Part 26
The remarkably fine and suggestive essay in which this passage occurs was written in 1876, in the course of a discussion raised by Tyndall’s Belfast Address. It is not easy to appreciate the speculation that Martineau offers in direct opposition to the theory of Darwinism without reading his preceding argument.
It may be well to begin with a quotation from his sermon, “Perfection, Divine and Human”: “However vast and majestic the uniformities of nature, they are nevertheless finite: science counts them one by one; a completed science would count them all. God, however, is not finite; He lives out beyond the legislation He has made; and His thought, which defines the rules of matter, does not transmigrate into them and cease else-how to be; _but merely flings out the law as an emanating act, and Himself abides behind as Thinking Power_.”
In the present essay Martineau first develops the argument that there is only one Power that exercises all the forces in the universe, whether mechanical, chemical, or vital. That power is God, the Indwelling Mind of the world. He is of like nature to (although infinitely higher than) His highest product, which is conscious, thinking, and willing man. Seeing that God and man are alike in their natures, Martineau proceeds to draw an analogy between the history of the world and the history of man’s own development. The Divine Mind at first _consciously_ exercises the forces that we know as gravitation, cohesion, chemical attraction, etc.; just as, to take a simple example, a baby has at first consciously to use its muscles and balance its body in the process of walking. Later the baby, having formed the _habit_, does all this _unconsciously_ and, while walking, can pay attention to other matters. So the Indwelling Mind of the world forms its _habits_ which we know as the laws of gravitation, etc., and is free to attend to higher and higher objects. In this progress there is no evolution of the organic from the inorganic, or of the higher from the lower forms of life. Inorganic matter, having become subject to fixed laws, is precipitated and dropped out of further conscious effort; also each lower form of life is similarly laid aside as the Indwelling Mind proceeds to the higher forms, until finally man is reached. The highest result thus arrived at is the production of conscious _Mind_. All this involves what is usually known as Special Creation, and the idea of “God at His working-bench” creating one species after another is regarded as absurd. But it is not absurd on Martineau’s argument, because the Indwelling Mind is constantly doing the whole work of the world (and also because a fact to be accounted for by any theory is that a higher form of existence _appears_ whenever the environment is suitable). In the present state of our knowledge Martineau’s speculation cannot be proved or disproved, but it may contain the germ of a true scheme of the universe—which scheme is yet far to seek. In any case, he makes the important point that the nature of _power_ in the world must be judged from the best thing it has done—namely, the _minds_ it has produced. The idea of a blind, unconscious force is incompatible with the fact that _that force has produced conscious mind_. It is the same argument as the Psalmist uses, “He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see? He that teacheth man knowledge, shall not He know?” (Ps. xciv, 9, 10.) The following (by whom written I do not know) has the same idea: “Every thing is a thought, and bears a relation to the thought that placed it there, and the thought that finds it there.” It is interesting to consider Martineau’s suggestion with that of William James on p. 165.
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There’s lifeless matter; add the power of shaping, And you’ve the crystal: add again the organs, Wherewith to subdue sustenance to the form And manner of one’s self, and you’ve the plant: Add power of motion, senses, and so forth, And you’ve all kind of beasts; suppose a pig: To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff, Then you have man. What shall we add to man, To bring him higher?
T. L. BEDDOES (1803-1849) (_Death’s Jest-Book_, V. 2).
_Death’s Jest-Book_ was published in 1850, after Beddoes’ death; _The Origin of Species_ appeared in 1859: the passage is, therefore, curious. In suggesting, however, development by the addition of faculties, it affords no explanation how those faculties came to be added.
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“OUTLANDISH PROVERBS”
Love rules his kingdom without a sword. He plays well that wins. The offender never pardons. Nothing dries sooner than a tear. Three women can hold their peace—if two are away. A woman conceals what she knows not. Saint Luke was a Saint and a Physician, yet is dead.[43] Were there no hearers, there would be no backbiters. He will burn his house to warm his hands. The buyer needs a hundred eyes, the seller not one. Ill ware is never cheap. Punishment is lame—but it comes. Gluttony kills more than the sword.[44] The filth under the white snow the sun discovers. You cannot know wine by the barrel. At length the fox is brought to the furrier. Love your neighbour, yet pull not down your hedge. None is a fool always, every one sometimes.[45] In a great river great fish are found, but take heed lest you be drowned. I wept when I was born, and every day shows why. The honey is sweet, but the bee stings. Gossips are frogs, they drink and talk. He is a fool that thinks not that another thinks. He that sows, trusts in God. He that hath one hog makes him fat, and he that hath one son makes him a fool.
Where your will is ready, your feet are light. A fair death honours the whole life. To a good spender God is the treasurer. The choleric man never wants woe. Love makes a good eye squint. He that would have what he hath not should do what he doth not. A wise man cares not for what he cannot have. The fat man knoweth not what the lean thinketh. In every country dogs bite. None says his garner is full. To a close-shorn sheep, God gives wind by measure.[46] Silks and satins put out the fire in the chimney. Lawyers’ houses are built on the heads of fools. It is better to have wings than horns. We have more to do when we die than we have done.
