More Pages from a Journal

by William Hale White

Detached Quantock Notes.

Ye Woods! that listen to the night-birds’ singing,
Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,
Save where your own imperious branches swinging,
Have made a solemn music of the wind.’

These lines from France were written by Coleridge when he was a little over twenty-five years old. In the combination of two gifts, music and meaning, he is hardly surpassable at his best by any poet. Not an atom of meaning is sacrificed to gain a melody: in fact the melody adds to the meaning.

Here is another example showing how the poetic form with Coleridge is not a hindrance to expression, but aids it.

Gentle woman, for thy voice remeasures
Whatever tones and melancholy pleasures
The things of Nature utter; birds or trees,
Or moan of ocean-gale in weedy caves,
Or where the stiff grass ’mid the heath-plant waves,
Murmur and music thin of sudden breeze.’

His similitudes are not mere external comparisons; the objects compared become modes of unity. ‘A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the alive [italics C.’s] sea, most interestingly combined with the number of white seagulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing, and had flown up.’

The intimations which are but whispered, the Presences which are but half-disclosed, are those which we should intently obey. The coarsely obvious has its own strength.

‘She went forth alone
Urged by the indwelling angel-guide, that oft,
With dim inexplicable sympathies
Disquieting the heart, shapes out Man’s course
To the predoomed adventure.’

Destiny of Nations.

Wordworth’s habit of spending so much time in the open air and with the humble people around him gives to what he says the value of experience, distinguishable totally from the ideas of the literary man, which may be brilliant, but do not agree with the sun, moon and stars, and turn out to be nothing when we ask is the thing really so.

Wordsworth’s verses have been in the sun and wind. It is a test of good sane writing that we can read it out of doors.

If Wordsworth’s love of clouds and mountains ended there it would be no better than the luxury of a refined taste. But it does not end there. It affects the whole of his relationships with men and women, and is therefore most practical.

In Wordsworth what we expect does not come, but in its place the unexpected. In the twelfth book of the Prelude he tells us:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master—outward sense
The obedient servant of her will.’

He then gives us one of these ‘passages,’ and what is it? A day when as a child he saw

‘A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and, more near,
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind.’

It was, as he says, an ‘ordinary sight,’ but

‘Colours and words that are unknown to man’

would have failed him

‘To paint the visionary dreariness’

which invested what he saw.

Years afterwards, when he revisited the spot, the ‘loved one at his side,’ there fell on it

‘A spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam;
And think ye not with radiance more sublime
For these remembrances, and for the power
They had left behind? So feeling comes in aid
Of feeling, and diversity of strength
Attends us, if but once we have been strong.’

This was the experience, then, of ‘distinct pre-eminence’ in whose recollection his mind was ‘nourished and invisibly repaired.’ It is in such a moment that the soul’s strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. Although he expands here and elsewhere he does not elaborate. He stops where the fact ends and shuns abstractions.

‘So taught, so trained, we boldly face
All accidents of time and place;
Whatever props may fail,
Trust in that sovereign law can spread
New glory o’er the mountain’s head,
Fresh beauty through the vale.’

This is from The Wishing-Gate Destroyed, a late poem, not published till 1842, when Wordsworth was seventy-two years old. It is his Nicene and Apostles’ Creed and Thirty-Nine Articles. Trust, with no credentials but its own existence, and yet they are indisputable.

‘Is it that Man is soon deprest?
A thoughtless Thing! who, once unblest,
Does little on his memory rest,
Or on his reason.’

To the Daisy.

An example of Wordsworth’s wisdom disclosing itself in his simplest pieces. For one sad conclusion to which the reason leads us, the uncontrolled, baseless procedure in the brain which we call thinking, but is really day-dreaming, leads us to a score. Reason on the whole is sanative.

‘Blest Statesman He, whose Mind’s unselfish will
Leaves him at ease among grand thoughts: whose eye
Sees that, apart from magnanimity,
Wisdom exists not, nor the humbler skill
Of Prudence, disentangling good and ill
With patient care.’

Exist not. We are befooled by words. We conceive wisdom, prudence, and magnanimity as distinct entities, without intercommunication. If we could but see things as they are without the tyranny of definition!

Wordsworth has a singular power of expressing articulately that which would be mere mist without him, but is of vital importance.

GODWIN AND WORDSWORTH

(Reprinted from The Pilot, 20th April 1901. With added postscript.)

Dr. Émile Legouis, in his singularly interesting book, La Jeunesse de William Wordsworth, well translated into English by Mr. T. W. Matthews (Dent and Co., 1897), calls attention to the influence on Wordsworth in his early years of Godwin’s Political Justice. On reading Political Justice now, it is difficult to understand why Wordsworth should have been so much affected by it. Its philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate nature. ‘All vice is nothing more than error and mistake’ (i. 31). [205] ‘We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and judge’ (i. 57). ‘Justice . . . is coincident with utility’ (i. 121). ‘If my mother were in a house on fire, and I had a ladder outside with which I could save her, she would not, because she was my mother, have any greater claim than the other inmates on my exertions’ (i. 83). ‘But,’ says an objector, ‘your mother nourished you in the helplessness of infancy.’ ‘When she first subjected herself,’ replies Godwin, ‘to the necessity of these cares, she was probably influenced by no particular motives of benevolence to her future offspring. . . . It is the disposition of the mind . . . that entitles to respect,’ and consequently justice demands that I should rescue the most meritorious person first.’ All moral science may be reduced to this one head, calculation of the future’ (ii. 468), and consequently a promise is not an obligation. The statement that it is essential that we should be able to depend on engagements ‘would be somewhat more accurate if we said “that it was essential to various circumstances of human intercourse, that we should be known to bestow a steady attention upon the quantities of convenience or inconvenience, of good or evil, that might arise to others from our conduct”’ (i. 156). The understanding is supreme in us, and ‘depravity would have gained little ground in the world, if every man had been in the exercise of his independent judgment’ (i. 174). Reason (the Godwinian Reason) is sufficient to control or even extinguish the strongest of all passions. Marriage having been denounced as ‘the most odious of all monopolies’ (ii. 850), Godwin is reminded that half a dozen men perhaps might feel for a woman ‘the same preference that I do.’ ‘This,’ says he, ‘will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial object.’ It was impossible not to acknowledge that the understanding often finds the problem rather abstruse of deciding whether an action will or will not secure ultimately the largest balance of happiness. Calvin was no fool, and yet he deliberately came to the conclusion that in burning Servetus he was promoting the welfare of mankind; but ‘Calvin was unacquainted with the principles of justice, and therefore could not practise them. The duty of no man can exceed his capacity’ (i. 102). As to Godwin’s necessarianism, it is perhaps hardly worth while to cite passages in order to explain it. It is of the usual type, incontrovertible if the question is to be settled by common logic. ‘Volition is that state of an intellectual being in which, the mind being affected in a certain manner by the apprehension of an end to be accomplished, a certain motion of the organs and members of the animal frame is found to be produced’ (i. 297). ‘A knife has a capacity of cutting. In the same manner a human being has a capacity of walking, though it may be no more true of him than of the inanimate substance, that he has the power of exercising or not exercising that capacity’ (i. 308). ‘A knife is as capable as a man of being employed in the purposes of virtue, and the one is no more free than the other as to its employment. The mode in which a knife is made subservient to these purposes is by material impulse. The mode in which a man is made subservient is by inducement and persuasion. But both are equally the affair of necessity. The man differs from the knife, just as the iron candlestick differs from the brass one; he has one more way of being acted upon. This additional way in man is motive, in the candlestick is magnetism’ (i. 309).

At first sight it is, as I have said, a wonder that Wordsworth should have been much impressed by such doctrines as these, but the evidence is strong that for a time they lay upon him like a nightmare. I will not quote the Borderers for a reason which will be seen presently, but the testimony of Hazlitt, Coleridge, the Prelude, and the Excursion is decisive. “Throw aside your books of chemistry,” said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, “and read Godwin on Necessity”’ (Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, p. 49, 3rd edition). Now it is a question, important historically, but more important to ourselves privately, whether Wordsworth’s temporary subjugation by Political Justice was due to pure intellectual conviction. I think not. Coleridge noticed that Wordsworth suffered much from hypochondria. He complains that during the Scotch tour in 1803 ‘Wordsworth’s hypochondriacal feelings keep him silent and self-centred.’ He again says to Richard Sharp, in 1804, that Wordsworth has ‘occasional fits of hypochondriacal uncomfortableness, from which, more or less, and at longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very childhood,’ and that he has a ‘hypochondriacal graft in his nature.’ Wordsworth himself speaks of times when—

‘ . . . fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not nor could name.’

He is haunted with

‘ . . . the fear that kills,’

and he thinks of Chatterton and his end.

During 1793, 1794, and part of 1795, this tendency to hypochondria must have been greatly encouraged. His hopes in the Revolution had begun to fail, but the declaration of war against France made him wretched. He wandered about from place to place, unable to conjecture what his future would be. ‘I have been doing nothing,’ he tells Matthews, ‘and still continue to do nothing. What is to become of me I know not.’ He proposed to start a Republican magazine to be called the Philanthropist, and we find him inquiring whether he could get work on the London newspapers. Hypochondriacal misery is apt to take an intellectual shape. The most hopeless metaphysics or theology which we happen to encounter fastens on us, and we mistake for an unbiased conviction the form which the disease assumes. The Political Justice found in Wordsworth the aptest soil for germination; it rooted and grew rapidly.

‘So I fared,
Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds
Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind,
Suspiciously, to establish in plain day
Her titles and her honours; now believing,
Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed
With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground
Of obligation, what the rule and whence
The sanction; till, demanding formal proof,
And seeking it in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.
This was the crisis of that strong disease,
This the soul’s last and lowest ebb; I drooped,
Deeming our blessed reason of least use
Where wanted most: “The lordly attributes
Of will and choice,” I bitterly exclaimed,
“What are they but a mockery of a Being
Who hath in no concerns of his a test
Of good and evil; knows not what to fear
Or hope for, what to covet or to shun:
And who, if those could be discerned, would yet
Be little profited, would see, and ask,
Where is the obligation to enforce?”’

