illustration of the width and force of his intellectual sympathies. Many
men, even of high ability, if convinced as Mr. Gladstone was of the
truth and sufficiency of the Christian revelation, permit themselves
to ignore these experimental approaches to spiritual knowledge, as at
best superfluous. They do not realize how profoundly the evidence,
the knowledge, which we seek and which in some measure we find, must
ultimately influence men’s views as to both the credibility and the
adequacy of all forms of faith. Mr. Gladstone’s broad intellectual
purview,—aided perhaps in this instance by something of the practical
foresight of the statesman,—placed him in a quite different attitude
towards our quest. “It is the most important work which is being done
in the world,” he said in a conversation in 1885. “By far the most
important,” he repeated, with a grave emphasis which suggested previous
trains of thought, to which he did not care to give expression. He
went on to apologize, in his courteous fashion, for his inability to
render active help; and ended by saying “If you will accept sympathy
without service, I shall be glad to join your ranks.” He became an
Honorary Member, and followed with attention,—I know not with how much
of study—the successive issues of our _Proceedings_. Towards the close
of his life he desired that the _Proceedings_ should be sent to St.
Deiniol’s Library, which he had founded at Hawarden; thus giving final
testimony to his sense of the salutary nature of our work. From a man so
immersed in other thought and labour that work could assuredly claim no
more; from men profoundly and primarily interested in the spiritual world
it ought, I think, to claim no less.
F. W. H. MYERS (_S.P.R. Journal, June, 1898_).
Apart from this interesting glimpse of Gladstone, it shows the
importance he attached to the work of the Society for Psychical
Research. To the severely orthodox, who think no evidence of
life after death should be sought outside “Revelation,” his
opinion should appeal. Every increase of knowledge is a further
“Revelation.” In the Bible we are told of one resurrection,
and there is certainly no reason why we should not seek the
evidence of others. We should not shut our eyes and close our
ears to new _Revelation_.
The Society has been thirty-eight years in existence and is
still insufficiently appreciated. Hodgson said in _The Forum_,
1896 “There are so many ways of looking at the world. It may
be a speck in space, or a huge cauldron with a graveyard for
its crust, a place in which to get a hunger and satisfy it,
the fighting ground for a while of dragon or ape, of Trojan or
Turk, an evolutionary drama that must end in ice or fire. Many
things it means to different men. One is busy with earthworms,
another with stars, another with the splendour of the day or
the strivings of the human soul. Numerous investigators are
hunting for further proofs that we came out of the mud, but
very few are seeking indications, in any scientific spirit,
of what may follow the toil and turmoil of our individual
existence here.”
Myers says: “The question of the survival of man is a branch of
experimental psychology. Is there, or is there not, evidence in
the actual observed phenomena of automatism, apparitions and
the like, for a transcendental energy in living men, or for an
influence emanating from personalities which have overpassed
the tomb? This is the definite question, which we can at least
intelligibly discuss, and which either we or our descendants
may some day hope to answer.”
* * * * *
Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!
WORDSWORTH (_On the Death of James Hogg_).
* * * * *
Car, voyez-vous, la femme est, comme on dit, mon maître,
Un certain animal difficile à connoitre,
Et de qui la nature est fort encline au mal.
(A woman, look you, is a certain animal hard to understand and much
inclined to mischief.)
MOLIÈRE (_Le Dépit Amoureux_).
* * * * *
Here, where sharp the sea-bird shrills his ditty,
Flickering flame-wise through the clear live calm,
Rose triumphal, crowning all a city,
Roofs exalted once with prayer and psalm,
Built of holy hands for holy pity,
Frank and fruitful as a sheltering palm.
Church and hospice wrought in faultless fashion,
Hall and chancel bounteous and sublime,
Wide and sweet and glorious as compassion,
Filled and thrilled with force of choral chime,
Filled with spirit of prayer and thrilled with passion,
Hailed a God more merciful than Time.
Ah, less mighty, less than Time prevailing,
Shrunk, expelled, made nothing at his nod,
Less than clouds across the sea-line sailing
Lies he, stricken by his master’s rod.
“Where is man?” the cloister murmurs wailing;
Back the mute shrine thunders—“Where is God?”
Here is all the end of all his glory—
Dust, and grass, and barren silent stones.
Dead, like him, one hollow tower and hoary
Naked in the sea-wind stands and moans,
Filled and thrilled with its perpetual story;
Here, where earth is dense with dead men’s bones.
