proper element in which to move his wings) he enriched his diction with
Hellenisms and with Hebraisms; [Footnote: The diction of Milton is a
case absolutely unique in literature: of many writers it has been said,
but of him only with truth, that he created a peculiar language. The
value must be tried by the result, not by inferences from _a priori_
principles; such inferences might lead us to anticipate an unfortunate
result; whereas, in fact, the diction of Milton is such that no other
could have supported his majestic style of thinking. The final result is
a _transcendant_ answer to all adverse criticism; but still it is to be
lamented that no man properly qualified has undertaken the examination
of the Miltonic diction as a separate problem. Listen to a popular
author of this day (Mr. Bulwer). He, speaking on this subject, asserts
(_England and the English_, p. 329), that, "_There is scarcely an
English idiom which Milton has not violated, or a foreign one which he
has not borrowed._" Now, in answer to this extravagant assertion, I will
venture to say that the two following are the sole cases of questionable
idiom throughout Milton:--1st, "Yet virgin of Proserpine from Jove;"
and, in this case, the same thing might be urged in apology which
Aristotle urges in another argument, namely, that _anonymon to pathos_,
the case is unprovided with _any_ suitable expression. How would it
be possible to convey in good English the circumstances here
indicated--namely, that Ceres was yet in those days of maiden innocence,
when she had borne no daughter to Jove? Second, I will cite a case
which, so far as I remember, has been noticed by no commentator; and,
probably, because they have failed to understand it. The case occurs
in the "Paradise Regained;" but where I do not at this moment remember.
"Will they _transact_ with God?" This is the passage; and a most
flagrant instance it offers of pure Latinism. _Transigere_, in the
language of the civil law, means to make a compromise; and the word
_transact_ is here used in that sense--a sense utterly unknown to the
English language. This is the worst case in Milton; and I do not know
that it has been ever noticed. Yet even here it may be doubted whether
Milton is not defensible; asking if they proposed to terminate their
difference with God after the fashion in use amongst courts of law, he
points properly enough to these worldly settlements by the technical
term which designated them. Thus, might a divine say: Will he arrest the
judgments of God by a _demurrer_? Thus, again, Hamlet apostrophizes the
lawyer's skull by the technical terms used in actions for assault,
&c. Besides, what proper term is there in English for expressing a
compromise? Edmund Burke, and other much older authors, express the idea
by the word _temperament_; but that word, though a good one, was at one
time considered an exotic term--equally a Gallicism and a Latinism.]
but never, as could be easy to show, without a full justification in the
result. Two things may be asserted of all his exotic idioms--1st, That
they express what could not have been expressed by any native idiom; 2d,
That they harmonize with the English language, and give a coloring of
the antique, but not any sense of strangeness to the diction. Thus, in
the double negative, "Nor did they not perceive," &c., which is classed
as a Hebraism--if any man fancy that it expresses no more than the
simple affirmative, he shows that he does not understand its force; and,
at the same time, it is a form of thought so natural and universal,
that I have heard English people, under corresponding circumstances,
spontaneously fall into it. In short, whether a man differ from others
by greater profundity or by greater sublimity, and whether he write as
a poet or as a philosopher, in any case, he feels, in due proportion
to the necessities of his intellect, an increasing dependence upon the
Latin section of the English language; and the true reason why Lord
Brougham failed to perceive this, or found the Saxon equal to his wants,
is one which I shall not scruple to assign, inasmuch as it does not
reflect personally on Lord Brougham, or, at least, on him exclusively,
but on the whole body to which he belongs. That thing which he and
they call by the pompous name of statesmanship, but which is, in fact,
_statescraft_--the art of political intrigue--deals (like the opera)
with ideas so few in number, and so little adapted to associate
themselves with other ideas, that, possibly, in the one case equally
as in the other, six hundred words are sufficient to meet all their
demands.