In the autumn of 1795, Wordsworth, helped by the modest legacy of Raisley Calvert, was able to move with Dorothy to Racedown, and he immediately set to work on the Borderers, which I take to be the beginning of recovery. It was obviously written to exhibit the character of Oswald, the villain. He is one of a band of outlaws, and is jealous of the appointment of Marmaduke as chief. His revenge is a determination to make Marmaduke as guilty as himself. Marmaduke is in love with Idonea, and Oswald, partly by inventing lies about her blind father, Herbert, and partly by dexterous sophistry derived from Political Justice, endeavours to persuade Marmaduke to kill him. Marmaduke hesitates, but is finally overpowered. Although he cannot himself murder Herbert, he draws him to a desolate moor and leaves him to perish. Oswald then recounts his own story. When he was on a voyage to Syria he had believed on false evidence, that some wrong had been done to him by his captain, and accordingly contrived that he should be left to die in agony on a barren island. Oswald discovered that he had been deceived, but he declares exultantly to Marmaduke that, after being somewhat stunned, he found himself emancipated:—

‘Life stretched before me smooth as some broad way
Cleared for a monarch’s progress. Priests might spin
Their veil, but not for me—’twas in fit place
Among its kindred cobwebs.’

He concludes by avowing impudently that Herbert is innocent and that the impulse which prompted the monstrous perfidy of procuring his death was—

‘I would have made us equal once again.’

This is the commentary by Wordsworth on Godwin’s parable by which he illustrates the simplicity of action in what we call the soul. ‘When a ball upon a billiard-board is struck,’ etc. etc. ‘Exactly similar to this . . . are the actions of the human mind’ (i. 306–7). Lacy, one of the freebooters asks Wallace:—

‘But for the motive?’

and Wallace replies:—

‘Natures such as his
Spin motives out of their own bowels, Lacy!’

The Borderers is stuffed full with Godwinism. ‘Remorse,’ exclaims Oswald,

‘It cannot live with thought; think on, think on,
And it will die. What! In this universe,
Where the least things control the greatest, where
The faintest breath that breathes can move a world;
What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed,
A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been
Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals.’

So Godwin: ‘We shall, therefore, no more be disposed to repent of our own faults than of the faults of others’ (i. 315). The noxious thing is now, however, with Wordsworth no longer subject but object, and when a man can cast loose the enemy and survey him, victory is three parts achieved.

There is no evidence that Wordsworth attempted any reasoned confutation of Political Justice. It was falsified in him by Racedown, by better health, by the society of his beloved sister, and finally by the friendship with Coleridge, although there was but little intimacy with him till the summer of 1797, and the Borderers was finished in 1796. This, then, is the moral—to repeat what has been said before—that certain beliefs, at any rate with men of Wordsworth’s stamp, are sickness, and that with the restoration of vitality and the influx of joy they disappear.

One other observation. Wordsworth never afterwards vexed himself with free will, necessity, and the like. He knew such matters were not for him. Many problems may appear to be of great consequence, but it is our duty to avoid them if our protecting genius warns us away.

POSTSCRIPT

The most singular portion of Political Justice is that which deals with Population, and some notice of it, by way of postscript, may be pardoned, for it cannot be neglected in our estimate of Godwin, and it is a curious instance of the futility of attempting to comprehend character without searching into corners and examination of facts which, judged by external bulk, are small. These small facts may contain principles which are constituent of the man. The chapter on Population occupies a few pages at the end of the second volume of the Political Justice.

Godwin would like to see property equalised, or common, and he tries to answer the argument that excessive population would ensue. He quotes (ii. 862) a reported conjecture of Franklin’s that ‘mind will one day become omnipotent over matter.’ If over matter, which is outside us, thinks Godwin, why not over our own bodies, ‘in a word, why may not man be one day immortal’ (ii. 862). He points out that the mind already has great power over the body, that it can conquer pain, assist in the cure of disease, and successfully resist old age.

‘Why is it that a mature man soon loses that elasticity of limb which characterises the heedless gaiety of youth? Because he desists from youthful habits. He assumes an air of dignity incompatible with the lightness of childish sallies. He is visited and vexed with all the cares that rise out of our mistaken institutions, and his heart is no longer satisfied and gay. Hence his limbs become stiff and unwieldy. This is the forerunner of old age and death’ (ii. 863–64). ‘Medicine may reasonably be stated to consist of two branches, the animal and intellectual. The latter of these has been infinitely too much neglected’ (ii. 869). We may look forward to a time when we shall be ‘indifferent to the gratifications of sense. They please at present by their novelty, that is because we know not how to estimate them. They decay in the decline of life indirectly because the system refuses them, but directly and principally because they no longer excite the ardour and passion of mind . . . The gratifications of sense please at present by their imposture. We soon learn to despise the mere animal function, which, apart from the delusions of intellect, would be nearly the same in all cases; and to value it, only as it happens to be relieved by personal charms or mental excellence. We absurdly imagine that no better road can be found to the sympathy and intercourse of minds. But a very slight degree of attention might convince us that this is a false road, full of danger and deception. Why should I esteem another, or by another be esteemed? For this reason only, because esteem is due, and only so far as it is due.

‘The men therefore who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them. In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence her career at the end of every thirty years. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government. These latter articles are at no great distance; and it is not impossible that some of the present race of men may live to see them in part accomplished. But, besides this, there will be no disease, no anguish, no melancholy, and no resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all’ (ii. 870–72).

A very curious vein, not golden indeed but copper, let us say, is hidden away in the earthy mass of Godwin. The dull, heavy-featured creature sees an apocalyptic vision and becomes poetical. It is partly absurd, but not because it is ideal, and there are lineaments in it of the true Utopia. Godwin probably would have denounced the Revelation of St. John the Divine as superstitious nonsense, but he saw before him a kind of misty, distorted reflection of the New Jerusalem, in which there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, where there shall be no more curse, no night, no candle, no light of the sun. It might have been thought that it was impossible to establish a connection between Patmos and Skinner Street, but the first postulate of Euclid’s elements holds good universally, ‘that a straight line may be drawn from any one point to any other point.’

NOTES

Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim
Credebat libris.—Hor. Sat., II. i. 30.

Nothing is more dangerous than a mass of discontent which does not know what remedy is to be sought. All sorts of cures will be tried, many of them mere quackery, and their failure will make matters worse.

Whatever may be the meaning of the process of the world, however disheartening some steps in its evolution may be, they are necessary, and without them, perhaps, some evil could not thoroughly have been worked out.

People often manifest a diseased desire to express their will. A theory is adopted, not because the facts force it upon them, but because its adoption shows their power. The larger, the freer the nature, the less there is of this action of the will, the more the mind is led.

A mere dream, a vague hope may be more potent than certainty in a lesser matter. The faintest vision of God is more determinative of life than a gross earthly certainty.

The more nearly the performer on a musical instrument approaches perfection, the larger is that part of his execution which is unconscious. Consciousness arises with defect, or sense of something to be overcome. How conscious we are when striving to think and work in ill-health!

The highest education is that which teaches us to guide ourselves by motives which are intangible, remote, incapable of direct and material appreciation.

Weak minds find confirmation of their beliefs in the discovery of the same beliefs in other people. They do not take the trouble to find out how their neighbours obtained these beliefs. If they are current at the time, the probability is that the coincidence is worthless as any evidence of validity.

The certainty which comes of intelligent conviction is a tempered certainty. Its possessor knows the difficulty of the path by which he has reached it, and the reasons which on his way have appeared so potent against it. Fanaticism is the accompaniment of conclusions which are not the result of reason.

To understand a thing is to understand all its laws. The thing is then nothing but law, and mere matter seems to disappear.

What is it which governs the selection of truths which make up religions? Why are this and that chosen? Has not the selection a damaging effect upon the great body of truth?

Every action should be an end in itself as well as a means. The end of getting up in the morning, as Goethe says, is getting up.

We are always searching for something extraordinary which shall give life its pleasure and value. The extraordinary must be contributed by our own minds and feelings.

The real object in any human being of my love and worship is that which is not in any table of virtues, nor can I in any way describe it: it is something which perpetually escapes, which is not to be found in anything said or done.

It is a common mistake to demand a definition of that which can have none. We loosely cover a mass of phenomena which are diverse with a single word. For example, we puzzle over a definition of life, but there is no such thing as life in the sense of a single, distinct entity.

Religion has done harm by assigning an artificial urgency to insoluble problems. We are all told that we must be certain on matters concerning which the wisest man is ignorant. When we begin to reflect and to doubt, the urgency unhappily remains and we are distressed.

I know a man who had to encounter three successive trials of all the courage and inventive faculty in him. If he had failed in one he would have been ruined. The odds were desperate against him in each, and against ultimate victory were overwhelming. Nevertheless he made the attempt and was triumphant almost by a miracle in each struggle. How often calculation is folly and cowardice!

Before we can hear the Divine Voice we must shut out all other voices, so that we may be able to listen, to discern its faintest whisper. The most precious messages are those which are whispered.

A negative may be really positive. It depends on the extent of that which the negative excludes. If I say of hydrogen that it is not oxygen, nothing is gained. If I say it is not a fluid nor a solid, more is gained. So in the determinations of Spirit, God, etc., although we use negatives, the results may be of value.

True mental training is a discipline compelling us to dwell on that which is presented to us, to discover what unites it to other objects and what differentiates it from them. To the untrained mind creation is a blur. The moral effect on a child of teaching it to express distinction by significant words is great.

‘Ought’ is a singular instance of the confusion wrought by words and of their inefficiency. There is no single ‘ought’ and therefore no science of the obligation it implies. ‘Ought’ in the phrase ‘you ought to speak the truth’ refers to an instinct in us to report veraciously what we see. ‘Ought’ of self-sacrifice refers to love, and ‘ought’ of sobriety to the subordination of desires, to a difference in their authority of which we can give no account, excepting that we are creatures fashioned in a certain way.

In the presence of some people we inevitably depart from ourselves: we are inaccurate, say things we do not feel, and talk nonsense. When we get home we are conscious that we have made fools of ourselves. Never go near these people.

What cardboard puppets are the creations of fiction compared with a common man or woman intimately known!

How much of what I say is an echo; how little is myself! Sometimes it seems as if my real self were nothing and that what stands for it were a mere miscellany of odds and ends picked up here and there. What a Self is the Jesus of the Gospels!

A cousin of mine had an evening class of poor girls. She was trying to explain to them the words ‘liquid’ and ‘solid.’

‘You walked over the bridge; it was a hard road.’

‘Yes, teacher.’

‘If you had gone down by the side of the bridge you could not have walked across there?’

‘No, teacher.’

