AN AUTHOR'S MIND: PROBABILITIES.
My next book, published by Bentley in 1841, is in some sort a
psychological curiosity,--its title being "An Author's Mind, the Book of
Title-pages;" and when I add that it contains in succession sketches of
thirty-four new brain-children, all struggling together for exit from my
occiput, it may be imagined how impelled I was to write them all down
(fixt, however briefly, in black and white) in order to get rid of them.
The book is printed as "edited" by me; whereas I wrote every word of it,
but had not then the courage to say so, as certain things therein might
well have offended some folks, and I did not wish that. I think I will
give here a bit of the prefatory "Ramble," to show how the emptying out
of my thought-box must have been a most wholesome, a most necessary
relief:--
* * * * *
"Now, reader, one little preliminary parley with you about myself. Here
beginneth the trouble of authorship, but it is a trouble causing ease;
ease from thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, which never cease to make one's
head ache till they are fixed on paper; ease from dreams by night and
reveries by day (thronging up in crowds behind, like Deucalion's
children, or a serried host in front, like Jason's instant army),
harassing the brain, and struggling for birth, a separate existence, a
definite life,--ease, in a cessation of that continuous internal hum of
aerial forget-me-nots, clamouring to be recorded. O happy unimaginable
vacancy of mind, to whistle as you walk for want of thought! O mental
holiday, now as impossible to me as to take a true schoolboy's interest
in rounders and prisoner's base! An author's mind,--and remember always,
friend, I write in character, so judge not as egotistic vanity merely
the well playing of my _rôle_,--such a mind is not a sheet of smooth
wax, but a magic stone indented with fluttering inscriptions,--no empty
tenement, but a barn stored to bursting--it is a painful pressure,
constraining to write for comfort's sake,--an appetite craving to be
satisfied, as well as a power to be exerted,--an impetus that longs to
get away, rather than a dormant dynamic--thrice have I (let me confess
it) poured forth the alleviating volume as an author, a real author,
real, because, for very peace of mind, involuntary,--but still the
vessel fills,--still the indigenous crop springs up, choking a better
harvest, seeds of foreign growth,--still these Lernæan necks sprout
again, claiming with many mouths to explain, amuse, suggest, and
controvert, to publish invention, and proscribe error. Truly it were
enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive,--to be fitted with a
colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaïdes might not
keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to
ramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal,
perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have often
cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of
a man, fret, wear, worry him,--to be irritable is the conditional tax
laid of old upon an author's intellect; the crowd of internal imagery
makes him hasty, quick, nervous, as a haunted, hunted man--minds of
coarser web heed not how small a thorn rends one of so delicate a
texture,--they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword were in a
tougher scabbard,--the river, not content with channel and restraining
banks, overflows perpetually,--the extortionate exacting armies of the
ideal and the causal persecute MY spirit, and I would make a
patriot stand at once to vanquish the invaders of my peace. I write
these things only to be quit of them, and not to let the crowd
increase,--I have conceived a plan to destroy them all, as Jehu and
Elijah with the priests of Baal; I feel Malthusian among my mental
nurslings; a dire resolve has filled me to effect a premature
destruction of the literary populace superfætating in my brain,--plays,
novels, essays, tales, homilies, and rhythmicals; for ethics and
poetics, politics and rhetorics, will I display no more mercy than
sundry commentators of maltreated Aristotle. I will exhibit them in
their state chaotic,--I will addle the eggs, and the chicken shall not
chirp,--I will reveal, and secrets shall not waste me; I will write, and
thoughts shall not batten on me."
The whole volume, as before-mentioned, is an epitome or quintessence of
more than thirty works,--perhaps the best being "The Prior of Marrick,"
a story of idolatry; "Anti-Xurion," a crusade against razors; and "The
Author's Tribunal," an oration; but I confess, not having looked at the
book since my hair was black (and now it is snow-white), and considering
that I wrote it forty-five years ago, I am surprised to find how well
worth reading is my old Author's Mind. It may some day attain a
resurrection: possibly even, in more than the skeleton form of its
present appearance, muscles and skin being added, in a detailed filling
up and finishing of these mere sketches, if only time and opportunity
were given to me. But I much fear at my time of life that my Tragedy of
Nero must remain unwritten, as also my Novel of Charlotte Clopton, and
that thrilling Handbook of the Marvellous; not to mention my abortive
Epic of Home, and sundry essays, satires, and other lucubrations which,
alas! may now be considered addled eggs. In a last word, I somewhat
vaingloriously claim for authorship, as thus:--
_The Cathedral Mind._
"Temple of truths most eloquently spoken,
Shrine of sweet thoughts veil'd round with words of power,
The Author's Mind in all its hallowed riches
Stands a Cathedral; full of precious things--
Tastefully built in harmonies unbroken,
Cloister and aisle, dark crypt and aery tower;
Long-treasured relics in the fretted niches
And secret stores, and heaped-up offerings,
Art's noblest wealth with Nature's fruit and flower.
Paintings and Sculpture, Summer's best, and Spring's,
Its plenitude of pride and praise betoken;
An ever-burning lamp shines in its soul;
Deep music all around enchantment flings;
And God's great Presence consecrates the whole!"
Probabilities.
