It is common knowledge that the distinguishing characteristic of the
day is the zeal displayed by us all in hunting after Truth. A really not
inconsiderable portion of whatever time we are able to spare from making
or losing money or reputation, is devoted to this sport, whilst both
reading and conversation are largely impressed into the same service.
Nor are there wanting those who avow themselves anxious to see
this, their favourite pursuit, raised to the dignity of a national
institution. They would have Truth-hunting established and endowed.
Mr. Carlyle has somewhere described with great humour the 'dreadfully
painful' manner in which Kepler made his celebrated calculations and
discoveries; but our young men of talent fail to see the joke, and take
no pleasure in such anecdotes. Truth, they feel, is not to be had from
them on any such terms. And why should it be? Is it not notorious that
all who are lucky enough to supply wants grow rapidly and enormously
rich; and is not Truth a now recognised want in ten thousand
homes--wherever, indeed, persons are to be found wealthy enough to pay
Mr. Mudie a guinea and so far literate as to be able to read? What, save
the modesty, is there surprising in the demand now made on behalf of
some young people, whose means are incommensurate with their talents,
that they should be allowed, as a reward for doling out monthly or
quarterly portions of truth, to live in houses rent-free, have their
meals for nothing, and a trifle of money besides? Would Bass consent
to supply us with beer in return for board and lodging, we of course
defraying the actual cost of his brewery, and allowing him some £300 a
year for himself? Who, as he read about 'Sun-spots,' or 'Fresh Facts for
Darwin,' or the 'True History of Modesty or Veracity,' showing how it
came about that these high-sounding virtues are held in their present
somewhat general esteem, would find it in his heart to grudge the
admirable authors their freedom from petty cares?
But, whether Truth-hunting be ever established or not, no one can doubt
that it is a most fashionable pastime, and one which is being pursued
with great vigour.
All hunting is so far alike as to lead one to believe that there must
sometimes occur in Truth-hunting, just as much as in fox-hunting, long
pauses, whilst the covers are being drawn in search of the game, and
when thoughts are free to range at will in pursuit of far other objects
than those giving their name to the sport. If it should chance to any
Truth-hunter, during some 'lull in his hot chase,' whilst, for example,
he is waiting for the second volume of an 'Analysis of Religion,' or for
the last thing out on the Fourth Gospel, to take up this book, and
open it at this page, we should like to press him for an answer to the
following question: 'Are you sure that it is a good thing for you to
spend so much time in speculating about matters outside your daily life
and walk?'
Curiosity is no doubt an excellent quality. In a critic it is especially
excellent. To want to know all about a thing, and not merely one man's
account or version of it; to see all round it, or, at any rate, as far
round as is possible; not to be lazy or indifferent, or easily put
off, or scared away--all this is really very excellent. Sir Fitz James
Stephen professes great regret that we have not got Pilate's account
of the events immediately preceding the Crucifixion. He thinks it would
throw great light upon the subject; and no doubt, if it had occurred
to the Evangelists to adopt in their narratives the method which long
afterwards recommended itself to the author of 'The Ring and the Book,'
we should now be in possession of a mass of very curious information.
But, excellent as all this is in the realm of criticism, the question
remains, How does a restless habit of mind tell upon conduct?
John Mill was not one from whose lips the advice '_Stare super
antiquas vias_' was often heard to proceed, and he was by profession
a speculator, yet in that significant book, the 'Autobiography,'
he describes this age of Truth-hunters as one 'of weak convictions,
paralyzed intellects, and growing laxity of opinions.'
Is Truth-hunting one of those active mental habits which, as Bishop
Butler tells us, intensify their effects by constant use; and are weak
convictions, paralyzed intellects, and laxity of opinions amongst
the effects of Truth-hunting on the majority of minds? These are not
unimportant questions.
Let us consider briefly the probable effects of speculative habits on
conduct.
The discussion of a question of conduct has the great charm of
justifying, if indeed not requiring, personal illustration; and this
particular question is well illustrated by instituting a comparison
between the life and character of Charles Lamb and those of some of his
distinguished friends.
Personal illustration, especially when it proceeds by way of comparison,
is always dangerous, and the dangers are doubled when the subjects
illustrated and compared are favourite authors. It behoves us to proceed
warily in this matter. A dispute as to the respective merits of Gray
and Collins has been known to result in a visit to an attorney and
the revocation of a will. An avowed inability to see anything in Miss
Austen's novels is reported to have proved destructive of an otherwise
good chance of an Indian judgeship. I believe, however, I run no great
risk in asserting that, of all English authors, Charles Lamb is the one
loved most warmly and emotionally by his admirers, amongst whom I reckon
only those who are as familiar with the four volumes of his 'Life and
Letters' as with 'Elia.'