‘If you were to try and were to put your feet on the water, where would you go?’

‘To hell, teacher.’

The association of the question, ‘Where would you go?’ was too strong.

This sunset, which is common to the whole county, is more to me than anything exclusively mine.

If emotion be profound, symbolism, as a means of expression, is indispensable.

There would be no objection to ‘telling the truth’ about Burns, Byron, and Shelley if it could be told. But it cannot be told. We are informed that they did this or that, and the thing they did is to us what it would be if done by ourselves.

We are most vain of that which is least ourselves, of that which is acquired, put on, stuck in. It is not correct to say that a woman is vain of her beauty.

Controversy is demoralising. Never suffer yourself to become an advocate. Never rely on controversy to convince. Say what you have to say and leave it. Do it if you wish to persuade.

People are often unkind, not from malignity, but from ineptitude.

It is of the greatest importance continually to bear in mind that the violation of a law personal to myself is as immoral as the violation of a general law, and may be more mischievous.

To die is easy when we are in perfect health. On a fine spring morning, out of doors, on the downs, mind and body sound and exhilarated, it would be nothing to lie down on the turf and pass away.

What we want is wise counsel on particular occasions. Principles we can get by the bushel anywhere. The reason why our friends are so useless is that they will not take trouble. The selection and the application of the principle are difficult.

It is terrible to live with a person who has a strong, narrow sense of duty without further-reaching thought or love by which the rigidity of duty may be softened.

By the third, which is neither ourselves nor the object, do we recognise it. The third is the celestial light.

It is appalling to reflect that there are enormous masses of human energy which can find no proper outlet. The consequence is mischief either through expression in any direction and at any cost, or through suppression. We want an organisation of energy, one of the noblest offices of a true church.

The tyranny of the imagination is perhaps that which is most to be dreaded. By strength of will we can prevent an act, but no strength of will is able to prevent the invasion of self-created pictures. The only remedies are health and indifference to them when they present themselves. If we worry ourselves about them they become worse. If we let them alone they fade and we forget them.

Thinking much upon insoluble problems is apt to breed superstition even in the strongest minds. The failure of the reason weakens our reliance on it, and the difference between the incomprehensible and the absurd is very fine.

In this howling Bedlam of voices, it is of no use to talk or write—no man, if he has anything to say, can be heard. He is reviewed to-day and forgotten to-morrow. To soothe the pangs of a single sufferer, to drain a poor man’s cottage and give him wholesome drinking water, are good things done of which we can be sure.

Life is a matter of small virtues, but we have to bring them to perfection. This may be done by great principles. The humblest act may proceed from that which is beyond the stars.

What a vile antithesis is that between a man and his faults! If I love a man, I do not love his faults, for they are abstractions, but I love the man in his faults. Are they not truly himself? He is often more himself in his faults than in his virtues.

We should not talk as if we were responsible for the effect of what we say. We are responsible for saying it, and for nothing more. A higher power is responsible for the effect which is to follow from each cause.

Wisdom for old age.—Check the propensity to dwell on what you have thought before. Try to get new ideas into your head. Beware of giving trouble or asking for sympathy. Do everything yourself, which you have been in the habit of doing, so long as you can move a muscle, and when you cannot, secure, if possible, paid help: watch what the most devoted of friends or relatives say of continued attendance on the sick: note the relief when the sick man dies. Let not the thought sadden you that six weeks after you are in your grave those to whom you are now dear will be laughing and living just as if you had never existed. Why should they not? Are you of such consequence that they should for ever wear mourning for you? A slow march as you are carried to the churchyard, but when a handful of earth has been thrown on your coffin, let everybody go home to draw up the blinds and open the windows. So much dead already, all passion, so many capacities for enjoyment, why care for this miserable residuum, this poor empty I?

Clear vision is not often the cause of distress. It is rather the cloud of imagination distorting what is before us and preventing distinct view. Science, removing the heavens to an infinite distance, destroying traditions, abolishing our little theologies, does not disturb our peace so seriously as that vague dreaming in which there is no thinking.

Ah, it is not a quarrel which is so deadly! It is the strange transformation of what were once thought to be charms and virtues. The soft blue eyes are now simply silly; innocence is stupidity; docility is incapacity of resolution; the sweet, even temper is absence of passion.

Is it true that less evidence is necessary to prove an event which is probable than one that is improbable? The probability of an event is no evidence that it actually happened. Its probability may be the reason why we should examine the evidence more closely, because witnesses are more likely, in the case of a probable event, to refrain from scrutiny than in the case of one not probable. I sit at my window and see a whitish object with four legs in a field. I am short-sighted, but I at once say ‘a cow,’ and take no pains to ascertain whether it is a cow or not. If I had seen a white object apparently with three legs only, I should have gone out, inspected it closely, and should have called other people to look at it.

I pray for a gift which perhaps would be miraculous: simply to be able to see that field of waving grass as I should see it if association and the ‘film of custom’ did not obscure it.

Why do we admire intellect when it is united with even diabolic disregard of moral laws? Partly because it stands out more prominently; partly because it triumphs over obstacles; but mainly because we are all more or less in sympathy with insurrection and the assertion of individuality.

As we move higher, personality becomes of less consequence. We do not live in the ‘I,’ but in truths. Something of a metaphysical hint here.

Principles are dangerous tools for a fool. What awful mischief they have done!

Never was there a time in which men were less governed by ideas. The Church and the sects are neither Calvinist nor Arminian, orthodox nor rational, and in politics an idea damns a measure at once.

We have no capitalised happiness, nothing on which to draw when temporary sources fail.

A decided bent or twist, is not unsuitable in a man, but I do not care for it in a woman. I love that equipoise in the faces of the Greek women in the old statues and sculptures. It appears also in some pictures of the Virgin.

The duty of the State as to toleration cannot be decided by an appeal to rights. Everybody admits that government is sometimes justified in suppressing what is honestly believed. But if government had not been resisted we should have had no Christianity. The vindication of the authority of the State is a vindication of persecution, and if we dispute this authority we cannot logically disallow dangerous licence. There is no way out of the difficulty so long as we generalise. Toleration is an abstraction, nothing but a word. What we have to decide is, whether it is wise or unwise to send to prison the people now before us who preach bigamy, assassination of kings, or theological heresy.

When we struggle to see more than we possibly can see we undervalue what we indubitably see.

There is but little thinking, or perhaps it is more correct to say but little reflection, in the Bible. There is profound sympathy with a few truths, but ideas are not sought for their own sake. Carlyle is Biblical. It has been said scoffingly that he is no thinker. It is his glory that he is not.

What we have toiled after painfully often lies unused. No opportunity occurs for saying or doing a tithe of it. The hour demands its own special wisdom.

When we really love we cannot believe that our love is mortal. We feel, not only that it is immortal, but that it is eternal, in the sense in which Spinoza uses the word. It is not the attraction of something entirely limited and personal to that which is also limited and personal.

We think of rest as natural to bodies, and motion as something added. But the new doctrine is that motion is primary. Nothing is at rest, and, so far as we know, rest has never been. It is an astounding conception.

There is a certain distance at which each person whom we know is naturally placed from us. It varies with each, and we must not attempt to alter it. We may clasp him who is close, and we are not to pull closer him who is more remote.

Many people would be much better if they would let themselves be as good as they really are. They seem to take delight in making themselves less.

We are much misled by characters in fiction or on the stage, for they are always more consistent than men and women in real life. Real men and women are seldom controlled for twenty-four hours by the same motives or principles. If my friend is mean to-day, let me not doubt his generosity to-morrow. Let me joyously believe in it when the morrow comes.

What a pest is the re-appearance in us of discarded conclusions! It would be of service if we could keep a register of those things which, after careful examination, we have determined to be false.

Acting from the strongest motives, even if they are bad, is perhaps not so dangerous as acting from none. The evils which arise through deeds done from conspicuous motives attract attention, but the vast sum of misery caused by mere idle, irresolute swaying hither and thither passes unnoticed.

Pig-headedness is often a sign of weakness of will. The pig-headed person knows he is weak, and to convince himself and others of his resolution holds to any chance purpose with tenacity. The less reasonable the purpose is, the more obstinately he clings to it, because, by so doing, he shows as he thinks his strength of volition.

If we desire peace we must get beyond the notion of personality. Nothing of any value is bound up with it: it is an illusion.

Intense feeling gives intellectual precision. The man who feels profoundly the beauty of a cloud is the man who can describe it. But the first effect of intense feeling is often to break up false precision. The ideas of God, life, personality, right and wrong, are examples.

The blue sky is more beautiful because we know it is not painted opacity, but transparent.

The slowness of the change in the sky is exquisite, the dying out of the light in the clouds after sunset. The quiet abiding of the grey cloud as darkness thickens is wonderful.

June—Sky and sea pure blue. The blue tint suffuses the distant vessels. One large sailing ship with sails all set is so blue that it differs only by a shade from sky and sea.

It is not true that guileless people are the most easily deceived. S. G. is not sharp-witted, but she is transparent as a pool of rain on meadow grass, and consequently it is impossible to deceive her, and ridiculous to attempt it: her eyes forbid it. She does not infer insincerity: it is automatically rejected.

July.—North-easterly wind, strong: hateful in the streets and even in the house: dust everywhere. Inclined to shut the windows and stay indoors, but went out for a long walk up to the flag-staff. A perfect day for that view. The bay all shades of blue; here and there deep, and, inshore, the blue is broken with pure white from the tops of the waves: the yellow beach to the farthest point clasping the sea like an arm. So beautiful that it gives pain: it is not possible to extend oneself to it.

Whether truth does or does not lie in the mean depends on the selection of the extremes. A mechanical choice of the mean is stupidity.

The Athanasian Creed is not objectionable because of its damnatory clauses. Neglect to observe the finest distinctions continually involves damnation. The difference between a vice and a virtue may be a hair-line. The true reason for rejecting the Creed is that it is manufactured, that it is not a statement of what is seen and felt to be true. There is nevertheless a certain dogmatic pride in it, a desire to affirm as offensively as possible.

The peace which orthodox religion is said to bring is obtained by clipping the Infinite and reducing it to a finite. The joy of inclusion is great but false.

