Part 25

Much of the scepticism that we meet with is necessarily affectation or conceit; for it is as likely that the ignorant, weak, and indolent should become mathematicians as reasoning unbelievers. Patient study and perfect impartiality must precede rational conviction, whether ending in faith or doubt. Need it be asked, how many are capable of such an examination? But whether they come honestly by their opinions or not, it is much more advisable to refute than to burn, or even to scorch them.

It has been shrewdly remarked by a contemporary:

All the voices which have any real influence with an Englishman in easy circumstances combine to stimulate a low form of energy, which stifles every high one. The newspapers extol his wisdom by assuming that the average intelligence which he represents is, under the name of public opinion, the ultimate and irresponsible ruler of the nation. The novels which he and his family devour with insatiable greediness have no tendency to rouse his imagination, to say nothing of his mind. They are pictures of the every-day life to which he has always been accustomed,—sarcastic, sentimental, or ludicrous, as the case may be,—but never rising to any thing which could ever suggest the existence of tragic dignity or ideal beauty. The human mind has made considerable advances in the last three-and-twenty centuries; but the thousands of Greeks who could enjoy not only Euripides, but Homer and Æschylus, were superior, in some important points, to the millions of Englishmen who in their inmost hearts prefer Pickwick to Shakspeare. Even the religion of the present day is made to suit the level of commonplace Englishmen. There was a time when Christianity meant the embodiment of all truth and holiness in the midst of a world lying in wickedness. It afterwards included law, liberty, and knowledge, as opposed to the energetic ignorance of the northern barbarians. It now too often means philanthropic societies—excellent things as far as they go, but rather small. Any doctrine now is given up if it either seems uncomfortable or likely to make a disturbance. It is almost universally assumed that the truth of an opinion is tested by its consistency with cheerful views of life and nature. Unpleasant doctrines are only preached under incredible forms, and thus serve to spice the enjoyments which they would otherwise destroy.[122]

Footnote 122:

_Cornhill Magazine._

WORLDLY MORALITY.

Professor Blackie, in his eloquent Edinburgh Essay, has these stringent remarks upon the lax morality of the day:

There is in the world always a respectable sort of surface morality,—and nowhere more than in this British world at the present hour,—a morality of convenience and utility, which pays respect to the principles of right and wrong when generally formalised, but which recognises them practically only in so far as local customs and decencies, proprieties, etiquettes, and the round of certain “inevitable charities,” are willing to recognise them. This morality many a consumer of beefsteaks and swiller of porter in this lusty and material land accepts, after eighteen hundred years of Gospel preaching, as quite sufficient for all the purposes of a respectable English life. But the perverse maxims and vicious practices with which our British society is rank, make it evident to the most superficial glance how far the current morality of our trades and parties is from seeking to accommodate itself to the principles of extreme moral purity laid down in every page of the New Testament. A sermon may be a very proper thing as Sunday work, and may help to bridge the way to heaven, when a bridge shall be required; but on Monday a man must attend to his business, and act according to the maxims of his trade, of his party, of his corporation, of his vestry. Then the respectable sporting-man will stake his last thousand on the leg of a race-horse, and think it quite like a Christian gentleman to allow his tailor’s bill to be unpaid for another year; then the respectable Highland proprietor will refuse to renew the lease to the industrious poor cotter on his estate, that the people, for whom he cares nothing, may make way for the red-deer, which it is his only passion to stalk; then the respectable brewer, instead of preparing wholesome drink from wholesome grain, will infect his brewst with deleterious drugs in order to excite a factitious thirst in the stomach of his customers, and increase the amount of drinking; then a respectable corporation, to maintain their own “vested rights,” will move heaven and earth to prevent the national parliament from acting on the plainest rules of justice and common sense in a matter seriously affecting the public well-being; and the respectable members of society shall flutter round the gilded wax-lights of aristocracy, and perform worship at Hudson’s statue, and have respect to men with gold rings and goodly apparel, and do every thing that is expressly forbidden in the second chapter of the Epistle of James, which they profess to receive as a divine rule of conduct. These are only one or two of the more glaring points in which our commonly-received maxims and practice of respectable British life run directly in the face of that highest morality, which the most religious and church-going Englishman professes to acknowledge as his rule of conduct.

Professor Blackie concludes with the gospel text, “What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” which the Professor applies in the plain practical question: “What will it profit England to spin more cotton, to pile more money-bags, to set more steam-coaches a-going, if Mammon is to be worshiped every where, rather than virtue and wisdom?” &c.

