129. Now, as I have above told you, these two statements are given on the two sides of the same leaf; and the reader must make what he may of them. Setting the best of my own poor wits at them, it seems to me that the merciless abstraction of down is indeed the usual custom of the inhabitants and visitors; but that the 'good lady,' referred to by Mr. Shepherd, manages things differently; and in consequence we are presently farther told of her, (bottom of p. 65,) that "when she first became possessor of the island, the produce of down from the ducks was not more than fifteen pounds weight in the year; but under her careful nurture of twenty years it had risen to nearly one hundred pounds annually. It requires about one pound and a half to make a coverlet for a single bed, and the down is worth from twelve to fifteen shillings per pound. Most of the eggs are taken and pickled for winter consumption, one or two only being left to hatch."
But here, again, pulverulent Dr. Hartwig leaves us untold who 'consumes' all these pickled eggs of the cooing and downy-breasted creatures; (you observe, in passing, that an eider-duck coos instead of quacking, and must be a sort of Sea-Dove,) or what addition their price makes to the good old lady's feather-nesting income of, as I calculate it, sixty to seventy-five pounds a year,—all her twenty years of skill and humanity and moderate plucking having got no farther than that. And not feeling myself able, on these imperfect data, to offer any recommendations to the Icelandic government touching the duck trade, I must end my present chapter with a rough generalization of results. For a beginning of which, the time having too clearly and sadly come for me, as I have said in my preface, to knit up, as far as I may, the loose threads and straws of my raveled life's work, I reprint in this place the second paragraph of the chapter on Vital Beauty in the second volume of 'Modern Painters,' premising, however, some few necessary words.
130. I intended never to have reprinted the second volume of 'Modern Painters'; first, because it is written in affected imitation of Hooker, and not in my own proper style; and, secondly, yet chiefly, because I did not think the analytic study of which it mainly consists, in the least likely to be intelligible to the general student, or, therefore, profitable to him. But I find now that the 'general student' has plunged himself into such abysses, not of analytic, but of dissolytic,—dialytic—or even diarrhœic—lies, belonging to the sooty and sensual elements of his London and Paris life, that, however imperfectly or dimly done, the higher analysis of that early work of mine ought at least to be put within his reach; and the fact, somehow, enforced upon him, that there were people before he lived, who knew what 'æsthesis' meant, though they did not think that pigs' flavoring of pigs'-wash was ennobled by giving it that Greek name: and that there were also people before his time who knew what vital beauty meant, though they did not seek it either in the model-room, or the Parc aux Cerfs.
Therefore, I will republish (D.V.) the analytic parts of the second volume of 'Modern Painters' as they were written, but with perhaps an additional note or two, and the omission of the passages concerning Evangelical or other religious matters, in which I have found out my mistakes.
131. To be able to hunt for these mistakes, and crow over them, in the original volume, will always give that volume its orthodox value in sale catalogues, so that I shall swindle nobody who has already bought the book by bringing down its price upon them. Nor will the new edition be a cheap one—even if I ever get it out, which is by no means certain. Here, however, at once, is the paragraph above referred to, quite one of the most important in the book. The reader should know, preparatorily, that for what is now called 'æsthesis,' I always used, and still use, the English word 'sensation'—as, for instance, the sensation of cold or heat, and of their differences;—of the flavor of mutton and beef, and their differences;—of a peacock's and a lark's cry, and their differences;—of the redness in a blush, and in rouge, and their differences;—of the whiteness in snow, and in almond-paste, and their differences;—of the blackness and brightness of night and day, or of smoke and gaslight, and their differences, etc., etc. But for the Perception of Beauty, I always used Plato's word, which is the proper word in Greek, and the only possible single word that can be used in any other language by any man who understands the subject,—'Theoria,'—the Germans only having a term parallel to it, 'Anschauung,' assumed to be its equivalent in p. 22 of the old edition of 'Modern Painters,' but which is not its real equivalent, for Anschauung does not (I believe) include bodily sensation, whereas Plato's Theoria does, so far as is necessary; and mine, somewhat more than Plato's. "The first perfection," (then I say, in this so long in coming paragraph) of the theoretic faculty, "is the kindness and unselfish fullness of heart, which receives the utmost amount of pleasure from the happiness of all things. Of which in high degree the heart of man is incapable; neither what intense enjoyment the angels may have in all that they see of things that move and live, and in the part they take in the shedding of God's kindness upon them, can we know or conceive: only in proportion as we draw near to God, and are made in measure like unto Him, can we increase this our possession of charity, of which the entire essence is in God only. But even the ordinary exercise of this faculty implies a condition of the whole moral being in some measure right and healthy, and to the entire exercise of it there is necessary the entire perfection of the Christian character; for he who loves not God, nor his brother, cannot love the grass beneath his feet, and the creatures which live not for his uses, filling those spaces in the universe which he needs not; while, on the other hand, none can love God, nor his human brother, without loving all things which his Father loves; nor without looking upon them, every one, as in that respect his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than he, if, in the under concords they have to fill, their part be touched more truly. It is good to read of that kindness and humbleness of S. Francis of Assisi, who never spoke to bird or cicala, nor even to wolf and beast of prey, but as his brother; and so we find are moved the minds of all good and mighty men, as in the lesson that we have from the mariner of Coleridge, and yet more truly and rightly taught in the Hartleap Well:—
'Never to blend our pleasure, or our pride,
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.'
And again in the White Doe of Rylstone, with the added teaching, that anguish of our own
'Is tempered and allayed by sympathies,
Aloft ascending, and descending deep,