In a former lecture in this Institution, I said that the human race owed
more to the eighteenth century than to any century since the Christian
era. It may seem a bold assertion to those who value duly the century
which followed the revival of Greek literature, and consider that the
eighteenth century was but the child, or rather grandchild, thereof. But
I must persist in my opinion, even though it seem to be inconsistent with
my description of the very same era as one of decay and death. For side
by side with the death, there was manifold fresh birth; side by side with
the decay there was active growth;--side by side with them, fostered by
them, though generally in strong opposition to them, whether conscious or
unconscious. We must beware, however, of trying to find between that
decay and that growth a bond of cause and effect where there is really
none. The general decay may have determined the course of many men's
thoughts; but it no more set them thinking than (as I have heard said)
the decay of the Ancien Regime produced the new Regime--a loose metaphor,
which, like all metaphors, will not hold water, and must not be taken for
a philosophic truth. That would be to confess man--what I shall never
confess him to be--the creature of circumstances; it would be to fall
into the same fallacy of spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when
they believed that bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox. In the
first place, the bees were no bees, but flies--unless when some true
swarm of honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs,
as Samson's bees did in that of the lion. But bees or flies, each sprang
from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of its own: it
was fostered by the carcass it fed on during development; but bred from
it it was not, any more than Marat was bred from the decay of the Ancien
Regime. There are flies which, by feeding on putridity, become poisonous
themselves, as did Marat: but even they owe their vitality and
organisation to something higher than that on which they feed; and each
of them, however, defaced and debased, was at first a "thought of God."
All true manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances; and if any
man be the creature of circumstances, it is because he has become so,
like the drunkard; because he has ceased to be a man, and sunk downward
toward the brute.
Accordingly we shall find, throughout the 18th century, a stirring of
thought, an originality, a resistance to circumstances, an indignant
defiance of circumstances, which would have been impossible, had
circumstances been the true lords and shapers of mankind. Had that
latter been the case, the downward progress of the Ancien Regime would
have been irremediable. Each generation, conformed more and more to the
element in which it lived, would have sunk deeper in dull acquiescence to
evil, in ignorance of all cravings save those of the senses; and if at
any time intolerable wrong or want had driven it to revolt, it would have
issued, not in the proclamation of new and vast ideas, but in an anarchic
struggle for revenge and bread.
There are races, alas! which seem, for the present at least, mastered by
circumstances. Some, like the Chinese, have sunk back into that state;
some, like the negro in Africa, seem not yet to have emerged from it; but
in Europe, during the eighteenth century, were working not merely new
forces and vitalities (abstractions which mislead rather than explain),
but living persons in plenty, men and women, with independent and
original hearts and brains, instinct, in spite of all circumstances, with
power which we shall most wisely ascribe directly to Him who is the Lord
and Giver of Life.
Such persons seemed--I only say seemed--most numerous in England and in
Germany. But there were enough of them in France to change the destiny
of that great nation for awhile--perhaps for ever.
M. de Tocqueville has a whole chapter, and a very remarkable one, which
appears at first sight to militate against my belief--a chapter "showing
that France was the country in which men had become most alike."
"The men," he says, "of that time, especially those belonging to the
upper and middle ranks of society, who alone were at all conspicuous,
were all exactly alike."
And it must be allowed, that if this were true of the upper and middle
classes, it must have been still more true of the mass of the lowest
population, who, being most animal, are always most moulded--or rather
crushed--by their own circumstances, by public opinion, and by the wants
of five senses, common to all alike.
But when M. de Tocqueville attributes this curious fact to the
circumstances of their political state--to that "government of one man
which in the end has the inevitable effect of rendering all men alike,
and all mutually indifferent to their common fate"--we must differ, even
from him: for facts prove the impotence of that, or of any other
circumstance, in altering the hearts and souls of men, in producing in
them anything but a mere superficial and temporary resemblance.
For all the while there was, among these very French, here and there a
variety of character and purpose, sufficient to burst through that very
despotism, and to develop the nation into manifold, new, and quite
original shapes. Thus it was proved that the uniformity had been only in
their outside crust and shell. What tore the nation to pieces during the
Reign of Terror, but the boundless variety and originality of the
characters which found themselves suddenly in free rivalry? What else
gave to the undisciplined levies, the bankrupt governments, the parvenu
heroes of the Republic, a manifold force, a self-dependent audacity,
which made them the conquerors, and the teachers (for good and evil) of
the civilised world? If there was one doctrine which the French
Revolution specially proclaimed--which it caricatured till it brought it
into temporary disrepute--it was this: that no man is like another; that
in each is a God-given "individuality," an independent soul, which no
government or man has a right to crush, or can crush in the long run: but
which ought to have, and must have, a "carriere ouverte aux talents,"
freely to do the best for itself in the battle of life. The French
Revolution, more than any event since twelve poor men set forth to
convert the world some eighteen hundred years ago, proves that man ought
not to be, and need not be, the creature of circumstances, the puppet of
institutions; but, if he will, their conqueror and their lord.
Of these original spirits who helped to bring life out of death, and the
modern world out of the decay of the mediaeval world, the French
_philosophes_ and encyclopaedists are, of course, the most notorious.
They confessed, for the most part, that their original inspiration had
come from England. They were, or considered themselves, the disciples of
Locke; whose philosophy, it seems to me, their own acts disproved.
