Views and Opinions

by Ouida

SHELLEY

Above my head in the starry July night goes with soft, swift, silent movement through the scented air, above the tall leaves of the aloes, and under the green boughs of the acacias, a little brown owl. Families of them live on the roof of this great house, and at sunset they descend and begin hunting for crickets and moths and water-beetles and mice. These owls are called, in scientific nomenclature, the scops carniola; to the peasantry they are known as the chiu; by Shelley they were called the aziola. I have never found any Italian who called this owl aziola, but I suppose that Mary Godwin did, since she said, ‘Do you not hear the aziola cry?’ And Shelley made answer, very truly, of this cry, that it was music heard,—

‘By wood and stream, meadow and mountain side,

And fields and marshes wide,—

Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird

The soul ever stirred.’

The note is very far-reaching, deep and sweet, clear and melodious, one single note sounding at intervals of thirty or forty seconds through the still air of the summer night. It is said to be a love call, but I doubt it, for it may be heard long after the pairing season; the bird gives it forth when he is flying as when he is sitting still, and it is unmistakably a note of contentment. Nor do I think it is sad, as Shelley terms it; it has a sound as of pleased meditation in it, and it has a mellow thrill which, once heard, cannot be forgotten ever. For myself, never do I hear the call of the chiu (which is often heard from May time until autumn, when these birds migrate to the East) without remembering Shelley and wishing that he lived to hear.

He is more truly a son of Italy than any one of her own poets, for he had the sentiment and passion of her natural beauty, which cannot be said of the greatest of them. Neither he nor Byron can be well comprehended by those who are not intimately acquainted with Italian landscape. The exceeding truthfulness of their observation of, and feeling for, it cannot certainly be appreciated except by those who have lived amongst the sights and sounds which took so close a hold upon their imagination and their heart.

Byron must have often ridden over the firm, smooth, yellow shores of the sea beyond Pisa, for he lived some time in the peaceful city dedicated to St Ranier, and probably both he and Shelley spent many hours many a time in a wood I know well, which follows the line of the sea for sixteen miles, and is many miles in depth. On the shore, pines, rooted in drifted sand half a mile broad, stand between the deciduous trees and the sea beach, and protect them from the violence of the westerly winds; when you are half a mile inland, you leave the pines and find ilex, acacia, beech, holly, juniper, and many aspen and other forest trees. Here the wood-dove, the goldfinch, the nuthatch, the woodpecker, the jay and the cuckoo dwell; here the grassy paths lead down dusky green aisles of foliage, fringed with dog-roses, where one may roam at pleasure all the day long, and meet nothing living beside the birds, except sometimes a stoat or a fox; here the flag-lily and the sword-rush grow in the reedy pools, and the song of the nightingale may be heard in perfection; its nests are made in numbers under the bracken, amongst the gorse and in the impenetrable thickets of the marucca and the heather. These woods are still entirely wild and natural, and they are rarely invaded except by the oxen or buffaloes drawing waggons to be filled with cut furze and dead branches by the rough and picturesque families who sit aloft on the giddy heights of these sylvan loads. But these invaders are few and far between, and in spring and summer these forest lands are as still and solitary as they certainly were when the poets wandered through them, listening to the sea-breeze sighing through the trees.

No one, I repeat, can fully appreciate the fineness and accuracy of observation and description of both Byron and Shelley who does not know Italy well; not with the pretended knowledge of the social hordes who come to its cities for court, and embassy, and gallery, and tea party, but such knowledge as can alone be gained by long and familiar intimacy with its remote and solitary places.

Few, perhaps, if any, think of Shelley as often as I do; and to me his whole personality seems the most spiritual and the most sympathetic of the age.

The personality of Byron startles, captivates, entrances; he flashes by us like a meteor; lover, noble, man of pleasure and of the world, solitary and soldier by turns, and a great poet always, let the poetasters and sciolists of the moment say what they will in their efforts to decry and to deny him. Shelley’s has nothing of this dazzling and gorgeous romance, as he has nothing in his portraits of that haughty and fiery challenge which speaks in the pose of the head and the glance of the eyes in every picture of Byron. Shelley’s eyes gaze outward with wistful, dreamy tenderness; they are the eyes of contemplative genius, the eyes which behold that which is not seen by the children of men. That sweetness and spirituality which are in his physiognomy characterise the fascination which his memory, like his verse, must exercise over any who can understand his soul. Nothing is more unfitting to him than those wranglings over his remains which are called studies of his life and letters. The solemnity and beauty of his death and burial should surely have secured him repose in his grave.

In no other country than England would it be possible to find writers and readers, so utterly incapable of realising what manner of nature and of mind his was, that they can presume to measure both by their foot-rule of custom and try to press both into their small pint-pot of conventional mortality. Would he not have said of his biographers, as he wrote of critics,—

‘Of your antipathy

If I am the Narcissus, you are free

To pine into a sound with hating me?’

What can his conduct, within the bonds of marriage or without them, matter to a world which he blessed and enriched? What can his personal sorrows or failings be to people who should only rejoice to hearken to his melodious voice? Who would not give the lives of a hundred thousand ordinary women to make happy for an hour such a singer as he?

The greatest duty of a man of genius is to his own genius, and he is not bound to dwell for a moment in any circumstances or any atmosphere which injures, restrains, or depresses it. The world has very little comprehension of genius. In England there is, more than anywhere else, the most fatal tendency to drag genius down into the heavy shackles of common-place existence, and to make Pegasus plough the common fields of earth. English genius has suffered greatly from the pressure of middle-class English opinion. It made George Eliot a hypocrite; it made Tennyson a chanter of Jubilee Odes; it put in chains even the bold spirit of Browning; and it has kept mute within the soul much noble verse which would have had rapture and passion in its cadences. The taint of hypocrisy, of Puritanism, of conventionality, has deeply entered into the English character, and how much and how great has been the loss it has caused to literature none will ever be able to measure.

Shelley affranchised himself in its despite, and for so doing he suffered in his life and suffers in his memory. He was a Republican in a time when republican doctrines were associated with the horrors of the guillotine and the excesses of the mob, then fresh in the public mind. He would now be called an Altruist where he was then called a Jacobin. His exhortation to the men of England,—

‘Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low?

Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear?’—

would, were it published now, be quoted with admiration by all the good Radicals, with John Morley at their head; indeed, it is astonishing that they have never reprinted it in their manuals for the people. It is wonderful also that ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ has escaped quotation by the leaders of the Irish opposition, and that the lines written during the Castlereagh administration have not been exhumed to greet the administration of any Tory Viceroy. Shelley in these forgot, as poets will forget, his own law, that the poet, like the chameleon, should feed from air, not earth. But what then was deemed so terrible a political crime in one of his gentle birth and culture would now be thought most generous and becoming, as the democratic principles of Vernon Harcourt and Lord Rosebery are now considered to be by their political party; the odes and sonnets which then drew down on him execration and persecution would now procure him the gratitude of Gladstone and the honour of the Nineteenth Century.

‘A people starved and stabbed in the untillèd field,’

is a line which has been strangely overlooked by orators for Ireland.

