"Love, it is a wrathful peace,
A free acquittance, without release,
And truth with falsehood all a-fret,
And fear within secureness set;
In heart it is despairing hope;
And full of hope, it is vain hope.
Wise madness and wild reasonne,
And sweet danger, wherein to droune.
A heavy burden, light to bear;
A wicked way, away to wear.
It is discordance that can accord,
And accordance to discord;
It is cunning without science,
Wisdom without sapience,
Wit without discretion,
Having, without possession,
And health full of malady,
And charity full of envy,
And restraint full of abundance,
And a greedy suffisaunce.
Delight right full of heaviness,
And drearihood, full of gladness;
Bitter sweetness, and sweet error,
Right evil savoured good savour;
Sin, that pardon hath within,
And pardon, spotted outside with sin:
A pain also it is joyous,
And cruelty, right piteous;
A strength weak to stand upright,
And feebleness full of might;
Wit unadvised, sage follie,
And joy full of tormentry.
A laughter it is, weeping aye;
Rest, that travaileth night and day;
Also a sweet Hell it is,
And a sorrowful Paradise; [83]
A pleasant gaol, and an easy prison,
And full of froste, summer season;
Prime-time, full of froste's white,
And May devoid of all delight."
"Mesment de ceste amour
Li plus sages n'y sceunt tour
Maiz ou entent je te diray
Une aût (outre) amour te descriray
De celle veuil je que pour t'ame
Tu aimes la tres-doulce dame.
Si com dist la ste escripture
Amours est fors, amours est dure,
Amours soustient, amours endure,
Amours revient, et tousjours dure;
Amours met en amer sa cure;
Amours loyal, amours seure
Sert, et de servise nacure.
Amours fait de propre commun,
Amours fait de deux cuers un;
Amours enchace, ce me semble,
Amours rent cuers, amours les emble,
Amours despiece, amours refait,
Amours fait paix, amours fait plait,
Amours fait bel, amours fait lait,
Toutes heures quant il lui plaist
Amours attrait, amours estrange
Amours fait de prive estrange;
Amours seurprent, amours emprent,
Amours reprent, amours esprent,
Il n'est riens qu'amours ne face;
Amours tolt cuer, amours tolt grace,
Amours delie, amours enlace,
Amours ocist, amours efface,
Amours ne craint ne pic ne mace:
Amours fist Dieu venir en place,
Amours lui fist ûre (notre) char prendre,
Amours le fist devenir mendre,
Amours le fist en la croix pendre,
Amours le fist illec extendre,
Amours le fist le coste fendre,
Amours le fist les maulx reprendre,
Amours lui fist les bons aprendre,
Amours le fist a nous venir,
Amours nous fait a lui tenir."
These descriptions of the two kinds of noble love are both given in
the part of the Romance of the Rose which was written by Jean de
Meung. [84] Chaucer translated the first, and I have partly again
translated his translation into more familiar English. I leave
the original French of the other for you to work at, if ever you
care to learn French;--the first is all that I want you to read
just now; but they should not be separated, being among the most
interesting expressions extant of the sentiment of the dark ages,
which Mr. Applegarth is desirous of eliminating from modern business.
The two great loves,--that of husband and wife, representing generally
the family affections, and that of mankind, to which, at need, the
family affection must be sacrificed,--include, rightly understood,
all the noble sentiments of humanity. Modern philosophy supposes
these conditions of feeling to have been always absurd, and at
present, happily, nearly extinct; and that the only proper, or,
in future, possible, motives of human action are the three wholly
unsentimental desires,--the lust of the flesh, (hunger, thirst, and
sexual passion), the lust of the eyes, (covetousness), and the pride
of life, (personal vanity).