And first, a few words on these same _philosophes_. One may be
thoroughly aware of their deficiencies, of their sins, moral as well as
intellectual; and yet one may demand that everyone should judge them
fairly--which can only be done by putting himself in their place; and any
fair judgment of them will, I think, lead to the conclusion that they
were not mere destroyers, inflamed with hate of everything which mankind
had as yet held sacred. Whatever sacred things they despised, one sacred
thing they reverenced, which men had forgotten more and more since the
seventeenth century--common justice and common humanity. It was this, I
believe, which gave them their moral force. It was this which drew
towards them the hearts, not merely of educated bourgeois and nobles (on
the _menu peuple_ they had no influence, and did not care to have any),
but of every continental sovereign who felt in himself higher aspirations
than those of a mere selfish tyrant--Frederick the Great, Christina of
Sweden, Joseph of Austria, and even that fallen Juno, Catharine of
Russia, with all her sins. To take the most extreme instance--Voltaire.
We may question his being a philosopher at all. We may deny that he had
even a tincture of formal philosophy. We may doubt much whether he had
any of that human and humorous common sense, which is often a good
substitute for the philosophy of the schools. We may feel against him a
just and honest indignation when we remember that he dared to travestie
into a foul satire the tale of his country's purest and noblest heroine;
but we must recollect, at the same time, that he did a public service to
the morality of his own country, and of all Europe, by his
indignation--quite as just and honest as any which we may feel--at the
legal murder of Calas. We must recollect that, if he exposes baseness
and foulness with too cynical a license of speech (in which, indeed, he
sinned no more than had the average of French writers since the days of
Montaigne), he at least never advocates them, as did Le Sage. We must
recollect that, scattered throughout his writings, are words in favour of
that which is just, merciful, magnanimous, and even, at times, in favour
of that which is pure; which proves that in Voltaire, as in most men,
there was a double self--the one sickened to cynicism by the iniquity and
folly which he saw around him--the other, hungering after a nobler life,
and possibly exciting that hunger in one and another, here and there, who
admired him for other reasons than the educated mob, which cried after
him "Vive la Pucelle."
Rousseau, too. Easy it is to feel disgust, contempt, for the
"Confessions" and the "Nouvelle Heloise"--for much, too much, in the
man's own life and character. One would think the worse of the young
Englishman who did not so feel, and express his feelings roundly and
roughly. But all young Englishmen should recollect, that to Rousseau's
"Emile" they owe their deliverance from the useless pedantries, the
degrading brutalities, of the medieval system of school education; that
"Emile" awakened throughout civilised Europe a conception of education
just, humane, rational, truly scientific, because founded upon facts;
that if it had not been written by one writhing under the bitter
consequences of mis-education, and feeling their sting and their brand
day by day on his own spirit, Miss Edgeworth might never have reformed
our nurseries, or Dr. Arnold our public schools.
And so with the rest of the _philosophes_. That there were charlatans
among them, vain men, pretentious men, profligate men, selfish,
self-seeking, and hypocritical men, who doubts? Among what class of men
were there not such in those evil days? In what class of men are there
not such now, in spite of all social and moral improvement? But nothing
but the conviction, among the average, that they were in the right--that
they were fighting a battle for which it was worth while to dare, and if
need be to suffer, could have enabled them to defy what was then public
opinion, backed by overwhelming physical force.
Their intellectual defects are patent. No one can deny that their
inductions were hasty and partial: but then they were inductions as
opposed to the dull pedantry of the schools, which rested on tradition
only half believed, or pretended to be believed. No one can deny that
their theories were too general and abstract; but then they were theories
as opposed to the no-theory of the Ancien Regime, which was, "Let us eat
and drink, for to-morrow we die."
Theories--principles--by them if men do not live, by them men are, at
least, stirred into life, at the sight of something more noble than
themselves. Only by great ideas, right or wrong, could such a world as
that which Le Sage painted, be roused out of its slough of foul
self-satisfaction, and equally foul self-discontent.
For mankind is ruled and guided, in the long run, not by practical
considerations, not by self-interest, not by compromises; but by theories
and principles, and those of the most abstruse, delicate, supernatural,
and literally unspeakable kind; which, whether they be according to
reason or not, are so little according to logic--that is, to speakable
reason--that they cannot be put into speech. Men act, whether singly or
in masses, by impulses and instincts for which they give reasons quite
incompetent, often quite irrelevant; but which they have caught from each
other, as they catch fever or small-pox; as unconsciously, and yet as
practically and potently; just as the nineteenth century has caught from
the philosophers of the eighteenth most practical rules of conduct,
without even (in most cases) having read a word of their works.
And what has this century caught from these philosophers? One rule it
has learnt, and that a most practical one--to appeal in all cases, as
much as possible, to "Reason and the Laws of Nature." That, at least,
the philosophers tried to do. Often they failed. Their conceptions of
reason and of the laws of nature being often incorrect, they appealed to
unreason and to laws which were not those of nature. "The fixed idea of
them all was," says M. de Tocqueville, "to substitute simple and
elementary rules, deduced from reason and natural law, for the
complicated traditional customs which governed the society of their
time." They were often rash, hasty, in the application of their method.
They ignored whole classes of facts, which, though spiritual and not
physical, are just as much facts, and facts for science, as those which
concern a stone or a fungus. They mistook for merely complicated
traditional customs, many most sacred institutions which were just as
much founded on reason and natural law, as any theories of their own. But
who shall say that their method was not correct? That it was not the
only method? They appealed to reason. Would you have had them appeal to
unreason? They appealed to natural law. Would you have had them appeal
to unnatural law?--law according to which God did not make this world?
