worth. Mind may be great or small, noble or mean, strong or weak; the mode
of thinking of one person or one time may be higher, finer, grander than
that of another; the moral and intellectual constitutions of diverse
individuals or peoples may present all varieties of the admirable and
lovely or the despicable and unlovely; the pulses and motions in that
mystic transparency which we fancy as one man's mind may be more vehement,
more awful, more rhythmical and musical, than are known in that which we
fancy as the mind of some other; the thinking apparatus which A possesses,
and by which he performs the business of his life, may be more massive,
more complex, more exquisite, capable of longer reaches and more superb
combinations, than that which has fallen to the lot of B. All this is
taken for granted everywhere; all our speech and conduct proceed on the
assumption.
(2.) Somewhat less familiar, but not unimportant, is a consideration which
I may express by calling it the necessary instability of mind, its
variability from moment to moment. Your mind, my mind, every mind, is
continually sustaining modifications, disintegrations, reconstructions, by
all that acts upon it, by all it comes to know. We are much in the habit,
indeed, of speaking of experience, of different kinds of knowledge, as so
much material for the mind--material delivered into it, outspread as it
were on its floor, and which it, the lord and master, may survey, let lie
there for occasion, and now and then select from and employ. True! but not
the whole truth! The mind does not stand amid what it knows, as something
distinct and untouched; the mind is actually composed at any one moment of
all that it has learnt or felt up to that moment. Every new information
received, every piece of knowledge gained, every joy enjoyed, every sorrow
suffered, is then and there transmuted into mind, and becomes incorporate
with the prior central substance. To resort now to that mechanical figure
which I said might be found useful: every new piece of information, every
fact that one comes to apprehend, every probability brought before one in
the course of life, is not only so much new matter for the thinking
apparatus to lay hold of and work into the warp and woof of thought; it is
actually also a modification of the thinking apparatus itself. The mind
thinks _with_ what it knows; and, if you alter the knowledge in any one
whit, you alter the thinking instrumentality in proportion. Our whole
practice of education is based on this idea, and yet somehow the idea is
allowed to lurk. It may be brought out best perhaps by thinking what may
happen to a mind that has passed the period of education in the ordinary
sense. A person of mature age, let us say, betakes himself, for the first
time, to the study of geology. He gains thereby so much new and important
knowledge of a particular kind. Yes! but he does more. He modifies his
previous mind; he introduces a difference into his mode of thinking by a
positive addition to that instrumentality of notions _with_ which he
thinks. The geological conceptions which he has acquired become an organic
part of that reason, that intellect, which he applies to all things
whatsoever; he will think and imagine thenceforward with the help of an
added potency, and, consequently, never again precisely as he did before.
Generalize this hint, and let it run through history. The mind of Man
cannot remain the same through two consecutive generations, if only
because the knowledge which feeds and makes mind, the notions that
constitute the thinking power, are continually varying. In this age of a
hundred sciences, all tramping on Nature's outside with their flags up,
and marching her round and round, and searching her through and through
for her secrets, and flinging into the public forum their heaps of
results, how is it possible to call mind the same as it was a generation
or two ago, when the sciences were fewer, their industry more leisurely,
and their discoveries less frequent? Nay, but we may go back not a
generation or two only, but to generation beyond generation through a long
series, still, as we ascend, finding the sciences fewer, earth's load of
knowledge lighter, and man's very imagination of the physical universe
which he tenants cruder and more diminutive. Till two hundred years ago
the Mundus, or physical system of things, to even the most learned of men,
with scarcely an exception, was a finite spectacular sphere, or succession
of spheres, that of the fixed stars nearly outermost, wheeling round the
central earth for her pleasure; as we penetrate through still prior
centuries, even this finite spherical Mundus is seen to shrink and shrink
in men's fancies of it till a radius of some hundreds of miles would sweep
from the earth to the starry roof; back beyond that again the very notion
of sphericity disappears, and men were walking, as it seemed, on the upper
side of a flat disc, close under a concave of blue, travelled by fiery
caprices. How is it possible to regard man's mode of thinking and
feeling, man's mind, as in any way constant through such vicissitude in
man's notions respecting his very housing in space, and the whole
encircling touch of his physical belongings?