‘And thy fats shall overflow with new wine’—Proverbs iii. 10, Revised Version. Called on A. in London. I forget how it came about, but in course of conversation he asked me if ‘fats’ were not a mistake for ‘vats.’ I told him it was not, turning up the word in the dictionary as an equivalent to ‘vats.’ Called on his sister, who was staying three or four miles away and had come up to town that afternoon from the country where she lived. That very evening she asked me the same question her brother had asked. She had not seen him, nor held any communication with him on the subject, nor had it been suggested to them by any person or book. Moreover, neither of them is a frequent reader of the Bible. Yesterday I told the story to A. in his sister’s presence. She confirmed it, and A., who is accustomed to scientific investigation, was quite unable to account for it. If a jury were trying a prisoner charged with murder, and an equally singular concurrence of circumstances were in evidence against him, they would not hesitate to hang him.

If you are very short-sighted or half blind, it is safer in the twilight to shut the eyes and depend entirely on the touch in moving about.

The books on the adjustment of astronomical instruments say that if there is a slight error, it is better always to make allowance for it than to attempt to correct it.

The sun, we say, is the cause of heat, but the heat is the sun, here on this window-ledge.

The contact of a system of philosophy or religion with reality is that of a tangent with a circle. It touches the circle at one point, but instantly the circle edges away.

In every man there is something of the Universal Spirit, strangely limited by that which is finite and personal, but still there. Occasionally it makes itself known in a word, look, or gesture, and then he becomes one with the stars and sea.

We cannot really understand a religion unless we have believed it.

We ought to cultivate strength of will by doing what we have once decided to do. Subsequent reasons for not doing it may appear plausible, but it will generally be better to adhere to our first resolution. The advantage gained by change will not be equal to that derived from persistence.

Never be afraid of being commonplace. Never turn aside from the truth because it is commonplace.

A nightmare is not scattered while we are asleep. It disappears simply by—waking.

Cursed temperament.—A long drought broke up. The grass had been burnt, and the cattle were dying for want of water. In one week two inches of rain fell.

A. ‘What a blessing this rain is!’

B. ‘Yes, but a reaction is sure to follow. I’ve noticed that after weather like this we always have a spell of dry, northerly winds.’

The prompter which urges us on from one point to another, never discouraged by failure to see in the present moment what it seemed to possess when we pursued it, or rather, not permitting us to stop to find out if there be any failure—this it is by which we live. When it departs it is time to die.

January.—The wind is north-west after yesterday’s fog and rain from the south. Suddenly and silently, just after sunset, the whole south-western sky has blazed up, passing from glowing flame-colour on the horizon to carmine on the zenith. Between the promontories of cloud are lakes and gulfs of the tenderest green and blue. What magnificent pomp, fit to celebrate the death of a god for the world’s salvation! But there is nothing below to explain it. It must be a spectacle displayed for celestial reasons altogether hidden.

Much misunderstanding would be prevented if we were to say exactly what we believe and not modify it to suit, as we suppose, the person to whom we speak.

Humour people sometimes in what you do, but not in the expression of your convictions. Go a mile out of your way to please an obstinate friend, but utter with precision what you believe. It is in the sharpness and finish that its value lies.

Everybody in these civilised, intercommunicative days seems arrested: everybody is a compromise. It is rare that we meet with a person who has been let alone, whose own particular self has been developed free from intrusion.

People believe the truth more readily if something difficult of belief or incredible is mixed with it.

I want no more beliefs. What I want is active strength in those I have. I know there is no ghost round the corner, but I dare not go.

There is always a point in our insistence or persuasion when it is most effective, and generally it is much lower than we suppose. One degree above it is waste and impediment.

Keep a watch upon your tongue when you are in particularly good health.

Early morning before sunrise: the valley was filled with mist; red clouds in the sky. For a minute or two the mist took the colour, but fainter, of the clouds. What patience is required in order to see! The sun had not risen, the grass in the field was obviously green, but not without intent fixture of the eyes upon it was the dark, twilight shade of green recognised which was its peculiar meaning and beauty. To most of us, perhaps not to artists, it is more difficult to look than to think.

The just judgment is not that of the judge who has no interest in it. The most unjust judgments are due to indifference.

The sun is setting in crimson, delicate blue and green. I think of the earth as a revolving ball. ‘This was the Creator’s design, or, if we prefer so to speak, this was the law, that there should be a ball and that it should turn on its axis. But just as surely was it the design or law that there should be these colours, crimson, blue, and green, and that I should be affected by them. This affection was rolled up in the primal impulse which started the planet and is as necessary as its revolution.

Zeal in proselytising is often due to an uneasy suspicion that we only half-believe.

We should take pains to be polite to those whom we love. Politeness preserves love, is a kind of sheath to it.

The hornbeam hedge is coming into leaf in patches although all parts of each side face the same point of the compass. The leaves of some patches are fully expanded, while in others they are only in bud. The dry, brown, dead leaves of last year have remained through the winter and early spring, but they are dropping off now that the new leaves begin to shoot.

We ought not to expect every child to be religious. The religious temper is an endowment like that for painting or poetry.

A. and B. meet on the road. B. is a retired official and has nothing to do.

B. ‘Meant to have come to see you several times’ (has not called for nine months), ‘but I have so many engagements.’ (Shows a basket.) ‘Look here, just had to take some eggs to C. for my wife.’

‘If a man turns to Christ, nothing in him is to be left behind. Every passion must be brought to Him to be transformed by Him. Otherwise the man does not come, but only a part of him.’ [Said to me years ago by a pious friend now dead.]

The real proportion between vice and virtue in a man is often misjudged because the vice is before us continually, while the virtue does not obtrude.

If you are to live in happiness and peace with the woman you love, you must not permit the daily course of life to have its way unchecked. There must be hours of removal to a distance when in silence you create anew her ideal and proper form, when you think of her as sculptured in white marble.

Blacksmiths forging one on this side of the anvil and the other on the opposite side. Each keeps his own time, not regulating his stroke by watching his mate.

There is in man an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground round it into a swamp.

Went into the cathedral and heard morning service. Miracle of miracles! Into the soul of a carpenter’s son more than eighteen centuries ago came a thought, and it is returned to us to-day in majestic architecture, music of voice and organ.

Disbelief in Christianity is not so much to be dreaded as its acceptance with a complete denial of it in society and politics.

The love that has lasted for years; which has resisted all weakness and defect; has been constant in all moods and circumstances better and worse; has exacted nothing; has been content with silence; always soft and easy as the circumambient air, a love with no reserve; what is there in any relationship to person or thing worth a straw compared with it!

We ought to endeavour to give our dreams reality, but in Reality we should preserve the dream.

If her unhappiness does not destroy my happiness, and if her happiness does not make me happy, I do not love her.

There are problems which cannot be solved, for directly we have stated them, as we suppose, they elude the statement and are outside. Who can say what is the meaning of the question, ‘Does God exist?’

There is always a multitude of reasons both in favour of doing a thing and against doing it. The art of debate lies in presenting them; the art of life in neglecting ninety-nine hundredths of them.

How beautiful is a rapid rivulet trying to clear itself from stirred-up mud.

The most foolish things we say are said from another person’s point of view and not from our own.

On a siding at one of the stations on the Great Western Railway were a number of old engines waiting to be broken up. There they stood, uncleaned, their bright parts rusted and indistinguishable from the others. Some were back to back and some front to front. There they stood and saw the expresses rush past them with their new engines.

Went out this afternoon to call on C. and his wife. They are certainly the most cultivated people I know. They travel a good deal, and each of them can speak two or three languages besides English. They read the best books, and do not read those which are bad. Some friends were there, and I was entertained with intelligent criticism of literature, music, and pictures, and learned much that was worth knowing. But I came away unsatisfied, and rather dazed. On my way back—it was a singularly warm, clear evening in February—I turned in to see an old lady who lives near me. She was sitting wrapped up at her wide-open window, looking at the light that was still left in the south-west. I said, of course, that I hoped she would not take cold. ‘Oh no,’ she replied, ‘I often sit here, and so long as I keep myself warm I come to no harm. I cannot read by candlelight, and I am thankful that this room faces the south. I know the stars much better than when I was young.’ I took the chair beside her, and for ten minutes neither of us spoke, but I was not conscious for an instant of the disagreeable feeling that silence must be broken, and search be made for something with which to break it. If two persons are friends in the best sense of the word, they are not uncomfortable if they do not talk when they are together. Presently she told me that she had received news that morning of the birth of a granddaughter. She was much pleased. The mother already had two sons and desired a girl. I stayed for about half an hour, and went home in debt to her for peace.

Bacon observes that whatever the mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion. Naturally so, because it is nearly certain to be something merely personal to ourselves.

Excepting in one word, the betrayal of Jesus, the defection of Peter, the examination before Pilate and Herod, and the crucifixion, are recorded, as Spedding notices, without any vituperation. The excepted word, not named by Spedding, is ‘blasphemously’ (Luke xxii. 65). [250]

Coleridge says that great minds are never wrong but in consequence of being right, which is perfectly true; but it may be added that they are also right through being wrong.

‘When he is moderate and regular in any of these things, out of a sense of Christian sobriety and self-denial, that he may offer unto God a more reasonable and holy life, then it is, that the smallest rule of this kind is naturally the beginning of great piety. For the smallest rule in these matters is of great benefit, as it teaches us some part of the government of ourselves, as it keeps up a tenderness of mind, as it presents God often to our thoughts, and brings a sense of religion into the ordinary actions of our common life.’—(Law’s Serious Call.) Men are restrained by fear of consequences, but it is Law’s rule which gives strength and dignity. Living in a certain way because Perfection demands it produces a result different from that obtained by living in the same way through fear of injury to health.

Man is the revelation of the Infinite, and it does not become finite in him. It remains the Infinite.

Luther says somewhere, ‘Do not anxiously search for the pillars which are to keep the sky from falling.’ Many of us have been afraid all our lives that the sky would fall, and have anxiously searched for the pillars. There are none, and yet the sky will not fall.

Idolatry is the worship of that which is non-significant. The worship of one God, as Coleridge says, may be idolatry.

What a man is conscious of, is not himself, but that which is not himself. Without a belief in the existence of an external world, I could not believe in my own existence.

The dialectic of Socrates is positive in so far as it shows the futility of reasoning as a means of reaching the truth. If we wish to know whether courage is knowledge, we must face imminent danger.

The omnipotence of God—that is to say, absolute omnipotence, a power which knows no resistance—is an utterly inconceivable abstraction. Yet much speculation is based on it.

There is a great reserve of incomprehensibility in all the few friends for whom I really care. It is better that it should be so. What would a comprehensible friend be worth? The impenetrable background gives the beauty to that which is in front of it. The most unfathomable also of my friends are those who are most sincere and luminous.