But how does he illustrate the particular question now engaging our
attention?
Speaking of his sister Mary, who, as everyone knows, throughout 'Elia'
is called his Cousin Bridget, he says:
'It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener, perhaps, than I could have
wished, to have had for her associates and mine freethinkers, leaders
and disciples of novel philosophies and systems, but she neither
wrangles with nor accepts their opinions.'
Nor did her brother. He lived his life cracking his little jokes and
reading his great folios, neither wrangling with nor accepting the
opinions of the friends he loved to see around him. To a contemporary
stranger it might well have appeared as if his life were a frivolous and
useless one as compared with those of these philosophers and thinkers.
_They_ discussed their great schemes and affected to probe deep
mysteries, and were constantly asking, 'What is Truth?' _He_ sipped his
glass, shuffled his cards, and was content with the humbler inquiry,
'What are Trumps?' But to us, looking back upon that little group,
and knowing what we now do about each member of it, no such mistake is
possible. To us it is plain beyond all question that, judged by whatever
standard of excellence it is possible for any reasonable human being to
take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a better man than any of them. No
need to stop to compare him with Godwin, or Hazlitt, or Lloyd; let
us boldly put him in the scales with one whose fame is in all the
churches--with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'logician, metaphysician, bard.'
There are some men whom to abuse is pleasant. Coleridge is not one of
them. How gladly we would love the author of 'Christabel' if we could!
But the thing is flatly impossible. His was an unlovely character. The
sentence passed upon him by Mr. Matthew Arnold (parenthetically, in one
of the 'Essays in Criticism')--'Coleridge had no morals'--is no less
just than pitiless. As we gather information about him from numerous
quarters, we find it impossible to resist the conclusion that he was a
man neglectful of restraint, irresponsive to the claims of those who had
every claim upon him, willing to receive, slow to give.
In early manhood Coleridge planned a Pantisocracy where all the virtues
were to thrive. Lamb did something far more difficult: he played
cribbage every night with his imbecile father, whose constant stream of
querulous talk and fault-finding might well have goaded a far stronger
man into practising and justifying neglect.
That Lamb, with all his admiration for Coleridge, was well aware of
dangerous tendencies in his character, is made apparent by many letters,
notably by one written in 1796, in which he says:
'O my friend, cultivate the filial feelings! and let no man think
himself released from the kind charities of relationship: these shall
give him peace at the last; these are the best foundation for every
species of benevolence. I rejoice to hear that you are reconciled with
all your relations.'
This surely is as valuable an 'aid to reflection' as any supplied by the
Highgate seer.
Lamb gave but little thought to the wonderful difference between the
'reason' and the 'understanding.' He preferred old plays--an odd diet.
some may think, on which to feed the virtues; but, however that may be,
the noble fact remains, that he, poor, frail boy! (for he was no more,
when trouble first assailed him) stooped down and, without sigh or sign,
took upon his own shoulders the whole burden of a life-long sorrow.
Coleridge married. Lamb, at the bidding of duty, remained single,
wedding himself to the sad fortunes of his father and sister. Shall
we pity him? No; he had his reward--the surpassing reward that is
only within the power of literature to bestow. It was Lamb, and not
Coleridge, who wrote 'Dream-Children: a Reverie':
'Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in
despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W----n; and as
much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness and
difficulty and denial meant in maidens--when, suddenly turning to Alice,
the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality
of representment that I became in doubt which of them stood before
me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the
children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still receding,
till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the
uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon
me the effects of speech. "We are not of Alice nor of thee, nor are
we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are
nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only _what might have
been_."'
Godwin! Hazlitt! Coleridge! Where now are their 'novel philosophies and
systems'? Bottled moonshine, which does _not_ improve by keeping.
'Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.'
Were we disposed to admit that Lamb would in all probability have been
as good a man as everyone agrees he was--as kind to his father, as full
of self-sacrifice for the sake of his sister, as loving and ready a
friend--even though he had paid more heed to current speculations, it
is yet not without use in a time like this, when so much stress is laid
upon anxious inquiry into the mysteries of soul and body, to point out
how this man attained to a moral excellence denied to his speculative
contemporaries; performed duties from which they, good men as they were,
would one and all have shrunk; how, in short, he contrived to achieve
what no one of his friends, not even the immaculate Wordsworth or the
precise Southey, achieved--the living of a life, the records of
which are inspiriting to read, and are indeed 'the presence of a good
diffused;' and managed to do it all without either 'wrangling with or
accepting' the opinions that 'hurtled in the air' about him.
