Chapter IV: Part I: Ethics and Character (1)

Ethical Fragments.

1.

Bacon says, how wisely! that "there is often as great vanity in withdrawing and retiring men's conceits from the world, as in obtruding them." Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty. When I see people haunted by the idea of self,--spreading their hands before their faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every other face, as if the world were to them like a French drawing-room, panelled with looking glass,--always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of consciousness, miscalled modesty,--always on their defence against compliments, or mistaking sympathy for compliment, which is as great an error, and a more vulgar one than mistaking flattery for sympathy,--when I see all this, as I have seen it, I am inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the character, or to what is worse, a total want of simplicity. To some characters fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,--they do well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But to others, fame is "love disguised," the love that answers to love, in its widest most exalted sense. It seems to me, that we should all bring the best that is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which God has given us), and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity,--if not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So will the pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and they will not heed if those who _can_ bring nothing or _will_ bring nothing, unless they can blaze like a beacon, call out "VANITY!"

2.

There are truths which, by perpetual repetition, have subsided into passive truisms, till, in some moment of feeling or experience, they kindle into conviction, start to life and light, and the truism becomes again a vital truth.

3.

It is well that we obtain what we require at the cheapest possible rate; yet those who cheapen goods, or beat down the price of a good article, or buy in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind an inferior article at an inferior price, sometimes do much mischief. Not only do they discourage the production of a better article, but if they be anxious about the education of the lower classes they undo with one hand what they do with the other; they encourage the mere mechanic and the production of what may be produced without effort of mind and without education, and they discourage and wrong the skilled workman for whom education has done much more and whose education has cost much more.

Every work so merely and basely mechanical, that a man can throw into it no part of his own life and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the human being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his understanding, and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate the workman; and this is not the case with very cheap production of any kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.)

Since this was written the same idea has been carried out, with far more eloquent reasoning, in a noble passage which I have just found in Mr. Ruskin's last volume of "The Stones of Venice" (the Sea Stories). As I do not _always_ subscribe to his theories of Art, I am the more delighted with this anticipation of a moral agreement between us.

"We have much studied and much perfected of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men:--divided into mere segments of men,--broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now, it is a good and desirable thing truly to make many pins in a day, but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points are polished--sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,--we should think there might be some loss in it also; and the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace-blast, is all in very deed for this,--that we manufacture everything there except men,--we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages; and all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads, can be met only in one way,--not by teaching nor preaching; for to teach them is but to show them their misery; and to preach to them--if we do nothing more than preach,--is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty or cheapness, as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman, and by equally determined demand for the products and results of a healthy and ennobling labour." ....

"We are always in these days trying to separate the two (intellect and work). We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working; and we call one a gentleman and the other an operative; whereas, the workman ought to be often thinking, and the thinker often working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity."

Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing before either of us:

"Our life is turn'd
Out of her course wherever man is made
An offering or a sacrifice,--a tool
Or implement,--a passive thing employed
As a brute mean, without acknowledgment
Of common right or interest in the end,
Used or abused as selfishness may prompt.
Say what can follow for a rational soul
Perverted thus, but weakness in all good
And strength in evil?"

And this leads us to the consideration of another mistake, analogous with the above, but referable in its results chiefly to the higher, or what Mr. Ruskin calls the _thinking_, classes of the community.

It is not good for us to have all that we value of worldly material things in the form of money. It is the most vulgar form in which value can be invested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful things are better; but even jewels and trinkets are sometimes to be preferred to mere hard money. Lands and tenements are good, as involving duties; but still what is valuable in the market sense should sometimes take the ideal and the beautiful form, and be dear and lovely and valuable for its own sake as well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I think the character would be apt to deteriorate when all its material possessions take the form of money, and when money becomes valuable for its own sake, or as the mere instrument or representative of power.

4.

We are told in a late account of Laura Bridgeman, the blind, deaf, and dumb girl, that her instructor once endeavoured to explain the difference between the material and the immaterial, and used the word "soul." She interrupted to ask, "What is soul?"

"That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves,----"

"And _aches_?" she added eagerly.

5.

