One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on one important subject—that of poetry—as much of a bull in a china-shop as Ruskin was in art. Great friends as were he and Tennyson, the famous anecdote à propos of Tennyson's publication of The Idylls of the King—"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some work"—and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who, according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist of Chelsea and Ecclefechan.
A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. There was no subject, however remote from his knowledge or experience on which he would hesitate to pronounce, and if necessary bludgeon forth, his opinion. But in his case, there is one important distinction to be made, a distinction that has made him immortal.
He disported his huge bulk about the china-shop with such quaintness, with such engaging sturdiness of character, strangely displaying all the time so unique a wisdom of that world that lies outside and encloses all china-shops, so unparalleled a genius of common sense, oddly linked with that good old-time quality called "the fear of God," that in his case we felt that the china, after all, didn't matter, but that Dr. Samuel Johnson, "the great lexicographer," supremely did. His opinions of Scotsmen or his opinions of poetry in themselves amount to little—though they are far from being without their shrewd insight—and much of the china—such as Milton's poetry—among which he gambolled, after the manner of Behemoth, chanced to be indestructible. Any china he broke was all to the ultimate good of the china-shop. Yet, if we accept him so, is it not because he was such a wonderful bull in the china-shop of the world?
There have been other such bulls but hardly another so great, and with his name I will, for the moment at least, put personalities aside, and refer to droves rather than to individual bulls. A familiar type of the bull in the china-shop is the modern clergyman, who, apparently, insecure in his status of saint-hood, dissatisfied with that spiritual sphere which so many confiding human beings have given into his keeping, will be forever pushing his way like an unwelcome, yet quite unauthoritative, policeman, into that turmoil of human affairs—of which politics is a sort of summary—where his opinion is not of the smallest value, though, perforce, it is received with a certain momentary respect—as though some beautiful old lady should stroll up to a battery of artillery, engaged in some difficult and dangerous attack, and offer her advice as to the sighting and management of the guns. The modern clergyman's interference in the working out of the secular problems of modern life has no such picturesque beauty—and it is even less effective.
One would have thought that to have the care of men's souls would be enough. What a world of suggestiveness there was in the old phrase "a cure of souls"! Men's souls need saving as much today as ever. Perhaps they were never in greater danger. Therefore, as the proverbial place for the cobbler is his last, so more than ever the place for the clergyman is his church, his pulpit, and those various spiritual offices for which he is presumably "chosen." His vows do not call upon him either to be a politician or a matinée idol, nor is it his business to sow doubt where he is paid for preaching faith. If the Church is losing its influence, it is largely because of its inefficient interference in secular affairs, and because of the small percentage of real spirituality amongst its clergy.
But there is a worse intrusion than that of clergymen into secular affairs. There is the intrusion of the cheap atheist, the small materialistic thinker, into a sphere of which certainly no clergyman or priest has any monopoly, that sphere of what we call the spiritual life, which, however undemonstrable by physical tests, has been real to so many men and women whose intellects can hardly be called negligible, from Plato to Newman. I have too much respect for their courageous sincerity, their nobility of character, as well as for the necessary, if superficial, destructive work they did, when to do such work meant no little personal peril and obloquy to themselves, to class Robert Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh with the small fry that resemble them merely in their imitative negations; yet this is certainly true of both of them that they were bulls in the china-shop to this extent—that they confounded real religion with the defective historical evidences of one religion, and the mythologic assertions and incongruities of its sacred book. They did splendid work in their iconoclastic criticism of "the letter" that "killeth," but of "the spirit" that "giveth life" they seem to have had but little inkling. To make fun of Jonah and the whale, or "the Mistakes of Moses," had no doubt a certain usefulness, but it was no valid argument against the existence of God, nor did it explain away the mysterious religious sense in man—however, or wherever expressed. Neither Ingersoll nor Bradlaugh saw that the crudest Mumbo-Jumbo idolatry of the savage does really stand for some point of rapport between the seen and the unseen, and that, so long as the mysterious sacredness of life is acknowledged and reverenced, it matters little by what symbols we acknowledge it and do it reverence.
One may consider that the present age is an age of spiritual eclipse, though that is not the writer's opinion, and question with Matthew Arnold:
What girl
Now reads in her bosom as clear
As Rebekah read, when she sate
At eve by the palm-shaded well?
Who guards in her breast
As deep, as pellucid a spring
Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?
What bard,
At the height of his vision, can deem
Of God, of the world, of the soul,
With a plainness as near,
As flashing as Moses felt
When he lay in the night by his flock
On the starlit Arabian waste?
Can rise and obey
The beck of the Spirit like him.
Yet the sight of one who sees is worth more than the blindness of a hundred that cannot see. Some people are born with spiritual antennae and some without. There is much delicate wonder in the universe that needs special organizations for its apprehension. "One eye," you remember, that of Browning's Sordello—
one eye
In all Verona cared for the soft sky.