Liberty.
As I learnt subsequently, my identity and my stratagem were revealed to the authorities by one of my comrades of the convoy shortly after I left Irkoutsk. But when the gendarmes went to the village of Talminsky, I had already vanished. Every effort was, however, made to retake me, the quest being kept up night and day for six weeks. Then it was rumored that a body found in the forest had been identified as mine, and that I had perished of hunger. According to another story, I had been arrested at Nijni Oudinsk, and was being brought back to Irkoutsk. Among the vagabonds who at this time were captured right and left on the high roads throughout the province, were several whom it pleased to call themselves by my name. The deceit was naturally soon detected, but while it lasted the deceivers enjoyed certain advantages, which helped to render their detention tolerable. Instead of walking they rode in carriages, and were accompanied by an escort, and being regarded as important prisoners, they were both better fed and better treated than common malefactors, while their audacity rendered them highly popular with their vagabond and convict comrades. There were at one time no fewer than four false Debagorio Mokrievitches in the jail of Irkoutsk. The police sought me with great diligence among the political exiles of the province; a most stupid proceeding on their part, for to take refuge with the politicals would have been putting my head in the lion's mouth.
Three other men who about the same time attempted to escape were all recaptured.
I stayed in Siberia a year, making during that time several journeys to the eastward of Irkoutsk. At length the police having abandoned all hope of finding me, I resolved to leave the country. A passport being absolutely necessary, I borrowed the name and obtained the papers of a gentleman recently deceased—Ivan Alexandrovitch Selivanoff. It was in the winter of 1880 that I set out on my long journey of 3,600 miles. I travelled post, by way of Irkoutsk, Krasnoiarsk and Tomsk—towns through which, a twelvemonth before, I had passed as a prisoner. Rather a bold undertaking in the circumstances; but as I possessed an itinerary-card signed by the governor of the province, giving me the right to relays of horses, I ran no great danger, and left the home of my hospitable friend with an easy mind.
During the journey I met from time to time gangs of prisoners on the way from Russia to Irkoutsk. The clanking of the irons, the yellow pelisses, the worn faces, the weary walk, and the shorn heads of these unfortunates—how familiar they all were, and how the sight of them thrilled me to the soul! And behind the chain gang came the wagons of the political prisoners, among whom, more than once, I recognized the face of a dear friend. But instead of jumping from my carriage and folding the poor fellows in my arms, I had to look the other way!
All went well with me, but once I had a terribly narrow escape of falling a second time into the toils. It so chanced that I passed through the province of Tobolsk in company with a tchinovnik (government employé), whose acquaintance I had made on the road, a big-paunched, rosy-cheeked fellow, with merry eyes and a mellow voice; and, being on his way home after a long absence, in high good humor and full of fun. Once at the end of a long day's journey, we arrived about midnight at a town in the neighborhood of Tobolsk, and, being tired and sleepy, resolved to pass the rest of the night there. So we went into the travellers' room, ordered tea, and handed our itinerary cards to the starosta of the station, in order that he might make the necessary entries in the travellers' book. Before going to the sleeping room we requested that the horses might be ready at seven o'clock next morning.
I slept the sleep of the just, rose betimes, and called for the starosta.
“Are the horses ready?” I asked. “And be good enough to bring hither our itinerary-cards.”
“The station-master will himself bring your itinerary-cards, and as for the horses they are already yoked up.”
Half-an-hour later the station-master (otherwise director), came into our room, holding in his hand the itinerary-cards.
“I am sorry to trouble you,” he said politely; “but I should like to know which of you young gentlemen is Ivan Alexandrovitch Selivanoff?”
“At your service sir,” I answered, stepping forward.
The station-master looked at me with a ludicrous expression of bewilderment and surprise.
“A thousand pardons,” he said at length, with a low bow. “But really—I don't quite understand. The fact is, I knew Mr. Selivanoff, and here I see the same surname and Christian name; the name of the father is also the same, the tchin (rank) likewise! Yet I was told he had died—more than a year ago—but when I saw his name on the card I thought the news must be false, and I came to assure myself. I see that I am mistaken. A thousand pardons, sir, a thousand pardons,” and again he saluted me still more profoundly than before.
I felt as if the ground were opening under my feet, and was thinking how on earth I should get out of the scrape, when my companion came—without knowing it—to the rescue.
“What a capital joke!” he shouted, clapping me on the back, and laughing so that he could hardly speak. “One might suppose that the worthy director takes you for an escaped prisoner with a dead man's passport. Ha, ha, ha, what a capital joke to be sure!”
And holding his big belly with both hands, he balanced himself first on one foot and then the other, laughing the while, until he could hardly stand.
“You are quite right,” I said, also laughing, though with considerable effort. “It is really an excellent joke. But seriously (turning to the station-master), the thing is easily explained. In the part I come from the Selivanoffs are as plentiful as blackberries. The late Ivan Alexandrovitch, your friend, and I were kinsmen, and had a great affection for each other; the name is so common in the province that I could introduce you to a dozen of my namesakes any day.”
The station-master seemed satisfied with this explanation. At any rate, he made no objection to our departure, and shortly afterwards we were once more en route. But my companion, the tchinovnik did not cease laughing for a long time. “To take you for a fugitive convict with a false passport!” he would say “it is really too good,” and whenever he remembered the incident he would laugh as if he never meant to stop. I remembered it, as may be supposed, with very different feelings. The escape was a very narrow one, and showed me how much I was still at the mercy of the slightest mishap. But this proved to be my last adventure and my last peril. In May, 1881, I reached Geneva, and felt that I was at last really free.
As most stories of Russian revolutionary life have necessarily, if they be true, a tragical termination, readers of the foregoing narrative may be pleased to know that M. Mokrievitch is still in a land where he feels really free. Though one of the heroes of Russian liberty he has not yet become one of its martyrs. But the time may come when he, as many other fugitives have done, will return to the volcanic soil of his native country, there to take part in the struggle to death which, though unseen, goes always on, and must continue without truce and without surcease until the sun of Freedom shall dawn in the Empire of the Night.—Contemporary Review.
[COLERIDGE AS A SPIRITUAL THINKER.]
BY PRINCIPAL TULLOCH.
Mr. Traill's recent volume has recalled the poet-philosopher who died just fifty years ago, leaving a strongly marked but indefinite impression upon the mind of his time. The volume has done something to renew and vivify the impression both in respect of Coleridge's poetry and criticism. His work as a critic has never, perhaps, been better or more completely exhibited. It is recognised generously in all its largeness and profundity, as well as delicacy and subtlety; and justice is especially done to his Shakesperian commentary, which in its richness, variety, felicity, combined with depth and acuteness, is absolutely unrivalled. But Mr. Traill cannot be said to have even attempted any estimate of Coleridge as a spiritual thinker. It may be questioned how far he has recognised that there is a spiritual side to all his thought, without which neither his poetry nor his criticism can be fully understood, cleverly as they may be judged.
It is not only out of date, but outside of all intelligent judgment to quote at this time of day Mr. Carlyle's well-known caricature from his Life of Sterling, and put readers off with this as a “famous criticism.” We now know how to value utterances of this kind, and the unhappy spirit of detraction which lay beneath such wild and grotesque humors. Carlyle will always remain an artist in epithets—but few will turn to him for an intelligent or comprehensive estimate of any great name of his own or of recent time.
We propose to look at Coleridge for a little as a religious thinker, and to ask what is the meaning and value of his work in this respect now that we can calmly and fully judge it. If Coleridge was anything, he was not only in his own view, as Mr. Traill admits, but in the view of his generation, a religious philosopher. It is not only the testimony of men like Hare, or Sterling, or Maurice, or even Cardinal Newman, but of John Stuart Mill, that his teaching awakened and freshened all contemporary thought. He was recognised with all his faults as a truly great thinker, who raised the mind of the time and gave it new and wide impulses. This judgment we feel sure will yet verify itself. If English literature ever regains the higher tone of our earlier national life—the tone of Hooker and Milton and Jeremy Taylor—Coleridge will be again acknowledged, in Julius Hare's words, as “a true sovereign of English thought.” He will take rank in the same line of spiritual genius. He has the same elevation of feeling, the same profound grasp of moral and spiritual ideas, the same wide range of vision. He has, in short, the same love of wisdom, the same insight, the same largeness—never despising nature or art, or literature, for the sake of religion, still less ever despising religion for the sake of culture. In reading over Coleridge's prose works again, returning to them after a long past familiarity, I am particularly struck by their massive and large intellectuality, akin to our older Elizabethan literature. There is everywhere the play of great power—of imagination as well as reason—of spiritual perception as well as logical subtlety.
To speak of Coleridge in this manner as a great spiritual power, an eminently healthy writer in the higher regions of thought, may seem absurd to some who think mainly of his life, and of the fatal failure which characterised it. It is the shadow of this failure of manliness in his conduct, as in that of his life-long friend, Charles Lamb, which no doubt prompted the great genius who carried manliness, if little sweetness, from his Annandale home, to paint both the one and the other in such darkened colors. We have not a word to say on behalf of the failings of either. They were deplorable and unworthy; but it is the fact, notwithstanding, that the mind of both retained a serenity and a certain touch of respectfulness which are lacking in their great Scottish contemporary. They were both finer-edged than Carlyle. They inherited a more delicate and polite personal culture; and delicacy can never be far distant from true manliness. Neither of them could have written of the treasures of old religion as Carlyle did in his Life of Sterling. Whether they accepted for themselves those treasures or not, they would have spared the tender faith of others and respected an ancient ideal. And this is the higher attitude. Nothing which has ever deeply interested humanity or profoundly moved it, is treated with contempt by a good and wise man. It may call for and deserve rejection, but never insult. Unhappily this attitude of mind, reserved, as well as critical, reverent as well as bold, has been conspicuously absent in some of the most powerful and best known writers of our era.
There is a striking contrast between the career of Coleridge and that of his friend Wordsworth. Fellows in the opening of their poetic course, they soon diverged widely. With a true instinct, Wordsworth devoted himself, in quietness and seclusion, to the cultivation of his poetic faculty. He left aside the world of politics and of religious thought, strongly moved as he had been by the interests of both. It may be said that Wordsworth continued a religious thinker as well as poet all his life. And to some extent this is true. The “Wanderer” is a preacher and not only a singer. He goes to the heart of religion, and lays again its foundations in the natural instincts of man. But while Wordsworth's poetry was instinct with a new life of religious feeling, and may be said to have given a new radiancy to its central principles,[2] it did not initiate any movement in Christian thought. In religious opinion Wordsworth soon fell back upon, if he ever consciously departed from, the old line of Anglican traditions. The vague Pantheism of the Excursion implies rather a lack of distinctive dogma than any fresh insight into religious problems or capacity of co-ordinating them in a new manner. And so soon as definite religious conceptions came to the poet, the Church in her customary theology became a satisfactory refuge. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets mark this definite stage in his spiritual development. Wordsworth did for the religious thought of his time something more and better perhaps than giving it any definite impulse. While leaving it in the old channels, he gave it a richer and deeper volume. He showed with what vital affinity religion cleaves to humanity, in all its true and simple phases, when uncontaminated by conceit or frivolity. Nature and man alike were to him essentially religious, or only conceivable as the outcome of a Spirit of life, “the Soul of all the worlds.”[3] Wordsworth, in short, remained as he began, a poet of a deeply religious spirit. But he did not enter the domain of theological speculation or attempt to give any new direction to it.
In all this Coleridge is his counterpart. He may be said to have abandoned poetry just when Wordsworth in his retirement at Grasmere (1799) was consecrating his life to it. Whether it be true, according to De Quincey, that Coleridge's poetical power was killed by the habit of opium-eating, it is certainly true that the harp of Quantock[4] was never again struck save for a brief moment. The poet Coleridge passed into the lecturer and the poetical and literary critic, and then, during the final period of his life, from 1816 to 1834, into the philosopher and theologian. It is to this latter period of his life in the main that his higher prose writings belong, and especially the well-known Aids to Reflection which—disparaged as it is by Mr. Traill—may be said to contain, as his disciples have always held to contain, all the finer substance of his spiritual thought. It is true that it is defective as a literary composition. We are even disposed to allow that it has “less charm of thought, less beauty of style,” and in some respects even less “power of effective statement,”[5] than is common with Coleridge; but withal it is his highest work. These very defects only serve to bring out the more its strong points, when we consider the wonderful hold the book has taken of many minds, and how it has been the subject of elaborate commentary.[6] It is a book, we may at the same time say, which none but a thinker on divine things will ever like. All such thinkers have prized it greatly. To many such it has given a new force of religious insight; for its time, beyond all doubt, it created a real epoch in Christian thought. It had life in it; and the living seed, scattered and desultory as it was, brought forth fruit in many minds.
What, then, were its main contributions to religious thought, and in what respects generally is Coleridge to be reckoned a spiritual power?
(1.) First, and chiefly, in the Aids to Reflection, Coleridge may be said to have transformed and renewed the current ideas of his time about religion. He was, we know, a man of many ambitions never realised; but of all his ambitions, the most persistent was that of laying anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. This was “the great work” to which he frequently alluded as having given “the preparation of more than twenty years of his life.”[7] Like other great tasks projected by him, it was very imperfectly accomplished; and there will always be those in consequence who fail to understand his influence as a leader of thought. We are certainly not bound to take Coleridge at his own value, nor to attach the same importance as he did to some of his speculations. No one, indeed, knew better than Coleridge himself that there was nothing new in his Platonic Realism. It was merely a restoration of the old religious metaphysic which had preceded “the mechanical systems,” that became dominant in the reign of Charles the Second. He himself constantly claims to do nothing more than re-assert the principles of Hooker, of Henry More, of John Smith, and Leighton, all of whom he speaks of as “Platonizing divines!” But the religious teaching of Coleridge came upon his generation as a new breath, not merely or mainly because he revived these ancient principles, but because he vitalised anew their application to Christianity, so as to transform it from a mere creed, or collection of articles, into a living mode of thought, embracing all human activity. Coleridge was no mere metaphysician. He was a great interpreter of spiritual facts—a student of spiritual life, quickened by a peculiarly vivid and painful experience; and he saw in Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of the facts of our spiritual being and the true remedy for their disorder. He brought human nature, not merely on one side, but all sides, once more near to Christianity, so as to find in it not merely a means of salvation in any limited evangelical sense, but the highest Truth and Health—a perfect philosophy. His main power lies in this subjective direction, just as here it was that his age was most needing stimulus and guidance.
The Evangelical School, with all its merits, had conceived of Christianity rather as something superadded the highest life of humanity than as the perfect development of that life; as a scheme for human salvation authenticated by miracles, and, so to speak, interpolated into human history rather than a divine philosophy, witnessing to itself from the beginning in all the higher phases of that history. And so Philosophy, and no less Literature, and Art, and Science, were conceived apart from religion. The world and the Church were not only antagonistic in the Biblical sense, as the embodiments of the Carnal and the Divine Spirit—which they must ever be; but they were, so to speak, severed portions of life divided by outward signs and badges: and those who joined the one or the other were supposed to be clearly marked off. All who know the writings of the Evangelical School of the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth century, from the poetry of Cowper and the letters of his friend Newton, to the writings of Romaine, John Forster, and Wilberforce, and even Chalmers, will know how such commonplaces everywhere reappear in them. That they were associated with the most devout and beautiful lives, that they even served to foster a peculiar ardor of Christian feeling and love of God, cannot be disputed. But they were essentially narrow and false. They destroyed the largeness and unity of human experience. They not merely separated religion from art and philosophy, but they tended to separate it from morality.
Coleridge's most distinctive work was to restore the broken harmony between reason and religion, by enlarging the conception of both, but of the latter especially,—by showing how man is essentially a religious being having a definite spiritual constitution, apart from which the very idea of religion becomes impossible. Religion is not, therefore, something brought to man, it is his highest education. Religion, he says, was designed “to improve the nature and the faculties of man, in order to the right governing of our actions, to the securing the peace and progress, eternal and internal, of individuals and communities.” Christianity is in the highest degree adapted to this end; and nothing can be a part of it that is not duly proportioned thereto. In thus vindicating the rationality of religion, Coleridge had a twofold task before him, as every such thinker has. He had to assert against the Epicurean and Empirical School the spiritual constitution of human nature, and against the fanatical or hyper-evangelical school the reasonable working of spiritual influence. He had to maintain, on the one hand, the essential divinity of man, that “there is more in him than can be rationally referred to the life of nature and the mechanism of organisation,” and on the other hand to show that this higher life of the spirit is throughout rational—that it is superstition and not true religion which professes to resolve “men's faith and practice” into the illumination of such a spirit as they can give no account of,—such as does not enlighten their reason or enable them to render their doctrine intelligible to others. He fights, in short, alike against materialistic negation and credulous enthusiasm.
The former he meets with the assertion of “a spirituality in man,” a self-power or Will at the root of all his being. “If there be aught spiritual in man, the will must be such. If there be a will, there must be a spirituality in man.” He assumes both positions, seeing clearly—what all who radically deal with such a question must see—that it becomes in the end an alternative postulate on one side and the other. The theologian cannot prove his case, because the very terms in which it must be proved are already denied ab initio by the materialist. But no more can the materialist, for the same reason, refute the spiritual thinker. There can be no argument where no common premiss is granted. Coleridge was quite alive to this, yet he validly appeals to common experience. “I assume,” he says, “a something the proof which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for himself. If any man assert that he has no such experience, I am bound to disbelieve him, I cannot do otherwise without unsettling the foundation of my own moral nature. For I either find it as an essential of the humanity common to him and to me, or I have not found it at all.... All the significant objections of the materialist and necessitarian,” he adds, “are contained in the term morality, and all the objections of the infidel in the term religion. These very terms imply something granted, which the objector in each case supposes not granted. A moral philosophy is only such because it assumes a principle of morality, a will in man, and so a Christian philosophy or theology has its own assumptions resting on three ultimate facts, namely, the reality of the law of conscience; the existence of a responsible will as the subject of that law; and lastly, the existence of God.... The first is a fact of consciousness; the second, a fact of reason necessarily concluded from the first; and the third, a fact of history interpreted by both.”
These were the radical data of the religious philosophy of Coleridge. They imply a general conception of religion which was revolutionary for his age, simple and ancient as the principles are. The evangelical tradition brought religion to man from the outside. It took no concern of man's spiritual constitution beyond the fact that he was a sinner and in danger of hell. Coleridge started from a similar but larger experience, including not only sin, but the whole spiritual basis on which sin rests. “I profess a deep conviction,” he says, “that man is a fallen creature,” “not by accident of bodily constitution or any other cause, but as diseased in his will—in that will which is the true and only strict synonyme of the word I, or the intelligent Self.” This “intelligent Self” is a fundamental conception lying at the root of his system of thought. Sin is an attribute of it, and cannot be conceived apart for it, and conscience, or the original sense of right and wrong governing the will. Apart from these internal realities there is no religion, and the function of the Christian Revelation is to build up the spiritual life out of these realities—to remedy the evil, to enlighten the conscience, to educate the will. This effective power of religion comes directly from God in Christ. Here Coleridge joins the Evangelical School, as indeed every school of living Christian Faith. This was the element of Truth he found in the doctrine of Election as handled “practically, morally, humanly,” by Leighton. Every true Christian, he argues, must attribute his distinction not in any degree to himself—“his own resolves and strivings,” “his own will and understanding,” still less to “his own comparative excellence,”—but to God, “the being in whom the promise of life originated, and on whom its fulfilment depends.” Election so far is a truth of experience. “This the conscience requires; this the highest interests of morality demand.” So far it is a question of facts with which the speculative reason has nothing to do. But when the theological reasoner abandons the ground of fact and “the safe circle of religion and practical reason for the shifting sand-wastes and mirages of speculative theology,” then he uses words without meaning. He can have no insight into the workings or plans of a Being who is neither an object of his senses nor a part of his self-consciousness.
Nothing can show better than this brief exposition how closely Coleridge in his theology clung to a base of spiritual experience, and sought to measure even the most abstruse Christian mysteries by facts. The same thing may be shown by referring to his doctrine of the Trinity, which has been supposed the most transcendental and, so to speak, “Neo-Platonist” of all his doctrines. But truly speaking his Trinitarianism, like his doctrine of Election, is a moral rather than a speculative truth. The Trinitarian idea was, indeed, true to him notionally. The full analysis of the notion “God” seemed to him to involve it. “I find a certain notion in my mind, and say that is what I understand by the term God. From books and conversation I find that the learned generally connect the same notion with the same word. I then apply the rules laid down by the masters of logic for the involution and evolution of terms, and prove (to as many as agree with my premisses) that the notion 'God' involves the notion 'Trinity,'” So he argued, and many times recurred to the same Transcendental analysis. But the truer and more urgent spiritual basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, even to his own mind, was not its notional but its moral necessity. Christ could only be a Saviour as being Divine. Salvation is a Divine work. “The idea of redemption involves belief in the Divinity of our Lord. And our Lord's Divinity again involves the Trinitarian idea, because in and through this idea alone the Divinity of Christ can be received without breach of faith in the Unity of the Godhead.” In other words, the best evidence of the doctrine of the Trinity, is the compulsion of the spiritual conscience which demands a Divine Saviour; and only in and through the great idea of Trinity in Unity does this demand become consistent with Christian Monotheism.[8]
These doctrines are merely used in illustration, as they are by Coleridge himself in his Aids to Reflection. But nothing can show in a stronger light the general character of the change which he wrought in the conception of Christianity. From being a mere traditional creed, with Anglican and Evangelical, and it may be added Unitarian alike, it became a living expression of the spiritual consciousness. In a sense, of course, it had always been so. The Evangelical made much of its living power, but only in a practical and not in a rational sense. It is the distinction of Coleridge to have once more in his age made Christian doctrine alive to the reason as well as the conscience—tenable as a philosophy as well as an evangel. And this he did by interpreting Christianity in the light of our moral and spiritual life. There are aspects of Christian truth beyond us—Exeunt in mysteria. But all Christian truth must have vital touch with our spiritual being, and be so far at least capable of being rendered in its terms, or, in other words, be conformable to reason.
There was nothing absolutely new in this luminous conception, but it marked a revolution of religious thought in the earlier part of our century. The great principle of the Evangelical theology was that theological dogmas were true or false without any reference to a subjective standard of judgment. They were true as pure data of revelation, or as the propositions of an authorised creed settled long ago. Reason had, so far, nothing to do with them. Christian truth, it was supposed, lay at had in the Bible, an appeal to which settled everything. Coleridge did not undervalue the Bible. He gave it an intelligent reverence. But he no less reverenced the spiritual consciousness or divine light in man; and to put out this light, as the Evangelical had gone far to do, was to destroy all reasonable faith. This must rest not merely on objective data, but on internal experience. It must have not merely authority without, but rationale within. It must answer to the highest aspiration of human reason, as well as the most urgent necessities of human life. It must interpret reason and find expression in the voice of our higher humanity, and so enlarge itself as to meet all its needs.