Thus, in a recent debate on the treatment of Canada, [85] Sir
C. Adderley deprecates the continuance of a debate on a question
"purely sentimental." I doubt if Sir C. Adderley knew in the least
what was meant by a sentimental question. It is a purely "sentimental
question," for instance, whether Sir C. Adderley shall, or shall not,
eat his mother, instead of burying her. Similarly, it is a purely
sentimental question, whether, in the siege of Samaria, the mother
who boiled her son and ate him, or the mother who hid her son, was
best fulfilling her duty to society. Similarly, the relations of a
colony to its mother-country, in their truth and depth, are founded on
purely parental and filial instincts, which may be either sentimental
or bestial, but must be one or the other. Sir Charles probably did
not know that the discussion of every such question must therefore
be either sentimental or bestial.
Into one or other, then, of these two forms of sentiment, conjugal
and family love, or compassion, all human happiness, properly so
called, resolves itself; but the spurious or counter-happiness of
lust, covetousness, and vanity being easily obtained, and naturally
grasped at, instead, may altogether occupy the lives of men, without
ever allowing them to know what happiness means.
But in the use I have just made of the word 'compassion', I
mean something very different from what is usually understood by
it. Compassion is the Latin form of the Greek word 'sympathy'--the
English for both is 'fellow-feeling'; and the condition of delight
in characters higher than our own is more truly to be understood by
the word 'compassion' than the pain of pity for those inferior to our
own; but in either case, the imaginative understanding of the natures
of others, and the power of putting ourselves in their place, is the
faculty on which the virtue depends. So that an unimaginative person
can neither be reverent nor kind. The main use of works of fiction,
and of the drama, is to supply, as far as possible, the defect of
this imagination in common minds. But there is a curious difference
in the nature of these works themselves, dependent on the degree
of imaginative power of the writers, which I must at once explain,
else I can neither answer for you my own question put in last 'Fors,'
why Scott could not write a play, nor show you, which is my present
object, the real nature of sentiment.
Do you know, in the first place, what a play is? or what a poem
is? or what a novel is? That is to say, do you know the perpetual
and necessary distinctions in literary aim which have brought these
distinctive names into use? You had better first, for clearness' sake,
call all the three 'poems,' for all the three are so, when they are
good, whether written in verse or prose. All truly imaginative account
of man is poetic; but there are three essential kinds of poetry,--one
dramatic, one lyric, and one epic.
Dramatic poetry is the expression by the poet of other people's
feelings, his own not being told.
Lyric poetry is the expression by the poet of his own feelings.
Epic poetry is account given by the poet of other people's external
circumstances, and of events happening to them, with only such
expression either of their feelings, or his own, as he thinks may be
conveniently added.
The business of Dramatic poetry is therefore with the heart
essentially; it despises external circumstance.
Lyric poetry may speak of anything that excites emotion in the speaker;
while Epic poetry insists on external circumstances, and no more
exhibits the heart-feeling than as it may be gathered from these.
For instance, the fight between the Prince of Wales and Hotspur, in
Henry the Fourth, corresponds closely, in the character of the event
itself, to the fight of Fitz-James with Roderick, in the Lady of the
Lake. But Shakespeare's treatment of his subject is strictly dramatic;
Scott's, strictly epic.
Shakespeare gives you no account whatever of any blow or wound: his
stage direction is, briefly, "Hotspur is wounded, and falls." Scott
gives you accurate account of every external circumstance, and the
finishing touch of botanical accuracy,--
"Down came the blow; but in the heath
The erring blade found bloodless sheath,"--
makes his work perfect, as epic poetry. And Scott's work is always
epic, and it is contrary to his very nature to treat any subject
dramatically.
That is the technical distinction, then, between the three modes of
work. But the gradation of power in all three depends on the degree
of imagination with which the writer can enter into the feelings of
other people. Whether in expressing their's or his own, and whether in
expressing their feelings only, or also the circumstances surrounding
them, his power depends on his being able to feel as they do; in other
words, on his being able to conceive character. And the literature
which is not poetry at all, which is essentially unsentimental,
or anti-poetic, is that which is produced by persons who have no
imagination; and whose merit (for of course I am not speaking of bad
literature) is in their wit or sense, instead of their imagination.
