TWO LETTERS OF PAREPIDEMUS.

(Published in ‘Putnam’s Monthly,’ New York, for July and August 1853.)

LETTERS OF PAREPIDEMUS

I.

My dear Sir,—I left this country as nearly as possible (next June, I believe, will complete it) one quarter of a century back, to go to school. I was sent ‘home,’ as they called it—that is, away from home, to the land which my parents, and, I presume, yours also, long ago belonged to—to be educated.

Does one get educated in twenty-five years, I wonder? The wisest of the seven wise men of Greece describes to us how that he

Each day grew older and learnt something new.

And, since the something new may possibly contradict, and will assuredly modify, the everything not so new before it, at what age may one consider oneself entitled, for example, to write letters in print to the editor of a magazine? At what figure does one attain one’s real majority and right of speech? How soon may one venture to affirm anything which everybody else does not already know and believe? And, in the meantime, is there any good in talking merely to be assented to? Is it so agreeable an exercise on the part of the reader to express mentally to himself that assent? If agreeable, is it therefore useful? ‘Were it not better done as others use?’ to follow the plough or the ledger, to find a Neæra in agriculture, or an Amaryllis in commerce? ‘What boots it, with incessant care, to tend the slighted’ bookmaker’s trade, ‘and strictly meditate the thankless muse’ of magazines? Will posterity know anything of our miserably imperfect, impotent fugitive verses, or contemporaneity be none the worse for them? Are we not most likely corrupting the pure taste which would otherwise turn with a natural appetite to Shakspeare and Milton, to Addison and Goldsmith, to Virgil and Homer? Goethe, I have heard, said not long before his death, that had he known ere he began writing how many good books there were in the world before, he would never have written a word.

There is one thing, indeed, I think one might do, could one only believe that one could. No so certain a way of learning the merit of a great picture as an attempt to copy it or represent something like it. And as we, if we look to it and take pains, may by our indifferent writing learn to appreciate the worth and merit of great writers, whom before we thought but little of, so it is also possible that our faithful, though small attempts, may help people to appreciate the great originals.

Every new age has something new in it—takes up a new position; the view presented by the writers of an anterior age is not readily seized, or adopted by those born in a later century. It may, I think, be one good work attainable to the efforts of the humble, modern littérateur, to elevate and direct to the noblest objects the tastes and enjoyments of his contemporaries. He holds a position common with them: he may avail himself of this for their edification. As the traveller who knows the country will show his less experienced companion at each new stage, each further remove, under changed aspects, the high mountain points they are retiring from; will point out the Mont Blanc whose shadow they stood in at Chamouni, in its full magnificent outline at Sallanches, and again, far distant, yet not less rose-tinged, at sunset from Geneva, so the writers (that is, or should be, the more instructed readers) of each new century may successively restore each successive generation to connection with the teachers of the past. Such is a possible function for a writer. Do twenty-five years educate one, I wonder, for this—twenty-five years of the universal slovenly habits of writing, speaking, hearing, thinking, remembering, which pervade our time? ‘Twenty-five years have I spent in learning,’ said the young man to the old. ‘Return,’ said the sage, ‘and spend another twenty-five in unlearning.’ ‘Each day grow older and unlearn something’—is this to be our other reading of Solon’s maxim? Alas! it would seem there is need of it. We submit ourselves for instruction to teachers, and they teach us (or is it our awkwardness that we learn from them?) their faults and mistakes. Each new age and each new year has its new direction; and we go to the well-informed of the season before ours, to be put by them in the direction which, because right for their time, is therefore not quite right for ours.

Upon the water in a boat,

I sit and sketch as there we float;

The scene is fair, the stream is strong,

I sketch it as we float along.

The stream is strong, and as I sit

And view the picture that we quit,

It flows and flows, and bears the boat,

And I sit sketching as we float.

Still as we go, the things I see,

E’en as I see them, cease to be,

The angles shift, and with the boat

The whole perspective seems to float.

Each pointed height, each wavy line,

To new and other forms combine;

Proportions change and colours fade,

And all the landscape is remade.

Depicted—neither far nor near,

And larger there and smaller here,

And partly old, and partly new,

E’en I can hardly think it true.

Yet still I look, and still I sit,

Adjusting, shaping, altering it;

And still the current bears the boat

And me, still sketching as we float.

Did I really read or only dream somewhere that anecdote of an elderly painter, who, going over one day, with a friend of his youth, who had known him in his prime and promise, a series of his popular and most admired pieces, said mournfully, ‘All these poor, unmeaning, ill-designed, half-executed things, I have made to earn bread and time to do that,’ pointing to a chaotic, unfinished canvas at the end of the room, ‘and that, after all, is as bad as any of them.’ ‘This also,’ saith the Preacher, ‘is a sore evil that I have seen under the sun.’

To grow old, therefore, learning and unlearning, is such the conclusion? Conclusion or no conclusion, such, alas! appears to be our inevitable lot, the fixed ordinance of the life we live. The cruel king Tarchetius gave his daughters a web to weave, upon the completion of which he said they should get married; and what these involuntary Penelopes did in the daytime, servants by his orders undid at night. A hopeless and a weary work, indeed, especially for young people desirous to get married.

Weaving and unweaving, learning and unlearning, learning painfully, painfully unlearning, under the orders of the cruel king Tarchetius, behold—are we to say, ‘our life’? ‘Every new lesson,’ saith the Oriental proverb, ‘is another grey hair; and time will pluck out this also.’ And what saith the Preacher? ‘I, the Preacher, was King over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under the heavens; this sore travail hath God given to the sons of men to be exercised therewith.’ Perchè pensa? Pensando s’invecchia,’ said the young, unthinking Italian to the grave German sitting by him in the diligence, whose name was Goethe. Is it true?

To spend uncounted years of pain

Again, again, and yet again,

In working out in heart and brain

The problem of our being here;

To gather facts from far and near;

Upon the mind to hold them clear,

And, knowing more may yet appear,

Unto one’s latest breath to fear

The premature result to draw,—

Is this the object, end, and law

And purpose of our being here?