If we turn for a moment to the special exposition of the doctrines of sin and redemption which Coleridge has given in the Aids to Reflection, it is still mainly with the view of bringing out more clearly his general conception of Christianity as a living movement of thought rather than a mere series of articles or a traditionary creed.
In dealing first with the question of sin, he shows how its very idea is only tenable on the ground of such a spiritual constitution in man as he has already asserted. It is only the recognition of a true will in man—a spirit or supernatural in man, although “not necessarily miraculous”—which renders sin possible. “These views of the spirit and of the will as spiritual,” he says more than once, “are the groundwork of my scheme.” There was nothing more significant or fundamental in all his theology. If there is not always a supernatural element in man in the shape of spirit and will, no miracles or anything else can ever authenticate the supernatural to him. A mere formal orthodoxy, therefore, hanging upon the evidence of miracles, is a suspension bridge without any real support. So all questions between infidelity and Christianity are questions here, at the root, and not what are called “critical” questions as to whether this or that view of the Bible be right, or this or that traditionary dogma be true. Such questions are, truly speaking, inter-Christian questions, the freest views of which all Churches must learn to tolerate. The really vital question is whether there is a divine root in man at all—a spiritual centre, answering to a higher spiritual centre in the universe. All controversies of any importance come back to this. Coleridge would have been a great Christian thinker if for no other reason than this, that he brought all theological problems back to this living centre, and showed how they diverged from it. Apart from this postulate, sin was inconceivable to him; and in the same manner all sin was to him sin of origin or “original sin.” It is the essential property of the will that it can originate. The phrase original sin is therefore “a pleonasm.” If sin was not original, or from within the will itself, it would not deserve the name. “A state or act that has not its origin in the will may be a calamity, deformity, disease, or mischief, but a sin it cannot be.”
Again he says: “That there is an evil common to all is a fact, and this evil must, therefore, have a common ground. Now this evil ground cannot originate in the Divine will; it must, therefore, be referred to the will of man. And this evil ground we call original sin. It is a mystery, that is, a fact which we see, but cannot explain; and the doctrine a truth which we apprehend, but can neither comprehend nor communicate. And such by the quality of the subject (namely, a responsible will) it must be, if it be truth at all.”
This inwardness is no less characteristic of Coleridge's treatment of the doctrine of atonement or redemption. It is intelligible so far as it comes within the range of spiritual experience. So far its nature and effects are amply described or figured in the New Testament, especially by St. Paul. And the apostle's language, as might be expected, “takes its predominant colors from his own experience, and the experience of those whom he addressed.” “His figures, images, analogies, and references,” are all more or less borrowed from this source. He describes the Atonement of Christ under four principal metaphors: 1. Sin-offering, sacrificial expiation. 2. Reconciliation, atonement, καταλλάγη. 3. Redemption, or ransom from slavery. 4. Satisfaction, payment of a debt. These phrases are not designed to convey to us all the Divine meaning of the atonement, for no phrases or figures can do this; but they set forth its general aspect and design. One and all they have an intelligible relation to our spiritual life, and so clothe the doctrine for us with a concrete living and practical meaning. But there are other relations and aspects of the doctrine of atonement that transcend experience, and consequently our powers of understanding. And all that can be said here is, “exit in mysteria.” The rationalism of Coleridge is at least a modest and self-limiting rationalism. It clears the ground within the range of spiritual experience, and floods this ground with the light of reason. There is no true doctrine can contradict this light, or shelter itself from its penetration. But there are aspects of Christian doctrine that outreach all grasp of reason, and before which reason must simply be silent. For example, the Divine act in redemption is “a causative act—a spiritual and transcendent mystery that passeth all understanding. 'Who knoweth the mind of the Lord, or being his councillor who hath instructed him?' Factum est.” This is all that can be said of the mystery of redemption, or of the doctrine of atonement on its Divine side.
And here emerges another important principle of the Coleridgian theology. While so great an advocate of the rights of reason in theology, of the necessity, in other words, of moulding all its facts in a synthesis intelligible to the higher reason he recognises strongly that there is a province of Divine truth beyond all such construction. We can never understand the fulness of Divine mystery, and it is hopeless to attempt to do so. While no mind was less agnostic in the modern sense of the term, he was yet with all his vivid and large intuition, a Christian agnostic. Just because Christianity was Divine, a revelation, and not a mere human tradition, all its higher doctrines ended in a region beyond our clear knowledge. As he himself said, “If the doctrine is more than a hyperbolical phrase it must do so.” There was great pregnancy in this as in his other conceptions; and probably no more significant change awaits the theology of the future, than the determination of this province of the unknown, and the cessation of controversy, as to matters which come within it, and therefore admit of no dogmatic settlement.
(2.) But it is more than time to turn to the second aspect, in which Coleridge appears as a religious leader of the thought of the nineteenth century. The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit was not published till six years after his death, in 1840; and it is curious to notice their accidental connection with the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, which had been translated by Carlyle some years before.[9] These Confessions, in the shape of seven letters to a friend, gather together all that is valuable in the Biblical criticism of the author scattered through his various writings; and although it may be doubtful whether the volume has ever attained the circulation of the Aids to Reflection, it is eminently deserving—small as it is, nay, because of its very brevity—of a place beside the larger work. It is eminently readable, terse and nervous, as well as eloquent in style. In none of his writings does Coleridge appear to greater advantage, or touch a more elevating strain, rising at times into solemn music.
The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit were of course merely one indication of the rise of a true spirit of criticism in English theology. Arnold, Whately, Thirlwall, and others, it will be seen, were all astir in the same direction, even before the Confessions were published. The notion of verbal inspiration, or the infallible dictation of Holy Scripture, could not possibly continue after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had begun. As soon as men plainly recognised the organic growth of all great facts, literary as well as others, it was inevitable that they should see the Scriptures in a new light, as a product of many phases of thought in course of more or less perfect development. A larger and more intelligent sense of the conditions attending the origin and progress of all civilisation, and of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social ideas advance, necessarily carried with it a changed perception of the characteristics of Scriptural revelation. The old Rabbinical notion of an infallible text was sure to disappear. The new critical method besides is, in Coleridge's hands, rather an idea—a happy and germinant thought—than a well-evolved system. Still to him belongs the honor of having first plainly and boldly announced that the Scriptures were to be read and studied, like any other literature, in the light of their continuous growth, and the adaptation of their parts to one another.
The divinity of Scripture appears all the more brightly, when thus freely handled. “I take up the work,” he says, “with the purpose to read it as I should read any other work—so far as I can or dare. For I neither can nor dare throw off a strong and awful prepossession in its favor, certain as I am that a large part of the light and life in and by which I see, love, and embrace the truths and the strengths organised into a living body of faith and knowledge have been directly or indirectly derived to me from the sacred volume.” All the more reason why we should not make a fetish of the Bible, as the Turk does of the Koran. Poor as reason may be in comparison with “the power and splendor of the Scriptures,” yet it is and must be for him a true light. “While there is a Light higher than all, even the Word that was in the beginning;—the Light of which light itself is but the Schechinah and cloudy tabernacle;—there is also a 'Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world;' and the spirit of man is declared to be 'the candle of the Lord,'” “If between this Word,” he says, “and the written letter I shall anywhere seem to myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude that such there actually is. Nor, on the other hand, will I fall under the condemnation of those that would lie for God, but, seek as I may, be thankful for what I have and wait.”
Such is the keynote of the volume. The supremacy of the Bible as a divinely inspired literature is plainly recognised from the first. Obviously it is a book above all other books in which deep answers to deep, and our inmost thoughts and most hidden griefs find not merely response, but guidance and assuagement. And whatever there finds us “bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Spirit.” “In the Bible,” he says again, “there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together; the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being, and whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.”
But there is much in the Bible that not only does not find us in the Coleridgian sense, but that seems full of contradictions, both moral and historical; the psalms in which David curses his enemies; the obviously exaggerated ages attributed to the patriarchs; and the incredible number of the armies said to be collected by Abijah and Jeroboam (2 Chron. xiii. 3), and other incidents familiar to all students of Scripture. What is to be made of such features of the Bible? According to the old notion of its infallibility such parts of Scripture, no less than its most elevating utterances of “lovely hymn and choral song and accepted prayer of saint and prophet,” were to be received as dictated by the Holy Spirit. They were stamped with the same Divine authority. Coleridge rightly enough emphasises this view as that of the fathers and reformers alike; but he no less rightly points out that not one of them is consistent in holding to their general doctrine. Their treatment of the Scriptures in detail constantly implies the fallacy of the Rabbinical tradition to which they yet clung. He no less forcibly points out that the Scriptures themselves make no such pretension to infallibility, “explicitly or by implication.” “On the contrary, they refer to older documents, and on all points express themselves as sober-minded and veracious writers under ordinary circumstances are known to do.” The usual texts quoted, such as 2 Tim. iii. 16, have no real bearing on the subject. The little we know as to the origin and history of many of the books of the Bible, of “the time of the formation and closing of the canon,” of its selectors and compilers, is all opposed to such a theory. Moreover, the very nature of the claim stultifies itself when examined. For “how can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expression?”
But if the tenet of verbal inspiration has been so long received and acted on “by Jew and Christian, Greek, Roman, and Protestant, why can it not now be received?” “For every reason,” answered Coleridge, “that makes me prize and revere these Scriptures;—prize them, love them, revere them beyond all other books.” Because such a tenet “falsifies at once the whole body of holy writ, with all its harmonious and symmetrical gradations.” It turns “the breathing organism into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice,” which no man hath uttered, and no human heart hath conceived. It evacuates of all sense and efficacy the fact that the Bible is a Divine literature of many books, “composed in different and widely distant ages under the greatest diversity of circumstances and degrees of light and information.” So he argues in language I have partly quoted and partly summarised. And then he breaks forth into a magnificent passage about the song of Deborah, a passage of rare eloquence with all its desultoriness, but which will hardly bear separation from the context. The wail of the Jewish heroine's maternal and patriotic love is heard under all her cursing and individualism—mercy rejoicing against judgment. In the very intensity of her primary affections is found the rare strength of her womanhood; and sweetness lies near to fierceness. Such passages probably give us a far better idea of the occasional glory of the old man's talk as “he sat on the brow of Highgate Hill,” than any poor fragments of it that have been preserved. Direct and to the point it may never have been, but at times it rose into an organ swell with snatches of unutterable melody and power.
(3.) But Coleridge contributed still another factor to the impulsion of religious thought in his time. He did much to revive the historic idea of the Church as an intellectual as well as a spiritual commonwealth. Like many other ideas of our older national life this had been depressed and lost sight of during the eighteenth century. The Evangelical party, deficient in learning generally, was especially deficient in breadth of historical knowledge. Milner's History, if nothing else, serves to point this conclusion. The idea of the Church as the mother of philosophy and arts and learning, as well as the nurse of faith and piety, was unknown. It was a part of the Evangelical creed, moreover, to leave aside as far as possible mere political and intellectual interests. These belonged to the world, and the main business of the religious man was with religion as a personal affair, of vast moment, but outside all other affairs. Coleridge helped once more to bring the Church as he did the gospel into larger room as a great spiritual power of manifold influence.
This volume On the Constitution of Church and State according to the idea of each was published in 1830, and was the last volume which the author himself published. The Catholic Emancipation question had greatly excited the public mind, and some friend had appealed to Coleridge expressing astonishment that he should be in opposition to the proposed measure. He replied that he is by no means unfriendly to Catholic emancipation, while yet “scrupling the means proposed for its attainment.” And in order to explain his difficulties he composed a long letter to his friend which is really an essay or treatise, beginning with the fundamental principles of his philosophy and ending with a description of antichrist. The essay is one of the least satisfactory of his compositions from a mere literary point of view, and is not even mentioned by Mr. Traill in his recent monograph. But amidst all its involutions and ramblings it is stimulating and full of thought on a subject which almost more than any other is liable to be degraded by unworthy and sectarian treatment. Here, as everywhere in Coleridge's writings, we are brought in contact with certain large conceptions which far more than cover the immediate subject in hand.
It has been sometimes supposed that Coleridge's theory of the Church merely revived the old theory of the Elizabethan age so powerfully advocated by Hooker and specially espoused by Dr. Arnold in later times. According to this theory the Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. But Coleridge's special theory is different from this, although allied to it. He distinguishes the Christian Church as such from any national church. The former is spiritual and catholic, the latter institutional and local. The former is opposed to the “world,” the latter is an estate of the realm. The former has nothing to do with states and kingdoms. It is in this respect identical with the “spiritual and invisible church known only to the Father of Spirits,” and the compensating counterpoise of all that is of the world. It is, in short, the Divine aggregate of what is really Divine in all Christian communities, and more or less ideally represented “in every true church.” A national church again is the incorporation of all the learning and knowledge—intellectual and spiritual—in a country. Every nation in order to its true health and civilisation requires not only a land-owning or permanent class along with a commercial, industrial, and progressive class, but moreover, an educative class to represent all higher knowledge, “to guard the treasures of past civilisation,” to bind the national life together in its past, present, and future, and to communicate to all citizens a clear understanding of their rights and duties. This third estate of the realm Coleridge denominated the “Clerisy,” and included not merely the clergy, but, in his own language, “the learned of all denominations.” The knowledge, which it was their function to cultivate and diffuse, embraced not only theology, although this pre-eminently as the head of all other knowledge, but law, music, mathematics, the physical sciences, “all the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and cultivation of which constitute the civilisation of a country.”
This is at any rate a large conception of a national church. It is put forth by its author with all earnestness, although he admitted that it had never been anywhere realised. But it was his object “to present the Idea of a national church as the only safe criterion by which we can judge of existing things.” It was only when “we are in full and clear possession of the ultimate aim of an institution” that we can ascertain how far “this aim has ever been attained in other ways.”
These, very briefly explained, are the main lines along which Coleridge moved the national mind in the third decade of this century. They may seem to some rather impalpable lines, and hardly calculated to touch the general mind. But they were influential, as the course of Christian literature has since proved. Like his own genius, they were diffusive rather than concentrative. The Coleridgian ideas permeated the general intellectual atmosphere, modifying old conceptions in criticism as well as theology, deepening if not always clarifying the channels of thought in many directions, but especially in the direction of Christian philosophy. They acted in this way as a new circulation of spiritual air all around, rather than in conveying any new body of truth. The very ridicule of Carlyle testifies to the influence which they exercised over aspiring and younger minds. The very emphasis with which he repudiates the Coleridgian metaphysic probably indicates that he had felt some echo of it in his own heart.—Fortnightly Review.
[THE PORTRAIT.]
A Story of the Seen and the Unseen.
At the period when the following incidents occurred I was living with my father at The Grove, a large old house in the immediate neighborhood of a little town. This had been his home for a number of years; and I believe I was born in it. It was a kind of house which, notwithstanding all the red and white architecture, known at present by the name of Queen Anne, builders nowadays have forgotten how to build. It was straggling and irregular, with wide passages, wide staircases, broad landings; the rooms large but not very lofty; the arrangements leaving much to be desired, with no economy of space; a house belonging to a period when land was cheap, and, so far as that was concerned, there was no occasion to economise. Though it was so near the town, the clump of trees in which it was environed was a veritable grove. In the grounds in spring the primroses grew as thickly as in the forest. We had a few fields for the cows, and an excellent walled garden. The place is being pulled down at this moment to make room for more streets of mean little houses,—the kind of thing, and not a dull house of faded gentry, which perhaps the neighborhood requires. The house was dull, and so were we, its last inhabitants; and the furniture was faded, even a little dingy,—nothing to brag of. I do not, however, intend to convey a suggestion that we were faded gentry, for that was not the case. My father, indeed, was rich, and had no need to spare any expense in making his life and his house bright if he pleased; but he did not please, and I had not been long enough at home to exercise any special influence of my own. It was the only home I had ever known; but except in my earliest childhood, and in my holidays as a schoolboy, I had in reality known but little of it. My mother had died at my birth, or shortly after, and I had grown up in the gravity and silence of a house without women. In my infancy, I believe, a sister of my father's had lived with us, and taken charge of the household and of me; but she, too, had died long, long ago, my mourning for her being one of the first things I could recollect. And she had no successor. There was, indeed, a housekeeper and some maids,—the latter of whom I only saw disappearing at the end of a passage, or whisking out of a room when one of “the gentlemen” appeared. Mrs. Weir, indeed, I saw nearly every day; but a curtsey, a smile, a pair of nice round arms which she caressed while folding them across her ample waist, and a large white apron, were all I knew of her. This was the only female influence in the house. The drawing-room I was aware of only as a place of deadly good order, into which nobody ever entered. It had three long windows opening on the lawn, and communicated at the upper end, which was rounded like a great bay, with the conservatory. Sometimes I gazed into it as a child from without, wondering at the needlework on the chairs, the screens, the looking-glasses which never reflected any living face. My father did not like the room, which probably was not wonderful, though it never occurred to me in those early days to inquire why.
I may say here, though it will probably be disappointing to those who form a sentimental idea of the capabilities of children, that it did not occur to me either, in these early days, to make any inquiry about my mother. There was no room in life, as I knew it, for any such person; nothing suggested to my mind either the fact that she must have existed, or that there was need of her in the house. I accepted, as I believe most children do, the facts of existence, on the basis with which I had first made acquaintance with them, without question or remark. As a matter of fact, I was aware that it was rather dull at home; but neither by comparison with the books I read, nor by the communications received from my school-fellows, did this seem to me anything remarkable. And I was possibly somewhat dull too by nature, for I did not mind. I was fond of reading, and for that there was unbounded opportunity. I had a little ambition in respect to work, and that too could be prosecuted undisturbed. When I went to the university, my society lay almost entirely among men; but by that time and afterwards, matters had of course greatly changed with me, and though I recognised women as part of the economy of nature, and did not indeed by any means dislike or avoid them, yet the idea of connecting them at all with my own home never entered into my head. That continued to be as it had always been, when at intervals I descended upon the cool, grave, colorless place, in the midst of my traffic with the world; always very still, well-ordered, serious—the cooking very good, the comfort perfect—old Morphew, the butler, a little older (but very little older, perhaps on the whole less old, since in my childhood I had thought him a kind of Methuselah), and Mrs. Weir, less active, covering up her arms in sleeves, but folding and caressing them just as always. I remember looking in from the lawn through the windows upon that deadly-orderly drawing-room, with a humorous recollection of my childish admiration and wonder, and feeling that it must be kept so forever and ever, and that to go into it would break some sort of amusing mock mystery, some pleasantly ridiculous spell.
But it was only at rare intervals that I went home. In the long vacation, as in my school holidays, my father often went abroad with me, so that we had gone over a great deal of the Continent together very pleasantly. He was old in proportion to the age of his son, being a man of sixty when I was twenty, but that did not disturb the pleasure of the relations between us. I don't know that they were ever very confidential. On my side there was but little to communicate, for I did not get into scrapes nor fall in love, the two predicaments which demand sympathy and confidences. And as for my father himself, I was never aware what there could be to communicate on his side. I knew his life exactly—what he did almost at every hour of the day; under what circumstances of the temperature he would ride and when walk; how often and with what guests he would indulge in the occasional break of a dinner-party, a serious pleasure—perhaps, indeed, less a pleasure than a duty. All this I knew as well as he did, and also his views on public matters, his political opinions, which naturally were different from mine. What ground, then, remained for confidence? I did not know any. We were both of us of a reserved nature, not apt to enter into our religious feelings, for instance. There are many people who think reticence on such subjects a sign of the most reverential way of contemplating them. Of this I am far from being sure; but, at all events, it was the practice most congenial to my own mind.
And then I was for a long time absent, making my own way in the world. I did not make it very successfully. I accomplished the natural fate of an Englishman, and went out to the Colonies; then to India in a semi-diplomatic position; but returned home after seven or eight years, invalided, in bad health and not much better spirits, tired and disappointed with my first trial of life. I had, as people say, “no occasion” to insist on making my way. My father was rich, and had never given me the slightest reason to believe that he did not intend me to be his heir. His allowance to me was not illiberal, and though he did not oppose the carrying out of my own plans, he by no means urged me to exertion. When I came home he received me very affectionately, and expressed his satisfaction in my return. “Of course,” he said, “I am not glad that you are disappointed, Philip, or that your health is broken; but otherwise it is an ill wind, you know, that blows nobody good—and I am very glad to have you at home. I am growing an old man—”
“I don't see any difference, sir,” said I; “everything here seems exactly the same as when I went away—”
He smiled, and shook his head. “It is true enough,” he said, “after we have reached a certain age we seem to go on for a long time on a plane, and feel no great difference from year to year; but it is an inclined plane—and the longer we go on, the more sudden will be the fall at the end. But at all events it will be a great comfort to me to have you here.”
“If I had known that,” I said, “and that you wanted me, I should have come in any circumstances. As there are only two of us in the world—”
“Yes,” he said, “there are only two of us in the world; but still I should not have sent for you, Phil, to interrupt your career.”
“It is as well, then, that it has interrupted itself,” I said, rather bitterly; for disappointment is hard to hear.
He patted me on the shoulder and repeated, “It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,” with a look of real pleasure which gave me a certain gratification too; for, after all, he was an old man, and the only one in all the world to whom I owed any duty. I had not been without dreams of warmer affections, but they had come to nothing—not tragically, but in the ordinary way. I might perhaps have had love which I did not want, but not that which I did want,—which was not a thing to make any unmanly moan about, but in the ordinary course of events. Such disappointments happen every day; indeed, they are more common than anything else, and sometimes it is apparent afterward that it is better it was so.
However, here I was at thirty stranded—yet wanting for nothing, in a position to call forth rather envy than pity from the greater part of my contemporaries,—for I had an assured and comfortable existence, as much money as I wanted, and the prospect of an excellent fortune for the future. On the other hand, my health was still low, and I had no occupation. The neighborhood of the town was a drawback rather than an advantage. I felt myself tempted, instead of taking the long walk into the country which my doctor recommended, to take a much shorter one through the High Street, across the river, and back again, which was not a walk but a lounge. The country was silent and full of thoughts—thoughts not always very agreeable—whereas there were always the humors of the little urban population to glance at, the news to be heard, all those petty matters which so often make up life in a very impoverished version for the idle man. I did not like it, but I felt myself yielding to it, not having energy enough to make a stand. The rector and the leading lawyer of the place asked me to dinner. I might have glided into the society, such as it was, had I been disposed for that—everything about me began to close over me as if I had been fifty, and fully contented with my lot.
