*****
It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting
shells than to be born a millionaire. Although neither is to be
despised, it is always better policy to learn an interest than to make
a thousand pounds; for the money will soon be spent, or perhaps you may
feel no joy in spending it; but the interest remains imperishable and
ever new. To become a botanist, a geologist, a social philosopher, an
antiquary, or an artist, is to enlarge one's possessions in the universe
by an incalculably higher degree, and by a far surer sort of property,
than to purchase a farm of many acres.
*****
He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches
against the day of riches; if prosperity come, he will not enter poor
into his inheritance; he will not slumber and forget himself in the lap
of money, or spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but be up and
briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which is not
that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into living delight and
satisfaction. ETRE ET PAS AVOIR--to be, not to possess--that is the
problem of life. To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and
money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in
all honourable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy,
to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity
of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or
unkindness--these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and
without which money can buy nothing.
*****
An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to
be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.
*****
'Mr. Archer was telling me in some strange land they used to run races
each with a lighted candle, and the art was to keep the candle burning.
Well, now, I thought that was like life; a man's good conscience is the
flame he gets to carry, and if he comes to the winning-post with that
still burning, why, take it how you will, the man is a hero--even if he
was low-born like you and me.'
*****
Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence. From first to
last, and in the face of smarting disillusions, we continue to
expect good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so
confidently, that we judge it needless to deserve them.
*****
'Do I, indeed, lack courage?' inquired Mr. Archer of himself. 'Courage,
the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand? Courage, that a
poor private carrying a musket has to spare of; that does not fail a
weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty? I to fail there, I wonder?
But what is courage? The constancy to endure oneself or to see others
suffer? The itch of ill-advised activity: mere shuttle-wittedness, or to
be still and patient? To inquire of the significance of words is to rob
ourselves of what we seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to
stand still is the least heroic.'
*****
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the
only end of life.
*****
But let the man learn to love a woman as far as he is capable of love;
and for this random affection of the body there is substituted a
steady determination, a consent of all his powers and faculties, which
supersedes, adopts, and commands the others. The desire survives,
strengthened, perhaps, but taught obedience, and changed in scope and
character. Life is no longer a tale of betrayals and regrets; for the
man now lives as a whole; his consciousness now moves on uninterrupted
like a river; through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he
remains approvingly conscious of himself.
Now to me, this seems a type of that righteousness which the soul
demands. It demands that we shall not live alternately with our opposing
tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some
path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each
other to a common end. It demands that we shall not pursue broken ends,
but great and comprehensive purposes, in which soul and body may unite,
like notes in a harmonious chord. That were indeed a way of peace and
pleasure, that were indeed a heaven upon earth. It does not demand,
however, or, to speak in measure, it does not demand of me, that I
should starve my appetites for no purpose under heaven but as a purpose
in itself; or, if in a weak despair, pluck out the eye that I have
not learned to guide and enjoy with wisdom. The soul demands unity
of purpose, not the dismemberment of man; it seeks to roll up all his
strength and sweetness, all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make
of him a perfect man exulting in perfection. To conclude ascetically is
to give up, and not to solve, the problem.
*****
The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always partly
closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above
our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and
pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in
their manner--which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called
a good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the
middle class--serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age
and, add a distinction to grey hairs. But their superiority is founded
more deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in
the march of man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they
have battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have
held their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and
harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's darts; we
can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed. Yet long before
we were so much as thought upon, the like calamity befel the old man or
woman that now, with pleasant humour, rallies us upon our inattention,
sitting composed in the holy evening of man's life, in the clear shining
after rain. We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse,
like villainous roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective,
under the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence
of contented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before
them 'like a thing reproved,' not the flitting and ineffectual fear
of death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and
revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in
the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene, marred
faces are more eloquent and tell another story. 'Where they have gone,
we will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured
unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make a shift to bear.
*****
If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him,
unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority
of his contemporaries, you must discredit in his eyes the authoritative
voice of his own soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never be
a man. It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard this babble and
chattering of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk
straight before us by what light we have. They may be right; but so,
before heaven, are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that
knowledge we must stand or fall. There is such a thing as loyalty to a
man's own better self; and from those who have not that, God help
me, how am I to look for loyalty to others? The most dull, the most
imbecile, at a certain moment turn round, at a certain point will hear
no further argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational
sense of right. It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt
and blame, that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul. Be glad
if you are not tried by such extremities. But although all the world
ranged themselves in one line to tell 'This is wrong,' be you your own
faithful vassal and the ambassador of God--throw down the glove and
answer, 'This is right.' Do you think you are only declaring yourself?