I was reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell's Life of Johnson that "it is a theory which every one knows to be _false in fact_, that virtue in real life is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery." I should say that all my experience teaches me that the position is not false but true: that virtue _does_ produce happiness, and vice _does_ produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. By _happiness_, we do not necessarily mean a state of worldly prosperity. By _virtue_, we do not mean a series of good actions which may or may not be rewarded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence of virtue. Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual sense of right, and the habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with benevolent sympathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This union of the highest conscience and the highest sympathy fulfils my notion of virtue. Strength is essential to it; weakness incompatible with it. Where virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are predominant; the whole being is in that state of harmony which I call happiness. Pain may reach it, passion may disturb it, but there is always a glimpse of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity of being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God.

And vice is necessarily misery: for that fluctuation of principle, that diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs falsehood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with the absence of the benevolent propensities,--these constitute misery as a state of being. The most miserable person I ever met with in my life had 12,000_l._ a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass its own ends; very little conscience, not enough, one would have thought, to vex with any retributive pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made the misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The perpetual kicking against the pricks, the unreasonable _exigéance_ with regard to things, without any high standard with regard to persons,--these made the misery. I can speak of it as misery who had it daily in my sight for five long years.

I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to call them so, with Carlyle on this point. It appeared to me that he confounded happiness with pleasure, with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering scorn the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so called: he styled this philosophy of happiness, "the philosophy of the frying-pan." But this was like the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is plenty of sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation, is, as the world goes, something to thank God for. I should be one of the last to undervalue it; I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain is pain, a great evil, which I do not like either to inflict or suffer. But happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure--is as sublime a thing as virtue itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of view it seems a perilous mistake to separate them.

6.

Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God's blessed sunshine--_Tristi fummo nel' aer dolce_; and in some of the ancient Christian systems of virtues and vices, Melancholy is unholy, and a vice; Cheerfulness is holy, and a virtue.

Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics of moral health and goodness to consist in "a constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble satisfaction."

What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our Redeemer, have had, though it has become too customary to place him before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant head of Christ in Raphael's Transfiguration should rather be our ideal of Him who came "to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord."

7.

A profound intellect is weakened and narrowed in general power and influence by a limited range of sympathies. I think this is especially true of C----: excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half the good he might do, because his sympathies are so confined. And then he wants gentleness: he does not seem to acknowledge that "the wisdom that is from above is _gentle_." He is a man who carries his bright intellect as a light in a dark-lantern; he sees only the objects on which he chooses to throw that blaze of light: those he sees vividly, but, as it were, exclusively. All other things, though lying near, are dark, because perversely he _will_ not throw the light of his mind upon them.

8.

Wilhelm von Humboldt says, "Old letters lose their vitality."

Not true. It is because they retain their vitality that it is so dangerous to keep some letters,--so wicked to burn others.

9.

A Man thinks himself, and is thought by others to be insulted when another man gives him the lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once, or only to be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not considered in the same unpardonable light by herself or others,--is indeed a slight thing. Now, whence this difference? Is not truth as dear to a woman as to a man? Is the virtue itself, or the reputation of it, less necessary to the woman than to the man? If not, what causes this distinction,--one so injurious to the morals of both sexes?

10.

It is good for us to look up, morally and mentally. If I were tired I would get some help to hold my head up, as Moses got some one to hold up his arms while he prayed.

"Ce qui est moins que moi m'éteint et m'assomme; ce qui est à côté de moi m'ennuie et me fatigue. II n'y a que ce qui est au-dessus de moi qui me soutienne et m'arrache à moi-même."

11.

There is an order of writers who, with characters perverted or hardened through long practice of iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense of the good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, so that men's hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which live not in the heart of the writer,--only in his head.

And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who, intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious,--who are never weary of holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.

Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us familiar with evil?

12.

"Thought and theory," said Wordsworth, "must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory."

Yes, and no. What we _act_ has its consequences on earth. What we _think_, its consequences in heaven. It is not without reason that action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old rhymester hath it:

"He that good thinketh good may do,
And God will help him there unto;
For was never good work wrought,
Without beginning of good thought."