Low and loud and long, a voice for ever,
Sounds the wind’s clear story like a song.
Tomb from tomb the waves devouring sever,
Dust from dust as years relapse along;
Graves where men made sure to rest and never
Lie dismantled by the seasons’ wrong.
Now displaced, devoured and desecrated,
Now by Time’s hands darkly disinterred,
These poor dead that sleeping here awaited
Long the archangel’s re-creating word,
Closed about with roofs and walls high-gated
Till the blast of judgment should be heard,
Naked, shamed, cast out of consecration,
Corpse and coffin, yea the very graves,
Scoffed at, scattered, shaken from their station,
Spurned and scourged of wind and sea like slaves,
Desolate beyond man’s desolation,
Shrink and sink into the waste of waves.
Tombs, with bare white piteous bones protruded,
Shroudless, down the loose collapsing banks,
Crumble, from their constant place detruded,
That the sea devours and gives not thanks.
Graves where hope and prayer and sorrow brooded
Gape and slide and perish, ranks on ranks.
Rows on rows and line by line they crumble,
They that thought for all time through to be.
Scarce a stone whereon a child might stumble
Breaks the grim field paced alone of me.
Earth, and man, and all their gods wax humble
Here, where Time brings pasture to the sea.
...
But afar on the headland exalted,
But beyond in the curl of the bay,
From the depth of his dome deep-vaulted
Our father is lord of the day.
Our father and lord that we follow,
For deathless and ageless is he;
And his robe is the whole sky’s hollow,
His sandal the sea.
Where the horn of the headland is sharper,
And her green floor glitters with fire,
The sea has the sun for a harper,
The sun has the sea for a lyre.
The waves are a pavement of amber,
By the feet of the sea-winds trod
To receive in a god’s presence-chamber
Our father, the God.
Time, haggard and changeful and hoary,
Is master and god of the land:
But the air is fulfilled of the glory
That is shed from our lord’s right hand.
O father of all of us ever,
All glory be only to thee
From heaven, that is void of thee never,
And earth, and the sea....
SWINBURNE (_By the North Sea_).
Swinburne introduced the new Hellenism or paganism, which was
followed by Pater and J. A. Symonds and ended with Oscar Wilde
(see p. 310 note.) Here Time is the supreme god who wrecks
Christian Churches, etc.
Although Swinburne had no important message to deliver, yet
by his wonderful mastery of metre and language he was of
tremendous service in transforming English Poetry (see p. 219.)
But in spite of the magical effect of his new melodies, he was
wanting in the art (of which Milton is the supreme example)
of varying his rhythm and accents. His extreme regularity,
notwithstanding the fine language and the splendid swing of
his verses, produces in his longer poems a certain effect of
monotony. Swinburne spoke of the “spavined and spur-galled
Pegasus” of George Eliot, but although she lacked his wonderful
lyric melody, she was more artistic and effective than he in
varying the rhythm of her verse. However, the immense influence
of Swinburne on all subsequent poetry can never be forgotten.
Even the dreary Iambic couplet in his hands was transformed
into music.
* * * * *
There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the
truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love
the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed—and scarcely one
woman—love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the
former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of the
persecution of the truth—the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty
and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true
is ultimately identical is given only to those who love both sincerely
and without any foreign ends.
S. T. COLERIDGE (_Table Talk_).
* * * * *
The old creeds grew out of human nature as genuinely as weeds and flowers
out of the earth. It is well enough that the gardener, whose business it
is to pull them up, should despise them as pigweed, wormwood, chickweed,
shadblossom: so they are, out of their place; but the botanist picks
up the same and recognizes them as Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchier,
Amaranth. _Natura nihil agit frustra._ Let us coax each to yield its last
bud.
MONCURE D. CONWAY.
I have not Conway’s book _An Earthward Pilgrimage_ to refer to.
The latter part of the above is apparently a quotation from
Thoreau, as I remember it is so quoted by Emerson.
* * * * *
God is my witness, what hours of wretchedness I have spent at times,
while reading the Bible devoutly from day to day, and reverencing
every word of it as the Word of God, when petty contradictions met me
which seemed to my reason to conflict with the notion of the absolute
historical veracity of every part of Scripture, and which, as I felt,
_in the study of any other book_ we should honestly treat as errors or
mis-statements, without in the least detracting from the real value of
the book! But in those days, I was taught that it was my duty to fling
the suggestion from me at once, “as if it were a loaded shell shot into
the fortress of my soul,” or to stamp out desperately, as with an iron
heel, each spark of honest doubt, which God’s own gift, the love of
truth, had kindled in my bosom.... I thank God that I was not able long
to throw dust in the eyes of my own mind, and do violence to the love of
truth in this way.
