Mr. Mill says, in his book on Liberty, that “Christian morality is in
great part merely a protest against paganism; its ideal is negative
rather than positive, passive rather than active.” He says, that, in
certain most important respects, “it falls far below the best morality
of the ancients.” Now, the object of systems of morality is to take
possession of human life, to save it from being abandoned to passion or
allowed to drift at hazard, to give it happiness by establishing it in
the practice of virtue; and this object they seek to attain by
prescribing to human life fixed principles of action, fixed rules of
conduct. In its uninspired as well as in its inspired moments, in its
days of languor and gloom as well as in its days of sunshine and energy,
human life has thus always a clue to follow, and may always be making
way towards its goal. Christian morality has not failed to supply to
human life aids of this sort. It has supplied them far more abundantly
than many of its critics imagine. The most exquisite document after
those of the New Testament, of all the documents the Christian spirit
has ever inspired,—the _Imitation_,—by no means contains the whole of
Christian morality; nay, the disparagers of this morality would think
themselves sure of triumphing if one agreed to look for it in the
_Imitation_ only. But even the _Imitation_ is full of passages like
these: “Vita sine proposito languida et vaga est;”—“Omni die renovare
debemus propositum nostrum, dicentes: nunc hodiè perfectè incipiamus,
quia nihil est quod hactenus fecimus;”—“Secundum propositum nostrum est
cursus profectûs nostri;”—“Raro etiam unum vitium perfectè vincimus, et
ad _quotidianum_ profectum non accendimur;” “Semper aliquid certi
proponendum est;” “Tibi ipsi violentiam frequenter fac;” (_A life
without a purpose is a languid, drifting thing;—Every day we ought to
renew our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let us make a sound
beginning, for what we have hitherto done is nought;—Our improvement is
in proportion to our purpose;—We hardly ever manage to get completely
rid even of one fault, and do not set our hearts on daily
improvement;—Always place a definite purpose before thee;—Get the habit
of mastering thine inclination._) These are moral precepts, and moral
precepts of the best kind. As rules to hold possession of our conduct,
and to keep us in the right course through outward troubles and inward
perplexity, they are equal to the best ever furnished by the great
masters of morals—Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius.
But moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously
followed as laws, are, and must be, for the sage only. The mass of
mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly
as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws.
The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for
the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the
narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is
impossible to rise from reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a
sense of constraint and melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid
upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear. Honor to the sages who
have felt this, and yet have borne it! Yet, even for the sage, this
sense of labor and sorrow in his march towards the goal constitutes a
relative inferiority; the noblest souls of whatever creed, the pagan
Empedocles as well as the Christian Paul, have insisted on the necessity
of an inspiration, a joyful emotion, to make moral action perfect; an
obscure indication of this necessity is the one drop of truth in the
ocean of verbiage with which the controversy on justification by faith
has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary man, this sense of labor
and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification; it paralyzes him;
under the weight of it, he cannot make way towards the goal at all. The
paramount virtue of religion is, that it has _lighted up_ morality; that
it has supplied the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the
sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along
it at all. Even the religious with most dross in them have had something
of this virtue; but the Christian religion manifests it with unexampled
splendor. “Lead me, Zeus and Destiny!” says the prayer of Epictetus,
“whithersoever I am appointed to go; I will follow without wavering;
even though I turn coward and shrink, I shall have to follow all the
same.” The fortitude of that is for the strong, for the few; even for
them the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and
gray, But, “Let thy loving spirit lead me forth into the land of
righteousness;”—“The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and
thy God thy glory;”—“Unto you that fear my name shall the sun of
righteousness arise with healing in his wings,” says the Old Testament;
“Born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of
man, but of God;”—“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom
of God;”—“Whatsoever is born of God, overcometh the world,” says the
New. The ray of sunshine is there, the glow of a divine warmth;—the
austerity of the sage melts away under it, the paralysis of the weak is
healed; he who is vivified by it renews his strength; “all things are
possible to him;” “he is a new creature.”