Perhaps in some dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully
understood, you are opening wider the straits of prejudice and preparing
mankind for some truer and more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as
you stand forth for your own judgment, you are covering a thousand
weak ones with your body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have
avoided the guilt of false witness against humanity and the little ones
unborn. It is good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to
respect oneself and utter the voice of God.
I think it worth noting how this optimist was acquainted with pain.
It will seem strange only to the superficial. The disease of pessimism
springs never from real troubles, which it braces men to bear, which it
delights men to bear well. Nor does it readily spring at all, in minds
that have conceived of life as a field of ordered duties, not as a chase
in which to hunt for gratifications.
*****
But the race of man, like that indomitable nature whence it sprang,
has medicating virtues of its own; the years and seasons bring various
harvests; the sun returns after the rain; and mankind outlives secular
animosities, as a single man awakens from the passions of a day. We
judge our ancestors from a more divine position; and the dust being a
little laid with several centuries, we can see both sides adorned with
human virtues and fighting with a show of right.
*****
It is a commonplace that we cannot answer for ourselves before we
have been tried. But it is not so common a reflection, and surely more
consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and
better than we thought. I believe this is every one's experience; but
an apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents
mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad. I wish
sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been some
one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger; to tell sue
how dangers are most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good
in a man's spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and rarely or
never deserts him in the hour of need. But we are all for tootling on
the sentimental flute in literature; and not a man among us will go to
the head of the march to sound the heady drums.
*****
It is a poor heart, and a poorer age, that cannot accept the conditions
of life with some heroic readiness.
*****
I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at any rate
judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider small perils in
the arrangement of life. Life itself I submitted, was a far too risky
business as a whole to make each additional particular of danger worth
regard.
*****
There is nothing but tit for tat in this world, though sometimes it be
a little difficult to trace; for the scores are older than we ourselves,
and there has never yet been a settling day since things were. You get
entertainment pretty much in proportion as you give. As long as we
were a sort of odd wanderers, to be stared at and followed like a quack
doctor or a caravan, we had no want of amusement in return; but as soon
as we sunk into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met were similarly
disenchanted. And here is one reason of a dozen why the world is dull to
dull persons.
*****
All literature, from Job and Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt
Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such
largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of
living to the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about the best
satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapour, or a
show, or made out of the same stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in its more
rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages; and after a myriad bald
heads have wagged over the problem, and piles of words have been heaped
one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy
has the honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her contribution
towards the subject: that life is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation.
Truly a fine result! A man may very well love beef, or hunting, or a
woman; but surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation!
He may be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a
club, or even an undertaker's man; but not certainly of abstract death.
We may trick with the word life in its dozen senses until we are weary
of tricking; we may argue in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but
one fact remains true throughout--that we do not love life in the sense
that we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not,
properly speaking, love life at all, but living.
*****
Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall--a mere bag's
end, as the French say--or whether we think of it as a vestibule or
gymnasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some
more noble destiny; whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little
atheistic poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look
justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a
bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and all of these views
and situations there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should
stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set
before him with a single mind.
As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good
man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise
our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not
at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage,
not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over
the past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world.
*****
It is not over the virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel that people
are abashed into high resolutions. It may be because their hearts are
crass, but to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory
with sonic pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our
sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing
moral influence, are more valuable to England than any material
benefit in all the books of political economy between Westminster and
Birmingham. Greenville chewing wine-glasses at table makes no very
pleasant figure, any more than a thousand other artists when they are
viewed in the body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his
finished tragedy, is an elegant performance; and I contend it ought not
only to enliven men of the sword as they go into battle, but send back
merchant-clerks with more heart and spirit to their book-keeping by
double entry.
*****
It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.
'It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost
every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice
is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud;
there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells
delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will
have some kind of a bull's-eye at his belt.