The most prosaic, in this sense, piece I have ever myself examined,
in the literature of any nation, is the Henriade of Voltaire. You may
take that as a work of a man whose head was as destitute of imaginative
power as it is possible for the healthy cerebral organization of a
highly developed mammalian animal to be. The description of the storm
which carries Henry to Jersey, and of the hermit in Jersey "que Dieu
lui fit connaitre," and who, on that occasion, "au bord d'une onde
pure, offre un festin champêtre," cannot be rivalled, for stupor in
conceptive power, among printed books of reputation. On the other hand,
Voltaire's wit, and reasoning faculties, are nearly as strong as his
imagination is weak. His natural disposition is kind; his sympathy
therefore is sincere with any sorrow that he can conceive; and his
indignation great against injustices of which he cannot comprehend
the pathetic motives. Now notice further this, which is very curious,
and to me inexplicable, but not on that account less certain as a fact.
The imaginative power always purifies; the want of it therefore as
essentially defiles; and as the wit-power is apt to develope itself
through absence of imagination, it seems as if wit itself had a
defiling tendency. In Pindar, Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Scott, the
colossal powers of imagination result in absolute virginal purity
of thought. The defect of imagination and the splendid rational
power in Pope and Horace associate themselves--it is difficult to
say in what decided measures--with foulness of thought. The Candide
of Voltaire, in its gratuitous filth, its acute reasoning, and its
entire vacuity of imagination, is a standard of what may perhaps
be generally and fitly termed 'fimetic literature,' still capable,
by its wit, and partial truth, of a certain service in its way. But
lower forms of modern literature and art--Gustave Doré's paintings,
for instance,--are the corruption, in national decrepitude, of this
pessimist method of thought; and of these, the final condemnation is
true--they are neither fit for the land, nor yet for the dunghill.
It is one of the most curious problems respecting mental government to
determine how far this fimetic taint must necessarily affect intellects
in which the reasoning and imaginative powers are equally balanced,
and both of them at high level,--as in Aristophanes, Shakespeare,
Chaucer, Molière, Cervantes, and Fielding; but it always indicates
the side of character which is unsympathetic, and therefore unkind;
(thus Shakespeare makes Iago the foulest in thought, as cruelest in
design, of all his villains,) but which, in men of noble nature,
is their safeguard against weak enthusiasms and ideals. It is
impossible, however, that the highest conditions of tenderness in
affectionate conception can be reached except by the absolutely
virginal intellect. Shakespeare and Chaucer throw off, at noble
work, the lower part of their natures as they would a rough dress;
and you may also notice this, that the power of conceiving personal,
as opposed to general, character, depends on this purity of heart and
sentiment. The men who cannot quit themselves of the impure taint,
never invent character, properly so called; they only invent symbols
of common humanity. Even Fielding's Allworthy is not a character,
but a type of a simple English gentleman; and Squire Western is not
a character, but a type of the rude English squire. But Sir Roger
de Coverley is a character, as well as a type; there is no one else
like him; and the masters of Tullyveolan, Ellangowan, Monkbarns,
and Osbaldistone Hall, are all, whether slightly or completely drawn,
portraits, not mere symbols.
The little piece which I shall to-day further translate for you from
my Swiss novel is interesting chiefly in showing the power with which
affectionate and sentimental imagination may attach itself even to
inanimate objects, and give them personality. But the works of its
writer generally show the most wholesome balance of the sentimental
and rational faculty I have ever met with in literature;--the part of
Gotthelf's nature which is in sympathy with Pope and Fielding enables
him to touch, to just the necessary point, the lower grotesqueness
of peasant nature, while his own conception of ideal virtue is as
pure as Wordsworth's.