Alas! that had been done too often already. Solomon saw it done in his
time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no good end. Rabelais
saw it done in his time; and wrote his chapters on the "Children of
Physis and the Children of Antiphysis." But, born in an evil generation,
which was already, even in 1500, ripening for the revolution of 1789, he
was sensual and, I fear, cowardly enough to hide his light, not under a
bushel, but under a dunghill; till men took him for a jester of jests;
and his great wisdom was lost to the worse and more foolish generations
which followed him, and thought they understood him.
But as for appealing to natural law for that which is good for men, and
to reason for the power of discerning that same good--if man cannot find
truth by that method, by what method shall he find it?
And thus it happened that, though these philosophers and encyclopaedists
were not men of science, they were at least the heralds and the
coadjutors of science.
We may call them, and justly, dreamers, theorists, fanatics. But we must
recollect that one thing they meant to do, and did. They recalled men to
facts; they bid them ask of everything they saw--What are the facts of
the case? Till we know the facts, argument is worse than useless.
Now the habit of asking for the facts of the case must deliver men more
or less from that evil spirit which the old Romans called "Fama;" from
her whom Virgil described in the AEneid as the ugliest, the falsest, and
the cruellest of monsters.
From "Fama;" from rumours, hearsays, exaggerations, scandals,
superstitions, public opinions--whether from the ancient public opinion
that the sun went round the earth, or the equally public opinion, that
those who dared to differ from public opinion were hateful to the deity,
and therefore worthy of death--from all these blasts of Fame's lying
trumpet they helped to deliver men; and they therefore helped to insure
something like peace and personal security for those quiet, modest, and
generally virtuous men, who, as students of physical science, devoted
their lives, during the eighteenth century, to asking of nature--What are
the facts of the case?
It was no coincidence, but a connection of cause and effect, that during
the century of _philosopher_ sound physical science throve, as she had
never thriven before; that in zoology and botany, chemistry and medicine,
geology and astronomy, man after man, both of the middle and the noble
classes, laid down on more and more sound, because more and more extended
foundations, that physical science which will endure as an everlasting
heritage to mankind; endure, even though a second Byzantine period should
reduce it to a timid and traditional pedantry, or a second irruption of
barbarians sweep it away for awhile, to revive again (as classic
philosophy revived in the fifteenth century) among new and more energetic
races; when the kingdom of God shall have been taken away from us, and
given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.
An eternal heritage, I say, for the human race; which once gained, can
never be lost; which stands, and will stand; marches, and will march,
proving its growth, its health, its progressive force, its certainty of
final victory, by those very changes, disputes, mistakes, which the
ignorant and the bigoted hold up to scorn, as proofs of its uncertainty
and its rottenness; because they never have dared or cared to ask
boldly--What are the facts of the case?--and have never discovered either
the acuteness, the patience, the calm justice, necessary for ascertaining
the facts, or their awful and divine certainty when once ascertained.
[But these philosophers (it will be said) hated all religion.
Before that question can be fairly discussed, it is surely right to
consider what form of religion that was which they found working round
them in France, and on the greater part of the Continent. The quality
thereof may have surely had something to do (as they themselves asserted)
with that "sort of rage" with which (to use M. de Tocqueville's words)
"the Christian religion was attacked in France."
M. de Tocqueville is of opinion (and his opinion is likely to be just)
that "the Church was not more open to attack in France than elsewhere;
that the corruptions and abuses which had been allowed to creep into it
were less, on the contrary, there than in most Catholic countries. The
Church of France was infinitely more tolerant than it ever had been
previously, and than it still was among other nations. Consequently, the
peculiar causes of this phenomenon" (the hatred which it aroused) "must
be looked for less in the condition of religion than in that of society."
"We no longer," he says, shortly after, "ask in what the Church of that
day erred as a religious institution, but how far it stood opposed to the
political revolution which was at hand." And he goes on to show how the
principles of her ecclesiastical government, and her political position,
were such that the _philosophes_ must needs have been her enemies. But
he mentions another fact which seems to me to belong neither to the
category of religion nor to that of politics; a fact which, if he had
done us the honour to enlarge upon it, might have led him and his readers
to a more true understanding of the disrepute into which Christianity had
fallen in France.
"The ecclesiastical authority had been specially employed in keeping
watch over the progress of thought; and the censorship of books was a
daily annoyance to the _philosophes_. By defending the common liberties
of the human mind against the Church, they were combating in their own
cause: and they began by breaking the shackles which pressed most closely
on themselves."
Just so. And they are not to be blamed if they pressed first and most
earnestly reforms which they knew by painful experience to be necessary.
All reformers are wont thus to begin at home. It is to their honour if,
not content with shaking off their own fetters, they begin to see that
others are fettered likewise; and, reasoning from the particular to the
universal, to learn that their own cause is the cause of mankind.
There is, therefore, no reason to doubt that these men were honest, when
they said that they were combating, not in their own cause merely, but in
that of humanity; and that the Church was combating in her own cause, and
that of her power and privilege. The Church replied that she, too, was
combating for humanity; for its moral and eternal well-being. But that
is just what the _philosophes_ denied. They said (and it is but fair to
take a statement which appears on the face of all their writings; which
is the one key-note on which they ring perpetual changes), that the cause
of the Church in France was not that of humanity, but of inhumanity; not
that of nature, but of unnature; not even that of grace, but of disgrace.