Nevertheless, to say something, to talk to one’s fellow-creatures, to relieve oneself by a little exchange of ideas, is there no good, is there no harm, in that? Prove to the utmost the imperfection of our views, our thoughts, our conclusions; yet you will not have established the uselessness of writing.

Most true, indeed, by writing we relieve ourselves, we unlearn; it is the one best recipe for facilitating that needful process.

Each day write something, and unlearn it so.

Most true, indeed! The observations that we can make nothing of, the maxims that have ceased to be serviceable to us, our spent theories, our discarded hypotheses, the wit that has become stale to us, the wisdom that has grown fusty with us, the imaginations that molest us, the illhumours that fret us, our follies, fancies, falsities; oh, happy relief!—away with them to the magazine!

Yes, methinks I see it so, through the long series of ages. The ‘Iliad’ is but the scum of the mind of Homer, and Plato’s dialogues the refuse of his thought. Who that reads the ‘Odyssey’ perceives not that it is an act of penitence for the ‘Iliad,’ and feels not that, had the poet lived, the ‘Odyssey’ also would have had its Palinode? In the divine eloquence of Plato there are intonations in which I hear him saying to me, ‘You know I don’t quite mean all this.’

Alas! ’tis true I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view,

is the Great Dramatist’s profoundest feeling about himself, his doings, his sayings, his writings. Virgil bade his ‘Æneid’ be burnt; and what we read as his is not his deliberate word, but that of Varius and Tucca. As Rousseau, it is said, in his old age, smiled sadly at the fervent disciples of the ‘Social Contract,’ the ‘Émile,’ and the ‘Julie’; so, doubt it not, did greater than Rousseau. So felt Raphael of his paintings, and Phidias of his sculptures; Michael Angelo, also, of his Pantheon suspended in the heavens. Dante, from some strange region of the spiritual spaces, looks down, half scorn, half remorse, on the worshippers of the Divine Comedy of his human spleen and bitterness. Cervantes laughs aloud to hear philosophers discriminate the pure reason in Don Quixote and the understanding in Sancho; and Montaigne, with open eyes of more than mortal wonder, repeats his ‘Que sçais-je?’ at the sight of grave worshippers of his levities. May it not be true that when I quote from Milton, a shade of severe vexation darkens his spiritual features, and when I repeat the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, an ethereal frown contracts the immortal forehead of the Preacher?

You are feeding, oh you students of Greek and lovers of Latin, you that add to your German, French, and to your French, Italian and Spanish, you inquirers afar off into Persian and Sanscrit, you devotees of Chaucer and votaries of Shakspeare and Milton—you are feeding upon that, precisely, which was tried by these wise men of old and found wanting. You stand picking up the dross where those before you have carried away the gold; you are swallowing as truth what they put away from them—expressed, because it was false or insufficient.

Or is this, peradventure, confined to our own weaker selves, our more impatient, irretentive, unthoughtful age? For, certainly, my dear sir, what you and I and the young people read in any modern page is, in the manner aforestated, ‘the thing that is not.’ Each striking new novel does but reveal a theory of life and action which its writer is anxious to be rid of; each enthusiastic address or oration is but that which its speaker is just beginning to feel disgusted with. Oh! happy and happy again, and thrice happy relief to the writer; but to the reader——?

Said the Tree to the Children, ‘How can you go and pick up those dirty dead leaves I have thrown away?’ Said the Children to the Tree, ‘Will you grow us any better next year?’ Said the Tree to the Children, ‘What! are you positively going to put into your mouths those horrid things (fruit, do you call it?) that have fallen from my branches?’ Said the Children to the Tree, ‘Why, they are very nice.’ Said the Tree then to itself, ‘Suppose I were to restrain myself next spring, and not grow any leaves, and to suppress, ascetically, all tendencies to blossom? Should I not then produce something better? By all that is wise and moral I will try.’ Said the Springtime six months after to the Tree, ‘My dear Tree, that is out of the question.’ The Children came again the next fall, and the Tree made no remark.

An illustration, however, is not the same thing as an argument; though sometimes, indeed, it may be better. It is a game, in any case, for two to play at. For it is also told of the Phœnix, that, having reached its term of years it proceeded to Arabia, and built up carefully its pyre of odoriferous combustibles, and sat down to expect the new birth. But when the fire began to kindle, and the odoriferous sticks crackled, the odours indeed were beautiful (ornithologists, however, are uncertain whether the Phœnix has any sense of smell), the flame meantime was most undoubtedly painful in the extreme when it got within the feathers (the Phœnix, there is no question, has the sense of touch). The Phœnix started up and exclaimed to itself, ‘Oh! surely, surely, I am young again now!’ ‘Sit still, sit still, poor Phœnix; not till pain has deprived thee of the very sense of pain, not until thought and self-consciousness are burnt out and out of thee—not, by many pangs, yet—is the new creature born in thee!’ with which exhortation the story concludes.

And with which illustration, upon which side, my dear sir, is the truth, or the most of the truth? ‘As the leaves are, so are the lives of men;’ and so also their writings? Shall we yield to the promptings of nature, and let the eager sap aspire forth in germination, and the leaflets open out, and display themselves, to fall from us dead and uncomely in November? Or shall we burn slowly, in silence, that hereafter something better may be born of us? Quien sabe?

Was it the silence or the speech of previous ages that formed the more perfect writers? Was Perugino necessary to Raphael, or had Raphael been more himself without him? Some function, indeed, higher than that of mere self-relief, we must conceive of for the writer. To sum up the large experience of ages, to lay the finger on yet unobserved, or undiscovered, phenomena of the inner universe, something we can detect of these in the spheric architecture of St. Peter’s, in the creative touches of the ‘Tempest.’

Imperfect, no doubt, both this and that is; short of the better thing to come—the real thing that is. Yet not impotent, not wholly unavailing.

In conclusion, will you let me offer you the last ‘modern invocation’ to the poet—shall we say in modern phrase—of the future? ‘Come, poet, come’—no, I will trouble you only with a few verses at the end:—

In vain I seem to call, and yet

Think not the living years forget:

Ages of heroes fought and fell,

That Homer, in the end, might tell;

O’er grovelling generations past

The Doric column rose at last.

