Telemachus, who has come from Ithaca to ask tidings of his father, how,
after the taking of Troy, the insolence and violence of the Achæans
called down upon them the displeasure of the Father of the Gods and the
stern blue-eyed virgin, his daughter. Agamemnon and Meneläus, flushed
with wine, quarrelled openly in an assembly held at sunset, which broke
up in disorder and tumult; the leaders, some of them, staying behind to
please Agamemnon; others, drawing down their ships without delay and
sailing off with Ulysses, came as far as Tenedos, and then turned again
back. But I, says Nestor--
But I, with my ships in a body, the whole that obeyed me,
Fled, well perceiving that wrath was rising against us;
Tydides also fled with me, his company calling;
Later, upon our track followed the yellow Meneläus;
In Lesbos found us, debating there of the long voyage,
Were we to sail, to wit, by this side of rocky Chios,
Making for Psyrie-isle, Chios being kept to the larboard,
Or to the far side Chios along by the windy Mimante.
Will this sort of thing please the modern ear? It is to be feared
not. It is too late a day in this nineteenth century to introduce a
new principle, however good, into modern European verse. We must be
content, perhaps, in this, as in other and higher matters, to take
things as we find them, and make the best we can of them. You, I dare
say, my dear sir, though perhaps no great lover of hexameters at all,
will prefer to my laboured Homerics the rough-and-ready Anglo-savage
lines that follow. They render the prayer of Achilles when he is
sending out Patroclus with the Myrmidons to check the victory of the
Trojans.
Dodonëan, Pelasgican Zeus, up in heaven above us,
King of Dodona, the stormy and cold, where thy Selli attend thee,
Barefoot, that wash not their feet, whose bed is the earth,
thy expounders--
Once when I prayed thee before, thou gavest me all my petition,
Gavest me honour, and greatly afflicted the host of Achaia;
Even so now too, Zeus, fulfil my prayer and petition;
I am myself staying here, alone in the midst of my vessels.
But I am sending my friend, and the Myrmidon people about him,
Into the battle: O Zeus, Wide-Seër, accord to him honour,
Strengthen, embolden the heart in his breast; that Hector to-day may
See whether my companion has skill of his own for the battle,
Or is invincible only, when I too enter the onset.
And when the might of his hand shall have driven the war from the
galleys,
Then let him come back safe to me by the side of my vessels,
Unhurt bringing me home my arms and all my companions.
So in his prayer he spoke; and the Zeus, the Counsellor, heard him:
Granted him half his desire; but half the Father denied him;
Granted him that his friend should drive the war and the onset
Back from the galleys; denied him his safe return from the battle.
Here, in a milder mood, the poet, for the conclusion of his first book,
describes the ‘easy living’ gods:--
So the live-long day they thus were unto the sunset
Feasting; neither did heart lack ever a portion of banquet,
Nor lack ever the lyre, sweet-toned, in the hand of Apollo,
Nor the muses, in turn singing sweetly with beautiful voices.
But as soon as the shining light of the sun had descended,
They, to lay them down, went every one to his chamber,
Where for each one a house the far-famed Worker with both hands,
Even Hephœstus, had made with the skill of his understanding.
Zeus also to his bed, the Olympian flasher of lightning,
Where he was wont before, when slumber sweet came upon him--
Thither gone-up was sleeping, the white-armed Heera beside him.
The best translations of Homer into this verse which I am acquainted
with are those by Mr. Lockhart and Dr. Hawtrey, in the little
oblong-quarto collection of English Hexameters. Yet, after all----!
At any rate--
My dear sir, here is a chapter, which, be it for better or worse is
From beginning to end about hexameter verses;
Could they but jingle a little, ’twere better, perhaps; but the trouble
Really is endless, of hunting for rhymes that have all to be double.
Adieu, till the next time, when either in prose or in rhyme I
Haply may find something better to gossip about in a letter.
In the meanwhile, my dear sir, till writing again may beseem us,
I am, your faithful, obliged, and obedient,
PAREPIDEMUS.