Truely or falsely, they complained that the French clergy had not only
identified themselves with the repression of free thought, and of
physical science, especially that of the Newtonian astronomy, but that
they had proved themselves utterly unfit, for centuries past, to exercise
any censorship whatsoever over the thoughts of men: that they had
identified themselves with the cause of darkness, not of light; with
persecution and torture, with the dragonnades of Louis XIV., with the
murder of Calas and of Urban Grandier; with celibacy, hysteria,
demonology, witchcraft, and the shameful public scandals, like those of
Gauffredi, Grandier, and Pere Giraud, which had arisen out of mental
disease; with forms of worship which seemed to them (rightly or wrongly)
idolatry, and miracles which seemed to them (rightly or wrongly)
impostures; that the clergy interfered perpetually with the sanctity of
family life, as well as with the welfare of the state; that their evil
counsels, and specially those of the Jesuits, had been patent and potent
causes of much of the misrule and misery of Louis XIV.'s and XV.'s
reigns; and that with all these heavy counts against them, their morality
was not such as to make other men more moral; and was not--at least among
the hierarchy--improving, or likely to improve. To a Mazarin, a De Retz,
a Richelieu (questionable men enough) had succeeded a Dubois, a Rohan, a
Lomenie de Brienne, a Maury, a Talleyrand; and at the revolution of 1789
thoughtful Frenchmen asked, once and for all, what was to be done with a
Church of which these were the hierophants?
Whether these complaints affected the French Church as a "religious"
institution, must depend entirely on the meaning which is attached to the
word "religion": that they affected her on scientific, rational, and
moral grounds, independent of any merely political one, is as patent as
that the attack based on them was one-sided, virulent, and often somewhat
hypocritical, considering the private morals of many of the assailants.
We know--or ought to know--that within that religion which seemed to the
_philosophes_ (so distorted and defaced had it become) a nightmare dream,
crushing the life out of mankind, there lie elements divine, eternal;
necessary for man in this life and the life to come. But we are bound to
ask--Had they a fair chance of knowing what we know? Have we proof that
their hatred was against all religion, or only against that which they
saw around them? Have we proof that they would have equally hated, had
they been in permanent contact with them, creeds more free from certain
faults which seemed to them, in the case of the French Church,
ineradicable and inexpiable? Till then we must have charity--which is
justice--even for the _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century.
This view of the case had been surely overlooked by M. de Tocqueville,
when he tried to explain by the fear of revolutions, the fact that both
in America and in England, "while the boldest political doctrines of the
eighteenth-century philosophers have been adopted, their anti-religious
doctrines have made no way."
He confesses that, "Among the English, French irreligious philosophy had
been preached, even before the greater part of the French philosophers
were born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. Throughout the
eighteenth century infidelity had celebrated champions in England. Able
writers and profound thinkers espoused that cause, but they were never
able to render it triumphant as in France." Of these facts there can be
no doubt: but the cause which he gives for the failure of infidelity will
surely sound new and strange to those who know the English literature and
history of that century. It was, he says, "inasmuch as all those who had
anything to fear from revolutions, eagerly came to the rescue of the
established faith." Surely there was no talk of revolutions; no wish,
expressed or concealed, to overthrow either government or society, in the
aristocratic clique to whom English infidelity was confined. Such was,
at least, the opinion of Voltaire, who boasted that "All the works of the
modern philosophers together would never make as much noise in the world
as was made in former days by the disputes of the Cordeliers about the
shape of their sleeves and hoods." If (as M. de Tocqueville says)
Bolingbroke set up Voltaire, neither master nor pupil had any more
leaning than Hobbes had toward a democracy which was not dreaded in those
days because it had never been heard of. And if (as M. de Tocqueville
heartily allows) the English apologists of Christianity triumphed, at
least for the time being, the cause of their triumph must be sought in
the plain fact that such men as Berkeley, Butler, and Paley, each
according to his light, fought the battle fairly, on the common ground of
reason and philosophy, instead of on that of tradition and authority; and
that the forms of Christianity current in England--whether Quaker,
Puritan, or Anglican--offended, less than that current in France, the
common-sense and the human instincts of the many, or of the sceptics
themselves.]
But the eighteenth century saw another movement, all the more powerful,
perhaps, because it was continually changing its shape, even its purpose;
and gaining fresh life and fresh adherents with every change. Propagated
at first by men of the school of Locke, it became at last a protest
against the materialism of that school, on behalf of all that is, or
calls itself, supernatural and mysterious. Abjuring, and honestly, all
politics, it found itself sucked into the political whirlpool in spite of
itself, as all human interests which have any life in them must be at
last. It became an active promoter of the Revolution; then it helped to
destroy the Revolution, when that had, under Napoleon, become a levelling
despotism; then it helped, as actively, to keep revolutionary principles
alive, after the reaction of 1815:--a Protean institution, whose power we
in England are as apt to undervalue as the governments of the Continent
were apt, during the eighteenth century, to exaggerate it. I mean, of
course, Freemasonry, and the secret societies which, honestly and
honourably disowned by Freemasonry, yet have either copied it, or
actually sprung out of it. In England, Freemasonry never was, it seems,
more than a liberal and respectable benefit-club; for secret societies
are needless for any further purposes, amid free institutions and a free
press. But on the Continent during the eighteenth century, Freemasonry
excited profound suspicion and fear on the part of statesmen who knew
perfectly well their friends from their foes; and whose precautions were,
from their point of view, justified by the results.
I shall not enter into the deep question of the origin of Freemasonry.