But I have only room in this 'Fors' for a very little bit more of
the broom-maker. I continue the last sentence of it from page 13 of
Letter XXX.:--
"And then Hansli always knew that as soon as he got home there would
be enough to eat;--his mother saw faithfully to that. She knew the
difference it makes whether a man finds something ready to eat, when
he comes in, or not. He who knows there will be something at home,
does not stop in the taverns; he arrives with an empty stomach, and
furnishes it, highly pleased with all about him; but if he usually
finds nothing ready when at home, he stops on the road, comes in when
he has had enough or too much; and grumbles right and left.
"Hansli was not avaricious, but economical. For things really useful
and fit, he did not look at the money. In all matters of food and
clothes, he wished his mother to be thoroughly at ease. He made a
good bed for himself; and when he had saved enough to buy a knife
or a good tool, he was quite up in the air. He himself dressed well,
not expensively, but solidly. Any one with a good eye knows quickly
enough, at the sight of houses or of people, whether they are going
up or down. As for Hansli, it was easy to see he was on his way
up--not that he ever put on anything fine, but by his cleanliness
and the careful look of his things: aussi, everybody liked to see
him, and was very glad to know that he prospered thus, not by fraud,
but by work. With all that, he never forgot his prayers. On Sunday he
made no brooms: in the morning he went to the sermon, [86] and in the
afternoon he read a chapter of the Bible to his mother, whose sight
was now failing. After that he gave himself a personal treat. This
treat consisted in bringing out all his money, counting it, looking
at it, [87] and calculating how much it had increased, and how much
it would yet increase, etc. etc. In that money there were some very
pretty pieces,--above all, pretty white pieces" (silver among the
copper). "Hansli was very strong in exchanges; he took small money
willingly enough, but never kept it long; it seemed always to him that
the wind got into it and carried it off too quickly. The new white
pieces gave him an extreme pleasure,--above all, the fine dollars of
Berne with the bear, and the superb Swiss of old time. When he had
managed to catch one of these, it made him happy for many days. [88]
"Nevertheless, he had also his bad days. It was always a bad day for
him when he lost a customer, or had counted on placing a dozen of new
brooms anywhere, and found himself briskly sent from the door with
'We've got all we want.' At first Hansli could not understand the
cause of such rebuffs, not knowing that there are people who change
their cook as often as their shirt--sometimes oftener,--and that
he couldn't expect new cooks to know him at first sight. He asked
himself then, with surprise, what he could have failed in,--whether
his brooms had come undone, or whether anybody had spoken ill of
him. He took that much to heart, and would plague himself all night to
find out the real cause. But soon he took the thing more coolly; and
even when a cook who knew him very well sent him about his business,
he thought to himself, 'Bah! cooks are human creatures, like other
people; and when master or mistress have been rough with them [89]
because they've put too much pepper in the soup, or too much salt
in the sauce, or when their schatz" (lover,--literally, treasure)
"is gone off to Pepperland, [90] the poor girls have well the right
to quarrel with somebody else.' Nevertheless, the course of time
needs brought him some worse days still, which he never got himself
to take coolly. He knew now, personally, very nearly all his trees;
he had indeed given, for himself alone, names to his willows, and
some other particular trees, as Lizzie, Little Mary-Anne, Rosie, and
so on. These trees kept him in joy all the year round, and he divided
very carefully the pleasure of gathering their twigs. He treated the
most beautiful with great delicacy, and carried the brooms of them
to his best customers. It is true to say also that these were always
master-brooms. But when he arrived thus, all joyous, at his willows,
and found his Lizzie or his Rosie all cut and torn from top to bottom,
his heart was so strained that the tears ran down his cheeks, and his
blood became so hot that one could have lighted matches at it. That
made him unhappy for a length of time; he could not swallow it, and
all he asked was that the thief might fall into his grip, not for the
value of the twigs, but because his trees had been hurt. If Hansli was
not tall, still he knew how to use his limbs and his strength, and he
felt his heart full of courage. On that point he absolutely would not
obey his mother, who begged him for the love of God not to meddle with
people who might kill him, or do him some grievous harm. But Hansli
took no heed of all that. He lay in wait and spied until he caught
somebody. Then there were blows and formidable battles in the midst
of the solitary trees. Sometimes Hansli got the better, sometimes he
came home all in disorder. But at the worst, he gained at least this,
that thenceforward one let his willows more and more alone, as happens
always when a thing is defended with valour and perseverance. What
is the use of putting oneself in the way of blows, when one can get
things somewhere else without danger? Aussi, the Rychiswyl farmers
were enchanted with their courageous little garde-champêtre, and if
one or the other saw him with his hair pulled, they failed not to say,
'Never mind, Hansli; he will have had his dance all the same. Tell me
the next time you see anything--I'll go with you, and we'll cure him
of his taste for brooms.' Whereupon, Hansli would tell him when he saw
anybody about that should not be; the peasant [91] kept himself hid;
Hansli began the attack; the adversary, thinking himself strongest,
waited for him; once the thief seized, the peasant showed himself,
and all was said. Then the marauder would have got away if he could,
but Hansli never let go till he had been beaten as was fitting.