I have used my privilege of discursiveness to step aside from
Demosthenes to another subject, no otherwise connected with the
Attic orator than, first, by the common reference of both subjects
to rhetoric; but, secondly, by the accident of having been jointly
discussed by Lord Brougham in a paper, which (though now forgotten)
obtained, at the moment, most undue celebrity. For it is one of the
infirmities of the public mind with us, that whatever is said or done by
a public man, any opinion given by a member of Parliament, however much
out of his own proper jurisdiction and range of inquiry, commands an
attention not conceded even to those who speak under the known privilege
of professional knowledge. Thus, Cowper was not discovered to be a poet
worthy of any general notice, until Charles Fox, a most slender critic,
had vouchsafed to quote a few lines, and that, not so much with a
view to the poetry, as to its party application. But now, returning
to Demosthenes, I affirm that his case is the case of nearly all the
classical writers,--at least, of all the prose writers. It is, I admit,
an extreme one; that is, it is the general case in a more intense
degree. Raised almost to divine honors, never mentioned but with
affected rapture, the classics of Greece and Rome are seldom read,
most of them never; are they, indeed, the closet companions of any man?
Surely it is time that these follies were at an end; that our practice
were made to square a little better with our professions; and that our
pleasures were sincerely drawn from those sources in which we pretend
that they lie.
The Greek language, mastered in any eminent degree, is the very rarest
of all accomplishments, and precisely because it is unspeakably the most
difficult. Let not the reader dupe himself by popular cant. To be an
accomplished Grecian, demands a very peculiar quality of talent; and
it is almost inevitable that one who is such should be vain of a
distinction which represents so much labor and difficulty overcome. For
myself, having, as a school-boy, attained to a very unusual mastery over
this language, and (though as yet little familiar with the elaborate
science of Greek metre) moving through all the obstacles and resistances
of a Greek book with the same celerity and ease as through those of
the French and Latin, I had, in vanquishing the difficulties of the
language, lost the main stimulus to its cultivation. Still, I read
Greek daily; but any slight vanity which I might connect with a power
so rarely attained, and which, under ordinary circumstances, so readily
transmutes itself into a disproportionate admiration of the author, in
me was absolutely swallowed up in the tremendous hold taken of my entire
sensibilities at this time by our own literature. With what fury would
I often exclaim: He who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how
shall he love God whom he hath not seen? You, Mr. A, L, M, O, you who
care not for Milton, and value not the dark sublimities which rest
ultimately (as we all feel) upon dread realities, how can you seriously
thrill in sympathy with the spurious and fanciful sublimities of the
classical poetry--with the nod of the Olympian Jove, or the seven-league
strides of Neptune? Flying Childers had the most prodigious stride of
any horse on record; and at Newmarket that is justly held to be a great
merit; but it is hardly a qualification for a Pantheon. The parting of
Hector and Andromache--that is tender, doubtless; but how many passages
of far deeper, far diviner tenderness, are to be found in Chaucer! Yet
in these cases we give our antagonist the benefit of an appeal to what
is really best and most effective in the ancient literature. For, if we
should go to Pindar, and some other great names, what a revelation of
hypocrisy as respects the _fade_ enthusiasts for the Greek poetry!