Shelley’s political creed—if an impersonal but intense indignation can deserve the name of creed—was born of his hatred of tyranny and a pity for pain which amounted to a passion. But his nature was not one which could long nurture hate; and he says truly that, with him and in all he wrote, ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world.’

In politics, had he lived now, he would certainly have fared much better; in moral liberty also he would, I think, have found more freedom. Though the old hypocrisy clings still in so much to English society, in much it has been shaken off, and within the last twenty years there has been a very marked abandonment of conventional opinion. There is much that is conventional still; much to the falsehood of which it is still deemed necessary to adhere. But still there is a greater liberality, a wider tolerance, an easier indulgence; and it may certainly be said that Shelley, if he lived now, would neither be worried to dwell beside Harriet Westbrooke, nor would Mary Godwin be excluded from any society worthy of the name. Society is arriving at the consciousness that for an ordinary woman to expect the monopoly of the existence of a man of genius is a crime of vanity and of egotism so enormous that it cannot be accepted in its pretensions or imposed upon him in its tyranny. Therefore it is wholly out of date, and unfitting to the times, to see critics and authors discussing and embittering the memory of Shelley on account of his relations with women.

These relations are in any man indisputably those which most reveal his character; but they are none the less indisputably those with which the public have least permission to interfere. We have the ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and ‘The Revolt of Islam’; we have the sonnet to England and the ode to the skylark; we have the ‘Good-night’[‘Good-night’]; and the ‘Song’; and with all these riches and their like given to us by his bounteous and beautiful youth, shall we dare to rake in the ashes of his funeral-pyre and search in the faded lines of his letters to find material for carping censure or for ingenious misconstruction? It adds greater horror to death; this groping of the sextons of the press amongst the dust of the tomb, this unhallowed’’ searching of alien hands amongst the papers which were written only to be read by eyes beloved. The common mortal is freed from such violation; he has left nothing behind him worth the stealing, he has been a decorous and safe creature, and his signature has been affixed to his weekly accounts, his bank drafts, his household orders, his epistles to his children at school, and not a soul cares to disturb the dust on their tied-up bundles. But the man or woman of genius has no sepulchre buried so deep in earth or barred so strongly that the vampire of curiosity cannot enter to break in and steal; from Heloise to Shelley the paper on which the burning words which come straight from the heart are recorded is the prey of the vulgar, and the soul bared only to one other soul becomes the sport of those who have not eyes to see, nor ears to hear, nor mind to understand.

I have said ere now often, and I shall say it as long as I have power to say anything, that with the private life of the man or woman of genius the world has nothing to do.

What is it to the world who was Allegra’s mother, or who was the prototype of Mignon, or who was the Lady of Solitude of the Elysian isles of the ‘Epipsychidion’; what matter whether Shakespeare blessed or cursed Anne Hathaway, or whether personal pains and longings inspired the doctrines of the ‘Tetrarchordon’? It matters no more than it matters whether Lesbia’s sparrow was a real bird or a metaphor, no more than it matters whether the carmen to Cerinthe were written for the poet’s pleadings in propria persona or for his friend. It matters nothing. We have ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Wilhelm Meister’; we have ‘Hamlet’ and the ‘Lycidas’; we have the songs of Catullus and the elegies of Tibullus; what wants the world more than these? Alas! alas! it wants that which shall pull down the greater stature to the lower; it wants that which shall console it for its own drear dulness by showing it the red spots visible on the lustre of the sun.

The disease of ‘documents,’ as they are called in the jargon of the time, is only another name for the insatiable appetite to pry into the private life of those greater than their fellows, in the hope to find something therein wherewith to belittle them. Genius may say as it will that nothing human is alien to it, humanity always sullenly perceives that genius is genius precisely because it is something other than humanity, something beyond it, above it—never of it; something which stands aloof from it, however it may express itself as kin to it. That the soul of man is divine is a doubtful postulate; but, that whatever there is divine in a human form is to be found in genius, is true for all time. The mass of men dimly feel this, and they vaguely resent it, and dislike genius, as the multitude in India and Palestine disliked Buddha and Christ. When the tiger tears it or the cross bears it the mass of men are consoled for their own inferiority to it. In the world Prometheus is always kept chained; and the fire he brings from heaven is spat upon.

‘Oh, weep for Adonais!—The quick Dreams,

The passion-winged Ministers of thought,

Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams

Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught

The love which was its music, wander not,

Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,

But droop there, whence they spring; and mourn their lot

Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,

They ne’er will gather strength, nor find a home again.

. . . . . . . . . .

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.’

Every line in Shelley’s verse which speaks of Italy is pregnant with the spirit of the land. Each line is a picture; true and perfect, whether of day or night, of water or shore, of marsh or garden, of silence or melody. Take this poem, ‘Julian and Maddalo,’—

‘How beautiful is sunset, when the glow

Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,

Thou paradise of exiles, Italy!

. . . . . . . . . .

As those who pause on some delightful way,

Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood

Looking upon the evening, and the flood

Which lay between the city and the shore

Paved with the image of the sky: the hoar

And airy Alps, towards the north, appeared,

Thro’ mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared

Between the east and west; and half the sky

Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,

Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew

Down the steep west into a wondrous hue

Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent

Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent

Among the many-folded hills—they were

These famous Euganean hills, which bear,

As seen from Lido through the harbour piles,

The likeness of a clump of peaked isles—

And then, as if the earth and sea had been

Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen

Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,

Around the vaporous sun, from which there came

The inmost purple spirit of light, and made

Their very peaks transparent.’

Whoever knows the lagoons of the Lido and of Murano knows the exquisite justness and veracity of this description. I thought of it not long ago when, sailing over the shallow water on the way to the city from Torcello, I saw the sun descend behind the roseate Euganean hills, whilst the full moon hung exactly opposite, over the more distant chain of the Istrian mountains.

Then this again:

‘I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit

Built round dark caverns, even to the root

Of the living stems who feed them; in whose bowers,

There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers;

Beyond, the surface of the unsickled corn

Trembles not in the slumbering air, and borne

In circles quaint, and ever-changing dance,

Like winged stars the fire-flies flash and glance

Pale in the open moonshine; but each one

Under the dark trees seems a little sun,

A meteor tamed; a fixed star gone astray

From the silver regions of the Milky-way.

Afar the Contadino’s song is heard,

Rude, but made sweet by distance;—and a bird

Which cannot be a nightingale, and yet

I know none else that sings so sweet as it

At this late hour;—and then all is still.’

He said, ‘which cannot be a nightingale,’ because he wrote this on the 1st of July, and nightingales rarely sing after June is past. But I have heard nightingales sing in Italy until the middle of July if the weather were cool and if their haunts, leafy and shady, were well protected from the sun; so that this bird which he heard was most likely Philomel. Blackbirds and woodlarks sing late into the dark of evening, but never in the actual night.

How he heard and studied the nightingale!

‘There the voluptuous nightingales

Are awake through all the broad noonday,

When one with bliss or sadness fails,

And through the windless ivy-boughs,

Sick with sweet love, droops dying away

On its mate’s music-panting bosom;

Another from the swinging blossom,

Watching to catch the languid close

Of the last strain, then lifts on high

The wings of the weak melody,

Till some new strain of feeling bear

The song, and all the woods are mute;

When there is heard through the dim air

The rush of wings, and rising there

Like many a lake-surrounded flute,

Sounds overflow the listener’s brain

So sweet, that joy is almost pain.’