The result of impulse is the positive; the result of consideration the negative. The positive is essentially and abstractedly better than the negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the most expedient.

On my observing how often I had had reason to regret not having followed the first impulse, O. G. said, "In _good_ minds the first impulses are generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry, for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive, our second thoughts to the negative; and I have no respect for the negative,--it is the vulgar side of every thing."

On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one who stands endowed with great power and with great responsibilities in the midst of a thousand duties and interests, can no longer take things in this simple fashion; for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets, perhaps, some rock, and splits upon it; it recoils on the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the impulse to do good _here_ becomes injury _there_, and we are forced to calculate results; we cannot trust to them.

I have not sought to deduce my principles from conventional notions of expediency, but have believed that out of the steady adherence to certain fixed principles, the right and the expedient _must_ ensue, and I believe it still. The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

It requires merely passive courage and strength to resist, and in some cases to overcome evil. But it requires more--it needs bravery and self-reliance and surpassing faith--to act out the true inspirations of your intelligence and the true impulses of your heart.

Out of the attempt to harmonise our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry,--or, it may be, religion.

F---- used the phrase "_stung into heroism_" as Shelley said, "_cradled into poetry_," by wrong.

13.

Coleridge calls the personal existence of the Evil Principle, "a mere fiction, or, at best, an allegory supported by a few popular phrases and figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically by the Evangelists." And he says, that "the existence of a personal, intelligent, Evil Being, the counterpart and antagonist of God, is in direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ. '_Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?_'--Amos, iii. 6. '_I make peace and create evil._'--Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the deep mystery of the abyss of God."

Do our theologians go with him here? I think not: yet, as a theologian, Coleridge is constantly appealed to by Churchmen.

14.

"We find (in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians), every where instilled as the essence of all well-being and well-doing, (without which the wisest public and political constitution is but a lifeless formula, and the highest powers of individual endowment profitless or pernicious,) the spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and rights,--with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments of other minds, which alone, whether in the family or in the Church, can impart unity and effectual working together for good in the communities of men."

"The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of freedom to the whole human race."--_Thom's Discourses on St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians._

And this is the true Catholic spirit,--the spirit and the teaching of Paul,--in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic spirit,--the spirit and tendency of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no respect for individuality except in so far as it can imprison this individuality within a creed, or use it to a purpose.

15.

Dr. Baillie once said that "all his observation of death-beds inclined him to believe that nature intended that we should go out of the world as unconscious as we came into it." "In all my experience," he added, "I have not seen one instance in fifty to the contrary."

Yet even in such a large experience the occurrence of "one instance in fifty to the contrary" would invalidate the assumption that such was the law of nature (or "nature's intention," which, if it means any thing, means the same).

The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced by sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the sleeping state.

16.

_Thoughts on a Sermon._

He is really sublime, this man! with his faith in "the religion of pain," and "the deification of sorrow!" But is he therefore right? What has he preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence, all the earnestness of conviction? that "pain is the life of God as shown forth in Christ;"--"that we are to be crucified to the world and the world to us." This perpetual presence of a crucified God between us and a pitying redeeming Christ, leads many a mourner to the belief that this world is all a Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify each other. Is this the law under which we are to live and strive? The missionary Bridaine accused himself of sin in that he had preached fasting, penance, and the chastisements of God to wretches steeped in poverty and dying of hunger; and is there not a similar cruelty and misuse of power in the servants of Him who came to bind up the broken-hearted, when they preach the necessity, or at least the theory, of moral pain to those whose hearts are aching from moral evil?

Surely there is a great difference between the resignation or the endurance of a truthful, faithful, loving, hopeful spirit, and this dreadful theology of suffering as the necessary and appointed state of things! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while most miserable, I will believe in happiness; even while I do or suffer evil, I will believe in goodness; even while my eyes see not through tears, I will believe in the existence of what I do not see--that God is benign, that nature is fair, that the world is not made as a prison or a penance. While I stand lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return of the unfailing dawn,--even though my soul be amazed into such a blind perplexity that I know not on which side to look for it, and ask "where is the East? and whence the dayspring?" For the East holds its wonted place, and the light is withheld only till its appointed time.

