SOME INTERESTING WORDS.
One of the most interesting results of the study of language is the elucidation which it affords of the history of mankind. In the larger sphere of comparative philology, important discoveries regarding the relations of various races have been made. In some cases a common origin has been proved for the widely dissimilar languages of different nations; in others, the influence of one people upon its less civilised neighbors is clearly shown. If, on the other hand, we confine our inquiries to our own language, the historical associations which it presents are no less interesting. The successive races which predominated in the early days of the history of Great Britain, have each left its impress upon our language, in which Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Danish, and Norman elements are strangely intermingled. Even now, our commercial intercourse with the inhabitants of every quarter of the globe is ever enriching our vocabulary with borrowed terms and phrases. Hence, it is hardly to be wondered that such a composite language affords an ample field for research. We may trace in it the gradual progress of civilisation, and follow the changes of national ideas and feelings, the elevation of some words, the debasement of many others. We may recognise the half-forgotten names of men once famous for their characters and achievements, and of places once renowned for their produce and manufactures. Finally, we may recall states of society which have long since passed away, and find in modern phrases vestiges of the manners and customs of other days.
It is to these records of the minor details of life that we would briefly call attention, as an investigation possessing the double interest of investing with greater reality the history of the past, and of throwing a new light on the bearing of words otherwise inexplicable. This class of words has undoubtedly been increased by startling derivations, due more to the imagination and ingenuity of their inventors, than to any certain foundation in fact. But even those which are universally recognised form a considerable category, from which we may select a few of the more interesting specimens.
We would first remind our readers of the derivations of two words applied to a peculiar form of wealth—the substantive fee and the adjective pecuniary, which, though so widely different in form, recall to us the same idea through the vehicle of different languages. They are both taken from words—the one Saxon, the other Latin—signifying “cattle,” and thus take us back to the times when flocks and herds were the chief property of our ancestors, the evidence as well as the source of their wealth. It is curious how, from this first signification, the words came to be considered applicable to wealth of any kind, and have now become almost limited in meaning to property in the form of money. To the same days of primitive simplicity we may also undoubtedly attribute the word rivals, when the pastoral dwellers by the same stream (Latin rivus) would not unfrequently be brought into unfriendly competition with each other. Some words and expressions are derived from the time when but few persons could boast of what we should consider the most elementary education. The word signature, for example, had a more literal application in the days when the art of writing was known but to a few monks and scholars, and when kings and barons, no less than their humbler followers, affixed their cross or sign to any document requiring their assent. Again, when we speak of abstruse calculations, we make unthinking reference to the primitive method of counting by means of pebbles (calculi), resorted to by the Romans.
It is remarkable how many of the terms relating to books and the external materials of literature refer primarily to the simple materials made use of by our ancestors to preserve their thoughts and the records of their lives. In book itself, it is generally acknowledged we have a proof of how a primitive race, generally believed to have been the Goths, employed the durable wood of the boc or beech-tree on which to inscribe their records. Library and kindred words in our own and other modern languages indicate the use of the liber or inner bark of a tree as a writing material; while code, from caudex, the trunk of a tree, points to the wooden tablets smeared with wax on which the ancients originally wrote. The thin wooden leaves or tablets were not like the volumina, rolled within one another, but, like those of our books, lay over one another. The stilus, or iron-pointed implement used for writing on these tablets, has its modern form in our style, which has come to be applied less to the manner of writing than to the mode of expression. Hence its significance has been extended so as to apply to arts other than that of composition. As advancing civilisation brought to the Western world the art of making a writing material from strips of the inner rind of the Egyptian papyrus glued together transversely, the word paper was introduced, to be applied as time went on to textures made of various substances. The Greek name of the same plant (byblos) gives us a word used with reference to books in the composite forms of bibliographer, bibliomania, and so forth. It is worthy of remark that in England, as well as in France, Germany, and other European countries, the simple form of this Greek word for book, our Bible, has come to be restricted to One Book, to the exclusion of all others. From scheda, a Latin word for a strip of papyrus rind, has also descended our schedule.
The transition from tablets to paper as a writing material has also a monument in volume, which, in spite of its significance as a roll of paper, is applied to the neatly folded books which have taken the place of that cumbrous form of literature. More than one instance of a similar retention of a word the actual signification of which is completely obsolete, might easily be adduced. The word indenture refers to an ancient precaution against forgery resorted to in the case of important contracts. The duplicate documents, of which each party retained one, were irregularly indented in precisely the same manner, so that upon comparison they might exactly tally. A vignette portrait has also lost the accompaniment which alone made the name appropriate, namely, the vine-leaves and tendrils which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries usually formed its ornamental border. The directions in the English Prayer-book, again, are still known as rubrics (Latin ruber, red), although it is now the exception rather than the rule to see them printed as originally, in red letters. Once more, we apply without any sense of incongruity the name of pen (from Latin penna, a feather) to all those modern appliances which rival, if they have not yet superseded, the quill, to which alone the word is really appropriate.
Several words come down to us derived from customs connected with election to public offices. The word candidate (from Latin candidus, white), is one of these. It was customary among the Romans for any suitor for office to appear in a peculiar dress denoting his position. His toga was loose, so that he might show the people the scars of the wounds received in the cause of the commonwealth, and artificially whitened in token of fidelity and humility. Again, ambition—a word of which the significance has been widened to embrace the most overpowering of all the passions of the human heart—refers primarily to the practice of these same candidates of repairing to the forum and other places of public resort, and their “going round” (Latin ambientes) among the people, endeavoring to ingratiate themselves by friendly words and greetings. From the ancient practice of secret voting by means of “balls,” we have the word ballot, which is erroneously applied to all secret voting, even when, as in the case of our parliamentary elections, voting-papers, and not balls, are employed. Nor must we omit another word of similar origin—that is, ostracism. This word signified among the Greeks the temporary banishment which might be inflicted by six thousand votes of the Athenian people upon any person suspected of designs against the liberty of the state. The name arose from the votes being recorded upon a bit of burnt clay or an earthenware tile shaped like a shell (Gr. ostrakon, a shell). It is closely allied to the Greek ostreon, or Latin ostrea, an oyster. A somewhat similar practice existed among the Syracusans, where it went by the name of petalism, from the leaf (Gr. petalon) on which the name of the offender was written. With the caprice of language, this word has entirely passed away, while the Athenian custom gives us a word expressive of social exclusion.
It has been said that there is hardly an institution of ancient times which has not some memorial in our language. The sacrifices of Greeks and Romans are commemorated in the word immolate, from the habit of throwing meal (Latin mola) upon the head of the victim. The word contemplate was probably used originally of the augurs who frequented the temples of the gods, temple meaning originally “a place cut off,” and hence “reserved,” Our word funeral is borrowed from a Latin word of similar signification, which in its turn is connected with fumus, smoke, thus giving us an allusion to the ancient habit of burning the bodies of the dead. Another word connected with the rites accorded to the dead—that is, dirge—is of Christian origin. It is a contraction of the first word of the antiphon in the office for the dead, taken from the eighth verse of the fifth Psalm: “Dirge, Dominus meus,” etc. (“Lead or direct me, O Lord,” etc.). From a Roman law-term of Greek origin we have the word paraphernalia, signifying strictly those articles of personal property, besides her jointure, which were at the disposal of a woman after the death of her husband.
From a detail of Roman military life we trace the derivation of the word subsidy, originally applied only to assistance in arms, but generalised to signify help of any kind, especially pecuniary aid. Salary meant originally “salt-money,” or money given to the soldiers for salt. With the inconsistency frequently found in language, the name survived after money had taken the place of such rations. Strictly speaking, the word stipend is liable to the same etymological objection, since the meaning of the word is a certain quantity of small coins estimated by weight.
The derivation of the word tragedy has been a fruitful field of controversy. It is undoubtedly the case that this class of drama was originally of anything but a mournful and pathetic character, and was a remnant of the winter festival in honor of the god Dionysus. The word is coined from the Greek tragos, a goat; but various reasons have been assigned for this connection. Some assert that a goat was the prize awarded to the best extempore poem in honor of the god; others, that the first actors were dressed like satyrs, in goat-skins. A more likely explanation is that a goat was sacrificed at the singing of the song.