There is not the slightest exaggeration in these lines, for, exquisite as they are, they rather fall below than exceed the rapture and riot of countless nightingales in Italian woods by noon and night, and the marvellous manner in which the stronger singers will take up and develop the broken songs of weaker birds.

‘If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

As then, when to outstrip the skyey speed

Scarce seemed a vision, I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth;

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,

If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’

In the ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ written in a wood washed by the Arno waters, how completely his spirit loses itself in and is identified with the forces of Nature! how in every line we feel the sweep and motion of the strong libeccio coming from the grey Atlantic, over ‘the sapless foliage of the ocean,’ to

‘waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day.’

When that wind sweeps up the broad bed of the Arno, the yellowing canebrakes bend, the rushes thrill and tremble, the summer’s empty nests are shaken from the ilex and oak boughs, the great pines bend and tremble, the river, stirred by the breath of the sea, grows yellow and grey and swollen and turgid, the last swallow flies southward from his home under the eaves of granary or chapel, and the nightingales rise from their haunts in the thickets of laurel and bay and go also where the shadows of Indian temples or of Egyptian palm-trees lie upon the sands of a still older world.

In that most beautiful and too little known of poems, ‘Epipsychidion,’ the whole scene, though called Greek, is Italian, and might be taken from the woods beside the Lake of Garda, or the Sercchio which he knew so well, or the forest-like parks which lie deep and cool and still in the blue shadows of Appenine or Abruzzi.

‘There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide;

And many a fountain, rivulet and pond,

As clear as elemental diamond,

Or serene morning air; and far beyond,

The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer

(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year),

Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls

Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls

Illumining, with sound that never fails,

Accompany the noonday nightingales;

And all the place is peopled with sweet airs;

The light clear element which the isle wears

Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers,

Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers

And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep;

And from the moss violets and jonquils peep,

And dart their arrowy odour through the brain,

Till you might faint with that delicious pain.’

In the whole world of poetry Love has never been sung with more beauty than in this great poem.

‘Ah me!

I am not thine: I am a part of thee.

. . . . . . . . . .

Pilot of the Fate

Whose course has been so starless! O too late

Beloved! O too soon adored, by me!

For in the fields of immortality

My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,

A divine presence in a place divine;

Or should have moved beside it on this earth,

A shadow of that substance, from its birth;

. . . . . . . . . .

We—are we not formed, as notes of music are,

For one another, though dissimilar;

Such difference, without discord, as can make

Those sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake

As trembling leaves in a continuous air?

. . . . . . . . . .

The day is come, and thou wilt fly with me.

To whatsoe’er of dull mortality

Is mine, remain a vestal sister still;

To the intense, the deep, the imperishable,

Not mine, but me, henceforth be thou united

Even as a bride, delighting and delighted.

The hour is come:—the destined Star has risen,

Which shall descend upon a vacant prison.

The walls are high, the gates are strong, thick set

The sentinels—but true love never yet

Was thus constrained: it overleaps all fence;

Like lightning, with invisible violence

Piercing its continents.

. . . . . . . . . .

This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed

Thee to be lady of the solitude.

And I have fitted up some chambers there

Looking towards the golden Eastern air.

And level with the living winds which flow

Like waves above the living waves below.

I have sent books and music there, and all

Those instruments with which high spirits call

The future from its cradle, and the past

Out of its grave, and make the present last

In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,

Folded within their own eternity.

Our simple life wants little, and true taste

Hires not the pale drudge Luxury to waste

The scene it would adorn, and therefore still,

Nature with all her children, haunts the hill.

The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet

Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit

Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance

Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;

The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight

Before our gate, and the slow silent night

Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep.

Be this our home in life, and when years heap

Their withered hours, like leaves, on our decay,

Let us become the overhanging day,

The living soul of this Elysian isle,

Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile

We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,

Under the roof of Blue Ionian weather,

And wander in the meadows, or ascend

The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend

With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;

Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,

Under the quick faint kisses of the sea,

Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy,—

Possessing and possest by all that is

Within that calm circumference of bliss,

And by each other, till to love and live

Be one:—or, at the noontide hour, arrive

Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep

The moonlight of the expired night asleep,

Through which the awakened day can never peep;

A veil for our seclusion, close as Night’s,

Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights;

Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain

Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.

And we will talk until thought’s melody

Become too sweet for utterance, and it die

In words, to live again in looks, which dart

With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,

Harmonising silence without a sound.

Our breaths shall intermix, our bosoms bound,

And our veins beat together; and our lips

With other eloquence than words, eclipse

The soul that burns between them; and the wells

Which boil under our beings inmost cells,

The fountains of our deepest life, shall be

Confused in passion’s golden purity,

As mountain springs under the morning Sun.

We shall become the same, we shall be one

Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?

One passion in twin hearts, which grows and grew

Till like two meteors of expanding flame,

Those spheres instinct with it become the same,

Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still

Burning, yet ever inconsumable:

In one another’s substance finding food,

Like flames too pure and bright and unimbued

To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,

Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:

One hope within two wills, one will beneath

Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,

One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,

And one annihilation. Woe is me!

The winged words on which my soul would pierce

Into the height of love’s rare Universe,

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire,—

I pant, I sink, I tremble I expire!’

No words which were ever written ever expressed more truly that infinite and indefinite yearning which exists in all love that is a passion of the soul as well as of the senses; that nameless longing for some still closer union than any which physical and mental union can bestow upon us; that desire for absolute absorption into and extinction within the life beloved, as stars are lost in the light of the sun, which never can find full fruition in life as we know it here.

Keats, Shelley, Savage Landor, Byron, Browning, and Robert Lytton, have been each and all profoundly penetrated by and deeply imbued with the influence of Italy; and it may be said of each and all of them that their genius has been at its highest when under Italian influences, and has been injured and checked and depressed in its development by all English influences brought to bear upon it.

Shelley most completely of all escapes the latter, not only because he died so early, but because his whole temperament resisted conventional pressure as a climbing plant resists being fastened to the earth; flung it off with impatience, as the shining plumage of the sea-bird flings off the leaden-coloured rain and the colourless sands of the shore. Shelley had not only genius: he had courage; the most rare, most noble, and most costly of all forms of courage, that which rejects the measurements and the laws imposed upon the common majority of men by conventional opinion. And this praise, no slight praise, may be given to him, which cannot be given to many, that he had the courage to act up to his opinions. The world had never dominion enough over him to make him fear it, or sacrifice his higher affections to it. In this, as in his adoration of Nature and his instinctive pantheism, he was the truest poet the modern world has known.