It was possibly my own want of occupation which made me observe with surprise, after a while, how much occupied my father was. He had expressed himself glad of my return; but now that I had returned, I saw very little of him. Most of his time was spent in his library, as had always been the case. But on the few visits I paid him there, I could not but perceive that the aspect of the library was much changed. It had acquired the look of a business-room, almost an office. There were large business-like books on the table, which I could not associate with anything he could naturally have to do; and his correspondence was very large. I thought he closed one of those books hurriedly as I came in, and pushed it away, as if he did not wish me to see it. This surprised me at the moment, without arousing any other feeling; but afterward I remembered it with a clearer sense of what it meant. He was more absorbed altogether than I had been used to see him. He was visited by men sometimes not of very prepossessing appearance. Surprise grew in my mind without any very distinct idea of the reason of it; and it was not till after a chance conversation with Morphew that my vague uneasiness began to take definite shape. It was begun without any special intention on my part. Morphew had informed me that master was very busy, on some occasion when I wanted to see him. And I was a little annoyed to be thus put off. “It appears to me that my father is always busy,” I said, hastily. Morphew then began very oracularly to nod his head in assent.
“A deal too busy, sir, if you take my opinion,” he said.
This startled me much, and I asked hurriedly, “What do you mean?” without reflecting that to ask for private information from a servant about my father's habits was as bad as investigating into a stranger's affairs. It did not strike me in the same light.
“Mr. Philip,” said Morphew, “a thing 'as 'appened as 'appens more often than it ought to. Master has got awful keen about money in his old age.”
“That's a new thing for him,” I said.
“No, sir, begging your pardon, it ain't a new thing. He was once broke of it, and that wasn't easy done; but it's come back, if you'll excuse me saying so. And I don't know as he'll ever be broke of it again at his age.”
I felt more disposed to be angry than disturbed by this. “You must be making some ridiculous mistake,” I said. “And if you were not so old a friend as you are, Morphew, I should not have allowed my father to be so spoken of to me.”
The old man gave me a half-astonished, half-contemptuous look. “He's been my master a deal longer than he's been your father,” he said, turning on his heel. The assumption was so comical that my anger could not stand in face of it. I went out, having been on my way to the door when this conversation occurred, and took my usual lounge about, which was not a satisfactory sort of amusement. Its vanity and emptiness appeared to be more evident than usual to-day. I met half a dozen people I knew, and had as many pieces of news confided to me. I went up and down the length of the High Street. I made a small purchase or two. And then I turned homeward—despising myself, yet finding no alternative within my reach. Would a long country walk have been more virtuous?—it would at least have been more wholesome—but that was all that could be said. My mind did not dwell on Morphew's communication. It seemed without sense or meaning to me; and after the excellent joke about his superior interest in his master to mine in my father, was dismissed lightly enough from my mind. I tried to invent some way of telling this to my father without letting him perceive that Morphew had been finding faults in him, or I listening; for it seemed a pity to lose so good a joke. However, as I returned home, something happened which put the joke entirely out of my head. It is curious when a new subject of trouble or anxiety has been suggested to the mind in an unexpected way, how often a second advertisement follows immediately after the first, and gives to that a potency which in itself it had not possessed.
I was approaching our own door, wondering whether my father had gone, and whether, on my return, I should find him at leisure—for I had several little things to say to him—when I noticed a poor woman lingering about the closed gates. She had a baby sleeping in her arms. It was a spring night, the stars shining in the twilight, and everything soft and dim; and the woman's figure was like a shadow, flitting about, now here, now there, on one side or another of the gate. She stopped when she saw me approaching, and hesitated for a moment, then seemed to take a sudden resolution. I watched her without knowing, with a prevision that she was going to address me, though with no sort of idea as to the subject of her address. She came up to me doubtfully, it seemed, yet certainly, as I felt, and when she was close to me, dropped a sort of hesitating curtsey, and said, “It's Mr. Philip?” in a low voice.
“What do you want with me?” I said.
Then she poured forth suddenly, without warning or preparation, her long speech—a flood of words which must have been all ready and waiting at the doors of her lips for utterance. “Oh, sir, I want to speak to you! I can't believe you'll be so hard, for you're young; and I can't believe he'll be so hard if so be as his own son, as I've always heard he had but one, 'll speak up for us. Oh, gentleman, it is easy for the likes of you, that, if you ain't comfortable in one room, can just walk into another; but if one room is all you have, and every bit of furniture you have taken out of it, and nothing but the four walls left—not so much as the cradle for the child, or a chair for your man to sit down upon when he comes from his work, or a saucepan to cook him his supper—”
“My good woman,” I said, “who can have taken all that from you? surely nobody can be so cruel?”
“You say it's cruel!” she cried with a sort of triumph. “Oh, I knowed you would, or any true gentleman that don't hold with screwing poor folks. Just go and say that to him inside there, for the love of God. Tell him to think what he's doing, driving poor creatures to despair. Summer's coming, the Lord be praised, but yet it's bitter cold at night with your counterpane gone; and when you've been working hard all day, and nothing but four bare walls to come home to, and all your poor little sticks of furniture that you've saved up for, and got together one by one, all gone—and you no better than when you started, or rather worse, for then you was young. Oh, sir!” the woman's voice rose into a sort of passionate wail. And then she added, beseechingly, recovering herself—“Oh, speak for us—he'll not refuse his own son—”
“To whom am I to speak? who is it that has done this to you?” I said.
The woman hesitated again, looking keenly in my face—then repeated with a slight faltering, “It's Mr. Philip?” as if that made everything right.
“Yes; I am Philip Canning,” I said; “but what have I to do with this? and to whom am I to speak?”
She began to whimper, crying and stopping herself. “Oh, please, sir! it's Mr. Canning as owns all the house property about—it's him that our court and the lane and everything belongs to. And he's taken the bed from under us, and the baby's cradle, although it's said in the Bible as you're not to take poor folks's bed.”
“My father!” I cried in spite of myself—“then it must be some agent, some one else in his name. You may be sure he knows nothing of it. Of course I shall speak to him at once.”
“Oh, God bless you, sir,” said the woman. But then she added, in a lower tone—“It's no agent. It's one as never knows trouble. It's him that lives in that grand house.” But this was said under her breath, evidently not for me to hear.
Morphew's words flashed through my mind as she spoke. What was this? Did it afford an explanation of the much occupied hours, the big books, the strange visitors? I took the poor woman's name, and gave her something to procure a few comforts for the night, and went indoors disturbed and troubled. It was impossible to believe that my father himself would have acted thus; but he was not a man to brook interference, and I did not see how to introduce the subject, what to say. I could but hope that, at the moment of broaching it, words would be put into my mouth, which often happens in moments of necessity, one knows not how, even when one's theme is not so all-important as that for which such help has been promised. As usual, I did not see my father till dinner. I have said that our dinners were very good, luxurious in a simple way, everything excellent in its kind, well cooked, well served, the perfection of comfort without show—which is a combination very dear to the English heart. I said nothing till Morphew, with his solemn attention to everything that was going, had retired—and then it was with some strain of courage that I began.
“I was stopped outside the gate to-day by a curious sort of petitioner—a poor woman, who seems to be one of your tenants, sir, but whom your agent must have been rather too hard upon.”
“My agent? who is that?” said my father, quietly.
“I don't know his name, and I doubt his competence. The poor creature seems to have had everything taken from her—her bed, her child's cradle.”
“No doubt she was behind with her rent.”
“Very likely, sir. She seemed very poor,” said I.
“You take it coolly,” said my father, with an upward glance, half-amused, not in the least shocked by my statement. “But when a man, or a woman either, takes a house, I suppose you will allow that they ought to pay rent for it.”
“Certainly, sir,” I replied, “when they have got anything to pay.”
“I don't allow the reservation,” he said. But he was not angry, which I had feared he would be.
“I think,” I continued, “that your agent must be too severe. And this emboldens me to say something which has been in my mind for some time”—(these were the words, no doubt, which I had hoped would be put into my mouth; they were the suggestion of the moment, and yet as I said them it was with the most complete conviction of their truth)—“and that is this: I am doing nothing; my time hangs heavy on my hands. Make me your agent. I will see for myself, and save you from such mistakes; and it will be an occupation—”
“Mistakes? What warrant have you for saying these are mistakes?” he said testily; then after a moment: “This is a strange proposal from you, Phil. Do you know what it is you are offering?—to be a collector of rents, going about from door to door, from week to week; to look after wretched little bits of repairs, drains, etc.; to get paid, which, after all, is the chief thing, and not to be taken in by tales of poverty.”
“Not to let you be taken in by men without pity,” I said.
He gave me a strange glance, which I did not very well understand, and said, abruptly, a thing which, so far as I remember, he had never in my life said before, “You've become a little like your mother, Phil—”
“My mother!” The reference was so unusual—nay, so unprecedented—that I was greatly startled. It seemed to me like the sudden introduction of a quite new element in the stagnant atmosphere, as well as a new party to our conversation. My father looked across the table, as if with some astonishment at my tone of surprise.
“Is that so very extraordinary?” he said.
“No; of course it is not extraordinary that I should resemble my mother. Only—I have heard very little of her—almost nothing.”
“That is true.” He got up and placed himself before the fire, which was very low, as the night was not cold—had not been cold heretofore at least; but it seemed to me now that a little chill came into the dim and faded room. Perhaps it looked more dull from the suggestion of a something brighter, warmer, that might have been. “Talking of mistakes,” he said, “perhaps that was one: to sever you entirely from her side of the house. But I did not care for the connection. You will understand how it is that I speak of it now when I tell you—” He stopped here, however, said nothing more for a minute or so, and then rang the bell. Morphew came, as he always did, very deliberately, so that some time elapsed in silence, during which my surprise grew. When the old man appeared at the door—“Have you put the lights in the drawing-room, as I told you?” my father said.
“Yes, sir; and opened the box, sir; and it's a—it's a speaking likeness—”
This the old man got out in a great hurry, as if afraid that his master would stop him. My father did so with a wave of his hand.
“That's enough. I asked no information. You can go now.”
The door closed upon us, and there was again a pause. My subject had floated away altogether like a mist, though I had been so concerned about it. I tried to resume, but could not. Something seemed to arrest my very breathing: and yet in this dull respectable house of ours, where everything breathed good character and integrity, it was certain that there could be no shameful mystery to reveal. It was some time before my father spoke, not from any purpose that I could see, but apparently because his mind was busy with probably unaccustomed thoughts.
“You scarcely know the drawing-room, Phil,” he said at last.
“Very little. I have never seen it used. I have a little awe of it, to tell the truth.”
“That should not be. There is no reason for that. But a man by himself, as I have been for the greater part of my life, has no occasion for a drawing-room. I always, as a matter of preference, sat among my books; however, I ought to have thought of the impression on you.”
“Oh, it is not important,” I said; “the awe was childish. I have not thought of it since I came home.”
“It never was anything very splendid at the best,” said he. He lifted the lamp from the table with a sort of abstraction, not remarking even my offer to take it from him, and led the way. He was on the verge of seventy, and looked his age; but it was a vigorous age, with no symptoms of giving way. The circle of light from the lamp lit up his white hair, and keen blue eyes, and clear complexion; his forehead was like old ivory, his cheek warmly colored: an old man, yet a man in full strength. He was taller than I was, and still almost as strong. As he stood for a moment with the lamp in his hand, he looked like a tower in his great height and bulk. I reflected as I looked at him that I knew him intimately, more intimately than any other creature in the world,—I was familiar with every detail of his outward life; could it be that in reality I did not know him at all?
The drawing-room was already lighted with a flickering array of candles upon the mantelpiece and along the walls, producing the pretty starry effect which candles give without very much light. As I had not the smallest idea what I was about to see, for Morphew's “speaking likeness” was very hurriedly said, and only half comprehensible in the bewilderment of my faculties, my first glance was at this very unusual illumination, for which I could assign no reason. The next showed me a large full-length portrait, still in the box in which apparently it had travelled, placed upright, supported against a table in the centre of the room. My father walked straight up to it, motioned to me to place a smaller table close to the picture on the left side, and put his lamp upon that. Then he waved his hand towards it, and stood aside that I might see.
It was a full-length portrait of a very young woman—I might say, a girl, scarcely twenty—in a white dress, made in a very simple old fashion, though I was too little accustomed to female costume to be able to fix the date. It might have been a hundred years old, or twenty, for aught I knew. The face had an expression of youth, candor, and simplicity more than any face I had ever seen—or so, at least, in my surprise, I thought. The eyes were a little wistful, with something which was almost anxiety—which at least was not content—in them; a faint, almost imperceptible, curve in the lids. The complexion was of a dazzling fairness, the hair light, but the eyes dark, which gave individuality to the face. It would have been as lovely had the eyes been blue—probably more so—but their darkness gave a touch of character, a slight discord, which made the harmony finer. It was not, perhaps, beautiful in the highest sense of the word. The girl must have been too young, too slight, too little developed for actual beauty; but a face which so invited love and confidence I never saw. One smiled at it with instinctive affection. “What a sweet face!” I said. “What a lovely girl! Who is she? Is this one of the relations you were speaking of on the other side?”
My father made me no reply. He stood aside, looking at it as if he knew it too well to require to look,—as if the picture was already in his eyes. “Yes,” he said, after an interval, with a long-drawn breath, “she was a lovely girl, as you say.”
“Was?—then she is dead. What a pity!” I said; “what a pity! so young and so sweet!”
We stood gazing at her thus, in her beautiful stillness and calm—two men, the younger of us full grown and conscious of many experiences, the other an old man—before this impersonation of tender youth. At length he said, with a slight tremulousness in his voice, “Does nothing suggest to you who she is, Phil?”
I turned round to look at him with profound astonishment, but he turned away from my look. A sort of quiver passed over his face. “That is your mother,” he said, and walked suddenly away, leaving me there.
My mother!
I stood for a moment in a kind of consternation before the white-robed innocent creature, to me no more than a child; then a sudden laugh broke from me, without any will of mine: something ludicrous, as well as something awful, was in it. When the laugh was over, I found myself with tears in my eyes, gazing, holding my breath. The soft features seemed to melt, the lips to move, the anxiety in the eyes to become a personal inquiry. Ah, no! nothing of the kind; only because of the water in mine. My mother! oh, fair and gentle creature, scarcely woman—how could any man's voice call her by that name! I had little idea enough of what it meant,—had heard it laughed at, scoffed at, reverenced, but never had learned to place it even among the ideal powers of life. Yet, if it meant anything at all, what it meant was worth thinking of. What did she ask, looking at me with those eyes? what would she have said if “those lips had language”? If I had known her only as Cowper did—with a child's recollection—there might have been some thread, some faint but comprehensible link, between us; but now all that I felt was the curious incongruity. Poor child! I said to myself; so sweet a creature: poor little tender soul! as if she had been a little sister, a child of mine—but my mother! I cannot tell how long I stood looking at her, studying the candid, sweet face, which surely had germs in it of everything that was good and beautiful; and sorry, with a profound regret, that she had died and never carried these promises to fulfilment. Poor girl! poor people who had loved her! These were my thoughts: with a curious vertigo and giddiness of my whole being in the sense of a mysterious relationship, which it was beyond my power to understand.
Presently my father came back: possibly because I had been a long time unconscious of the passage of the minutes, or perhaps because he was himself restless in the strange disturbance of his habitual calm. He came in and put his arm within mine, leaning his weight partially upon me, with an affectionate suggestion which went deeper than words. I pressed his arm to my side: it was more between us two grave Englishmen than any embracing.
“I cannot understand it,” I said.
“No. I don't wonder at that; but if it is strange to you, Phil, think how much more strange to me! That is the partner of my life. I have never had another—or thought of another. That—girl! If we are to meet again, as I have always hoped we should meet again, what am I to say to her—I, an old man? Yes; I know what you mean. I am not an old man for my years; but my years are threescore and ten, and the play is nearly played out. How am I to meet that young creature? We used to say to each other that it was forever, that we never could be but one, that it was for life and death. But what—what am I to say to her, Phil, when I meet her again, that—that angel? No, it is not her being an angel that troubles me; but she is so young! She is like my—my granddaughter,” he cried, with a burst of what was half sobs, half laughter; “and she is my wife—and I am an old man—an old man! And so much has happened that she could not understand.”
I was too much startled by this strange complaint to know what to say. It was not my own trouble, and I answered it in the conventional way.
“They are not as we are, sir,” I said; “they look upon us with larger, other eyes than ours.”
“Ah! you don't know what I mean,” he said quickly; and in the interval he had subdued his emotion. “At first, after she died, it was my consolation to think that I should meet her again—that we never could be really parted. But, my God, how I have changed since then! I am another man—I am a different being. I was not very young even then—twenty years older than she was: but her youth renewed mine. I was not an unfit partner; she asked no better: and knew as much more than I did in some things—being so much nearer the source—as I did in others that were of the world. But I have gone a long way since then, Phil—a long way; and there she stands just where I left her.”
I pressed his arm again. “Father,” I said, which was a title I seldom used, “we are not to suppose that in a higher life the mind stands still.” I did not feel myself qualified to discuss such topics, but something one must say.
“Worse, worse!” he replied; “then she too will be like me, a different being, and we shall meet as what? as strangers, as people who have lost sight of each other, with a long past between us—we who parted, my God! with—with——”
His voice broke and ended for a moment: then while, surprised and almost shocked by what he said, I cast about in my mind what to reply, he withdrew his arm suddenly from mine, and said in his usual tone, “Where shall we hang the picture, Phil? It must be here in this room. What do you think will be the best light?”
This sudden alteration took me still more by surprise, and gave me almost an additional shock; but it was evident that I must follow the changes of his mood, or at least the sudden repression of sentiment which he originated. We went into that simpler question with great seriousness, consulting which would be the best light. “You know I can scarcely advise,” I said; “I have never been familiar with this room. I should like to put off, if you don't mind, till daylight.”
“I think,” he said, “that this would be the best place.” It was on the other side of the fireplace, on the wall which faced the windows—not the best light, I knew enough to be aware, for an oil-painting. When I said so, however, he answered me with a little impatience,—“It does not matter very much about, the best light. There will be nobody to see it but you and me. I have my reasons——” There was a small table standing against the wall at this spot, on which he had his hand as he spoke. Upon it stood a little basket in very fine lace-like wickerwork. His hand must have trembled, for the table shook, and the basket fell, its contents turning out upon the carpet,—little bits of needlework, colored silks, a small piece of knitting half done. He laughed as they rolled out at his feet, and tried to stoop to collect them, then tottered to a chair, and covered for a moment his face with his hands.
No need to ask what they were. No woman's work had been seen in the house since I could recollect it. I gathered them up reverently and put them back. I could see, ignorant as I was, that the bit of knitting was something for an infant. What could I do less than put it to my lips? It had. been left in the doing—for me.
“Yes, I think this is the best place,” my father said a minute after, in his usual tone.
We placed it there that evening with our own hands. The picture was large, and in a heavy frame, but my father would let no one help me but himself. And then, with a superstition for which I never could give any reason even to myself, having removed the packings, we closed and locked the door, leaving the candles about the room, in their soft strange illumination lighting the first night of her return to her old place.
That night no more was said. My father went to his room early, which was not his habit. He had never, however, accustomed me to sit late with him in the library. I had a little study or smoking-room of my own, in which all my special treasures were, the collections of my travels and my favorite books—and where I always sat after prayers, a ceremonial which was regularly kept up in the house. I retired as usual this night to my room, and as usual read—but to-night somewhat vaguely, often pausing to think. When it was quite late, I went out by the glass door to the lawn, and walked round the house, with the intention of looking in at the drawing-room windows, as I had done when a child. But I had forgotten that these windows were all shuttered at night, and nothing but a faint penetration of the light within through the crevices bore witness to the instalment of the new dweller there.
In the morning my father was entirely himself again. He told me without emotion of the manner in which he had obtained the picture. It had belonged to my mother's family, and had fallen eventually into the hands of a cousin of hers, resident abroad—“A man whom I did not like, and who did not like me,” my father said; “there was, or had been, some rivalry, he thought: a mistake, but he was never aware of that. He refused all my requests to have a copy made. You may suppose, Phil, that I wished this very much. Had I succeeded, you would have been acquainted, at least, with your mother's appearance, and need not have sustained this shock. But he would not consent. It gave him, I think, a certain pleasure to think that he had the only picture. But now he is dead—and out of remorse, or with some other intention, has left it to me.”
“That looks like kindness,” said I.
“Yes; or something else. He might have thought that by so doing he was establishing a claim upon me.” my father said: but he did not seem disposed to add any more. On whose behalf he meant to establish a claim I did not know, nor who the man was who had laid us under so great an obligation on his deathbed. He had established a claim on me at least: though, as he was dead, I could not see on whose behalf it was. And my father said nothing more. He seemed to dislike the subject. When I attempted to return to it, he had recourse to his letters or his newspapers. Evidently he had made up his mind to say no more.
Afterwards I went into the drawing-room to look at the picture once more. It seemed to me that the anxiety in her eyes was not so evident as I had thought it last night. The light possibly was more favorable. She stood just above the place where, I make no doubt, she had sat in life, where her little work-basket was—not very much above it. The picture was full-length, and we had hung it low, so that she might have been stepping into the room, and was little above my own level as I stood and looked at her again. Once more I smiled at the strange thought that this young creature, so young, almost childish, could be my mother; and once more my eyes grew wet looking at her. He was a benefactor, indeed, who had given her back to us. I said to myself, that if I could ever do anything for him or his, I would certainly do, for my—for this lovely young creature's sake.
And with this in my mind, and all the thoughts that came with it, I am obliged to confess that the other matter, which I had been so full of on the previous night, went entirely out of my head.
It is rarely, however, that such matters are allowed to slip out of one's mind. When I went out in the afternoon for my usual stroll—or rather when I returned from that stroll—I saw once more before me the woman with her baby whose story had filled me with dismay on the previous evening. She was waiting at the gate as before, and—“Oh, gentleman, but haven't you got some news to give me?” she said.
“My good woman—I—have been greatly occupied. I have had—no time to do anything.”
“Ah!” she said, with a little cry of disappointment, “my man said not to make too sure, and that the ways of the gentlefolks is hard to know.”
“I cannot explain to you,” I said, as gently as I could, “what it is that has made me forget you. It was an event that can only do you good in the end. Go home now, and see the man that took your things from you, and tell him to come to me. I promise you it shall be put right.”