*****
For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may
hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside,
like Dancer's in the mysterious inwards of psychology. It may consist
with perpetual failure, and find exercise in the continued chase. It
has so little bond with externals (such as the observer scribbles in his
notebook) that it may even touch them not; and the man's true life, for
which he consents to live, lie altogether in the field of fancy. The
clergyman in his spare hours may be winning battles, the farmer sailing
ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading another
life, plying another trade from that they chose; like the poet's
house-builder, who, after all, is cased in stone,
'By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts,
Rebuilds it to his liking.'
In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul,
with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but
to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his
nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of
foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And
the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a
squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And
the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find
out where joy resides, and give it voice beyond singing.
*****
He who shall pass judgment on the records of our life is the same that
formed us in frailty.
*****
We are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and
castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel
soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of
Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we
must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed
world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without
discontent, and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be doing, to
be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment
in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing,
of which these are but the parts--namely, to live. We fall in love, we
drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep. And
now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have
been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. To sit
still and contemplate--to remember the faces of women without desire, to
be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and
everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain where and what you
are--is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with
happiness?
*****
Of those who fail, I do not speak--despair should be sacred; but
to those who even modestly succeed, the changes of their life bring
interest: a job found, a shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are
wells of pleasure springing afresh for the successful poor; and it is
not from these, but from the villa-dweller, that we hear complaints of
the unworthiness of life.
*****
I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct
man at large presents: of organised injustice, cowardly violence and
treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They
cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his
efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how
tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely
we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from
which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.
*****
Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled
with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded,
savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow
lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his
destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead
filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably
valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down amidst his momentary life,
to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up
to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and
his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing, with
long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery,
we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought
of duty, the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour,
to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were
possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not
stoop.
*****
There are two just reasons for the choice any way of life: the first
is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some high utility in the
industry selected.
*****
There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their
neighbours good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to
my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make
him happy--if I may.
*****
In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit
by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how
or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must
not ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he
must try to be good; somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will
do it, he must try to give happiness to others.
*****
Of this one thing I am sure: that every one thawed and became more
humanised and conversible as soon as these innocent people appeared upon
the scene. I would not readily trust the travelling merchant with any
extravagant sum of money, but I am sure his heart was in the right
place.
In this mixed world, if you can find one or two sensible places in a
man; above all, if you should find a whole family living together on
such pleasant terms, you may surely be satisfied, and take the rest for
granted; or, what is a great deal better, boldly make up your mind that
you can do perfectly well without the rest, and that ten thousand bad
traits cannot make a single good one any the less good.
*****
His was, indeed, a good influence in life while he was still among us;
he had a fresh laugh; it did you good to see him; and, however sad he
may have been at heart, he always bore a bold and cheerful countenance
and took fortune's worst as it were the showers of spring.
*****
Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because, like the quality
of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest. There
must always be two in a kiss, and there may be a score in a jest; but
wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is conferred with
pain, and, among generous people, received with confusion.
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By
being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain
unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody
so much as the benefactor.
*****
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note.
He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into
a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care
whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better
thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the
Liveableness of Life.
*****
Mme. Bazin came out after a while; she was tired with her day's work,
I suppose; and she nestled up to her husband and laid her head upon
his breast. He had his arm about her and kept gently patting her on the
shoulder. I think Bazin was right, and he was really married. Of how few
people can the same be said!
Little did the Bazins know how much they served us. We were charged for
candles, for food and drink, and for the beds we slept in. But there was
nothing in the bill for the husband's pleasant talk; nor for the
pretty spectacle of their married life. And there was yet another item
uncharged. For these people's, politeness really set us up again in our
own esteem. We had a thirst for consideration; the sense of insult was
still hot in our spirits; and civil usage seemed to restore us to our
position in the world.
How little we pay our way in life! Although we have our purses
continually in our hand, the better part of service goes still
unrewarded. But I like to fancy that a grateful spirit gives as good as
it gets. Perhaps the Bazins knew how much I liked them? perhaps they,
also, were healed of some slights by the thanks that I gave them in my
manner?
*****
No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has
not been mirthfully conceived. And no man, it may be added, was ever
anything but a wet blanket and a cross to his companions who boasted not
a copious spirit of enjoyment.
*****
There is yet another class who do not depend on corporal advantages, but
support the winter in virtue of a brave and merry heart. One shivering
evening, cold enough for frost, but with too high a wind, and a little
past sundown, when the Lamps were beginning to enlarge their circles
in the growing dusk, a brace of barefooted lassies were seen coming
eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as much as nine, the
other was certainly not more than seven. They were miserably clad; and
the pavement was so cold, you would have thought no one could lay a
naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along waltzing, if you
please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music. The person who
saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the moment, pocketed
a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and which he now
hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.