A thousand hearts on thousand years

Had wasted labour, hopes, and fears,

Knells, laughters, and unmeaning tears,

Ere England Shakspeare saw, or Rome,

The pure perfection of her dome.

Others, I doubt not, if not we,

The issue of our toils shall see;

Young children gather as their own

The harvest that the dead have sown—

The dead, forgotten and unknown.

Let me sign myself, my dear sir (as we are all ‘strangers and pilgrims,’ so myself in an especial sense),

Your faithful and obliged
Parepidemus.

II.

My dear Sir,—Do people in general, upon this side of the great water, read Homer? Virgil, I know, in some parts of the Union, is a lady’s book; nor is there, I think, any ancient author that better deserves the honour. But the man’s book, Homer? It is not every boy that learns Greek; and not all who learn Greek read through the whole forty-eight books of the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’ Is Pope much studied? I should fancy not: and, indeed, though one is glad to hear any one say that he has, in the past tense, read that ingenious composition, it is not easy to bid any one, in the future, go and read it. And, if not Pope, whom can we recommend? Chapman is barbarous, dissonant, obsolete, incorrect. In Hobbes there are two good lines, well known, but they cannot be repeated too often—

And like a star upon her bosom, lay

His beautiful and shining golden head.

(They are of Astyanax in the arms of his mother; and how that first of English prosaists was inspired with them remains a problem to all generations.) Cowper, who could read, however much enjoined to it? In short there neither is, nor has been, nor in all probability ever will be, anything like a translation. And the whole Anglo-Saxon world of the future will, it is greatly to be feared, go forth upon its way, clearing forests, building clippers, weaving calicoes, and annexing Mexicos, accomplishing its natural manifest destiny, and subsiding into its primitive aboriginal ignorance. Accomplishing our manifest destiny! to be, that is, the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ to the human race in general; and then, peradventure, when the wood has all been hewn, and the water drawn, to cease to exist, to be effaced from the earth we have subdued—

Fear no more the heat of the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages,

Thou thine earthly task hast done,

Homeward gone, and ta’en thy wages.

To cease to exist, to vanish, to give place, in short, to some nobler kind of men, in whose melodious and flexible form of speech the old Homer will have a chance of reappearing unimpaired, or possibly some new Homer singing the wrath of another Achilles and the wanderings of a wiser Ulysses.

Fiat voluntas! Let us go forward to our manifest destiny with content, or at least resignation, and bravely fill up the trench, which our nobler successors may thus be able to pass.

In the meantime, various attempts in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ and elsewhere, have been made in the last few years at rendering Homer in modern English hexameter verse. We venture to pronounce them unsuccessful. It is not an easy thing to make readable English hexameters at all; not an easy thing even in the freedom of original composition, but a very hard one, indeed, amid the restrictions of faithful translation. Mr. Longfellow has gained, and has charmed, has instructed in some degree, and attuned the ears of his countrymen and countrywomen (in literature we may be allowed to say), upon both sides of the Atlantic, to the flow and cadence of this hitherto unacceptable measure. Yet the success of ‘Evangeline’ was owing not more, we think, to the author’s practised skill in versification than to his judgment in the choice of his material. Even his powers, we believe, would fail to obtain a wide popularity for a translation even from a language so nearly akin to our own as the German. In Greek, where grammar, inflection, intonation, idiom, habit, character, and genius are all most alien, the task is very much more hopeless.

Moreover, in another point, it may be right to turn the ‘Louise’ of Voss and the ‘Herman and Dorothea’ of Goethe into corresponding modern so-called hexameters. If the verse is clumsy in our rendering, so was it to begin with in the original. If no high degree of elegance is attained, no high degree of elegance was there to be lost.

But in Greek there seems really hardly a reason for selecting this in preference to some readier, more native, and popular form of verse. Certainly the easy flowing couplets of Chaucer, the melodious blank verse of Shakspeare, or some improved variety of ballad metre, such as Mr. Frere used in translating the ‘Cid,’ would be, on the whole, not less like the original music of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ than that which we listen to with pleasure in ‘Evangeline,’ and read without much trouble in the ‘Herman and Dorothea.’ Homer’s rounded line, and Virgil’s smooth verse, were both of them (after more puzzling about it than the matter deserves, I have convinced myself) totally unlike those lengthy, straggling, irregular, uncertain slips of prose mesurée which we find it so hard to measure, so easy to read in half a dozen ways, without any assurance of the right one, and which, since the days of Voss, the Gothic nations consider analogous to classic hexameter.

Lend me, if you can spare them for a moment or two my dear sir, your ears, and tell me, honour bright, is

Conticuere omnes, intentique ora tenebant

the same thing as

Hab’ich den Markt und die Strasse doch nicht so einsam gesehen

Were I to interpolate in a smooth passage of ‘Evangeline’ a verse from the ‘Georgies’ or the ‘Æneid,’ would they go together?

Is the following a metrical sequence?

Thus, in the ancient time the smooth Virgilian verses

Fell on the listening ear of the Roman princes and people.

Ut belli signum Laurenti Turnus ab arce.

There is one line, one example of the smooth Virgilian verses, which perhaps Mr. Longfellow would have allowed himself to use, and his readers consented to accept, as a real hexameter.

Spargens humida mella soporiferumque papaver,

might, perhaps have been no more objected to than

Tous les Bourgeois de Chartres et le carillon de Dunkerque.

Yet even this most exceptionable form, with its special aim at expressing, by an adaptation of sound to sense, the

Scattering of liquid honeys and soporiferous poppy,

is a model of condensation, brevity, smoothness, and netteté, compared with that sprawling bit of rhythmical prose into which I have turned it.