The woman looked at me in astonishment, then burst forth, as it seemed, involuntarily,—“What! without asking no questions?” After this there came a storm of tears and blessings, from which I made haste to escape, but not without carrying that curious commentary on my rashness away with me—“Without asking no questions?” It might be foolish, perhaps: but after all how slight a matter. To make the poor creature comfortable at the cost of what—a box or two of cigars, perhaps, or some other trifle. And if it should be her own fault, or her husband's—what then? Had I been punished for all my faults, where should I have been now. And if the advantage should be only temporary, what then? To be relieved and comforted even for a day or two, was not that something to count in life? Thus I quenched the fiery dart of criticism which my protégée herself had thrown into the transaction, not without a certain sense of the humor of it. Its effect, however, was to make me less anxious to see my father, to repeat my proposal to him, and to call his attention to the cruelty performed in his name. This one case I had taken out of the category of wrongs to be righted, by assuming arbitrarily the position of Providence in my own person—for, of course, I had bound myself to pay the poor creature's rent as well as redeem her goods—and, whatever might happen to her in the future, had taken the past into my own hands. The man came presently to see me who, it seems, had acted as my father's agent in the matter. “I don't know, sir, how Mr. Canning will take it,” he said. “He don't want none of those irregular, bad-paying ones in his property. He always says as to look over it and let the rent run on is making things worse in the end. His rule is, 'Never more than a month, Stevens:' that's what Mr. Canning says to me, sir. He says, 'More than that they can't pay. It's no use trying.' And it's a good rule; it's a very good rule. He won't hear none of their stories, sir. Bless you, you'd never get a penny of rent from them small houses if you listened to their tales. But if so be as you'll pay Mrs. Jordan's rent, it's none of my business how it's paid, so long as it's paid, and I'll send her back her things. But they'll just have to be took next time,” he added, composedly. “Over and over: it's always the same story with them sort of poor folks—they're too poor for anything, that's the truth,” the man said.
Morphew came back to my room after my visitor was gone. “Mr. Philip,” he said, “you'll excuse me, sir, but if you're going to pay all the poor folk's rent as have distresses put in, you may just go into the court at once, for it's without end—”
“I am going to be the agent myself, Morphew, and manage for my father: and we'll soon put a stop to that,” I said, more cheerfully than I felt.
“Manage for—master,” he said, with a face of consternation. “You, Mr. Philip!”
“You seem to have a great contempt for me, Morphew.”
He did not deny the fact. He said with excitement, “Master, sir—master don't let himself be put a stop to by any man. Master's—not one to be managed. Don't you quarrel with master, Mr. Philip, for the love of God.” The old man was quite pale.
“Quarrel!” I said. “I have never quarreled with my father, and I don't mean to begin now.”
Morphew dispelled his own excitement by making up the fire, which was dying in the grate. It was a very mild spring evening, and he made up a great blaze which would have suited December. This is one of many ways in which an old servant will relieve his mind. He muttered all the time as he threw on the coals and wood. “He'll not like it—we all know as he'll not like it. Master won't stand no meddling, Mr. Philip,”—this last he discharged at me like a flying arrow as he closed the door.
I soon found there was truth in what he said. My father was not angry; he was even half amused. “I don't think that plan of yours will hold water, Phil. I hear you have been paying rents and redeeming furniture—that's an expensive game, and a very profitless one. Of course, so long as you are a benevolent gentleman acting for your own pleasure, it makes no difference to me. I am quite content if I get my money, even out of your pockets—so long as it amuses you. But as my collector, you know, which you are good enough to propose to be——”
“Of course I should act under your orders,” I said; but at least you might be sure that I would not commit you to any—to any——” I paused for a word.
“Act of oppression,” he said with a smile—“piece of cruelty, exaction—there are half-a-dozen words——”
“Sir——” I cried.
“Stop, Phil, and let us understand each other. I hope I have always been a just man. I do my duty on my side, and I expect it from others. It is your benevolence that is cruel. I have calculated anxiously how much credit it is safe to allow; but I will allow no man, or woman either, to go beyond what he or she can make up. My law is fixed. Now you understand. My agents, as you call them, originate nothing—they execute only what I decide——”
“But then no circumstances are taken into account—no bad luck, no evil chances, no loss unexpected.”
“There are no evil chances,” he said “there is no bad luck—they reap as they sow. No, I don't go among them to be cheated by their stories and spend quite unnecessary emotion in sympathising with them. You will find it much better for you that I don't. I deal with them on a general rule, made, I assure you, not without a great deal of thought.”
“And must it always be so?” I said. “Is there no way of ameliorating or bringing in a better state of things?”
“It seems not,” he said; “we don't get 'no forrarder' in that direction so far as I can see.” And then he turned the conversation to general matters.
I retired to my room greatly discouraged that night. In former ages—or so one is led to suppose—and in the lower primitive classes who still linger near the primeval type, action of any kind was, and is, easier than amid the complications of our higher civilisation. A bad man is a distinct entity, against whom you know more or less what steps to take. A tyrant, an oppressor, a bad landlord, a man who lets miserable tenements at a rack-rent (to come down to particulars), and exposes his wretched tenants to all those abominations of which we have heard so much—well! he is more or less a satisfactory opponent. There he is, and there is nothing to be said for him—down with him! and let there be an end of his wickedness. But when, on the contrary, you have before you a good man, a just man, who has considered deeply a question which you allow to be full of difficulty; who regrets, but cannot, being human, avert, the miseries which to some unhappy individuals follow from the very wisdom of his rule,—what can you do—what is to be done? Individual benevolence at haphazard may baulk him here and there, but what have you to put in the place of his well-considered scheme? Charity which makes paupers? or what else? I had not considered the question deeply, but it seemed to me that I now came to a blank wall, which my vague human sentiment of pity and scorn could find no way to breach. There must be wrong somewhere—but where? There must be some change for the better to be made—but how?
I was seated with a book before me on the table, with my head supported on my hands. My eyes were on the printed page, but I was not reading—my mind was full of these thoughts, my heart of great discouragement and despondency, a sense that I could do nothing, yet that there surely must and ought, if I but knew it, be something to do. The fire which Morphew had built up before dinner was dying out, the shaded lamp on my table left all the corners in a mysterious twilight. The house was perfectly still, no one moving: my father in the library, where, after the habit of many solitary years, he liked to be left alone, and I here in my retreat, preparing for the formation of similar habits. I thought all at once of the third member of the party, the newcomer, alone too in the room that had been hers; and there suddenly occurred to me a strong desire to take up my lamp and go to the drawing-room and visit her, to see whether her soft angelic face would give any inspiration. I restrained, however, this futile impulse—for what could the picture say?—and instead wondered what might have been had she lived, had she been there, warmly enthroned beside the warm domestic centre, the hearth which would have been a common sanctuary, the true home. In that case what might have been? Alas! the question was no more simple to answer than the other: she might have been there alone too, her husband's business, her son's thoughts, as far from her as now, when her silent representative held her old place in the silence and darkness. I had known it so, often enough. Love itself does not always give comprehension and sympathy. It might be that she was more to us there, in the sweet image of her undeveloped beauty, than she might have been had she lived and grown to maturity and fading, like the rest.
I cannot be certain whether my mind was still lingering on this not very cheerful reflection, or if it had been left behind, when the strange occurrence came of which I have now to tell: can I call it an occurrence? My eyes were on my book, when I thought I heard the sound of a door opening and shutting, but so far away and faint that if real at all it must have been in a far corner of the house. I did not move except to lift my eyes from the book, as one does instinctively the better to listen; when——But I cannot tell, nor have I ever been able to describe exactly what it was. My heart made all at once a sudden leap in my breast. I am aware that this language is figurative, and that the heart cannot leap: but it is a figure so entirely justified by sensation, that no one will have any difficulty in understanding what I mean. My heart leapt up and began beating wildly in my throat, in my ears, as if my whole being had received a sudden and intolerable shock. The sound went through my head like the dizzy sound of some strange mechanism, a thousand wheels and springs, circling, echoing, working in my brain. I felt the blood bound in my veins, my mouth became dry, my eyes hot, a sense of something insupportable took possession of me. I sprang to my feet, and then I sat down again. I cast a quick glance round me beyond the brief circle of the lamplight, but there was nothing there to account in any way for this sudden extraordinary rush of sensation—nor could I feel any meaning in it, any suggestion, any moral impression. I thought I must be going to be ill, and got out my watch and felt my pulse: it was beating furiously, about 125 throbs in a minute. I knew of no illness that could come on like this with out warning, in a moment, and I tried to subdue myself, to say to myself that it was nothing, some flutter of the nerves, some physical disturbance. I laid myself down upon my sofa to try if rest would help me, and keep still—as long as the thumping and throbbing of this wild excited mechanism within, like a wild beast plunging and struggling, would let me. I am quite aware of the confusion of the metaphor—the reality was just so. It was like a mechanism deranged, going wildly with ever-increasing precipitation, like those horrible wheels that from time to time catch a helpless human being in them and tear him to pieces: but at the same time it was like a maddened living creature making the wildest efforts to get free.
When I could bear this no longer I got up and walked about my room; then having still a certain command of myself, though I could not master the commotion within me, I deliberately took down an exciting book from the shelf, a book of breathless adventure which had always interested me, and tried with that to break the spell. After a few minutes, however, I flung the book aside; I was gradually losing all power over myself. What I should be moved to do,—to shout aloud, to struggle with I know not what; or if was I going mad altogether, and next moment must be a raving lunatic,—I could not tell. I kept looking round, expecting I don't know what: several times with the corner of my eye I seemed to see a movement, as if some one was stealing out of sight; but when I looked straight, there was never anything but the plain outlines of the wall and carpet, the chairs standing in good order. At last I snatched up the lamp in my hand and went out of the room. To look at the picture? which had been faintly showing in my imagination from time to time, the eyes, more anxious than ever, looking at me from out the silent air. But no; I passed the door of that room swiftly, moving, it seemed, without any volition of my own, and before I knew where I was going, went into my father's library with my lamp in my hand.
He was still sitting there at his writing-table; he looked up astonished to see me hurrying in with my light. “Phil!” he said, surprised. I remember that I shut the door behind me, and came up to him, and set down the lamp on his table. My sudden appearance alarmed him. “What is the matter?” he cried. “Philip, what have you been doing with yourself?”
I sat down on the nearest chair and gasped, gazing at him. The wild commotion ceased, the blood subsided into its natural channels, my heart resumed its place, I use such words as mortal weakness can to express the sensations I felt. I came to myself thus, gazing at him, confounded, at once by the extraordinary passion which I had gone through, and its sudden cessation. “The matter?” I cried; “I don't know what is the matter.”
My father had pushed his spectacles up from his eyes. He appeared to me as faces appear in a fever, all glorified with light which is not in them—his eyes glowing, his white hair shining like silver; but his look was severe. “You are not a boy, that I should reprove you; but you ought to know better,” he said.
Then I explained to him, so far as I was able, what had happened. Had happened? nothing had happened. He did not understand me—nor did I, now that it was over, understand myself; but he saw enough to make him aware that the disturbance in me was serious, and not caused by any folly of my own. He was very kind as soon as he had assured himself of this, and talked, taking pains to bring me back to unexciting subjects. He had a letter in his hand with a very deep border of black when I came in. I observed it, without taking any notice or associating it with anything I knew. He had many correspondents, and although we were excellent friends, we had never been on those confidential terms which warrant one man in asking another from whom a special letter has come. We were not so near to each other as this, though we were father and son. After a while I went back to my own room, and finished the evening in my usual way, without any return of the excitement which, now that it was over, looked to me like some extraordinary dream. What had it meant? had it meant anything? I said to myself that it must be purely physical, something gone temporarily amiss, which had righted itself. It was physical; the excitement did not affect my mind. I was independent of it all the time, a spectator of my own agitation—a clear proof that, whatever it was, it had affected my bodily organisation alone.
Next day I returned to the problem which I had not been able to solve. I found out my petitioner in the back street, and that she was happy in the recovery of her possessions, which to my eyes indeed did not seem very worthy either of lamentation or delight. Nor was her house the tidy house which injured virtue should have when restored to its humble rights. She was not injured virtue, it was clear. She made me a great many curtseys, and poured forth a number of blessings. Her “man” came in while I was there, and hoped in a gruff voice that God would reward me and that the old gentleman 'd let 'em alone. I did not like the looks of the man. It seemed to me that in the dark lane behind the house of a winter's night he would not be a pleasant person to find in one's way. Nor was this all: when I went out into the little street, which it appeared was all, or almost all, my fathers property, a number of groups formed in my way, and at least half-a-dozen applicants sidled up. “I've more claims nor Mary Jordan any day,” said one; “I've lived on Squire Canning's property one place and another, this twenty year.” “And what do you say to me,” said another; “I've six children to her two, bless you, sir, and ne'er a father to do for them.” I believed in my father's rule before I got out of the street, and approved his wisdom in keeping himself free from personal contact with his tenants. Yet when I looked back upon the swarming thoroughfare, the mean little houses, the women at their doors all so open-mouthed, and eager to contend for my favor, my heart sank within me at the thought that out of their misery some portion of our wealth came—I don't care how small a portion: that I, young and strong, should be kept idle and in luxury, in some part through the money screwed out of their necessities, obtained sometimes by the sacrifice of everything they prized! Of course I know all the ordinary commonplaces of life as well as anyone—that if you build a house with your hands or your money, and let it, the rent of it is your just due, and must be paid. But yet——
“Don't you think, sir,” I said, that evening at dinner, the subject being reintroduced by my father himself, “that we have some duty towards them when we draw so much from them?”
“Certainly,” he said; “I take as much trouble about their drains as I do about my own.”
“That is always something, I suppose.”
“Something! it is a great deal—it is more than they get anywhere else. I keep them clean, as far as that's possible. I give them at least the means of keeping clean, and thus check disease, and prolong life—which is more, I assure you, than they've any right to expect.”
I was not prepared with arguments as I ought to have been. That is all in the Gospel according to Adam Smith, which my father had been brought up in, but of which the tenets had begun to be less binding in my day. I wanted something more, or else something else; but my views were not so clear, nor my system so logical and well-built, as that upon which my father rested his conscience, and drew his percentage with a light heart.
Yet I thought there were signs in him of some perturbation. I met him one morning coming out of the room in which the portrait hung, as if he had gone to look at it stealthily. He was shaking his head, and saying, “No, no,” to himself, not perceiving me, and I stepped aside when I saw him so absorbed. For myself, I entered that room but little. I went outside, as I had so often done when I was a child, and looked through the windows into the still and now sacred place, which had always impressed me with a certain awe. Looked at so, the slight figure in its white dress seemed to be stepping down into the room from some slight visionary altitude, looking with that which had seemed to me at first anxiety, which I sometimes represented to myself now as a wistful curiosity, as if she were looking for the life which might have been hers. Where was the existence that had belonged to her, the sweet household place, the infant she had left? She would no more recognize the man who thus came to look at her as through a veil with mystic reverence, than I could recognize her. I could never be her child to her, any more than she could be a mother to me.
Thus time passed on for several quiet days. There was nothing to make us give any special heed to the passage of time, life being very uneventful and its habits unvaried. My mind was very much preoccupied by my father's tenants. He had a great deal of property in the town which was so near us,—streets of small houses, the best paying property (I was assured) of any. I was very anxious to come to some settled conclusion: on the one hand, not to let myself be carried away by sentiment; on the other, not to allow my strongly roused feelings to fall into the blank of routine, as his had done. I was seated one evening in my own sitting-room busy with this matter,—busy with calculations as to cost and profit, with an anxious desire to convince him, either that his profits were greater than justice allowed, or that they carried with them a more urgent duty than he had conceived.
It was night, but not late, not more than ten o'clock, the household still astir. Everything was quiet—not the solemnity of midnight silence, in which there is always something of mystery, but the soft-breathing quiet of the evening, full of the faint habitual sounds of a human dwelling, a consciousness of life about. And I was very busy with my figures, interested, feeling no room in my mind for any other thought. The singular experience which had startled me so much had passed over very quickly, and there had been no return. I had ceased to think of it: indeed I had never thought of it save for the moment, setting it down after it was over to a physical cause without much difficulty. At this time I was far too busy to have thoughts to spare for anything, or room for imagination: and when suddenly in a moment without any warning, the first symptom returned, I started with it into determined resistance, resolute not to be fooled by any mock influence which could resolve itself into the action of nerves or ganglions. The first symptom, as before, was that my heart sprang up with a bound, as if a cannon had been fired at my ear. My whole being responded with a start. The pen fell out of my fingers, the figures went out of my head as if all faculty had departed: and yet I was conscious for a time at least of keeping my self-control. I was like the rider of a frightened horse, rendered almost wild by something which in the mystery of its voiceless being it has seen, something on the road which it will not pass, but wildly plunging, resisting every persuasion, turns from, with ever increasing passion. The rider himself after a time becomes infected with this inexplainable desperation of terror, and I suppose I must have done so: but for a time I kept the upper hand. I would not allow myself to spring up as I wished, as my impulse was, but sat there doggedly, clinging to my books, to my table, fixing myself on I did not mind what, to resist the flood of sensation, of emotion, which was sweeping through me, carrying me away. I tried to continue my calculations. I tried to stir myself up with recollections of the miserable sights I had seen, the poverty, the helplessness. I tried to work myself into indignation; but all through these efforts I felt the contagion growing upon me, my mind falling into sympathy with all those straining faculties of the body, startled, excited, driven wild by something I knew not what. It was not fear. I was like a ship at sea straining and plunging against wind and tide, but I was not afraid. I am obliged to use these metaphors, otherwise I could give no explanation of my condition, seized upon against my will, and torn from all those moorings of reason to which I clung with desperation—as long as I had the strength.
When I got up from my chair at last, the battle was lost, so far as my powers of self-control were concerned. I got up, or rather was dragged up, from my seat, clutching at these material things round me as with a last effort to hold my own. But that was no longer possible; I was overcome. I stood for a moment looking round me feebly, feeling myself begin to babble with stammering lips, which was the alternative of shrieking, and which I seemed to choose as a lesser evil. What I said was, “What am I to do?” and after a while, “What do you want me to do?” although throughout I saw no one, heard no voice, and had in reality not power enough in my dizzy and confused brain to know what I myself meant. I stood thus for a moment looking blankly round me for guidance, repeating the question, which seemed after a time to become almost mechanical. What do you want me to do? though I neither knew to whom I addressed it nor why I said it. Presently—whether in answer, whether in mere yielding of nature, I cannot tell—I became aware of a difference: not a lessening of the agitation, but a softening, as if my powers of resistance being exhausted, a gentler force, a more benignant influence, had room. I felt myself consent to whatever it was. My heart melted in the midst of the tumult; I seemed to give myself up, and move as if drawn by some one whose arm was in mine, as if softly swept along, not forcibly, but with an utter consent of all my faculties to do I knew not what, for love of I knew not whom. For love—that was how it seemed—not by force, as when I went before. But my steps took the same course: I went through the dim passages in an exaltation indescribable, and opened the door of my father's room.
He was seated there at his table, as usual, the light of the lamp falling on his white hair: he looked up with some surprise at the sound of the opening door. “Phil,” he said, and, with a look of wondering apprehension on his face, watched my approach. I went straight up to him, and put my hand on his shoulder. “Phil, what is the matter? What do you want with me? What is it?” he said.
“Father, I can't tell you. I come not of myself. There must be something in it, though I don't know what it is. This is the second time I have been brought to you here.”
“Are you going——?” he stopped himself. The exclamation had been begun with an angry intention. He stopped, looked at me with a scared look, as if perhaps it might be true.
“Do you mean mad? I don't think so. I have no delusions that I know of. Father, think—do you know any reason why I am brought here? for some cause there must be.”
I stood with my hand upon the back of his chair. His table was covered with papers, among which were several letters with the broad black border which I had before observed. I noticed this now in my excitement without any distinct associations of thoughts, for that I was not capable of; but the black border caught my eye. And I was conscious that he, too, gave a hurried glance at them, and with one hand swept them away.
“Philip,” he said, pushing back his chair, “you must be ill, my poor boy. Evidently we have not been treating you rightly: you have been more ill all through than I supposed. Let me persuade you to go to bed.”
“I am perfectly well,” I said. “Father, don't let us deceive one another. I am neither a man to go mad nor to see ghosts. What it is that has got the command over me I can't tell: but there is some cause for it. You are doing something or planning something with which I have a right to interfere.”
He turned round squarely in his chair with a spark in his blue eyes. He was not a man to be meddled with. “I have yet to learn what can give my son a right to interfere. I am in possession of all my faculties, I hope.”
“Father,” I cried, “won't you listen to me? no one can say I have been undutiful or disrespectful. I am a man, with a right to speak my mind, and I have done so; but this is different. I am not here by my own will. Something that is stronger than I has brought me. There is something in your mind which disturbs—others. I don't know what I am saying. This is not what I meant to say: but you know the meaning better than I. Some one—who can speak to you only by me—speaks to you by me; and I know that you understand.”
He gazed up at me, growing pale, and his under lip fell. I, for my part, felt that my message was delivered. My heart sank into a stillness so sudden that it made me faint. The light swam in my eyes: everything went round with me. I kept upright only by my hold upon the chair; and in the sense of utter weakness that followed I dropped on my knees I think first, then on the nearest seat that presented itself, and covering my face with my hands, had hard ado not to sob, in the sudden removal of that strange influence, the relaxation of the strain.
There was silence between us for some time; then he said, but with a voice slightly broken, “I don't understand you Phil. You must have taken some fancy into your mind which my slower intelligence——Speak out what you want to say. What do you find fault with? Is it all—all that woman Jordan?”
He gave a short forced laugh as he broke off, and shook me almost roughly by the shoulder, saying, “speak out! what—what do you want to say?”
“It seems, sir, that I have said everything.” My voice trembled more than his, but not in the same way. “I have told you that I did not come by my own will—quite otherwise. I resisted as long as I could: now all is said. It is for you to judge whether it was worth the trouble or not.”
He got up from his seat in a hurried way. “You would have me as—mad as yourself,” he said, then sat down again as quickly. “Come, Phil: if it will please you, not to make a breach, the first breach, between us, you shall have your way. I consent to your looking into that matter about the poor tenants. Your mind shall not be upset about that even though I don't enter into all your views.”
“Thank you,” I said; “but father, that is not what it is.”
“Then it is a piece of folly,” he said, angrily. “I suppose you mean——but this is a matter in which I choose to judge for myself.”
“You know what I mean,” I said, as quietly as I could, “though I don't myself know; that proves there is good reason for it. Will you do one thing for me before I leave you? Come with me into the drawing-room——”
“What end,” he said, with again the tremble in his voice, “is to be served by that?”