A PASSAGE UPON OXFORD STUDIES:
EXTRACTED FROM
A REVIEW OF THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY
COMMISSIONERS’ REPORT, 1852.
(Published in the ‘North American Review’ for April 1853,
Vol. lxxvi., No 159.)
‘I went to Oxford from the sixth form (the highest class) of a public
school. I had at that time read all Thucydides, except the sixth and
seventh books; the six first books of Herodotus; the early books of
each author I had done at least three times over. I had read five
plays, I think, of Sophocles, four of Æschylus--several of these two or
three times over; four, perhaps, or five, of Euripides; considerable
portions of Aristophanes; nearly all the “Odyssey”; only about a third
of the “Iliad,” but that several times over; one or two dialogues
of Plato--the “Phædo,” I remember, was one; not quite all Virgil;
all Horace; a good deal of Livy and Tacitus; a considerable portion
of Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” and two or three books of his “Ethics”;
besides, of course, other things. I mention these, because they have
to do with Oxford. I had been used to do my very best in translating
in the class. We were not marked; but expressions of approbation,
graduated carefully, and invariably given by the rule so formed,
were quite sure to let every boy know how he had done his part. The
more diligent used to listen with eagerness for note and comment;
the idlest amongst us were considerably afraid of reprimand. We were
wont, moreover, to do three long original exercises every week, out of
school. These were looked over with us singly, and marked by a regular
scale. To fall below 26 I used to consider latterly a disgrace; to
attain 28, a very great piece of honour. I knew perfectly well when I
did ill, and when I did well.
‘No words, not even those of Mr. Lowe, can express the amount of
the change which I experienced on entering the lecture-rooms of my
college--though confessedly one of the very best in Oxford--and on
embarking upon the course of University study. Had I not read pretty
nearly all the books? Was I to go on, keeping up my Latin prose
writers, for three years more? Logic and Ethics had some little
novelty; there was a little extra scholarship to be obtained in some
of the college lectures. But that was the utmost. I should have
wished to take to Mathematics, which I had hitherto rather neglected;
but Mathematics alone would not lead to a Fellowship, and I did
not feel any certainty that I could stand the strain of work for a
“Double-First.” I had been pretty well sated of distinctions and
competitions at school; I would gladly have dispensed with anything
more of success in this kind, always excepting the 200_l._ a year of
the Fellowship. What I wanted was to sit down to happy, unimpeded
prosecution of some new subject or subjects; surely, there was more
in the domain of knowledge than that Latin and Greek which I had been
wandering about in for the last ten years. Surely, there were other
accomplishments to be mastered, besides the composition of Iambics and
Ciceronian prose. If there were, however, they existed not for me.
There were the daily lectures in the morning, which I did not like to
miss (and, indeed, could hardly have missed to any profitable extent);
nor yet, if I attended them, to neglect to prepare for them. The daily
lectures now, and the weary re-examination in classics three years
ahead! An infinite lassitude and impatience, which I saw reflected
in the faces of others, quickly began to infect me. _Quousque_ Latin
prose? Though we should gain by it prizes and honours academical,
beyond all academical example, it would not the less certainly be
a mere shame and waste of strength to make the effort. I did go on,
for duty’s sake, and for discipline and docility, sadly doing Latin
prose; but, except in docility, profiting but little. Could I only
have hoped to get through the whole business in a year or a year and a
half’s time, and then to be free to do what, before that is over, one
never does, _study_! Some pleasure, too, there would have been, even
in that old Greek and Latin, could one but have been free to pasture
freely, following a natural instinct, upon its fairly extensive field.
But no; if one did anything, one must “get up” the books for the
schools, and they were--three years ahead. Even the present alteration
in the statute, by which the suffering pilgrim is allowed to lay down
a portion of his classical burden at the feet of the examiners, at
the end of the second year, appears to me insufficient; ever so much
classics and theology still remain behind, to be carried on, as before,
to the end of the third year. No proper emancipation, no true admission
to the rights of manly reading, is given, until the moment when, for
most, it comes too late.