It is curious to remark how many names applied to persons, in allusion either to their characters or occupations, can be traced to some custom of other days. The very word person is an example of this class of derivatives. It was first applied to the masks which it was customary for actors to wear. These covered the whole head, with an opening for the mouth, that the voice might sound through (Latin personare). The transition was easy from the disguise of the actor to the character which he represented, and the word was ultimately extended beyond the scenic language to denote the human being who has a part to play in the world. Sycophant is compounded of two Greek words (sycon, phantēs), signifying literally a “fig-shewer,” that is, one who brings figs to light by shaking the tree. It has been conjectured, also, that “fig-shewer” perhaps referred to one who informed against persons exporting figs from Attica, or plundering sacred fig-trees. Sycophant meant originally a common informer, and hence a slanderer; but it was never used in the modern sense of a flatterer. Another word of somewhat similar meaning, parasite, sprung from no such contemptible trade. The original bearers of the name were a class of priests who probably had their meals in common (Latin parasiteo, to sit beside). But very early with the Greeks the term came to be applied to one who lives at the expense of the great, gaining this position by adulation and servility. Also of Greek origin is pedagogue (paidagōgos), signifying, first, rather the slave who conducted the child’s steps to the place of instruction, than, as now, the master who guides his mind in the way of knowledge. In later times, a chancellor gained his name from the place which it was customary for him to occupy near the lattice-work screen (cancellus) which fenced off the judgment-seat from the body of the court. The same Latin derivation gives us the chancel of a church, from the fact of its being screened off, and what is more remarkable, the verb to cancel, that is, to strike out anything which is written by making cross-lines over it.
Several of the names of different trades will at once occur to our readers. Thus, a stationer is one who had a “station” or stand in the market-place for the sale of books, in order to attract the passers-by as customers. An upholsterer, originally upholdster, was, it would seem, an auctioneer, who “held up” his wares in order to show them off. The double -er in this word is superfluous, as in poulter-er. A haberdasher was so called from his selling a stuff called hapertas in old French, which is supposed to be from a Scandinavian word meaning pedlars’ wares, from the haversack in which they were carried.
Two military terms have curious origins. Sentinel has been traced through Italian to the Latin sentina, the hold of a ship, and is thus equivalent to the Latin sentinator, the man who pumps bilge-water out of a ship. It is curious to mark how the name of a naval official of whom constant vigilance was required has been wholly transferred to a post requiring equal watchfulness in the sister service. The other term to which we would call attention is hussar, a Hungarian word signifying “twentieth.” In explanation of this derivation, it is related that when Matthias Corvinus ascended the Hungarian throne in 1458, the dread of imminent foreign invasion caused him to command an immediate levy of troops. The cavalry he raised by a decree ordering that one man should be enrolled out of “twenty” in every village, who should provide among themselves for his subsistence and pay.
We may pass now to some words of the same nature of less honorable significance. Assassin remains in our language as the dread memorial of the domination of an odious sect in Palestine which flourished in the thirteenth century, the Hashishin (drinkers of hashish, an intoxicating drink or decoction of the Cannabis indica, a kind of hemp). The “Old Man of the Mountain” roused his followers’ spirits by help of this drink, and sent them to stab his enemies, especially the leading Crusaders. The emissaries of this body waged for two hundred years a treacherous warfare alike against Jew, Christian, and orthodox Mohammedan. Among the distinguished men who fell victims to their murderous daggers were the Marquis of Monteferrat in 1192, Louis of Bavaria in 1213, and the Kahn of Tartary some forty years later. The buccaneers, who at a later date were hardly less dreaded, derived their name from the boucan or gridiron on which the original settlers at Hayti were accustomed to broil or smoke for future consumption the flesh of the animals they had killed for their skins. The word is said to be Caribbean, and to mean “a place where meat is smoke-dried.”
Some of the contemptuous terms in our language have been attributed to remarkable origins. In scamp, we have a deserter from the field of battle (Latin ex, and campus), a parallel word to decamp; and in scoundrel, “a loathsome fellow,” “one to scunner or be disgusted at.” The old word scunner, still used as a term of strong dislike in Lowland Scotch, meant also “to shrink through fear,” so that scunner-el is equivalent to one who shrinks, a coward. Poltroon is “one who lies in bed,” instead of bestirring himself.
Several words have passed from a literal to a figurative sense, and have thus become much wider in signification. Thus, villain originally meant merely a farm-servant; pagan, a dweller in a village; knave, a boy; idiot, a private person; heathen, a dweller on a heath; gazette, a small coin; and brat, a rag or clout, especially a child’s bib or apron. Treacle meant an antidote against the bites of serpents; intoxicate, to drug or poison; coward, a bob-tailed hare; and butcher, a slaughterer merely of he-goats. Brand and stigmatise still mean to mark with infamy, although the practical significance of the words is now chiefly a matter of history. Under the Romans, a slave who had proved dishonest, or had attempted to run away from his master, was branded with the three letters F U R, a thief or rascal; while it may not be generally known that in England the custom of branding the cheek of a felon with an F was only abolished by statute some sixty years ago.
These examples of a class of words denoting traces of customs of other days, might easily be largely multiplied; but enough has been said to remind our readers of one aspect of the historical value of our language—that is, the impress of the thoughts and practices of past generations stamped upon the words which are used in the familiar intercourse of life.—Chambers’s Journal.
SOCIAL SCIENCE ON THE STAGE.
BY H. SUTHERLAND EDWARDS.
It is certainly not necessary that to every play, as to every fable, a moral easily deducible from it should be attached; though every play that presents a true picture of life must almost as a matter of course teach some lesson. Othello is the drama of jealousy, Macbeth the drama of ambition, Romeo and Juliet the drama of passionate love; but it was not to show the danger of jealousy, of ambition, or of passionate love, that these dramas were written. A picture of the “green-eyed monster,” in all its hideousness, occurs in the first; a reflection on the futility of “vaulting ambition” in the second; and a warning of the “violent ends” produced by “violent delights” in the third. The moral purpose of the play, supposing such a purpose to exist, is not, however, in either case made obvious. In numbers of the most successful plays of modern France, on the other hand, we find a moral thesis adopted beforehand and deliberately worked out by dramatic means. This moral thesis does not necessarily embody a high moral notion. It may be, and often is, paradoxical in character. The one thing essential is that it shall assert a principle, and present a case of as dramatic a character as possible in illustration of it. The moral which, as before remarked, belongs to every incident in life, is not always an evident one; nor in the finest works of art does the moral ever lie conspicuously on the surface. But if a vivacious comedy or a dramatic play is specially intended to teach or rather to prove something, it is as well that there should be no mistake about it; and in these cases the audience is generally informed in the first act of what in the succeeding acts the author proposes to demonstrate. A French drama of incidents has often no moral beyond the familiar—not to say vulgar—one that virtue prospers and vice does not; and though each of Victor Hugo’s dramas teaches some special lesson it might sometimes be difficult, but for the preface, to discover it. Numbers of French dramas, however, deal not only with the facts of life but also in an explicit manner with its theories, and though often immoral are constructed on what may be called a moral basis.
In that edifying work, the Pink Dominos, for instance, the complicated and certainly very ingenious intrigue which forms the substance of the piece has its origin in an argument between two ladies, one a thorough Parisian, the other a simple-minded and rather backward provincial, as to the true nature and appropriate treatment of husbands. A husband, according to the Parisian lady, is never perfect; and the wise wife is she who pardons his “slight slips ’gainst bonos mores,” and, to avoid driving him to humiliating subterfuges and denials, pretends even not to see them. In the long run a husband will be grateful to such a wife, and she may be sure in a general way of his fidelity and affection; whereas to a wife too vigilant and too implacable he will be obliged to behave with a duplicity which, reacting upon his own sensitive nature, will make him despise himself and detest her.