“I don't very well know; but to look at her, you and I together, will always do something for us, sir. As for the breach, there can be no breach when we stand there.”
He got up, trembling like an old man, which he was, but which he never looked like, save at moments of emotion like this, and told me to take the light; then stopped when he had got half-way across the room. “This is a piece of theatrical sentimentality,” he said. “No, Phil, I will not go. I will not bring her into any such——Put down the lamp, and if you will take my advice, go to bed.”
“At least,” I said, “I will trouble you no more, father, to-night. So long as you understand, there need be no more to say.”
He gave me a very curt “good-night,” and turned back to his papers—the letters with the black edge, either by my imagination or in reality, always keeping uppermost. I went to my own room for my lamp, and then alone proceeded to the silent shrine in which the portrait hung. I at least would look at her to-night. I don't know whether I asked myself, in so many words, if it were she who—or if it was any one—I knew nothing; but my heart was drawn with a softness—born, perhaps, of the great weakness in which I was left after that visitation—to her, to look at her, to see perhaps if there was any sympathy, any approval in her face. I set down my lamp on the table where her little work-basket still was: the light threw a gleam upward upon her,—she seemed more than ever to be stepping into the room, coming down towards me, coming back to her life. Ah no! her life was lost and vanished: all mine stood between her and the days she knew. She looked at me with eyes that did not change. The anxiety I had seen at first seemed now a wistful subdued question; but that difference was not in her look but in mine.
I need not linger on the intervening time. The doctor who attended us usually, came in next day “by accident,” and we had a long conversation. On the following day a very impressive yet genial gentleman from town lunched with us—a friend of my father's, Dr. something; but the introduction was hurried, and I did not catch his name. He, too, had a long talk with me afterwards—my father being called away to speak to some one on business. Dr. —— drew me out on the subject of the dwellings of the poor. He said he heard I took great interest in this question, which had come so much to the front at the present moment. He was interested in it too, and wanted to know the view I took. I explained at considerable length that my view did not concern the general subject, on which I had scarcely thought, so much as the individual mode of management of my father's estate. He was a most patient and intelligent listener, agreeing with me on some points, differing in others; and his visit was very pleasant. I had no idea until after of its special object: though a certain puzzled look and slight shake of the head when my father returned, might have thrown some light upon it. The report of the medical experts in my case, however, had been quite satisfactory, for I heard nothing more of them. It was, I think, a fortnight later when the next and last of these strange experiences came.
This time it was morning, about noon,—a wet and rather dismal spring day. The half-spread leaves seemed to tap at the window, with an appeal to be taken in; the primroses, that showed golden upon the grass at the roots of the trees, just beyond the smooth-shorn grass of the lawn, were all drooped and sodden among their sheltering leaves. The very growth seemed dreary—the sense of spring in the air making the feeling of winter a grievance, instead of the natural effect which it had conveyed a few months before. I had been writing letters and was cheerful enough, going back among the associates of my old life, with, perhaps, a little longing for its freedom and independence, but at the same time a not ungrateful consciousness that for the moment my present tranquillity might be best.
This was my condition—a not unpleasant one—when suddenly the now well-known symptoms of the visitation to which I had become subject suddenly seized upon me,—the leap of the heart; the sudden, causeless, overwhelming physical excitement, which I could neither ignore nor allay. I was terrified beyond description, beyond reason, when I became conscious that this was about to begin over again: what purpose did it answer, what good was in it? My father, indeed, understood the meaning of it, though I did not understand: but it was little agreeable to be thus made a helpless instrument without any will of mine, in an operation of which I knew nothing; and to enact the part of the oracle unwillingly, with suffering and such a strain as it took me days to get over. I resisted, not as before, but yet desperately, trying with better knowledge to keep down the growing passion. I hurried to my room and swallowed a dose of a sedative which had been given me to procure sleep on my first return from India. I saw Morphew in the hall, and called him to talk to him, and cheat myself, if possible, by that means. Morphew lingered, however, and, before he came, I was beyond conversation. I heard him speak, his voice coming vaguely through the turmoil which was already in my ears, but what he said I have never known. I stood staring, trying to recover my power of attention, with an aspect which ended by completely frightening the man. He cried out at last that he was sure I was ill, that he must bring me something; which words penetrated more or less into my maddened brain. It became impressed upon me that he was going to get some one—one of my father's doctors, perhaps—to prevent me from acting, to stop my interference,—and that if I waited a moment longer I might be too late. A vague idea seized me at the same time, of taking refuge with the portrait—going to its feet, throwing myself there, perhaps, till the paroxysm should be over. But it was not there that my footsteps were directed. I can remember making an effort to open the door of the drawing-room, and feeling myself swept past it, as if by a gale of wind. It was not there that I had to go. I knew very well where I had to go,—once more on my confused and voiceless mission to my father, who understood, although I could not understand.
Yet as it was daylight, and all was clear, I could not help noting one or two circumstances on my way. I saw some one sitting in the hall as if waiting—a woman, a girl, a black-shrouded figure, with a thick veil over her face: and asked myself who she was, and what she wanted there? This question, which had nothing to do with my present condition, somehow got into my mind, and was tossed up and down upon the tumultuous tide like a stray log on the breast of a fiercely rolling stream, now submerged, now coming uppermost, at the mercy of the waters. It did not stop me for a moment, as I hurried towards my father's room, but it got upon the current of my mind. I flung open my father's door, and closed it again after me, without seeing who was there or how he was engaged. The full clearness of the daylight did not identify him as the lamp did at night. He looked up at the sound of the door, with a glance of apprehension; and rising suddenly, interrupting some one who was standing speaking to him with much earnestness and even vehemence, came forward to meet me. “I cannot be disturbed at present,” he said quickly; “I am busy.” Then seeing the look in my face, which by this time he knew, he too changed color. “Phil,” he said, in a low, imperative voice, “wretched boy, go away—go away; don't let a stranger see you——”
“I can't go away,” I said. “It is impossible. You know why I have come. I cannot, if I would. It is more powerful than I——”
“Go, sir,” he said; “go at once—no more of this folly. I will not have you in this room. Go——go!”
I made no answer. I don't know that I could have done so. There had never been any struggle between us before; but I had no power to do one thing or another. The tumult within me was in full career. I heard indeed what he said, and was able to reply; but his words, too, were like straws tossed upon the tremendous stream. I saw now with my feverish eyes who the other person present was. It was a woman, dressed also in mourning similar to the one in the hall; but this a middle-aged woman, like a respectable servant. She had been crying, and in the pause caused by this encounter between my father and myself, dried her eyes with a handkerchief, which she rolled like a ball in her hand, evidently in strong emotion. She turned and looked at me as my father spoke to me, for a moment with a gleam of hope, then falling back into her former attitude.
My father returned to his seat. He was much agitated too, though doing all that was possible to conceal it. My inopportune arrival was evidently a great and unlooked-for vexation to him. He gave me the only look of passionate displeasure I have ever had from him, as he sat down again: but he said nothing more.
“You must understand,” he said, addressing the woman, “that I have said my last words on this subject. I don't choose to enter into it again in the presence of my son, who is not well enough to be made a party to any discussion. I am sorry that you should have had so much trouble in vain; but you were warned beforehand, and you have only yourself to blame. I acknowledge no claim, and nothing you can say will change my resolution. I must beg you to go away. All this is very painful and quite useless. I acknowledge no claim.”
“Oh, sir,” she cried, her eyes beginning once more to flow, her speech interrupted by little sobs. “Maybe I did wrong to speak of a claim. I'm not educated to argue with a gentleman. Maybe we have no claim. But if it's not by right, oh, Mr. Canning, won't you let your heart be touched by pity? She don't know what I'm saying, poor dear. She's not one to beg and pray for herself, as I'm doing for her. Oh, sir, she's so young! She's so lone in this world—not a friend to stand by her, nor a house to take her in! You are the nearest to her of any one that's left in this world. She hasn't a relation—not one so near as you——oh!” she cried, with a sudden thought, turning quickly round upon me, “this gentleman's your son! Now I think of it, it's not your relation she is, but his, through his mother! That's nearer, nearer! Oh, sir! you're young; your heart should be more tender. Here is my young lady that has no one in the world to look to her. Your own flesh and blood: your mother's cousin—your mother's——”
My father called to her to stop, with a voice of thunder. “Philip, leave us at once. It is not a matter to be discussed with you.”
And then in a moment it became clear to me what it was. It had been with difficulty that I had kept myself still. My breast was laboring with the fever of an impulse poured into me, more than I could contain. And now for the first time I knew why. I hurried towards him, and took his hand, though he resisted, into mine. Mine were burning, but his like ice: their touch burnt me with its chill, like fire. “This is what it is?” I cried. “I had no knowledge before. I don't know now what is being asked of you. But, father—understand! You know, and I know now, that some one sends me—some one—who has a right to interfere.”
He pushed me away with all his might. “You are mad,” he cried. “What right have you to think——? Oh, you are mad—mad! I have seen it coming on——”
The woman, the petitioner, had grown silent, watching this brief conflict with the terror and interest with which women watch a struggle between men. She started and fell back when she heard what he said, but did not take her eyes off me, following every movement I made. When I turned to go away, a cry of indescribable disappointment and remonstrance burst from her, and even my father raised himself up and stared at my withdrawal, astonished to find that he had overcome me so soon and easily. I paused for a moment, and looked back on them, seeing them large and vague through the mist of fever. “I am not going away,” I said. “I am going for another messenger—one you can't gainsay.”
My father rose. He called out to me threateningly, “I will have nothing touched that is hers. Nothing that is hers shall be profaned——”
I waited to hear no more: I knew what I had to do. By what means it was conveyed to me I cannot tell; but the certainty of an influence which no one thought of calmed me in the midst of my fever. I went out into the hall, where I had seen the young stranger waiting. I went up to her and touched her on the shoulder. She rose at once, with a little movement of alarm, yet with docile and instant obedience, as if she had expected the summons. I made her take off her veil and her bonnet, scarcely looking at her, scarcely seeing her, knowing how it was: I took her soft, small, cool, yet trembling hand into mine; it was so soft and cool, not cold, it refreshed me with its tremulous touch. All through I moved and spoke like a man in a dream, swiftly, noiselessly, all the complications of waking life removed, without embarrassment, without reflection, without the loss of a moment. My father was still standing up, leaning a little forward as he had done when I withdrew, threatening, yet terror-stricken, not knowing what I might be about to do, when I returned with my companion. That was the one thing he had not thought of. He was entirely undefended, unprepared. He gave her one look, flung up his arms above his head, and uttered a distracted cry, so wild that it seemed the last outcry of nature—“Agnes!” then fell back like a sudden ruin, upon himself, into his chair.
I had no leisure to think how he was, or whether he could hear what I said. I had my message to deliver. “Father,” I said, laboring with my panting breath, “it is for this that heaven has opened, and one whom I never saw, one whom I know not, has taken possession of me. Had we been less earthly we should have seen her—herself, and not merely her image. I have not even known what she meant. I have been as a fool without understanding. This is the third time I have come to you with her message, without knowing what to say. But now I have found it out. This is her message. I have found it out at last.”
There was an awful pause—a pause in which no one moved or breathed. Then there came a broken voice out of my father's chair. He had not understood, though I think he heard what I said. He put out two feeble hands. “Phil—I think I am dying—has she—has she come for me?” he said.
We had to carry him to his bed. What struggles he had gone through before I cannot tell. He had stood fast, and had refused to be moved, and now he fell—like an old tower, like an old tree. The necessity there was for thinking of him saved me from the physical consequences which had prostrated me on a former occasion. I had no leisure now for any consciousness of how matters went with myself.
His delusion was not wonderful, but most natural. She was clothed in black from head to foot, instead of the white dress of the portrait. She had no knowledge of the conflict, of nothing but that she was called for, that her fate might depend on the next few minutes. In her eyes there was a pathetic question, a line of anxiety in the lids, an innocent appeal in the looks. And the face the same: the same lips, sensitive, ready to quiver; the same innocent, candid brow; the look of a common race, which is more subtle than mere resemblance. How I knew that it was so, I cannot tell, nor any man. It was the other—the elder—ah no! not elder; the ever young, the Agnes to whom age can never come—she who they say was the mother of a man who never saw her—it was she who led her kinswoman, her representative, into our hearts.
My father recovered after a few days: he had taken cold, it was said, the day before—and naturally, at seventy, a small matter is enough to upset the balance even of a strong man. He got quite well; but he was willing enough afterwards to leave the management of that ticklish kind of property which involves human well-being in my hands, who could move about more freely, and see with my own eyes how things were going on. He liked home better, and had more pleasure in his personal existence in the end of his life. Agnes is now my wife, as he had, of course, foreseen. It was not merely the disinclination to receive her father's daughter, or to take upon him a new responsibility, that had moved him, to do him justice. But both these motives had told strongly. I have never been told, and now will never be told, what his griefs against my mother's family, and especially against that cousin, had been; but that he had been very determined, deeply prejudiced, there can be no doubt. It turned out after, that the first occasion on which I had been mysteriously commissioned to him with a message which I did not understand, and which for that time he did not understand, was the evening of the day on which he had received the dead man's letter, appealing to him—to him, a man whom he had wronged—on behalf of the child who was about to be left friendless in the world. The second time, further letters, from the nurse who was the only guardian of the orphan, and the chaplain of the place where her father had died, taking it for granted that my father's house was her natural refuge—had been received. The third I have already described, and its results.
For a long time after, my mind was never without a lurking fear that the influence which had once taken possession of me might return again. Why should I have feared to be influenced—to be the messenger of a blessed creature, whose wishes could be nothing but heavenly? Who can say? Flesh and blood is not made for such encounters: they were more than I could bear. But nothing of the kind has ever occurred again.
Agnes had her peaceful domestic throne established under the picture. My father wished it to be so, and spent his evenings there in the warmth and light, instead of in the old library, in the narrow circle cleared by our lamp out of the darkness, as long as he lived. It is supposed by strangers that the picture on the wall is that of my wife; and I have always been glad that it should be so supposed. She who was my mother, who came back to me and became as my soul for three strange moments and no more, but with whom I can feel no credible relationship as she stands there, has retired for me into the tender regions of the unseen. She has passed once more into the secret company of those shadows, who can only become real in an atmosphere fitted to modify and harmonise all differences, and make all wonders possible—the light of the perfect day.—Blackwood's Magazine.
[DELLA CRUSCA AND ANNA MATILDA:]
An Episode in English Literature.
BY ARMINE T. KENT.
Most people are more or less vaguely aware that there existed in England, towards the end of the last century, a school of poets, or poetasters, called Della Cruscan; and Mrs. Oliphant not long ago suggested, in her Literary History, that a sketch of their eccentricities might not be unamusing. I propose, accordingly, for the edification of the curious, to recount a few particulars of the Della Cruscan writers, in the days of their prosperity and the days of their collapse. They were, let it at once be admitted, a feeble and a frivolous folk; yet I think that a moral may suggest itself when their story has been told.
In the year 1784 Mr. Robert Merry, a bachelor of thirty, had been for some years domiciled at Florence. That his position and prospects were not of a very definite order was owing to no defect of nurture or opportunity. He had been educated at Harrow, at the same time as Sheridan, and afterwards at Christ's College, Cambridge, and was originally intended for the Bar. To Lincoln's Inn he accordingly made a pretence of belonging till the death of his father, who was a Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company; the family connection with the North Seas being still perpetuated in the name of Merry's Island. Robert Merry at once took advantage of the independence which came to him on his father's death to abandon the Bar and buy himself a commission in the Guards. His liking for high play and high society kept him, for a short time, amused in his new position. He grew, however, once more restless; wandered on the Continent; and became, in the phraseology of the day, a man of letters and of leisure. His love of letters he gratified, at Florence, by becoming a member of the Italian Academy, the Accademia della Crusca, and his love of letters and leisure combined by joining himself to an English society who called themselves the “Oziosi,” and, no doubt, took good care to merit that designation.
The leading spirit of this coterie was no less a personage than Mrs. Piozzi, happily married at last, and safely escaped from the malice of her cold-blooded daughters, and from the virulence with which the English journals had inveighed against her choice of a second husband. Even now the memory of her domestic troubles tended to inspire her with a dejection which the master-pieces of Florentine sculpture were, oddly enough, powerless to remove. As she herself described it, in lines at which one cannot help smiling, sincere as they perhaps were,—
The slave and the wrestlers, what are they to me,
From plots and contention removed?
And Job with still less satisfaction I see,
When I think on the pains I have proved.
The homage of her countrymen, however, did much to enliven her despondency; and she complacently records in her journals some of the compliments paid her by her fellow-members of the “Oziosi.” They used to address her in this style:—
E'en so when Parsons pours his lay,
Correctly wild, or sweetly strong,
Or Greathead charms the listening day,
With English or Italian song,
Or when, with trembling wing I try,
Like some poor wounded bird, to fly,
Your fostering smiles you ne'er refuse,
But are the Pallas and the Muse!
The Parsons and Greathead of this all-round panegyric of Merry's were two members of the “Oziosi” clique: Parsons, a bachelor with a tendency to flirt, to “trifle with Italian dames,” as Mrs. Piozzi poetically put it; Greathead, the newly-married husband of a beautiful wife. Both Parsons and Greathead were voluminous contributors to the society's Album, which soon assumed formidable dimensions. The staple of the contents consisted of high-flown compliments in verse. Parsons, for instance, would write to Greathead's wife:—
O blest with taste, with Genius blest,
Sole mistress of thy Bertie's breast,
Who to his love-enraptured arms are given
The rich reward his virtues claim from Heaven.
And Bertie, as in duty bound, would reply in kind, bidding the sallow Arno pause and listen to the lays of Parsons. As an alternative to these panegyrics, they wrote Dithyrambics to Bacchus, Odes to the Siroc, or lines on that latest novelty, Montgolfier's air-balloon. Mrs. Greathead was, in fact, as Parsons informs us, the only member of the society who contributed nothing but the inspiration of her charms.
Some of these poems were printed in an Arno Miscellany, of which only a few copies were privately circulated. It was a subsequent and larger collection, published in 1785, under the name of The Florence Miscellany, which first made its way to England, and drew the attention of the English public to the rising school of versifiers. Horace Walpole characterized their productions as “mere imitations of our best poets,” that is to say, of Milton, Gray, and Collins. How justly, may be inferred from the opening stanza of Merry's Ode on a distant prospect of Rome:—
When Rome of old, terrific queen,
High-placed on Victory's sounding car,
With arm sublime and martial mien,
Brandished the flaming lance of war,
Low crouched in dust lay Afric's swarthy crowd,
And silken Asia sank, and barbarous Britain bowed.
The imitations of Milton and Collins are of a like description. Such as it was, the book was a success, and samples of its contents were reproduced, after the fashion of the day, in the newspapers and magazines—the Gentleman's, the European, the Universal Magazine, and so forth. Of the quality of the poems, critically considered, and of the Della Cruscan poetry generally, I shall have something to say farther on. In the meantime, it may, perhaps, be worth while to disinter a ludicrous passage in one of Merry's contributions to the Florence Miscellany. The “Oziosi” had one day agreed that each of them should produce by the evening a story or poem which should “excite horror by description.” Mrs. Piozzi's production will be found in her Autobiography, and is by no means devoid of merit. Merry brought a poem (“a very fine one,” says Mrs. Piozzi), in which he introduced the following remarkable ghost, which I commend to the attention of the new Psychical Society:—
While slow he trod this desolated coast,
From the cracked ground uprose a warning ghost;
Whose figure, all-confused, was dire to view,
And loose his mantle flowed, of shifting hue;
He shed a lustre round; and sadly pressed
What seemed his hand upon what seemed his breast;
Then raised his doleful voice, like wolves that roar
In famished troops round Orcas' sleepy shore,—
“Approach yon antiquated tower,” he cried,
“There bold Rinaldo, fierce Mambrino, died,” etc.
But I must not linger over the Florence Miscellany, which was but the prelude to those melodious bursts which filled the spacious times of George III. with the music of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda. A year or two after its publication the Florence coterie broke up, and returned to England.
The first note of the concert was struck by Robert Merry, who, in June 1787, sent to the World a poem entitled The Adieu and Recall to Love, subscribing himself Della Crusca, a nickname which had been given to him at Florence, on account of his connection, already mentioned, with the Italian Academy. The World was a daily morning paper, price threepence, which in more than one respect resembled its modern namesake. A contemporary satirist, writing under the modest pseudonym of “Horace Juvenal,” describes how the young lady of 1787—
Reluctant opes her eyes, 'twixt twelve and one,
To skim the World, or criticise the Sun,
And when she sees her darling friend abused
Is half enraged, yet more than half-amused.
And another poet portrays two unlucky baronets, Sir Gregory Turner and Sir John Miller—husband of Lady Miller of Bath Easton vase celebrity—lamenting the ridicule with which the same newspaper had overwhelmed them:—
Woe wait the week, Sir John, and cursed the hour,
When harmless gentlemen felt satire's power,
When, raised from insignificance and sloth,
The World began to ridicule us both.
“In this paper,” says Gifford, “were given the earliest specimens of those audacious attacks on all private character, which the town first smiled at for their quaintness, then tolerated for their absurdity; and now that other papers, equally wicked and more intelligible, have ventured to imitate it, will have to lament to the last hour of British liberty.” That literary history is self-repeating, and that prophecies are mostly mistaken, are not new reflections; yet it is difficult to avoid making them when we compare those days with these.
But beyond its function as a purveyor of social gossip, no newspaper was then considered complete without a Poet's Corner, consecrated to sentimental effusions and labored impromptus—“Complimentary verses to the brilliancy of the Hon. Mrs. N——h's Eyes,” or “Lines on Lady T—e—l's Ring.” In publishing his poem in the World, Della Crusca did but select the natural and recognized arena of the eighteenth-century poet. It may be as well to quote the greater part of The Adieu and Recall to Love, in order to give some notion of the calibre of the verses which were to found a school:—
Go, idle Boy, I quit thy bower,
The couch of many a thorn and flower;
Thy twanging bow, thine arrow keen,
Deceitful Beauty's timid mien;
The feigned surprise, the roguish leer,
The tender smile, the thrilling tear,
Have now no pangs, no joys for me,
So fare thee well, for I am free!
Then flutter hence on wanton wing,
Or lave thee in yon lucid spring,
Or take thy beverage from the rose,
Or on Louisa's breast repose;
I wish thee well for pleasures past,
Yet, bless the hour, I'm free at last,
But sure, methinks, the altered day
Scatters around a mournful ray;
And chilling every zephyr blows,
And every stream untuneful flows.