‘The masters of the public schools have, it is true, been in fault;
they have pushed on their pupils too hastily; have prepared them
prematurely for the ultimate honours of the degree; have neglected the
“Æneid” and the “Iliad” for the sake of Aristophanes and the Ethics.
Yet it is true, nevertheless, that this very examination in Ethics,
&c., used to be passed, not so many years ago, by young men not a bit
older than the boys at the top of the public schools. Arnold took his
First at nineteen, Peel his “Double-First” at twenty. Surely, after the
age of nineteen or twenty, it is really time that this schoolboy love
of racing, this empty competition, should be checked. There is less,
a great deal, at Oxford than at Cambridge; but there is a great deal
too much at Oxford. For the preliminary discipline of boys, I grant
it to be needful; to carry it forward into the very years of legal
manhood, appears to me a most foolish and ill-advised innovation. The
existing change I cannot account sufficient; every one, as before, must
do his _literæ humaniores_. Still, if four substantial departments
were once really and fairly established for the third year, I am happy
in the belief that no one would think so very much of high honours
in any one of them. Examinations are useful things, and the stricter
they are the better; and the results, I suppose, can hardly be made
public without some honour attending them. But by the great principle,
“_divide et impera_,” we shall, I hope, over-power much of this
pernicious distinction. We shall be able to prove to young men whether
they really know what they think they know, without declaring them (_dî
meliora!_), to themselves and all the world, to be the cleverest men
in Oxford. Examinations, I repeat, are essential; but no examinations
will do much good unless there be, independent and irrespective of
them, a real inward taste, and liking, and passion, shall I say, not
for competitive effort and distinction, but for study, and the subjects
themselves of study. Examinations are sadly apt to impair this spring
of happy spontaneity; _honos_, indeed, _alít artes_, but not that
honour which attends the success of the race-horse; which testifies
to a mere personal and comparative superiority. Far more grateful and
of far higher value than any such popular plaudit, is to the faithful
student, the strictly plain and severely true ascertainment, not of
whom he has beat, but of what he has done: the real desideratum for him
is the exact and well-considered verdict of an accomplished judge of
details; to details and separate branches, therefore--not to aggregates
of studies, but to distinct studies--should examinations be applied.
_Quot homines, tot studia; quot studia, tot examinationes_: Have as
many as you please; the more they are in number, the less imposing they
are singly; multiply them indefinitely. Only, of all Senior Wranglers,
Medallists, and even “Double-First,” let us be fairly and finally rid.’
EXTRACTS FROM A REVIEW
OF A WORK ENTITLED
‘CONSIDERATIONS ON SOME RECENT
SOCIAL THEORIES.’
(Published in the ‘North American Review’ for July 1853,
Vol. lxxvii., No. 160.)
Our author begins with the vague declamations, rather than positions,
which have lately been current in Europe--‘Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity,’ ‘God and the People,’ ‘Direct Popular Government,’ ‘The
Universal Republic,’ and the like. Several of these he sums up in the
old formula, _Vox populi vox Dei_, and devotes his first chapter to
the question of its correctness. The high doctrine proclaimed by the
fervid Italian leader, of the supreme ‘authority of the people as the
collective perpetual interpreter of the will of God,’ finds but little
favour with him. Who and what, he asks, is this ‘Royal priesthood,’
this ‘Peculiar people’?