(3.) A third consideration, however, administers a kind of corrective to
the last. It is that, though the last consideration is not unimportant,
its importance practically, and as far as the range of historic time is
concerned, may be easily exaggerated. We have supposed a person betaking
himself to the study of geology, and have truly said that his very mode of
thinking would be thereby affected, that his geological knowledge would
pass into his reason, and determine so far the very cast of his mind, the
form of his ability. Well, but he might have betaken himself to something
else; and who can tell, without definite investigation, but that out of
that something else he might have derived as much increase of his mental
power, or even greater? There are thousands of employments for all minds,
and, though all may select, and select differently, there are thousands
for all in common. Life itself, all the inevitable activity of life, is
one vast and most complex schooling. Books or no books, sciences or no
sciences, we live, we look, we love, we laugh, we fear, we hate, we
wonder; we are sons, we are brothers, we have friends; the seasons return,
the sun shines, the moon walks in beauty, the sea roars and beats the
land, the winds blow, the leaves fall; we are young, we grow old; we
commit others to their graves, we see somewhere the little grassy mound
which shall conceal ourselves:--is not this a large enough primary school
for all and sundry; are not these sufficient and everlasting rudiments?
That so it is we all recognise. Given some original force or goodness of
nature, and out of even this primary school, and from the teaching of
these common rudiments, may there not come, do there not come, minds
worthy of mark--the shrewd, keen wit, the upright and robust judgment, the
disposition tender and true, the bold and honest man? And though, for
perfection, the books and the sciences must be superadded, yet do not the
rudiments persist in constant over-proportion and incessant compulsory
repetition through all the process of culture, and is not the great result
of culture itself a reaction on the rudiments? And so, without prejudice
to our foregone conclusion that mind is variable with knowledge, that
every new science or body of notions conquered for the world modifies the
world's mode of thinking and feeling, alters the cast and the working
trick of its reason and imagination, we can yet fall back, for historic
time at least, on the notion of a human mind so essentially permanent and
traditional that we cannot decide by mere chronology where we may justly
be fondest of it, and certainly cannot assume that its latest individual
specimens, with all their advantages, are necessarily the ablest, the
noblest, or the cleverest. In fact, however we may reconcile it with our
theories of vital evolution and progressive civilization, we all
instinctively agree in this style of sentiment. Shakespeare lived and
died, we may say, in the pre-scientific period; he lived and died in the
belief of the fixedness of our earth in space and the diurnal wheeling
round her of the ten spectacular spheres. Not the less was he Shakespeare;
and none of us dares to say that there is now in the world, or has
recently been, a more superb thinking apparatus of its order than his mind
was, a spiritual transparency of larger diameter, or vivid with grander
gleamings and pulses. Two hundred and fifty years, therefore, chock-full
though they are of new knowledges and discoveries, have not been a single
knife-edge of visible advance in the world's power of producing splendid
individuals; and, if we add two hundred and fifty to that, and again two
hundred and fifty, and four times two hundred and fifty more without
stopping, still we cannot discern that there has been a knife-edge of
advance in that particular. For at this last remove we are among the
Romans, and beyond them there lie the Greeks; and side by side with both,
and beyond both, are other Mediterranean Indo-Europeans, and, away in
Asia, clumps and masses of various Orientals. For ease of reference, let
us go no farther than the Greeks. Thinking apparatuses of first-rate grip!