Alas! is all this boasted ease
To lose each warm desire to please,
No sweet solicitude to know
For others' bliss, or others' woe,
A frozen apathy to find,
A sad vacuity of mind?
Oh, hasten back, then, heavenly Boy,
And with thine anguish bring thy joy!
Return with all thy torments here,
And let me hope, and doubt, and fear;
Oh, rend my heart with every pain,
But let me, let me love again.
I suppose what will strike most readers with regard to these lines is that they are decidedly fluent, and utterly commonplace. That, however, is not the light in which a critic of the last quarter of the eighteenth century would regard them. Amid the dead level of sing-song couplets, the milk-and-water decency of Hayley, the chill and prolix classicism of Pye, the ineffable mediocrity of a thousand Pratts and Polwheles—the fluency of Merry passed, according to the critic's leanings, for fire or for fustian; and the phraseology, which afterwards became hackneyed, was then startling. Take, for instance, Horace Walpole's criticism of the new poetic departure. “It is refreshing to read natural easy poetry, full of sense and humor, instead of that unmeaning, labored, painted style now in fashion of the Della Cruscas and Co., of which it is impossible ever to retain a couplet, no more than one could remember how a string of emeralds and rubies were placed in a necklace. Poetry has great merit if it is the vehicle and preservative of sense, but it is not to be taken in change for it.” Poetry the vehicle and preservative of sense—that is the critical canon which would have made Walpole as blind to Della Crusca's merits, had he happened to possess any, as it made him keen-sighted for his defects.
It may, nevertheless, be doubted whether Della Crusca would have caused so great a stir in literature, had it not been for several collateral circumstances, of which the first and most important was the appearance in the World, some ten days later, of “Anna Matilda,” with a poem entitled To Della Crusca, the Pen.
Oh, seize again thy golden quill,
And with its point my bosom thrill,
With magic touch explore my heart,
And bid the tear of passion start.
Thy golden quill Apollo gave,
Drenched first in bright Aonia's wave.
He snatched it fluttering through the sky,
Borne on the vapor of a sigh;
It fell from Cupid's burnished wing
As forcefully he drew the string,
Which sent his keenest, surest dart,
Through a rebellious, frozen heart,
That had, till then, defied his power,
And vacant beat through each dull hour.
Be worthy, then, the sacred loan!
Seated on Fancy's air-built throne;
Immerse it in her rainbow hues,
Nor, what the Godheads bid, refuse.
Apollo Cupid shall inspire,
And aid thee with their blended fire;
The one poetic language give,
The other bid thy passion live,
With soft ideas fill thy lays,
And crown with Love thy wintry days!
The shuttlecock of correspondence, thus fairly started, was diligently tossed to and fro in the World by the two pseudonymous writers; Della Crusca “seized his quill” again and again, and his ideal passion for the invisible Anna Matilda gained in fervor of expression with every fortnight. It is obvious that here was just that element of mystery, of romance, which creates a furore and sets a fashion.
The lady who signed herself “Anna Matilda” was Mrs. Hannah Cowley, the wife of an absent East India captain, then in her forty-fifth year, and known to-day as the authoress of the Belle's Stratagem, a play which still, and deservedly, keeps the stage. Her biographer records the beginning of her literary career as follows: “In the year 1776, some years after her marriage, a sense of power for dramatic writing suddenly struck her whilst sitting with her husband at the theatre. 'So delighted with this?' said she to him; 'why, I could write as well myself.' She then wrote The Runaway. Many will recollect the extraordinary success with which it was brought out.” Her habits of composition were not, perhaps, likely to result in poetry of much excellence. “Catching up her pen immediately as the thought struck her, she always proceeded with the utmost facility and celerity. Her pen and paper were so immediately out of sight again, that those around her could scarcely tell when it was she wrote. She was always much pleased with the description of Michael Angelo making the marble fly around him, as he was chiselling with the utmost swiftness, that he might shape, however roughly, his whole design in unity with one clear conception.” Her preparatory note to her collected “Anna Matilda” poems bears out this account. “The beautiful lines of The Adieu and Recall to Love struck her so forcibly that, without rising from the table at which she read, she answered them. Della Crusca's elegant reply surprised her into another, and thus the correspondence most unexpectedly became settled. Anna Matilda's share in it had little to boast; but she has one claim of which she is proud, that of having been the first to point out the excellence of Della Crusca; if there can be merit in discerning what is so very obvious.” She further apologizes for one of her poems to Della Crusca, on the ground that it was written while sitting for her portrait, the painter interrupting her with “Smile a little,” or “More to the right.” Only that class of mind which grows incredulous when informed that orators prepare their speeches, will expect much from such methods of workmanship.
Nevertheless, to Mrs. Cowley appears to belong the credit, or discredit, of giving to the Della Cruscan poetry a certain turn or development which did much to make it popular. A hint of this development may be seen in the description of the pen, which was “borne on the vapor of a sigh.” It took final shape in such phrases as these:—
Hushed be each ruder note! Soft silence spread
With ermine hand thy cobweb robe around.
Was it the shuttle of the Morn,
That wove upon the cobweb'd thorn
Thy airy lay?
Or in the gaudy spheroids swell
Which the swart Indian's groves illume.
Gauzy zephyrs fluttering o'er the plain,
In Twilight's bosom drop their filmy rain.
Bid the streamy lightnings fly
In liquid peril from thine eye.
Summer tints begemmed the scene,
And silky ocean slept in glossy green.
A large and amusing assortment of this ambitious verbiage, which subsequently became in the eyes of the critics the sole “differentia” of Della Cruscan verse, may be seen in the notes to Gifford's Baviad. It was, however, an after-development, proceeding from a gradual consciousness of flagging powers; the feeling which induced Charles Reade's Triplet to “shove his pen under the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction.”
The other members of the Florence coterie, who, as I have said, were now back in England, speedily began to swell the Della Cruscan chorus in the columns of the World and the Oracle. Bertie Greathead as “Reuben” became Della Crusca's rival, on paper, in the affections of Anna Matilda; and Parsons, signing himself “Benedict,” in memory of a sojourn in the Benedictine convent of Vallombrosa, deluged with sonnets an imaginary Melissa. Whether Mrs. Piozzi contributed anything beyond tea-party patronage, appears to be doubtful; but, as was only to be expected, London already possessed a score of indigenous rhymesters, eager to pursue the triumph and partake the gale. One of the principal of these was Edward Jerningham, alias “The Bard,” who is commemorated in Macaulay's neat sentence: “Lady Miller who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put verses, and Jerningham who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase of Lady Miller.” His brother, Sir William, of Cossy Hall, in Norfolk, kept an album which rivalled in celebrity the vase of Bath Easton, and “The Bard” had been a determined poetaster for the last thirty years. He is described as “a mighty gentleman, who looks to be painted, and is all daintification in manner, speech, and dress, singing to his own accompaniment on the harp, whilst he looks the gentlest of all dying Corydons.” Fashionable poets seldom suffer from lack of appreciation. Burke wrote of Jerningham's poem The Shakespeare Gallery, “I have not for a long time seen anything so well finished. The author has caught new fire by approaching in his perihelion so near to the sun of our poetical system.” I think we may be certain, after reading The Shakespeare Gallery, that the patron of Crabbe did not read it.
Another Della Cruscan songstress was Mrs. Robinson, alias “Laura Maria,” known to the public as a former mistress of the Prince of Wales, and authoress of various novels. In rapidity of composition she emulated Mrs. Cowley. “Conversing one evening with Mr. Richard Burke” (the Burke family appear to have been sometimes unfortunate in their poetical acquaintances) “respecting the facility with which modern poetry was composed, Mrs. Robinson repeated nearly the whole of those beautiful lines, 'To him who will understand them.' This improvisatore produced in her auditor not less surprise than admiration, when solemnly assured by its author that this was the first time of its being repeated. Mr. Burke entreated her to commit the poem to writing, a request which was readily complied with; and Mrs. Robinson had afterwards the gratification of finding this offspring of her genius inserted in the Annual Register, with a flattering encomium from the pen of the eloquent and ingenious editor.” She was one of Merry's most ardent admirers.
Winged Ages picture to the dazzled view
Each marked perfection of the sacred few,
Pope, Dryden, Spenser, all that Fame shall raise,
From Chaucer's gloom, till Merry's lucid days.
Her Della Cruscan poems were published under the signature of “Laura,” and she was followed by Cesario, Carlos, Adelaide, Orlando, Arno, and fifty more whose identity can no longer be determined.
A year after his first appearance in the World, Della Crusca printed his poems in a volume, and Anna Matilda speedily followed suit. But this was not enough for the reading public. They further greedily absorbed a collection of Della Cruscan verse, published as The Poetry of the “World,” by Major Topham, the creator and editor of that paper, who, in a dedication to Sheridan, observes: “Of their merit, I am free to say I know no modern poems their superior. I am more happy that your opinion has confirmed mine.” It will be well to make allowance for changing literary fashions before we make too sure that Sheridan is here misrepresented. The Poetry of the “World” afterwards ran through at least four editions as The British Album. As we read the publisher's advertisement of this work, which still abounds on second-hand bookstalls—immorimur studiis lapsoque renascimur ævo—we seem to be walking in the Bond Street of the Prince Regent. “Two beautiful volumes this day published, embellished with genuine portraits of the real Della Crusca and Anna Matilda, engraved in a very superior manner from faithful pictures, under the title of The British Album, being a new edition, revised and corrected by their respective authors, of the celebrated poems of Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, Arley, Laura, Benedict, and the elegant Cesario, “the African Boy;” and others, signed The Bard, by Mr. Jerningham; General Conway's elegy on Miss C. Campbell; Marquis of Townshend's verses on Miss Gardiner; Lord Derby's lines on Miss Farren's portrait.” It is unfortunate that the only pseudonym in the list which it is of much interest to decipher, should still remain a mystery. It is to “Arley” that we owe the admittedly excellent ballad of “Wapping old Stairs,” which first appeared in the World for November 29th, 1787, and shines, a solitary pearl, in the pages of the British Album.
The Della Cruscan mania was at its height—“bedridden old women and girls at their samplers began to rave,”—when Gifford, in search of a quarry for a seasonable satire, came before the town with the Baviad. Of this poem I shall say but little, as it is better known than the writings which it satirised. It contains passages of a certain coarse and rank vigor not difficult of attainment by a student of Dryden and Juvenal. There is, in fact, a sort of Billingsgate raciness about the Baviad; and the notes, which are better written than the poem, contain much amusing matter. The imputation made against the Della Cruscan love-poetry of licentious warmth is, however, wholly absurd—as absurd as the charge made by Mathias, the author of The Pursuits of Literature, that Merry—
Proves a designer works without design,
And fathoms Nature with a Gallic line;
a notion which arose merely from the fact that he identified himself with the anarchists of France, and wrote odes for the Revolution Society, thereby acquiring the name, as Madame d'Arblay tells us, of “Liberty Merry,” and no doubt also the reputation for free-thinking then associated with everything French. As for detecting any breach of decorum in the mannered and falsetto gallantries of insincere Reubens addressing imaginary Annas, the idea was only possible to a satirist who started with the determination to fling all the mud he could find; and, it must be added, when he flung it at irreproachable characters such as Mrs. Piozzi, he did but excite a certain revulsion of sympathy for the victims. Nor was this Gifford's only misrepresentation. He asserted, in order to bring in an apt quotation from Martial, that the interview which finally took place between Merry and Mrs. Cowley, produced mutual disgust. This is not the testimony of Della Crusca himself in the poem of The Interview.
My song subsides, yet ere I close
The lingering lay that feeds my woes,
Ere yet forgotten Della Crusca runs
To torrid gales or petrifying suns,
Ere, bowed to earth, my latest feeling flies,
And the big passion settles on my eyes;
Oh, may this sacred sentiment be known,
That my adoring heart is Anna's own!
Such is the immortality of poetic attachments—
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.
That the poet was shortly afterward “married to another,” is sufficient to explain the cessation of the correspondence, from which Gifford argues that the interview resulted in aversion. And he might further have reflected that when a poet is reduced to talk of “petrifying suns” his correspondence has been known to cease for lack of ideas.
The satirised poets did their best to retaliate on Gifford by abusive sonnets in the newspapers; and Mr. Jerningham wrote a feebly vituperative poem on Gifford and Mathias. The Della Cruscans had, undeniably, the worst of the battle. The efficacy of Gifford's satire in putting an end to the school is, however, more than doubtful. It is true that it afterwards came to be considered, naturally enough, that he had given the Della Cruscans their death-blow. Scott, for instance, writing in 1827, observes that the Baviad “squabashed at one blow a set of coxcombs who might have humbugged the world long enough”; but that is not the evidence of contemporary witnesses. Seven years after the publication of the Baviad, Mathias, in the preface to The Pursuits of Literature, remarks that “even the Baviad drops from Mr. Gifford's pen have fallen off like oils from the plumage of the Florence and Cruscan geese. I am told that Mr. Greathead and Mr. Merry yet write and speak, and Mr. Jerningham (poor man!) still continues 'sillier than his sheep.”
This statement is in far better accordance both with the facts and the probabilities of the case. Satire, even first-rate satire, does not kill follies. They gradually die of inanition, or are crowded out by newer fashions. Laura Matilda's dirge in the Rejected Addresses is a standing monument of the vitality of Della Cruscanism more than twenty years after its supposed death-blow.
The career as stage-writers of Merry, Greathead, and Jerningham, their bad tragedies and bad farces, do not belong to my present subject. Of the subsequent history of one or two of them a word may, however, be said. Jerningham lived to publish, as late as 1812, two editions of a flaccid poem, called The Old Bard's Farewell, after which he disappears from life and literature. Mrs. Cowley, perhaps the most interesting of the group, died in rural and religious retirement at Tiverton, in 1809. Mrs. Piozzi, as is well known, outlived all her contemporaries, and witnessed the popularity of a modern literature of which she had no very high opinion.
As for Della Crusca, he married, in 1791, Miss Brunton, an actress, whose sister became Countess of Craven, and who had played the heroine in his tragedy of Lorenzo. His reply to the remonstrances of his aunt on the mésalliance shall be quoted, to show that he had his lucid intervals. “She ought,” he said, “to be proud that he had brought a woman of such virtue and talents into the family. Her virtue his marrying her proved; and her talents would all be thrown away by taking her off the stage.” Nevertheless, he afterwards weakly yielded to his relations, and withdrew her from the stage against her own inclination, thereby depriving himself of a source of income with which, as a gambler and bon vivant, he could ill afford to dispense. He accordingly quitted England, and must have betaken himself to France, an adventure which befell him in Paris, in September, 1792, being thus amusingly given by Horace Walpole:—
In the midst of the massacre of Monday last, Mr. Merry, immortalized, not by his verses, but by those of the Baviad, was mistaken for the Abbé Maury, and was going to be hoisted to the lanterne. He cried out that he was Merry, the poet: the ruffians, who probably had never read the scene in Shakespeare, yet replied, “Then we will hang you for your bad verses”; but he escaped better than Cinna, I don't know how, and his fright cost him but a few “gossamery tears,” and I suppose he will be happy to re-cross the “silky ocean,” and shed dolorous nonsense in rhyme over the woes of this happy country.
But England was not to see much more of Merry. English society was probably not so kind to the Radical husband of an actress as it had been to the bachelor of fashion. He withdrew, with his wife, to America, in 1796, and died, three years afterwards, of apoplexy, in his garden at Baltimore.
Merry did not fail to find in his own day apologists of some pretensions to taste. I find in the notes to George Dyer's poem, The Poet's Fate, published in 1797—which contains early and interesting laudations not only of his school-fellows Lamb and Coleridge, but also of Wordsworth and Southey—the following reference to Merry:—“But, after all, though the hero of the Baviad betrayed glitter and negligence—though he misled the taste of some, too much inclined to admire and imitate defects, yet Merry's writings possess poetical merits; and the spirit of liberty and benevolence which breathes through them is ardent and sincere.” The criticism may be incorrect, but it is worth noting, because it is the criticism of a contemporary. Had it not been for Coleridge's fervently expressed admiration for Bowles's sonnets, which so perplexes critics who do not judge literature from a historical point of view, the world would have continued to sneer at him, with Byron, as “simple Bowles,” and to know him only by Byron's line. The fact is, literary history will never be intelligently written, till it is studied in the spirit of the naturalist, to whom the tares are as interesting as the wheat. We may, perhaps, give the Della Cruscans, with their desperate strainings after poetic fire and poetic diction, the credit of having done something to shake the supremacy of versified prose; of having forwarded, however feebly, the poetic emancipation which Wordsworth and Coleridge were to consummate. The false extravagance of Della Crusca may have cleared the way for the truthful extravagance of Keats. It is, I am aware, customary to attribute the regeneration of English poetry to the French Revolution, which “shook up the sources of thought all over Europe,” but the critics who use these glib catch-words are in no hurry to point out a concrete chain of logical connection between Paris mobs and sequestered poets. Plain judges will ever consider it a far cry from The Rights of Man to Christabel. At all events, Dyer was right in deprecating the savagery of Gifford's satire. The question
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
will apply to other schools and fashions besides that of the “elegant Cesario's,” whom Leigh Hunt designated par excellence as “the plague of the Butterflies.” And here, I think, we touch upon the moral which I promised at the outset.
It is not very long since the country, to which Della Crusca ultimately betook himself, received to her shores the reputed prophet of Æstheticism, whose career, in other respects, presented remarkable parallels with that of Robert Merry. Each made his poetical appearance in the columns of a newspaper called the World; each professed Republican opinions; each wrote poems not remarkable for truth to nature or sobriety of diction; each represented a school; and the name of each became as a red rag to the Giffords who played the part of the bull in the china shop. But it is not with this clumsy rage that posterity will regard our follies; nor is it useful, or desirable, that we should now so regard them. It is with a smile of amused anticipation, it is with a bland and philosophic interest, that the antiquarian of the future will turn to the pages of Punch or the libretto of Patience, to read of the Anna Matildas who lately delighted to apparel themselves in what Bramston called “shape-disguising sacks”—the Della Cruscas who took Postlethwaite for a great poet.—National Review.
[THE SAVAGE.]
BY PROF. F. MAX MÜLLER.
There are people in the world who are very fond of asking what they call point-blank questions. They generally profess to hate all shilly-shallying, and they are at no pains to hide their suspicion that anyone who declines to say yes or no to any question which they choose to ask has either his intellect clouded by metaphysics or has not the courage of his opinions. The idea that it is often more difficult to ask a sensible question than to answer it, and that a question, however pointed it may sound, may for all that be so blunt and vague that no accurate and honest thinker would care or dare to answer it, never enters their mind; while the thought that there are realms of knowledge where indefinite language is more appropriate, and in reality more exact and more truthful than the most definite phraseology, is scouted as mere fencing and intellectual cowardice.
One of those point-blank questions which has been addressed to me by several reviewers of my books is this, “Tell us, do you hold that man began as a savage or not?” To say that man began as a savage, and that the most savage and degraded races now existing present us with the primeval type of man, seems to be the shibboleth of a certain school of thought, a school with which on many points I sympathize, so long as it keeps to an accurate and independent inquiry into facts, and to an outspoken statement of its discoveries, regardless of all consequences, but from which I totally dissent as soon as it tries to make facts subservient to theories. I am told that my own utterances on this subject have been ambiguous. Now even granting this, I could never understand why a certain hesitation in answering so difficult a question should rouse such angry feelings, till it began to dawn on me that those who do not unreservedly admit that man began as a savage are supposed to hold that man was created a perfect and almost angelic being. This would amount to denying the gospel of the day, that man was the offspring of a brute, and hence, I suppose, the Anathema.
Now I may say this, that though I have hesitated to affirm that man began as a savage, whatever that may mean, I have been even more careful not to commit myself to the opinion that man began as an angel, or as a child, or as a perfect rational being. I strongly object to such alternatives as that if man did not begin as a savage he must have begun as a child. It would be dreadful if, because there is no sufficient evidence to enable us to form a decided opinion on any given subject, we were to be driven into a corner by such alternatives, instead of preserving our freedom of judgment until we have the complete evidence before us.
But in our case the evidence is as yet extremely scanty, and, from the nature of the case, will probably always remain so. If we want to prove that man began as a child, what evidence can we produce? If we appealed to history, history is impossible before the invention of language; and what language could the primitive child have spoken, what life could it have lived, without a father and without a mother? If we give up history and appeal to our inner consciousness, our reason, nay, our very imagination, collapses when approaching the problem how such a child could have been born, how such a child could have been nourished, reared, and protected from wild animals and other dangers. We feel we have come to the end of our tether, and are running our head against a very old, but a very solid, wall.
Has Kant then written in vain; and is it still supposed that our senses or our reason can ever reach transcendent truths? Has the lesson to be taught again and again that both our senses and our reason have their limits; that we are indeed tethered, and that it is no proof of intellectual strength or suppleness to try to stand on our own shoulders? We are so made that neither can our senses perceive nor can our reason conceive the real beginning and end of anything, whether in space or in time. And yet we imagine we can form a definite conception of the true beginning of mankind.
Then what remains? There remains the humbler and yet far nobler task of studying the earliest records of man's life on earth: to go back as far as literature, language, and tools will allow us, and for a time to consider that as primitive which, whether as a tool, or as a word, or as a proverb, or as a prayer, is the last we can reach, and seems at the same time so simple, so rational, so intelligible, as to require no further antecedents. That is the true work of the historian, and of the philosopher too; and there is plenty of work left for both of them before they dive into the whirlpool of their inner consciousness to find there the primordial savage.
Instead of allowing ourselves to be driven into a corner by such a question as “Did man begin as a savage or as a child?” we have a perfect right to ask the question, What is meant by these two words, savage and child?
Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of savage, and to draw a sharp line between a savage and a non-savage? Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of child, if used in opposition to savage or brute? Have we been told whether by child is meant a suckling without a mother, or a boy who can speak, and count, and reason without a father? Lastly, are savage and child really terms that mutually exclude each other? May not a savage be a child, and may not a child be a savage?
How, then, is any one who has given serious thought to the problem of the origin of mankind to answer such a question as “Tell me, do you hold that man began as a savage or as a child?”
When we read some of the more recent works on anthropology, the primordial savage seems to be not unlike one of those hideous india-rubber dolls that can be squeezed into every possible shape, and made to utter every possible noise. There was a time when the savage was held up to the civilised man as the inhabitant of a lost paradise—a being of innocence, simplicity, purity, and nobility. Rousseau ascribed to his son of nature all the perfection which he looked for in vain in Paris and London. At present, when so many philosophers are on the lookout for the missing-link between man and beast, the savage, even if he has established his right to the name of man, cannot be painted black enough. He must be at least a man who maltreats his women, murders his children, kills and eats his fellow-creatures, and commits crimes from which even animals would shrink.