We cannot, indeed, any more than our author, soar to the high modern
Mazzinian acceptation of the ancient maxim. Those who use it should, at
any rate, we think, temper it in application by the rule,
Nec deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus;
and may, perhaps, find their advantage in collating it with another
significant dictum which tells us that at times
Sua cuique deus fit dira cupido;
a people can be the slave of cupidity and resentment; a people can be
pusillanimous, dastardly, and base; a people can be also fiendishly
inhuman; the fears and passions of a people, when once excited,
are more hopelessly irrational, more wildly uncontrollable, more
extensively ruinous, more appallingly terrible, than those of councils
and kings. Nevertheless, depravation and barbarism apart, in an average
state of society, a state such as we hope and believe in for the
future, it may be true that the common impulses and plain feelings of
the people may be expected to be honest and good. Great questions, that
must go back for their solution to natural instincts and unconscious
first principles, may refer themselves to the popular voice. In such
cases the love of routine, the narrow and rigid views, the personal
interest, ambition, or indolence of officials and representatives, are
likely enough to impede and retard, to mislead, pervert, and corrupt
the national action. In executive details, meantime, what choice have
we but to trust to individuals? A crowd of voters cannot easily study,
cannot readily appreciate, the subtle and intricate circumstances
which embarrass the application of principles. A complex question in
arithmetic is better submitted to the computation of an accountant
than to the suffrage of a town meeting. Accountants and auditors may
combine to deceive, but the chances of their telling the truth are
greater than those of our carrying it by acclamation. A people also, we
conceive, however generous and well meaning, is apt to be a little too
rough-handed to deal properly with nice points of fairness and honour
and delicate questions of feeling.
A second chapter, on Liberty, the supposed principle, is followed by
a third, on the projected perfect practice of it in the Universal
Republic. The writer urges, with reason, that the existence of
government at all presupposes a certain surrender of some portion of
their freedom to do whatever they please, upon the part of those who
live under it. Upon any other theory, how strange and anomalous, for
example, is that constraint which, in the freest of all politics,
restricts the freewill of the citizen, by requiring his submission
to the vote of a majority. This regulation, he argues, all political
regulations, all institutions and constitutions whatever, are not
in themselves principles; they are, at their very best, extremely
imperfect human expedients for attaining, in a rough way, some amount,
often a very small one, of practicable common benefit. Universal
suffrage is one social method, monarchy is another; as the former is
sometimes best, so also sometimes is the latter. Universal suffrage
would hardly do on shipboard, the rule of one is unsuitable for a
club. There are times when a state is very much like a club; there are
occasions when it may fitly be compared to a ship.
Before quitting these chapters we must add a few words on _Liberty_.
The dream and aspiration of the ardent and generous spirits of our time
is for a certain royal road to human happiness. Disappointed a thousand
times, they still persist in their exalted creed that there must and
will be here on earth, if not now, in some future and approaching time,
a state of social arrangement in which the spontaneous action and
free development of each individual constituent member will combine
to form ‘a vast and solemn harmony,’ the ultimate perfect movement
of collective humanity. There beautiful thoughts will distil as the
dew, and fair actions spring up as the green herb; there, without
constraint, we shall all be good, and without trouble, happy; there,
what in its imperfect form is vice, shall gently and naturally flower
out into virtue; there contention and contest, control and commandment,
will be the obsolete terms of a dead language, with no modern
equivalents to explain them. A divine interior instinct will intimate
to each single human being his fittest and highest vocation, and will
prompt and inspire and guide him to fulfil it; while in the pursuit of
his own free choice and in the fulfilment of his own strongest desires,
he will, by the blessing of the presiding genius of humanity, best
serve the true interests of society and the race.
Was it thus not long ago? For,
Ante etiam sceptrum Dictæi regis, et ante
Impia quam cæsis gens est epulata juvencis,
Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat.
O blessed ages of pure, spontaneous, unconscious, unthinking,
unreasoning life and action, to you, either in the past or the future,
the human heart is still fain to recur--still must dream, even though
it be but a dream, of how sweet it were to grow as the green herb, and
bloom as the spring flowers, to be good because we cannot be otherwise,
and happy because we cannot help it. O blessed ages, indeed! But have
such, since men were men, ever been? Or are such, while men are men,
ever likely to come? Alas, the rude earth itself affords us admonition--
Pater ipse colendi
Haud facilem esse viam voluit, primusque per artem,
Movit agros, _curis acuens mortalia corda_,
_Nec torpere gravi passus sua regna veterno_.
And, strange as it may seem--how charming soever be spontaneity, still
those who have endured coercion find a good deal also to say in favour
of it.
O life! without thy chequered scene
Of right and wrong, of weal and woe,
Success and failure--could a ground
For magnanimity be found,
For faith, mid ruined hopes serene?
Or whence could virtue flow?