One uninitiate, as I am, has no right to give an opinion on the great
questions of the mediaeval lodge of Kilwinning and its Scotch degrees; on
the seven Templars, who, after poor Jacques Molay was burnt at Paris,
took refuge on the Isle of Mull, in Scotland, found there another Templar
and brother Mason, ominously named Harris; took to the trowel in earnest,
and revived the Order;--on the Masons who built Magdeburg Cathedral in
876; on the English Masons assembled in Pagan times by "St. Albone, that
worthy knight;" on the revival of English Masonry by Edwin, son of
Athelstan; on Magnus Grecus, who had been at the building of Solomon's
Temple, and taught Masonry to Charles Martel; on the pillars Jachin and
Boaz; on the masonry of Hiram of Tyre, and indeed of Adam himself, of
whose first fig-leaf the masonic apron may be a type--on all these
matters I dare no more decide than on the making of the Trojan Horse, the
birth of Romulus and Remus, or the incarnation of Vishnoo.
All I dare say is, that Freemasonry emerges in its present form into
history and fact, seemingly about the beginning of George I.'s reign,
among Englishmen and noblemen, notably in four lodges in the city of
London: (1) at The Goose and Gridiron alehouse in St. Paul's Churchyard;
(2) at The Crown alehouse near Drury Lane; (3) at The Apple Tree tavern
near Covent Garden; (4) at The Rummer and Grapes tavern, in Charnel Row,
Westminster. That its principles were brotherly love and good
fellowship, which included in those days port, sherry, claret, and punch;
that it was founded on the ground of mere humanity, in every sense of the
word; being (as was to be expected from the temper of the times) both
aristocratic and liberal, admitting to its ranks virtuous gentlemen
"obliged," says an old charge, "only to that religion wherein all men
agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves: that is, to be
good men and true, or men of honour and honesty, by whatever
denominations or persuasions they may be distinguished; whereby Masonry
becomes the centre of union and means of conciliating true friendship
among persons that otherwise must have remained at a distance."
Little did the honest gentlemen who established or re-established their
society on these grounds, and fenced it with quaint ceremonies, old or
new, conceive the importance of their own act; we, looking at it from a
distance, may see all that such a society involved, which was quite new
to the world just then; and see, that it was the very child of the Ancien
Regime--of a time when men were growing weary of the violent factions,
political and spiritual, which had torn Europe in pieces for more than a
century, and longed to say: "After all, we are all alike in one thing--for
we are at least men."
Its spread through England and Scotland, and the seceding bodies which
arose from it, as well as the supposed Jacobite tendency of certain
Scotch lodges, do not concern us here. The point interesting to us just
now is, that Freemasonry was imported to the Continent exclusively by
English and Scotch gentlemen and noblemen. Lord Derwentwater is said by
some to have founded the "Loge Anglaise" in Paris in 1725; the Duke of
Richmond one in his own castle of Aubigny shortly after. It was through
Hanoverian influence that the movement seems to have spread into Germany.
In 1733, for instance, the English Grand Master, Lord Strathmore,
permitted eleven German gentlemen and good brethren to form a lodge in
Hamburg. Into this English Society was Frederick the Great, when Crown
Prince, initiated, in spite of strict old Frederick William's objections,
who had heard of it as an English invention of irreligious tendency.
Francis I. of Austria was made a Freemason at the Hague, Lord
Chesterfield being in the chair, and then became a Master in London under
the name of "Brother Lothringen," to the discontent of Maria Theresa,
whose woman's wit saw farther than her husband. Englishmen and Scotchmen
introduced the new society into Russia and into Geneva. Sweden and
Poland seem to have received it from France; while, in the South, it
seems to have been exclusively an English plant. Sackville, Duke of
Middlesex, is said to have founded the first lodge at Florence in 1733,
Lord Coleraine at Gibraltar and Madrid, one Gordon in Portugal; and
everywhere, at the commencement of the movement, we find either London or
Scotland the mother-lodges, introducing on the Continent those liberal
and humane ideas of which England was then considered, to her glory, as
the only home left on earth.
But, alas! the seed sown grew up into strange shapes, according to the
soil in which it rooted. False doctrine, heresy, and schism, according
to Herr Findel, the learned and rational historian whom I have chiefly
followed, defiled the new Church from its infancy. "In France," so he
bemoans himself, "first of all there shot up that baneful seed of lies
and frauds, of vanity and presumption, of hatred and discord, the
mischievous high degrees; the misstatement that our order was allied to
the Templars, and existed at the time of the Crusades; the removal of old
charges, the bringing in surreptitiously of a multitude of symbols and
forms which awoke the love of secrecy; knighthood; and, in fact, all
which tended to poison Freemasonry." Herr Findel seems to attribute
these evils principally to the "high degrees." It would have been more
simple to have attributed them to the morals of the French noblesse in
the days of Louis Quinze. What could a corrupt tree bring forth, but
corrupt fruit? If some of the early lodges, like those of "La Felicite"
and "L'Ancre," to which women were admitted, resembled not a little the
Bacchic mysteries of old Rome, and like them called for the interference
of the police, still no great reform was to be expected, when those
Sovereign Masonic Princes, the "Emperors of the East and West,"
quarrelled--knights of the East against knights of the West--till they
were absorbed or crushed by the Lodge "Grand Orient," with Philippe
Egalite, Duc de Chartres, as their grand master, and as his
representative, the hero of the diamond necklace, and disciple of Count
Cagliostro--Louis, Prince de Rohan.