But we are going to be learned, my dear sir; so I release your kind ears, and beg you will no longer trouble either yourself or them—but, some one, I foresee, of the numerous well-instructed future readers of this private correspondence will interpose with his or her objection, and will tell me, You read your Latin verse wrongly, you don’t put the stress upon the ictus—you should pronounce Virgil like Evangeline, Evangeline is the true hexameter; in Virgil the colloquial accent which you follow was lost in the accent of verse. The Romans of old read it, not

Ut bélli signum Laurénti Túrnus ab árce.

but

Ut belli signúm.

O dear! and can you, courteous and well-instructed reader, positively read your ‘Georgics’ or ‘Æneid’ in that way? Do you, as a habit, scan as you go along? Do you not feel it very awkward, must not the Romans also have felt it rather awkward, to pass so continually and violently from the ordinary to the sing-song accentuation? And if, as I think you must allow, there was some awkwardness in it, why is it that Virgil, and the other good versifiers, so constantly prefer that form of verse in which this awkwardness most appears? Why is

Spárgens húmida mélla, soporíférúmque papáver,

where there is no such difficulty, a rare form, and ‘Ut bélli sígnum,’ where there is, a common and favourite one? Do you know, I shall venture to assert, that in the Latin language the system of accentuation was this, which enjoined the awkwardness you complain of; the separation, in general, of the colloquial and the metrical accent, the very opposite of that which we observe, who, unless the two coincide, think the verse bad. Enough of this, however.

Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past—come back, my dear sir, we will talk no more prosody—only just allow me to recite to you a few verses of metaphrase, as they used to say, from the ‘Odyssey’; constructed as nearly as may be upon the ancient principle; quantity, so far as, in our forward-rushing, consonant-crushing, Anglo-savage enunciation—long and short can in any kind be detected, quantity attended to in the first place, and care also bestowed, in the second, to have the natural accents very frequently laid upon syllables which the metrical reading depresses.

The aged Nestor, sitting among his sons at Pylos, is telling Telemachus, who has come from Ithaca to ask tidings of his father, how, after the taking of Troy, the insolence and violence of the Achæans called down upon them the displeasure of the Father of the Gods and the stern blue-eyed virgin, his daughter. Agamemnon and Meneläus, flushed with wine, quarrelled openly in an assembly held at sunset, which broke up in disorder and tumult; the leaders, some of them, staying behind to please Agamemnon; others, drawing down their ships without delay and sailing off with Ulysses, came as far as Tenedos, and then turned again back. But I, says Nestor—

But I, with my ships in a body, the whole that obeyed me,

Fled, well perceiving that wrath was rising against us;

Tydides also fled with me, his company calling;

Later, upon our track followed the yellow Meneläus;

In Lesbos found us, debating there of the long voyage,

Were we to sail, to wit, by this side of rocky Chios,

Making for Psyrie-isle, Chios being kept to the larboard,

Or to the far side Chios along by the windy Mimante.

Will this sort of thing please the modern ear? It is to be feared not. It is too late a day in this nineteenth century to introduce a new principle, however good, into modern European verse. We must be content, perhaps, in this, as in other and higher matters, to take things as we find them, and make the best we can of them. You, I dare say, my dear sir, though perhaps no great lover of hexameters at all, will prefer to my laboured Homerics the rough-and-ready Anglo-savage lines that follow. They render the prayer of Achilles when he is sending out Patroclus with the Myrmidons to check the victory of the Trojans.

Dodonëan, Pelasgican Zeus, up in heaven above us,

King of Dodona, the stormy and cold, where thy Selli attend thee,

Barefoot, that wash not their feet, whose bed is the earth, thy expounders—

Once when I prayed thee before, thou gavest me all my petition,

Gavest me honour, and greatly afflicted the host of Achaia;

Even so now too, Zeus, fulfil my prayer and petition;

I am myself staying here, alone in the midst of my vessels.

But I am sending my friend, and the Myrmidon people about him,

Into the battle: O Zeus, Wide-Seër, accord to him honour,

Strengthen, embolden the heart in his breast; that Hector to-day may

See whether my companion has skill of his own for the battle,

Or is invincible only, when I too enter the onset.

And when the might of his hand shall have driven the war from the galleys,

Then let him come back safe to me by the side of my vessels,

Unhurt bringing me home my arms and all my companions.

So in his prayer he spoke; and the Zeus, the Counsellor, heard him:

Granted him half his desire; but half the Father denied him;

Granted him that his friend should drive the war and the onset

Back from the galleys; denied him his safe return from the battle.

Here, in a milder mood, the poet, for the conclusion of his first book, describes the ‘easy living’ gods:—

So the live-long day they thus were unto the sunset

Feasting; neither did heart lack ever a portion of banquet,

Nor lack ever the lyre, sweet-toned, in the hand of Apollo,

Nor the muses, in turn singing sweetly with beautiful voices.

But as soon as the shining light of the sun had descended,

They, to lay them down, went every one to his chamber,

Where for each one a house the far-famed Worker with both hands,

Even Hephœstus, had made with the skill of his understanding.

Zeus also to his bed, the Olympian flasher of lightning,

Where he was wont before, when slumber sweet came upon him—

Thither gone-up was sleeping, the white-armed Heera beside him.

The best translations of Homer into this verse which I am acquainted with are those by Mr. Lockhart and Dr. Hawtrey, in the little oblong-quarto collection of English Hexameters. Yet, after all——!

At any rate—

My dear sir, here is a chapter, which, be it for better or worse is

From beginning to end about hexameter verses;

Could they but jingle a little, ’twere better, perhaps; but the trouble

Really is endless, of hunting for rhymes that have all to be double.

Adieu, till the next time, when either in prose or in rhyme I

Haply may find something better to gossip about in a letter.

In the meanwhile, my dear sir, till writing again may beseem us,

I am, your faithful, obliged, and obedient,

Parepidemus.

A PASSAGE UPON OXFORD STUDIES:
EXTRACTED FROM A REVIEW OF THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY
COMMISSIONERS’ REPORT, 1852.

(Published in the ‘North American Review’ for April 1853,
Vol. lxxvi., No 159.)

