Miscellanies. By the Rev. James Martineau. Boston: Crosby & Nichols. 1 vol. 12mo.
Mr. Martineau has long been known to a numerous class of readers in this country as an eloquent preacher and essayist. The present volume is composed of philosophical essays, selected from his contributions to the Westminster and Prospective Reviews, and is edited by the Rev. Thomas S. King, of Boston, himself one of the most eloquent and accomplished of New England clergymen. Mr. Martineau’s sermons have been repeatedly reprinted, but this volume of Miscellanies conveys an impression of the independence and fertility of his mind and the reach of his acquisitions, which his sermons, with all their peculiar merit, would never give. It evinces not only an interest in all the social and religious problems which puzzle the present age, but a grasp of scholarship extending far back over the philosophies and literatures of other times and nations. The bent of his nature, however, is toward mental hospitality to the radical opinions of the day, and new thoughts, new hopes, even new paradoxes, are ever welcomed by his heart and disposition when his cool head doubts, discusses, demurs, and withholds its assenting judgment. He seems to have more sympathy for reformers than their productions, as his rich and various culture enables him to detect one-sidedness or superficiality in many a plan of amelioration, the spirit of which he approves. Both, however, in politics and religion he would be classed with the extremely “liberal” party; and though the conservative elements of his mind are, to a discriminating reader, visible in almost every page of the present volume, the author appears all the while desirous to share the glorious unpopularity of a class of thinkers with whom he but imperfectly sympathizes rather than to indicate his points of disagreement with their schemes and systems. He has a deep mental disgust for the moral timidity and intellectual feebleness which characterize so many of the fashionable and conventional thinkers on politics and theology, and is perhaps from this cause too apt to overlook defects in heretical systems in his admiration of the courage of the heretics. In his own words, “it is a dishonorable characteristic of the present age, that on its most marked intellectual tendencies is impressed a character of FEAR. While its great practical agitations exhibit a progress toward some positive and attainable good, all its conspicuous movements of thought seem to be retreats from some apprehended evil. The open plain of meditation, over which, in simpler times, earnest men might range with devout and unmolested hope, bristles all over with directions showing which way we are not to go. Turn where we may we see warnings to beware of some sophist’s pitfall, or devil’s ditch, or fool’s paradise, or atheist’s desert.”
This “despair of truth,” this intellectual cowardice, is more offensive to Mr. Martineau than unbelief itself. He describes the class of thinkers he most dislikes in one sentence of beautiful sharpness. “Checked and frightened,” he says, “at the entrance of every path on which they venture, they spend their strength in standing still; or devise ingenious proofs, that, in a world where periodicity is the only progress, retrogradation is the discreetest method of advance.” His whole volume is therefore a protest against the practice, common both in England and the United States, of erecting in the republic of thought a despotism of dullness and timidity, by which independent investigation is to be allowed only so far as it results in fortifying accredited systems, and a bounty is put on that worst form of disbelief, infidelity to the laws of thought, the monitions of conscience, and the beckonings of new and inspiring truths. But while he is properly angry at such noodleism as this, which, if unlashed and unrebuked, would reduce men of thought into a corporation of intellectual Jerry Sneaks, he does not appear to us properly to distinguish between that independence which seeks truth and that independence which is merely a blustering egotism, and ostentatious exhibition of the commonplaces of error. His discrimination is not always of that sort which detects through the verbal disguises of moral energy the unmistakable features of moral pertness. The charlatans of dignity and convention have provoked a corresponding clique of charlatans, who revel in the bravadoes of license and anarchy; and it is no part of a wise man’s duty to allow his disgust of one form of nonsense to tempt him into championship of another form, because it happens to be on the opposite extreme.
The defect of Mr. Martineau’s nature appears to be the dominion of the reflective portion of his nature over all its other powers. He is emphatically a thinker, but a thinker on subjects so allied to sentiment and passion, that some action should be combined with it, in order that the mind shall receive no morbid taint, be not “sicklied o’er” by a thought that broadens into unpractical comprehension. The fertility of his mind in thoughts is altogether out of proportion to the vigor of his nature, and though intellectually brave he is not intellectually robust. Hence a lack of muscle and nerve in his most beautiful paragraphs; hence the absence of electric force and condensed energy of expression in his finest statements; hence a certain sadness and languor in the atmosphere spread over his writings, the breathing of which does not invigorate the mind so much as it enlarges its view. He communicates thoughts, but he does not always communicate the inspiration to think.
