Part 13

A world without a contingency or an agony could have no hero and no saint, and enable no Son of Man to discover that he was a Son of God. But for the suspended plot, that is folded in every life, history is a dead chronicle of what was known before as well as after; art sinks into the photograph of a moment, that hints at nothing else; and poetry breaks the cords and throws the lyre away. There is no Epic of the certainties; and no lyric without the surprise of sorrow and the sigh of fear. Whatever touches and ennobles us in the lives and in the voices of the past is a divine birth from human doubt and pain. Let then the shadows lie, and the perspective of the light still deepen beyond our view; else, while we walk together, our hearts will never burn within us as we go, and the darkness as it falls, will deliver us into no hand that is Divine.

JAS. MARTINEAU (_Hours of Thought_, 1, 328).

The subject of the sermon is the _uncertainties_ of life, the perils and catastrophies that cannot be foreseen or provided for, death, disease, and other ills which may fall upon us at any moment, the crises that arise in the history of men and nations. It is by reason of these that _character_ is formed. If everything happened by known rule, and could be predicted as surely as the movements of the stars, we should have no affections or emotions and would be mere creatures of habit.

From a recent book of poems, _The Lily of Malud_, by J. C. Squire, I take the following musical verse. (“The Stronghold” is where pain, hate, and all unpleasant things are excluded and peace only reigns.)

But O, if you find that castle, Draw back your foot from the gateway, Let not its peace invite you, Let not its offerings tempt you, For faded and decayed like a garment, Love to a dust will have fallen, And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow, And hope will have gone with pain; And of all the throbbing heart’s high courage Nothing will remain.

Martineau not only did important work in philosophy, but he was also eminent as a moral teacher. Taking together his originality, sublimity of soul, and beauty of expression, the sermons in _Hours of Thought_ and other similar writings are the finest product of modern religious thought. They indeed stand among the best productions of our _literature_, and should be read even by those (if there are any such persons) who love literature and thought but are indifferent to religion. To illustrate this, I choose—almost at random—a passage where the thought itself has no interest outside religion (_Hours of Thought_, II. 334):—

Worship is the free offering of ourselves to God; ever renewed, because ever imperfect. It expresses the consciousness that we are His by right, yet have not duly passed into His hand; that the soul has no true rest but in Him, yet has wandered in strange flights until her wing is tired. It is her effort to return home, the surrender again of her narrow self-will, her prayer to be merged in a life diviner than her own. It is at once the lowliest and loftiest attitude of her nature: we never hide ourselves in ravine so deep; yet overhead we never see the stars so clear and high. The sense of saddest estrangement, yet the sense also of eternal affinity between us and God meet and mingle in the act; breaking into the strains, now penitential and now jubilant, that, to the critic’s reason, may sound at variance but melt into harmony in the ear of a higher love. This twofold aspect devotion must ever have, pale with weeping, flushed with joy; deploring the past, trusting for the future; ashamed of what is, kindled by what is meant to be; shadow behind, and light before. Were we haunted by no presence of sin and want, we should only browse on the pasture of nature; were we stirred by no instinct of a holier kindred, we should not be drawn towards the life of God.

* * * * *

GROWN UP.

My son is straight and strong, Ready of lip and limb; ’Twas the dream of my whole life long To bear a son like him.

He has griefs I cannot guess, He has joys I cannot know: I love him none the less— With a man it should be so.

But where, where, where Is the child so dear to me, With the silken-golden hair Who sobbed upon my knee?

ELIZABETH WATERHOUSE.

* * * * *

For her alone the sea-breeze seemed to blow, For her in music did the white surf fall, For her alone the wheeling birds did call Over the shallows, and the sky for her Was set with white clouds far away and clear, E’en as her love, this strong and lovely one, Who held her hand, was but for her alone.

AUTHOR NOT TRACED (_Perseus and Andromeda_).

* * * * *

He cometh not a king to reign; The world’s long hope is dim; The weary centuries watch in vain The clouds of heaven for Him.

And not for sign in heaven above Or earth below they look, Who know with John His smile of love, With Peter His rebuke.