mental transparencies of large diameter and tremulous with great powers
and pulses! What do we say to Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and the rest
of the great Hellenic cluster which these represent! True, their cosmology
was in a muddle (perhaps _ours_ is in a muddle too, for as little as we
think so); but somehow they contrived to be such that the world doubts to
this day whether, on the whole, at any time since, it has exhibited, in
such close grouping, such a constellation of spirits of the highest
magnitude. And the lesson enforced by this Greek instance may be enforced,
less blazingly perhaps, but still clearly, as by the light of scattered
stars, by instances from the whole course of historic time. Within that
range, despite the vicissitudes of the mode of human thought caused by
continued inquisitiveness and its results in new knowledges, despite the
change from age to age in mankind's very image of its own whereabouts in
space, and the extent of that whereabouts, and the complexity of the
entanglement in which it rolls, it is still true that you may probe at any
point with the sure expectation of finding at least _some_ minds as good
intrinsically, as strong, as noble, as valiant, as inventive, as any in
our own age of latest appearances and all the newest lights. I am aware,
of course, where the compensation may be sought. The philosophical
historian may contend that, though some minds of early ages have been as
able intrinsically as any minds of later ages, these later minds being
themselves the critics and judges, yet an enormous general progress may be
made out in the increased _number_ in the later ages of minds tolerably
able, in the heightening of the general level, in the more equable
diffusion of intelligence, in the gradual extension of freedom, and the
humanizing of manners and institutions. On that question I am not called
upon to enter now, nor is my opinion on it to be inferred from anything I
am now saying. I limit myself to the assertion that within historic time
we find what we are obliged to call an intrinsic co-equality of _some_
minds at various successive points and at long-separated intervals, and
that consequently, if the human race _is_ gradually acquiring a power of
producing individuals more able than their ablest predecessors, the rate
of its law in this respect is so slow that 2,500 years have not made the
advance appreciable. The assertion is limited; it is reconcilable, I
believe, with the most absolute and extreme doctrine of evolution; but it
seems to be both important and curious, inasmuch as it has not yet been
sufficiently attended to in any of the phrasings of that doctrine that
have been speculatively put forward. No doctrine is rightly phrased, I
would submit, when, if it were true according to that phrasing, it would
be man's highest duty to proceed as if it weren't.
History itself, the mere tradition and records of the human race, would
have authorized our assertion. Pericles, Epaminondas, Alexander the Great,
Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne: would not the authenticated tradition
of the lives and actions of those men, and others of their order, or of
other orders, prove that possible capacity of the individual mind has not,
for the last 2,500 years of our earth's history, been a mere affair of
chronological date? But it is Literature that reads us the lesson most
fully and convincingly. Some of those great men of action have left little
or no direct speech of themselves. They mingled their minds with the rage
of things around them; they worked, and strove, and died. But the books we
have from all periods, the poems, the songs, the treatises, the
pleadings--some of them from men great also in the world of action, but
most from men who only looked on, and thought, and tried to rule the
spirit, or to find how it might be ruled--these remain with us and can be
studied yet microscopically. If what the Historian wants to get at is the
mind of the time that interests him, or of the past generally, here it is
for him in no disguised form, but in actual specimens. Poems, treatises,
and the like, are actual transmitted _bits_ of the mind of the past;
every fragment of verse or prose from a former period preserves something
of the thought and sentiment of that period expressed by some one
belonging to it; the masterpieces of the world's literature are the
thought and feeling of successive generations expressed, in and for each
generation, by those who could express them best. What a purblind
perversity then it is for History, professing that its aim is to know the
mind or real life of the past, to be fumbling for that mind or life amid
old daggers, rusty iron caps and jingling jackets, and other such material
relics as the past has transmitted, or even groping for it, as ought to be
done most strictly, in statutes and charters and records, if all the while
those literary remains of the past are neglected from which the very thing
searched for stares us face to face!
* * * * *
There is a small corollary to our main proposition. It is that ages which
we are accustomed to regard as crude, barbarous, and uncivilized, may turn
out perhaps, on due investigation and a better construction of the
records, to have been not so crude and barbarous after all, but to have
contained a great deal of intrinsic humanity, interesting to us yet, and
capable, through all intervening time and difference, of folding itself
round our hearts. And here I will quit those great, but perhaps too
continually obtrusive, Greeks and Romans, and will take my examples, all
the homelier though they must be, from our own land and kindred.
