And now the dream is lived through, and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau awakens in his own palace: not much better pleased with his own plain speaking than with the imaginary heroics of Messrs. Hugo and Thiers. "One's case is so much stronger before it is put into words. Motives which seem sufficient in the semi-darkness of one's own consciousness, are so feeble in the light of day. When we reason with ourselves, we subordinate outward claims without appearing to do so: since the necessity of making the best of life for our own sake supplies unconsciously to ourselves the point of view from which all our reasonings proceed. When forced to think aloud, we stoop to what is probably an untruth. We say that our motives were—what they should have been; what perhaps we have fancied them to be."
These closing pages convey the author's comment on Prince Hohenstiel's defence. They present it, in his well-known manner, as what such a man might be tempted to say; rather than what this particular man was justified in saying. But he takes the Prince's part in the lines beginning,
"Alack, one lies oneself
Even in the stating that one's end was truth," (p. 209.)
for they farther declare that though we aim at truth, our words cannot always be trusted to hit it. The best cannon ever rifled will sometimes deflect. Words do this also. We recognize the conviction of the inadequacy of language which was so forcibly expressed in the Pope's soliloquy in "The Ring and the Book," but in what seems a more defined form.
"BISHOP BLOUGRAM'S APOLOGY."
"Bishop Blougram's Apology" is a defence of religious conformity in those cases in which the doctrines to which we conform exceed our powers of belief, but ate not throughout opposed to them; its point of view being that of a Roman Catholic churchman, who has secured his preferment by this kind of compromise. It is addressed to a semi-freethinker, who is supposed to have declared that a man who could thus identify himself with Romish superstitions must be despised as either knave or fool; and Bishop Blougram has undertaken to prove that he is not to be thus despised; and least of all by the person before him.
The argument is therefore special-pleading in the full sense of the word; and it is clear from a kind of editor's note with which the poem concludes, that we are meant to take it as such. But it is supposed to lie in the nature of the man who utters, as also in the circumstance in which it is uttered: for Bishop Blougram was suggested by Cardinal Wiseman;[[57]] and the literary hack, Gigadibs, is the kind of critic by whom a Cardinal Wiseman is most likely to be assailed: a man young, shallow, and untried; unused to any but paper warfare; blind to the deeper issues of both conformity and dissent, and as much alive to the distinction of dining in a bishop's palace as Bishop Blougram himself. The monologue is spoken on such an occasion, and includes everything which Mr. Gigadibs says, or might say, on his own side of the question. We must therefore treat it as a conversation.
Mr. Gigadibs' reasoning resolves itself into this: "he does not believe in dogmas, and he says so. The Bishop cannot believe in them, but does not say so. He is true to his own convictions: the Bishop is not true to his." And the Bishop's defence is as follows.