A good many modern French plays are in fact pamphlets in dramatic form; and some of them have suffered as works of art from having been too evidently written with a purpose. The dramatist who wishes to prove the truth of a proposition put forward by himself will of course make his characters act as it is necessary they should act in order to give the desired result. He must not violate probability in too flagrant a manner, and his play will scarcely succeed if the dénouement seems altogether unnatural; but even while observing these conditions he may, and usually does, so mould his personages as to make them quite exceptional; though it is with these exceptional personages that he works towards establishing his general rule. The interesting thing, however, in connection with the moral and philosophical plays of modern France is not any lesson that they teach, but the fact that such plays exist, showing as it does that the theatre in France is much more than a place of amusement. It is a place of discussion, in which every question that agitates society is treated, and often in several different pieces from several different points of view. Absurdities of the day (such as those of æstheticism) are satirised no doubt on our own stage. But the social questions dealt with on the French stage are often of a far graver character than any connected with dress. This was the case even with M. Sardou’s Famille Benoiton, notoriously a costume piece, and dependent in a large measure for its success on its amusing exaggerations of the exaggerated costumes of the day. But it was more than that. It touched upon many other follies akin to that of exaggeration in dress; and was really a stage echo of M. Dupin’s celebrated pamphlet on Le Luxe effréné des Femmes. M. Sardou’s exhilarating picture of the unbridled luxury of women called for no reply, and in fact admitted of none. His eloquent apostrophe to white muslin, “O sainte mousseline,” was criticised in the press on economical grounds, the work of “getting up” a muslin dress being neither so simple nor so inexpensive as M. Sardou had imagined. But admitting the existence of the evils that he attacked it was impossible to defend them. Similarly when, in the lively days of 1848, La Propriété c’est le Vol was brought out, and the serpent of Eden was presented on the stage with the hat and spectacles and the very physiognomy of M. Proudhon, it was not likely that any dramatist would take the part of the Socialist and seek to represent individualism as ridiculous. The “right to labor” is asserted in this same piece by a dentist without patients, who insists as a matter of principle on pulling out the teeth of the first person he meets. This again could be met by no counter-presentation from a socialistic point of view, nor would the Government have permitted it; for despite the article in the Constitution of 1830, declaring that “the censorship is abolished and cannot be re-established,” it has never been found possible to dispense in France with stage censorship, which, temporarily set aside as a result of some revolutionary movement, has always been re-established before long. So necessary, indeed, had it become under the second French Republic, to restrain the Aristophanic tendencies of the newly emancipated dramatists, that the censorship went to extremes, and not content with prohibiting political subjects interfered with social subjects also. Thus it was under the second French Republic that the younger Dumas’ sympathetic picture of the woman who has gone astray (La Traviata, as she is considerately called in the Italian version of the play) was objected to by the censorship, nor was it until the Empire that La Dame aux Camélias could be brought out.
It would probably be a mistake to see in this piece any deliberate attempt to raise up the fallen woman. The play was only a dramatic version of a novel by the same author for which the subject had been furnished by the life and death of a certain Marie Duplessis—whose story Dickens, becoming acquainted with it during a visit to Paris, had at one time proposed to treat. La Dame aux Camélias was in any case destined to achieve such popularity that for a time the class to which the heroine belongs became invested with unusual interest. Vice by being represented as consumptive lost all its grossness; but no sooner had the play attained its maximum of success than the discovery was made that it rested on a wrong moral basis. It “rehabilitated the courtesan;” and M. Théodore Barrière, assisted by the inevitable collaborateur, undertook to set matters right by exhibiting that objectionable personage in her true colors. The outcome of this undertaking was Les Filles de Marbre: too fine a name for them according to Théophile Gautier, who preferred as a substitute Les Filles de Platre. Instead of dying of love, complicated by phthisis, with claims to forgiveness based on her having “loved much,” the leading lady of M. Barrière’s piece reduced her lover to poverty and despair, unconsciously ruined his talent, and consciously insulted him when she could no longer extort money from him. The God this young woman avowedly worshipped was not love but gold. She was without pity, without remorse; nor did the author think fit to place in contrast with her a more amiable specimen of depravity—even as Dumas has placed side by side with his tender-hearted Marguerite Gauthier, the selfish and ignoble Prudence. Marco, the chief of the Girls of Marble, is doubtless a much more common character in the world than Marguerite Gauthier; and Balzac, who knew the world, had anticipated in only one of his characters—the unfortunate Coralie—all the best points in Marguerite Gauthier, whereas he had anticipated in half-a-dozen different characters, from Madame de Marneffe downward, the worst points in Marco. But though Marco may have been a good deal truer to nature than Marguerite Gauthier she was far less interesting; and the picture of a fallen woman saved by an access of genuine feeling was much more agreeable than that of a degraded one dragging to his destruction a miserably weak man.
The Girls of Marble seemed, however, to M. Léon Laya too hard, too cold; and to show that women might lead irregular lives, and yet be kind and generous, he wrote Les Cœurs d’Or. Here two young women, attached by anti-matrimonial ties to two young men, find that they are preventing them from making suitable marriages in a decent sphere of life. The young men know what, in a worldly point of view, they ought to do, but are restrained by good feeling and the remembrance of past affection from doing it. The young women, however, resolve to sacrifice themselves. They take the initiative in breaking off the connection, and by doing so prove that they have “hearts of gold.” This sentimental piece, written in the style called “honnête,” did not meet with anything like the success of the highly emotional Dame aux Camélias, or of the cynical Filles de Marbre; nor did it close the stage discussion as to the goodness or badness of a particular class of women—a discussion which, indeed, might have been carried on for an indefinite time, seeing that the class in question comprises a great number of different specimens, from Cleopatra—that “reine entretenue,” as Heine called her—to the Esther of Balzac’s Splendeurs et Misères d’une Courtisane.
Then arose the question—suggested, no doubt, by M. Laya’s Cœurs d’Or—whether a woman really possessing a heart of gold ought to be abandoned whenever it suited the convenience or the caprice of her lover to get rid of her. M. Léon Gozlan took one view of the matter and M. Emile Augier the other; the former developing his ideas on the subject in a single act, the latter in a full-sized drama. In Léon Gozlan’s charming little piece, La Fin du Roman, ou Comment on se débarrasse d’une Maîtresse, a young man is represented as so hopelessly attached to a young woman whom he has omitted to marry, that his friends, as “men of the world,” think it necessary to speak to him on the subject. The attachment has lasted a considerable time, and it is explained to him that it will be mere weakness on his part to allow it to continue any longer. He is invited to join a travelling party to Italy, and is mockingly told that he will want to bring his mistress with him. He repels the taunt, and, in response to the suggestion of one of his friends, makes a bet on the subject. The separation having been decided on, a division of household effects takes place. Difficulties arise about the appropriation of certain objects to which a sentimental interest belongs, and which each, from regard for the other, wishes to retain. A favorite dog is disputed for; and when it is arranged that he shall be the property of the one he goes to most willingly, the faithful animal hesitates between the two, and maintains an attitude of strict but friendly neutrality. Lastly, there is a child’s miniature which neither will consent to part with; and thus, little by little, the impossibility of the separation is made manifest. The young man takes the young woman with him to Italy. But he wins his bet all the same, for he is accompanied not by his mistress but by his wife.
As a counterpart to this work, in which an immoral situation is rectified by the simplest means, may be taken M. Emile Augier’s Mariage d’Olympe, in which a similar situation is, by similar means, made to yield terrible and tragic results. Only M. Augier’s young woman happens to be not at all the same sort of person as M. Gozlan’s young woman; so that whereas to abandon the one would have been culpable and foolish, to introduce the other into decent society was reckless and criminal.
Dumas showed before long a disposition to turn, not against his own views, but of views supposed to be his. Whatever allowances might be made for a woman in the position of Marguerite Gauthier, a real wife ought not, according to his very original idea, to deceive her husband. He exhibited, in Diane de Lys, a lady who took this liberty, and who was shot in consequence by her justly indignant spouse.
M. Dumas’ Fils Naturel, in which a father disavows his son, until at last the young man finds himself in such a position that he can in his turn disavow his father, gave rise to a good many pieces on the same subject. The half-a-dozen or dozen plays in which it is shown that irregular relations between men and women are likely to have awkward consequences, are, as studies of social problems, scarcely worth dwelling upon. Every one knows that (as in La Fiammina) the son of a prima donna who has misconducted herself may find difficulties in his way when he proposes to marry a girl whose parents are eminently respectable; and we need no sensational dramatist to teach us (as in Coralie), that an officer whose mother has amassed a large fortune by the most shameful means may, in spite of his personal merits, meet with slights and indignities.
M. Emile Augier’s Gendre de M. Poirier started the son-in-law as a dramatic subject. In this comedy, one of the best of modern times, a rich bourgeois has married his daughter to a penniless aristocrat, who directs the household in such a sumptuous style that the father-in-law finds himself in a fair way of being ruined. To this a sort of counterpart was furnished by M. Augier himself in Un Beau Mariage; which, while sparing fathers-in-law, exposes the thoughtlessness of some mothers-in-law who expect their daughters’ husbands, not only to take charge of their affairs, but to accompany them to evening parties and balls. This to a serious-minded young man would doubtless be a great trial; and in M. Augier’s comedy the end of the matter is that the husband leaves the house of his rich mother-in-law, and, followed at a very dramatic crisis by his wife, supports himself by the exercise of his talents as a chemist, mechanician, and inventor. The mother-in-law, even when she possesses the advantage of being rich, is not a popular character on the French stage; nor, apparently, on the Spanish stage either. There is, at all events, a modern Spanish comedy, called The Meadow Coat (the rough coat, that is to say, of the untrained, unclipped horse), in which, as in Un Beau Mariage, a rustic husband who rises early meets, on coming down in the morning, his wife and mother returning from a late ball. In M. Augier’s corresponding scene the husband has been reading and writing all night when the two ladies in their ball dresses suddenly burst upon his solitude.