The Fourteenth Century in our island was not what we should now hold up as
a model age, a soft age, an orderly age, an instructed age, a pleasant age
for a lady or gentleman that has been accustomed to modern ideas and
modern comforts to be transferred back into. It was the age of the three
first Edwards, Richard II., and Henry IV. in England, and of the Wallace
Interregnum, Bruce, David II., and the two first Stuarts in Scotland. Much
was done in it, as these names will suggest, that has come down as
picturesque story and stirring popular legend. It is an age, on that
account, in which schoolboys and other plain uncritical readers of both
nations revel with peculiar relish. Critical inquirers, too, and real
students of history, especially of late, have found it an age worth their
while, and have declared it full of important facts and powerful
characters. Not the less the inveterate impression among a large number of
persons of a rapid modern way of thinking is that all this interesting
vision of the England and Scotland of the fourteenth century is mere
poetical glamour or antiquarian make-believe, and that the real state of
affairs was one of mud, mindlessness, fighting and scramble generally, no
tea and no newspapers, but plenty of hanging, and murder almost _ad
libitum_. Now these are most wrong-headed persons, and they might be
beaten black and blue by sheer force of records. But out of kindliness one
may take a gentler method with them, and try to bring them right by
aesthetic suasion. It so chances, for example, that there are literary
remains of the fourteenth century, both English and Scottish, and that the
authors of the chief of these were Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English
literature proper, and John Barbour, the father of the English literature
of North Britain. Let us take a few bits from Chaucer and Barbour.
Purposely, we shall take bits that may be already familiar.
Here is Chaucer's often-quoted description of the scholar, or typical
student of Oxford University, from the Prologue to his _Canterbury
Tales_:--
A Clerk there was of Oxenford also,
That unto logic hadde long ygo,
As leane was his horse as is a rake,
And _he_ was not right fat, I undertake;
But looked hollow, and thereto soberly.
Full threadbare was his overest courtepy;
For he had getten him yet no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office;
For him was liefer have at his bed's head
A twenty books, clothed in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie
Than robes rich, or fiddle, or sautrie.
But, albe that he was a philosopher,
Yet had he but a little gold in coffer;
But all that he might of his friendes hent
On bookes and on learning he it spent,
And busily gan for the soules pray
Of hem that gave him wherewith to scholay.
Of study took he most cure and most heed;
Not oe word spak he more than was need;
And that was said in form and reverence,
And short and quick, and full of high sentence;
Souning in moral virtue was his speech,
And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.
Or take an out-of-doors' scene from one of Chaucer's reputed minor poems.
It is a description of a grove or wood in spring, or early summer:--
In which were oakes great, straight as a line,
Under the which the grass, so fresh of hue,
Was newly sprung, and an eight foot or nine
Every tree well fro his fellow grew,
With branches broad, laden with leaves new,
That sprungen out agen the sunne sheen,
Some very red, and some a glad light green.
Or, for a tidy scene indoors, take this from another poem:--
And, sooth to sayen, my chamber was
Full well depainted, and with glass
Were all the windows well yglazed
Full clear, and not an hole ycrased,
That to behold it was great joy;
For wholly all the story of Troy
Was in the glazing ywrought thus,
Of Hector and of King Priamus,
Of Achilles and of King Laomedon,
And eke of Medea and Jason,
Of Paris, Helen, and Lavine;
And all the walls with colours fine
Weren paint, both text and glose,
And all the Romaunt of the Rose:
My windows weren shut each one,
And through the glass the sunne shone
Upon my bed with brighte beams.
Or take these stanzas of weighty ethical sententiousness (usually printed
as Chaucer's, but whether his or not does not matter):--
Fly from the press, and dwell with soothfastness;
Suffice unto thy good, though it be small;
For hoard hath hate, and climbing tickleness,
Press hath envy, and weal is blent in all;
Savour no more than thee behove shall;
Rede well thyself that other folk canst rede;
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.