In joy of inward peace, or sense Of sorrow over sin, He is His own best evidence His witness is within.

The healing of His seamless dress, Is by our beds of pain; We touch Him in life’s throng and press, And we are whole again.

O Lord and Master of us all! Whate’er our name or sign, We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, We test our lives by Thine....

Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord, What may Thy service be?— Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word, But simply following Thee.

We faintly hear, we dimly see, In differing phrase we pray; But, dim or clear, we own in Thee, The Light, the Truth, the Way!

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (_Our Master_).

Many verses are omitted from this poem for want of space, and the last two are transposed in order.

* * * * *

’Tis weary watching wave by wave, And yet the Tide heaves onward, We climb, like Corals, grave by grave, That pave a pathway sunward;

We are driven back, for our next fray A newer strength to borrow, And, where the Vanguard camps To-day, The Rear shall rest To-morrow.

GERALD MASSEY (_To-day and To-morrow_).

* * * * *

Where gods are not, spectres rule.

* * * * *

Where children are is a golden age.

* * * * *

A people, like a child, is a separate educational problem.

NOVALIS.

* * * * *

Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, _not_ a false imagining, an unreal character—but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature—loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by a divine gift of prophecy—like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a vision, standing, clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right hand of God—as he has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious foresight unveil to us this resurrection form of the friends with whom we daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity, we should follow them with faith and reverence through all the disguises of human faults and weaknesses, “waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.”

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (_The Minister’s Wooing_).

* * * * *

Because thou hast the power and own’st the grace To look through and behind this mask of me, (Against which years have beat thus blanchingly With their rains) and behold my soul’s true face, The dim and weary witness of life’s race,— Because thou hast the faith and love to see, Through that same soul’s distracting lethargy, The patient angel waiting for a place In the new Heavens,—because nor sin nor woe, Nor God’s infliction, nor death’s neighbourhood, Nor all which others viewing, turn to go, Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed,— Nothing repels thee, ... Dearest, teach me so To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!

E. B. BROWNING (_Sonnets from the Portuguese_).

Here two fine thoughts of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Browning are inspired by the vision of Monica, the saintly mother of the great St. Augustine (354-430).

This is a good illustration of the need of notes. Without a reference to St. Monica’s vision, I think that readers would be repelled, rather than attracted, by Mrs. Browning’s sonnet. It does not accord with one’s sense of modesty that a lady should say to her lover, “My unattractive person and incurable illness turned other men away, but you saw that, behind all this, I was ‘a patient _angel_ waiting for a place in the new Heavens.’” I myself could not understand how Mrs. Browning could write and her husband could publish this poem, until Hodgson, in one of his letters to me, referred to “the use made by Mrs. Browning of St. Monica’s vision in one of her sonnets.”

The sonnet is not quoted as one of the finest of the series.

I have placed Mrs. Stowe’s quotation first for an obvious reason; but _The Minister’s Wooing_ was published in 1859, while the sonnet appeared in 1847.

* * * * *

Death is the ocean of immortal rest; ... Where shines ’mid laughing waves a far-off isle for me

Why fear? The light wind whitens all the brine, And throws fresh foam upon the marble shores; Or it may be that strong and strenuous oars Must force the shallop o’er the hyaline; But, welcome utter calm or bitter blast,— The voyage will be done, the island reached at last.

...

Will it be thus when the strange sleep of Death Lifts from the brow, and lost eyes live again? Will morning dawn on the bewildered brain, To cool and heal? And shall I feel the breath Of freshening winds that travel from the sea, And meet thy loving, laughing eyes, Earine?

...

O virgin world! O marvellous far days! No more with dreams of grief doth love grow bitter Nor trouble dim the lustre wont to glitter In happy eyes. Decay alone decays; A moment—death’s dull sleep is o’er and we Drink the immortal morning air, Earine.

MORTIMER COLLINS.

* * * * *

We live in a world, where one fool makes many fools, but one wise man only a few wise men.

LICHTENBERG.

* * * * *

O Lady! We receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Dejection_).

See note to next quotation.

* * * * *

TELLING STORIES.