Note on a picture.—The sea-shore; low cliffs topped with grass; a small cove; the open sea, calm, intensely blue; sky also deep blue, but towards the horizon there are soft, white clouds. On a little sandy ridge sit a brown fisher-boy and fisher-girl, immortal as the sea, cliffs, and clouds which are a setting or frame for them.

The strength of the argument in favour of a philosophy or religion is proportionate to the applicability of the philosophy or religion to life. If in all situations we find it ready, it is true.

Bacon observes that ‘interpretations’ of Nature, that is to say real generalisations elicited from facts by a just and methodical process, ‘cannot suddenly strike the understanding’ like ‘anticipations’ collected from a few instances. I have often noticed that ‘striking’ is seldom a sign of truth, and that those things which are most true, the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables for example, do not ‘strike.’

We foolishly exaggerate ingratitude to us. Ought we to require of those whom we have served, that they should be always confessing their obligations to us? Why should we care about neglect? ‘Seek Him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is His name.’

The worship of the idol is often more passionate than that of God. People prostrate themselves in ecstasy before the idol, and remain unmoved in the presence of a starry night. A starry night does not provoke hysterics. The adoration of the veritably divine is calm.

‘It is a sad thing,’ said she, ‘that so kind and good a man should be an infidel.’ ‘It is a sad thing to me,’ said her terrible sister, ‘that an infidel should be what you call kind and good.’

Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit. [254] Quoted by Montaigne (Of Presumption) from Lactantius. Characteristic of Montaigne and true, so far that a man can know nothing thoroughly unless the knowledge be a necessity.

‘Certainty of knowledge,’ says Dr. Johnson in the Idler (No. 84), ‘not only excludes mistake, but fortifies veracity. . . . That which is fully known cannot be falsified but with reluctance of understanding, and alarm of conscience: of understanding, the lover of truth; of conscience, the sentinel of virtue.’

At the present day we are chiefly taken up with that which is beyond our grasp. Our literature is the newspapers, and nine-tenths of what we read in them morning and evening we do not understand. Everybody is expected to take sides in politics, but not one person in a thousand can give an intelligible account of political questions. The difficulty of so doing is much increased by the absence of systematic information. We get leading articles and columns of telegrams, but seldom concise exposition or carefully edited and connected history.

An object is of importance to us in inverse proportion to the square of the distance, but men worry themselves about the news from China and will not give five minutes’ thought in a week to their own souls or to those of wife or child. It is pathetic to see how excited they become about remote events which cannot affect their happiness one iota. Why should we not occupy ourselves with that which is definite when there is so much of it? Political problems confront us, but if they are too big for us, let us avoid them by every means in our power. If we are in doubt we ought not to vote. The question which we are incapable of settling will be settled better by Time than by the intermeddling of ignorance.

In religion, and science also, we dare not say I do not know. We must always be dabbling in matters on which we can come to no conclusion worth a rotten nut. We busy ourselves with essays on the dates and composition of the books of the Old Testament and cannot tell the story of Joshua or Saul; we listen to lectures on radium, or the probable exhaustion of the sun’s energy, and have never learned the laws of motion. Few people estimate properly the evil of habitual intercourse with that which is vague and indeterminate. The issues before us not being clearly cut and comprehensible, the highest faculties of our minds are not exercised. We lazily wander over the surface without coming to a definite conclusion. Perhaps we pick up by chance some irrational notion, which we defend with obstinacy, for we are more dogmatic concerning that which we cannot prove than we are concerning a truth which is incontrovertible. The former is our own personal property, the latter is common. One step further, and by constantly affirming and denying when we have no demonstration, lying becomes easy.

There is much which is called criticism that is poisonous, not because it is mistaken, but because it invites people to assert beyond their knowledge or capacity. A popular lecturer discusses the errors of Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, or George Eliot before an audience but superficially acquainted with the works of these great authors and not qualified to pass judgment upon them. He is considered ‘cheap’ if he does not balance

‘His wit all see-saw between that and this,
Now high, now low, now master up, now miss.’

If we will be content with admiring, we are on much surer ground. It is by admiration and not by criticism that we live, and the main purpose of criticism should be to point out something to admire, which we should not have noticed. One great advantage of studying Nature is that we are not tempted to criticise her. We go to the Academy, and for a whole morning contrast faults with merits. If the time so spent had been passed in the fields with the clouds we should have gone home less conceited.

It is an awful thought that behind human speech, incapable by its very nature of anything but approximate expression, and distorted by weakness and wilfulness, lies the TRUTH as it is, exact without qualification.

The long apprenticeship has ended in little or nothing. What I was fifty years ago I am now; certainly no better, with no greater self-control, with no greater magnanimity. How much I might have gained had I taken life as an art I cannot say.

I have been looking at a cabinet of flies. Hundreds of them, each different, were arranged in order and named. Some I had to examine through a microscope. Their beauty was marvellous, but more marvellous was their variety. The differences, although the type was preserved, seemed inexhaustible, and all reasons for them broke down. If a particular modification is an advantage, why is it confined to one species? Why this range of colour? Why these purely fantastic forms? The only word we can say with certainty is that Nature is infinite and tends to infinite expression. Verum ego me satis clare ostendisse puto, a summa Dei potentia sive infinita natura infinita infinitis modis, hoc est, omnia necessario effluxisse, vel semper eadem necessitate sequi; eodem modo, ac ex natura trianguli ab æterno et in æternum sequitur ejus tres angulos æquari duobus rectis. Quare Dei omnipotentia actu ab æterno fuit et in æternum in eadem actualitate manebit.

Johnson is religious through and through, but there are passages in the Rambler and Idler dark as starless, moonless midnight. ‘None would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other subjects have eluded their hopes . . . That misery does not make all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less certain that of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greatest part.’

There is seldom in life any occasion for great virtues, and we must not be disappointed if it passes without great passion. We must expect to be related to one another by nothing more than ordinary bonds and satisfied if human beings give us pleasure without excitement.

I have good reason to believe that I am passing on life’s journey through what almost all wayfarers therein have had to pass through, but nobody has told me of it.

How wonderful is the withdrawal of heat! It silently departs, the iron grows cold, but the heat spreads and lives!

‘Who knows, though he sees the snow-cold blossom shed,
If haply the heart that burned within the rose,
The spirit in sense, the life of life be dead?
If haply the wind that slays with storming snows
Be one with the wind that quickens?’

swinburne, A Reminiscence.

With increase of reading we have fallen into a fireside, dilettante culture of ideas as an intellectual pleasure. Amos and Isaiah do not deal in ideas. Their strength lies in love and hatred, in the keenness and depth of their division between right and wrong. They repeat the work of God the Creator: chaotic sameness becomes diverse; the heavenly firmament mounts on high; there is Light and there is Darkness.

SHAKESPEARE

‘Glory to thee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator!’ (Landor, Imaginary Conversations, Delille and Landor).

2 Henry VI. iii. 3.—The lines beginning with the one which follows are not in the old play and are Shakespeare’s own:

‘O thou eternal Mover of the heavens,’ etc.

Johnson’s note is: ‘This is one of the scenes which have been applauded by the criticks, and which will continue to be admired when prejudices shall cease, and bigotry give way to impartial examination. These are beauties that rise out of nature and of truth; the superficial reader cannot miss them, the profound can image nothing beyond them.’ We talk idly of Johnson’s pompous redundance. His sentences are balanced, and it is therefore supposed that the second part repeats the first, but the truth is that each part contains a new thought. It was his manner to throw successive ideas into this form. Those who are acquainted with his history and his awful mental struggles will find infinite pathos in this restrained comment.

Midsummer Night’s Dream.—Shakespeare’s overlooking quality, as that of a god surveying human affairs, is shown in this play:

‘When they next wake, all this derision
Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision.’
. . .
‘Her dotage now I do begin to pity.’
. . .
‘And think no more of this night’s accidents
But as the fierce vexation of a dream.’
. . .

All this night’s storm from a drop of magic juice! Oberon has been watching Titania’s courtship of Bottom. She sleeps, and he touches her eyes with Dian’s bud:

‘Now, my Titania, wake you, my sweet queen’

Romeo and Juliet.—The love of Juliet is a thing altogether by itself, not to be classed, never anticipated by any other author, and not imitable. It is sensuous. Look at her soliloquy, ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,’ etc., and yet it is woven through and through with immortal threads of fidelity and contempt of death:

‘O! bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower.
. . .
Or bid me go into a new-made grave.’

How great this girl is! If I were to meet her, how I should be awed! The Juliets I have seen on the stage fail here. They do not bend my knees in that adoration which is inspired by the sea and stars. The love of Romeo for Juliet and of Juliet for Romeo does not stimulate passion, but rather controls it. I never become hot in reading the play. What a solemnity there is in its movement! The lovers are not merely two human beings with no other meaning. The Eternal Powers are at work throughout. Romeo’s love for Rosaline is taken over from Brooke’s poem. Shakespeare adds the touch that it was not genuine. He makes Friar Laurence say:

‘O she knew well!
Thy love did read by rote, and could not spell.’

The love for Rosaline is different altogether from the love for Juliet.

‘O heavy lightness! serious vanity!’

is artificial.

Shakespeare also follows Brooke in Juliet’s momentary outburst against Romeo when she hears of Tybalt’s death, but the contradiction of the echo by the nurse is Shakespeare’s own:

‘Blister’d be thy tongue
For such a wish! he was not born to shame.’

Apart from the quarrel between the Montagus and Capulets, we feel that the love between Romeo and Juliet could have no other than a tragic end. This world of ours conspires against such passion.

I Henry IV. v. 4—

‘O Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth!
I better brook the loss of brittle life
Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;
They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh:
But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.’

The last three lines are not melancholy philosophising. As such they would be out of place coming from Hotspur. They are consolation and joy. Death will extinguish for us the memory of certain things suffered and done. That is a gain which is not outweighed by the loss of any pleasure life can give.