BISHOP COLENSO (1814-1883) (_Pentateuch_).
(See G. W. Cox’s _Life of Colenso_, I, 493.) Colenso’s
quotation, “as if it were a loaded shell,” etc., is from
Bishop Wilberforce. Cox mentions elsewhere that in one of
Wilberforce’s published sermons he speaks of a young man of
great promise dying in darkness and despair, because he had
indulged in doubt as to whether the sun and moon stood still
at Joshua’s bidding! Who, that went through the experiences of
those days, can ever forget them? We had been taught that we
“must believe” every word of the Bible to be divinely inspired
or else be eternally damned. And yet we realized that such
belief was absolutely impossible!
The horror with which Bishop Colenso’s revelations were
received in orthodox circles would to-day be scarcely credible,
and not until after the eighties were the results of the Higher
Criticism generally accepted.
* * * * *
Let a man be once fully persuaded that there is no difference between
the two positions, “The Bible contains the religion revealed by God,”
and “Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by
God”; and that whatever can be said of the Bible, collectively taken, may
and must be said of each and every sentence of the Bible, taken for and
by itself,—and I no longer wonder at these paradoxes. I only object to
the inconsistency of those who profess the same belief, and yet affect
to look down with a contemptuous or compassionate smile on John Wesley
for rejecting the Copernican system as incompatible therewith; or who
exclaim, “Wonderful!” when they hear that Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy
old woman to the gallows in honour of the Witch of Endor.... I challenge
these divines and their adherents to establish the compatibility of a
belief in the modern astronomy and natural philosophy with their and
Wesley’s doctrine respecting the inspired Scriptures.
S. T. COLERIDGE.
* * * * *
For the Parsons are dumb dogs, turning round,
And scratching their hole in the warmest ground,
And laying them down in the sun to wink,
Drowsing, and dreaming, and thinking they think.
As they mumble the marrowless bones of morals,
Like toothless children gnawing their corals,
Gnawing their corals to soothe their gums
With a kind of watery thought that comes.
W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).
* * * * *
Why do we respect some vegetables, and despise others? The bean is a
graceful, confiding, engaging vine; but you never can put beans in
poetry, nor into the highest sort of prose. Corn—which, in my garden,
grows alongside the bean, and, so far as I can see, with no affectation
of superiority—is, however, the child of song. It “waves” in all
literature.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (_My Summer in a Garden_).
Mr. Yeats has, however, rescued the bean from its invidious
position (_The Lake Isle of Innisfree_):—
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
Lady Middleton, a friend of old days in Adelaide and now in
England, reminded me of these lines.
* * * * *
Yet in my hid soul must a voice reply
Which knows not which may seem the viler gain,
To sleep for ever or be born again.
The blank repose or drear eternity.
A solitary thing it were to die
So late begotten and so early slain,
With sweet life withered to a passing pain
Till nothing anywhere should still be I.
Yet if for evermore I must convey
These weary senses thro’ an endless day
And gaze on God with these exhausted eyes,
I fear that howsoe’er the seraphs play
My life shall not be theirs nor I as they,
But homeless in the heart of Paradise.
F. W. H. MYERS (1843-1901) (_Immortality_).
This is from Myers’ _Poems_, 1870, and is one of a pair of
sonnets. I do not quote the first in full because its meaning
seems obscure, but the last six lines on the shortness of life
as compared with eternity are as follow:
Lo, all that age is as a speck of sand
Lost on the long beach where the tides are free,
And no man metes it in his hollow hand
Nor cares to ponder it, how small it be;
At ebb it lies forgotten on the land
And at full tide forgotten in the sea.
In the second sonnet quoted above, Myers is not merely
referring to the Biblical account of the future life in heaven
as consisting in endless worship—which, if taken literally
instead of symbolically, would certainly mean a “drear
eternity.” The suggestion is that there must be some equivalent
to work, thought, activity, progress, and definite aims to make
eternal life preferable to annihilation. (I am reminded here of
a curious statement made by the great Adam Smith, “What can be
added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out
of debt, and has a clear conscience!”) Myers ultimately came
to the definite conclusion that the future life will be one of
continued progress.