‘I went to Oxford from the sixth form (the highest class) of a public school. I had at that time read all Thucydides, except the sixth and seventh books; the six first books of Herodotus; the early books of each author I had done at least three times over. I had read five plays, I think, of Sophocles, four of Æschylus—several of these two or three times over; four, perhaps, or five, of Euripides; considerable portions of Aristophanes; nearly all the “Odyssey”; only about a third of the “Iliad,” but that several times over; one or two dialogues of Plato—the “Phædo,” I remember, was one; not quite all Virgil; all Horace; a good deal of Livy and Tacitus; a considerable portion of Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” and two or three books of his “Ethics”; besides, of course, other things. I mention these, because they have to do with Oxford. I had been used to do my very best in translating in the class. We were not marked; but expressions of approbation, graduated carefully, and invariably given by the rule so formed, were quite sure to let every boy know how he had done his part. The more diligent used to listen with eagerness for note and comment; the idlest amongst us were considerably afraid of reprimand. We were wont, moreover, to do three long original exercises every week, out of school. These were looked over with us singly, and marked by a regular scale. To fall below 26 I used to consider latterly a disgrace; to attain 28, a very great piece of honour. I knew perfectly well when I did ill, and when I did well.

‘No words, not even those of Mr. Lowe, can express the amount of the change which I experienced on entering the lecture-rooms of my college—though confessedly one of the very best in Oxford—and on embarking upon the course of University study. Had I not read pretty nearly all the books? Was I to go on, keeping up my Latin prose writers, for three years more? Logic and Ethics had some little novelty; there was a little extra scholarship to be obtained in some of the college lectures. But that was the utmost. I should have wished to take to Mathematics, which I had hitherto rather neglected; but Mathematics alone would not lead to a Fellowship, and I did not feel any certainty that I could stand the strain of work for a “Double-First.” I had been pretty well sated of distinctions and competitions at school; I would gladly have dispensed with anything more of success in this kind, always excepting the 200l. a year of the Fellowship. What I wanted was to sit down to happy, unimpeded prosecution of some new subject or subjects; surely, there was more in the domain of knowledge than that Latin and Greek which I had been wandering about in for the last ten years. Surely, there were other accomplishments to be mastered, besides the composition of Iambics and Ciceronian prose. If there were, however, they existed not for me. There were the daily lectures in the morning, which I did not like to miss (and, indeed, could hardly have missed to any profitable extent); nor yet, if I attended them, to neglect to prepare for them. The daily lectures now, and the weary re-examination in classics three years ahead! An infinite lassitude and impatience, which I saw reflected in the faces of others, quickly began to infect me. Quousque Latin prose? Though we should gain by it prizes and honours academical, beyond all academical example, it would not the less certainly be a mere shame and waste of strength to make the effort. I did go on, for duty’s sake, and for discipline and docility, sadly doing Latin prose; but, except in docility, profiting but little. Could I only have hoped to get through the whole business in a year or a year and a half’s time, and then to be free to do what, before that is over, one never does, study! Some pleasure, too, there would have been, even in that old Greek and Latin, could one but have been free to pasture freely, following a natural instinct, upon its fairly extensive field. But no; if one did anything, one must “get up” the books for the schools, and they were—three years ahead. Even the present alteration in the statute, by which the suffering pilgrim is allowed to lay down a portion of his classical burden at the feet of the examiners, at the end of the second year, appears to me insufficient; ever so much classics and theology still remain behind, to be carried on, as before, to the end of the third year. No proper emancipation, no true admission to the rights of manly reading, is given, until the moment when, for most, it comes too late.

‘The masters of the public schools have, it is true, been in fault; they have pushed on their pupils too hastily; have prepared them prematurely for the ultimate honours of the degree; have neglected the “Æneid” and the “Iliad” for the sake of Aristophanes and the Ethics. Yet it is true, nevertheless, that this very examination in Ethics, &c., used to be passed, not so many years ago, by young men not a bit older than the boys at the top of the public schools. Arnold took his First at nineteen, Peel his “Double-First” at twenty. Surely, after the age of nineteen or twenty, it is really time that this schoolboy love of racing, this empty competition, should be checked. There is less, a great deal, at Oxford than at Cambridge; but there is a great deal too much at Oxford. For the preliminary discipline of boys, I grant it to be needful; to carry it forward into the very years of legal manhood, appears to me a most foolish and ill-advised innovation. The existing change I cannot account sufficient; every one, as before, must do his literæ humaniores. Still, if four substantial departments were once really and fairly established for the third year, I am happy in the belief that no one would think so very much of high honours in any one of them. Examinations are useful things, and the stricter they are the better; and the results, I suppose, can hardly be made public without some honour attending them. But by the great principle, “divide et impera,” we shall, I hope, over-power much of this pernicious distinction. We shall be able to prove to young men whether they really know what they think they know, without declaring them (dî meliora!), to themselves and all the world, to be the cleverest men in Oxford. Examinations, I repeat, are essential; but no examinations will do much good unless there be, independent and irrespective of them, a real inward taste, and liking, and passion, shall I say, not for competitive effort and distinction, but for study, and the subjects themselves of study. Examinations are sadly apt to impair this spring of happy spontaneity; honos, indeed, alít artes, but not that honour which attends the success of the race-horse; which testifies to a mere personal and comparative superiority. Far more grateful and of far higher value than any such popular plaudit, is to the faithful student, the strictly plain and severely true ascertainment, not of whom he has beat, but of what he has done: the real desideratum for him is the exact and well-considered verdict of an accomplished judge of details; to details and separate branches, therefore—not to aggregates of studies, but to distinct studies—should examinations be applied. Quot homines, tot studia; quot studia, tot examinationes: Have as many as you please; the more they are in number, the less imposing they are singly; multiply them indefinitely. Only, of all Senior Wranglers, Medallists, and even “Double-First,” let us be fairly and finally rid.’

EXTRACTS FROM A REVIEW OF A WORK ENTITLED
‘CONSIDERATIONS ON SOME RECENT SOCIAL THEORIES.’

(Published in the ‘North American Review’ for July 1853,
Vol. lxxvii., No. 160.)