God so strengthen me that I may think of pain and sin only as accidental apparent discords in his great harmonious scheme of good! Then I am ready--I will take up the cross, and hear it bravely, while I _must_; but I will lay it down when I can, and in any case I will never lay it on another.

17.

If I fear God it is because I love him, and believe in his love; I cannot conceive myself as standing in fear of any spiritual or human being in whose love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersonation of Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may devour, the image brings to me no fear, only intense disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his love for me that I fear to offend against God; it is because of his love that his displeasure must be terrible. And with regard to human beings, only the being I love has the power to give me pain or inspire me with fear; only those in whose love I believe, have the power to injure me. Take away my love, and you take away my fear: take away _their_ love, and you take away the power to do me any harm which can reach me in the sources of life and feeling.

18.

Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to carve out their own purposes.

19.

While we were discussing Balzac's celebrity as a romance writer, she (O. G.) said, with a shudder: "His laurels are steeped in the tears of women,--every truth he tells has been wrung in tortures from some woman's heart."

20.

Sir Walter Scott, writing in 1831, seems to regard it as a terrible misfortune that the whole burgher class in Scotland should be gradually preparing for representative reform. "I mean," he says, "the middle and respectable classes: when a borough reform comes, which, perhaps, cannot long be delayed, ministers will no longer return a member for Scotland from the towns." "The gentry," he adds, "will abide longer by _sound_ principles, for they are needy, and desire advancement for themselves, and appointments for their sons and so on. But this is a very hollow dependence, and those who sincerely hold ancient opinions are waxing old," &c. &c.

With a great deal more, showing the strange moral confusion which his political bias had caused in his otherwise clear head and honest mind. The sound principles, then, by which educated people are to abide,--over the decay of which he laments,--are such as can only be upheld by the most vulgar self-interest! If a man should utter openly such sentiments in these days, what should we think of him?

In the order of absolutism lurk the elements of change and destruction. In the unrest of freedom the spirit of change and progress.

21.

"A single life," said Bacon, "doth well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool."

Certainly there are men whose charities are limited, if not dried up, by their concentrated domestic anxieties and relations. But there are others whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier and warmer, through the strength of their domestic affections.

Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordaining men as clergymen in places where they had been born or brought up, or in the midst of their own relatives: "Their habits, their manners, their talk, their acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me say, even their domestic affections, naturally draw them one way, while their professional obligations point out another." If this were true universally, or even generally, it would be a strong argument in favour of the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy, which certainly is one element, and not the least, of their power.

22.

Landor says truly: "Love is a secondary passion in those who love most, a primary in those who love least: he who is inspired by it in the strongest degree is inspired by honour in a greater."

"Whatever is worthy of being loved for any thing is worthy to be preserved."

Again:--"Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their own fame, when God hath commanded them to stand on high for an example."

"Weak motives," he says, "are sufficient for weak minds; whenever we see a mind which we believed a stronger than our own moved habitually by what appears inadequate, we may be certain that there is--to bring a metaphor from the forest--_more top than root_."

Here is another sentence from the same writer--rich in wise sayings:--

"Plato would make wives common to abolish selfishness; the very mischief which, above all others, it would directly and immediately bring forth. There is no selfishness where there is a wife and family. There the house is lighted up by mutual charities; everything achieved for them is a victory; everything endured a triumph. How many vices are suppressed that there may be no _bad_ example! How many exertions made to recommend and inculcate a _good_ one."

True: and I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into egotism, of which I could show you many and notable examples.

All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side. This your mere worldly people do not seem to know, and therein make the sorriest and the vulgarest of all mistakes. "_Pour être assez bon il faut l'être trop_:" we all need more mercy than we deserve.

How often in this world the actions that we condemn are the result of sentiments that we love and opinions that we admire!

23.

A.---- observed in reference to some of her friends who had gone over to the Roman Catholic Church, "that the peace and comfort which they had sought and found in that mode of faith was like the drugged sleep in comparison with the natural sleep: necessary, healing perhaps, where there is disease and unrest, not otherwise."

24.