His name, Myers, is purely English, not Jewish. This gifted man
was not only a fine poet, but also an important essayist and a
remarkable classical scholar. He, Hodgson, and others formed
the small band of able men who threw everything else aside and
devoted their lives to Psychical Research. Myers’ best poems
appeared in _The Renewal of Youth and other Poems_, 1882, and
it was no doubt a loss to poetry that during the remaining
eighteen years of his life he added little, if anything, more.
However, he and Hodgson considered that the work to which they
had devoted themselves was of the very highest importance.
_Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death_, the
important work in which Myers embodied his conclusions, was
left incomplete at his death, but Hodgson, with Miss Alice
Johnson’s assistance, completed and edited it.
Myers was quite satisfied before his death, in 1901, that the
evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research had
already established in itself the fact of survival after death.
But the interesting fact is that during the nineteen years
since he “passed over to the other side” he has apparently
been the principal agent in adding greatly to that evidence.
There is every reason to believe that Myers has personally been
communicating and arranging and directing much of the evidence
that has since been given.
* * * * *
It is not the essayist’s duty to inform, to build pathways through
metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty
of the poet to do these things. Incidentally he may do something in
that way, just as the poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not
be expected of him. Skylarks are primarily created to sing, although a
whole choir of them may be baked in pies and brought to table; they were
born to make music, although they may incidentally stay the pangs of
vulgar hunger.... The essay should be pure literature as the poem is pure
literature.
ALEXANDER SMITH (_On the Writing of Essays_).
* * * * *
Time takes them home that we loved, fair names and famous,
To the soft long sleep, to the broad sweet bosom of death;
But the flower of their souls he shall not take away to shame us,
Nor the lips lack song for ever that now lack breath;
For with us shall the music and perfume that die not dwell,
Though the dead to our dead bid welcome, and we farewell.
SWINBURNE (_In Memory of Barry Cornwall_).
* * * * *
MIMNERMUS IN CHURCH
You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forego,
This warm kind world is all I know.
You say there is no substance here,
One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear,
And child-like hide myself in love:
Show me what angels feel. Till then,
I cling, a mere weak man, to men.
You bid me lift my mean desires
From faltering lips and fitful veins
To sexless souls, ideal quires,
Unwearied voices, wordless strains:
My mind with fonder welcome owns
One dear dead friend’s remembered tones.
Forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.
WILLIAM (JOHNSON) CORY (1823-1892).
Mimnermus was a fine Greek elegiac poet—about 630-600 B.C.
* * * * *
MORS ET VITA
We know not yet what life shall be,
What shore beyond earth’s shore be set;
What grief awaits us, or what glee,
We know not yet.
Still, somewhere in sweet converse met,
Old friends, we say, beyond death’s sea
Shall meet and greet us, nor forget
Those days of yore, those years when we
Were loved and true—but will death let
Our eyes the longed-for vision see?
We know not yet.
SAMUEL WADDINGTON.
The evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research
indicates that friends do certainly meet. See the remarkably
convincing _Ear of Dionysius_, lately published, where Dr.
Verrall and Professor Butcher are clearly having a great time
together on the other side.
* * * * *
Art—which I may style the love of loving, rage
Of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things
For truth’s sake, whole and sole,—nor any good, truth brings
The knower, seer, feeler beside.
R. BROWNING (_Fifine at the Fair_).
* * * * *
De par le Roy dèfense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu.
(By order of the King, God is forbidden
To work miracles in this place.)
ANON.
The teaching of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) led to an
important evangelical movement in the Roman Catholic Church.
When, however, the Jansenists became subjected to persecution,
the usual result followed that numbers of them became fanatics.
The more corrupt the French Court and Society became, the
more frenzied became this fanaticism. In 1727 the Jansenist
deacon, Pâris, a man of very holy life, was buried in the St.
Médard churchyard, and shortly afterwards miracles were said
to take place at his tomb. In consequence large crowds of
_convulsionnaires_ assembled there and very shocking scenes
were enacted, men and women in hysterical and epileptic fits
and ecstatic delirium, eating the earth of the grave and
inflicting frightful tortures on themselves and each other.
When in 1732 the Court interposed and closed the churchyard
some wit wrote the above couplet on the gate.