But _was_ there no relation between his unspeculative habit of mind and
his honest, unwavering service of duty, whose voice he ever obeyed as
the ship the rudder? It would be difficult to name anyone more unlike
Lamb, in many aspects of character, than Dr. Johnson, for whom he had
(mistakenly) no warm regard; but they closely resemble one another in
their indifference to mere speculation about things--if things they
can be called--outside our human walk; in their hearty love of honest
earthly life, in their devotion to their friends, their kindness to
dependents, and in their obedience to duty. What caused each of them the
most pain was the recollection of a past unkindness. The poignancy of
Dr. Johnson's grief on one such recollection is historical; and amongst
Lamb's letters are to be found several in which, with vast depths of
feeling, he bitterly upbraids himself for neglect of old friends.
Nothing so much tends to blur moral distinctions, and to obliterate
plain duties, as the free indulgence of speculative habits. We must all
know many a sorry scrub who has fairly talked himself into the belief
that nothing but his intellectual difficulties prevents him from being
another St. Francis. We think we could suggest a few score of other
obstacles.
Would it not be better for most people, if, instead of stuffing their
heads with controversy, they were to devote their scanty leisure to
reading books, such as, to name one only, Kaye's 'History of the Sepoy
War,' which are crammed full of activities and heroisms, and which force
upon the reader's mind the healthy conviction that, after all, whatever
mysteries may appertain to mind and matter, and notwithstanding grave
doubts as to the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, it is bravery, truth
and honour, loyalty and hard work, each man at his post, which make this
planet inhabitable?
In these days of champagne and shoddy, of display of teacups and rotten
foundations--especially, too, now that the 'nexus' of 'cash payment,'
which was to bind man to man in the bonds of a common pecuniary
interest, is hopelessly broken--it becomes plain that the real wants
of the age are not analyses of religious belief, nor discussions as to
whether 'Person' or 'Stream of Tendency' are the apter words to describe
God by; but a steady supply of honest, plain-sailing men who can be
safely trusted with small sums, and to do what in them lies to maintain
the honour of the various professions, and to restore the credit of
English workmanship. We want Lambs, not Coleridges. The verdict to be
striven for is not 'Well guessed,' but 'Well done.'
All our remarks are confined to the realm of opinion. Faith may be well
left alone, for she is, to give her her due, our largest manufacturer of
good works, and whenever her furnaces are blown out, morality suffers.
But speculation has nothing to do with faith. The region of speculation
is the region of opinion, and a hazy, lazy, delightful region it is;
good to talk in, good to smoke in, peopled with pleasant fancies and
charming ideas, strange analogies and killing jests. How quickly the
time passes there! how well it seems spent! The Philistines are all
outside; everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and good-tempered; you
think and scheme and talk, and look at everything in a hundred ways and
from all possible points of view; and it is not till the company breaks
up and the lights are blown out, and you are left alone with silence,
that the doubt occurs to you, What is the good of it all?
Where is the actuary who can appraise the value of a man's opinions?
'When we speak of a man's opinions,' says Dr. Newman, 'what do we mean
but the collection of notions he happens to have?' Happens to have! How
did he come by them? It is the knowledge we all possess of the sorts of
ways in which men get their opinions that makes us so little affected in
our own minds by those of men for whose characters and intellects we may
have great admiration. A sturdy Nonconformist minister, who thinks Mr.
Gladstone the ablest and most honest man, as well as the ripest scholar
within the three kingdoms, is no whit shaken in his Nonconformity
by knowing that his idol has written in defence of the Apostolical
Succession, and believes in special sacramental graces. Mr. Gladstone
may have been a great student of Church history, whilst Nonconformist
reading under that head usually begins with Luther's Theses--but what
of that? Is it not all explained by the fact that Mr. Gladstone was at
Oxford in 1831? So at least the Nonconformist minister will think.
The admission frankly made, that these remarks are confined to the
realms of opinion, prevents me from urging on everyone my prescription,
but, with the two exceptions to be immediately named, I believe it would
be found generally useful. It may be made up thus: 'As much reticence
as is consistent with good-breeding upon, and a wisely tempered
indifference to, the various speculative questions now agitated in our
midst.'