Although these drawbacks prevent us from ranking him, as a writer, in the highest class—for a writer of the highest class impresses his readers by the force of his character as much as by the affluence of his conceptions and the beauties of his style—still Mr. Martineau ranks high among contemporary prose writers for the sweetness, clearness, pliancy and unity of his style, his happy felicities of imagery, his unostentatious intellectual honesty, and his command of all the rhetorical aids of metaphor, sarcasm and figurative illustration. His style is also strictly vital, the exact expression of his nature as well as opinions; but its melody is flute-like rather than clarion-like; is so consistently ornate and so tuned on one key, that commonplaces and originalities are equally clad in the same superb uniform, and move to the music of the same slow march; and the sad earnestness and languor, which we have mentioned as characterizing his will, steal mysteriously out from his exquisite periods, and pass into the reader’s mind like an invisible essence. Almost every professor of rhetoric would say that Mr. Martineau is a better writer than the Bishop of Exeter, a church dignitary for whom Mr. Martineau’s liberal mind has a natural antipathy. Mr. Martineau has evidently a larger command of words and images, more taste, more toleration, more intellectual conscientiousness and comprehension, a better metaphysician, a more trustworthy thinker, with less mosaic work in his logic, and less casuistry in his ethics. But behind all the Bishop of Exeter’s sentences is a great, brawny, hard-fisted, pugilistic, arrogant man, daring, confident, indomitable, with as much will as reason, and with all his opinions so thoroughly penetrated with the life-blood of his character that they have all the force of bigotry and prejudice. He is equally unreasonable and uncreative as a thinker, but his unreason has a vigor that Mr. Martineau’s reason lacks. Wielding with his strong arm some piece of medieval bigotry, he goes crashing on from sentence to sentence, angrily pummeling and buffeting his opponents—a theological “ugly customer,” who, when the rush of his coming is heard afar off, makes the adversaries he is approaching glance instinctively to the direction—“look out for the engine when the bell rings!” Mr. Martineau’s large understanding would be benefited by some of the Bishop’s will; and one is driven to the conclusion, that, a man of purely independent thought, who abides in conceptions of his own, entirely apart from authority, must be a genius of the first order to escape from that weakness of will which distinguishes the most adventurous of Mr. Martineau’s abstract and uninvigorating speculations.
Indeed, in all declamations about the advantages of strict individualism in matters of faith and speculation, there is not the right emphasis laid on the distinction between abstract and concrete ideas. A faith which rests on some union of authority with reason, which is connected with institutions, which combines the principle of obedience with that of liberty, may be narrow but it is sure to be strong, and if not distinguished by reach of thought will compensate for that deficiency by force of character. Mr. Martineau’s tendency is to the abstract, the impalpable, the unrealized in speculation, and spends much of his strength in supporting himself at the elevation of his thought. But as his thinking is not on the level of his character, he insensibly exalts opinion over life, and is more inclined to tolerate the excesses of unbridled and unreasonable egotism, than the prejudices of pious humility. As a thinker his mind demands breadth and largeness of view, and we hardly think he could be satisfied with a saint who was not something of a philosopher. But while he has a literary advantage over his adversaries, they have a personal advantage over him. In courage, even, there can be little doubt that the Bishop of Exeter is his superior, for all the coarser human elements which enter into courage Mr. Martineau lacks. Mr. Martineau has the courage to deny in his Review any proposition which any established church might proclaim; but he could not have assailed the Archbishop of Canterbury, and bearded Lord Campbell, like the bishop. The difference in the case is, that the bishop battled for a positive institution around which for years his affections and passions had clustered; while Mr. Martineau has no such inspiration to support the abstract conclusions of his intellect.