Le Gendre de M. Poirier, too, was the progenitor, or at least the caller-into-existence, of another son-in-law piece called Les Petites Mains, in which a son-in-law of fashionable tastes and habits, but without money of his own, is harshly treated by a father-in-law, who insists upon his adopting some occupation, and who ultimately, by dint of persecution and misrepresentation, separates him from his wife and forces him to become clerk and touter to a house agent. The moral of this amusing little comedy is not quite apparent to the unspectacled eye. The semi-burlesque proposition on which it rests is, however, to the effect that men with large hands are intended by nature to make money, and men with small hands to spend it. The piece belongs in any case to the son-in-law series, in which, by its entertaining qualities, it may claim to hold an honorable place.
The latest social subject dealt with by French dramatists has been the fertile one of divorce, which M. Sardou has treated both seriously and comically. Before Odette and Divorçons, he had, however, written the less known Daniel Rochat, which ends with a divorce in Switzerland, the divorced persons being of course citizens of the Helvetian Republic; and though the main subject of Daniel Rochat is the union, followed immediately afterwards by the separation, of two persons who are prevented from living together as husband and wife by incompatibility of religious convictions, it may all the same be classed with M. Sardou’s other divorce pieces. The author lets it be seen that the mistake made by Daniel Rochat can easily be remedied in Switzerland, a country, where divorce is easy; whereas it would have been without remedy in France, where divorce was at that time impossible. The case, however, though an effective one for the dramatist—at least for such a dramatist as M. Sardou—is of too exceptional a character to merit attention from the dramatic moralist or legist.
The practice of treating subjects of the day in dramatic form is one which, from a purely artistic point of view, cannot be commended. The process involves almost necessarily forced motives and distorted characters. Works, too, produced on this system must, from the nature of the case, be of ephemeral interest. Who, for instance, now that France, like England, Germany, and the United States, has a law of divorce, can care for pieces in which the interest turns upon the iniquity of treating as indissoluble every contract, to whatever painful consequences it may have led, which has once been signed in presence of Monsieur le Maire? In Shakespeare and Molière so little are affairs of the day touched upon (without ever being made the subject of an entire work) that a reader might find it difficult to determine from internal evidence at what period either of these writers lived. The characteristic talk of Les Précieuses is about the only indication in the case of Molière of the time to which the piece belongs. There is scarcely a work, on the other hand, from the pen of M. Sardou (who may be taken as the representative comedy writer of modern France) which does not bear the impress and color of the time, and which (especially in the case of his later pieces) does not in a very direct manner reproduce the incidents or reflect the ideas of the life around him. If immediate and striking success with a Paris audience be the author’s aim, it must be admitted that M. Sardou’s method is more effective than that of his predecessor, Scribe, whose comedies are masterpieces of ingenuity, but are for the most part independent of place and time. Many of Scribe’s pieces have been quite as successful in England as in France. This cannot be said of any of Sardou’s plays, with the solitary exception of “Les Pattes de Mouche,” one of his earliest works, written at a time when Scribe was still his model. But so far as Paris at the present moment is concerned, M. Sardou hits the mark, and hits it harder than ever Scribe did.
The stage in France would be used for the discussion of political as well as social questions, did the censorship permit it. Of this we had a sign in M. Sardou’s Rabagas, produced soon after the Commune, in various pieces brought out during the revolutionary days of 1848, and in Les Cosaques, which, after being previously rejected by the censorship, was authorised for representation just before the outbreak of the Crimean war, when, as a matter of policy, antagonism to Russia was encouraged and stimulated by the Government. As a rule, however, no performance likely to call forth manifestations of political feeling, or to give offence to a friendly State, or to its people, is allowed. M. Sardou’s L’oncle Sam was objected to as calculated to hurt the feelings of the Americans; and the authors of a little piece called L’Etrangère—not to be confounded with the five-act comedy of the same name—were required to change it because (as set forth in a document which figures among the Papiers secrets de l’Empire) numbers of foreigners visit Paris and might be annoyed at seeing the leading character of the very objectionable little piece put forward as a typical lady from abroad! All social questions of the day have, however, for the last thirty years been left freely to the dramatist to treat as he may think fit. Or it may be that such questions have always been left to him, and that it is only during the last quarter of a century or so that he has thought fit to occupy himself with them.
The true character of women who have none was the first theme to be treated controversially, with examples in lieu of arguments; then the desirability of getting married in certain cases where the marriage ceremony had been dispensed with; then, in due time, the rights of natural children and their compromising effect in connection with mothers proposing to lead a new life. The son-in-law question—of such slight interest to Englishmen—had meantime sprung up; and the quiet, studious son-in-law, bullied by his wife’s mother; the fashionably extravagant son-in-law, devouring the substance of his wife’s father; the idle but well-meaning son-in-law, misunderstood by every one, were turn by turn exhibited. Finally, the divorce question produced a whole crop of pieces, serious and comic; and it may be that the treatment of this question by a succession of dramatists, who dwelt on the misery and disgrace resulting from marriages practically dissolved, but legally indissoluble, had some effect in hastening the adoption of M. Naquet’s Bill. The cruel position of a husband chained to a disreputable wife, and unable to set himself free, has been shown in one of M. Sardou’s most effective pieces, which, thirty years ago, when England also was without a divorce law, would have been as effective in England as in France. But it was difficult for English audiences to realise the situation; and now that continued wedlock between husbands and wives who hate one another is no longer enforced by law, the difficulty for French audiences may soon be equally great. With the passing of M. Naquet’s Divorce Bill such pieces as the Odette of M. Sardou, the Diane de Lys of M. Alexandre Dumas the younger, and the Fiammina of M. Mario Uchard lost all significance. When the pressure of the matrimonial knot has become quite unbearable it is now no longer necessary either that the wife should retire to a convent or that the husband should be shot. The difficulty is solved by the simpler, though less dramatic, means of a divorce. It is matter of publicity that immediately after M. Naquet’s Bill became law the author of La Fiammina took precisely this view of his own matrimonial trouble.
There has been a recent instance, too, in Germany, of a subject of the day—this time a serious one—being dealt with by a dramatist. Die Gräfin Lea, a play by Herr Rudolf Lindau, contains a striking exhibition of that prejudice against everything Jewish, to which in Germany the high-sounding name of anti-Semiticism has been given. In a very ingenious succession of scenes he shows that the widow, who by reason not only of her Jewish faith, but also of her low origin, is deemed by her husband’s relatives unworthy to succeed to his nobiliary estate, is an excellent and charming woman, who would not be out of place even in the very highest position. The tribunal before which the case is brought takes just this view of the matter, and the Countess Lea triumphs. But the dramatists argument in favor of the Jews is somewhat weak; and he leaves us to suppose that if the Countess Lea had been an ill-bred, commonplace Jewess, instead of a Jewess of great refinement, the court might equitably have given judgment against her. A reply to Herr Lindau’s piece, such as in France it would certainly have elicited, might easily have been written. But in Germany, as in England and all countries except France, the stage has not enough hold upon society to cause social questions to be often discussed in stage pieces. In France, on the other hand, the public takes such an interest in the theatre that the “boards” are almost to them what the platform is to the English and the Americans.
The production of a whole series of pieces on one particular subject of debate implies a continuous attention on the part of the intelligent public such as no stage but that of Paris—and the Paris stage only in modern times—seems ever to have enjoyed. Until the end of the last century the French dramatist was poorly paid, and as dramatist had little offered to him in the way of distinction beyond the hollow applause of the public. It was not until Beaumarchais obtained the decree fixing the remuneration to dramatic authors at so much per cent. on the gross receipts that writers of all kinds, and of every degree of eminence, began to occupy themselves with the stage; and it was not until all the best literary talent in the country had thus been attracted to the drama that the French Academy opened its doors to dramatists as such. Victor Hugo was a poet first and a dramatist afterwards. The elder Dumas was a dramatist first and a novelist afterwards—and he was never admitted to the Academy at all. The election of Scribe, a dramatist, and virtually nothing else, was quite an event. Since that time, however, the entry of a highly successful dramatist of long-established reputation into the Academy has come to be looked upon as a matter of course. The last dramatist elected as such was a very admirable farce writer, M. Labiche, author of Un Chapeau de Paille d’Italie, Le Voyage de M. Perrichon, Les Petites Mains, and other similar pieces, full of humor, but without the least academical pretensions.—Fortnightly Review.
A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS.
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD.