SPEAKING THE TRUTH.

One of the sublimest things in the world is plain Truth. Indeed it is so sublime as to be entirely out of the reach of many people.

The ancients said many fine things of Truth; but nothing to exceed in practical worth the love of Truth shown by the great Duke of Wellington in every phase of his wonderful career, of which the majority of us have been, more or less, contemporary witnesses.

“The foundation of all justice,” said this truly great man, “is Truth; and the mode of discovering truth has always been to administer an oath, in order that the witness may give his depositions under a high sanction.”

Elsewhere he said, when advocating the cause of the Church of England, “I am resolved to tell plainly and honestly what I think, quite regardless of the odium I may incur from those whose prejudices my candour and sincerity may offend. I am here to speak the truth, and not to flatter the prejudices of any man. In speaking the truth, I shall utter it in the language that truth itself most naturally suggests. It is upon her native strength—upon her own truth—it is upon her spiritual character, and upon the purity of her doctrines, that the Church of England rests.”

When, upon the death of Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington sought to express what seemed to him most admirable in the character of his friend, he said that he was _the truest man he had ever known;_ adding: “I was long connected with him in public life. We were both in the councils of our sovereign together, and I had long the honour to enjoy his private friendship. In all the course of my acquaintance with Sir Robert Peel, I never knew a man in whose truth and justice I had a more lively confidence, or in whom I saw a more invariable desire to promote the public service. In the whole course of my communication with him I never knew an instance in which he did not show the strongest attachment to truth; and I never saw, in the whole course of my life, the smallest reason for suspecting that he stated any thing which he did not firmly believe to be the fact.”

It was the instinct of a man, himself as true as he was great, thus to place the regard for truth in the front rank of human qualities. On that simple and noble basis his own nature rested. Wellington could not vapour, or even utter a lie in a bulletin. Every thing with him was simple, direct, straightforward, and went to the heart of its purpose, if any thing could. In all that has singled out England from the nations, and given her the front place in the history of the world, the Duke of Wellington was emphatically an Englishman. His patience, his probity, his punctuality in the smallest things, in every thing the practical fidelity and reliability of his character, we rejoice to regard as the type of that which has made us the great people that we are. It has indeed been well said that the Duke’s whole existence was a practical refutation of all falsehood.

RESTLESSNESS AND ENTERPRISE.

An anxious, restless temper, that runs to meet care on its way, that regrets lost opportunities too much, and that is over-painstaking in contrivances for happiness, is foolish, and should not be indulged.[123] If you cannot be happy in one way, be happy in another; and this facility of disposition wants but little aid from philosophy, for health and good-humour are almost the whole affair. Many run about after felicity, like an absent man hunting for his hat while it is on his head or in his hand. Though sometimes small evils, like invisible insects, inflict great pain, yet the chief secret of comfort lies in not suffering trifles to vex one, and in prudently cultivating an undergrowth of small pleasures, since very few great ones, alas, are let on long leases.

Nothing will justify, or even excuse, dejection. Untoward accidents will sometimes happen; but, after many years’ experience (writes Mr. Sharp), I can truly say, that nearly all those who began life with me have succeeded, or failed, as they deserved:

Faber quisque fortunæ propriæ.

Though you may look to your understanding for amusement, it is to the affections that we must trust for happiness, These imply a spirit of self-sacrifice; and often our virtues, like our children, are endeared to us by what we suffer for them. Conscience, even when it fails to govern our conduct, can disturb our peace of mind. Yes, it is neither paradoxical nor merely poetical to say:

That seeking others’ good, we find our own.

This solid yet romantic maxim is found in no less a writer than Plato; who, it has been well observed, sometimes in his moral lessons, as well as in his theological, is almost, though not altogether, a Christian.

The passion for enterprise and adventure is the shoal upon which high hopes are constantly being wrecked. We remember, some thirty years since, a merchant of London, who inherited a princely fortune, which he embarked in speculations of almost astounding magnitude. He was a large-minded and generous man; and among other instances of his liberality, was his aid to scientific explorations, in acknowledgment of which he received an honorary Fellowship of the Royal Society. He published upon political economy and monetary questions; and with that fatality which often attends those who aspire to public business, our merchant, in some measure, out-ventured his own. Before the problematical economy of vast steam-ships had been settled, he invested large sums in this class of speculation. He was rather athirst for fresh fields than for the gold itself; and with this view he and his family ceded to a chartered company a group of islands discovered some forty years previously through their enterprise, and which the Government had granted them in consideration for their services in more recent discoveries of the southern continent. It was then resolved to colonise the islands as the head-station of the southern whale-fishery; our merchant receiving the appointment of lieutenant-governor. Troops of friends and well-wishers attended the leave-taking; the voyage out was fair and auspicious, and the governor and his little staff planted their bare emblem of authority upon the islands.