This devil-savage, however, of the present anthropologist is as much a wild creation of scientific fancy as the angel-savage of former philosophers. The true Science of Man has no room for such speculations.
Sometimes the history of a name can take the place of its definition, but this is hardly so in our case. The Greeks spoke of barbarians rather than of savages, and the Romans followed their example, though they might possibly have called the national heroes and sages of Germany and Britain not only barbari but feri—that is, savages not very far removed from feræ, or wild beasts. Our own word savage, and the French sauvage, meant originally a man who lived in the woods, a silvaticus. It was at first applied to all who remained outside the cities, who were not cives, or civilised, and who in Christian times were also called heathen—that is, dwellers on the heath.
But all this does not help us much. Of course the Spaniards called the inhabitants of America savages, though it is now quite generally conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilisation than they established.[10] The first discoverers of India called the naked Brahmans savages, though they could hardly have followed them in their subtle arguments on every possible philosophical topic. Even by us New Zealanders and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet a Zulu proved a match for an English bishop; and some of the Maori poems and proverbs may rightly claim a place by the side of English popular poems and proverbs. Nothing is gained if it is said that a savage is the opposite of a civilised man. Civilisation is the product of the uninterrupted work of many generations; and if savage meant no more than an uncivilised man, it is no great discovery to say that the first man must have been a savage. No doubt he could not have been acquainted even with what we consider the fundamental elements of civilisation, such as the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic. His dress must have been very scanty, his food very primitive, his dwelling very uncomfortable, his family life very unrestrained. And yet, for all that, he might have been very far removed from the brute; nay, he might have been a perfect man, doing his duty in that state of life into which it pleased God to call him.
Civilisation, as it is well known, is as vague a term as savagery. When Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, the representative of Greek civilisation, stood before the naked philosophers of India, who were ὑλόβιοι dwellers in the forest, can we hesitate to say which of the two was the true savage and which the sage? To the New Zealander who has been brought into contact with European civilisation, his former so-called savage life seems to have gained little by recent improvements. A grand Maori chief, reputed to have been one of the strongest men in his youth, thus speaks of the old days:[11]—
In former times we lived differently; each tribe had its territory; we lived in pas placed high upon the mountains. The men looked to war as their only occupation, and the women and the young people cultivated the fields. We were a strong and a healthy people then. When the Pakeha came, everything began to die away, even the natural animals of the country. Formerly, when we went into a forest, and stood under a tree, we could not hear ourselves speak for the noise of the birds—every tree was full of them. Then we had pigeons and everything in plenty; now many of the birds have died out.... In those times the fields were well tilled, there was always plenty of provisions, and we wore few clothes—only our own mats of feathers. Then the missionaries came and took our children from the fields, and taught them to sing hymns: they changed their minds, and the fields were untilled. The children came home and quoted Gospel on an empty stomach. Then came the war between the Pakeha and the Maori that split up our homes, and made one tribe fight against the other; and after the war came the Pakeha settlers, who took our lands, taught us to drink and to smoke, and made us wear clothes that brought on disease. What race could stand against them? The Maori is passing away like the Kiwi, the Tui, and many other things, and by-and-by they will disappear just like the leaves of the trees, and nothing will remain to tell of them but the names of their mountains and their rivers!
This is the view which a so-called savage takes of the benefits of European civilisation as contrasted with the contentment and happiness in which his forefathers had passed through this life. Let us now hear what a highly educated American, a scholar and a philosopher, Mr. Morgan, says of the character of the Iroquois, who are often quoted as specimens of extreme savagery:—
No test of friendship was too severe; no sacrifice to repay a favor too great; no fidelity to an engagement too inflexible for the red man. With an innate knowledge of the freedom and dignity of man, he has exhibited the noblest virtues of the heart, and the kindest deeds of humanity, in those sylvan retreats we are wont to look upon as vacant and frightful solitudes.
No one would suspect Morgan of exaggeration or sentimentality. And if it should be objected that these were private virtues only, and no proof of true civilisation or a well-organised society among the Iroquois, the same writer tells us:[12]—
They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage, except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation they stood for nearly two centuries with an unshaken front against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. Under their federal system, the Iroquois flourished in independence, and were capable of self-protection long after the New England and Virginia races had surrendered their jurisdictions and fallen into the condition of dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the administration of the league, and their courage in its defence.
The words of another author also may be quoted, who tells us:[13]—
Their legislation was simple, and the penalties which gave law its sanctions well defined. Their league stood in the consent of the governed. It was a representative popular government, conceived in the wisdom of genuine statesmanship, and with the sagacity to provide against some of the dangers which beset popular institutions. It is said that the framers of our own (the American) government borrowed some of its features from the Iroquois league. Whether or not this be true, it is a matter of history that as early as 1755 a suggestion came from the Iroquois nation to the colonies that they should unite in a confederacy like their own for mutual protection.
It is the fashion to quote against these favorable statements cases of cruelty committed by the Red Indians or the New Zealanders in their wars among themselves and in their resistance to their white enemies. But let us not forget the bloody pages of our own history. We should probably say that the eighteenth century was one of the most brilliant in the history of Europe. We should probably assign to England at that time a foremost place among European countries, and we know how high a position Scotchmen took during the last century in general culture, in philosophy, in science, and statesmanship. Yet, in his “History of England in the Eighteenth Century,” Mr. Lecky describes the common people of Scotland as broken into fierce clans, ruled by wild chieftains; as thieves and cattle-lifters, kidnappers of men and children to be sold as slaves; as ferocious barbarians, besotted with the most brutal ignorance, and the grossest and gloomiest superstitions, possessed of the rudest modes of agriculture, scratching the earth with a crooked piece of wood for a plough, and for a harrow a brush attached to the tail of a horse, otherwise devoid of harness; their food, oatmeal and milk, mixed with blood drawn from the living cow; their cooking, revolting and filthy, boiling their beef in the hide, and roasting fowls in their feathers, with many like customs and demoralising habits unknown to aboriginal life among the Red Indians.
It will be clear after these few specimens, which might have been considerably increased, that we shall make no step in advance if we continue to use the word savage so vaguely as it has been hitherto used. To think is difficult, but it becomes utterly impossible if we use debased or false coin. I have been considered too inquisitive for venturing to ask anthropologists what they meant by a fetish, but I must expose myself once more to the same reproach by venturing to ask them to state plainly what they mean by a savage.
Whatever other benefits a study of the science of language may confer, there is one which cannot be valued too highly—namely, that it makes us not only look at words, but through words. If we are told that a savage means an uncivilised man, then, to say that the first man was a savage is saying either nothing or what is self-evident. Civilisation consists in the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of men, and to say that the first generation of men was uncivilised is therefore pure tautology. We are far too tolerant with respect to such tautologies. How many people, for instance, have been led to imagine that such a phrase as the survival of the fittest contains the solution of the problem of the survival of certain species and the extinction of others? To the student of language the survival of the fittest is a mere tautology, meaning the survival of the fittest to survive, which is the statement of a fact, but no solution of it.
It is easy to say that the meaning of savage has been explained and defined by almost every writer on anthropology. I know these explanations and definitions, but not one of them can be considered as answering the requirements of a scientific definition.
Some anthropologists say that savage means wild and cruel. But in that case no nation would be without its savages. Others say that savages are people who wear little or no clothing. But in that case the greatest philosophers, the gymnosophists of India, would have to be classed as savages. If it means people without a settled form of government, without laws and without a religion, then, go where you like, you will not find such a race. Again, if people who have no cities and no central government are to be called savages, then the Jews would have been savages, the Hindus, the Arabs, the ancient Germans, and other of the most important races in the history of the world. In fact, whatever characteristics are brought forward as distinctive of a savage, they can always be met by counter-instances, showing that each definition would either include races whom no one dares to call savage, or exclude races whom no one dares to call civilised. It used to be imagined that the use of letters was the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, to quote the words of Gibbon, “the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas committed to her charge, and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers, the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.” Such arguments might pass in the days of Gibbon, but after the new light that has been thrown on the ancient history of some of the principal nations of the world they are no longer tenable.
No one would call the ancient Brahmans savages, and yet writing was unknown to them before the third century B.C. Homer, quite apart from his blindness, was certainly unacquainted with writing for literary purposes. The ancient inhabitants of Germany, as described by Tacitus, were equally ignorant of the art of writing as a vehicle of literature; yet for all that we could not say, with Gibbon, that with them the nobler faculties of the mind had lost their powers, the judgment had become feeble, and the imagination languid.
And as we find that the use of letters is by no means an indispensable element of true civilisation, we should arrive at the same conclusion in examining almost every discovery which has been pointed out as a sine quâ non of civilised life. Every generation is apt to consider the measure of comfort which it has reached as indispensable to civilised life, but very often, in small as well as great things, what is called civilised to-day may be called barbarous to-morrow. Races who abstain from eating the flesh of animals are apt to look on carnivorous people as savages; people who abstain from intoxicating drinks naturally despise a nation in which drunkenness is prevalent. What should we say if we entered a town in which the streets were neither paved nor lighted, and in which the windows were without glass; where we saw no carriages in any of the thoroughfares, and where, inside the houses, ladies and gentlemen might be seen eating without forks and wearing garments that had never been washed? And yet even in Paris no street was paved before 1185. In London Holborn was first paved in 1417, and Smithfield in 1614, while Berlin was without paved streets far into the seventeenth century. No houses had windows of glass before the twelfth century, and as late as the fourteenth century anything might be thrown out of window at Paris, after three times calling out “Gare l'eau!” Shirts were an invention of the Crusades, and the fine dresses which ladies and gentlemen wore during the Middle Ages were hardly ever washed, but only refreshed from time to time with precious scents. In 1550 we are told that there existed in Paris no more than three carriages—one belonging to the Queen, the other to Diane de Poitiers, and the third to René de Laval. In England coaches (so called from the Hungarian kossi) date from 1580, though whirlicotes go back to the fourteenth century. So far as we know, neither Dante nor Beatrice used forks in eating, and yet we should hardly class them as savages.
It is easy to say that all these are matters of small importance. No doubt they are, but we often see them treated as matters of great importance, when we speak of races with red skins or black skins. With us civilisation, whether consisting of these small or great matters, has often become a burden, a check rather than a help to the free development of all that is noble in human nature; while many conditions of life which we are inclined to call barbarous were almost essential for the growth of the human mind during its earlier stages. Can we imagine a religion growing up in modern Paris? Would a travelling bard, such as Homer, find an audience in the streets of London? Would a Socrates be listened to by the professors of Berlin? A Panini sitting almost naked under a pippal tree and composing the rules of his marvellous grammar of Sanskrit, a Bâdârâyana with dishevelled hair, spinning out of his mind the subtle web of Vedânta philosophy, would be shunned as wild creatures by a young English officer, and yet, on the ladder that leads to the highest excellence of intellect, how many steps would the former stand above the latter! For carrying out the chief objects of our life on earth, very little of what is now called civilisation is really wanted. Many things are pleasant, without being really essential to our fulfilling our mission on earth. For laying the foundations of society, for settling the broad principles of law and morality, for discovering the deep traces of order and unity in nature, and for becoming conscious of the presence of the Divine within and without, a life in the forests, on the mountains, ay, even in the desert, is far more favorable than a lodging in Bond Street.
The latest attempt which has been made at defining the true character of a savage restricts the distinctive characteristics of a savage to three—(1) that he murders his children, (2) that he kills and eats his fellow-men, (3) that he disregards certain laws of nature.
Now in that sense it seems quite clear that the first man could not have been a savage, for if he had murdered his children we should not be alive; if he had eaten his fellow-men, supposing there were any to eat, again we should not be alive; and if he had disregarded certain laws of nature, in that case also, probably, we should not be alive.
What, then, is to be done? Are we to say that there never were any savages, or that it is impossible to distinguish between a savage and a non-savage? Certainly not. All we have to do is to be on our guard against a very common trick of language, or rather against a very common mistake of philosophers, who imagine that the same name must always mean the same thing. All the difficulties hitherto detailed which have prevented anthropologists from agreeing on any real definition of savage have arisen from their having mixed up under the same name at least two totally different classes of men, both called savages in ordinary parlance, but each occupying its own place in the history of the world. How this should have happened is difficult to explain, but I think we can trace the first beginnings in the works of some of the earlier anthropologists, who were carried away by the idea that we can study in the illiterate races of the present day, such as we find in Africa, America, and Polynesia, the true character of the primitive man, as he emerged new-born from the bowels of nature. Scientific ethnologists have long since awaked from this fond dream, but the primitive savage has remained as a troublesome legacy in other quarters. Nothing can be more interesting than the study of races who have no literature, but whose former history may be read in their languages and their tools, and whose present state of civilisation or savagery may certainly be used to throw collateral light on many phases in the history of more highly civilised nations. Only let us remember that these races and their languages are as old as the most civilised races and their languages, while their history, if so we may call it, seldom carries us back beyond the mere surface of the day. If we in England are old, the Fuegians are not a day younger. If the question as to the age of the European and American races could be settled by geological evidence, it would seem as if America is now able to produce human skulls older than the Neanderthal skull.[14] No one, so far as I know, has ever succeeded in proving that after man had once been evolved or created, a new evolution or creation of man took place, attested by contemporaneous witnesses. The Duke of Argyll goes so far as to maintain[15] that those who hold the opinion that different races of men represent different species, or a species which spread from more than one place, stand outside the general current of scientific thought.
But while scientific anthropologists have long given up the idea that, if we want to know the condition of primitive man, we must study it among the Fuegians or Eskimos, the subject has lost none of its charms. It is, no doubt, a very amusing occupation to run through the books of modern and ancient travellers, traders, or missionaries, to mark with pencil a strange legend here, and an odd custom there, to point out a similarity between a Shâman and an Archbishop, between a Hottentot and Homer. This kind of work can be done in the intervals of more serious studies, and if it is done with the facile pen of a journalist or the epigrammatic eloquence of a young lawyer, nothing can be more delightful. But it is dangerous work—so dangerous that the prejudice that has lately arisen among scientific anthropologists against Agriology seems justified, at least to a certain extent. There are truly scholarlike works on savages. I say scholarlike intentionally, because they are based on a scholarlike study of the languages spoken by the races whose mental organisation has to be analysed. The works of Bishops Callaway and Caldwell, of Brinton and Horatio Hale, of Gill, Bleek, and Hahn, the more general compilations of Waitz, Tiele, Lubbock, Tylor, and Reville, the clever contributions of A. Lang, John Fiske, and others, are but the first that occur to my mind as specimens of really useful work that may be done in this line. But the loose and superficial appeals to savages as the representatives of a brand-new humanity, fresh from the hands of the potter, the ignorant attempts at explaining classical myths from Melanesian tattle, the wild comparisons of Hebrew customs with the outrages of modern cannibals, have at last met with their well-merited reward, and the very name of savage is gradually disappearing from the best works on anthropology and philosophy.
And yet there are savages, only we must distinguish. There are, as I pointed out long ago, two classes of savages, to say nothing of minor subdivisions—namely, progressive and retrogressive savages. There is a hopeful and a hopeless barbarism, there is a growing and a decaying civilisation. We owe a great deal to the Duke of Argyll, particularly in his last great work, The Unity of Nature, for having laid so much stress on the fact that of all works of nature man is the one most liable to two kinds of evolution, one ascending and the other descending. Like the individual, a whole family, tribe, or race of men may, within a very short time, rise to the highest pitch of virtue and culture, and in the next generation sink to the lowest level of vice and brutality.
The first question, therefore, which we have to ask when we have to speak of savages, is whether there is any indication of their having once reached a higher stage from which they have descended, or whether they are only just ascending from that low but healthy level which must precede every attempt at what we call civilisation. We may call both by the same name of savages, but, if we do so, we must always remember that, from an historical point of view, no two stages in civilised life can be more apart from each other than that of the retrogressive and that of the progressive savage.
But even after we have laid down this broad line of demarcation, we shall by no means find it easy to catch either a progressive or a retrogressive savage pur et simple. If looking out for retrogressive or decaying savages, most people would naturally think of Fuegians, Tasmanians, Hottentots, Ashantis, Veddas, and Red Indians, and one of the strongest proofs of their decay would be derived from the fact that they are dying out wherever they are brought in contact with European civilisation. Now it is true that the Tasmanians have become extinct, and that several of the Red Indian tribes, too, have actually been destroyed by our civilisation. But we must not generalise too quickly. Some of these very tribes, the Red Indians,[16] seem to be recovering, seem to increase again, and to be able to hold their own against the baneful influences which threatened to destroy them. The negroes also are by no means dwindling away. On the contrary, they are increasing both in Africa and in America. We must therefore be careful before we deny the recuperative powers even of retrogressive savages, and we must look for other evidence beyond mere statistics in support of their hopeless degeneracy.
Historical evidence of such gradual degeneracy is, from the nature of the case, almost impossible. We must trust, therefore, to less direct proof. I believe there is some distinct historical evidence in the case of the Central and South American races, that at the time of the arrival of Columbus and his successors civilisation had really been decaying for some time in America.[17] But in nearly all other cases we have to look out for other proofs in support of a higher antecedent civilisation possessed by tribes who, as we know them at present, have to be classed as savages. Such proofs, if they exist, must be sought for in language, religion, customs, tools, and works of art.
As I look upon language neither as a ready-made gift of God nor as a natural growth of the human mind, but as, in the true sense of the word, a work of human art, I must confess that nothing has surprised me so much as the high art displayed in the languages of so-called savages. I do not wish to exaggerate; and I know quite well that a great abundance of grammatical forms, such as we find in these savage dialects, is by no means a proof of high intellectual development. But if we consider how small is the number of words and ideas in the ordinary vocabulary of an English peasant,[18] and if then we find that one dialect of the Fuegians, the Tagan, consists of about 30,000 words,[19] we certainly hesitate before venturing to classify the possessors of so vast an inherited wealth as the descendants of poor savages, more savage than themselves. Such facts cannot be argued away. We cannot prevent people from despising religious concepts different from their own, or from laughing at customs which they themselves could never adopt. But such a treasure of conceptual thought as is implied in the possession of a vocabulary of 30,000 entries cannot be ignored in our estimate of the antecedents of this Fuegian race. I select the Fuegians as a crucial test simply because Darwin[20] selected them as the strongest proof of his own theory, and placed them almost below the level reached by the most intelligent animals. I have always had a true regard for Darwin, and what I admired in him more than anything else was his fearlessness, his simple devotion to truth. I believe that if he had seen that his own theories were wrong, he would have been the first to declare it, whatever his followers might have said. But in spite of all that, no man can resist the influence of his own convictions. When Darwin looked at the Fuegians, he no doubt saw what he tells us, but then he saw it with Darwinian eyes. According to his account, the party of Fuegians whom he saw resembled the devils which come on the stage in such plays as Der Freischütz.[21] “Viewing such men, one can hardly believe,” he says, “that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world” (p. 235). “Their language, according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate. Captain Cook has compared it to a man clearing his throat, but certainly no European ever cleared his throat with so many hoarse, guttural, and clicking sounds.”
Now, even with regard to their physical aspect, Darwin must have either been very unlucky in the Fuegians whom he met, or he cannot have kept himself quite free from prejudice. Captain Parker Snow, in his Two Years Cruise of Tierra del Fuego (London 1857), speaks of them as without the least exaggeration really beautiful representatives of the human race. Professor Virchow, when exhibiting a number of Fuegians at Berlin, strongly protested against the supposition of the Fuegians being by nature an inferior race, so that they might be considered as a connecting link between ape and man. But what shall we say of Darwin's estimate of the Fuegian language? Here we can judge for ourselves, and I doubt whether, so far as this sound is concerned, anyone would consider Fuegian as inferior to English. Giacomo Bove, when speaking of the Tagan dialect, says, “le parole di quella sono dolci, piacevoli, piene di vocali.” And though he admits that some of the other dialects are harsher, yet that is very far as yet from the sound of clearing the throat.
And, even if the sound of their language was as guttural as some of the Swiss dialects, how shall we account for the wealth of their vocabulary? Every concept embodied in their language is the result of hard intellectual labor; and although here again excessive wealth may be an embarrassment, yet there remains enough to prove a past that must have been very different from the present.
The workman must at least have been as great as his work; and if the ruins of Central America tell us of architects greater than any that country could produce at present, the magnificent ruins in the dialects, whether of Fuegians, Mohawks, or Hottentots, tell us of mental builders whom no one could match at present. Even in their religious beliefs there are here and there rays of truth which could never have proceeded from the dark night of their actual superstitions. The Fuegians, according to Captain FitzRoy, believe in a just god and a great spirit moving about in forests and mountains. They may believe in a great deal more, but people who believe in a great spirit in forests and mountains, and in a just god, are not on the lowest step of the ladder leading from earth to heaven.
The Duke of Argyll, in examining the principal races that are commonly called savage, has pointed out that degraded races generally inhabit the extreme ends of continents or tracts of country almost unfit for human habitation, or again whole islands difficult of access except under exceptionally favorable conditions. He naturally concludes that they did not go there of their own free will, but that they represent conquered races, exiles, weaklings, cowards, criminals, who saved nothing but their life in their flight before more vigorous conquerors, or in their exile from countries that had thrown them off like poison. Instead of looking on the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego as children of the soil, Autochthones, or the immediate descendants of the mythical Proanthropoi, the Duke points out that it is far more likely they may have come from the north; that their ancestors may have participated in the blessings of the soil and climate of Chili, Peru, Brazil, or Mexico, possibly in the early civilisation of that part of the world; and that the wretchedness of the country into which they were driven fully accounts for their present degradation. Take away the wretchedness of their present home, educate a baby, as Captain FitzRoy did, under the beneficent influences of an English sky and of European civilisation, and in one generation, as Mr. Darwin tells us, “his intellect was good, and his disposition nice.”