There are many, surely, who, looking back into their past lives, feel
most thankful for those acts which came least from their own mere
natural volition--can see that what did them most good was what they
themselves would least have chosen; that things which, in fact, they
were forced to, were, after all, the best things that ever happened
to them. There are some, surely, who have had reason to bless a
wholesome compulsion; there are some who prefer doing right under a
master to doing nothing but enjoy themselves as their own masters; who,
rather than be left to their own unaided feebleness, hesitation, and
indolence, would voluntarily, for their own and the common good, enter
a condition of what thenceforth would be ‘involuntary servitude.’ The
mature freewill of the grown man looks back, undoubtedly, with some
little regret, but also with no little scorn, upon the bygone puerile
spontaneities of the time when he did as he liked.
There are periods, it is true, in the life of the individual human
being, and perhaps of the collective human race, when expansion is
the first of necessities. Such, it is possible, may be the present.
But because we would be rid of existing restrictions, it does not
follow that restriction of all kinds is an evil; because our present
house is too small for us, it is not to be inferred that we shall live
henceforth in the open air.
As a general rule of life and conduct, we see as yet no reason to
believe that _liberty_, if this be its meaning, is better than service.
It does not seem to be established that the system on which the things
we live amongst were arranged, is that of spontaneous development,
rather than of coercion met by a mixture of resistance and submission.
The latter hypothesis seems intrinsically as much more elevating as
the other does more agreeable. Meantime, as a matter of language,
we should be inclined to reject altogether this modern sense of our
old-established word Liberty. If the new theory wants a name, let
it find a new one. It will but perplex and cheat us by claiming one
already otherwise appropriated. When we hear people demanding liberty,
we shall consider them to express their desire, not for the golden
age, but either for release from some particular form of restriction,
or, it may be, for a less degree of restriction in general. Liberty
for us will mean either _more_ liberty--just as, in the Black Hole
of Calcutta, ‘air’ meant ‘_more_ air’--or distinct emancipation, for
example, from personal slavery, or from foreign rule. Liberty in itself
is but the power of doing what we please; a power which, for all human
beings, has its natural limits. We may easily, indeed, have too much
or too little of it; we can only have it in degree, but without some
degree of it we cannot exist.
* * * * *
The crying evil, as it appears to us, of the present system of
unrestricted competition, is not so much the distress of the workmen
as the extreme slovenliness and badness of their work. The joy and
satisfaction of making really good things is destroyed by the criminal
eagerness to make them to suit the market. The love of art, which,
quite as much as virtue, is its own reward, used in the old times to
penetrate down as far as to the meanest manufacture, of kettles, for
example, and pots. With us, on the contrary, the miserable truckling
to the bad taste of the multitude has gradually stolen up to the very
regions of the highest art--into architecture, sculpture, painting,
music, literature. Nay, has it not infected even morality and religion?
And do we never hear spiritual advice, which in fact bids us do as
little good, and get as much applause for it, as we can; and, above all
things, know the state of the market?
So far as co-operative societies or guilds would remove this evil,
they would be of great use. But let it not be forgotten that the
object of human society is not the mere ‘culinary’ one of securing
equal apportionments of meat and drink to all its members. Men combine
for some higher object; and to that higher object it is, in their
social capacity, the _privilege_ and real happiness of individuals to
sacrifice themselves. The highest political watchword is not Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, nor yet Solidarity, but _Service_.
The true comfort to the soldiers, serving in the great industrial army
of arts, commerce, and manufactures, is neither to tell them, with the
Utopians, that a good time is coming, when they will have plenty of
victuals and not so much to do; nor yet, with the Economists, to hold
out to them the prospect of making their fortune; but to show them that
what they are now doing is good and useful service to the community;
to call upon them to do it well and thoroughly; and to teach them how
they may; and all this quite irrespectively of any prospects either of
making a fortune or living on into a good time.
We are not sure that our author would quite coincide with us in a
comparative disregard of physical discomfort, privation, and suffering.
Yet we think he would join us in the belief that the real want of the
present time is, above all things, the distinct recognition and steady
observance of a few plain, and not wholly modern, rules of morality.