The scheme was reasonable; for whale-fishing was rife in the neighbouring seas, and sperm-whales even came into the anchorage. The country is luxuriantly wooded, the flowering plants abound; and the climate is mild, temperate, and salubrious. But the fishery failed, and the horizon soon grew dark with gathering clouds of discontent among the colonists; and there arose cabals, the usual consequence of defeated hopes: as success brightly colours all things in life, so failures darken them. After many months of suffering from indignities heaped upon him by exasperated adventurers, and the confusion which follows such mischances, the governor’s brief authority was respected only by _two_ individuals among the six-score colonists. Such heartless desertion in a land upon whose storm-beaten shores human foot had rarely set, would have made many a stout heart quail: not so our almost friendless representative of authority; and at length the many closed their cruel indignities by determining that he should leave the islands by the first ship which should touch there. This stern resolve was carried into effect; and our merchant-prince, solitary in all respects save hope, returned to the home which he had left amid a choir of aspirations. He memorialised the Government for redress, and besought parliament-men to assert his wrongs; but the only result was the usual official coldness and disinclination to interfere in troublesome matters; although the enterprise was, at the commencement, fully recognised by the colonial authorities at home.

This is a painful story of a few years’ misadventure and wrecked fortune, and ingratitude to a man whose honour and integrity, in the face of misfortune, should at least have shielded him from insult. Yet how forcibly does it illustrate the perils which so often beset the restless spirit!

Footnote 123:

Such a person knows as much of what true felicity consists as did Horace Walpole’s gardener, who thought it “something of a bulbous root.”

THE PRESENT AND THE PAST.

Sharon Turner, a man of sound, practical sense, as well as a reverential and reflective writer of history, has these pertinent remarks upon the tendency of historians to magnify the Present at the expense of the Past:

Nothing is a greater reproach, to the reasoning intellect of any age than a splenetic censoriousness on the manners and characters of our ancestors. It is but common justice for us to bear in mind that in those times we should have been as they were, as they in ours would have resembled ourselves. Both are but the same men, acting under different circumstances, wearing different dresses, and pursuing different objects; but neither inferior to the other in talent, industry, or intellectual worth. The more we study biography, we shall perceive more evidence of this truth.

Disregarding what satire might, without being cynical, lash in our own costumes, we are apt to look proudly back on those who have gone before us, and to regale our self-complacency with comparisons of their deficiencies, and of our greater merit. The retrospect is pleasing, but it offers no ground for exultation. We are superior, and we have in many things better taste and sounder judgment and wiser habits than they possessed. And why? Because we have had means of superiority by which they were not assisted. But a merit which owes its origin merely to our having followed, instead of preceding, in existence, gives us no right to depreciate those over whom our only advantage has been the better fortune of a later chronology. We may therefore allow those who have gone before us to have been amused with what would weary or dissatisfy us, without either sarcasms on their absurdities, or contemptuous wonder at their stately childishness and pompous inanities.

One of our most popular historians indulges to excess in these brilliant antitheses, which in his pages remind one of poppies in corn.

CIRCUMSTANCES AND GENIUS.

This episode in man’s history,—this stage in the great struggle of life,—has been thus powerfully painted by a contemporary:

