EDUCATION.
61. The most helpful and sacred work which can at present be done for
humanity, is to teach people (chiefly by example, as all best teaching
must be done) not how "to better themselves," but how to "satisfy
themselves." It is the curse of every evil nature and evil creature to
eat and _not_ be satisfied. The words of blessing are, that they shall
eat and be satisfied; and as there is only one kind of water which
quenches all thirst, so there is only one kind of bread which
satisfies all hunger--the bread of justice or righteousness; which
hungering after, men shall always be filled, that being the bread of
Heaven; but hungering after the bread or wages of unrighteousness,
shall not be filled, that being the bread of Sodom. And in order to
teach men how to be satisfied, it is necessary fully to understand the
art of joy and humble life--this, at present, of all arts or sciences,
being the one most needing study. Humble life; that is to say,
proposing to itself no future exaltation, but only a sweet
continuance: not excluding the idea of foresight, but wholly of
fore-sorrow, and taking no troublous thought for coming days; so also
not excluding the idea of providence or provision, but wholly of
accumulation;--the life of domestic affection and domestic peace, full
of sensitiveness to all elements of costless and kind
pleasure;--therefore chiefly to the loveliness of the natural world.
62. We shall find that the love of nature, wherever it has existed,
has been a faithful and sacred element of feeling; that is to say,
supposing all the circumstances otherwise the same with respect to two
individuals, the one who loves nature most will be always found to
have more capacity for _faith_ in God than the other. Nature-worship
will be found to bring with it such a sense of the presence and power
of a Great Spirit as no mere reasoning can either induce or
controvert; and where that nature-worship is innocently
pursued--_i.e._, with due respect to other claims on time, feeling,
and exertion, and associated with the higher principles of
religion,--it becomes the channel of certain sacred truths, which by
no other means can be conveyed.
63. Instead of supposing the love of nature necessarily connected with
the faithlessness of the age, I believe it is connected properly with
the benevolence and liberty[29] of the age; that it is precisely the
most healthy element which distinctively belongs to us; and that out
of it, cultivated no longer in levity or ignorance, but in earnestness
and as a duty, results will spring of an importance at present
inconceivable; and lights arise, which, for the first time in man's
history, will reveal to him the true nature of his life, the true
field for his energies, and the true relations between him and his
Maker.
[29] I forget, now, what I meant by 'liberty' in this passage; but I
often used the word in my first writings, in a good sense, thinking of
Scott's moorland rambles and the like. It is very wonderful to me, now,
to see what hopes I had once: but Turner was alive, then; and the sun
used to shine, and rivers to sparkle.
64. To any person who has all his senses about him, a quiet walk, over
not more than ten or twelve miles of road a day, is the most amusing
of all travelling; and all travelling becomes dull in exact proportion
to its rapidity.
Going by railroad I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely
"being sent" to a place, and very little different from becoming a
parcel.
65. I believe an immense gain in the bodily health and happiness of
the upper classes would follow on their steadily endeavouring, however
clumsily, to make the physical exertion they now necessarily exert in
amusements, definitely serviceable. It would be far better, for
instance, that a gentleman should mow his own fields, than ride over
other people's.
66. In order to define what is fairest, you must delight in what is
fair; and I know not how few or how many there may be who take such
delight. Once I could speak joyfully about beautiful things, thinking
to be understood; now I cannot, any more, for it seems to me that no
one regards them. Wherever I look or travel, in England or abroad, I
see that men, wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty. They seem
to have no other desire or hope but to have large houses, and be able
to move fast. Every perfect and lovely spot which they can touch, they
defile. Thus the railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen, and
that round the Clarens shore of the lake of Geneva, have destroyed the
power of two pieces of scenery of which nothing can ever supply the
place, in appeal to the higher ranks of European mind.
67. The first thing which I remember as an event in life, was being
taken by my nurse to the brow of Friar's Crag on Derwentwater. The
intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in looking through the
hollows in the mossy roots, over the crag into the dark lake, has
associated itself more or less with all twining roots of trees ever
since. Two other things I remember as, in a sort, beginnings of
life;--crossing Shap-fells, being let out of the chaise to run up the
hills; and going through Glenfarg, near Kinross, on a winter's
morning, when the rocks were hung with icicles; these being
culminating points in an early life of more travelling than is usually
indulged to a child. In such journeyings, whenever they brought me
near hills, and in all mountain ground and scenery, I had a pleasure,
as early as I can remember, and continuing till I was eighteen or
twenty, infinitely greater than any which has been since possible to
me in anything.