Paine thee not each crooked to redress
In trust of her that turneth as a ball.
Great rest standeth in little business;
Beware also to spurn against an awl;
Strive not as doth a crocke with a wall;
Deeme thyself that deemest others dead;
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.
That thee is sent receive in buxomness;
The wrestling of this world asketh a fall;
Here is no home, here is but wilderness:
Forth, pilgrim! forth, beast, out of thy stall!
Look up on high, and thanke God of all:
Waive thy lusts, and let thy ghost thee lead;
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.
Or, finally, take a little bit of Chaucer's deep, keen slyness, when he is
speaking smilingly about himself and his own poetry. He has represented
himself as standing in the House or Temple of Fame, observing company
after company going up to the goddess, and petitioning for renown in the
world for what they have done. Some she grants what they ask, others she
dismisses crestfallen, and Chaucer thinks the _levee_ over:--
With that I gan about to wend,
For one that stood right at my back
Methought full goodly to me spak,
And said, "Friend, what is thy name?
Art _thou_ come hither to have fame?"
"Nay, forsoothe, friend," quoth I;
"I came not hither, grammercy,
For no such cause, by my head.
Sufficeth me, as I were dead,
That no wight have _my_ name in hand:
I wot myself best how I stand;
For what I dree or what I think
I will myselfe all it drink,
Certain for the more part,
As farforth as I ken mine art!"
Chaucer ranks to this day as one of the very greatest and finest minds in
the entire literature of the English speech, and stands therefore on a
level far higher than can be assumed for his contemporary Barbour. But
Barbour was a most creditable old worthy too. Let us have a scrap or two
from his _Bruce_. Who does not know the famous passage which is the very
key-note of that poem? One is never tired of quoting it:--
Ah! freedom is a noble thing;
Freedom makes man to have liking:
Freedom all solace to man gives;
He lives at ease that freely lives.
A noble heart may have nane ease,
Ne ellys nought that may him please
Gif freedom faileth; for free liking
Is yearnit ower all other thing;
Nor he that aye has livit free
May not know weel the propertie,
The anger, ne the wretched doom,
That is couplit to foul thirldom;
But, gif he had essayit it,
Then all perquere he suld it wit,
And suld think freedom mair to prize
Than all the gold in the warld that is.
Or take the portrait of the good Sir James, called "The Black Douglas,"
the chief companion and adherent of Bruce, introduced near the beginning
of the poem, where he is described as a young man living moodily at St.
Andrews before the Bruce revolt:--
Ane weel great while there dwellit he:
All men loved him for his bountie;
For he was of full fair effere,
Wise, courteous, and debonair;
Large and lovand also was he,
And ower all thing loved loyauty.
Loyautie to love is gretumly;
Through loyautie men lives richtwisely;
With a virtue of loyautie
Ane man may yet sufficiand be;
And, but loyautie, may nane have prize,
Whether he be wicht or be he wise;
For, where _it_ failis, nae virtue
May be of prize, ne of value
To mak ane man sae good that he
May simply callit good man be.
He was in all his deedes leal;
For him dedeignit not to deal
With treachery ne with falset.
His heart on high honour was set,
And him contened in sic manere
That all him loved that war him near.
But he was not sae fair that we
Suld speak greatly of his beautie.
In visage was he somedeal grey,
And had black hair, as I heard say;
But of his limbs he was well made,
With banes great and shoulders braid;
His body was well made leanlie,
As they that saw him said to me.
When he was blythe, he was lovely
And meek and sweet in company;
But wha in battle micht him see
All other countenance had he.
And in speech lispit he somedeal;
But that set him richt wonder weel.
To Good Hector of Troy micht he
In mony thinges likenit be.
Hector had black hair as he had,
And stark limbes and richt weel made,
And lispit also as did he,
And was fulfillit of loyautie,
And was courteous, and wise, and wicht.