To the multitude of men he must be forever unintelligible and alien; because their laws are not his laws, their sight is not his sight, their heaven of small things makes his hell, and his heaven of beautiful visions and of pure passions is a paradise whereof they cannot even dimly see the portals. But to all poets his memory and his verse must ever be inexpressibly dear and sacred. His ‘Adonais’ may be repeated for himself. There is a beauty in the manner of his death which we must not grudge to him if we truly love him. It fitly rounded a poet’s life. That life was short, as measured by years! but, ended so, it was more complete than it would have been had it stretched on to age. Who knows?—he might have become a magnate in Hampshire, a country squire, a member of Parliament, a sheriff for the county, any and all things such as the muses would have wept for; Shelley in England, Shelley old, would have been Shelley no more. Better and sweeter the waves of the Tyrrhene Sea and the violet-sown grave of Rome. Sadder and more painful than earliest death is it to witness the slow decay of the soul under the carking fret and burdensome conventionalities of the world; more cruel than the sudden storm is the tedious monotony of the world’s bondage. The sea was merciful when it took the Adonais who sang of Adonais from earth when he was yet young. He and his friends, he and those who wrote the ‘Endymion’ and the ‘Manfred,’ were happy in their deaths; their spirits, eternally young, live with us and have escaped all contamination of the commonplace. Byron might have lived to wrangle in the Lords over the Corn Laws; Keats might have lived to become a London physician and pouch fees; Shelley might have lived to be Custos Rotulorum and to take his daughters to a court ball. Their best friend was the angel of death who came at Rome, at Missolonghi, at Lerici. ‘Whom the gods love die young.’

The monotony, the thraldom and the pettiness of conventional life lie forever in wait for the man of genius, to sink him under their muddy waters and wash him into likeness with the multitude: Shelley, Byron and Keats escaped this fell embrace.

What may be termed the material side of the intellect receives assistance in England, that is to say, in the aristocratic and political world of England; wit and perception and knowledge of character are quickened and multiplied by it. But the brilliancy, liberty and spirituality of the imagination are in it dulled and lowered. If a poet can find fine and fair thoughts in the atmosphere of a London Square, he would be visited by far finer and fairer thoughts were he standing by the edge of the Adrian or Tyrrhene Sea, or looking down, eagle-like, from some high spur of wind-vexed Apennine. The poet should not perhaps live forever away from the world, but he should oftentimes do so.

The atmosphere of Italy has been the greatest fertiliser of English poetical genius. There is something fatal to genius in modern English life; its conditions are oppressive; its air is heavy; its habits are altogether opposed to the life of the imagination. Out-of-door life in England is only associated with what is called ‘the pleasure of killing things,’ and is only possible to those who are very robust of frame and hard of feeling. The intellectual life in England is only developed in gaslight and lamplight, over dinner-tables and in club-rooms, and although the country houses in some instances might be made centres of intellectual life, they never are so by any chance, and remain only the sanctuaries of fashion, of gastronomy[gastronomy] and of sport. The innumerable demands on time, the routine of social engagements, the pressure of conventional opinion, are all too strong in England to allow the man of genius to be happy there, or to reach there his highest and best development. The many artificial restraints of life in England are, of all things, the most injurious to the poetic temperament, which at all times is quickly irritated and easily depressed by its surroundings. There is not enough leisure or space for meditation, or freedom to live as the affections or the fancy or the mind desires; and the absence of beauty—of beauty, artistic, architectural, natural and physical—oppresses and dulls the poetic imagination without its being sensible of what it is from the lack of which it suffers.

It has been said of a living statesman that he is only great in opposition. So may it be said of the poet who touches mundane things. He is only great in opposition. Milton could not have written a Jubilee Ode without falling from his high estate; and none can care for Shakespeare without desiring to expunge the panegyric on a Virgin Queen written for the Masque of Kenilworth. The poet is lord of a spiritual power; he is far above the holders of powers temporal. He holds the sensitive plant in his hand, and feels every innermost thrill of Nature; he is false to himself when he denies Nature and does a forced and unreal homage to the decrees and the dominion of ordinary society or of ordinary government.

‘Both are alien to him, and are his foes.’

This line might fittingly have been graven on Shelley’s tombstone, for it was essentially the law of his soul. The violence of his political imprecations is begotten by love, though love of another kind: love of justice, of truth, of tolerance, of liberty, all of which he beheld violated by the ruling powers of the state and of the law. With the unerring vision which is the birthright of genius, he saw through the hypocrisies and shams of kings, and priests, and churches, and council-chambers, and conventional morality, and political creeds. The thunder of the superb sonnet to England which begins with the famous line,

‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,’

came from his heart’s depths in scorn of lies, in hatred of pretence, in righteous indignation as a patriot at the corruption, venality and hypocrisy of

‘Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leech-like to their fainting country cling.’

It is perhaps to be lamented that the true poetic temperament should ever turn aside to share the fret and fever of political strife. It is waste of the spirit of Alastor to rage against Swellfoot. But the poet cannot wholly escape the influences of baser humanity, and, watching the struggles of ‘the blind and battling multitude’ from afar, he cannot avoid being moved either to a passion of pity or to a passion of disdain, or to both at once, in view of this combat, which seems to him so poor and small, so low and vile. Men of genius know the mere transitory character of those religions and those social laws which awe, as by a phantasm of terror, weaker minds, and they refuse to allow their lives to be dictated to or bound down; and in exact proportion to their power of revolt is their attainment of greatness.

The soul of Shelley was, besides, deeply imbued by that wide pantheism which makes all the received religions of men look so trite, so poor, so narrow and so mean.

‘Canst those imagine where those spirits live

Which make such delicate music in the woods?

. . . . . . . . . .

’Tis hard to tell:

I have heard those more skilled in spirits say,

The bubbles, which enchantment of the sun

Sucks from the pale, faint water-flowers that pave

The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,

Are the pavilions where such dwell and float

Under the green and golden atmosphere

Which noon-tide kindles through the woven leaves;

And when these burst, and the thin, fiery air,

The which they breathed within those lucent domes,

Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,

They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed,

And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire

Under the waters of the earth again.

If such live thus, have others other lives,

Under pink blossoms or within the bells

Of meadow flowers, or folded violets deep,

Or on their dying odours when they die,

Or on the sunlight of the sphered dell?’

The loveliness of Nature filled him with awe and deep delight.

‘How glorious art thou, Earth! and if thou be

The shadow of some spirit lovelier still,

Though evil stain its work, and it should be

Like its creation, weak yet beautiful,

I could fall down and worship that and thee.’

‘My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;

And thine doth like an angel sit

Beside the helm conducting it,

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing

It seems to float ever, forever.

Upon that many-winding river,

Between mountains, woods, abysses,

A paradise of wildernesses!

Till, like one in slumber bound,

Borne to the ocean, I float down, around

Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound.’

This intimate sympathy with Nature, this perception of beauty in things seen and unseen, this deep joy in the sense of existence, make the very life of Shelley’s life; he is the ideal poet, feeding

‘on the aerial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.’

Taine has said, with truth, of modern life,—

‘Nous ne savons plus prendre la vie en grand, sortir de nous mêmes; nous nous contennons dans un petit bien-être personnel, dans une petite œuvre viagère.’ [He is writing in the mountains beyond Naples.] ‘Ici on reduit le vieux et le couvert au simple necessaire. Ainsi dégagée l’âme, comme les yeux, pouvait contempler les vastes horizons tout ce qui s’etend et dure au déla de l’homme.’

Modern life gives you six electric bells beside your bed, but not one court or chamber that a great artist would care to copy. The poet yawning among the electric bells becomes a common-place person, with a mind obscured by a gourmet’s love of the table and the cellar; he is the chameleon who has lost his luminous and magical powers of transfiguration, and become a mere gorged lizard stuffed with sugar.

Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, were in their different lives so great because they had all the power to reject the drowsy and dulling influences of the common world of men, and withdraw from it to Ravenna, to Lirici, to Rydal. The commonplace of life, whether in occupations, relationships, or so-called duties, eats away the poetry of temperament with the slow, sure gnawing of the hidden insect which eats away the tiger-skin until where the golden bronze and deep sable of the shining fur once glistened, there is only a bald, bare spot, with neither colour nor beauty left in it. There are millions on millions of ordinary human lives to follow the common tracks and fulfil the common functions of human life. When the poet is dragged down to any of these he is lost. The moth who descried the star lies dead in the kitchen fire, degraded and injured beyond recall.

‘There is a path on the sea’s azure floor;

No keel has ever ploughed that path before.’

Such should be the poet’s passage through life. Not his is it to sail by chart and compass with common mariners along the sea roads marked out for safety and for commerce.

Above all else, the poet should be true to himself—to his own vision, his own powers, his own soul,

‘like Heaven’s pure breath

Which he who grasps can hold not; like death,

Who rides upon a thought, and makes his way

Through temple, tower and palace, and the array

Of arms.’

The supreme glory of Shelley is that he, beyond all others, did go where ‘no keel ever ploughed before,’ did dwell more completely than any other has ever dwelt

‘on an imagined shore

Where the gods spoke with him.’

The poet is wisest, and his creations are most beautiful when his thoughts roam alone in

‘fields of Heaven-reflecting sea,

. . . . . . . . . .

Beneath the uplifting winds, like plains of corn

Swayed by the summer air;’

and when he, like Proteus, marks

‘The shadow of fair ships, as mortals see

The floating bark of the light-laden moon

With that white star, it’s sightless pilot’s crest,

Borne down the rapid sunset’s ebbing sea;

Tracking their path no more by blood and groans,

And desolation, and the mingled voice

Of slavery and command; but by the light

Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,

And music soft and mild, free, gentle voices,

That sweetest music, such as spirits love.’

And he is wisest when he says, with Apollo,

‘I shall gaze not on the deeds which make

My mind obscure with sorrow, as eclipse

Darkens the sphere I guide; but list, I hear

The small, clear, silver lute of the young Spirit

That sits i’ the morning star.’

If ever poet held that lute on earth, Shelley held it all through his brief life; and if ever there be immortality for any soul, his surely is living now beside that Spirit in the light of a ceaseless day.

‘Death is the veil which those who live call life;

They sleep, and it is lifted.’

SOME FALLACIES OF
SCIENCE[^[K]]

‘Le génie fait les philosophes et les poetes: le temps ne fait

que les savants.’—Fontenelle.

Sir Lyon, now Lord, Playfair, read to the assembled members of the British Association, when they met at Aberdeen, a discourse both eloquent and well suited to excite the enthusiasm of his audience, already disposed by taste and bias to salute its propositions as gospel. That there were truths in it, no one would dispute; that it was exclusively composed of truth is not so evident to minds unswayed by scientific prejudice. It, at all events, was a curious and complete example of the scientific mind, of its views, conclusions and expectations, and is therefore interesting in itself, if not as overwhelming in its persuasions to the dispassionate reader as it was to the sympathetic and selected audience to which it was addressed. Scientific persons usually never address themselves to any other audience than one thus pannelled and prepared. They like to see a crowd of their own disciples in their halls ere they let fall their pearls of wisdom. The novelist does not demand that he shall be only read by novelists. The painter does not think that none but painters can be permitted to judge a painting. The sculptor does not ask that every critic of his work shall be a Phidias. The historian does not insist that none but a Tacitus shall pass judgment on him. But the scientist does exact that no opinion shall be formed of him and of his works except by his own brethren, and sweeps aside all independent criticism on a principle which, if carried out into other matters, would forbid John Ruskin ever to give an opinion on painting, and would prohibit Francisque Sareey from making any critical observations on actors. This address satisfied its audience, because that audience was composed of persons already willing to be satisfied; but if we can imagine some listener altogether without such bias, if we can suppose some one amongst the auditors with mind altogether unprejudiced, such an one might without effort have found many weak places in this fine discourse, and would have been sorely tempted to cry ‘Question! Question!’ at more than one point in it.

Taken as a whole, the address was an admirable piece of special pleading in favour of science, and of her superior claims upon the resources of all states and the minds of all men. But special pleading has always this disadvantage: that it seeks to prove too much; and the special pleading of the President of the Aberdeen meeting is not free from this defect. We know, of course, that, in his position, he could hardly say less; that with his antecedents and reputation, he would not have wished to say less; but those who are removed from the spell of his eloquence, and peruse his arguments in the serene air of their studies, may be pardoned if they be more critical than an audience of fellow-workers, and mutual admirers, if they lay down the pages of his admirably-worded praises of science, and ask themselves dispassionately: How much of this is true?

The main object of the discourse was to prove that science is the great benefactress of the world. But is it proved? To the mind of the scientist the doubt will seem as impious as the doubt of the sceptic always does seem to the true believer. Yet it is a doubt which must be entertained by those who are not led away by that bigotry of science, which has so much and so grievously in common with the bigotry of religions.

Let us see what are the statements which the President of the British Association brings forward in support of the position which he gives to Science as the goddess and the benefactress of mankind. First, to do this he casts down the Humanities beneath his feet, as the professors of science always do; and, as an illustration of the uselessness which he assigns to them, he asserts that were a Chrysoloras to teach Greek in the Italian universities he would not hasten perceptibly the onward march of Italy!

What does this mean? It is a statement, but the statement of an opinion, not of a fact.

What is comprised under the vague term ‘the onward march of Italy?’ Does it mean the return of Italy to her pristine excellence in all arts, her love of learning, her grace of living? or does it mean the effort of Italy to aggrandise herself at all cost, and to engage in foreign and colonial wars whilst her cities groan under taxation and her peasantry perish of pellagra? In the one case the teaching of Chrysoloras would be of infinite value; in the other it would, no doubt, not harmonise with the vulgar greeds and dangerous ambitions of the hour. If the ‘onward march of Italy’ means that she is to kneel to a Crispi, submit to a standing army, wait slavishly on Germany, and scramble for the sands of Africa, the teachings of Chrysoloras would be wasted; but if it mean that she is to husband her strength, cultivate her fertile fields, merit her gift of beauty, and hold a high place in the true civilisation of the world, then I beg leave to submit that Chrysoloras, or what his name is here taken to symbolise, would do more for her than any other teacher she could have, certainly more than any teacher she now possesses. Could the classic knowledge and all which is begotten by it of serenity, grace, trained eloquence and dispassionate meditation, be diffused once more through the mind of Italian youth, it would, I think, produce a generation which would not applaud Eritrea and Kassala, nor accept the political tyrannies of state-appointed prefects.

