, and refusing to lend himself to the point of view
of the practical man, that the critic can do the practical man any
service; and it is only by the greatest sincerity in pursuing his own
course, and by at last convincing even the practical man of his
sincerity, that he can escape misunderstandings which perpetually
threaten him.
For the practical man is not apt for fine distinctions, and yet in these
distinctions truth and the highest culture greatly find their account.
But it is not easy to lead a practical man,—unless you reassure him as
to your practical intentions, you have no chance of leading him,—to see
that a thing which he has always been used to look at from one side
only, which he greatly values, and which, looked at from that side,
quite deserves, perhaps, all the prizing and admiring which he bestows
upon it,—that this thing, looked at from another side, may appear much
less beneficent and beautiful, and yet retain all its claims to our
practical allegiance. Where shall we find language innocent enough, how
shall we make the spotless purity of our intentions evident enough, to
enable us to say to the political Englishman that the British
Constitution itself, which, seen from the practical side, looks such a
magnificent organ of progress and virtue, seen from the speculative
side,—with its compromises, its love of facts, its horror of theory, its
studied avoidance of clear thoughts,—that, seen from this side, our
august Constitution sometimes looks,—forgive me, shade of Lord Somers!—a
colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines? How is Cobbett to
say this and not be misunderstood, blackened as he is with the smoke of
a lifelong conflict in the field of political practice? how is Mr.
Carlyle to say it and not be misunderstood, after his furious raid into
this field with his _Latter-day Pamphlets_? how is Mr. Ruskin, after his
pugnacious political economy? I say, the critic must keep out of the
region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian
sphere, if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative
treatment of things, which may perhaps one day make its benefits felt
even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence irresistible manner.
Do what he will, however, the critic will still remain exposed to
frequent misunderstandings, and nowhere so much as in this country. For
here people are particularly indisposed even to comprehend that without
this free disinterested treatment of things, truth and the highest
culture are out of the question. So immersed are they in practical life,
so accustomed to take all their notions from this life and its
processes, that they are apt to think that truth and culture themselves
can be reached by the processes of this life, and that it is an
impertinent singularity to think of reaching them in any other. “We are
all _terræ filii_,” cries their eloquent advocate; “all Philistines
together. Away with the notion of proceeding by any other course than
the course dear to the Philistines; let us have a social movement, let
us organize and combine a party to pursue truth and new thought, let us
call it _the liberal party_, and let us all stick to each other, and
back each other up. Let us have no nonsense about independent criticism,
and intellectual delicacy, and the few and the many. Don’t let us
trouble ourselves about foreign thought; we shall invent the whole thing
for ourselves as we go along. If one of us speaks well, applaud him; if
one of us speaks ill, applaud him too; we are all in the same movement,
we are all liberals, we are all in pursuit of truth.” In this way the
pursuit of truth becomes really a social, practical, pleasurable affair,
almost requiring a chairman, a secretary, and advertisements; with the
excitement of an occasional scandal, with a little resistance to give
the happy sense of difficulty overcome; but, in general, plenty of
bustle and very little thought. To act is so easy, as Goethe says; to
think is so hard! It is true that the critic has many temptations to go
with the stream, to make one of the party movement, one of these _terræ
filii_; it seems ungracious to refuse to be a _terræ filius_, when so
many excellent people are; but the critic’s duty is to refuse, or, if
resistance is vain, at least to cry with Obermann: _Périssons en
résistant_.
How serious a matter it is to try and resist, I had ample opportunity of
experiencing when I ventured some time ago to criticize the celebrated
first volume of Bishop Colenso.[3] The echoes of the storm which was
then raised I still, from time to time, hear grumbling around me. That
storm arose out of a misunderstanding almost inevitable. It is a result
of no little culture to attain to a clear perception that science and
religion are two wholly different things. The multitude will for ever
confuse them; but happily that is of no great real importance, for while
the multitude imagines itself to live by its false science, it does
really live by its true religion. Dr. Colenso, however, in his first
volume did all he could to strengthen the confusion,[4] and to make it
dangerous. He did this with the best intentions, I freely admit, and
with the most candid ignorance that this was the natural effect of what
he was doing; but, says Joubert, “Ignorance, which in matters of morals
extenuates the crime, is itself, in intellectual matters, a crime of the
first order.” I criticized Bishop Colenso’s speculative confusion.