GEORGE HERBERT’S _Jacula Prudentum_.
The reader may not know of the “saintly Herbert’s” collection of “Outlandish Proverbs, Sentences, etc.” from which the few examples above are taken.
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AVALON.
We seek a land beneath the early beams Of stars that rise beyond the sunset gate, Where all the year the twilight lingers late, Athwart whose coast the last-born sunray gleams. Fair are the fields and full of pleasant streams, Far sound the hedge-rows with the burgher bees, Soft are the winds and taste of southern seas, Night brings no longing there, and sleep no dreams. O tillerman, steer true, while we, who bow Above the oar-shafts, sing the land we seek, Land of the past, its rapture and its ruth; Future we ask none, we are memories now, We bear the years whose lips no longer speak, And round our galley’s prow the name is Youth.
ROBERT CAMERON ROGERS (b. 1862).
An American author who wrote the well-known song, “The Rosary.”
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IF I COULD HOLD YOUR HANDS
If I could hold your hands to-night, Just for a little while, and know That only I, of all the world, Possessed them so:
A slender shape in that old chair, If I could see you here to-night, Between me and the twilight pale— So light and frail,
Your cool white dress, its folding lost In one broad sweep of shadow grey; Your weary head just drooped aside, That sweet old way,
Bowed like a flower-cup dashed with rain, The darkness crossing half your face, And just the glimmer of a smile For one to trace:
If I could see your eyes that reach Far out into the farthest sky, Where past the trail of dying suns The old years lie:
Or touch your silent lips to-night, And steal the sadness from their smile, And find the last kiss they have kept This weary while:
If it could be—Oh, all in vain The restless trouble of my soul Sets, as the great tides of the moon, Toward your control!
In vain the longings of the lips, The eye’s desire and the pain; The hunger of the heart—O love, _Is_ it in vain?
ANON.
* * * * *
A Cibo biscocto, A medico indocto, Ab inimico reconciliato, A mala muliere Libera nos, Domine.
(From twice-cooked food, from an ignorant doctor, from a reconciled enemy, from a wicked woman, Lord, deliver us.)
_Old Monkish Litany._
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CONSTANCY REWARDED
I vowed unvarying faith, and she, To whom in full I pay that vow, Rewards me with variety Which men who change can never know.
COVENTRY PATMORE (_The Angel in the House_).
* * * * *
The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening....
We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
WALTER PATER (1839-1894) (_The Renaissance_).
In the Adelaide edition of this book this famous “pulsation” passage appeared as originally written; it is now given as Pater afterwards altered it.
Pater was a Hellenist and preached the new paganism of last century. The Greek ideal life was supposed to be one of purely aesthetic enjoyment, divorced from religious problems or from any sense of the _higher_ in our nature. Pater, however, altered his views, _Marius, the Epicurean_, being intended as a recantation, and he became in effect an Anglo-Catholic. (See p. 343 note.)
Pater was “Rose” in Mallock’s _New Republic_.
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A CHILD
Is a man in a small Letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of the Apple.... He is nature’s fresh picture, newly drawn in oil, which time and much handling dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper, unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater.... His hardest labour is his tongue, as if he were loth to use so deceitful an organ.... We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest: and his drums, rattles and hobby-horses but the emblems and mocking of man’s business. His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs to see what innocence he has outlived. The older he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches.... Could he put off his body with his little Coat, he had got eternity without a burthen, and exchanged but one Heaven for another.
JOHN EARLE (_Micro-Cosmographie_, 1628).
* * * * *
As when a Gryphon through the wilderness With wingèd course, o’er hill and moory dale, Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth Had from his wakeful custody purloined The guarded gold.
MILTON (_Paradise Lost_).
The Griffin, with head and wings of a bird and body of a lion, is pursuing, “half on foot, half flying,” the one-eyed Arimaspian, who is fleeing on horseback with the purloined gold. The Griffins guarded mines of gold and hidden treasure. (_Herodotus_, iv, 27.)
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A WOMAN’S THOUGHT
I am a woman—therefore I may not Call to him, cry to him, Fly to him, Bid him delay not!
Then when he comes to me, I must sit quiet; Still as a stone— All silent and cold. If my heart riot— Crush and defy it! Should I grow bold, Say one dear thing to him, All my life fling to him, Cling to him— What to atone Is enough for my sinning? This were the cost to me, This were my winning— That he were lost to me. Not as a lover At last if he part from me, Tearing my heart from me, Hurt beyond cure— Calm and demure Then must I hold me, In myself fold me, Lest he discover; Showing no sign to him By look of mine to him What he has been to me— How my heart turns to him, Follows him, yearns to him, Prays him to love me.