*****
Happiness, at least, is not solitary; it joys to communicate; it loves
others, for it depends on them for its existence; it sanctions and
encourages to all delights that are not unkind in themselves; if it
lived to a thousand, it would not make excision of a single humorous
passage; and while the self-improver dwindles toward the prig, and, if
he be not of an excellent constitution, may even grow deformed into
an Obermann, the very name and appearance of a happy man breathe of
good-nature, and help the rest of us to live.
*****
It is never a thankful office to offer advice; and advice is the more
unpalatable, not only from the difficulty of the service recommended,
but often from its very obviousness. We are fired with anger against
those who make themselves the spokesmen of plain obligations; for they
seem to insult us as they advise.
*****
We are not all patient Grizzels, by good fortune, but the most of us
human beings with feelings and tempers of our own.
*****
Men, whether lay or clerical, suffer better the flame of the stake
than a daily inconvenience or a pointed sneer, and will not readily be
martyred without some external circumstance and a concourse looking on.
*****
An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds
cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at
their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
*****
The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when we find ourselves
alone on a church top, with the blue sky and a few tall pinnacles, and
see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened buttresses, and the
silent activity of the city streets.
*****
Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is,
if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the
blues, go nowhere else.
*****
Honour can survive a wound; it can live and thrive without member. The
man rebounds from his disgrace; he begins fresh foundations on the ruins
of the old; and when his sword is broken, he will do valiantly with his
dagger.
*****
It is easy to be virtuous when one's own convenience is not affected;
and it is no shame to any man to follow the advice of an outsider who
owns that, while he sees which is the better part, he might not have the
courage to profit himself by this opinion.
*****
As soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal
fungus, it finds its expression in a paralysis of generous acts.
*****
The man who cannot forgive any mortal thing is a green hand in life.
*****
It is a useful accomplishment to be able to say NO, but surely it is the
essence of amiability to prefer to say YES where it is possible. There
is something wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he is
constrained to say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this born
dissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not
enough of them to be truly polar with humanity; whether you call him
demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for he
was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities. The world's heroes
have room for all positive qualities, even those which are disreputable,
in the capacious theatre of their dispositions. Such can live many
lives; while a Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetual
foresight.
*****
We can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be shown, not
his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we
are too blind.
*****
And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;
And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder, and dew;
And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;
And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock is fair.
Beneficent streams of tears flow at the finger of pain;
And out of the cloud that smites, beneficent rivers of rain.
*****
'The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear and
shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly perceive the
aspect and drift of his intention. The longest argument is but a finger
pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel, and we see what
the man meant, whether it be a new Star or an old street-lamp. And
briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is because we are
thinking of something else.
*****
I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe
they both get paid in the end, but the fools first.
*****
Whether people's gratitude for the good gifts that come to them be
wisely conceived or dutifully expressed is a secondary matter, after
all, so long as they feel gratitude. The true ignorance is when a man
does not know that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine
that he has got it for himself. The self-made man is the funniest
windbag after all! There is a marked difference between decreeing light
in chaos, and lighting the gas in a metropolitan back parlour with a box
of patent matches; and, do what we will, there is always something made
to our hand, if it were only our fingers.
*****
Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man, because he once paid
too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper
source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one.
*****
I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no more
nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for what
can be more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest
feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you
need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and
then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for
them is at an end.
*****
We had needs invent heaven if it had not been revealed to us; there are
some things that fall so bitterly ill on this side time!
*****
To write with authority about another man, we must have fellow-feeling
and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise
or blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can
be his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand
enter for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to which we
are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that
we respect or virtues that we admire.
*****
To the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who fairly pointed
out the incalculable influence of nomenclature upon the whole life--who
seems first to have recognised the one child, happy in an heroic
appellation, soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other,
like the dead sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by sheer weight
of name into the abysses of social failure.
*****
It would be well if nations and races could communicate their qualities;
but in practice when they look upon each other, they have an eye to
nothing but defects.
*****
Many a man's destiny has been settled by nothing apparently more grave
than a pretty face on the opposite side of the street and a couple of
bad companions round the corner.