The subjects of the essays in this volume are Dr. Priestley, Dr. Arnold, Church and State, Theodore Parker’s Discourses of Religion, Phases of Faith, The Church of England, and the Battle of the Churches. Of these we have been particularly impressed with the analysis of the mental character of Priestley, the review of Mr. Parker, and the articles relating to the English Church. The essay on Dr. Arnold has something of the some merit which distinguishes that on Dr. Priestley; it is acute in the examination of principles but dull in the perception of character. Mr. Martineau is always strong in the explication of ideas and the statement and analysis of systems, but he constantly overlooks men in his attention to the opinions they champion and represent. The dramatic element not only does not exist in his mind, but he hardly accepts it as a possibility of the human intellect; and therefore he always fails in viewing ideas in connection with the individuality or nationality in which they have their root, and is accordingly often unintentionally intolerant to persons from his want of insight into the individual conditions of their intellectual activity. But we gladly hasten from these criticisms on his limitations to some examples of his peculiar merits as a writer. In speaking of Dr. Priestley’s intellectual processes as a scientific explorer and discoverer, he shrewdly remarks: “He was the ample collector of materials for discovery rather than the final discoverer himself; a sign of approaching order rather than the producer of order himself. We remember an amusing German play, designed as a satire upon the philosophy of atheism, in which Adam walks across the stage, going to be created; and, though a paradox, it may be said that truth, as it passed through Dr. Priestley’s mind, was going to be created.” In referring to the purely independent action of Dr. Priestley’s mind in the formation of his opinions, our analyst gives a fine statement of the real sources of most men’s “positive” knowledge and doctrines. “It would be difficult,” he says, “to select from the benefactors of mankind one who was less acted upon by his age; whose convictions were more independent of sympathy; in the whole circle of whose opinions you can set down so little to the prejudgments of education, to the attractions of friendship, to the perverse love of opposition, to the contagion of prevailing taste, or to any of the irregular moral causes which, independently of evidence, determine the course of human belief.” Again, how fine is his statement of the indestructibility of Christian faith: “Amid the vicissitudes of intellect, worship retains its stability; and the truth, which, it would seem, cannot be proved, is unaffected by an infinite series of refutations. How evident that it has its ultimate seat, not in the mutable judgments of the understanding, but in the native sentiments of Conscience and the inexhaustible aspirations of Affection! The Supreme certainly must needs be too true to be proved: and the highest perfection can appear doubtful only to sensualism and sin.”
“The Battle of the Churches,” the most exquisite in thought and style of all the essays in the volume, and well-known to most readers for its clear statement of the hold which Romanism has upon the affections of mankind, contains many examples of the fine irony and bland sarcasm which enter into the more stimulating ingredients of Mr. Martineau’s softly flowing diction. His statement of Comte’s Law of Progression, as followed by his view of the complicated theological discussions which now divide England into furious parties, is most demurely comical. “In 1822,” he commences, “a French philosopher discovered the grand law of human progression, revealed it to applauding Paris, brought the history of all civilized nations to pronounce it infallible, and computed from it the future course of European society. The mind of man, we are assured by Auguste Comte, passes by invariable necessity through three stages of development: the state of religion, or fiction; of metaphysics, or abstract thought; of science, or positive knowledge. No change in this order, no return upon its steps, is possible; the shadow cannot retreat upon the dial, or the man return to the nature of the child. Every one who is not behind the age will tell you, that he has outlived the theology of his infancy and the philosophy of his youth, to settle down on a physical belief in the ripeness of his powers. And so, too, the world, passing from myth to metaphysics, and from metaphysics to induction, begins with the Bible and ends with the ‘Cours de Philosophie Positive.’ To the schools of the prophets succeeds ‘L’Ecole Polytechnique;’ and our intellect, having surmounted the meridians of God and the Soul, culminates in the apprehension of material nature. Henceforth the problems so intensely attractive to speculation, and so variously answered by faith, retire from the field of thought. They have an interest, as in some sense the autobiography of an adolescent world: but they were never to return in living action upon the earth.”
We can only, in conclusion, recommend to our readers an examination of this volume, and to its editor a continuation of his well-rewarded labors in Mr. Martineau’s mine.