Still, in the Greek tragedy, however otherwise embittered against
ancient literature by the dismal affectations current in the scenical
poetry, at least I felt the presence of a great and original power. It
might be a power inferior, upon the whole, to that which presides in the
English tragedy; I believed that it was; but it was equally genuine,
and appealed equally to real and deep sensibilities in our nature. Yet,
also, I felt that the two powers at work in the two forms of the drama
were essentially different; and without having read a line of German at
that time, or knowing of any such controversy, I began to meditate on
the elementary grounds of difference between the Pagan and the Christian
forms of poetry. The dispute has since been carried on extensively in
France, not less than in Germany, as between the _classical_ and the
_romantic_. But I will venture to assert that not one step in advance
has been made, up to this day. The shape into which I threw the question
it may be well to state; because I am persuaded that out of that
one idea, properly pursued, might be evolved the whole separate
characteristics of the Christian and the antique: Why is it, I asked,
that the Christian idea of _sin_ is an idea utterly unknown to the Pagan
mind? The Greeks and Romans had a clear conception of a moral ideal, as
we have; but this they estimated by a reference to the will; and they
called it virtue, and the antithesis they called vice. The _lacheté_
or relaxed energy of the will, by which it yielded to the seductions
of sensual pleasure, that was vice; and the braced-up tone by which it
resisted these seductions was virtue. But the idea of holiness, and the
antithetic idea of sin, as a violation of this awful and unimaginable
sanctity, was so utterly undeveloped in the Pagan mind, that no word
exists in classical Greek or classical Latin which approaches either
pole of this synthesis; neither the idea of _holiness_, nor of its
correlate, _sin_, could be so expressed in Latin as at once to satisfy
Cicero and a scientific Christian. Again (but this was some years
after), I found Schiller and Goethe applauding the better taste of the
ancients, in symbolizing the idea of death by a beautiful youth, with a
torch inverted, &c., as compared with the Christian types of a skeleton
and hour-glasses, &c. And much surprised I was to hear Mr. Coleridge
approving of this German sentiment. Yet, here again I felt the peculiar
genius of Christianity was covertly at work moving upon a different
road, and under opposite ideas, to a just result, in which the harsh and
austere expression yet pointed to a dark reality, whilst the beautiful
Greek adumbration was, in fact, a veil and a disguise. The corruptions
and the other "dishonors" of the grave, and whatsoever composes the
sting of death in the Christian view, is traced up to sin as its
ultimate cause. Hence, besides the expression of Christian humility, in
thus nakedly exhibiting the wrecks and ruins made by sin, there is
also a latent profession indicated of Christian hope. For the Christian
contemplates steadfastly, though with trembling awe, the lowest point of
his descent; since, for him, that point, the last of his fall, is also
the first of his reäscent, and serves, besides, as an exponent of its
infinity; the infinite depth becoming, in the rebound, a measure of
the infinite reäscent. Whereas, on the contrary, with the gloomy
uncertainties of a Pagan on the question of his final restoration, and
also (which must not be overlooked) with his utter perplexity as to the
nature of his restoration, if any were by accident in reserve, whether
in a condition tending downwards or upwards, it was the natural resource
to consult the general feeling of anxiety and distrust, by throwing a
thick curtain and a veil of beauty over the whole too painful subject.
To place the horrors in high relief, could here have answered no purpose
but that of wanton cruelty; whereas, with the Christian hopes, the
very saddest memorials of the havocs made by death are antagonist
prefigurations of great victories in the rear.
These speculations, at that time, I pursued earnestly; and I then
believed myself, as I yet do, to have ascertained the two great and
opposite laws under which the Grecian and the English tragedy has each
separately developed itself. Whether wrong or right in that belief, sure
I am that those in Germany who have treated the case of classical
and romantic are not entitled to credit for any discovery at all. The
Schlegels, who were the hollowest of men, the windiest and wordiest (at
least, Frederic was so), pointed to the distinction; barely indicated
it; and that was already some service done, because a presumption
arose that the antique and the modern literatures, having clearly some
essential differences, might, perhaps, rest on foundations originally
distinct, and obey different laws. And hence it occurred that many
disputes, as about the unities, etc., might originate in a confusion of
these laws. This checks the presumption of the shallow criticism, and
points to deeper investigations. Beyond this, neither the German nor the
French disputers on the subject have talked to any profitable purpose.
I have mentioned Paley as accidentally connected with my _début_ in
literary conversation; and I have taken occasion to say how much I
admired his style and its unstudied graces, how profoundly I despised
his philosophy. I shall here say a word or two more on that subject. As
respects his style, though secretly despising the opinion avowed by my
tutor (which was, however, a natural opinion for a stiff lover of the
artificial and the pompous), I would just as unwillingly be supposed to
adopt the extravagant opinions, in the other extreme, of Dr. Parr and
Mr. Coleridge. These two gentlemen, who privately hated Paley, and,
perhaps, traduced him, have hung like bees over one particular paragraph
in his Evidences, as though it were a flower transplanted from Hymettus.