It is a long time since I quoted Bishop Wilson, but he is full of excellent things, and one of his apophthegms came into my mind the other day as I read an angry and unreasonable expostulation addressed to myself. Bishop Wilson’s apophthegm is this: Truth provokes those whom it does not convert. “Miracles,” I was angrily reproached for saying, “do not happen, and more and more of us are becoming convinced that they do not happen; nevertheless, what is really best and most valuable in the Bible is independent of miracles. For the sake of this I constantly read the Bible myself, and I advise others to read it also.” One would have thought that at a time when the French newspapers are attributing all our failures and misfortunes to our habit of reading the Bible, and when our own Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal is protesting that the golden rule is a delusion and a snare for practical men, the friends of the old religion of Christendom would have had a kindly feeling towards any one—whether he admitted miracles or not—who maintained that the root of the matter for all of us was in the Bible, and that to the use of the Bible we should still cling. But no; Truth provokes those whom it does not convert; so angry are some good people at being told that miracles do not happen, that if we say this, they cannot bear to have us using the Bible at all, or recommending the Bible. Either take it and recommend it with its miracles, they say, or else leave it alone, and let its enemies find confronting them none but orthodox defenders of it like ourselves!
The success of these orthodox champions is not commensurate with their zeal; and so, in spite of all rebuke, I find myself, as a lover of the Bible, perpetually tempted to substitute for their line of defence a different method, however it may provoke them. Christmas comes round again, and brings the most beautiful and beloved festival of the Christian year. What is Christmas, and what does it say to us? Our French friends will reply that Christmas is an exploded legend, and says to us nothing at all. The Guardian, on the other hand, lays it down that Christmas commemorates the miracle of the Incarnation, and that the Incarnation is the fundamental truth for Christians. Which is right, the Guardian or our French friends? Or are neither the one nor the other of them right, and is the truth about Christmas something quite different from what either of them imagine? The inquiry is profitable; and I kept Christmas, this last winter, by following it.
Who can ever lose out of his memory the roll and march of those magnificent words of prophecy, which, ever since we can remember, we have heard read in church on Christmas-day, and have been taught to regard as the grand and wonderful prediction of “the miracle of the Incarnation?” “The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, until he shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings.” We all know the orthodox interpretation. Immanuel is Jesus Christ, to be born of the Virgin Mary; the meaning of the name Immanuel, God with us, signifies the union of the divine nature and ours in Christ, God and man in one Person. “Butter and honey shall he eat”—the Christ shall be very man, he shall have a true human body, he shall be sustained, while he is growing up, with that ordinary nourishment wherewith human children are wont to be fed. And the sign that the promised birth of Immanuel, God and man in one Person, from the womb of a virgin, shall really happen, is this: the two kings of Syria and Israel who are now, in the eighth century before Christ, threatening the kingdom of Judah, shall be overthrown, and their country devastated. “For before the child shall know”—before this promised coming of Jesus Christ, and as a sign to guarantee it, the kings of Syria and Israel shall be conquered and overthrown. And conquered and overthrown they presently were.
But then comes the turn of criticism. The study of history, and of all documents on which history is based, is diligently prosecuted; a number of learned, patient, impartial investigators read and examine the prophets. It becomes apparent what the prophets really mean to say. It becomes certain that in the famous words read on Christmas-day the prophet Isaiah was not meaning to speak of Jesus Christ to be born more than seven centuries later. It becomes certain that his Immanuel is a prince of Judah to be born in a year or two’s time. It becomes certain that there is no question at all of a child miraculously conceived and born of a virgin; what the prophet says is that a young woman, a damsel, at that moment unmarried, shall have time, before certain things happen, to be married and to bear a son, who shall be called Immanuel. There is no question in the name Immanuel of a union of the human and divine natures, of God and man in one Person. “God present with his people and protecting them” is what the prophet means the name to signify. In “Butter and honey shall he eat,” there is no question of the Christ’s being very man, with a true human body. What the prophet intends to say is, that when the prince Immanuel, presently to be born, reaches adult age, agriculture shall have ceased in the desolated realm of Judah; the land, overrun by enemies, shall have returned to a wild state, the inhabitants shall live on the produce of their herds and on wild honey. But before this comes to pass, before the visitation of God’s wrath upon the kingdom of Judah, and while the prince Immanuel is still but a little child, not as yet able to discern betwixt good and evil, “to refuse the evil and choose the good,” the present enemies of Judah, the kings of Syria and Israel, shall be overthrown and their land made desolate. Finally, this overthrow and desolation are not, with the prophet, the sign and guarantee of Immanuel’s coming. Immanuel is himself intended as a sign; all the rest is accompaniment of this sign, not proof of it.
This, the true and sure sense of those noble words of prophecy which we hear read on Christmas-day, is obscured by slight errors in the received translation, and comes out clearer when the errors are corrected:
“The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, the damsel shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
Milk-curd and honey shall he eat, when he shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good.
For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land shall be forsaken, whose two kings make thee afraid.”
Syria and Israel shall be made desolate in Immanuel’s infancy, says the prophet; but the chastisement and desolation of Judah also shall follow later, by the time Immanuel is a youth. Further yet, however, Isaiah carries his prophecy of Immanuel and of the events of his life. In his manhood, the prophet continues, Immanuel, the promised child of the royal house of David, shall reign in righteousness over a restored, far-spreading, prosperous, and peaceful kingdom of the chosen people. “Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom.” This completion of the prophecy, too, we hear read in church on Christmas-day. Naturally, the received and erroneous interpretation, which finds, as we have seen, in the first part of the prophecy “the miracle of the Incarnation,” governs our understanding of the latter part also. But in the latter part, as well as in the former, the prophet undoubtedly has in view, not a scion of the house of David to be born and to reign seven centuries later, but a scion of the house of David to be born immediately; a scion who in his youth should see Judah afflicted, in his manhood should reign over it restored and triumphant.
Well, then, the “miracle of the Incarnation,” the preternatural conception and birth of Jesus Christ, which the Church celebrates at Christmas, and which is, says the Guardian, the fundamental truth for Christians, gets no support at all from the famous prophecy which is commonly supposed to announce it. Need I add that it gets no support at all from any single word of Jesus Christ himself, from any single word in the letters of Paul, Peter, James, or John? The miraculous conception and birth of Jesus is a legend, a lovely and attractive legend, which soon formed itself, naturally and irresistibly, around the origin of the Saviour; a legend which by the end of the first century had established itself, and which passed into two out of the four Gospel narratives that in the century following acquired canonicity. In the same way, a precisely similar legend formed itself around the origin of Plato, although to the popular imagination Plato was an object incomparably less fitted to offer stimulus. The father of Plato, said the Athenian story, was upon his marriage warned by Apollo in a dream that his wife, Perictiona, was about to bring forth a babe divinely conceived, and that he was to live apart from her until the child had been born. Among the students of philosophy, who were Plato’s disciples, this story, although authorized by his family, languished and died. Had Plato founded a popular religion the case would have been very different. Then the legend would have survived and thriven; and for Plato, too, there would have certainly been a world-famous “miracle of the Incarnation” investing his origin. But Plato, as Bossuet says, formed fewer disciples than Paul formed churches. It was these churches, this multitude, it was the popular masses with their receptivity, with their native tendencies of mind, heart, and soul, which made the future of the Christian legend of the miracle of the Incarnation.
But because the story of the miracle of the Incarnation is a legend, and because two of the canonical Gospels propound the legend seriously, basing it upon an evidently fantastic use of the words of prophecy, and because the festival of Christmas adopts and consecrates this legend, are we to cast the Gospels aside, and cast the celebration of Christmas aside; or else to give up our common sense, and to say that things are not what they are, and that Isaiah really predicted the preternatural conception and birth of Jesus Christ, and that the miracle of the Incarnation really happened as the Guardian supposes, and that Christians, in commemorating it, commemorates a solid fact of history, and a fact which is the fundamental truth for Christians? By no means. The solid fact of history marked by Christmas is the birth of Jesus, the miraculous circumstances with which that birth is invested and presented are legendary. The solid fact in itself, the birth of Jesus with its inexhaustible train of consequences, its “unspeakable riches,” is foundation enough, and more than enough, for the Christmas festival; yet even the legend and miracle investing the fact, and now almost inseparable from it, have, moreover, their virtue of symbol.