In this our day, Agnosticism, if not avowed Atheism, seems to be making
great way, and destroying the happiness of thousands. It may be a truth,
though partly an unpleasant one, that "he has no faith who never had a
doubt," even as "he has no hope who never had a fear." Well, in my short
day and in my own small way I seem to have been through everything, and
there was a time when I was much worried with uninvited difficulties and
involuntary unbeliefs. Such troublesome thoughts seemed to come to me
without my wish or will,--and stayed too long with me for my peace:
however, I searched them out and fought them down, and cleared my brain
of such poisonous cobwebs by writing my "Probabilities, an Aid to
Faith;" a small treatise on the antecedent likelihood of everything that
has happened, which did me great good while composing it, and has (to my
happy knowledge from many grateful letters) enlightened and comforted
hundreds of unwilling misbelievers. The book, after four editions, has
now long been out of print; however, certainly I still wish it was in
the hands of modern sceptics for their good. The scheme of the treatise
is briefly this: I begin by showing the antecedent probability of the
being of a God, then of His attributes, and by inference from His
probable benevolence, of His becoming a Creator: then that the created
being inferior to His perfection might fall, in which event His
benevolence would find a remedy. But what remedy? That Himself should
pay the penalty, and effect a full redemption. How? By becoming a
creature, and so lifting up the race to Himself through so generous a
condescension. I show that it was antecedently probable that the
Divinity should come in humble form, not to paralyse our reason by
outward glories,--that He might even die as a seeming malefactor; this
was the guess of Socrates: and that for the trial of our faith there are
likely to be permitted all manner of difficulties and mysteries for us
to gain personal strength by combating and living them down. Many other
topics are touched in this suggestive little treatise, whereanent a few
critiques are available; as thus, "The author has done good service to
religion by this publication: it will shake the doubts of the sceptical,
strengthen the trust of the wavering, and delight the faith of the
confirmed. As its character becomes known, it will deservedly fill a
high place in the estimation of the Christian world."--_Britannia._ And
similarly of other English journals, while the Americans were equally
favourable. Take this characteristic instance, one of many: the
_Brooklyn Eagle_ maintains that "the author is one of the rare men of
the age; he turns up thoughts as with a plough on the sward of
monotonous usage." And _Hunt's Magazine_, New York, commends "this
reasoning with the sceptical, showing that if they consider
probabilities simply, then all the great doctrines of our faith might
reasonably be expected."
* * * * *
An extract from the book itself, as out of print, may be acceptable, the
more so that it takes a new and true view (as I apprehend) of Job and
his restored prosperity:--
"One or two thoughts respecting Job's trial. That he should at last give
way was only probable: he was, in short, another Adam, and had another
fall, albeit he wrestled nobly. Worthy was he to be named among God's
chosen three, 'Noah, Daniel, and Job,' and worthy that the Lord should
bless his latter end. This word brings me to the point I wish to touch
on,--the great compensation which God gave to Job. Children can never be
regarded as other than individualities, and notwithstanding Eastern
feelings about increase in quantity, its quality is, after all, the
question for the heart. I mean that many children to be born is but an
inadequate return for many children dying. If a father loses a
well-beloved son, it is small recompense of that aching void that he
gets another. For this reason of the affections, and because I suppose
that thinkers have sympathised with me in the difficulty, I wish to say
a word about Job's children lost and found. It will clear away what is
to some minds a moral and affectionate objection. Now this is the state
of the case.
"The patriarch is introduced to us as possessing so many camels and
oxen, and so forth, and ten children. All these are represented to him
by witnesses, to all appearance credible, as dead; and he mourns for his
great loss accordingly. Would not a merchant feel to all intents and
purposes a ruined man, if he received a clear intelligence from
different parts of the world at once that all his ships and warehouses
had been destroyed by hurricanes and fire? Faith given, patience
follows: and the trial is morally the same, whether the news be true or
false.
"Remarkably enough, after the calamitous time is past, when the good man
of Uz is discerned as rewarded by heaven for his patience by the double
of everything once lost--his children remain the same in number, ten. It
seems to me quite possible that neither camels, &c., nor children,
really had been killed. Satan might have meant it so, and schemed it;
and the singly coming messengers believed it all, as also did the
well-enduring Job. But the scriptural word does not go to say that these
things happened; but that certain emissaries said they happened. I think
the devil missed his mark--that the messengers were scared by some
abortive diabolic efforts; and that (with a natural increase of camels,
&c., meanwhile) the patriarch's paternal heart was more than compensated
at the last by the restoration of his own dear children. They were dead,
and are alive again; they were lost, and are found. Like Abraham
returning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was the resurrection in a
figure.
"If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job were
real, therefore similarly real must be all his other evils; I reply,
that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental; in the
other, bodily. In the latter case, positive personal pain was the gist
of the matter--in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind
be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction
as the children's deaths amount to. God's mercy may well have allowed
the evil one to overreach himself; and when the restoration came, how
double was the joy of Job over these ten dear children!
"Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job
at the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has
ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth,--I must, in answer,
think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us as the verity of it would
have been to Job. Affection, human affection, is not so numerically nor
vicariously consoled--and it is, perhaps, worth while here to have
thrown out (what I suppose to be) a new view of the case, if only to
rescue such wealth as children from the infidel's sneer of being
confounded with such wealth as camels. Moreover, such a paternal reward
was anteriorly more probable."