A little child He took for sign To them that sought the way Divine.

And once a flower sufficed to show The whole of that we need to know.

Now here we lie, the child and I, And watch the clouds go floating by,

Just telling stories turn by turn.... Lord, which is teacher, which doth learn?

H. D. LOWRY.

As Coleridge says in the last quotation, “We receive but what we give.” We bring with us the mind that sees, and the feelings and emotions with which we contemplate the universe; and, so far as use, habit, and other causes still the activity and lessen the receptivity of the mind and spirit, the world around us becomes less instinct with life and beauty.

Putting aside the question whether, as Wordsworth says in his great Ode,

Trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home,

it will be familiar to anyone who has a sympathetic, appreciative sense that the _child’s_ outlook on the world around him is very different from our own. It has in him a more intense emotional reaction. He sees it with a freshness and wonder unfelt by us, because our sensibility is blunted and less vivid. And for the same reason that we trust our faculties in their prime rather than in their degeneration, so the fresh and clear emotional response of a child’s nature represents more _truthful_ appreciation than our own. Our sensibility is blunted, not only by use and habit, but also by the hardening and coarsening experiences of our lives; and also again by the development of intellect, which grows largely at the expense of the emotions. We lose the transparent soul of the child, his simple faith and trusting nature. To anyone who cannot _feel_ the difference between the child’s outlook and his own, this will convey no meaning—and words cannot assist him. It is as if one tried to describe love to a person who has never loved, or a religious experience to one who has never had such an experience, indeed, in both love and religious experience, there is the same child-like attitude of pure emotion; and hence Christ’s comparison of His true followers to “little children.” Poetry, music, love of nature, and the highest art produce in us at times the same indefinable feeling and give us back for evanescent periods the fresh, clear, emotional sensibility of a child.

In Edward Fitzgerald’s _Euphranor_, at the point where Wordsworth’s ode is being discussed, the following passage is interesting:—

“I have heard tell of another poet’s saying that he knew of no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant’s eyes; and how it was from those of his own he learned that those of the Divine Child in Raffaelle’s Sistine Madonna were not overcharged with expression, as he had previously thought they might be.”

“Yes,” said I, “that was on the occasion, I think, of his having watched his child one morning _worshipping the sunbeam on the bedpost_—I suppose the worship of wonder.... If but the philosopher or poet could live in the child’s brain for a while!”

(The poet referred to was Tennyson, see Memoir by his son, the baby in question, Vol. I., 357).

* * * * *

THE REVELATION

An idle poet, here and there, Looks round him; but, for all the rest, The world, unfathomably fair, Is duller than a witling’s jest.

Love wakes men, once a life-time each; They lift their heavy heads and look; And, lo, what one sweet page can teach They read with joy, then shut the book.

And some give thanks, and some blaspheme, And most forget: but, either way, That, and the Child’s unheeded dream, Is all the light of all their day.

COVENTRY PATMORE (1823-1896).

* * * * *

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself![21] To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily, through long years of the foretime, hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along, and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.

WILLIAM JAMES (_The Varieties of Religious Experience_).

* * * * *

Et in Arcadia ego.

(I too have been in Arcady.)

ANON.

Arcadia was a mountainous district in Greece which was taken to be the deal of pastoral simplicity and rural happiness—as in Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ and other literature. It was famous for its musicians and a favourite haunt of Pan.

The saying is best known from the fine landscape in the Louvre by N. Poussin (1594-1665). In part of the landscape is a tomb on which these words are written, and some young people are seen reading them. I learn, however, from _King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations_ that the words had been previously written on a picture by Bart. Schidone (1570-1615), where two young shepherds are looking at a skull.

The meaning intended was that _death_ came even to the joyous shepherds of Arcady. But the quotation is now used in a more general sense. “I too had my golden days of youth and love and happiness.”

* * * * *

It often happens that those are the best people, whose characters have been most injured by slanderers; as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

ALEXANDER POPE.

* * * * *

There are many flowers of heavenly origin in this world; they do not flourish in this climate but are properly heralds, clear-voiced messengers of a better existence: Religion is one; Love is another.