We presume there can be little doubt that circumstances have an effect upon the lives and characters of men; to say any thing else would be to contradict flatly the ordinary opinion of the world. Notwithstanding, if one will but look at one’s private experience among the most ordinary and obscure actors in the life-drama, how wonderfully, one must allow, character, temper, heart, and spirit, assert themselves beyond the reach of all external powers! How triumphantly the poor prodigal, to whom Providence has given the fairest prospects, and whose steps are guarded by love and kindness, can vindicate his own instincts against all the virtuous force of circumstance surrounding him, and go to destruction in its very face! Who needs to be taught that ever-recurring lesson? Who can be ignorant that scarcely a great career has ever been made in this world otherwise than in the face of circumstances—in strenuous defiance of all that external elements could do to overcome the unconquerable soul? In the face of such examples, what are we to say to the theory that adverse circumstances can excuse a man born with all the compensations of genius for an unlovely and ignoble life, a bitter and discontented heart, a course of vulgar vice and sordid meanness? Never was genius more wickedly disparaged. That celestial gift to which God has given capacities of enjoyment beyond the reach of the crowd, is of itself an armour against circumstance more proof than steel, and continually holds open to its possessor a refuge against the affronts of the world, a shelter from its contumelies, which is denied to other men. He who reckons of this endowment as of something which gives only a more exquisite egotism, a finer touch of selfishness, a sublimation of envy and self-assertion, and dependence upon the applause of the crowd, forms a mean estimate, against which it is the duty of every man who knows better to protest. Outside circumstances, disappointment, neglect, dark want and misery, have plagued the souls and disturbed the temper of great men before now, but have never, so far as we are aware, polluted a pure heart, or made a noble mind despicable. The bitter soreness of unappreciated genius belongs proverbially to those whose gift is of the smallest; and the man who excuses a bad life by the pretence that this divine lymph contained within it has been soured by popular neglect and turned to gall, speaks sacrilege and profanity.[124]

Footnote 124:

_Quarterly Review._

OUR UNIMAGINATIVE AGE.

We have now no great poets; and our poverty in this respect is not compensated by the fact, that we once had them, and that we may, and do, read their works. The movement has gone by; the charm is broken; the bond of union, though not cancelled, is seriously weakened. Hence our age, great as it is, and in nearly all respects greater than any the world has yet seen, has, notwithstanding its large and generous sentiments, its unexampled toleration, its love of liberty, and its profuse and almost reckless charity, a certain material, unimaginative, and unheroic character, which has made several observers tremble for the future.... That something has been lost is unquestionable.

We have lost much of that imagination which, though in practical life it often misleads, is, in speculative life, one of the highest of all qualities, being suggestive as well as creative. Even practically we should cherish it, because the commerce of the affections mainly depends on it. It is, however, declining; while, at the same time, the increasing refinement of society accustoms us more and more to suppress our emotions, lest they be disagreeable to others. And as the play of the emotions is the chief study of the poet, we see in this circumstance another reason which makes it difficult to rival that great body of poetry which our ancestors possessed. We quote the above from the second volume of Mr. Buckle’s _History of Civilization_. We would add, that the suppression of emotions to which the author refers is one great cause of the difficulty of getting persons to speak the truth in the present day: they are ever disguising their feelings, until hypocritical caution becomes habit, and it requires a stronger light than the old cynic possessed to find honest men. The low standard of commercial morality, and the time-serving expediency which so greatly regulates the actions of our rulers and those who make the laws, is traceable to this over-refinement.

MARVELS OF THE UNIVERSE.

Nothing is more startling, or more likely to be received with incredulity by minds unprepared for their reception, than what are, in common parlance, termed the Marvels of the Universe. The philosophical writers of our day have strikingly illustrated this fact, which should be taken into account in writing of the _impedimenta_ to the progress of science even in our own day. Sir John Herschel has thus forcibly stated the case:

What mere assertion will make any one believe that in one second of time, in one beat of the pendulum of a clock, a ray of light travels over 192,000 miles, and would therefore perform the tour of the world in about the same time that it requires to wink with our eyelids, and in much less than a swift runner occupies in taking a single stride? What mortal can be made to believe, without demonstration, that the sun is almost a million times larger than the earth? and that, although so remote from us that a cannon-ball shot directly towards it, and maintaining its full speed, would be twenty years in reaching it, yet it affects the earth by its attraction in an appreciable instant of time? Who would not ask for demonstration, when told that a gnat’s wing, in its ordinary flight, beats many hundred times in a second; or that there exists animated and regularly-organised beings, many thousands of whose bodies laid close together would not extend an inch? But what are these to the astonishing truths which modern optical inquiries have disclosed, which teach us that every point of a medium through which a ray of light passes, is affected with a succession of periodical movements, regularly recurring at equal intervals, no less than five hundred millions of millions of times in a single second! That it is by such movements communicated to the nerves of our eyes that we see; nay, more, that it is the difference in the frequency of their recurrence which affects us with the sense of the diversity of colour. That, for instance, in acquiring the sensation of redness, our eyes are affected four hundred and eighty-two millions of millions of times; of yellowness, five hundred and forty-two millions of millions of times; and of violet, seven hundred and seven millions of millions of times per second. Do not such things sound more like the ravings of madmen than the sober conclusions of people in their waking senses? They are, nevertheless, conclusions to which any one may most certainly arrive who will only be at the trouble of examining the chain of reasoning by which they have been obtained.