Epictetus says: “Every matter has two handles, one of which will bear
taking hold of, the other not. If thy brother sin against thee, lay not
hold of the matter by this, that he sins against thee; for by this
handle the matter will not bear taking hold of. But rather lay hold of
it by this, that he is thy brother, thy born mate; and thou wilt take
hold of it by what will bear handling.” Jesus, being asked whether a man
is bound to forgive his brother as often as seven times, answers: “I say
not unto thee, until seven times, but until seventy times seven.”
Epictetus here suggests to the reason grounds for forgiveness of
injuries which Jesus does not; but it is vain to say that Epictetus is
on that account a better moralist than Jesus, if the warmth, the
emotion, of Jesus’s answer fires his hearer to the practice of
forgiveness of injuries, while the thought in Epictetus’s leaves him
cold. So with Christian morality in general: its distinction is not that
it propounds the maxim, “Thou shalt love God and thy neighbor,” with
more development, closer reasoning, truer sincerity, than other moral
systems; it is that it propounds this maxim with an inspiration which
wonderfully catches the hearer and makes him act upon it. It is because
Mr. Mill has attained to the perception of truths of this nature, that
he is,—instead of being, like the school from which he proceeds, doomed
to sterility,—a writer of distinguished mark and influence, a writer
deserving all attention and respect; it is (I must be pardoned for
saying) because he is not sufficiently leavened with them, that he falls
just short of being a great writer.
That which gives to the moral writings of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
their peculiar character and charm, is their being suffused and softened
by something of this very sentiment whence Christian morality draws its
best power. Mr. Long has recently published in a convenient form a
translation of these writings, and has thus enabled English readers to
judge Marcus Aurelius for themselves; he has rendered his countrymen a
real service by so doing. Mr. Long’s reputation as a scholar is a
sufficient guarantee of the general fidelity and accuracy of his
translation; on these matters, besides, I am hardly entitled to speak,
and my praise is of no value. But that for which I and the rest of the
unlearned may venture to praise Mr. Long is this; that he treats Marcus
Aurelius’s writings, as he treats all the other remains of Greek and
Roman antiquity which he touches, not as a dead and dry matter of
learning, but as documents with a side of modern applicability and
living interest, and valuable mainly so far as this side in them can be
made clear; that as in his notes on Plutarch’s Roman Lives he deals with
the modern epoch of Cæsar and Cicero, not as food for schoolboys, but as
food for men, and men engaged in the current of contemporary life and
action, so in his remarks and essays on Marcus Aurelius he treats this
truly modern striver and thinker not as a Classical Dictionary hero, but
as a present source from which to draw “example of life, and instruction
of manners.” Why may not a son of Dr. Arnold say, what might naturally
here be said by any other critic, that in this lively and fruitful way
of considering the men and affairs of ancient Greece and Rome, Mr. Long
resembles Dr. Arnold?
One or two little complaints, however, I have against Mr. Long, and I
will get them off my mind at once. In the first place, why could he not
have found gentler and juster terms to describe the translation of his
predecessor, Jeremy Collier,—the redoubtable enemy of stage plays,—than
these: “a most coarse and vulgar copy of the original?” As a matter of
taste, a translator should deal leniently with his predecessor; but
putting that out of the question, Mr. Long’s language is a great deal
too hard. Most English people who knew Marcus Aurelius before Mr. Long
appeared as his introducer, knew him through Jeremy Collier. And the
acquaintance of a man like Marcus Aurelius is such an imperishable
benefit, that one can never lose a peculiar sense of obligation towards
the man who confers it. Apart from this claim upon one’s tenderness,
however, Jeremy Collier’s version deserves respect for its genuine
spirit and vigor, the spirit and vigor of the age of Dryden. Jeremy
Collier too, like Mr. Long, regarded in Marcus Aurelius the living
moralist, and not the dead classic; and his warmth of feeling gave to
his style an impetuosity and rhythm which from Mr Long’s style (I do not
blame it on that account) are absent. Let us place the two side by side.
The impressive opening of Marcus Aurelius’s fifth book, Mr. Long
translates thus:—
“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be
present: I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I
dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for
which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie
in the bed clothes and keep myself warm?—But this is more pleasant.—Dost
thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or
exertion?”