Symbol is a dangerous word, and we ought to be very cautious in employing it. People have a difficulty in owning that a thing is unhistorical, and often they try to get out of the difficulty by saying that the thing is symbolical. Thus they think to save the credit of whoever delivered the thing in question, as if he had himself intended to deliver it as symbolical and figurative, not as historical. They save it, however, at the expense of truth. In very many cases, undoubtedly, when this shift of symbol is resorted to for saving the credit of a narrator of legend, the narrator had not himself the least notion that what he propounded was figure, but fully imagined himself to be propounding historical fact. The Gospel narrators of the miracle of the Incarnation were in this position of mind; they did not in the least imagine themselves to be speaking symbolically. Nevertheless, a thing may have important value as symbol, although its utterer never told or meant it symbolically. Let us see how this is so with the Christian legend of the Incarnation.
In times and among minds where science is not a power, and where the preternatural is daily and familiarly admitted, the pureness and elevation of a great teacher strike powerfully the popular imagination, and the natural, simple, reverential explanation of his superiority is at once that he was born of a virgin. Such a legend is the people’s genuine translation for the fact of his unique pureness. In his birth, as well as in his life and teaching, this chosen one has been pure; has been unlike other men, and above them. Signal and splendid is the pureness of Plato; noble his serene faith, that “the conclusion has long been reached that dissoluteness is to be condemned, in that it brings about the aggrandisement of the lower side in our nature, and the defeat of the higher.” And this lofty pureness of Plato impressed the imagination of his contemporaries, and evoked the legend of his having been born of a virgin. But Plato was, as I have already said, a philosopher, not the founder of a religion; his personality survived, but for the intellect mainly, not the affections and imagination. It influenced and affected the few, not the many—not the masses which love and foster legend. On the figure of Jesus also the stamp of a pureness unique and divine was seen to dwell. The remark has often been made that the pre-eminent, the winning, the irresistible Christian virtues, were charity and chastity. Perhaps the chastity was an even more winning virtue than the charity; it offered to the Pagan world, at any rate, relief from a more oppressive, a more consuming, a more intolerable bondage. Chief among the beatitudes shone this pair: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God; and of these two, the second blessing may have been even the greater boon. Jesus, then, the bringer of this precious blessing, Jesus, the high exemplar and ideal of pureness, was born of a virgin. And what Jesus brought was not a philosophy, but a religion; he gave not to the few, but to the masses, to the very recipients whom the tender legend of his being born of the gracious Virgin, and laid in the humble manger, would suit best; who might most surely be trusted to seize upon it, not to let it go, to delight in it and magnify it for ever.
So the legend of the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus, like the legend of the miraculous conception and birth of Plato, is the popular homage to a high ideal of pureness, it is the multitude’s way of expressing for this its reverence. Of such reverence the legend is a genuine symbol. But the importance of the symbol is proportional to the scale on which it acts. And even when it acts on a very large scale, still its virtue will depend on these two things further: the worth of the idea to which it does homage, and the extent to which its recipients have succeeded in penetrating through the form of the legend to this idea.
And first, then, as to the innate truth and worth of that idea of pureness to which the legend of the miracle of the Incarnation does homage. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, says Jesus. God hath not called us to impureness, but unto holiness, adds his apostle. Perhaps there is no doctrine of Christianity which is exposed to more trial amongst us now, certainly there is none which will be exposed, so far as from present appearances one can judge, to more trial in the immediate future, than this. Let us return to nature, is a rising and spreading cry again now, as it was at the Renascence. And the Christian pureness has so much which seems to contradict nature, and which is menaced by the growing desire and determination to return to nature! The virtue has suffered more than most virtues in the hands of hypocrites; and with hypocrites and hypocrisy, as a power in English life, there is an increasing impatience. But the virtue has been mishandled, also, by the sincere; by the sincere, but who are at the same time over-rigid, formal, sour, narrow-minded; and these, too, are by no means in the ascendant among us just now. Evidently, again, it has been mishandled by many of the so-called saints, and by the asceticism of the Catholic Church; for these have so managed things, very often, as to turn and rivet the thoughts upon the very matter from which pureness would avert them and get them clear, and have to that extent served to endanger and impair the virtue rather than forward it. Then, too, with the growing sense that gaiety and pleasure are legitimate demands of nature, that they add to life and to our sum of force instead of, as strict people have been wont to say, taking from it—with this growing sense comes also the multiplication everywhere of the means of gaiety and pleasure, the spectacle ever more prominent of them and catching the eye more constantly, an ever larger number of applicants pressing forward to share in them. All this solicits the senses, makes them bold, eager and stirring. At the same time the force of old sanctions of self-restraint diminishes and gives way. The belief in a magnified and non-natural man, out of our sight, but proved by miracles to exist and to be all-powerful, who by his commands has imposed on us the obligation of self-restraint, and who will punish us after death in endless fire if we disobey, will reward us in Paradise if we submit—this belief is rapidly and irrecoverably losing its hold on men’s minds. If pureness or any other virtue is still to subsist, it must subsist nowadays not by authority of this kind enforcing it in defiance of nature, but because nature herself turns out to be really for it.
Mr. Traill has reminded us, in the interesting volume on Coleridge which he has recently published, how Coleridge’s disciple, Mr. Green, devoted the last years of his life to elaborating, in a work entitled “Spiritual Philosophy: founded on the Teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” the great Coleridgian position “that Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence, the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of reason—truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of nature and without aid from documents or tradition, may always and everywhere discover for himself.” We shall not find this position established or much elucidated in “Spiritual Philosophy,” We shall not find it established or much elucidated in the works of Coleridge’s immediate disciples. It was a position of extreme novelty to take at that time. Firmly to occupy it, resolutely to establish it, required great boldness and great lucidity. Coleridge’s position made demands upon his disciples which at that time it was almost impossible they should fulfil; it embarrassed them, forced them into vagueness and obscurity. The most eminent and popular among them, Mr. Maurice, seems never quite to have himself known what he himself meant, and perhaps never really quite wished to know. But neither did the master, as I have already said, establish his own position; there were obstacles in his own character, as well as in his circumstances, in the time. Nevertheless it is rightly called the great Coleridgian position. It is at the bottom of all Coleridge’s thinking and teaching; it is true; it is deeply important; and by virtue of it Coleridge takes rank, so far as English thought is concerned, as an initiator and founder. The “great Coleridgian position,” that apart from all question of the evidence for miracles, and of the historical quality of the Gospel narratives, the essential matters of Christianity are necessary and eternal facts of nature or truths of reason, is henceforth the key to the whole defence of Christianity. When a Christian virtue is presented to us as obligatory, the first thing, therefore, to be asked is whether our need of it is a fact of nature.
Here the appeal is to experience and testimony. His own experience may in the end be the surest teacher for every man; but meanwhile, to confirm or deny his instinctive anticipations and to start him on his way, testimony as to the experience of others, general experience, is of the most serious weight and value. We have had the testimony of Plato to the necessity of pureness, that virtue on which Christianity lays so much stress. Here is yet another testimony out of the same Greek world—a world so alien to the world in which Christianity arose; here is the testimony of Sophocles. “Oh that my lot might lead me in the path of holy pureness of thought and deed, the path which august laws ordain, laws which in the highest heaven had their birth;... the power of God is mighty in them, and groweth not old.” That is the testimony of the poet Sophocles. Coming down to our own times, we have again a like testimony from the greatest poet of our times, Goethe; a testimony the more important, because Goethe, like Sophocles, was in his own life what the world calls by no means a purist. “May the idea of pureness” says Goethe, “extending itself even to the very morsel which I take into my mouth, become ever clearer and more luminous within me!” But let us consult the testimony not only of people far over our heads, such as great poets and sages; let us have the testimony of people living, as the common phrase is, in the world, and living there on an every-day footing. And let us choose a world the least favorable to purists possible, the most given to laxity—and where indeed by this time the reign of the great goddess Lubricity seems, as I have often said, to be almost established—the world of Paris. Two famous women of that world of Paris in the seventeenth century, two women not altogether unlike in spirit, Ninon de l’Enclos and Mme. de Sévigné, offer, in respect to the virtue with which we are now occupied, the most striking contrast possible. Both had, in the highest degree, freedom of spirit and of speech, boldness, gaiety lucidity. Mme. de Sévigné, married to a worthless husband, then a widow, beautiful, witty, charming, of extraordinary freedom, easy and broad in her judgments, fond of enjoyment, not seriously religious; Mme. de Sévigné, living in a society where almost everybody had a lover, never took one. The French commentators upon this incomparable woman are puzzled by this. But really the truth is, that not from what is called high moral principle, not from religion, but from sheer elementary soundness of nature and by virtue of her perfect lucidity, she revolted from the sort of life so common all round her, was drawn towards regularity, felt antipathy to blemish and disorder. Ninon, on the other hand, with a like freedom of mind, a like boldness and breadth in her judgments, a like gaiety and love of enjoyment, took a different turn, and her irregular life was the talk of her century. But that lucidity, which even all through her irregular life was her charm, made her say at the end of it: “All the world tells me that I have less cause to speak ill of time than other people. However that may be, could anybody have proposed to me beforehand the life I have had, I would have hanged myself.” That, I say, is the testimony of the most lucid children of this world, as the testimony of Plato, Sophocles and Goethe is the testimony of the loftiest spirits, to the natural obligation and necessity of the essentially Christian virtue of pureness. So when legend represents the founder of Christianity and great exemplar of this virtue as born of a virgin, thus doing homage to pureness, it does homage to what has natural worth and necessity.