Immediately there was a cry raised: “What is this? here is a liberal
attacking a liberal. Do not you belong to the movement? are not you a
friend of truth? Is not Bishop Colenso in pursuit of truth? then speak
with proper respect of his book. Dr. Stanley is another friend of truth,
and you speak with proper respect of his book; why make these invidious
differences? both books are excellent, admirable, liberal; Bishop
Colenso’s perhaps the most so, because it is the boldest, and will have
the best practical consequences for the liberal cause. Do you want to
encourage to the attack of a brother liberal his, and your, and our
implacable enemies, the _Church and State Review_ or the _Record_,—the
High Church rhinoceros and the Evangelical hyena? Be silent, therefore;
or rather speak, speak as loud as ever you can! and go into ecstasies
over the eighty and odd pigeons.”
-----
Footnote 3:
So sincere is my dislike to all personal attack and controversy, that
I abstain from reprinting, at this distance of time from the occasion
which called them forth, the essays in which I criticized Dr.
Colenso’s book; I feel bound, however, after all that has passed, to
make here a final declaration of my sincere impenitence for having
published them. Nay, I cannot forbear repeating yet once more, for his
benefit and that of his readers, this sentence from my original
remarks upon him; _There is truth of science and truth of religion;
truth of science does not become truth of religion till it is made
religious_. And I will add: Let us have all the science there is from
the men of science; from the men of religion let us have religion.
Footnote 4:
It has been said I make it “a crime against literary criticism and the
higher culture to attempt to inform the ignorant.” Need I point out
that the ignorant are not informed by being confirmed in a confusion?
-----
But criticism cannot follow this coarse and indiscriminate method. It is
unfortunately possible for a man in pursuit of truth to write a book
which reposes upon a false conception. Even the practical consequences
of a book are to genuine criticism no recommendation of it, if the book
is, in the highest sense, blundering. I see that a lady who herself,
too, is in pursuit of truth, and who writes with great ability, but a
little too much, perhaps, under the influence of the practical spirit of
the English liberal movement, classes Bishop Colenso’s book and M.
Renan’s together, in her survey of the religious state of Europe, as
facts of the same order, works, both of them, of “great importance;”
“great ability, power, and skill;” Bishop Colenso’s, perhaps, the most
powerful; at least, Miss Cobbe gives special expression to her gratitude
that to Bishop Colenso “has been given the strength to grasp, and the
courage to teach, truths of such deep import.” In the same way, more
than one popular writer has compared him to Luther. Now it is just this
kind of false estimate which the critical spirit is, it seems to me,
bound to resist. It is really the strongest possible proof of the low
ebb at which, in England, the critical spirit is, that while the
critical hit in the religious literature of Germany is Dr. Strauss’s
book, in that of France M. Renan’s book, the book of Bishop Colenso is
the critical hit in the religious literature of England. Bishop
Colenso’s book reposes on a total misconception of the essential
elements of the religious problem, as that problem is now presented for
solution. To criticism, therefore, which seeks to have the best that is
known and thought on this problem, it is, however well meant, of no
importance whatever. M. Renan’s book attempts a new synthesis of the
elements furnished to us by the Four Gospels. It attempts, in my
opinion, a synthesis, perhaps premature, perhaps impossible, certainly
not successful. Up to the present time, at any rate, we must acquiesce
in Fleury’s sentence on such recastings of the Gospel-story: _Quiconque
s’imagine la pouvoir mieux écrire, ne l’entend pas_. M. Renan had
himself passed by anticipation a like sentence on his own work, when he
said: “If a new presentation of the character of Jesus were offered to
me, I would not have it; its very clearness would be, in my opinion, the
best proof of its insufficiency.” His friends may with perfect justice
rejoin that at the sight of the Holy Land, and of the actual scene of
the Gospel-story, all the current of M. Renan’s thoughts may have
naturally changed, and a new casting of that story irresistibly
suggested itself to him; and that this is just a case for applying
Cicero’s maxim: Change of mind is not inconsistency—_nemo doctus unquam
mutationem consilii inconstantiam dixit esse_. Nevertheless, for
criticism, M. Renan’s first thought must still be the truer one, as long
as his new casting so fails more fully to commend itself, more fully (to
use Coleridge’s happy phrase about the Bible) to _find_ us. Still M.
Renan’s attempt is, for criticism, of the most real interest and
importance, since, with all its difficulty, a fresh synthesis of the New
Testament _data_,—not a making war on them, in Voltaire’s fashion, not a
leaving them out of mind, in the world’s fashion, but the putting a new
construction upon them, the taking them from under the old, traditional,
conventional point of view and placing them under a new one,—is the very
essence of the religious problem, as now presented; and only by efforts
in this direction can it receive a solution.