"A poet," says Coleridge, "ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your imagination than your memory."

This advice is even more applicable to the painter, but true perhaps in its application to all artists. Raphael and Mozart were, in this sense, great borrowers.

25.

"What is the difference between being good and being bad? the good do not yield to temptation and the bad do."

This is often the distinction between the good and the bad in regard to act and deed; but it does not constitute the difference between _being_ good and _being_ bad.

26.

The Italians say (in one of their characteristic proverbs) _Sospetto licenzia Fede_. Lord Bacon interprets the saying "as if suspicion did give a passport to faith," which is somewhat obscure and ambiguous. It means, that suspicion discharges us from the duty of good faith; and in this, its original sense, it is, like many of the old Italian proverbs, worldly wise and profoundly immoral.

27.

IT was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, that "speech was like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in packs" (_i. e._ rolled up or packed up). Dryden had evidently this passage in his mind when he wrote those beautiful lines:

"Speech is the light, the morning of the mind;
It spreads the beauteous images abroad,
Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul."

Here the comparison of Themistocles, happy in itself, is expanded into a vivid poetical image.

28.

"Those are the killing griefs that do not speak," is true of some, not all characters. There are natures in which the killing grief finds utterance while it kills; moods in which we cry aloud, "as the beast crieth, expansive not appealing." That is my own nature: so in grief or in joy, I say as the birds sing:

"Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt,
Gab mir ein Got zu sagen was ich leide!"

29.

Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted _from_ the world!--yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted _in_ the world!

30.

Everything that ever has been, from the beginning of the world till now, belongs to us, is ours, is even a part of us. We belong to the future, and shall be a part of it. Therefore the sympathies of _all_ are in the past; only the poet and the prophet sympathise with the future.

When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, "I am a part of all that I have seen," it ought to be rather the converse,--"What I have seen becomes a part of me."

31.

In what regards policy--government--the interest of the many is sacrificed to the few; in what regards society, the morals and happiness of individuals are sacrificed to the many.

32.

We spoke to-night of the cowardice, the crime of a particular suicide: O. G. agreed as to this instance, but added: "There is a different aspect under which suicide might be regarded. It is not always, I think, from a want of religion, or in a spirit of defiance, or a want of confidence in God that we quit life. It is as if we should flee to the feet of the Almighty and embrace his knees, and exclaim, 'O my father! take me home! I have endured as long as it was possible; I can endure no more, so I come to you!'"

Of an amiable man with a disagreeable expressionless face, she said: "His countenance always gives me the idea of matter too strong, too hard for the soul to pierce through. It is as a plaster mask which I long to break (making the gesture with her hand), that I may see the countenance of his heart, for that must be beautiful!"

33.

Carlyle said to me: "I want to see some institution to teach a man the truth, the worth, the beauty, the heroism of which his present existence is capable; where's the use of sending him to study what the Greeks and Romans did, and said, and wrote? Do ye think the Greeks and Romans would have been what they were, if they had just only studied what the Phoenicians did before them?" I should have answered, had I dared: "Yet perhaps the Greeks and Romans would not have been what they were if the Egyptians and Phoenicians had not been before them."

34.

Can there be _progress_ which is not _progression_--which does not leave a past from which to start--on which to rest our foot when we spring forward? No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or obliterates the traces of the road through which he has travelled, or pulls down the memorials he has built by the way side. We cannot _get on_ without linking our present and our future with our past. All reaction is destructive--all progress conservative. When we have destroyed that which the past built up, what reward have we?--we are forced to fall back, and have to begin anew. "Novelty," as Lord Bacon says, "cannot be content to add, but it must deface." For this very reason novelty is not progress, as the French would try to persuade themselves and us. We gain nothing by defacing and trampling down the idols of the past to set up new ones in their places--let it be sufficient to leave them behind us, measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.

35.

E---- was compassionating to-day the old and the invalided; those whose life is prolonged in spite of suffering; and she seemed, even out of the excess of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of the world; but it is a mistake in reasoning and feeling. She does not know how much of happiness may consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and even with mental suffering.

36.