The scientists take for granted that the education of the schools creates intelligence; very often it does no such thing. It creates a superficial appearance of knowledge, indeed; but knowledge is like food, unless it be thoroughly assimilated when absorbed, and thoroughly digested, it can give no nourishment; it lies useless, a heavy and unleavened mass. It is the fashion in these times to despise husbandmen and husbandry, but it is much to be questioned if the city cad, with his smattering of education, his dabbling in politics, his crude, conceited opinions upon matters on which he is absolutely ignorant, be not a far more ignorant, as he is undoubtedly a far more useless, person than the peasant, who may never have opened a book or heard of arithmetic, but thoroughly understands the soil he works on, the signs of the weather, the rearing of plants and of animals, and the fruits of the earth which he cultivates. The man of genius may be many-sided; nature has given him the power to be so; but the mass of men do not and cannot obtain this Protean power; to do one thing well is the utmost that the vast majority can well hope to do; many never do so much, nor a quarter so much. To this vast majority science would say: you may be as indifferent weavers, ploughmen, carpenters, shopmen, what you will, but you must know where the spermatic nerves are situated in the ichneumon, and you must describe the difference between microzoaires and miraphytes, and you must understand the solidification of nitric acid. Nor is the temper which science and its teachers seem likely thus to give the human race, one of fair promise. How much have not the men of science added to the popular dread of cholera, which in its manifestation of cowardice and selfishness has so grossly disgraced the Continent of Europe of late years? Their real or imaginary creation, the microbe, has invested cholera with a fanciful horror so new and hideous in the popular mind, that popular terror of it grows ungovernable, and will, in great likelihood, revolt beyond all restraint, municipal or imperial, whenever the disease shall again revisit Europe with violence. Again, how many nervous illnesses, how many imaginary diseases, have sprung into existence since science, popularised, attracted the attention of mankind to the mechanism of its own construction? It is a familiar truth that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and of no knowledge is it truer than of physiological knowledge. It has been said, that every one at forty should be a fool or a physician, and so far as knowing what to eat, drink and avoid, every one should be so; but, unhappily, those who become the latter, i.e., those who become capable of controlling their own constitutional ailments and weaknesses, are apt to contract in their study of themselves an overweening tendency to think about themselves. The generalisation of physiology amongst the masses means the generalisation of this form of egotism. A child who was told and shown something of anatomy, said, naively: ‘Oh, dear me! now that I know how I am made, I shall be always thinking that I am coming to pieces.’ In a less innocent way the effect of the popularisation of physiology is the same on the multitude as on this child: it increases valetudinarianism, nervousness and the diseases which spring from morbid fears and morbid desires. Those nervous illnesses which are the peculiar privilege of modern times, are largely due to the exaggerated attention to themselves which science has taught to humankind. The Greek and the Latin said: ‘Let us eat and drink and enjoy, for to-morrow we die.’ Modern science says: ‘Let us concentrate our whole mind on ourselves and our body, although our mind like our body is only a conglomeration of gases which will go out in the dark.’ The classic injunction and conclusion are the more healthy and the more logical, and produced a race of men more manly, more vigorous and more consistent with themselves.

To return to the assertions contained in this address which we now consider: in the address it is stated as a fact which all must rejoice over, that in Boston one shoe factory, by its machines, does the work of 30,000 shoemakers in Paris, who have still to go through the weary drudgery of hand-labour. Now, why is the ‘drudgery’ of sewing a shoe in any way more ‘weary’ than the drudgery of oiling, feeding and attending to a machine? Machine-work is, on the contrary, of all work the most mechanical, the most absolute drudgery. There is no kind of proof that, because the work of 30,000 shoemakers is done by a machine, mankind at large is any the happier for this. We know that all machine-made work is inferior to hand-work; inferior in durability, in excellence of quality, and in its inevitable lack of that kind of individuality and originality which handwork takes from the fingers which form it. In the Seven Lamps of Architecture, there is an admirable exposition of this immeasurable difference in quality which characterises hand-labour and machine-made work; of the stone cut by steam and the stone cut by hand. Let us only consider what ruin to the arts of India has been brought about by the introduction of machinery. The exquisite beauty of Oriental work is due to the individuality which is put into it; the worker, sitting beneath his grove of date-trees, puts original feeling, individual character, into each line graven on the metal, each thread woven in the woof, each turn given to the ivory. Machines destroy all this. They make machines of the men who tend them, and give a soulless and hateful monotony to everything which they produce.

Despite the vaunt of Playfair, the cobbler who sits on the village green, doing sound, if simple work, honestly, giving a personality to the shoe he labours on, and knowing on what foot it will be worn and whither it will go, is a man, and maybe in his own humble way a good artist; but the attendant who feeds the shoe-machine with oil, or takes from it its thousands of machine-cut leathers, is no better than a machine himself; so far from being ‘set free,’ he is in servitude. The cobbler on the village green knows far more of freedom than he.

This curious statement that hand-work, with its scope for originality and individual interest is slavery, whilst the work of factories, mechanical, monotonous and done in ugly chambers and unwholesome air, is liberty, is surely the oddest delusion with which the fanatical and biased mind of science ever delighted itself. Who can compare the freedom of the native child in a village of Benares, shaping an ebony or cocoanut toy under the palm-fronds of his home, with the green paroquets swinging, and the monkeys chattering in the sun-lit bamboos above his head, with the servitude of the poor little sickly and weary Hindoos, thronging in patient flocks the noisome factory-chambers of Bombay?

The President of the British Association seems to expect that all men whom machines ‘set free’ from the drudgery of their daily calling, will, all at once, do something infinitely better than they did before they were free. But this seems to me a very rash conclusion. If the 30,000 shoemakers are all ‘set free’ in Paris, by the introduction of the Boston machine, is it so certain that their freedom will produce anything better than a good pair of shoes? What greater freedom is there in attending to the machine if they select to do that, or in entering into another trade?—one thing or the other no doubt they must do, if they want to earn their bread? What have they gained by being ‘set free, and passed from one kind of occupation to another?’ I fail to see what they have gained. Have the public gained? It is open to doubt. Where will be the gain to their contemporaries, or to themselves, if these 30,000 shoemakers ‘set free’ become telegraph clerks or book-keepers? Something they must become, unless they are to live as paupers or mendicants. Where is their freedom? ‘Set free’ is a seductive and resonant expression, but analysed it simply means nothing in this instance. And, before quitting this subject, let me also remark that if Playfair knew as much about shoes as he does about science, he would know that a machine to make shoes is a most unwholesome invention, because every shoe or boot which is not made expressly for the foot which is to wear it, is an ill-made shoe, and will cause suffering and deformity to the unwise wearer. The vast mass of the population of every ‘civilised’ nation has deformed feet, because they buy and wear ready-made shoes, thrusting their extremities into houses of leather never designed for them. Machines which make shoes by the thousand can only increase this evil. As it is, we never see by any chance any one walk well, unless it be some one whose shoes are made with great care and skill, adjusted to his feet alone, or peasants who have never shod their feet at all and step out, with the bare sole set firmly and lightly on their mother earth. Science can, no doubt, turn out millions of cheap shoes, all exactly alike, but Nature will not consent to adopt such monotony of contour in the feet which will wear them.

The President of the British Association speaks of science always as of a Demeter, with blessings in her hands, creating the fulness of the fields and the joys of mankind. He forgets that the curse of Demeter brought barrenness: and if we resist the charm of his eloquence and look more closely at the tissue of it, we shall not be so content to accept his declarations. What does the expression mean, ‘to benefit mankind?’ I conclude that it must mean to increase its happiness and its health; all the wisdom of the ages will avail it nothing if it pule in discontent and fret in nervous sickness. Now, does science increase the sum of human happiness? It is very doubtful.