Again, in the same spirit in which she judges Bishop Colenso, Miss
Cobbe, like so many earnest liberals of our practical race, both here
and in America, herself sets vigorously about a positive reconstruction
of religion, about making a religion of the future out of hand, or at
least setting about making it. We must not rest, she and they are always
thinking and saying, in negative criticism, we must be creative and
constructive; hence we have such works as her recent _Religious Duty_,
and works still more considerable, perhaps, by others, which will be in
every one’s mind. These works often have much ability; they often spring
out of sincere convictions, and a sincere wish to do good; and they
sometimes, perhaps, do good. Their fault is (if I may be permitted to
say so) one which they have in common with the British College of
Health, in the New Road. Every one knows the British College of Health;
it is that building with the lion and the statue of the Goddess Hygeia
before it; at least I am sure about the lion, though I am not absolutely
certain about the Goddess Hygeia. This building does credit, perhaps, to
the resources of Dr. Morrison and his disciples; but it falls a good
deal short of one’s idea of what a British College of Health ought to
be. In England, where we hate public interference and love individual
enterprise, we have a whole crop of places like the British College of
Health; the grand name without the grand thing. Unluckily, creditable to
individual enterprise as they are, they tend to impair our taste by
making us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character
properly belongs to a public institution. The same may be said of the
religions of the future of Miss Cobbe and others. Creditable, like the
British College of Health, to the resources of their authors, they yet
tend to make us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful
character properly belongs to religious constructions. The historic
religions, with all their faults, have had this; it certainly belongs to
the religious sentiment, when it truly flowers, to have this; and we
impoverish our spirit if we allow a religion of the future without it.
What then is the duty of criticism here? To take the practical point of
view, to applaud the liberal movement and all its works,—its New Road
religions of the future into the bargain,—for their general utility’s
sake? By no means; but to be perpetually dissatisfied with these works,
while they perpetually fall short of a high and perfect ideal.
For criticism, these are elementary laws; but they never can be popular,
and in this country they have been very little followed, and one meets
with immense obstacles in following them. That is a reason for asserting
them again and again. Criticism must maintain its independence of the
practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the
practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of
the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting. It must not hurry on to
the goal because of its practical importance. It must be patient, and
know how to wait; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to things
and how to withdraw from them. It must be apt to study and praise
elements that for the fulness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even
though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be
maleficent. It must be apt to discern the spiritual shortcomings or
illusions of powers that in the practical sphere may be beneficent. And
this without any notion of favoring or injuring, in the practical
sphere, one power or the other; without any notion of playing off, in
this sphere, one power against the other. When one looks, for instance,
at the English Divorce Court—an institution which perhaps has its
practical conveniences, but which in the ideal sphere is so hideous; an
institution which neither makes divorce impossible nor makes it decent,
which allows a man to get rid of his wife, or a wife of her husband, but
makes them drag one another first, for the public edification, through a
mire of unutterable infamy,—when one looks at this charming institution,
I say, with its crowded trials, its newspaper reports, and its money
compensations, this institution in which the gross unregenerate British
Philistine has indeed stamped an image of himself,—one may be permitted
to find the marriage theory of Catholicism refreshing and elevating. Or
when Protestantism, in virtue of its supposed rational and intellectual
origin, gives the law to criticism too magisterially, criticism may and
must remind it that its pretensions, in this respect, are illusive and
do it harm; that the Reformation was a moral rather than an intellectual
event; that Luther’s theory of grace no more exactly reflects the mind
of the spirit than Bossuet’s philosophy of history reflects it; and that
there is no more antecedent probability of the Bishop of Durham’s stock
of ideas being agreeable to perfect reason than of Pope Pius the
Ninth’s. But criticism will not on that account forget the achievements
of Protestantism in the practical and moral sphere; nor that, even in
the intellectual sphere, Protestantism, though in a blind and stumbling
manner, carried forward the Renascence, while Catholicism threw itself
violently across its path.