"This was a very efficacious remedy against the switch-stealers,
and Little Mary-Anne and Rosie remained in perfect security in
the midst of the loneliest fields. Thus Hansli passed some years
without perceiving it, and without imagining that things could
ever change. A week passed, as the hand went round the clock, he
didn't know how. Tuesday, market-day at Berne, was there before he
could think about it; and Tuesday was no sooner past than Saturday
was there; and he had to go to Thun, whether he would or no, for how
could the Thun people get on without him? Between times he had enough
to do to prepare his cartload, and to content his customers,--that
is to say, those of them that pleased him. Our Hansli was a man;
and every man, when his position permits it, has his caprices of
liking and disliking. Whenever one had trod on his toes, one must
have been very clever afterwards to get the least twig of a broom
from him. The parson's wife, for instance, couldn't have got one if
she would have paid for it twice over. It was no use sending to him;
every time she did, he said he was very sorry, but he hadn't a broom
left that would suit her.
"That was because she had one day said to him that he was just like
other people, and contented himself with putting a few long twigs
all round, and then bad ones in the middle.
"'Then you may as well get your brooms from somebody else,' said he;
and held to it too;--so well that the lady died without ever having
been able to get the shadow of a broom from him.
"One Tuesday he was going to Berne with an enormous cartful of his
prettiest brooms, all gathered from his favourite trees, that is to
say, Rosie, Little Mary-Anne, and company. He was pulling with all
his strength, and greatly astonished to find that his cart didn't
go of itself, as it did at first; that it really pulled too hard,
and that something must be wrong with it. At every moment he was
obliged to stop to take breath and wipe his forehead. 'If only I was
at the top of the hill of Stalden!' said he. He had stopped thus in
the little wood of Muri, close to the bench that the women rest their
baskets on. Upon the bench sat a young girl, holding a little bundle
beside her, and weeping hot tears. Hansli, who had a kind heart,
asked her what she was crying for.
"The young girl recounted to him that she was obliged to go into the
town, and that she was so frightened she scarcely dared; that her
father was a shoemaker, and that all his best customers were in the
town; that for a long time she had carried her bundle of shoes in, on
market days, and that nothing had ever happened to her. But behold,
there had arrived in the town a new gendarme, very cross, who had
already tormented her every Tuesday she had come, for some time back;
and threatened her, if she came again, to take her shoes from her,
and put her in prison. She had begged her father not to send her any
more, but her father was as severe as a Prussian soldier, and had
ordered her to 'go in, always; and if anybody hurt her, it was with
him they would have affairs;' but what would that help her?--she was
just as much afraid of the gendarme as before.
"Hansli felt himself touched with compassion; above all, on account
of the confidence the young girl had had in telling him all this;
that which certainly she would not have done to everybody. 'But she
has seen at once that I am not a bad fellow, and that I have a kind
heart,' thought he.
"Poor Hansli!--but after all, it is faith which saves, people say."