But we have further to ask to what extent the recipients of the legend showed themselves afterwards capable, while firmly believing the legend and delighting in it, of penetrating to that virtue which it honored, and of showing their sense that accompanying the legend went the glorification of that virtue. Here the Collects of the Church which have come down to us from Catholic antiquity—from the times when all legend was most unhesitatingly received, most fondly loved, most delighted in for its own sake—are the best testimony. Jesus was manifested, says one of the Epiphany Collects, “to make us the sons of God and heirs of eternal life,” and we, having this hope, are to “purify ourselves even as he is pure.” And the Collect for Christmas-day itself—that very day on which the miracle of the Incarnation is commemorated, and on which we might expect the legend’s miraculous side to be altogether dominant—firmly seizes the homage to pureness and renovation which is at the heart of the legend, and holds it steadily before us all Christmas-time. “Almighty God,” so the Collect runs, “who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin, grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit.” The miracle is amply and impressively stated, but the stress is laid upon the work of regeneration and inward renewal, whereby we are to be made sons of God, like to that supreme Son whose pureness was expressed through his being born of a pure Virgin. It is as, in celebrating at Easter the miracle of the Resurrection, the Church, following here St. Paul, seizes and elevates in the Collect for Easter Eve that great “secret of Jesus” which underlies the whole miraculous legend of the Resurrection, and which only through materializing itself in that legend could arrive at the general heart of mankind.
It is so manifest that there is that true and grand and profound doctrine of the necrosis, of “dying to re-live,” underlying all which is legendary in the presentation of the death and resurrection of Jesus by our Gospels, it is so manifest that St. Paul seized upon the doctrine and elevated it, and that the Church has retained it,—that one can find no difficulty, when the festival of Easter is celebrated, in fixing one’s thoughts upon the doctrine as a centre, and in receiving all the miraculous story as poetry naturally investing this and doing homage to it. And there is hardly a fast or a festival of the Christian year in which the underlying truth, the beneficent and forwarding idea, clothed with legend and miracle because mankind could only appropriate it by materializing it in legend and miracle, is not apparent. Trinity Sunday is an exception, but then Trinity Sunday does not really deal with Gospel story and miracle, it deals with speculation by theologians on the divine nature. Perhaps, considering the results of their speculation, we ought now rather to keep Trinity Sunday as a day of penitence for the aberrations of theological dogmatists. It is, however, in itself admissible and right enough that in the Christian year one day should be given to considering the aspects by which the human mind can in any degree apprehend God. But Trinity Sunday is, as I have said, an exception. For the most part, in the days and seasons which the Church observes, there is commemoration of some matter declared in Scripture, and combined and clothed more or less with miracle. Yet how near to us, under the accompanying investment of legend, does the animating and fructifying idea lie!—in Lent, with the miracle of the temptation, the idea of self-conquest and self-control; in Whitsuntide, with the miracle of the tongues of fire, the idea of the spirit and of inspiration.
What Christmas primarily commemorates is the birthday of Jesus—Jesus, the bringer to the world of the new dispensation contained in his method and secret, and in his temper of epieikeia, or sweet reasonableness, for applying them. But the religion of Christendom has in fact made the prominent thing in Christmas a miracle, a legend; the miracle of the Incarnation, as it is called, the legend of Jesus having been born of the Virgin. And to those who cannot bring themselves to receive miracle and legend as fact, what Christmas, under this popularly established aspect of it, can have to say, what significance it can contain, may at first seem doubtful. Christmas might as first appear to be the one great festival which is concerned wholly with mere miracle, which fixes our attention upon a miracle and nothing else. But when we come to look closer, we find that even in the case of Christmas the thing is not so. That on which Christmas even in its popular acceptation, fixes our attention, is that to which the popular instinct, in attributing to Jesus his miraculous Incarnation, in believing him born of a pure Virgin, did homage—pureness. And this, to which the popular instinct thus did homage, was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue of Christianity, the obligation of which, though apt to be questioned and discredited in the world, is at the same time nevertheless a necessary fact of nature and eternal truth of reason. And fondly as the Church has cherished and displayed the Christmas miracle, this, the true significance of the miraculous legend for religion, has never been unknown to her, never wholly lost out of sight. As times goes on, as legend and miracle are less taken seriously as matters of fact, this worth of the Christmas legend as symbol will more and more come into view. The legend will still be loved, but as poetry—as poetry endeared by the associations of some two thousand years; religious thought will rest upon that which the legend symbolizes.
It is a mistake to suppose that rules for conduct and recommendations of virtue, presented in a correct scientific statement, or in a new rhetorical statement from which old errors are excluded, can have anything like the effect on mankind of old rules and recommendations to which they have been long, accustomed, and with which their feelings and affections have become intertwined. Pedants always suppose that they can, but that this mistake should be so commonly made proves only how many of us have a mixture of the pedant in our composition. A correct scientific statement of rules of virtue has upon the great majority of mankind simply no effect at all. A new rhetorical statement of them, appealing, like the old familiar deliverances of Christianity, to the heart and imagination, can have the effect which those deliverances had, only when they proceed from a religious genius equal to that from which those proceeded. To state the requirement is to declare the impossibility of its being satisfied. The superlative pedantry of Comte is shown in his vainly imagining that he could satisfy it; the comparative pedantry of his disciples is shown by the degree in which they adopt their master’s vain imagination.
The really essential ideas of Christianity have a truth, depth, necessity, and scope, far beyond anything that either the adherents of popular Christianity, or its impugners, at present suppose. Jesus himself, as I have remarked elsewhere, is even the better fitted to stand as the central figure of a religion, because his reporters so evidently fail to comprehend him fully and to report him adequately. Being so evidently great and yet so uncomprehended, and being now inevitably so to remain for ever, he thus comes to stand before us as what the philosophers call an absolute. We cannot apply to him the tests which we can apply to other phenomena, we cannot get behind him and above him, cannot command him. But even were Jesus less of an absolute, less fitted to stand as the central figure of a religion, than he is, even were the constitutive and essential ideas of Christianity less pregnant, profound and far-reaching than they are, still the personage of Jesus, and the Christian rules of conduct and recommendations of virtue, being of that indisputable significance and worth that in any fair view which can be taken of them they are, would have a value and a substantiality for religious purposes which no new constructions can possibly have. No new constructions in religion can now hope to found a common way, hold aloft a common truth, unite men in a common life. And yet how true it is, in regard to mankind, conduct and course, that, as the “Imitation” says so admirably, “Without a way there is no going, without a truth no knowing, without a life no living.” Sine viâ non itur, sine veritate non cognoscitur, sine vitâ non vivitur. The way, truth, and life have been found in Christianity, and will not now be found outside of it. Instead of making vain and pedantic endeavors to invent them outside of it, what we have to do is to help, so far as we can, towards their continuing to be found inside of it by honest and sane people, who would be glad to find them there if they can accomplish it without playing tricks with their understanding; to help them to accomplish this, and to remove obstacles out of the way of their doing so.