Our author begins with the vague declamations, rather than positions, which have lately been current in Europe—‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,’ ‘God and the People,’ ‘Direct Popular Government,’ ‘The Universal Republic,’ and the like. Several of these he sums up in the old formula, Vox populi vox Dei, and devotes his first chapter to the question of its correctness. The high doctrine proclaimed by the fervid Italian leader, of the supreme ‘authority of the people as the collective perpetual interpreter of the will of God,’ finds but little favour with him. Who and what, he asks, is this ‘Royal priesthood,’ this ‘Peculiar people’?

We cannot, indeed, any more than our author, soar to the high modern Mazzinian acceptation of the ancient maxim. Those who use it should, at any rate, we think, temper it in application by the rule,

Nec deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus;

and may, perhaps, find their advantage in collating it with another significant dictum which tells us that at times

Sua cuique deus fit dira cupido;

a people can be the slave of cupidity and resentment; a people can be pusillanimous, dastardly, and base; a people can be also fiendishly inhuman; the fears and passions of a people, when once excited, are more hopelessly irrational, more wildly uncontrollable, more extensively ruinous, more appallingly terrible, than those of councils and kings. Nevertheless, depravation and barbarism apart, in an average state of society, a state such as we hope and believe in for the future, it may be true that the common impulses and plain feelings of the people may be expected to be honest and good. Great questions, that must go back for their solution to natural instincts and unconscious first principles, may refer themselves to the popular voice. In such cases the love of routine, the narrow and rigid views, the personal interest, ambition, or indolence of officials and representatives, are likely enough to impede and retard, to mislead, pervert, and corrupt the national action. In executive details, meantime, what choice have we but to trust to individuals? A crowd of voters cannot easily study, cannot readily appreciate, the subtle and intricate circumstances which embarrass the application of principles. A complex question in arithmetic is better submitted to the computation of an accountant than to the suffrage of a town meeting. Accountants and auditors may combine to deceive, but the chances of their telling the truth are greater than those of our carrying it by acclamation. A people also, we conceive, however generous and well meaning, is apt to be a little too rough-handed to deal properly with nice points of fairness and honour and delicate questions of feeling.

A second chapter, on Liberty, the supposed principle, is followed by a third, on the projected perfect practice of it in the Universal Republic. The writer urges, with reason, that the existence of government at all presupposes a certain surrender of some portion of their freedom to do whatever they please, upon the part of those who live under it. Upon any other theory, how strange and anomalous, for example, is that constraint which, in the freest of all politics, restricts the freewill of the citizen, by requiring his submission to the vote of a majority. This regulation, he argues, all political regulations, all institutions and constitutions whatever, are not in themselves principles; they are, at their very best, extremely imperfect human expedients for attaining, in a rough way, some amount, often a very small one, of practicable common benefit. Universal suffrage is one social method, monarchy is another; as the former is sometimes best, so also sometimes is the latter. Universal suffrage would hardly do on shipboard, the rule of one is unsuitable for a club. There are times when a state is very much like a club; there are occasions when it may fitly be compared to a ship.

Before quitting these chapters we must add a few words on Liberty.

The dream and aspiration of the ardent and generous spirits of our time is for a certain royal road to human happiness. Disappointed a thousand times, they still persist in their exalted creed that there must and will be here on earth, if not now, in some future and approaching time, a state of social arrangement in which the spontaneous action and free development of each individual constituent member will combine to form ‘a vast and solemn harmony,’ the ultimate perfect movement of collective humanity. There beautiful thoughts will distil as the dew, and fair actions spring up as the green herb; there, without constraint, we shall all be good, and without trouble, happy; there, what in its imperfect form is vice, shall gently and naturally flower out into virtue; there contention and contest, control and commandment, will be the obsolete terms of a dead language, with no modern equivalents to explain them. A divine interior instinct will intimate to each single human being his fittest and highest vocation, and will prompt and inspire and guide him to fulfil it; while in the pursuit of his own free choice and in the fulfilment of his own strongest desires, he will, by the blessing of the presiding genius of humanity, best serve the true interests of society and the race.

Was it thus not long ago? For,

Ante etiam sceptrum Dictæi regis, et ante

Impia quam cæsis gens est epulata juvencis,

Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat.

O blessed ages of pure, spontaneous, unconscious, unthinking, unreasoning life and action, to you, either in the past or the future, the human heart is still fain to recur—still must dream, even though it be but a dream, of how sweet it were to grow as the green herb, and bloom as the spring flowers, to be good because we cannot be otherwise, and happy because we cannot help it. O blessed ages, indeed! But have such, since men were men, ever been? Or are such, while men are men, ever likely to come? Alas, the rude earth itself affords us admonition—

Pater ipse colendi

Haud facilem esse viam voluit, primusque per artem,

Movit agros, curis acuens mortalia corda,

Nec torpere gravi passus sua regna veterno.

And, strange as it may seem—how charming soever be spontaneity, still those who have endured coercion find a good deal also to say in favour of it.

O life! without thy chequered scene

Of right and wrong, of weal and woe,

Success and failure—could a ground

For magnanimity be found,

For faith, mid ruined hopes serene?

Or whence could virtue flow?

There are many, surely, who, looking back into their past lives, feel most thankful for those acts which came least from their own mere natural volition—can see that what did them most good was what they themselves would least have chosen; that things which, in fact, they were forced to, were, after all, the best things that ever happened to them. There are some, surely, who have had reason to bless a wholesome compulsion; there are some who prefer doing right under a master to doing nothing but enjoy themselves as their own masters; who, rather than be left to their own unaided feebleness, hesitation, and indolence, would voluntarily, for their own and the common good, enter a condition of what thenceforth would be ‘involuntary servitude.’ The mature freewill of the grown man looks back, undoubtedly, with some little regret, but also with no little scorn, upon the bygone puerile spontaneities of the time when he did as he liked.

There are periods, it is true, in the life of the individual human being, and perhaps of the collective human race, when expansion is the first of necessities. Such, it is possible, may be the present. But because we would be rid of existing restrictions, it does not follow that restriction of all kinds is an evil; because our present house is too small for us, it is not to be inferred that we shall live henceforth in the open air.