My readers may at first be little interested by this uneventful
narrative; but they will find it eventually delightful, if they
accustom themselves to classic and sincere literature; and as an
account of Swiss life now fast passing away, it is invaluable. More
than the life of Switzerland,--its very snows,--eternal, as
one foolishly called them,--are passing away, as if in omen of
evil. One-third, at least, in the depth of all the ice of the Alps,
has been lost in the last twenty years; and the change of climate thus
indicated is without any parallel in authentic history. In its bearings
on the water supply and atmospheric conditions of central Europe, it is
the most important phenomenon, by far, of all that offer themselves to
the study of living men of science: yet in Professor Tyndall's recent
work on the glaciers, [92] though he notices the change as one which,
"if continued, will reduce the Swiss glaciers to the mere spectres
of their former selves," he offers no evidence, nor even suggestion,
as to the causes of the change itself.
I have no space in this number of 'Fors' to say what reason there is
for my taking notice of this book, or the glacier theory, in connection
with the life of Scott. In the interests of general literature, it
is otherwise fitting that the nature of the book itself should be
pointed out.
Its nature, that is to say, so far as it has any. It seems to be
written for a singular order of young people, whom, if they were older,
Professor Tyndall assures them, it would give him pleasure to take
up Mont Blanc; but whom he can at present invite to walk with him
along the moraine from the Jardin, where "perfect steadiness of foot
is necessary,--a slip would be death;" and to whom, with Mr. Hirsch,
he can "confide confidently" the use of his surveying chain. It is,
at all events, written for entirely ignorant people--and entirely idle
ones, who cannot be got to read without being coaxed and flattered
into the unusual exertion. "Here, my friend," says the Professor, at
the end of his benevolently alluring pages, "our labours close! It has
been a true pleasure to me to have you at my side so long. You have
been steadfast and industrious throughout.... Steadfast, prudent,
without terror, though not at all times without awe, I have found
you, on rock and ice. Give me your hand--Goodbye." Does the Professor
count, then, upon no readers but those whom he can gratify with polite
expressions of this kind? Upon none who perhaps unsteadfast, imprudent,
and very much frightened upon rock and ice, have nevertheless done
their own work there, and know good work of other people's, from bad,
anywhere; and true praise from false anywhere; and can detect the
dishonouring of nameable and noble persons, couched under sycophancy
of the nameless? He has at least had one reader whom I can answer for,
of this inconvenient sort.
It is, I am sorry to say, just forty years (some day last month)
since I first saw the Bernese Alps from above Schaffhausen. Since that
evening I have never let slip a chance of knowing anything definite
about glaciers and their ways; and have watched the progress of
knowledge, and the oscillations of theory, on the subject, with an
interest not less deep, and certainly more sincere, than it would
have been if my own industry had been able to advance the one, or my
own ingenuity to complicate the other. But only one great step in
the knowledge of glaciers has been made in all that period; and it
seems the principal object of Professor Tyndall's book to conceal
its having been taken, that he and his friends may get the credit,
some day, of having taken it themselves.
I went to the University in 1836, and my best friend there, among
the older masters, Dr. Buckland, kept me not ill-informed on my
favourite subject, the geological, or crystallogical, question. Nearly
everything of which Professor Tyndall informs his courageous readers
was known then, just as well as it is now. We all,--that is to say,
all geologists of any standing, and their pupils,--knew that glaciers
moved; that they were supplied by snow at the top of the Alps,
and consumed by heat at the bottom of them; that there were cracks
all through them, and moraines all down them; that some of their ice
was clear, and other ice opaque; that some of it was sound, and some
rotten; and that streams fell into them at places called mills, and
came out of them at places called grottoes. We were, I am sorry to
say, somewhat languidly content with these articles of information;
we never thought of wading "breast-deep through snow" in search of
more, and still less of "striking our theodolites with the feelings
of a general who had won a small battle." [93] Things went on thus
quietly enough. We were all puzzled to account for glacier motion,
but never thought of ascertaining what the motion really was. We knew
that the ice slipped over the rocks at some places, tumbled over
them at others; gaped, or as people who wanted to write sublimely
always said, yawned, when it was steep, and shut up again when it was
level. And Mr. Charpentiêr wrote a thick volume to show that it moved
by expansion and contraction, which I read all through, and thought
extremely plausible. But none of us ever had the slightest idea of
the ice's being anything but an entirely solid substance, which was
to be reasoned about as capable indeed of being broken, or crushed,
or pushed, or pulled in any direction, and of sliding or falling as
gravity and smooth surfaces might guide it, but was always entirely
rigid and brittle in its substance like so much glass or stone.