This prescription would be found to liberate the mind from all kinds
of cloudy vapours which obscure the mental vision and conceal from men
their real position, and would also set free a great deal of time which
might be profitably spent in quite other directions.
The first of the two exceptions I have alluded to is of those
who possess--whether honestly come by or not we cannot stop to
inquire--strong convictions upon these very questions. These convictions
they must be allowed to iterate and reiterate, and to proclaim that in
them is to be found the secret of all this (otherwise) unintelligible
world.
The second exception is of those who pursue Truth as by a divine
compulsion, and who can be likened only to the nympholepts of old; those
unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling amidst sylvan shades,
caught a hasty glimpse of the flowing robes or even of the gracious
countenance of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose pursuit
their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent.
The nympholepts of Truth are profoundly interesting figures in the
world's history, but their lives are melancholy reading, and seldom fail
to raise a crop of gloomy thoughts. Their finely touched spirits are not
indeed liable to succumb to the ordinary temptations of life, and they
thus escape the evils which usually follow in the wake of speculation;
but what is their labour's reward?
Readers of Dr. Newman will remember, and will thank me for recalling it
to mind, an exquisite passage, too long to be quoted, in which, speaking
as a Catholic to his late Anglican associates, he reminds them how he
once participated in their pleasures and shared their hopes, and thus
concludes:
'When, too, shall I not feel the soothing recollection of those dear
years which I spent in retirement, in preparation for my deliverance
from Egypt, asking for light, and by degrees getting it, with less of
temptation in my heart and sin on my conscience than ever before?'
But the passage is sad as well as exquisite, showing to us, as it does,
one who from his earliest days has rejoiced in a faith in God, intense,
unwavering, constant; harassed by distressing doubts, he carries them
all, in the devotion of his faith, the warmth of his heart, and the
purity of his life, to the throne where Truth sits in state; living, he
tells us, in retirement, and spending great portions of every day on
his knees; and yet--we ask the question with all reverence--what did Dr.
Newman get in exchange for his prayers?
'I think it impossible to withstand the evidence which is brought for
the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, or for the
motion of the eyes of the pictures of the Madonna in the Roman States. I
see no reason to doubt the material of the Lombard Cross at Monza, and
I do not see why the Holy Coat at Trèves may not have been what it
professes to be. I firmly believe that portions of the True Cross are
at Rome and elsewhere, that the Crib of Bethlehem is at Rome, and the
bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul; also I firmly believe that the relics
of the Saints are doing innumerable miracles and graces daily. I firmly
believe that before now Saints have raised the dead to life, crossed
the seas without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured incurable
diseases, and stopped the operations of the laws of the universe in a
multitude of ways.'
So writes Dr. Newman, with that candour, that love of putting the
case most strongly against himself, which is only one of the lovely
characteristics of the man whose long life has been a miracle of beauty
and grace, and who has contrived to instil into his very controversies
more of the spirit of Christ than most men can find room for in their
prayers. But the dilemma is an awkward one. Does the Madonna wink, or is
Heaven deaf?
Oh, Spirit of Truth, where wert thou, when the remorseless deep of
superstition closed over the head of John Henry Newman, who surely
deserved to be thy best-loved son?
But this is a digression. With the nympholepts of Truth we have nought
to do. They must be allowed to pursue their lonely and devious
paths, and though the records of their wanderings, their conflicting
conclusions, and their widely-parted resting-places may fill us with
despair, still they are witnesses whose testimony we could ill afford to
lose.
But there are not many nympholepts. The symptoms of the great majority
of our modern Truth-hunters are very different, as they will, with
their frank candour, be the first to admit. They are free 'to drop their
swords and daggers' whenever so commanded, and it is high time they did.
With these two exceptions I think my prescription will be found of
general utility, and likely to promote a healthy flow of good works.
I had intended to say something as to the effect of speculative habits
upon the intellect, but cannot now do so. The following shrewd remark
of Mr. Latham's in his interesting book on the 'Action of Examinations'
may, however, be quoted; its bearing will be at once seen, and its truth
recognised by many:
'A man who has been thus provided with views and acute observations may
have destroyed in himself the germs of that power which he simulates. He
might have had a thought or two now and then if he had been let alone,
but if he is made first to aim at a standard of thought above his
years, and then finds he can get the sort of thoughts he wants without
thinking, he is in a fair way to be spoiled.'