68. A fool always wants to shorten space and time; a wise man wants to
lengthen both. A fool wants to kill space and time; a wise man, first
to gain them, then to animate them.
69. I suspect that system-makers in general are not of much more use,
each in his own domain, than, in that of Pomona, the old women who tie
cherries upon sticks, for the more portableness of the same. To
cultivate well, and choose well, your cherries, is of some importance;
but if they can be had in their own wild way of clustering about their
crabbed stalks, it is a better connection for them than any others;
and if they cannot, then so that they be not bruised, it makes to a
boy of practical disposition not much difference whether he gets them
by handfuls, or in beaded symmetry on the exalting stick.
70. Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift
is to get good out of all things and all persons.
71. God appoints to every one of His creatures a separate mission, and
if they discharge it honourably, if they quit themselves like men, and
faithfully follow the light which is in them, withdrawing from it all
cold and quenching influence, there will assuredly come of it such
burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall shine before men,
and be of service constant and holy. Degrees infinite of lustre there
must always be, but the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly
trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which, worthily used, will be a
gift also to his race for ever.
72. There is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any creature, but it
is capable of a unity of some kind with other creatures; and in that
unity is its perfection and theirs, and a pleasure also for the
beholding of all other creatures that can behold. So the unity of
spirits is partly in their sympathy, and partly in their giving and
taking, and always in their love; and these are their delight and
their strength; for their strength is in their co-working and army
fellowship, and their delight is in their giving and receiving of
alternate and perpetual good; their inseparable dependency on each
other's being, and their essential and perfect depending on their
Creator's. And so the unity of earthly creatures is their power, and
their peace; not like the dead and cold peace of undisturbed stones
and solitary mountains, but the living peace of trust, and the living
power of support; of hands that hold each other and are still.[30]
[30] A long, affected, and obscure second volume sentence, written in
imitation of Hooker. One short sentence from Ecclesiastes is the sum of
it: "How can one be warm alone?"
73. It is good to read of that kindness and humbleness of St. Francis
of Assisi, who spoke never to bird, nor to cicada, nor even to wolf
and beasts of prey, but as his brother;--and so we find are moved the
minds of all good and mighty men, as in the lesson that we have from
the 'Mariner' of Coleridge, and yet more truly and rightly taught in
the 'Hartleap Well'--
"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels,"--
and again in the 'White Doe' of Rylstone, with the added teaching,
that anguish of our own
"Is tempered and allayed by sympathies
Aloft ascending, and descending deep,
Even to the inferior kinds;"--
so that I know not of anything more destructive of the whole theoretic
faculty, not to say of the Christian character and human intellect,[31]
than those accursed sports in which man makes of himself cat, tiger,
leopard, and alligator in one; and gathers into one continuance of
cruelty, for his amusement, all the devices that brutes sparingly and
at intervals use against each other for their necessities.
[31] I am more and more grieved, as I re-read this and other portions of
the most affected and weak of all my books, (written in a moulting time
of my life,)--the second volume of 'Modern Painters,'--at its morbid
violence of passion and narrowness of thought. Yet, at heart, the book
was, like my others, honest; and in substance it is mostly good; but all
boiled to rags.
74. He who loves not God, nor his brother, cannot love the grass
beneath his feet, nor the creatures which live not for his uses,
filling those spaces in the universe which he needs not: while, on the
other hand, none can love God, nor his human brother, without loving
all things which his Father loves; nor without looking upon them every
one as in that respect his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than
he, if, in the under concords they have to fill, their part is touched
more truly.[32]
[32] Morbidly Franciscan, again! and I am really compelled to leave out
one little bit my friend liked,--as all kindly and hopeful women
would,--about everything turning out right, and being to some good end.
For we have no business whatever with the ends of things, but with their
beings; and their beings are often entirely bad.
75. Things may always be seen truly by candid people, though never
_completely_. No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing; but
we may see more and more of it the longer we look. Every individual
temper will see something different in it; but supposing the tempers
honest, all the differences are there. Every advance in our acuteness
of perception will show us something new; but the old and
first-discerned thing will still be there, not falsified, only
modified and enriched by the new perceptions, becoming continually
more beautiful in its harmony with them, and more approved as a part
of the infinite truth.