It is quite fair that those who oppose this theory should call upon the Duke to establish his view by the evidence of language. If the Fuegians were the descendants of the same race which reached a high pitch of civilisation in Peru, Mexico, or Central America, their language ought to show the irrefragable proof of such descent. If it did, his position would be impregnable. Unfortunately the materials now at hand have not yet been sufficiently examined to enable us to say either yes or no. Nor must we forget that language, when it is not fixed by a popular literature, is liable among nomadic tribes to unlimited variation. The number of languages spoken[22] throughout the whole of North and South America has been estimated to considerably exceed twelve hundred; and on the northern continent alone more than five hundred distinct languages are said to be spoken, which admit of classification among seventy-five ethnical groups, each with essential linguistic distinctions, pointing to its own parent stock. Some of these languages are merely well-marked dialects, with fully developed vocabularies. Others have more recently acquired a dialectic character in the breaking up and scattering of dismembered tribes, and present a very limited range of vocabulary, suited to the intellectual requirements of a small tribe or band of nomads. The prevailing condition of life throughout the whole North American continent was peculiarly favorable to the multiplication of such dialects and their growth into new languages, owing to the constant breaking up and scattering of tribes, and the frequent adoption into their numbers of the refugees from other fugitive broken tribes, leading to an intermingling of vocabularies and fresh modifications of speech. It is to be hoped that the study of native American languages may before long receive that attention which it so fully deserves. It must be taken up in good earnest, and with all the accuracy which we are accustomed to in a comparative study of Indo-European languages. All ethnological questions must for the present be kept in abeyance till the linguistic witness can be brought into court, and it would be extraordinary if the laurels that can here be gained should fail to stimulate the ambition of some young scholar in America.
As to the Fuegians at Cape Horn, so at the North Pole the Eskimos, however low their present state of civilisation, have been looked upon as immigrants from a centre of civilisation located in a more temperate zone. The Eskimo leads the only life that is possible in his latitudes. Why he should have migrated there, unless driven by force majeure, is impossible to say. Unless we are willing to admit a special Eskimo Adam, we have no choice except to look upon him either as a withering offshoot of the American moundbuilders, or as a weak descendant of Siberian nomads.
In Africa, the most degraded races, the Bushmen, are clearly a corruption of the Hottentots, while it is well known that some eminent ethnologists look upon the Hottentots as degraded emigrants from Egypt. How much higher the civilisation of Africa stood in former ages, we know from the monuments of Egypt and Nubia, from the histories of Phœnicia, Carthage, and Numidia. If among the ruins of these ancient centres of civilisation we now find tribes whom European travellers would call savage, we see again that in the evolution of man retrogression is as important an element as progression.
Even in Australasia, where we meet with the most repulsive customs and the most hopeless barbarism, the Duke of Argyll shows that, according to the principles of evolution, the separation of the islands from the Asiatic continent would date from a period anterior to the age of man, and that here too man must be an immigrant, a degraded offshoot from that branch of the human race which in China or India has risen to some kind of civilised life. For further details the pages in the last book of the Duke of Argyll, particularly chapter x., on the “Degradation of Man,” should be consulted. It must suffice here to quote his summing up:—
Instead of assuming these (savage) tribes to be the nearest living representatives of primeval man, we should be more safe in assuming them to represent the widest departure from that earliest condition of our race which, on the theory of development, must of necessity have been associated at first with the most highly favorable conditions of external nature.
We have thus seen that, wherever we seem to lay hold of primeval savages who are supposed to represent to us the unchanged image of the primeval man, the evidence of their having been autochthonous in the places where we now find them is very weak, the proofs that they have never changed are altogether wanting; while geographical, physical, and linguistic considerations make it probable, though no more, that they originally came from more favored countries, that they were driven in the struggle for life into inhospitable climates, and that in accommodating themselves to the requirements of their new homes they gradually descended from a higher level of civilisation, indicated by their language and religion, to that low level in which we find them now. Some of them have sunk so low that, like individual members of the noblest families in Europe, they can no longer be reclaimed. Others, however, though shaken by sudden contact with the benefits and the dangers of a higher civilisation, may regain their former health and vigor, and, from having been retrogressive savages, become once more progressive in the great struggle for existence.
But if in the cases just mentioned we feel inclined to recognise the influence of degradation, and if we class such races as the Fuegians, the Eskimos, the Bushmen and Hottentots, the Papuans and brown Polynesians, as retrogressive savages, the question arises where we can hope to find specimens of the progressive savage, or rather of the natural man, who might teach us something of what man may have been before civilisation completely changed him into an artificial being, forgetful of the essential purposes of life, and who feels at home no longer in fields and forests, on rivers or mountains, but only in that enchanted castle of custom and fashion which he has erected for himself out of the unmeaning fragments of former ages?
My answer is that after we have collected the primitive tools and weapons which lie buried beneath the abodes of civilised man, our best chance of learning some of the secrets of primitive civilisation is to study the sacred hymns and the ancient legends of India, the traditions embodied in the Homeric poems, and whatever has been preserved to us of the most ancient literature of the progressive races of the world, the Italic, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic races. This of course applies to the Aryan race only. The Semitic races are represented to us in their progress from a nomadic to a more or less civilised life in the Old Testament, in the earliest ballads of the Arabs, and in passages scattered in the inscriptions of Assyrians, Babylonians, and Phœnicians. China too in its ancient literature allows us an insight into the age of a nascent society, while Egypt discloses to us the most ancient of all civilisations, which can boast of a literature at a time when the very idea of writing was as yet unknown to all other nations.
It is easy to say that all this is modern. In one sense no doubt it is. The Vedic literature, the most ancient of the whole Aryan race, presupposes a succession of intellectual strata which no chronology can measure. The language of the Veda is a work of art which it must have taken generations to build up. But is it reasonable to expect anything less modern in the history of the human race? And is there not a continuity in language and thought which allows us to see even in these literary remains, call them as modern as you like, something of the first dawn of human life. French is a very modern language, but in chien we still hear the Sanskrit ṥvan; in journal we recognise the old Vedic deity Dyaus. In the same way we can go back from what is common to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, to what was the common language of the Aryans before they broke up in different nationalities. In that common Aryan vocabulary, again, we can distinguish between what is radical and primitive and what is formal and secondary. Thus we may go back beyond all so-called historical limits to a stage of primitive thought, represented by a small number of radical concepts, and a still smaller number of formal elements. And is not that enough? Is it not more historical and more trustworthy, at all events, than all à priori speculations? and have we not at least a right to demand this from our à priori friends, that, in running their tunnel from the other end, they should take care that when it emerges into the daylight of history it should meet the tunnel which comparative philology, mythology, and theology have carefully dug out on the opposite side through the solid rock of facts? It will never do for à priori theories to run counter to à posteriori facts. It is a fact, for instance, proved by historical evidence, that fetichism represents a secondary stage in the growth of religion, and that it presupposes an earlier stage, in which the name and the concept of something divine, the predicate of every fetich, was formed. It would be fatal, therefore, to any system of à priori reasoning if it placed fetichism before that phase in the development of human thought which is represented by the first formation of divine concepts. It would be a real hysteron-proteron.
Again, it is a fact, proved by historical evidence, that all the words of the Aryan languages are derived from definite roots, expressive of definite concepts. It would therefore be fatal, again, to any system of à priori reasoning if it attempted to derive words direct from more or less inarticulate cries or imitations of cries, and not from that small number of roots which has been proved to supply all that is really wanted in explanation of all the facts of Aryan speech.
Again, it is a fact, proved by historical evidence, that most of the ancient deities of the Aryan nations have names expressive of the great powers of nature, and it would be an insult to all historical scholarship if our à priori friends were to attempt to prove once more that the worship of Zeus was derived from a general reverence felt for a gentleman of the name of Sky, or the belief in Eos from a sentimental devotion excited by a young lady of the name of Dawn. I believe it will be admitted by all honest anthropologists that the philological identification of one single word, Dyaus in the Veda and Zeus in Homer, has done more for rectifying our ideas of the true course of ancient Aryan civilisation than all the myths and customs of savages put together.
There was a time when the students of Oriental literature were inclined to claim an extravagant antiquity for the books which they had rescued from oblivion. But that tendency has now been changed into the very opposite. There may be traces of it among Chinese, sometimes among Egyptian and Accadian scholars, but wherever we have to deal with a real literature, whether in India, Persia, or Palestine, scholars are far more anxious to point out what is modern than what is ancient, whether in the Veda the Avesta, or the Old Testament. I certainly do not feel guilty of ever having claimed an excessive antiquity for the Rig-Veda. From the very first, though I placed the whole of Vedic literature before Buddhism, say the sixth century B.C. and though, owing to the changes in language, style, and thought which are clearly perceptible in different parts of Vedic literature, owing also to certain astronomical dates, I ventured to place it between 1000 and 1500 B.C., yet I have never concealed my impression that some portions of the Veda may turn out to be of far more recent origin.[23]
But is not that sufficient? Is it not perfectly marvellous that so much that is really old, so much that carries us back more than 3,000 years, should have been preserved to us at all? Why will people ask for what is impossible? Savages they say, do not read and write, and yet they want to have trustworthy information from literary documents composed by those very savages who cannot read and write. Among the Aryan nations, I do not believe in any written books before the sixth century B.C. In China, books may have been older, papyri are older in Egypt, and clay tablets in Babylon. But even when literature began, the very last that ancient people do is to write about themselves, about their manners and customs. What we know of the manners and customs of ancient people, when they were still passing through that phase which we call progressive savagery, comes to us from strangers only. As modern travellers give us full accounts of the life of savages who cannot speak and write for themselves, our only chance of learning something about our own ancestors, before they began to write, would be from ancient travellers who were interested in these promising savages. Now it is a piece of excessive good luck that, with regard to one of the Aryan races, with regard to our own Teutonic ancestors, we possess such a book, written by a stranger who felt deeply interested in German savages, and who has told us what they were, before they could write and tell us themselves what they were. If we want to study the progressive savage, not as he ought to have been, according to à priori philosophy, nor as he might have been, according to what we see among Fuegians of the present day, but as he really was according to the best information that could be collected by the best of historians, we must, read and read again the Germania of Tacitus.
If history means the evidence of contemporary eye-witnesses, I doubt whether history will ever enable us to see further into the natural transition of barbarism into civilisation than in the Germania of Tacitus. To divide civilisation from barbarism by a sharp line is of course impossible. There are remnants of barbarism in the most advanced state of civilisation, and there are sparks of civilisation in the most distant ages of barbarism—at least of that healthy barbarism which is represented to us in the Germania, and of which we find but scanty fragments in the ancient literature of the civilising nations of the world.
Here we may see ourselves as we were not quite two thousand years ago. Here we may see from how small beginnings the highest civilisation may be reached. Here we may study the natural man as he really was, in some respects certainly a savage, but a progressive savage, as we know from his later history, and certainly without one sign of that corruption and decay which is so plainly visible in Hottentots and Papuans.
This book, the account of the site, the manners, and the inhabitants of Germany, by Tacitus, has had various fates. To every German, to every member of the Teutonic race, it has always been a kind of national charter, a picture of a golden age, adorned with all that is considered most perfect, pure, and noble in human nature; whereas French savants have often either ridiculed the work of Tacitus as a mere romance, or so interpreted his words as to turn the ancient Germans into real Hottentots.
This controversy has been carried on during several centuries. M. Guizot, for instance, in his History of Civilisation completely ignoring the distinction between retrogressive and progressive savages, tried to show that there was little to choose between the Germans of Tacitus and the Red Indians of the present day.
This controversy became embittered by a curious circumstance. Whereas Tacitus and other Roman writers spoke in glowing terms of the Teutonic races, their remarks on the Gauls, the ancient inhabitants of France, were not only far from complimentary, but happened to touch on points on which Frenchmen are particularly sensitive. Tertullian, who was a great admirer of the Jews, was very wroth with Tacitus because he used very anti-Semitic language. He actually calls Tacitus a “brawler, and the greatest teller of lies,”[24] The French do not differ much from that opinion, not so much because Tacitus spoke ill of the Jews, and likewise of the Celts of Gaul, as because he spoke so well of the paysans du Danube. The ancient classical writers dwell rather strongly on the unfavorable side of the Celtic character. It is well known how low an opinion Aristotle formed of Celtic morality. Strabo says that the Celts are simple, but proud and sensitive, fond of dress and ornaments. It is even hinted that they dyed their hair, and allowed their mustache to grow, so that it interfered with the comfort of eating and drinking.[25] Strabo goes on to say that they are not malicious, but reckless, changeable, fond of innovation, and never to be depended on. They are quick in their resolutions, but often inconsiderate, fond of war, brave, but intolerably conceited if victorious, and quite demoralised if defeated. Polybius confirms that their first onslaught is terrible, but both Cæsar and Livy agree as to their want of steadiness and perseverance. Other Latin authors add that they are unmanageable and inclined to revolutions, and that, owing to continual factions, many are obliged to leave the country, and to try their fortunes as adventurers elsewhere. Still darker colors were added by others to this picture of national depravity. The state of morality in Gaul was such that it was considered infamous for a father to be seen in company with his son before the latter had come of age. At the death of a nobleman his widow was, as a matter of course, subjected to a trial as to whether she had been the cause of her husband's death. Strabo affirms that it was their custom to cut off the heads of their enemies after a battle, and to hang them on the heads of their horses, or nail them over their doors. While German scholars composed this mosaic out of all the stones that classical writers had ever thrown at the inhabitants of Gaul, French writers retaliated by either throwing discredit on Tacitus, the supposed encomiast of the Germans, or by showing that the account which Tacitus gives of the ancestors of the Teutonic race proves better than anything else that, at his time, the Germans had not yet emerged from a state of the grossest barbarism, and were incapable, therefore, as yet of vices of which they maintain are the outcome of a more advanced state of civilisation.
To my mind, apart from any national idiosyncrasies, the description which Tacitus gives us of the Germans, as he had seen them, is perfectly unique and invaluable as a picture of what I should willingly call the life of progressive savages. What should we give if, besides the hymns of the Rig-Veda, we had the accounts of travellers who had actually seen the ancient Rishis of India with their flocks and families, their priests and sacrifices, their kings and battles? What should we give if, besides the Homeric poems, we had the work of an eyewitness who could describe to us the real Troy, and the real fight between Greece and Asia Minor? This is what Tacitus has done for Germany, and at a time when the ancient religion was still living, when the simple laws of a primitive society were still observed, and when the epic poems of a later time were still being sung as ballads at the feasts of half-naked warriors! In Tacitus, therefore, and not in the missionary accounts of Melanesian savages, should we study the truly primitive man, primitive in the only sense in which we shall ever know of primitive man, and primitive certainly in a far truer sense than Papuans or Fuegians are likely to be in the nineteenth century. I cannot understand how an historian like Guizot could have allowed himself to be so much misguided by national prejudice as to speak of Tacitus as a kind of Montaigne or Rousseau, who, in a fit of disgust with his own country, drew a picture of Germany as a mere satire on Roman manners, or to call the Germania “the eloquent sulking of a patriotic philosopher who wishes to see virtue where he does not find the disgraceful effeminacy and the elegant depravity of an old society.” Surely the work of Tacitus cannot have been very fresh in the memory of the great French historian when he delivered this judgment. If Tacitus, like Rousseau or Voltaire, had intended to draw the picture of an ideal barbarism, would he have mentioned the many vices of the German Utopia, the indolence of the Germans, their drunkenness, their cruelty to slaves, their passion for gambling, and their riotous revels? Besides, three-fourths of his book treat of subjects which have no bearing whatever on Roman society, nay, which are of so little interest to the general reader that I doubt whether many Romans would have taken the trouble to read them. The facts which came to the knowledge of Tacitus are so loosely strung together that his book looks more like a collection of memoranda than the compact and pointed pamphlet of a political satirist. We need only read the letters of Voltaire on England, or Montalembert's pamphlet, De l'Angleterre, in order to perceive the difference between a political satire and an historical memoir. No doubt a man of the temper of Tacitus would naturally dwell with satisfaction on the bright side of the German character, and, while holding before the eyes of his own nation the picture of a brave and simple, religious and independent race, might naturally think of what Rome once had been, and was no longer. But there is no more sarcasm or satire in his work than is inseparable from a straightforward statement of facts when addressed to ears no longer accustomed to the sound of unvarnished truth.
So little did M. Guizot perceive the unique character of the Germania of Tacitus as an historical document of the earliest stage of society, that he amused himself with collecting from various books of travel a number of facts observed among the very lowest races in America and Africa, which, as he thinks, form an exact parallel to the statements of Tacitus with regard to the good and bad qualities of the Germans. His parallel columns, which occupy nearly ten pages, are certainly amusing, but they prove nothing, least of all that there was no difference between the healthy sons of Germany and the tattooed cannibals of New Zealand. If they prove anything, it is that there is one kind of barbarism through which every nation has to pass, the childhood and wild youth of a race, to be followed by the mature vigor of a nation's manhood, and that there is another kind of barbarism which leads to nothing, but ends in mere brutality, shrinking from contact with higher civilisation and succumbing when it attempts to imitate with monkeyish delight the virtues and vices of a more advanced society. Why is it that the fresh breezes of European civilisation proved fatal to the consumptive barbarism of the wretched inhabitants of Australia, while the strong constitution of the Germans of Tacitus resisted even the poisonous vapors of Roman life? When the results are so different, surely there must be a difference in the antecedents, and though M. Guizot is successful in showing that in some respects the ancient Germans did the same things and said the same things as Ojibways and Papuans, he forgets in drawing his conclusion the old proverb, Si duo dicunt idem, non est idem.
After these remarks it will perhaps seem less surprising that students of antiquity should decline to answer the point-blank question whether man began his life on earth as a savage. Every definition that has been attempted of a savage in general, has broken down as soon as it was confronted with facts. The only characteristic of the savage which remained, and was strong enough to withstand the sharpest cross-examination, was cannibalism. But I am not aware that even the most extreme believers in the primitive savage would insist on his having been necessarily a cannibal, a kind of human Kronos, swallowing his own kith and kin.
Every attempt to place the savage who can no longer be called civilised in the place of the savage who can not yet be so-called, could only end, as it has, in utter confusion of thought.
Something, however, will be gained, or at all events some kind of mutual understanding will become possible, if in future discussions on the character of primitive man a careful distinction is made between the two kinds of savages, the progressive and the retrogressive. When that distinction has once been grasped, the question whether man began as a savage has no longer anything perplexing about it. Man certainly began as a savage, but as a progressive savage. He certainly did not begin with an innate knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic; but, on the other hand, there is nothing to lead us to suppose that he was a being altogether foul and filthy, that when he grew up he invariably ill-treated his wife or wives, and that still later in life he passed his time in eating his children.
If we must need form theories or reason by analogy on the primitive state of man, let us go to the nearest ci-près, such as the Vedic Hindus, or the Germans as described by Cæsar and Tacitus, but not to Fuegians, who in time and probably in space also are the most widely removed from the primitive inhabitants of our globe. If we knew nothing of the manners and customs of the Saxons, when they first settled in these isles, should we imagine that they must have resembled the most depraved classes of modern English society? Let us but once see clearly that the Fuegian, whether as described by Darwin or by Parker Snow, is the most modern of human beings, and we shall pause before we see in him the image of the first ancestor of the human race. Wherever we look we can see the rise and fall of the human race. We can see it with our own eyes, if we look at the living representatives of some of our oldest and noblest families; we can read it in history if we compare ancient India with modern India, ancient Greece with modern Greece. The idea that the Fuegian was salted and preserved for us during many thousands of years, so that we might study in him the original type of man, is nothing but a poetical sentiment unsupported alike by fact, analogy, and reason.
I know full well that when I speak of the Germans of Tacitus or of the Aryans of the Veda as the ci-près of primitive man, all the indications of modern, or at all events of secondary and tertiary thought which I have pointed out myself in the hymns of the Rig-Veda, and which might easily be collected from the book of Tacitus, will be mustered against me. Must I quote the old saying again: Est quoddam prodire tenus si non datur ultra? All I maintain is that these historical documents bring us as near to the primitive man as historical documents can bring us; but that the nearest point within our reach is still very far from the cradle of the human race, no one has pointed out more often than myself.
There is, however, plenty of work still to be done in slowly following up the course of human progress and tracing it back to its earliest stages, as far as literary, monumental, and traditional documents will allow us to do so. There are many intricate windings of that historical river to be explored, many riddles to be solved, many lessons to be learnt. One thing only is quite certain—namely, that the private diary of the first man will never be discovered, least of all at Cape Horn.
I have thus tried to show how untenable is the theory which would boldly identify the modern savage with primitive man, and how cautious we ought to be whenever we take even a few hints here and there from degraded tribes of the present day in order to fill out our imaginary picture of the earliest civilisation of our race. Some lessons, and even important lessons, may be learnt from savages, if only they are studied in a truly scholarlike spirit, as they have been, for instance, by Callaway and Codrington, by Waitz and Tylor. But if the interpretation of an Homeric custom or myth requires care, that of African or Polynesian customs or myths requires ten times greater care, and if a man shrinks from writing on the Veda because he does not know Sanskrit, he should tremble whenever he writes the names of Zulus, unless he has some idea of what Bântu grammar means.
In arguing so far, I have carefully kept to the historical point of view, though I am well aware that the principal traits in the imaginary picture of primitive man are generally taken from a very different source. We are so made that for everything that comes before us we have to postulate a cause and a beginning. We therefore postulate a cause and a beginning for man. The ethnologist is not concerned with the first cause of man, but he cannot resist the craving of his mind to know at least the beginning of man.
Most ethnologists used to hold that, as each individual begins as a child, mankind also began as a child; and they imagined that a careful observation of the modern child would give them some idea of the character of the primeval child. Much ingenuity has been spent on this subject since the days of Voltaire, and many amusing books have been the result, till it was seen at last that the modern baby and the primeval baby have nothing in common but the name, not even a mother or a nurse.
It is chiefly due to Darwin and to the new impulse which he gave to the theory of evolution that this line of argument was abandoned as hopeless. Darwin boldly asked the question whose child the primeval human baby could have been, and he answered it by representing the human baby as the child of non-human parents. Admitting even the possibility of this transitio in aliud genus, which the most honest of Darwin's followers strenuously deny, what should we gain by this for our purpose—namely, for knowing the primitive state of man, the earliest glimmerings of the human intellect? Our difficulties would remain exactly the same, only pushed back a little further.
Disappointing as it may sound, the fact must be faced, nevertheless, that our reasoning faculties, wonderful as they are, break down completely before all problems concerning the origin of things. We may imagine, we may believe, anything we like about the first man; we can know absolutely nothing. If we trace him back to a primeval cell, the primeval cell that could become a man is more mysterious by far than the man that was evolved from a cell. If we trace him back to a primeval pro-anthropos, the pro-anthropos is more unintelligible to us than even the protanthropos would be. If we trace back the whole solar system to a rotating nebula, that wonderful nebula which by evolution and revolution could become an inhabitable universe is, again, far more mysterious than the universe itself.
The lesson that there are limits to our knowledge is an old lesson, but it has to be taught again and again. It was taught by Buddha, it was taught by Socrates, and it was taught for the last time in the most powerful manner by Kant. Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; it might be called more truly the knowledge of our ignorance, or, to adopt the more moderate language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.—Nineteenth Century.