I lately heard a man of thought and energy contrasting the want of ardor
and movement which he now found amongst young men in this country with
what he remembered in his own youth, twenty years ago. “What reformers
we were then!” he exclaimed; “What a zeal we had! how we canvassed every
institution in Church and State, and were prepared to remodel them all
on first principles!” He was inclined to regret, as a spiritual
flagging, the lull which he saw. I am disposed rather to regard it as a
pause in which the turn to a new mode of spiritual progress is being
accomplished. Everything was long seen, by the young and ardent amongst
us, in inseparable connection with politics and practical life. We have
pretty well exhausted the benefits of seeing things in this connection,
we have got all that can be got by so seeing them. Let us try a more
disinterested mode of seeing them; let us betake ourselves more to the
serener life of the mind and spirit. This life, too, may have its
excesses and dangers; but they are not for us at present. Let us think
of quietly enlarging our stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, as soon
as we get an idea or half an idea, be running out with it into the
street, and trying to make it rule there. Our ideas will, in the end,
shape the world all the better for maturing a little. Perhaps in fifty
years’ time it will in the English House of Commons be an objection to
an institution that it is an anomaly, and my friend the Member of
Parliament will shudder in his grave. But let us in the meanwhile rather
endeavor that in twenty years’ time it may, in English literature, be an
objection to a proposition that it is absurd. That will be a change so
vast, that the imagination almost fails to grasp it. _Ab integro
sæclorum nascitur ordo._
If I have insisted so much on the course which criticism must take where
politics and religion are concerned, it is because, where these burning
matters are in question, it is most likely to go astray. I have wished,
above all, to insist on the attitude which criticism should adopt
towards things in general; on its right tone and temper of mind. But
then comes another question as to the subject-matter which literary
criticism should most seek. Here, in general, its course is determined
for it by the idea which is the law of its being; the idea of a
disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and
thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true
ideas. By the very nature of things, as England is not all the world,
much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of
English growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is
just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought is
streaming in upon us from all sides, and takes excellent care that we
shall not be ignorant of its existence. The English critic of
literature, therefore, must dwell much on foreign thought, and with
particular heed on any part of it, which, while significant and fruitful
in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him. Again,
judging is often spoken of as the critic’s one business, and so in some
sense it is; but the judgment which almost insensibly forms itself in a
fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge, is the valuable one;
and thus knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic’s great
concern for himself. And it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and
letting his own judgment pass along with it,—but insensibly, and in the
second place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an
abstract lawgiver,—that the critic will generally do most good to his
readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an author’s
place in literature, and his relation to a central standard (and if this
is not done, how are we to get at our _best in the world_?) criticism
may have to deal with a subject-matter so familiar that fresh knowledge
is out of the question, and then it must be all judgment; an enunciation
and detailed application of principles. Here the great safeguard is
never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and
lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment
this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong. Still, under all
circumstances, this mere judgment and application of principles is, in
itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic; like mathematics,
it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the
sense of creative activity.
But stop, some one will say; all this talk is of no practical use to us
whatever; this criticism of yours is not what we have in our minds when
we speak of criticism; when we speak of critics and criticism, we mean
critics and criticism of the current English literature of the day; when
you offer to tell criticism its function, it is to this criticism that
we expect you to address yourself. I am sorry for it, for I am afraid I
must disappoint these expectations. I am bound by my own definition of
criticism: _a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best
that is known and thought in the world_. How much of current English
literature comes into this “best that is known and thought in the
world?” Not very much I fear; certainly less, at this moment, than of
the current literature of France or Germany. Well, then, am I to alter
my definition of criticism, in order to meet the requirements of a
number of practising English critics, who, after all, are free in their
choice of a business? That would be making criticism lend itself just to
one of those alien practical considerations, which, I have said, are so
fatal to it. One may say, indeed, to those who have to deal with the
mass—so much better disregarded—of current English literature, that they
may at all events endeavor, in dealing with this, to try it, so far as
they can, by the standard of the best that is known and thought in the
world; one may say, that to get anywhere near this standard, every
critic should try and possess one great literature, at least, besides
his own; and the more unlike his own, the better. But, after all, the
criticism I am really concerned with,—the criticism which alone can much
help us for the future, the criticism which, throughout Europe, is at
the present day meant, when so much stress is laid on the importance of
criticism and the critical spirit,—is a criticism which regards Europe
as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great
confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result;
and whose members have, for their proper outfit, a knowledge of Greek,
Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one another. Special, local, and
temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will
in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which most
thoroughly carries out this program. And what is that but saying that we
too, all of us, as individuals, the more thoroughly we carry it out,
shall make the more progress?
There is so much inviting us!—what are we to take? what will nourish us
in growth towards perfection? That is the question which, with the
immense field of life and of literature lying before him, the critic has
to answer; for himself first, and afterwards for others. In this idea of
the critic’s business the essays brought together in the following pages
have had their origin; in this idea, widely different as are their
subjects, they have, perhaps, their unity.
I conclude with what I said at the beginning: to have the sense of
creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being
alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism
must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.
Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative
activity; a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to
what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate
creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible.
Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to
genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true
man of letters ever can forget it? It is no such common matter for a
gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living
ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely
to underrate it. The epochs of Æschylus and Shakespeare make us feel
their pre-eminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life
of literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can
only beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we
shall die in the wilderness: but to have desired to enter it, to have
saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among
contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with
posterity.