Pity me, lean to me, Thou God above me!
RICHARD WATSON GILDER (1844-1909).
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Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.
MACAULAY (_On Niccolo Machiavelli_).
A wonderful record, if it were correct, but “Old Nick” is said to be derived from Scandinavian mythology.
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I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older.
MONTAIGNE (Essay, _Of Repentance_).
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Coleridge was holding forth on the effects produced by his preaching, and appealed to Lamb: “You have heard me preach, I think?” “I have never heard you do anything else,” was the urbane reply.
(John Sterling said) Coleridge is best described in his own words:
His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread. For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.[47]
Madame de Staël was by no means pleased with her intercourse with him, saying spitefully and feelingly, “M. Coleridge a un grand talent pour le monologue” (“Mr. Coleridge has a great talent for monologue”).
CAROLINE FOX’S JOURNALS.
Here we have different views of Coleridge’s monologues. Mme. de Staël objected to his monopolizing the conversation, but his friends loved to hear him. Lamb, of course, had to have his joke.
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Where is the use of the lip’s red charm, The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow, And the blood that blues the inside arm— Unless we turn, as the soul knows how, The earthly gift to an end divine? A lady of clay is as good, I trow.
R. BROWNING.
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What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been So nimble and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life.
FRANCIS BEAUMONT (_Epistle to Ben Jonson_).
What would one not give to have been present at the Mermaid Tavern with the wonderful Elizabethans who met there? Among them were Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne, Carew, and John Selden. One is reminded of the _Symposium_ of Plato.
The poem of Keats is well known:
Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
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On a day like this, when the sun is hid, And you and your heart are housed together, If memories come to you all unbid, And something suddenly wets your lid, Like a gust of the out-door weather, Why, who is in fault but the dim old day, Too dark for labour, too dull for play?
AUTHOR NOT TRACED.
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A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries with him the germ of his most exceptional actions; and, if we wise people make fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.
GEORGE ELIOT.
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I understand those women who say they don’t want the ballot. They purpose to hold the real power, while we go through the mockery of making laws. They want the power without the responsibility.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (_My Summer in a Garden_).
* * * * *
If we cannot find God in your house or in mine; upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should discern Him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand is, _there_ is miracle; and it is simply undevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which He does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise.
JAMES MARTINEAU (_Endeavours after the Christian Life_).
* * * * *
Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
S. T. COLERIDGE.
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My burden bows me to the knee; O Lord, ’tis more than I can bear. Didst Thou not come our load to share? My burden bows me to the knee: Dear Jesus, let me lean on Thee!...
Far off, so far, the Heavens be, With their wide arms! and I would prove The close, warm-beating heart of Love. But so far-off the Heavens be: Dear Jesus, let me lean on Thee!
GERALD MASSEY (_Out of the Depths_).
This poem is omitted from _My Lyrical Life_, Massey’s collected poems.
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Night dreams of day, and winter seems In sleep to breathe the balm of May, Their dreams are true anon; but they, The dreamers, then, alas, are dreams.
Thus, while our days the dreams renew Of some forgotten sleeper, we, The dreamers of futurity, Shall vanish when our own are true.
J. B. TABB.
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THE MOTHER WHO DIED TOO
She was so little—little in her grave, The wide earth all around so hard and cold— She was so little! therefore did I crave My arms might still her tender form enfold. She was so little, and her cry so weak When she among the heavenly children came— She was so little—I alone might speak For her who knew no word nor her own name.
EDITH MATILDA THOMAS.
* * * * *
The economy of Heaven is dark; And wisest clerks have miss’d the mark, Why human buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral That has his day; while shrivell’d crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years.
CHARLES LAMB (_On an infant dying as soon as born_).
* * * * *
Oh dreadful thought, if all our sires and we Are but foundations of a race to be,— Stones which one thrusts in earth, and builds thereon A write delight, a Parian Parthenon, And thither, long thereafter, youth and maid Seek with glad brows the alabaster shade.
And in processions’ pomp together bent Still interchange their sweet words innocent,— Not caring that those mighty columns rest Each on the ruin of a human breast,— That to the shrine the victor’s chariot rolls Across the anguish of ten thousand souls!
“Well was it that our fathers suffered thus,” I hear them say, “that all might end in us; Well was it here and there a bard should feel Pains premature and hurt that none could heal; These were their preludes, thus the race began; So hard a matter was the birth of Man.”
And yet these too shall pass and fade and flee, And in their death shall be as vile as we, Nor much shall profit with their perfect powers To have lived a so much sweeter life than ours, When at the last, with all their bliss gone by, Like us those glorious creatures come to die, With far worse woe, far more rebellious strife Those mighty spirits drink the dregs of life.
F. W. H. MYERS (_The Implicit Promise of Immortality_).
It will be observed that Myers, like Swinburne, handled the old heroic couplet in a masterly manner, undreamt of by Pope, Dryden, and their generation.
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