As a general rule of life and conduct, we see as yet no reason to believe that liberty, if this be its meaning, is better than service. It does not seem to be established that the system on which the things we live amongst were arranged, is that of spontaneous development, rather than of coercion met by a mixture of resistance and submission. The latter hypothesis seems intrinsically as much more elevating as the other does more agreeable. Meantime, as a matter of language, we should be inclined to reject altogether this modern sense of our old-established word Liberty. If the new theory wants a name, let it find a new one. It will but perplex and cheat us by claiming one already otherwise appropriated. When we hear people demanding liberty, we shall consider them to express their desire, not for the golden age, but either for release from some particular form of restriction, or, it may be, for a less degree of restriction in general. Liberty for us will mean either more liberty—just as, in the Black Hole of Calcutta, ‘air’ meant ‘more air’—or distinct emancipation, for example, from personal slavery, or from foreign rule. Liberty in itself is but the power of doing what we please; a power which, for all human beings, has its natural limits. We may easily, indeed, have too much or too little of it; we can only have it in degree, but without some degree of it we cannot exist.

The crying evil, as it appears to us, of the present system of unrestricted competition, is not so much the distress of the workmen as the extreme slovenliness and badness of their work. The joy and satisfaction of making really good things is destroyed by the criminal eagerness to make them to suit the market. The love of art, which, quite as much as virtue, is its own reward, used in the old times to penetrate down as far as to the meanest manufacture, of kettles, for example, and pots. With us, on the contrary, the miserable truckling to the bad taste of the multitude has gradually stolen up to the very regions of the highest art—into architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature. Nay, has it not infected even morality and religion? And do we never hear spiritual advice, which in fact bids us do as little good, and get as much applause for it, as we can; and, above all things, know the state of the market?

So far as co-operative societies or guilds would remove this evil, they would be of great use. But let it not be forgotten that the object of human society is not the mere ‘culinary’ one of securing equal apportionments of meat and drink to all its members. Men combine for some higher object; and to that higher object it is, in their social capacity, the privilege and real happiness of individuals to sacrifice themselves. The highest political watchword is not Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, nor yet Solidarity, but Service.

The true comfort to the soldiers, serving in the great industrial army of arts, commerce, and manufactures, is neither to tell them, with the Utopians, that a good time is coming, when they will have plenty of victuals and not so much to do; nor yet, with the Economists, to hold out to them the prospect of making their fortune; but to show them that what they are now doing is good and useful service to the community; to call upon them to do it well and thoroughly; and to teach them how they may; and all this quite irrespectively of any prospects either of making a fortune or living on into a good time.

We are not sure that our author would quite coincide with us in a comparative disregard of physical discomfort, privation, and suffering. Yet we think he would join us in the belief that the real want of the present time is, above all things, the distinct recognition and steady observance of a few plain, and not wholly modern, rules of morality.

It is very fine, perhaps not very difficult, to do every now and then some noble or generous act. But what is wanted of us is to do no wrong ones. It may be, for instance, in many eyes, a laudable thing to amass a colossal fortune by acts not in all cases of quite unimpeachable integrity, and then to expend it in magnificent benevolence. But the really good thing is not to make the fortune. Thorough honesty and plain undeviating integrity—these are our real needs; on these substructions only can the fabric of individual or national well-being safely be reared. ‘Other foundation can no man lay.’ Common men, who, in their petty daily acts, maintain these ordinary unostentatious truths, are the real benefactors of mankind, the real pillars of the State, are the apostles and champions of—something not to be named within a few pages of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the Solidarity of the Peoples, and the Universal Republic.

NOTES ON THE RELIGIOUS TRADITION.[23]

It is impossible for any scholar to have read, and studied, and reflected without forming a strong impression of the entire uncertainty of history in general, and of the history of Christianity in particular.

It is equally impossible for any man to live, act, and reflect without feeling the significance and depth of the moral and religious teaching which passes amongst us by the name of Christianity.

The more a man feels the value, the true import of this, the more will he hesitate to base it upon those foundations which as a scholar he feels to be unstable. Manuscripts are doubtful, records may be unauthentic, criticism is feeble, historical facts must be left uncertain.

Even in like manner my own personal experience is most limited, perhaps even most delusive: what have I seen, what do I know? Nor is my personal judgment a thing which I feel any great satisfaction in trusting. My reasoning powers are weak; my memory doubtful and confused; my conscience, it may be, callous or vitiated.

I see not how it is possible for a man disinclined to adopt arbitrarily the watchword of a party to the sacrifice of truth—indisposed to set up for himself, and vehemently urge some one point—I see not what other alternative any sane and humble-minded man can have but to throw himself upon the great religious tradition.

But I see not either how any upright and strict dealer with himself—how any man not merely a slave to spiritual appetites, affections, and wants—any man of intellectual as well as moral honesty—and without the former the latter is but a vain thing—I see not how any one who will not tell lies to himself, can dare to affirm that the narrative of the four Gospels is an essential integral part of that tradition. I do not see that it is a great and noble thing, a very needful or very worthy service, to go about proclaiming that Mark is inconsistent with Luke, that the first Gospel is not really Matthew’s, nor the last with any certainty John’s, that Paul is not Jesus, &c. &c. &c. It is at the utmost a commendable piece of honesty; but it is no new gospel to tell us that the old one is of dubious authenticity.

I do not see either, on the other hand, that it can be lawful for me, for the sake of the moral guidance and the spiritual comfort, to ignore all scientific or historic doubts, or if pressed with them to the utmost, to take refuge in Romish infallibility, and, to avoid sacrificing the four Gospels, consent to accept the legends of the saints and the tales of modern miracles.

I believe that I may without any such perversion of my reason, without any such mortal sin against my own soul, which is identical with reason, and against the Supreme Giver of that soul and reason, still abide by the real religious tradition.