*****
So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may arise from a
small degree of human reliance on oneself, and such, in particular, is
the happy star of this trade of writing, that it should combine pleasure
and profit to both parties, and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, and
useful, like good preaching.
*****
In all garrison towns, guard-calls, and reveilles, and such like, make a
fine, romantic interlude in civic business. Bugles, and drums, and fifes
are of themselves most excellent things in nature, and when they carry
the mind to marching armies and the picturesque vicissitudes of war they
stir up something proud in the heart.
*****
To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great and
dangerous step. With not a few, I think a large proportion of their
pleasure then comes to an end; 'the malady of not marking' overtakes
them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never again the
chime of fair words or the march of the stately period. NON RAGIONIAM of
these. But to all the step is dangerous; it involves coming of age; it
is even a kind of second weaning. In the past all was at the choice of
others; they chose, they digested, they read aloud for us and sang to
their own tune the books of childhood. In the future we are to approach
the silent, inexpressive type alone, like pioneers; and the choice of
what we are to read is in our own hands thenceforward.
*****
It remains to be seen whether you can prove yourselves as generous as
you have been wise and patient.
*****
'If folk dinna ken what ye're doing, Davie, they're terrible taken up
with it; but if they think they ken, they care nae mair for it than what
I do for pease porridge.'
*****
And perhaps if you could read in my soul, or I could read in yours, our
own composure might seem little less surprising.
*****
For charity begins blindfold; and only through a series of
misapprehensions rises at length into a settled principle of love and
patience, and a firm belief in all our fellow-men.
*****
There is no doubt that the poorer classes in our country are much more
charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth. And I fancy it must
arise a great deal from the comparative indistinction of the easy and
the not so easy in these ranks. A workman or a pedlar cannot shutter
himself off from his less comfortable neighbours. If he treats himself
to a luxury, he must do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. And what
should more directly lead to charitable thoughts? Thus the poor man,
camping out in life, sees it as it is, and knows that every mouthful he
puts in his belly has been wrenched out of the fingers of the hungry.
But at a certain stage of prosperity, as in a balloon ascent, the
fortunate person passes through a zone of clouds, and sublunary matters
are thenceforward hidden from his view. He sees nothing but the heavenly
bodies, all in admirable order, and positively as good as new. He finds
himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of
Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the
skylarks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so
unassuming in his open laudau! If all the world dined at one table, this
philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.
*****
Forgive me, if I seem to teach, who am as ignorant as the trees of the
mountain; but those who learn much do but skim the face of knowledge;
they seize the laws, they conceive the dignity of the design--the horror
of the living fact fades from the memory. It is we who sit at home with
evil who remember, I think, and are warned and pity.
*****
Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life; and
although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every step
of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me what
definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from
both to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is but
the shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never truly was; and you
yourself are altered beyond recognition. Times and men and circumstances
change about your changing character, with a speed of which no earthly
hurricane affords an image. What was the best yesterday, is it still the
best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow? Will your own Past truly
guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future? And if this be
questionable, with what humble, with what hopeless eyes, should we not
watch other men driving beside us on their unknown careers, seeing with
unlike eyes, impelled by different gales, doing and suffering in another
sphere of things?
*****
The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter.
Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and
profoundly than he speaks; and the best teachers can impart only broken
images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from one
to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two
experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is
for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is
in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
*****
Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field which is covered
by our knowledge, but by the nicety with which we can perceive relations
in that field, whether great or small.
*****
We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many
poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling
and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable
length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many
flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur,
but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This
literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this MALADIE DE RENE, as we
like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly
phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private
means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown
and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the
beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques,
and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires.
It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result,
among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our
little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom,
we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in not
the best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale
and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and
unremunerative labour; where a man in this predicament can afford a
lesson by the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, there
is plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by
teaching him to think differently. It is better to leave him as he is
than to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without
the cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing
sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight
against that hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of
consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and
they will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it,
above all, that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note,
and build the man up in courage while we demolish its substitute,
indifference.
*****
All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to truth. It
does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really
considered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled so far.
This does not apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the
road to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword
in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is
it the same thing as to have made one for yourself.
*****
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in
youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school
honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their
medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin
the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is
educating himself, or suffering others to educate him.... Books are good
enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for
life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a
mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality.
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will
have little time for thought.