Mr. King in his _Classical and Foreign Quotations_ has “De
faire _des miracles_,” but the above version seems correct (See
_Larousse_.)
* * * * *
And Christians love in the turf to lie,
Not in watery graves to be—
Nay, the very fishes would _sooner_ die
On the land than in the sea.
THOMAS HOOD.
* * * * *
There are two things that fill my soul with a holy reverence and an
ever-growing wonder: the spectacle of the starry sky, that virtually
annihilates us as physical beings; and the moral law which raises us to
infinite dignity as intelligent agents.
* * * * *
The _ought_ expresses a kind of necessity, a kind of connection
of actions with their grounds or reasons, such as is to be found
nowhere else in the whole natural world. For of the natural world our
understanding can know nothing except what is, what has been, or what
will be. We cannot say that anything in it ought to be other than it
actually was, is, or will be. In fact, so long as we are considering the
course of nature, the _ought_ has no meaning whatever. We can as little
inquire what ought to happen in nature as we can inquire what properties
a circle ought to have.
IMMANUEL KANT.
The first quotation (from the _Kritik of Practical Reason_)
appears to be the same passage that is often rendered in such
words as these: “Two things fill my soul with awe—the starry
heavens in the still night, and the sense of duty in man.”
* * * * *
The whole earth
The beauty wore of promise—that which sets
The budding rose above the rose full-blown.
W. WORDSWORTH (_The Prelude, Bk. XI_).
* * * * *
(——) is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state
of existence; I mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to
place him. I could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as that comes
to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a fellow
in the very lowest pothouse of heaven is utterly inconsistent with the
belief of that place being a place of happiness for me.
S. T. COLERIDGE (_Table Talk_).
* * * * *
It isn’t raining rain to me,
It’s raining daffodils.
In every dimpled drop I see
Wild flowers on the hills.
The clouds of grey engulf the day
And overwhelm the town:
It isn’t raining rain to me,
It’s raining roses down.
ROBERT LOVEMAN.
* * * * *
Let us reflect that the highest path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of
those, who look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may never
look so high again.
N. HAWTHORNE (_Transformation_).
* * * * *
One summer evening sitting by my window I watched for the first star
to appear, knowing the position of the brightest in the southern sky.
The dusk came on, grew deeper, but the star did not shine. By and by,
other stars less bright appeared, so that it could not be the sunset
which obscured the expected one. Finally, I considered that I must have
mistaken its position, when suddenly a puff of air blew through the
branch of a pear tree which overhung the window, a leaf moved, and there
was the star behind the leaf.
At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing at the sky up
through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful star shines clearly; here
a constellation is hidden by a branch; a universe by a leaf. Some mental
instrument or organon is required to enable us to distinguish between the
leaf which may be removed and a real void; when to cease to look in one
direction, and to work in another.... There are infinities to be known,
but they are hidden by a leaf.
RICHARD JEFFERIES (_The Story of My Heart_).
* * * * *
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow,
And through the wild-piled snowdrift
The warm rosebuds below.
R. W. EMERSON (_The World-Soul_).
Emerson is always an optimist.
* * * * *
Place thyself, oh, lovely fair!
Where a thousand mirrors are;
Though a thousand faces shine,
’Tis but one—and that is thine.
Then the Painter’s skill allow,
Who could frame so fair a brow.
What are lustrous eyes of flame,
What are cheeks, the rose that shame,
What are glances wild and free,
Speech, and shape, and voice—but He?
MOASI (_L. S. Costello’s translation_).
* * * * *
And here the Singer for his Art
Not all in vain may plead
‘The song that nerves a nation’s heart
Is in itself a deed.’
TENNYSON (_Charge of the Heavy Brigade_).
* * * * *
I knew a very wise man that believed that, if a man were permitted to
make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a
nation.
FLETCHER of Saltoun (_Letter to Montrose and others_).
What would the wise man have said of “It’s a long, long way to
Tipperary”?
* * * * *
FIRST LOVE
O my earliest love, who, ere I number’d
Ten sweet summers, made my bosom thrill!
Will a swallow—or a swift, or some bird—
Fly to her and say, I love her still?
Say my life’s a desert drear and arid,
To its one green spot I aye recur:
Never, never—although three times married—
Have I cared a jot for aught but her.
No, mine-own! though early forced to leave you,
Still my heart was there where first we met;
In those “Lodgings with an ample sea-view,”
Which were, forty years ago, “To let.”