It is indeed just conceivable that the Divine Orderer of the universe, and Father of our spirits, should have so created these and ordered that, as that the one should be directly contradictory to the other. It may be that the facts which we, by the best force of our intellects, discern, are by His ordinance delusions, intended of a set purpose to tempt us from our highest path, that of His love and the worship of Him. It is conceivable that he has subtly arranged that two and two should be four (by delusion) everywhere, that our faith (the one reality) may be tried when we propose to harmonise it with this fallacy. It is possible that as our senses and appetites would make us believe bad things, because pleasant, therefore good, so also our reason may cheat us to believe wrong things, because reasonable, therefore right. The rule which He has placed to measure all things by, and bid us trust in them implicitly, may be, by His special purpose, false for the highest things. What in our solemn courts of justice we should call false witness, may be in the Church to decide our verdict; what in the exchange would be imposture, may be in the sanctuary pure truth. I say, this thing is conceivable, yet it is conceivable also that sense and mind, that intellect and religion, things without and things within, are in harmony with each other. If it is conceivable that the earth in the natural world goes round the sun, delusively to tempt us from the revealed act of the supernatural world that the sun goes round the earth, it is also conceivable that the heavens, as astronomically discerned, declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handywork.

It is conceivable that religious truths of the highest import may grow up naturally, and appear before us involved in uncertain traditions, with every sort of mere accessory legend and story attached to them and entangled with them.

It may be true that as the physical bread has to be digested and the nutritive portion separated from the innutritive, so may it also be with the spiritual. It may be true that man has fallen, though Adam and Eve are legendary. It may be a divine fact that God is a person, and not a sort of natural force; and it may have happened that the tales of His personal appearance to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were the means of sustaining and conveying down to posterity that belief, and yet that He never sat in the tent on the plains of Mamre, nor wrestled with Jacob by night, nor spoke with Moses in the mount.

Where then, since neither in Rationalism nor in Rome is our refuge, where then shall we seek for the Religious Tradition?

Everywhere; but above all in our own work: in life, in action, in submission, so far as action goes, in service, in experience, in patience, and in confidence. I would scarcely have any man dare to say that he has found it, till that moment when death removes his power of telling it. Let no young man presume to talk to us vainly and confidently about it. Ignorant, as said Aristotle, of the real actions of life, and ready to follow all impressions and passions, he is hardly fitted as yet even to listen to practical directions couched in the language of religion. But this apart—everywhere.

The Religious Tradition—as found everywhere—as found not only among clergymen and religious people, but among all who have really tried to order their lives by the highest action of the reasonable and spiritual will. I will go to Johnson; I will go to Hume, as well as to Bishop Butler. The precepts with which our parents often startle our religious instincts, and our companions revolt our young moral convictions, these also are in some sense to be considered in the religious and moral tradition. Every rule of conduct, every maxim, every usage of life and society, must be admitted, like Ecclesiastes of old in the Old Testament, so in each new age to each new age’s Bible.

Everywhere—to India, if you will, and the ancient Bhagvad Gita and the laws of Menu; to Persia and Hafiz; to China and Confucius; to the Vedas and the Shasters; to the Koran; to pagan Greece and Rome; to Homer; to Socrates and Plato; to Lucretius, to Virgil, to Tacitus. Try all things, I do not imagine that any spiritual doctrine or precept of life found in all that travel from east to west and north to south will disqualify us to return to what prima facie does appear to be, not indeed the religion of the majority of mankind, but the religion of the best, so far as we can judge in past history, and despite of professed infidelity of the most enlightened of our own time.

Whether Christ died upon the Cross, I cannot tell; yet I am prepared to find some spiritual truth in the doctrine of the Atonement. Purgatory is not in the Bible; I do not therefore think it incredible.

There is only one theory or precept which must be noticed ere I end. It is said that each of us is born with a peculiar nature of his own, a constitution as it were for one form of truth to the exclusion of others; that we must each look for what will suit us, and not be over-solicitous for wide and comprehensive attainments. What is one man’s food is another’s poison. Climate, parentage, and other circumstances are too strong for us; it is impossible for the Italian to be Protestant, or for the sons of New England Puritans to turn Roman Catholics to any great extent.

I do not doubt that the Protestant has excluded himself (necessary perhaps it was that he should so do) from large religious experience which the Roman Catholic preserves. I am convinced again that the Unitarian is morally and religiously only half educated compared with the Episcopalian. Modern Unitarianism is, I conceive, unfortunate on the one hand in refusing to allow its legitimate force to the exercise of reason and criticism; on the other hand, in having by its past exercise of reason and criticism thrown aside treasures of pure religious tradition because of their dogmatic exterior.

I do acquiesce in this humble doctrine; I do believe that, strive as I will, I am restricted, and grasp as I may, I can never hold the complete truth. But that does not the least imply that I am justified in shutting the eyes of my understanding to the facts of science, or its ears to the criticisms of history, nor yet in neglecting those pulsations of spiritual instinct which come to me from association at one time with Unitarians, at another with Calvinists, or again with Episcopalians and Roman Catholics.

I cannot see beyond the horizon; but within the natural horizon am I to make an unnatural new horizon for myself? I cannot be in two places at once; shall I therefore refuse to visit them at different times?

This doctrine may indeed lead to one conclusion; but it can lead justly to one only, and that I think is a very harmless one—namely, that when we have done all, we are unprofitable servants; when we have tried all things, what we held fast is not the entire truth; when we have seen all we can, there is still more that we cannot do.

Thus far I am most content to accept it. But it is no excuse to the Italian for refusing to study the religious views of Englishmen, nor to the Unitarian for believing that Calvinism is nonsense; nor to any one for refusing to think.

It is very true that, speaking generally, to a certain extent, we must all of us be of the religion of our fathers; we are so whether we like it or not; whether we say we are, or say we are not. It is very true, nevertheless, that we cannot refuse to know, when we are told on good authority that there are many more Buddhists in the world than Christians.

And it appears to me that it is much more the apparent dispensation of things that we should gradually widen, than that we should narrow and individualise our creeds. Why are we daily coming more and more into communication with each other, if it be not that we learn each other’s knowledge and combine all into one? I feel more inclined to put faith in the currents of the river of things, than because it runs one way to think I must therefore pull hard against it to go the other.

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