But if Freemasonry, among the frivolous and sensual French noblesse,
became utterly frivolous and sensual itself, it took a deeper, though a
questionably fantastic form, among the more serious and earnest German
nobility. Forgetful as they too often were of their duty to their
peoples--tyrannical, extravagant, debauched by French opinions, French
fashions, French luxuries, till they had begun to despise their native
speech, their native literature, almost their native land, and to hide
their native homeliness under a clumsy varnish of French outside
civilisation, which the years 1807-13 rubbed off them again with a brush
of iron--they were yet Germans at heart; and that German instinct for the
unseen--call it enthusiasm, mysticism, what you will, you cannot make it
anything but a human fact, and a most powerful, and (as I hold) most
blessed fact--that instinct for the unseen, I say, which gives peculiar
value to German philosophy, poetry, art, religion, and above all to
German family life, and which is just the complement needed to prevent
our English common-sense, matter-of-fact Lockism from degenerating into
materialism--that was only lying hidden, but not dead, in the German
spirit.
With the Germans, therefore, Freemasonry assumed a nobler and more
earnest shape. Dropping, very soon, that Lockite and _Philosophe_ tone
which had perhaps recommended it to Frederick the Great in his youth, it
became mediaevalist and mystic. It craved after a resuscitation of old
chivalrous spirit, and the virtues of the knightly ideal, and the old
German _biederkeit und tapferkeit_, which were all defiled and overlaid
by French fopperies. And not in vain; as no struggle after a noble aim,
however confused or fantastic, is ever in vain. Freemasonry was the
direct parent of the Tugenbund, and of those secret societies which freed
Germany from Napoleon. Whatever follies young members of them may have
committed; whatever Jahn and his Turnerei; whatever the iron youths, with
their iron decorations and iron boot-heels; whatever, in a word, may have
been said or done amiss, in that childishness which (as their own wisest
writers often lament) so often defaces the noble childlikeness of the
German spirit, let it be always remembered that under the impulse first
given by Freemasonry, as much as that given by such heroes as Stein and
Scharnhorst, Germany shook off the chains which had fallen on her in her
sleep; and stood once more at Leipsic, were it but for a moment, a free
people alike in body and in soul.
Remembering this, and the solid benefits which Germany owed to Masonic
influences, one shrinks from saying much of the extravagances in which
its Masonry indulged before the French Revolution. Yet they are so
characteristic of the age, so significant to the student of human nature,
that they must be hinted at, though not detailed.
It is clear that Masonry was at first a movement confined to the
aristocracy, or at least to the most educated classes; and clear, too,
that it fell in with a temper of mind unsatisfied with the dry dogmatism
into which the popular creeds had then been frozen--unsatisfied with
their own Frenchified foppery and pseudo-philosophy--unsatisfied with
want of all duty, purpose, noble thought, or noble work. With such a
temper of mind it fell in: but that very temper was open (as it always
is) to those dreams of a royal road to wisdom and to virtue, which have
haunted, in all ages, the luxurious and the idle.
Those who will, may read enough, and too much, of the wonderful secrets
in nature and science and theosophy, which men expected to find and did
not find in the higher degrees of Masonry, till old Voss--the translator
of Homer--had to confess, that after "trying for eleven years to attain a
perfect knowledge of the inmost penetralia, where the secret is said to
be, and of its invisible guardians," all he knew was that "the documents
which he had to make known to the initiated were nothing more than a well
got-up farce."
But the mania was general. The high-born and the virtuous expected to
discover some panacea for their own consciences in what Voss calls, "A
multitude of symbols, which are ever increasing the farther you
penetrate, and are made to have a moral application through some
arbitrary twisting of their meaning, as if I were to attempt expounding
the chaos on my writing-desk."
A rich harvest-field was an aristocracy in such a humour, for quacks of
every kind; richer even than that of France, in that the Germans were at
once more honest and more earnest, and therefore to be robbed more
easily. The carcass was there: and the birds of prey were gathered
together.
Of Rosa, with his lodge of the Three Hammers, and his Potsdam
gold-making;--of Johnson, alias Leuchte, who passed himself off as a
Grand Prior sent from Scotland to resuscitate the order of Knights
Templars; who informed his disciples that the Grand Master Von Hund
commanded 26,000 men; that round the convent (what convent, does not
appear) a high wall was erected, which was guarded day and night; that
the English navy was in the hands of the Order; that they had MSS.
written by Hugo de Paganis (a mythic hero who often figures in these
fables); that their treasure was in only three places in the world, in
Ballenstadt, in the icy mountains of Savoy, and in China; that whosoever
drew on himself the displeasure of the Order, perished both body and
soul; who degraded his rival Rosa to the sound of military music, and
after having had, like every dog, his day, died in prison in the
Wartburg;--of the Rosicrucians, who were accused of wanting to support
and advance the Catholic religion--one would think the accusation was
very unnecessary, seeing that their actual dealings were with the
philosopher's stone, and the exorcism of spirits: and that the first
apostle of the new golden Rosicrucian order, one Schropfer, getting into
debt, and fearing exposure, finished his life in an altogether
un-catholic manner at Leipsic in 1774, by shooting himself;--of Keller
and his Urim and Thummim;--of Wollner (who caught the Crown Prince
Frederick William) with his three names of Chrysophiron, Heliconus, and
Ophiron, and his fourth name of Ormesus Magnus, under which all the
brethren were to offer up for him solemn prayers and intercessions;--of
Baron Heinrich von Ekker and Eckenhofen, gentleman of the bed-chamber and
counsellor of the Duke of Coburg Saalfeld, and his Jewish colleague
Hirschmann, with their Asiatic brethren and order named Ben Bicca,
Cabalistic and Talmudic; of the Illuminati, and poor Adam Weisshaupt,
Professor of Canon and National Law at Ingoldstadt in Bavaria, who set up
what he considered an Anti-Jesuitical order on a Jesuit model, with some
vague hope, according to his own showing, of "perfecting the reasoning
powers interesting to mankind, spreading the knowledge of sentiments both
humane and social, checking wicked inclinations, standing up for
oppressed and suffering virtue against all wrong, promoting the
advancement of men of merit, and in every way facilitating the
acquirement of knowledge and science;"--of this honest silly man, and his
attempts to carry out all his fine projects by calling himself Spartacus,
Bavaria Achaia, Austria Egypt, Vienna Rome, and so forth;--of Knigge, who
picked his honest brains, quarrelled with him, and then made money and
fame out of his plans, for as long as they lasted;--of Bode, the knight
of the lilies of the valley, who, having caught Duke Ernest of Saxe
Gotha, was himself caught by Knigge, and his eight, nine, or more
ascending orders of unwisdom;--and finally of the Jesuits who, really
with considerable excuses for their severity, fell upon these poor
foolish Illuminati in 1784 throughout Bavaria, and had them exiled or
imprisoned;--of all this you may read in the pages of Dr. Findel, and in
many another book. For, forgotten as they are now, they made noise
enough in their time.