*****
It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far
end of a telescope. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking
out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all
the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of
heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be
found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all
round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire
the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their
memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before
the week is out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play
the fiddle, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of
men. Many who have 'plied their book diligently,' and know all about
some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study
with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and
dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a
large fortune who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last.
And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with them--by
your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his
health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which
is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has
never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into
it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the student
afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his half-crowns,
for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of
Living?
*****
Nay, and the idler has another and more important quality than these. I
mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction
of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very
ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will
have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If
he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no
very burning falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much
frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace
Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense. Thence he shall command
an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while others behold the
East and West, the Devil and the sunrise, he will be contentedly aware
of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of
shadows running speedily and in many different directions into the great
daylight of Eternity.
*****
I begin to perceive that it is necessary to know some one thing to the
bottom--were it only literature. And yet, sir, the man of the world is a
great feature of this age; he is possessed of an extraordinary mass and
variety of knowledge; he is everywhere at home; he has seen life in all
its phases; and it is impossible but that this great habit of existence
should bear fruit.
*****
I am sorry indeed that I have no Greek, but I should be sorrier still if
I were dead; nor do I know the name of that branch of knowledge which
is worth acquiring at the price of a brain fever. There are many sordid
tragedies in the life of the student, above all if he be poor, or
drunken, or both; but nothing more moves a wise man s pity than the case
of the lad who is in too much hurry to be learned.
*****
'My friend,' said I, 'it is not easy to say who know the Lord; and it
is none of our business. Protestants and Catholics, and even those who
worship stones, may know Him and be known by Him; for He has made all.'
*****
Cheylard scrapes together halfpence or the darkened souls in Edinburgh;
while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoans the ignorance of Rome. Thus,
to the high entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with
evangelists, like schoolboys bickering in the snow.
*****
For courage respects courage; but where a faith has been trodden out, we
may look for a mean and narrow population.
*****
Its not only a great flight of confidence for a man to change his creed
and go out of his family for heaven's sake; but the odds are--nay, and
the hope is--that, with all this great transition in the eyes of man,
he has not changed himself a hairbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour to
those who do so, for the wrench is sore. But it argues something narrow,
whether of strength or weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in
those who can take a sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human
operations, or who can quit a friendship for a doubtful operation of the
mind. And I think I should not leave my old creed for another, changing
only words for words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit
and truth, and find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other
communions.
*****
It is not a basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and pistol-butts of a
regiment of horse, that can change one tittle of a ploughman's thoughts.
Outdoor rustic people have not many ideas, but such as they have are
hardy plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who has grown
a long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at
night, a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has,
in the end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and
amicable relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth Brother,
he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic;
it is the poetry of the man's existence, the philosophy of the history
of his life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has
appeared to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the
ground and essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds
and dogmas by authority, or proclaim, a new religion with the sound of
trumpets, if you will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and
will stubbornly adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a
Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a
man is not a woman, or a woman is not a man. For he could not vary from
his faith, unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a
strict and not conventional meaning, change his mind.
*****
For still the Lord is Lord of might;
In deeds, in deeds, he takes delight;
The plough, the spear, the laden barks,
The field, the founded city, marks;
He marks the smiler of the streets,
The singer upon garden seats;
He sees the climber in the rocks:
To him, the shepherd folds his flocks.
For those he loves that underprop
With daily virtues Heaven's top,
And bear the falling sky with ease,
Unfrowning caryatides.
Those he approves that ply the trade,
That rock the child, that wed the maid,
That with weak virtues, weaker hands,
Sow gladness on the peopled lands,
And still with laughter, song and shout,
Spin the great wheel of earth about.
*****
The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect,
clear, and stable like the earth. But let a man set himself to mark out
the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble and never
so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression
of the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he
has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed. Life may be
compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated forest;
circumstance is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language much more
inexact than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and
are renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole
world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time. Look
now for your shadows. O man of formulae, is this a place for you? Have
you fitted the spirit to a single case? Alas, in the cycle of the ages
when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of man? Now
when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood is filled with an
innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing; and
at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes new. Can you or your
heart say more?
*****
Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a difference; and
especially in these high matters, where we have all a sufficient
assurance that, whoever may be in the wrong, we ourselves are not
completely right.... I know right well that we are all embarked upon
a troublesome world, the children of one Father, striving in many
essential points to do and to become the same.