This was the state of affairs in 1841. Professor Agassiz, of Neuchâtel,
had then been some eight or ten years at work on the glaciers: had
built a cabin on one of them; walked a great many times over a great
many of them; described a number of their phenomena quite correctly;
proposed, and in some cases performed, many ingenious experiments
upon them; and indeed done almost everything that was to be done for
them--except find out the one thing that we wanted to know.
As his malicious fortune would have it, he invited in that year (1841)
a man of acute brains to see what he was about. The invitation was
accepted. The visitor was a mathematician; and after examining the
question, for discussion of which Agassiz was able to supply him with
all the data except those which were essential, resolved to find out
the essential ones himself.
Which in the next year (1842) he quietly did; and in 1843 solved
the problem of glacier motion for ever,--announcing, to everybody's
astonishment, and to the extreme disgust and mortification of all
glacier students,--including my poor self, (not the least envious,
I fancy, though with as little right to be envious as anyone),--that
glaciers were not solid bodies at all, but semi-liquid ones, and ran
down in their beds like so much treacle.
"Cela saute aux yeux," we all said, as soon as we were told; and I
well remember the intense mortification of first looking down on the
dirt bands of the Mer-de-Glace, from the foot of the Little Charmoz,
after I had read Principal Forbes' book. That we never should have
seen them before!--so palpable, so inevitable now, with every inch of
the ice's motion kept record of, in them, for centuries, and every
curve pencilled in dark, so that no river eddies, no festooned fall
of sweeping cascade, could be more conclusive in proof of the flowing
current. And of course it flowed; how else could it have moved but
by a series of catastrophes? [94] Everything explained, now, by one
shrewd and clear-sighted man's work for a couple of summer months;
and what asses we had all been!
But fancy the feelings of poor Agassiz in his Hotel des
Neuchâtelois! To have had the thing under his nose for ten years,
and missed it! There is nothing in the annals of scientific
mischance--(perhaps the truer word would be scientific dulness)--to
match it; certainly it would be difficult for provocation to be more
bitter,--at least, for a man who thinks, as most of our foolish modern
scientific men do think, that there is no good in knowing anything
for its own sake, but only in being the first to find it out.
Nor am I prepared altogether to justify Forbes in his method of
proceeding, except on the terms of battle which men of science have
laid down for themselves. Here is a man has been ten years at his
diggings; has trenched here, and bored there, and been over all the
ground again and again, except just where the nugget is. He asks one
to dinner--and one has an eye for the run of a stream; one does a
little bit of pickaxing in the afternoon on one's own account,--and
walks off with his nugget. It is hard.
Still, in strictness, it is perfectly fair. The new comer, spade
on shoulder, does not understand, when he accepts the invitation
to dinner, that he must not dig,--or must give all he gets to his
host. The luck is his, and the old pitsman may very excusably growl
and swear at him a little; but has no real right to quarrel with
him,--still less to say that his nugget is copper, and try to make
everybody else think so too.