And so it befell, that this eighteenth century, which is usually held to
be the most "materialistic" of epochs, was, in fact, a most
"spiritualistic" one; in which ghosts, demons, quacks, philosophers'
stones, enchanters' wands, mysteries and mummeries, were as
fashionable--as they will probably be again some day.
You have all heard of Cagliostro--"pupil of the sage Althotas, foster-
child of the Scheriff of Mecca, probable son of the last king of
Trebizond; named also Acharat, and 'Unfortunate child of Nature;' by
profession healer of diseases, abolisher of wrinkles, friend of the poor
and impotent; grand-master of the Egyptian Mason-lodge of High Science,
spirit-summoner, gold-cook, Grand-Cophta, prophet, priest, Thaumaturgic
moralist, and swindler"--born Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo;--of him, and
of his lovely Countess Seraphina--nee Lorenza Feliciani? You have read
what Goethe--and still more important, what Mr. Carlyle has written on
him, as on one of the most significant personages of the age? Remember,
then, that Cagliostro was no isolated phenomenon; that his success--nay,
his having even conceived the possibility of success in the brain that
lay within that "brass-faced, bull-necked, thick-lipped" head--was made
possible by public opinion. Had Cagliostro lived in our time, public
opinion would have pointed out to him other roads to honour--on which he
would doubtless have fared as well. For when the silly dace try to be
caught and hope to be caught, he is a foolish pike who cannot gorge them.
But the method most easy for a pike-nature like Cagliostro's, was in the
eighteenth century, as it may be in the latter half of the nineteenth, to
trade, in a materialist age, on the unsatisfied spiritual cravings of
mankind. For what do all these phantasms betoken, but a generation
ashamed of its own materialism, sensuality, insincerity, ignorance, and
striving to escape therefrom by any and every mad superstition which
seemed likely to give an answer to the awful questions--What are we, and
where? and to lay to rest those instincts of the unseen and infinite
around it, which tormented it like ghosts by day and night: a sight
ludicrous or pathetic, according as it is looked on by a cynical or a
human spirit.
It is easy to call such a phenomenon absurd, improbable. It is rather
rational, probable, say certain to happen. Rational, I say; for the
reason of man tells him, and has always told him, that he is a
supernatural being, if by nature is meant that which is cognisable by his
five senses: that his coming into this world, his relation to it, his
exit from it--which are the three most important facts about him--are
supernatural, not to be explained by any deductions from the impressions
of his senses. And I make bold to say, that the recent discoveries of
physical science--notably those of embryology--go only to justify that
old and general belief of man. If man be told that the microscope and
scalpel show no difference, in the first stage of visible existence,
between him and the lower mammals, then he has a right to answer--as he
will answer--So much the worse for the microscope and scalpel: so much
the better for my old belief, that there is beneath my birth, life,
death, a substratum of supernatural causes, imponderable, invisible,
unknowable by any physical science whatsoever. If you cannot render me a
reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will
render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory
of life, it will demand satisfaction from some magical theory; as did the
mind of the eighteenth century when, revolting from materialism, it fled
to magic, to explain the ever-astounding miracle of life.
The old Regime. Will our age, in its turn, ever be spoken of as an old
Regime? Will it ever be spoken of as a Regime at all; as an organised,
orderly system of society and polity; and not merely as a chaos, an
anarchy, a transitory struggle, of which the money-lender has been the
real guide and lord?
But at least it will be spoken of as an age of progress, of rapid
developments, of astonishing discoveries.
Are you so sure of that? There was an age of progress once. But what is
our age--what is all which has befallen since 1815--save after-swells of
that great storm, which are weakening and lulling into heavy calm? Are
we on the eve of stagnation? Of a long check to the human intellect? Of
a new Byzantine era, in which little men will discuss, and ape, the deeds
which great men did in their forefathers' days?
What progress--it is a question which some will receive with almost angry
surprise--what progress has the human mind made since 1815?
If the thought be startling, do me the great honour of taking it home,
and verifying for yourselves its truth or its falsehood. I do not say
that it is altogether true. No proposition concerning human things,
stated so broadly, can be. But see for yourselves, whether it is not at
least more true than false; whether the ideas, the discoveries, of which
we boast most in the nineteenth century, are not really due to the end of
the eighteenth. Whether other men did not labour, and we have only
entered into their labours. Whether our positivist spirit, our content
with the collecting of facts, our dread of vast theories, is not a
symptom--wholesome, prudent, modest, but still a symptom--of our
consciousness that we are not as our grandfathers were; that we can no
longer conceive great ideas, which illumine, for good or evil, the whole
mind and heart of man, and drive him on to dare and suffer desperately.