Luders’ essay three parts of a century ago showed conclusively that Holinshed’s and Shakespeare’s Prince of Wales, as we see him in the play of Henry IV., wild and dissolute with ignoble companions, is a legend which is disproved by documentary history, but Shakespeare’s Prince is nevertheless dramatically true. Johnson says, ‘He is great without effort, and brave without tumult. The trifler is roused into a hero, and the hero again reposes in the trifler. The character is great, original, and just.’ Johnson’s criticism is true. There is no interruption or strain in the passage from one self to the other self: they are both in fact the same self. It is something of a shock that the King should cast off Falstaff, but if a man is appointed to command it is necessary that he should at once take up his proper position. I remember the promotion of a subordinate to a responsible post. His manner changed the next day. He had the courage to ring his bell and give orders to his senior under whom he had been serving.

He became one of the most efficient administrators I ever knew. On the other hand, nearly at the same time another subordinate was promoted who was timid and continued his habits of familiarity with his colleagues. His department fell into disorder and he was dismissed.

As You Like It.—Lady Anne Blunt in her admirable books, A Pilgrimage to Nejd and The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, notices that the true Arab sheykh of the desert, when a traveller seeks his hospitality, asks no questions until food and drink have been offered, and even then is in no hurry. So also the Duke:

‘Welcome, fall to: I will not trouble you
As yet, to question you about your fortunes.’

Curiosity about personal matters is ignoble.

Rosalind’s love for Orlando is born of pity. ‘If I be foiled, there is but one shamed that was never gracious; if killed, but one dead that is willing to be so: I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me; the world no injury, for in it I have nothing; only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.’

It is a proof of Orlando’s gentle breeding that he instantly yields to courtesy:

‘Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you.’

Orlando says to Jaques: ‘I will chide no breather in the world, but myself, against whom I know most faults.’ This is characteristic of Shakespeare, and is in the spirit of the Gospels.

The difficulty in this play is not Oliver’s sudden love for Celia, although Shakespeare seems to have felt that it was a little too rapid, for Orlando asks Oliver, ‘Is’t possible that on so little acquaintance you should like her?’ It is rather Celia’s prompt response which takes us aback. It looks too much like ‘any woman to any man.’ It may be said in excuse that Celia had heard the piteous story of his conversion, how he had become ‘a wretched ragged man o’ergrown with hair,’ and what is more to the point, she had heard of Orlando’s noble kindness to him. It is odd that Shakespeare does not adopt from Lodge’s novel Oliver’s rescue of Celia from a band of ruffians. Johnson says, ‘To Celia much may be forgiven for the heroism of her friendship.’ She forsook not only her father—she had reason not to care much about him—but she forsook the court for Rosalind.

Much Ado about Nothing.—Why should Don Pedro offer to take Claudio’s place in the wooing of Hero and why should Claudio consent?

Borachio says, ‘Hear me call Margaret, Hero; hear Margaret call me Claudio.’

When Borachio recounts to Conrad what he had done, he makes no mention of his personation of Claudio—‘Know, that I have to-night wooed Margaret, the lady Hero’s gentlewoman, by the name of Hero; she leans me out at her mistress’s chamber-window, bids me a thousand times good night.’

Theobald remarks that if Claudio saw another man with the woman supposed to be Hero and heard her call him Claudio, Claudio would merely suppose that Hero was deceived. Theobald proposes to substitute ‘Borachio’ for ‘Claudio’ in the line just quoted. Borachio had just asked Don John to tell Don Pedro and Claudio that Hero loved him, Borachio. But if Theobald’s emendation be received, difficulties still remain. Margaret must have been persuaded to answer to the name of Hero. After Borachio’s arrest he tells us that Margaret wore Hero’s garments. But Shakespeare, deserting Spenser, from whom this mystification appears to be borrowed, gives no reason which induced Margaret to play this part.

Where was Hero on that night? Borachio promises Don John that ‘he will so fashion the matter, that Hero shall be absent.’ Claudio asks Hero

‘What man was he talk’d with you yesternight
Out at your window betwixt twelve and one?’

She does not reply, as we should think she would, that she was not sleeping in that room, although Benedick asks Beatrice,

‘Lady, were you her bedfellow last night?’

and Beatrice replies,

‘No, truly not; although until last night,
I have this twelvemonth been her bedfellow.’

Claudio is despicable, and his marriage with Hero is a foul, black spot in the play. Observe that in the first scene he asks Don Pedro,

‘Hath Leonato any son, my lord?’

and Don Pedro, understanding the drift of the question, replies:

‘No child but Hero, she’s his only heir.’

What a mean, damnable excuse he makes.

‘Yet sinn’d I not,
But in mistaking.’

Beatrice with sure eye discerns the scoundrel. ‘Kill Claudio.’ Not Don Pedro, not even Don John, although she had heard Benedick denounce him as the author of the villainy.

Beatrice and the Friar never doubt Hero’s innocence. The Friar declares that

‘In her eye there hath appear’d a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.’

What an amplitude there is in Beatrice! What a sweep it is to bring into what we already know of her such divine faith in her friend! This light-hearted girl suddenly becomes sublime.

Hamlet.—Coleridge’s remark that the two former appearances of the Ghost increase its objectivity when it appears to Hamlet is subtle and true. Observe that the Ghost is visible to Hamlet, Marcellus, Bernardo and Horatio, but not to the Queen.

There is in Coleridge an activity of intellect which is so fascinating that we do not stay to inquire whether the result is in accordance with the facts. He says that tædium vitæ as in the case of Hamlet is due to ‘unchecked appetency of the ideal.’ Was the appetency of the ideal strong in Hamlet? The ideal exalts our interest in earthly things.

‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.’ Johnson says that this speech, in which Hamlet contrives damnation for the man he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered; whereupon Coleridge remarks that Hamlet’s postponement of revenge till it should bring damnation to soul as well as body ‘was merely the excuse Hamlet made to himself for not taking advantage of this particular and favourable moment for doing justice upon his guilty uncle, at the urgent instance of the spirit of his father.’ I doubt if this is a complete explanation. Would it strike the audience as the motive? Men of Hamlet’s mould not only speak but feel extravagantly. Incapacity for prompt action is accompanied with more intense emotion than that which is felt by him who acts at once. Hamlet meditates on revenge instead of executing it, and his desire, by brooding, becomes diabolic.

Generalisations like those of Polonius are obtained from observation during youth and middle age. In old age the creation of generalisations ceases and we fall back on our acquired stock. They remain true, but the application fails. We must be increasingly careful in the use of these ancient abstractions, and more intent on the consideration of the instance before us. The temptation to drag it under what we already know is great and must be resisted. Proverbs and wise saws are more suitable to common life than to intricate relationships. They are inapplicable to deep passion and spiritual matters.

Johnson notes that the Ghost’s visits are a failure so far as Hamlet’s resolution is concerned.

Hamlet says,

‘O! from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!’

but they remained thoughts. The play is to be the thing to decide him, but when it is over and he has the clearest proofs, he does not act, but consents to leave Denmark and returns by accident. Had he obeyed the Ghost’s promptings and killed the King at the end of the play in the third act, Polonius, Ophelia, the Queen, Laertes, and Hamlet himself might have been saved.

Troilus and Cressida is an inexplicable play. It is a justification of those critics who obstinately, but without external evidence, refuse to believe that much which is attributed to Shakespeare really belongs to him. It is absolutely impossible that the man who put these words into the mouth of Achilles:

‘I have a woman’s longing,
An appetite that I am sick withal,
To see great Hector in his weeds of peace;
To talk with him, and to behold his visage,
Even to my full of view.’

could have adapted from the Recuyell the shocking ignominy of the ninth scene in the fifth act in which Achilles calls on his myrmidons to slay Hector unarmed, and then triumphs in these lines:

‘My half-supp’d sword, that frankly would have fed,
Pleas’d with this dainty bit, thus goes to bed.
[Sheathes his sword.
Come, tie his body to my horse’s tail;
Along the field I will the Trojan trail.’

Measure for Measure as a play is hateful to me, although there are passages in it as truly Shakespeare as anything to be found in all his works. The chief objection to it is that justice, to use Coleridge’s word, is ‘baffled.’ There are other objections almost as great. From beginning to end almost everybody is base, foolish, or uninteresting. The Duke’s temporary withdrawal is stupid and contemptible, considering that he is the governor of the state; the condemnation of Claudio is wildly unnatural; the substitution of Mariana loathsome; the treachery of Angelo in not reprieving Claudio inconceivable, notwithstanding what we already know of the deputy’s hypocrisy and villainy. The lowest depth of scoundrelism is reached when, face to face with Mariana and publicly at the city gate before the Duke and all the company assembled, he excuses himself from marrying her because

‘her reputation was disvalued
In levity.’

And yet he is let off scot-free, and Mariana marries him! Isabella’s apology,

‘I partly think,
A due sincerity govern’d his deeds,
Till he did look on me,’

might be sufficient for an outbreak of his lust but not for his lying, and Mariana’s is still worse:

‘Best men are moulded out of faults.’

Not out of such faults as Angelo’s are the best men moulded.

The punishment inflicted on the poor wretch Lucio is horrible.

Lucio. ‘I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore! . . . Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and hanging.

Duke. Slandering a prince deserves it.’

This is a foul line. I should like to discover documentary proof that it is not Shakespeare’s, but the gag of some actor desirous of pleasing court folk!

The Promos and Cassandra from which Measure for Measure is taken is certainly worse, for Promos (Angelo) is made to marry Cassandra (Isabella) and after the marriage is to die, but Cassandra, ‘tyed in the greatest bondes of affection to her husband, becomes an earnest suter for his life.’

Henry VIII.—The scene in which Katherine appears before the court is perhaps the finest in the play. To what noble use is her Spanish pride turned! The last line of the following quotation from Katherine’s reply to Wolsey is infinite:

‘For it is you
Have blown this coal betwixt my lord and me,
Which God’s dew quench.’

Othello is pure tragedy, for the judgment which falls on Othello and Desdemona, although it is disproportionate to the character or life of either, is necessary from the beginning. Brabantio was not wholly without justification in thinking the marriage unnatural, and Desdemona’s desertion of him without a word was unfeeling. The depth of the tragedy is increased by his death.

‘Poor Desdemon I am glad thy father’s dead.
Thy match was mortal to him.’

Iago feels the necessity of obtaining motives for his conduct. He tries to find them in the supposed infidelity of his wife with Othello and in his supersession by Cassio. Neither is sufficient, but he partly believes in them, and they partly serve their purpose.

Coleridge says Othello was not jealous: he lacked the suspicion that is essential to jealousy. Perhaps so, but in that case we want a name for the passion which rushes to belief of that which it prays may be false. The very intensity of love, so far from inducing careful examination of slander against the divinity I worship, prevents reflection by anxiety; by terror lest the love should be disturbed. Iago’s evidence, thinks Coleridge, was so strong that Othello could not have done otherwise; but would he have acted in war on evidence equally weak?