Dr. Parr pronounced it the finest sentence in the English language. It
is a period (that is, a cluster of sentences) moderately well, but not
_too_ well constructed, as the German nurses are accustomed to say. Its
felicity depends on a trick easily imitated--on a balance happily placed
(namely, "_in which the wisest of mankind would rejoice to find an
answer to their doubts, and rest to their inquiries_"). As a _bravura_,
or _tour de force_, in the dazzling fence of rhetoric, it is surpassed
by many hundreds of passages which might be produced from rhetoricians;
or, to confine myself to Paley's contemporaries, it is very far
surpassed by a particular passage in Burke's letter upon the Duke of
Bedford's base attack upon him in the House of Lords; which passage I
shall elsewhere produce, because I happen to know, on the authority of
Burke's executors, that Burke himself considered it the finest period
which he had ever written. At present, I will only make one remark,
namely, that it is always injudicious, in the highest degree, to cite
for admiration that which is not a _representative_ specimen of the
author's manner. In reading Lucian, I once stumbled on a passage of
German pathos, and of German effect. Would it have been wise, or would
it have been intellectually just, to quote this as the text of an
eulogium on Lucian? What false criticism it would have suggested to
every reader! what false anticipations! To quote a formal and periodic
pile of sentences, was to give the feeling that Paley was what the
regular rhetorical artists designate as a periodic writer, when, in
fact, no one conceivable character of style more pointedly contradicted
the true description of his merits.
But, leaving the style of Paley, I must confess that I agree with Mr.
Bulwer (_England and the English_) in thinking it shocking and almost
damnatory to an English university, the great well-heads of creeds,
moral and evangelical, that authors such in respect of doctrine as Paley
and Locke should hold that high and influential station as teachers, or
rather oracles of truth, which has been conceded to them. As to Locke,
I, when a boy, had made a discovery of one blunder full of laughter and
of fun, which, had it been published and explained in Locke's lifetime,
would have tainted his whole philosophy with suspicion. It relates
to the Aristotelian doctrine of syllogism, which Locke undertook to
ridicule. Now, a flaw, a hideous flaw, in the _soi-disant_ detecter of
flaws, a ridicule in the exposer of the ridiculous--_that_ is fatal;
and I am surprised that Lee, who wrote a folio against Locke in his
lifetime, and other examiners, should have failed in detecting this. I
shall expose it elsewhere; and, perhaps, one or two other exposures
of the same kind will give an impetus to the descent of this falling
philosophy. With respect to Paley, and the naked _prudentialism_ of
his system, it is true that in a longish note Paley disclaims that
consequence. But to this we may reply, with Cicero, _Non quoero quid
neget Epicurus, sed quid congruenter neget_. Meantime, waiving all this
as too notorious, and too frequently denounced, I wish to recur to
this trite subject, by way of stating an objection made to the Paleyan
morality in my seventeenth year, and which I have never since seen
reason to withdraw. It is this:--I affirm that the whole work, from
first to last, proceeds upon that sort of error which the logicians
call _ignoratio elenchi_, that is, ignorance of the very question
concerned--of the point at issue. For, mark, in the very vestibule of
ethics, two questions arise--two different and disconnected questions,
A and B; and Paley has answered the wrong one. Thinking that he was
answering A, and meaning to answer A, he has, in fact, answered B. One
question arises thus: Justice is a virtue; temperance is a virtue; and
so forth. Now, what is the common principle which ranks these several
species under the same genus? What, in the language of logicians, is the
common differential principle which determines these various aspects
of moral obligation to a common genius? Another question, and a more
interesting question to men in general, is this,--What is the motive to
virtue? By what impulse, law, or motive, am I impelled to be virtuous
rather than vicious? Whence is the motive derived which should impel
me to one line of conduct in preference to the other? This, which is
a practical question, and, therefore, more interesting than the other,
which is a pure question of speculation, was that which Paley believed
himself to be answering. And his answer was,--That utility, a perception
of the resulting benefit, was the true determining motive. Meantime, it
was objected that often the most obvious results from a virtuous action
were far otherwise than beneficial. Upon which, Paley, in the long note
referred to above, distinguished thus: That whereas actions have many
results, some proximate, some remote, just as a stone thrown into the
water produces many concentric circles, be it known that he, Dr. Paley,
in what he says of utility, contemplates only the final result, the very
outermost circle; inasmuch as he acknowledges a possibility that the
first, second, third, including the penultimate circle, may all happen
to clash with utility; but then, says he, the outermost circle of all
will never fail to coincide with the absolute maximum of utility.