Let us take the electric telegraph as an instance of the benevolence of science. Can it be said to make men happier? I think not. Politicians and diplomatists agree that the hasty judgments and conflicting orders which it favours and renders possible, double the chances of internecine quarrels, and stimulate to irritation and haste, which banish statesmanship. In business the same defects are due to it, and many a rash speculation or unconsidered reply, an acceptance or refusal, forced on men without there being time for any mature consideration, have led to disastrous engagements and as disastrous failures. Even in private life its conveniences may have a certain value, but the many troubles and excitements brought by it are incalculable. Niobe hearing of the death of her children by a printed line on a yellow sheet of paper, has her grief robbed of all dignity and privacy, and intensified by a shock which deals her its fatal blow without any preparation of the mind to receive it. The telegraph, bridging space, may be, and is, no doubt, a wonderful invention, but that it has contributed to the happiness or wisdom of humanity is not so certain. Men cannot do without it now, no doubt; neither can they do without alcohol. The telegraph, like nearly all the inventions of the modern age, tends to shorten time but to harass it, to make it possible to do much more in an hour, a day, a year, than was done of old, but to make it impossible to do any of this without agitation, brain-pressure and hurry. It has impaired language and manners, it has vulgarised death, and it has increased the great evils of immature choice and hasty action; these drawbacks weighed against its uses must at the time prevent us from regarding its invention as an unmixed blessing. Of the telephone may be said as much, and more.[^[L]]

Playfair, proceeding in his enumeration of the benefits which science confers on man, turns to that most familiar matter, air, and that equally familiar element, water. He speaks with pride of all which science has discovered concerning their component parts, and their uses and effects upon the world. His pride, no doubt, may be justified in much, but he passes over one great fact in connection with air and water, i.e., that both have been polluted through the inventions of science in a degree which may well be held to outweigh the value of the discoveries of science.

Were we to awake an Athenian of the time of Phidias from his mausoleum, and take him with eyes to see and ears to hear and nostrils to smell, into Blackpool or Belfast, even into Zurich or Munich, he would ask us, in stupefaction, under what curse of the gods had the earth fallen that mankind should dwell in such hideous clamour, such sooty darkness, such foul stenches, such defiled and imprisoned air. He would survey the begrimed toilers of the mills and looms, the pallid women, the stunted offspring, the long lines of hideous houses, the soil ankle-deep with cinder-dust, the skies a pall of lurid smoke, the country scorched and blackened and accursed; he would survey all this, I say, asking by what malediction of heaven and what madness of mankind the sweetest and chief joys of Nature had been ruined and forgotten thus? He would behold the dwarfed trees dying under the fume of poisonous gases, the clear river changed to a slimy, crawling, stinking, putrid flood of filth; the buoyant air, once sweet as the scent of cowslips or clover-grass, made by the greed of man into a sickly, noxious, loathsome thing, loaded with the stench of chemicals and the vapours of engine-belched steam. He would stand amidst this hell of discordant sounds, between these walls of blackened brick, under this sky of heavy-hanging soot; and he would remember the world as it was; and if at his ears any prated of science, he would smile in their faces, and say,—‘If these be the fruits of science let me rather dwell with the forest beast and the untaught barbarian.’

Yes; no doubt science can study air in her spectrum, and analyse water in her retorts; she can tell why the green tree dies in the evil gas, and the rose will not bloom where the blast-furnace roars: she can tell you the why and the wherefore, and can give you a learned treatise on the calcined dust which chokes up your lungs; but she cannot make the green tree and the wild rose live in the hell she has created for men, and she cannot make the skies she has blackened lighter, nor the rivers she has poisoned run clean. Even we who dwell where the air is pure, and the southern sun lights the smiling waves and the vine-clad hills, even we cannot tell how beautiful was the earth in the days of the Greek anthologists; when the silvery blue of wood-smoke alone rose from the hearth fires; when the flame of the vegetable oils alone illumined the fragrant night; when the white sails alone skimmed the violet seas; when the hand alone threw the shuttle and wove the web; and when the vast virgin forests filled the unpolluted air with their odorous breath. Even we cannot tell what the radiance of the atmosphere, of the horizons, of the sunrise and sunset, were when the world was young. Our loss is terrible and hopeless, like the loss of all youth. It may be useless to lament it, but in God’s name let us not be such purblind fools that we call our loss our gain.

Repose, leisure, silence, peace and sleep are all menaced and scattered by the inventions of the last and present century. They are the greatest though the simplest blessings that mankind has ever had; their banishment may be welcomed by men greedy only of gold; but, meantime, the mad-houses are crowded, spinal and cerebral diseases are in alarming increase, heart-disease in divers shapes is general, where it once was rare, and all the various forms of bodily and mental paralysis multiply and crown the triumphs of the age.

Let us turn for a moment to the consideration of politics and of war as these are affected by the influence of science. Playfair speaks much of the superior wisdom, the superior education, the superior devotion to science, of Germany, as contrasted with those of any other nation; he lauds to the skies her enormous grants to laboratories and professors of physiology and chemistry and ‘original research’ (called by the vulgar, vivisection); but the only result of all this expenditure and instruction is a military despotism so colossal that, whilst it overawes and paralyses both German liberty and European peace, it yet may fall over from its own weight any day, like the giant of clay which it resembles. Are we not then justified in objecting to accept, whilst the chief issue of German culture is Militarism and anti-Semitism, such praises of Germany, and refusing to render such homage to her? ‘By your fruits ye shall be judged,’ is a just saying: and the fruits of Germany, in the concert of Europe and the sum of political life, are dissension, apprehension, absolutism, and the sacrifice of all other nations to the pressure of the military Juggernaut which rolls before her; whilst in her own national life the outcome of the sanguinary lessons given by the government is little better than the barbarism of the middle ages without its redeeming law of chivalry. The incessant and senseless duels which maim and disfigure German youth remain a disgrace to civilisation, and a duellist may fire three times at an adversary who never returns the fire and, killing him at the last, will only be punished by a slight imprisonment, whilst he will be admired and deified by his comrades.[^[M]] Such barbarous brutality, such insensibility to generous feeling, such universal resort to the arbitration of every trifling dispute by the pistol or the sabre, is the chief characteristic of the nation in which science rules supreme! Conscription, that curse of nations, is forced on all weaklier powers by the enormous armed forces of Germany; art suffers, trades suffer, families suffer; and we are called on by a ‘scientific’ mind to admire as a model the nation which is the cause of this suffering, as we are bidden to admire as models also her mutilated and bandaged students, and her blue-spectacled and blear-eyed school children!