How mad Iago is with all his cunning! What a fool! Had he been anything but the maddest fool, he would have seen that in the end his plans must break down. Intellect? Yes, of a kind he had it pre-eminently, but intellect becomes folly when it is inhuman.

‘Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars.’

Shakespeare might have made Othello the more eager to plunge into the big wars, but Desdemona is so inwoven with him that the whole fabric goes to ruin when she is torn out.

Othello ‘falls in a trance’ after his outburst at the beginning of the fourth act. He is a Moor. In the background also lies Brabantio’s prophecy. Venice cannot do without him, but he cannot hold a Venetian woman.

King Lear.—There are passages in King Lear which are enough to make us wish we had never been born. They are almost an impeachment of the Ruler of the Universe, and yet—there is Cordelia. Whence did she come? She is as much His handiwork as Regan, and in all our conclusions about Him we must take her into account.

Lear does not go mad. He is mad from the beginning, but his madness is in abeyance. Look at the style of his curses on Goneril.

Coleridge’s criticism is exact: ‘Lear’s self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another’s breast.’ If a man desires not to go mad or not to be soured into oil of vitriol, let him watch the doors of his heart; let him never solicit any expression of love.

Cordelia’s ‘nothing, my lord,’ as Coleridge says, is partly irrepressible disgust at her sisters’ hypocrisy. There was also, as France admits, ‘a tardiness in nature’ in Cordelia. She was her father’s favourite, but what sort of a life must she have lived with such a father before the time at which the play opens? We ought not to be surprised that she refuses to be demonstrative. She reacts against his exaggeration.

I cannot read the blinding of Gloucester. The only excuse that can be offered, not good for much, is that Shakespeare found the story in the Arcadia, and that in his day horrors on the stage were not so repulsive as they are to us. Cordelia’s death taken from Holinshed is almost as bad. It is not involved in the tragedy like the death of Ophelia or of Desdemona.

All’s Well that Ends Well.—Johnson comments, ‘I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who married Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.’ This is just. Bertram is atrocious. With Helena before him he says,

‘If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,
I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.’

Did he require a deposition on oath in presence of a magistrate? He deserved a scourging in the market place.

Coleridge calls Helena one of Shakespeare’s loveliest women. I cannot agree. She secures her husband’s embraces under a false pretence. How a woman could consent to lie in the arms of a man who had cast her off, and who believed when he was enjoying her that she was a mistress whom he preferred is beyond my comprehension. It is so in Boccaccio, but that is no excuse. Devotion to a man who is indifferent or who hates, is tragically possible, but in its greatest intensity would hardly permit such humiliation.

The play is bad altogether. What was the necessity for suggesting Bertram’s second marriage? There is nowhere any trace of Shakespeare’s depth. The difficulties of the text are singular, and seem to mark this drama as one different from the rest.

Macbeth.—Johnson’s remark that the events are so great that they overpower the persons and prevent nice discrimination of character is partly true.

Coleridge notices that Lady Macbeth was a person of high rank, living much alone. A darkly meditative mind left in solitude can conceive without being startled the most awful designs. The same imagination in Lady Macbeth which brooded over the plot against Duncan’s life drove her to delirium and suicide.

Shakespeare transfers the most perilous stuff in him to Macbeth. The function smothered in surmise; the reflection on the emptiness of life—tale told by an idiot—Shakespeare empties it into this murderous traitor. He makes him the prey of that which is mixed in the composition of the best.

The witches do not strike us as miraculous. They are not supernatural, but extensions of the natural.

It is an apology for emendation that one of the most celebrated passages in the play is based on conjecture (confirmed by what follows) and on analogy.

‘I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares no [Folio] more is none.’

‘No’—corrected by Rowe to ‘do.’

In Measure for Measure we have

‘Be that you are,
That is, a woman; if you be more, you’re none.’

Note the terrible, gasping brevity of the dialogue between Lady Macbeth and her husband after the murder:

Lady M. ‘Did not you speak?

M. When?

Lady M. Now.

M. As I descended?

Lady M. Ay.’

Macbeth’s speech beginning just before he hears of Lady Macbeth’s death, and ending after he hears of it, should be interpreted and spoken as follows. He had just said he ‘will laugh a siege to scorn.’ Then a cry of women within.

‘What is that noise?

Seyton. It is the cry of women, my good lord.

[Exit.

Macbeth (musing). I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cool’d
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in ’t: I have supp’d full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.

Re-enter Seyton.

Wherefore was that cry?

Seyton. The queen, my lord, is dead.

Macbeth (with a touch of impatience). She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.’

He makes no inquiry about his wife, but goes on with his reverie, which does not specially refer to her.

‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.’

The ‘petty pace,’ coming from Macbeth! The ‘out, out, brief candle,’ should be spoken in the same musing tone.

Johnson says of a learned apology by Heath for a line in Macbeth which is defective in metre: ‘This is one of the effects of literature in minds not naturally perspicacious’—a criticism which might be extended to much Shakespearean comment.

Cymbeline.—The wager is loathsome. If any man with whom we were acquainted had laid it, should we not scorn and brand him? It was a crime to mention Imogen’s name in such society as that which met at Philario’s house. The only excuse is Boccaccio, but what shall we say of Iachimo’s interview with Imogen, invented by Shakespeare! After his beastly experiment upon her, he excuses himself:

‘I have spoke this, to know if your affiance
Were deeply rooted.’

She begs him to prolong his visit! The apology is worse than the original insult.

The royal behaviour, or what Shakespeare means us to take for royal behaviour, in the two youths is overdone and sometimes repulsive.

Arviragus goes out of his way to put his love for Imogen higher than that for his supposed father, Belarius, who is present.

‘The bier at door,
And a demand who is’t shall die, I’d say
My father, not this youth.’

Yet the point of the scene is the nobility of blood in these youths!

Lucius, who had protected Imogen, hopes she will plead for his life, and she turns on him:

‘No, no; alack!
There’s other work in hand: I see a thing
Bitter to me as death: your life, good master,
Must shuffle for itself.’

In the fifth act Posthumus believes his wife to be guilty, and yet breaks out into strains like these:

‘So I’ll die,
For thee, O Imogen! even for whom my life
Is every breath a death.
. . .
For Imogen’s dear life take mine; and though
’Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life; you coin’d it.’

Shakespeare surely ought to have made Posthumus revert to perfect faith. He ought to have borrowed something from his own Beatrice. Posthumus wishes Imogen saved, because, if her life had been spared, she might have repented.

Iachimo is impossible, simple blackness, worse than Iago. He is unactable, for some motivation is necessary.

Shakespeare’s genius is so immense that it overpowers us, and we must be on our guard lest it should twist our instinct for what is true and right. The errors of a fool are not dangerous, but those of a Shakespeare, Goethe, or Byron it is almost impossible to resist.

Twelfth Night.—The play is two plays in one without much connection. The Viola play is improbable. Why did Shakespeare omit that part of the story which tells us that Silla (Viola) had seen the Duke when he was shipwrecked on Cyprus where she lived, and had fallen in love with him? In the play, hearing of the Duke, she discloses a design to make her ‘own occasion mellow.’

Malvolio shut up as mad—

Clown. ‘What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?

Malvolio. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion?

Malvolio. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.’

Malvolio was a gentleman, but he was more. Shakespeare may go a little too far with the yellow stockings and cross-gartering, but the liability to deception by a supposed profession of love is a divine weakness, not inconsistent with true nobility of intellect and with sagacity. There is no reason to suppose he was often deceived in worldly matters. Maria is a bad sort of clever barmaid, and was not unwilling to marry the drunken Sir Toby. When I last saw Twelfth Night acted, the whole of the latter part of the fifth act was omitted, for the purpose, apparently, of strengthening the representation of Malvolio as a comic fool whose silly brain is turned by conceit. It was shocking, but the manager knew his audience.

Julius Cæsar.—Casca is indignant that Cæsar should be offered the crown, but he despises the applause of the mob when Cæsar rejected it. ‘The rabblement hooted and clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Cæsar refused the crown that it had almost choked Cæsar; for he swounded and fell down at it; and for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.’

Brutus. ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.’

I cannot think Dr. Johnson, Mason, and Delius are right in supposing the Genius to be the power which watches over us for our protection, and that the mortal instruments are the passions which rebel against it, and, as Johnson says, ‘excite him to a deed of honour and danger.’ The Genius and the mortal instruments are in council. The Genius is the president and the mortal instruments are subordinates. The insurrection is their resistance because they cannot at once be brought to do what the Genius directs. There is no hint in what goes before of ‘safety.’ The mortal instruments suggest

‘I know no personal cause to spurn at him.’

Blakeway agrees with this interpretation.

In both Plutarch and Shakespeare, Brutus refuses to kill Antony. Brutus will go no further than justice demands. But this is not enough for success. Hence the ruin of the republican cause.

Steevens says that the apparition at Sardis ‘could not be at once the shade of Cæsar and the evil genius of Brutus.’ But Shakespeare intended that it should be both. Brutus in the fifth scene of the fifth act thus replies to Volumnius:

‘The ghost of Cæsar hath appear’d to me
Two several times by night: at Sardis, once;
And, this last night, here in Philippi’s fields.’

It is an instance of Steevens’ prosaic temper that he could not see the fitness of the combination.

Brutus. And whether we shall meet again I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take;
For ever, and for ever, farewell, Cassius!
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why then, this parting was well made.
Cassius. For ever, and for ever, farewell, Brutus!
If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed;
If not, ’tis true, this parting was well made.

These verses are perhaps the noblest in our language. Nothing ever has gone or could go beyond them. Shakespeare here justifies the claim on his behalf to be placed alone and unreachable. Observe the repetition by Cassius almost word for word. Swift must have had this passage in his mind when in a letter to Pope, which I quote from memory, as I cannot lay my hand on it, he tells Pope that he will come over to England and see him if possible, but, if not, ‘we must part, as all human creatures have parted.’

‘Why, then, lead on. O! that a man might know
The end of this day’s business ere it come!
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known. Come, ho! away!’

These lines might easily be turned into commonplace, but what could be more pathetic or solemn?