NOVALIS.

* * * * *

ON DYING

I always made an awkward bow.

KEATS.

* * * * *

On n’a pas d’antécédent pour cela. Il faut improviser—c’est donc si difficile. (Death admits of no rehearsal.)

AMIEL.

* * * * *

C’est le maître jour; c’est le jour juge de tous les autres. (It is the master-day; the day that judges all the others.)

MONTAIGNE.

* * * * *

Will she return, my lady? Nay: Love’s feet, that once have learned to stray, Turn never to the olden way.

Ah, heart of mine, where lingers she? By what live stream or saddened sea? What wild-flowered swath of sungilt lea

Do her feet press, and are her days Sweet with new stress of love and praise, Or sad with echoes of old lays?

JOHN PAYNE (_Light o’ Love_).

* * * * *

I search but cannot see What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known The gain of every life. ... I say, I cannot think that gains—which will not be Except a special soul had gained them—that such gain Can ever be estranged, do aught but appertain Immortally, by right firm, indefeasible, To who performed the feat, through God’s grace and man’s will.

R. BROWNING (_Fifine at the Fair_).

* * * * *

Nature, they say, doth dote And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan Repeating us by rote.

J. R. LOWELL (_Ode at Harvard Commemoration_).

* * * * *

Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower, where I thought a flower would grow.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

* * * * *

Why describe our life-history as a state of waking rather than of sleep? Why assume that sleep is the acquired, vigilance the normal condition? It would not be hard to defend the opposite thesis. The newborn infant might urge with cogency that his habitual state of slumber was primary, as regards the individual, ancestral as regards the race; resembling at least, far more closely than does our adult life, a primitive or protozoic habit. “Mine,” he might say, “is a centrally stable state. It would need only some change in external conditions (as the permanent immersion in a nutritive fluid) to be safely and indefinitely maintained. Your waking state, on the other hand, is centrally unstable. While you talk and bustle around me you are living on your physiological capital, and the mere prolongation of vigilance is torture and death.”

A paradox such as this forms no part of my argument; but it may remind us that physiology at any rate hardly warrants us in speaking of our waking state as if that alone represented our true selves, and every deviation from it must be at best a mere interruption. Vigilance in reality is but one of two co-ordinate phases of our personality, which we have acquired or differentiated from each other during the stages of our long evolution.

F. W. H. MYERS (_Multiplex Personality_).

This is from an article in _The Nineteenth Century_ for November, 1886, in which Myers urged the study of the trance-personalities that exhibit themselves under hypnotism. In his _Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death_ his views on sleep may be very briefly summarized as follows: In the low forms of animal life there is an undifferentiated state, neither sleep nor waking, and this is also seen in our prenatal and earliest infantile life. In life generally the waking time can exist only for brief periods continuously. We cannot continue life without resort to the fuller vitality which sleep brings to us. Again, from the original undifferentiated state, our waking life has been developed by practical needs; the faculties required for our earthly life then become intensified, but by natural selection other faculties and sensations (including those which connect us with the spiritual world) are dropped out of our consciousness. The state of sleep cannot be regarded as the mere _absence of waking faculties_. In this state we have some faint glimmer of the other faculties and sensations in various forms—dreams, somnambulism, etc. Myers then develops the theory that the relations of hysteria and _genius_ to ordinary life correspond to those of somnambulism and hypnotic trance to sleep; and he arrives at the question of self-suggestion and hypnotism generally.

Thus in sleep there are, _first_, certain physiological changes (including a greater control of the physical organism, as seen in the muscular powers of somnambulists); no length of time spent lying down awake in darkness and silence will give the recuperative effect that even a few moments of sleep will give. But also, _secondly_, we find existing in sleep the other faculties withdrawn from use in ordinary waking life. Thus during sleep we find memory revived, problems unexpectedly solved, poems like “Kubla Khan” composed, and many intense sensations and emotions experienced. Beyond these powers again Myers finds in sleep still higher powers which seem to connect us with the spiritual world. Hence the advisability of studying the phenomena of sleep and investigating it _experimentally_ by employing hypnotism.