Far from having anything to gain by being timid and reticent, or else vague and rhetorical in treating of the miraculous element in the Bible, he who would help men will probably now do most good by treating this element with entire unreserve. Let him frankly say, that miracle narrated in the Bible is as legendary as miracle narrated anywhere else and not more to be taken as having actually happened. If he calls it symbolical, let him be careful to mark that the narrators did not mean it for symbol, but delivered it as having actually happened, and in so delivering it were mistaken. Let him say that we can still use it as poetry, and that in so using it we use it better than those who used it as matter of fact; but let him not leave in any uncertainty the point that it is as poetry that we do use it. Let no difficulties be slurred over or eluded. Undoubtedly a period of transition in religious belief, such as the period in which we are now living, presents many grave difficulties. Undoubtedly the reliance on miracles is not lost without some danger; but the thing to consider is that it must be lost, and that the danger must be met, and, as it can be, counteracted. If men say, as some men are likely enough to say, that they altogether give up Christian miracles and cannot do otherwise, but that then they give up Christian morals too, the answer is, that they do this at their own risk and peril; that they need not do it, that they are wrong in doing it, and will have to rue their error. But for my part, I prefer at present to say this simply and barely, not to give any rhetorical development to it. Springs of interest for the emotions and feelings this reality possesses in abundance, and hereafter these springs may and will most beneficially be used by the clergy and teachers of religion, who are the best persons to turn them to account. As they have habitually and powerfully used the springs of emotion contained in the Christian legend, so they will with time come to use the springs of emotion contained in the reality. But there has been so much vagueness, and so much rhetoric, and so much license of affirmation, and so much treatment of what cannot be known as if it were well known, and of what is poetry and legend as if it were essential solid fact, and of what is investment and dress of the matter as if it were the heart of the matter, that for the present, and when we are just at the commencement of a new departure, I prefer, I say, to put forward a plain, strict statement of the essential facts and truths consecrated by the Christian legend, and to confine myself to doing this. We make a mistake if we think that even those facts and truths can now produce their full effect upon men when exhibited in such a naked statement, and separately from the poetry and legend with which they are combined, and to which men have been accustomed for centuries. Nevertheless, the important thing at the present moment is not to enlarge upon the effect which the essential facts and truths gain from being still used in that combination, but after indicating this point, and insisting on it, to pass on to show what the essential facts and truths are.
Therefore, when we are asked: What really is Christmas, and what does it celebrate? we answer, the birthday of Jesus. What is the miracle of the Incarnation? A homage to the virtue of pureness, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent, and the miracle of the temptation? A homage to the virtue of self-control and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What does Easter celebrate? Jesus victorious over death by dying. By dying how? Dying to re-live. To re-live in Paradise, in another world? No, in this. What, then, is the kingdom of God? The ideal society of the future. Then what is immortality? To live in the eternal order, which never dies. What is salvation by Jesus Christ? The attainment of this immortality. Through what means? Through means of the method and the secret and the temper of Jesus.
Experience of the saving results of the method and secret and temper of Jesus, imperfectly even as this method and secret and temper have been extricated and employed hitherto, makes the strength of that wonderful Book in which, with an immense vehicle of legend and miracle, the new dispensation of Jesus and the old dispensation which led up to it are exhibited, and brought to mankind’s knowledge; makes the strength of the Bible, and of the religion and churches which the Bible has called into being. We may remark that what makes the attraction of a church is always what is consonant in it to the method and secret and temper of Jesus, and productive, therefore, of the saving results which flow from these. The attraction of the Catholic Church is unity, of the Protestant sects, conscience, of the Church of England, abuses reformed but unity saved. I speak of that which, in each of these cases, is the promise apparently held out; I do not say that the promise is made good. That which makes the weakness and danger of a church, again, is just that in it which is not consonant to the line of Jesus. Thus the danger of the Catholic Church is its obscurantism, of the Protestant sects their contentiousness, of the Church of England, its deference to station and property. I said the other day, in the East-end of London, that, ever since the appearance of Christianity, the prince of this world is judged. The Guardian was disquieted and alarmed at my saying this. I will urge nothing in answer, except that this deference to the susceptibilities of station and property, which has been too characteristic of the Church of England in the past—a deference so signally at variance with the line of Jesus—is at the same time just what now makes the Church of England’s weakness and main danger.
As time goes on, it will be more and more manifest that salvation does really depend on consonance to the line of Jesus, and that this experience, and nothing miraculous or preternatural, is what establishes the truth and necessity of Christianity. The experience proceeds on a large scale, and therefore slowly. But even now, and imperfectly, moreover, as the line of Jesus has been followed hitherto, it can be seen that those nations are the soundest which have the most seriously concerned themselves with it and have most endeavored to follow it. Societies are saved by following it, broken up by not following it; and as the experience of this continually proceeds, the proofs of Christianity are continually accumulating and growing stronger. The thing goes on quite independently of our wishes, and whether we will or no. Our French friends seem perfectly and scornfully incredulous as to the cogency of the beatitude which pronounces blessing on the pure in heart; they would not for a moment admit that nations perish through the service of the great goddess Lubricity. On the contrary, many of them maintain this service to be the most natural and reasonable thing in the world. Yet really this service broke up the great Roman Empire in the past, and is capable, it will be found, of breaking up any number of societies.
Or let us consider that other great beatitude and its fortunes, the beatitude recommending the Christian virtue of charity. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Many people do not even understand what it is which this beatitude means to bless; they think it recommends humbleness of spirit. Ferdinand Baur, whose exegesis of texts from the Gospels is more valuable than his criticism of the mode in which the Gospels were composed, has well pointed out that the persons here blest are not those who are humble-spirited, but those who are in the intention and bent of their spirit—in mind, as we say, and not in profession merely—indifferent to riches. Such persons, whether they possess riches or not, really regard riches as something foreign to them, something not their own, and are thus, in the phrase of another text where our received translation is misleading, faithful as regards riches. “If ye have not been faithful in that which is foreign to you, who will give you that which is your own?” The fidelity consists in having conquered the temptation to treat that for which men desire riches, private possession and personal enjoyment, as things vital to us and to be desired. Wherever there is cupidity, there the blessing of the Gospel cannot rest. The actual poor may altogether fail to be objects of the blessing; the actual rich may be objects of it in the highest degree. Nay, the surest of means to restore and perpetuate the reign of the selfish rich, if at any time it have been interrupted, is cupidity, envy, and hatred in the poor. And this again is a witness to the infallibility of the line of Jesus. We must come, both rich and poor, to prefer the common good, the interest of “the body of Christ”—to use the Gospel phrase—the body of Christ of which we are members, to private possession and personal enjoyment.
This is Christian charity, and how rare, how very rare it is, we all know. In this practical country of ours, where possessing property and estate is so loved, and losing them so hated, the opposition to it is almost as strong as that to Christian purity in France. The Saturday Review is in general respectful to religion, intelligent and decorous, in matters of literary and scientific criticism reasonable. But let it imagine property and privilege threatened, and instantly what a change! There seems to rise before one’s mind’s eye a sort of vision of an elderly demoniac, surrounded by a troop of younger demoniacs of whom he is the owner and guide, all of them suddenly foaming at the mouth and crying out horribly. The attachment to property and privilege is so strong, the fear of losing them so agitating. But the line of Jesus perpetually tends to establish itself, as I have said, independently of our wishes, and whether we will or no. And undoubtedly the line of Jesus is: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” In other words: “How hardly shall those who cling to private possessions and personal enjoyment, who have not brought themselves to regard property and riches as foreign and indifferent to them, who have not annulled self, and placed their happiness in the common good, make part of the ideal society of the future!”
The legend of Christmas is a homage to the Christian virtue of pureness, and Christmas, with its miracle of the Incarnation, should turn our thoughts to the certainty of this virtue’s final victory, against all difficulties. And with the victory of this virtue let us associate the victory of its great fellow-virtue of Christian charity, a victory equally difficult but equally certain. The difficulties are undeniable, but here the signs of the times point far more to the emergence and progress of the virtue than to its depression. Who cannot see that the idea of the common good is acquiring amongst us, at the present day, a force altogether new? that, for instance, in cases where, in the framing of laws and in the interpretation of them by tribunals, regard to property and privilege used to be, one may say, paramount, and the idea of the common good hardly considered at all, things are now tending quite the other way; the pretensions of property and privilege are severely scrutinized, the claims of the common good entertained with favor. An acceleration of progress in the spread of ideas of this kind, a decline of vitality in institutions where the opposite ideas were paramount, marks the close of a period. Jesus announced for his own period such a close; a close necessitated by the emergence of the new, the decay of the old. He announced it with the turbid figures familiar through prophecy to his hearers’ imagination figures of stupendous physical miracle, a break-up of nature, God coming to judgment. But he did not announce under these figures, as our Bibles make him announce, the end of the world; he announced “the end of the age,” “the close of the period.” That close came, as he had foretold; and a like “end of the age” is imminent wherever a certain stage is reached in the conflict between the line of Jesus and the facts of the period through which it takes its passage. Sometimes we may almost be inclined to augur that from some such “end of the age” we ourselves are not far now; that through dissolution—dissolution peaceful if we have virtue enough, violent if we are vicious, but still dissolution—we and our own age have to pass, according to the eternal law which makes dissolution the condition of renovation. The price demanded, by the inexorable conditions on which the kingdom of God is offered, for the mistakes of our past, for the attainment of our future, this price may perhaps be required sooner than we suppose, required even of us ourselves who are living now; “verily I say unto you, it shall be required of this generation.”—Contemporary Review.