The true drama of Julius Cæsar is indicated by Plutarch. It is Cæsar’s triumph over innumerable difficulties, any one of which might have been fatal, the protection by his genius, the limitation of its power, the Dictatorship—‘Semideus,’ his death. Shakespeare gives no reason, nor does Plutarch, why Brutus should have plotted to kill Cæsar, excepting the fear of what might happen if he were to become absolute. Brutus is abstract.

‘Such one he was (of him we boldly say),
In whose rich soule all sovereigne powres did sute,
In whom in peace the elements all lay
So mixt, as none could soveraigntie impute;
As all did govern, yet all did obey;
His lively temper was so absolute,
That ’t seem’d, when heaven his modell first began,
In him it show’d perfection in a man.’

This is Drayton’s imitation of what Antony says of Brutus, and it is one which not only does not spoil the original, but is itself original.

Antony and Cleopatra.—It is not Antony’s passion for Cleopatra which ruins him. He has not the cohesion which obtains success. He is loose-bonded. Cæsar is his complete foil and contrast. Cæsar exists dramatically to explain Antony. Antony’s challenge to single combat and the speeches he makes to his servants are characteristic. The marriage to Octavia, more than his Egyptian slavery, shows his weakness. There is a line in Plutarch which I wish Shakespeare had used. ‘But it was in the nature of Antonius to show his best qualities in difficulties, and in his misfortune he was as like as may be to a good man.’

Scenes 6 and 7, Act ii., the interview with Pompey, are in Plutarch, but it is not evident why they are in the drama. They do not advance the action. Shakespeare preserves also Antony’s message to Octavius that if he was dissatisfied with the treatment of Thyreus he might hang or torture Antony’s freedman Hipparchus—a detestable piece of brutality which might well have been omitted.

Cleopatra is quite apart from Shakespeare’s other women. She is a most complicated and difficult study. Shakespeare takes over from Plutarch her wandering disguised through the streets at night with Antony; the voyage down the Cydnus; the hanging of the salt fish on Antony’s hook; the flight at Actium; the fact that she was mistress of Julius Cæsar and Cnæus Pompey; the second betrayal of the fleet; her petition to Octavius for her son; and her attempt to cheat Octavius in the account of her treasures. In addition Shakespeare makes her ‘hop forty paces through the public street.’ What could have induced him to invent this story? She threatens Charmian with bloody teeth; lets Thyreus kiss her hand, arousing thereby Antony’s rage. Thyreus tells her that Cæsar knows she did not embrace Antony from love but from fear, and she replies:

‘He is a god, and knows
What is most right: mine honour was not yielded,
But conquer’d merely.’

This may be mockery, but after she has let Thyreus kiss her she goes on:

‘Your Cæsar’s father oft,
When he hath mus’d of taking kingdoms in,
Bestow’d his lips on that unworthy place,
As it rain’d kisses.’

She reminds herself of this, fresh from Antony, who had just told her of Octavius’s offer to protect her if she would give up the ‘grizled head’ of her lover.

After Antony’s death she finds

‘nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.’

She tells Proculeius before he surprises her that she would gladly look Cæsar in the face, but she tries to stab herself, for,

‘Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinion’d at your master’s court;
Nor once be chastis’d with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! rather on Nilus’ mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring! rather make
My country’s high pyramides my gibbet,
And hang me up in chains!’

She asks Dolabella what Cæsar means to do with her, and when she learns that she is to be taken to Rome she recurs to the horror of the triumph.

‘Now, Iras, what think’st thou?
Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown
In Rome, as well as I: mechanick slaves
With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall
Uplift us to the view; in their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded,
And forced to drink their vapour.

Iras. The gods forbid!

Cleopatra. Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors
Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o’ tune; the quick comedians,
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ the posture of a whore.’

This was a motive for death, but it was not all. She reproves herself because she let Iras die first, because Antony will

‘make demand of her, and spend that kiss
Which is my heaven to have’;

and Antony is her last word.

Charmian declares her to be ‘a lass unparallel’d,’ of ‘royal eyes.’

It is impossible to shut this woman up within the limits of what we call a character, but why should we attempt it? Why cannot we be content with what we have before us? Shakespeare never defined his people to himself. In Cleopatra we have a new combination of the simple, eternal elements, a combination subtle, and beyond analysis. What celestial lights begin to play over this passion as the drama goes on!

Coriolanus.—We cannot help being sorry that Shakespeare should have gone out of his way to select such a subject. It leaves a disagreeable taste in the mouth. The aristocrat is overdone. No true aristocrat would talk such rant as Coriolanus talks in Act i. Sc. I. Shakespeare omits Plutarch’s account of the oppression of the plebeians, or only slightly alludes to it. Volumnia’s contempt for the people is worse than that of Coriolanus. To her they are not human, and she does not consider that common truthfulness is binding in her intercourse with them.

‘It lies you on to speak
To the people, not by your own instruction,
Nor by the matter which your heart prompts you,
But with such words that are but rooted in
Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables
Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth.’

Reading such passages as these we understand Whitman when he says that although Shakespeare is ‘of astral genius,’ he is ‘entirely fit for feudalism . . . is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism,’ and contains much which is ‘ever offensive to democracy.’

Winter’s Tale.—Coleridge is perhaps super-subtle in his discrimination between the jealousy of Leontes and that of Othello, which Coleridge will not call jealousy. But the difference is not greater than that between the two men. The passion of Leontes is roused simply by Hermione’s giving her hand to Polixenes. This common courtesy is ‘paddling palms.’ There is something contemptible in his transports: not so in the case of Othello. Leontes cursing Hermione in the presence of his lords is unendurable.

Leontes in his passion disbelieves the oracle.

‘There is no truth at all i’ the oracle:
The sessions shall proceed: this is mere falsehood.’

But he is reversed, suddenly, completely, when he is told his son is dead.

‘Apollo’s angry; and the heavens themselves
Do strike at my injustice.’

Perdita is brought up by a shepherd and talks like a well-educated patrician’s daughter. ‘O Proserpina,’ etc. Polixenes says to Camillo:

‘This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever
Ran on the green-sward: nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself,
Too noble for this place.’

Here again the emphasis on descent is exaggerated and we resent it.

Leontes after the statue is unveiled—

‘But yet, Paulina,
Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems.’

Who can read this without choking? Like Exeter in Henry V.:

‘I had not so much of man in me,
And all my mother came into mine eyes,
And gave me up to tears.’

Could I have continued to live when that music sounded and she descended? I think not. I should have sought pardon and death.

‘Now, in age,
Is she become the suitor?’

Who can—I will not say express, but dream a tenderness deeper than that? Sixteen years she had waited, and then she embraces him! It is difficult to divine Shakespeare, the man, in his plays and poems, but in this passage and one or two others resembling it he seems to be revealed.

Pericles.—The last act of Pericles, and especially the first scene, is Shakespeare at his highest.

‘O Helicanus, strike me, honour’d sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me,
O’erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.’

What can equal in purifying, regenerative power the fact that one human being can be so much to another? No theology, morality, or philosophy can bring a man so near to God.

Tempest.—Prospero’s pardon for those who had conspired against him proceeds from ‘our little life is rounded with a sleep.’

The Tempest is called a comedy, but it suggests a tragedy in Prospero’s return to Milan and the months or years he spent there till he died. For twelve years he had been on the island with Miranda, ‘a thrid of his own life,’ ‘that for which he lived,’ ‘the cherubin that did preserve him’ during his voyage, who raised in him

‘An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.’

He hears her, smitten with Ferdinand almost in a moment, declare to him:

‘I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you,
Nor can imagination form a shape,
Besides yourself, to like of’;

and she leaves her father and goes far away to Naples with her husband.

Ariel, whom Prospero had freed from his miserable enchantment, had never ceased to thirst for liberty and returns to the winds. Dearly had Prospero loved his delicate Ariel.

‘Why, that’s my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee;
But yet thou shalt have freedom: so, so, so.’

Caliban he had tried to reclaim, had taught him speech and to name the big and lesser light, but all his pains were ‘lost, quite lost,’ and the ‘born devil’ rewarded them by an attempt on Miranda’s chastity. He is left behind, master of the island again, to take up his abode in the cell which Prospero and Miranda had inhabited, and with the added experience of Stephano’s drink, which he probably soon learned to imitate.

Antonio, the usurping brother, is said to have been penitent, but his penitence was not profound. He offered no apology, and the first words he is recorded to have uttered after his guilt was discovered were a joke upon ‘the plain fish,’ Caliban. He was forgiven, and most likely once more became malignant.

There is nothing to show us that the citizens of Milan were in much trouble when Prospero was deposed, or that they rejoiced when he was restored. They, doubtless, regretted Antonio, who

‘Set all hearts i’ the state
To what tune pleased his ear.’

The lord of the spirits, of the elves who chased the ebbing Neptune, he who had given fire to the dread rattling thunder, broke his staff and drowned his book and went back to his lonely palace. Did he never long for his island, for Ariel’s music, for his daughter’s daily presence, replaced by infrequent letters with news of the Court, her children, and Ferdinand? He may have reflected that she was happy, but nevertheless every third thought was his grave.

Merchant of Venice.—Jessica is hateful from the beginning; the disguise in boy’s clothes, the robbery of her father, and the exchange for a monkey of the jewel which belonged to her mother. I am afraid Shakespeare intended we should like her. But she is only a part of the perplexity of the play. That Shakespeare should have used the casket story is inexplicable. Not only is it, as Johnson says, ‘wildly improbable,’ it confuses Portia’s character: it is an irritating absurdity.

‘But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis.’

We have no proof that Antonio did this. He may have done it. He was the kind of person who might like popularity. If he was really guilty of ‘low simplicity,’ I sympathise with Shylock’s hatred of him. But if he was not, I understand it. Shylock was not bound to be generous. It would have been ridiculous in him, an alien in blood and religion, persecuted, spat upon.

The interest of the play departs with Shylock.

Shakespeare’s plays are organic, one character cannot be understood without the other; Hamlet without Ophelia; Romeo without Juliet. Each is in, by, and of the other; particularised by the other. I do not find this quality, at least in anything like the same degree, in Beaumont and Fletcher.

Note the way in which Shakespeare’s characters—Macbeth, for example—unfold themselves by new circumstances, what unconjecturable development takes place.

When a serious defect presents itself in a living friend it seems to obtrude itself, press upon us, and affect our judgment more than if we see it in a play of Shakespeare’s. In the play the background of counterbalancing virtue is not obscured and forgotten. In actual life we lose sight of it.