Alas, it was too clear that this Forbes' nugget was not copper. The
importance of the discovery was shown in nothing so much as in the
spite of Agassiz and his friends. The really valuable work of Agassiz
on the glaciers was itself disgraced, and made a monument to the genius
of Forbes, by the irrelevant spite with which every page was stained
in which his name could be introduced. Mr. Desor found consolation in
describing the cowardice of the Ecossais on the top of the Jungfrau;
and all the ingenuity and plausibility of Professor Tyndall have been
employed, since the death of Forbes, to diminish the lustre of his
discovery, and divide the credit of it.
To diminish the lustre, observe, is the fatallest wrong; by diminishing
its distinctness. At the end of this last book of his, in the four
hundred and tenth of the sapient sentences which he numbers with
paternal care, he still denies, as far as he dares, the essential point
of Forbes' discovery; denies it interrogatively, leaving the reader
to consider the whole subject as yet open to discussion,--only to be
conclusively determined by--Professor Tyndall and his friends. "Ice
splits," he says, "if you strike a pointed pricker into it; fissures,
narrow and profound, may be traced for hundreds of yards through
the ice. Did the ice possess even a very small modicum of that power
of stretching which is characteristic of a viscous substance, 'such
crevasses could not be formed.'" Professor Tyndall presumably never
having seen a crack in clay, nor in shoe-leather, nor in a dish of
jelly set down with a jerk; nor, in the very wax he himself squeezed
flat to show the nature of cleavage,--understood that the cleavage
meant the multiplication of fissure!
And the book pretends to be so explanatory, too, to his young
friends!--explanatory of the use of the theodolite, of the nature
of presence of mind, of the dependence of enjoyment of scenery upon
honest labour, of the necessity that in science, "thought, as far as
possible, should be wedded to fact," and of the propriety of their
becoming older and better informed before they unqualifiedly accept
his opinion of the labours of Rendu!
But the one thing which, after following him through the edification
of his four hundred and ten sentences, they had a right to have
explained to them--the one thing that will puzzle them if ever they
see a glacier, "how the centre flows past the sides, and the top
flows over the bottom," the Professor does not explain; but only
assures them of the attention which the experiments of Mr. Mathews,
Mr. Froude, and above all Signor Bianconi, on that subject, "will
doubtless receive at a future time."
The readers of 'Fors' may imagine they have nothing to do with
personal questions of this kind. But they have no conception of the
degree in which general science is corrupted and retarded by these
jealousies of the schools; nor how important it is to the cause of
all true education, that the criminal indulgence of them should be
chastised. Criminal is a strong word, but an entirely just one. I am
not likely to overrate the abilities of Professor Tyndall; but he had
at least intelligence enough to know that his dispute of the statements
of Forbes by quibbling on the word "viscous" was as uncandid as it
was unscholarly; and it retarded the advance of glacier science for
at least ten years. It was unscholarly, because no other single word
existed in the English language which Forbes could have used instead;
and uncandid, because Professor Tyndall knew perfectly well that Forbes
was aware of the difference between ice and glue, without any need
for experiments on them at the Royal Institution. Forbes said that the
mass of glacier ice was viscous, though an inch of ice was not, just as
it may be said, with absolute truth, that a cartload of fresh-caught
herring is liquid, though a single herring is not. And the absurdity
as well as the iniquity of the Professor's wilful avoidance of this
gist of the whole debate is consummated in this last book, in which,
though its title is "The Forms of Water," he actually never traces
the transformation of snow into glacier ice at all--(blundering by
the way, in consequence, as to the use of one of the commonest words
in Savoyard French, névé). For there are three great "forms of water"
by which the Alps are sheeted,--one is snow; another is glacier ice;
the third is névé, which is the transitional substance between one and
the other. And there is not a syllable, from the beginning of the book
to the end, on the subject of this change, the nature of which is quite
the first point to be determined in the analysis of glacier motion.
I have carried my letter to an unusual length, and must end for the
time; and next month have to deal with some other matters; but as the
Third Fors has dragged me into this business, I will round it off as
best I may; and in the next letter which I can devote to the subject,
I hope to give some available notes on the present state of glacier
knowledge, and of the points which men who really love the Alps may
now usefully work upon.