Railroads? Electric telegraphs? All honour to them in their place: but
they are not progress; they are only the fruits of past progress. No
outward and material thing is progress; no machinery causes progress; it
merely spreads and makes popular the results of progress. Progress is
inward, of the soul. And, therefore, improved constitutions, and
improved book instruction--now miscalled education--are not progress:
they are at best only fruits and signs thereof. For they are outward,
material; and progress, I say, is inward. The self-help and
self-determination of the independent soul--that is the root of progress;
and the more human beings who have that, the more progress there is in
the world. Give me a man who, though he can neither read nor write, yet
dares think for himself, and do the thing he believes: that man will help
forward the human race more than any thousand men who have read, or
written either, a thousand books apiece, but have not dared to think for
themselves. And better for his race, and better, I believe, in the sight
of God, the confusions and mistakes of that one sincere brave man, than
the second-hand and cowardly correctness of all the thousand.
As for the "triumphs of science," let us honour, with astonishment and
awe, the genius of those who invented them; but let us remember that the
things themselves are as a gun or a sword, with which we can kill our
enemy, but with which also our enemy can kill us. Like all outward and
material things, they are equally fit for good and for evil. In England
here--they have been as yet, as far as I can see, nothing but blessings:
but I have my very serious doubts whether they are likely to be blessings
to the whole human race, for many an age to come. I can conceive
them--may God avert the omen!--the instruments of a more crushing
executive centralisation, of a more utter oppression of the bodies and
souls of men, than the world has yet seen. I can conceive--may God avert
the omen!--centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the
junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires--a world-
spider in the omphalos of his world-wide web; and smiting from thence
everything that dared to lift its head, or utter a cry of pain, with a
swiftness and surety to which the craft of a Justinian or a Philip II.
were but clumsy and impotent.
All, all outward things, be sure of it, are good or evil, exactly as far
as they are in the hands of good men or of bad.
Moreover, paradoxical as it may seem, railroads and telegraphs, instead
of inaugurating an era of progress, may possibly only retard it. "Rester
sur un grand succes," which was Rossini's advice to a young singer who
had achieved a triumph, is a maxim which the world often follows, not
only from prudence, but from necessity. They have done so much that it
seems neither prudent nor possible to do more. They will rest and be
thankful.
Thus, gunpowder and printing made rapid changes enough; but those changes
had no farther development. The new art of war, the new art of
literature, remained stationary, or rather receded and degenerated, till
the end of the eighteenth century.
And so it may be with our means of locomotion and intercommunion, and
what depends on them. The vast and unprecedented amount of capital, of
social interest, of actual human intellect invested--I may say locked
up--in these railroads, and telegraphs, and other triumphs of industry
and science, will not enter into competition against themselves. They
will not set themselves free to seek new discoveries in directions which
are often actually opposed to their own, always foreign to it. If the
money of thousands are locked up in these great works, the brains of
hundreds of thousands, and of the very shrewdest too, are equally locked
up therein likewise; and are to be subtracted from the gross material of
social development, and added (without personal fault of their owners,
who may be very good men) to the dead weight of vested selfishness,
ignorance, and dislike of change.
Yes. A Byzantine and stationary age is possible yet. Perhaps we are now
entering upon it; an age in which mankind shall be satisfied with the
"triumphs of science," and shall look merely to the greatest comfort
(call it not happiness) of the greatest number; and like the debased Jews
of old, "having found the life of their hand, be therewith content," no
matter in what mud-hole of slavery and superstition.
But one hope there is, and more than a hope--one certainty, that however
satisfied enlightened public opinion may become with the results of
science, and the progress of the human race, there will be always a more
enlightened private opinion or opinions, which will not be satisfied
therewith at all; a few men of genius, a few children of light, it may be
a few persecuted, and a few martyrs for new truths, who will wish the
world not to rest and be thankful, but to be discontented with itself,
ashamed of itself, striving and toiling upward, without present hope of
gain, till it has reached that unknown goal which Bacon saw afar off, and
like all other heroes, died in faith, not having received the promises,
but seeking still a polity which has foundations, whose builder and maker
is God.
These will be the men of science, whether physical or spiritual. Not
merely the men who utilise and apply that which is known (useful as they
plainly are), but the men who themselves discover that which was unknown,
and are generally deemed useless, if not hurtful, to their race. They
will keep the sacred lamp burning unobserved in quiet studies, while all
the world is gazing only at the gaslights flaring in the street. They
will pass that lamp on from hand to hand, modestly, almost stealthily,
till the day comes round again, when the obscure student shall be
discovered once more to be, as he has always been, the strongest man on
earth. For they follow a mistress whose footsteps may often slip, yet
never fall; for she walks forward on the eternal facts of Nature, which
are the acted will of God. A giantess she is; young indeed, but humble
as yet: cautious and modest beyond her years. She is accused of trying
to scale Olympus, by some who fancy that they have already scaled it
themselves, and will, of course, brook no rival in their fancied monopoly
of wisdom.
The accusation, I believe, is unjust. And yet science may scale Olympus
after all. Without intending it, almost without knowing it, she may find
herself hereafter upon a summit of which she never dreamed; surveying the
universe of God in the light of Him who made it and her, and remakes them
both for ever and ever. On that summit she may stand hereafter, if only
she goes on, as she goes now, in humility and in patience; doing the duty
which lies nearest her; lured along the upward road, not by ambition,
vanity, or greed, but by reverent curiosity for every new pebble, and
flower, and child, and savage, around her feet.