Again Playfair traces the defeat of France in 1870 to the inferiority of her university teaching, and gives the opinion of the Institut de France as his authority. It seems a singularly illogical and unphilosophical decision for such an august body to have given forth publicly. The causes of the defeat of France stretch farther back and have deeper roots than can be accounted for by the omission of the state to create more professors and laboratories. The whole teachings of history show that all states, after reaching their perihelion, gradually decline and sink into an inferior place amongst the nations. The day of France, as of England, is already past its noon. Neither will ever be what they have been. Neither will ever again give law to Europe as they gave it once. But so many causes, some near, some remote, have all contributed to bring about a decline which is as inevitable to nations as to individuals, that it is surely most unphilosophic to contend that such decay could have been averted by the creation of some hundred or thousand more professors of natural or other science. It may be excusable for such a professor to consider such professorships the one universal panacea for all ills; but it is not an opinion in which those who know France best and most intimately would be inclined to coincide. They would conclude that, on the contrary, she has too many professors already; that the grace, and wit, and courtesy, and wisdom and chivalry have gone out of her since she was ruled from the desks of the school-master, the physiologist and the notary, and that the whole system of French colleges is calculated to emasculate and injure the character of the schoolboy before he goes up for his baccalaureate.

The German invasion of France was supported by all which science could do, yet most military judges are agreed that unless the carelessness of her foe had afforded her a fortnight’s preparation, Germany would have been hopelessly beaten on her own territory; whilst, look at the campaign how we may, it cannot stand a moment’s comparison with the Eastern marches of Alexander, or the conquests of Roman generals. With none of the resources of modern warfare, these great conquerors carried fire and sword through the whole of the regions known to them, from the sands of Africa to the ice-plains of the Baltic. What is there in modern war, which can compare with the campaigns of Hannibal, the amazing victories of Julius Cæsar, the deeds of the young Pompeiins, the story of every Legion? In the English endeavour to rescue Gordon, with every aid which modern science can invent, and assisted by every facility which modern modes of transit lend to the transport of multitudes, an army was despatched from Great Britain with orders to reach a city on the Nile. The errand was too difficult to be accomplished; the generals returned with their mission unfulfilled; the country received them with honour. This is the height to which the assistance of modern science has brought the would-be Cæsars of the age.

What child’s play would this expedition to Khartoum have seemed to Scipio Africanus or to Lucius Sylla! Yet all the ‘resources of science’ did not save the modern expedition from failure, and, in the face of Europe and Asia, it retreated in ignominy before the barbaric and untrained followers of a half-mad prophet, after an enormous expenditure of stores and treasure, and a perfectly useless waste of human life!

War has been almost incessant since the empire of science, but it has been characterised neither by magnanimity nor true triumph. Europe, armed to the teeth, is like a muzzled pack of blood-hounds; every nation lives in terror of the others; to such a pass has scientific warfare brought the world. The multiplication of engines of destruction is one of the chief occupations and boasts of a scientific age, and it can claim a melancholy pre-eminence in the discovery of the means to inflict the most agonising of all wounds through the medium of conical bullets and shells of nitro-glycerine. To have added unspeakable horror to death, and to have placed the power of secret and wholesale assassination in the hands of ignorant and envious men, is one of the chief benefits which this Egeria has brought to her eager pupil. And when her worshippers laud her to the skies, as does the president of the Aberdeen meeting, their silence on this side of her teaching is at once significant and ominous.

Playfair is obviously afraid that the Humanities will always obtain, in England at least, a larger place in public teaching and in public subsidies than pure science will be able to do. I wish his fear may be justified. My own fears are on the other side. Science offers prizes to the prurient curiosities and the nascent cruelties of youth with which literature can never compete. To study all the mysteries of sex in anatomy, and to indulge the power of a Nero in little when watching the agonies of a scientifically-tortured or poisoned dog, are enjoyments appealing to instincts in the frame of the school-boy, with which not even the most indecent passage in his Greek or Latin authors can ever pretend to measure attraction. The professors of science need have no fear as to the potency of the charm which their curriculum will exercise over the juvenile mind. Teaching which offers at once the penetration into corporeal secrets and the power of torture over animals, possesses a fascination for the minds of youth which it will never lose, because its appeals are addressed to those coarsest and crudest impulses which are strongest of all in the child and in the adolescent.

What science is preparing for the future of man, in thus putting the scalpel and the injecting-needle into the hands of children, is a darker and wider question. One thing is certain, that in the future, as in the streets and temples of Ancient Rome, there will be no altar to Pity.

The acknowledged doctrine of the professors of ‘research,’ that all knowledge is valuable because it is, or appears to be, knowledge, and that all ways and methods of obtaining it are justified and sanctified, bears so curious a likeness to the self-worship of the Papal dominion and of the Spanish Inquisition, that we see, with a sense of despair, how bigotry and despotism in some form or another are fated to reappear so long as human life shall last.

It is significant of the political immorality and readiness to tyrannise over others in the pursuit of their aims, which characterise the scientific classes, that they are willing to admire and support any government, however despotic, which is willing in return to endow their scholarships and erect their laboratories. They are inclined to surrender all political liberty, if by so doing they can obtain a ruler who will build them a number of new colleges, with every new instrument ready to their hands for animal torture and physiological or chemical experiment.

A Lorenzo di Medici, devoted exclusively to the sciences instead of to the arts, would be their ideal sovereign. Public liberties might perish under him as they should; he would give science her free scope, her desired endowments, her million living victims; he would be even too enlightened to refuse her human subjects for the physiological laboratory.

This curious willingness of the pursuers of science to join hands with tyranny, so long as tyranny helps themselves, is the darkest menace of the world’s future. In time to come it may assume dimensions and aspects which are undreamed of now. The demand of biologists and chemists to be provided for out of the funds of the state, is a demand which has never been made by literature or art, and would not be tolerated from them. The exorbitant sums insisted on for the establishment of laboratories and professorships, rob science of that character of disinterested devotion which alone would make it worthy of esteem. ‘Give me a thousand or fifteen hundred a year,’ says the physiologist to the state; ‘give me money-grants also for experiments which I may spend at my good option and for which I need return no account, and leave me to cut up dogs and cats and horses at leisure. In return I will give you some new facts about internal hydrocephalus or the length of time a new poison takes to kill a guinea-pig.’ The agreement may, or may not, be worth the state’s entering into with the physiologist, but in any case the physiologist cannot deny that he makes a good income out of his science, and cannot pretend to any disinterested or philanthropic selection of it. The moment that any man accepts a salary for intellectual work, he must submit to resign all claim to purely intellectual devotion to it. The claims of scientists to be paid and provided for out of national funds has many equivocal aspects, and will have many unwholesome results; whilst the rapacity and insistence with which they are put forward are as unbecoming as they are undisguised. The high priests of modern science are not likely to shed tears like the Greek philosopher Isocrates because they are compelled to take money. On the contrary, they clamour loudly for their maintenance by their nation, with a cupidity which has happily never disgraced either literature or art.

As modern socialism aspires to make the world into one vast allotment-ground, with every man’s half-acre meted out to him on which to build his hut and hive his store, so science would change the world into one vast class-room and laboratory, wherein all humanity (paying very large fees) should sit at the feet of its professors, whom it would clothe with purple and fine linen, and whom it would never presume to oppose or to contradict.

The world will gain nothing by delivering itself, as it is gradually doing, from the bondage of the various churches and their priesthoods, if in their stead it puts its neck under the yoke of a despotism, more intellectual perhaps, but as bigoted, as arrogant, and as cruel. That this danger lies before it from its submission to the demands of science, no dispassionate student of humanity can doubt.