Hence, in the first place, it appears that you cannot apply this test of
utility in a practical sense; you cannot say, This is useful, _ergo_, it
is virtuous; but, in the inverse order, you must say, This is virtuous,
_ergo_, it is useful. You do not rely on its usefulness to satisfy
yourself of its being virtuous; but, on the contrary, you rely on its
virtuousness, previously ascertained, in order to satisfy yourself
of its usefulness. And thus the whole practical value of this test
disappears, though in that view it was first introduced; and a vicious
circle arises in the argument; as you must have ascertained the
virtuousness of an act, in order to apply the test of its being
virtuous. But, _secondly_, it now comes out that Paley was answering a
very different question from that which he supposed himself answering.
Not any practical question as to the motive or impelling force in
being virtuous, rather than vicious,--that is, to the _sanctions_ of
virtue,--but a purely speculative question, as to the issue of virtue,
or the common _vinculum_ amongst the several modes or species of virtue
(justice, temperance, etc.)--this was the real question which he was
answering. I have often remarked that the largest and most subtle source
of error in philosophic speculations has been the confounding of the two
great principles so much insisted on by the Leibnitzians, namely, the
_ratio cognoscendi_ and the _ratio essendi_. Paley believed himself
to be assigning--it was his full purpose to assign--the _ratio
cognoscendi_; but, instead of that, unconsciously and surreptitiously,
he has actually assigned the _ratio essendi_; and, after all, a false
and imaginary _ratio essendi_.
THE PAGAN ORACLES
It is remarkable--and, without a previous explanation, it might seem
paradoxical to say it--that oftentimes under a continual accession of
light important subjects grow more and more enigmatical. In times when
nothing was explained, the student, torpid as his teacher, saw nothing
which called for explanation--all appeared one monotonous blank. But no
sooner had an early twilight begun to solicit the creative faculties
of the eye, than many dusky objects, with outlines imperfectly defined,
began to converge the eye, and to strengthen the nascent interest of the
spectator. It is true that light, in its final plenitude, is calculated
to disperse all darkness. But this effect belongs to its consummation.
In its earlier and _struggling_ states, light does but reveal darkness.
It makes the darkness palpable and "visible." Of which we may see a
sensible illustration in a gloomy glass-house, where the sullen lustre
from the furnace does but mass and accumulate the thick darkness in
the rear upon which the moving figures are relieved. Or we may see an
intellectual illustration in the mind of the savage, on whose blank
surface there exists no doubt or perplexity at all, none of the pains
connected with ignorance; he is conscious of no darkness, simply because
for _him_ there exists no visual ray of speculation--no vestige of
prelusive light.
Similar, and continually more similar, has been the condition of ancient
history. Once yielding a mere barren crop of facts and dates, slowly
it has been kindling of late years into life and deep interest under
superior treatment. And hitherto, as the light has advanced, _pari
passu_ have the masses of darkness strengthened. Every question solved
has been the parent of three new questions unmasked. And the power of
breathing life into dry bones has but seemed to multiply the skeletons
and lifeless remains; for the very natural reason--that these dry bones
formerly (whilst viewed as incapable of revivification) had seemed
less numerous, because everywhere confounded to the eye with stocks
and stones, so long as there was no motive of hope for marking the
distinction between them.