"Renoncez dans votre âme, et renoncez y fermement, une fois pour toutes, à vouloir vous connaître au-delà de cette existence passagère qui vous est imposée, et vous redeviendrez agréable à Dieu, utile aux autres hommes, tranquille avec vous-mêmes."

This does not mean "renounce hope or faith in the future." No! But renounce that perpetual craving after a selfish interest in the unrevealed future life which takes the true relish from the duties and the pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life which is not a continuation of this: to anticipate in that _future_ life, _another_ life, a _different_ life; what is it but to call in doubt our individual identity?

If we pray, "O teach us where and what is peace!" would not the answer be, "In the grave ye shall have it--not before?" Yet is it not strange that those who believe most absolutely in an after-life, yet think of the grave as peace? Now, if we carry this life with us--and what other life can we carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves--how shall there be peace?

As to the future, my soul, like Cato's, "shrinks back upon herself and startles at destruction;" but I do not think of my own destruction, rather of that which I love. That I should cease to be is not very intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my soul possess, should cease to be--there is the pang, the terror! I desire that which I love to be immortal, whether I be so myself or not.

Is not the idea which most men entertain of another, of an eternal life, merely a continuation of this present existence under pleasanter conditions? We cannot conceive another state of existence,--we only fancy we do so.

"I conceive that in all probability we have immortality already. Most men seem to divide life and immortality, making them two distinct things, when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is immortality but a continuation of life--life which is already our own? We have, then, begun our immortality even now."

For the same reason, or, rather, through the same want of reasoning by which we make _life_ and _immortality_ two (distinct things), do we make _time_ and _eternity_ two, which like the others are really one and the same. As immortality is but the continuation of life, so eternity is but the continuation of time; and what we call time is only that part of eternity in which we exist _now_.--_The New Philosophy._

37.

Strength does not consist only in the _more_ or the _less_. There are different sorts of strength as well as different degrees:--The strength of marble to resist; the strength of steel to oppose; the strength of the fine gold, which you can twist round your finger, but which can bear the force of innumerable pounds without breaking.

38.

Goethe used to say, that while intellectual attainment is progressive, it is difficult to be as good when we are old, as we were when young. Dr. Johnson has expressed the same thing.

Then are we to assume, that to _do_ good effectively and wisely is the privilege of age and experience? To _be_ good, through faith in goodness, the privilege of the young.

To preserve our faith in goodness with an extended knowledge of evil, to preserve the tenderness of our pity after long contemplation of pain, and the warmth of our charity after long experience of falsehood, is to be at once good and wise--to understand and to love each other as the angels who look down upon us from heaven.

We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.

I observe, that in our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they _do_, which they _can_ help, than for what they _are_, which they _cannot_ help.

39.

"Whence springs the greatest degree of moral suffering?" was a question debated this evening, but not settled. It was argued that it would depend on the texture of character, its more or less conscientiousness, susceptibility, or strength. I thought from two sentiments--from _jealousy_, that is, the sense of a wrong endured, in one class of characters; from _remorse_, that is, from the sense of a wrong inflicted, in another.

40.

The bread of life is love; the salt of life is work; the sweetness of life, poesy; the water of life, faith.

41.

I have seen triflers attempting to draw out a deep intellect; and they reminded me of children throwing pebbles down the well at Carisbrook, that they might hear them sound.

42.

A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that the bond does not become bondage.

"The secret of peace," said A. B., "is the resolution of the lesser into the greater;" meaning, perhaps, the due relative appreciation of our duties, and the proper placing of our affections: or, did she not rather mean, the resolving of the lesser duties and affections into the higher? But it is true in either sense.

The love we have for Genius is to common love what the fire on the altar is to the fire on the hearth. We cherish it not for warmth or for service, but for an offering, as the expression of our worship.

All love not responded to and accepted is a species of idolatry. It is like the worship of a dumb beautiful image we have ourselves set up and deified, but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sympathy. No!--though we should consume our own hearts on the altar. Our love of God would be idolatry if we did not believe in his love for us--his responsive love.

In the same moment that we begin to speculate on the possibility of cessation or change in any strong affection that we feel, even from that moment we may date its death: it has become the _fetch_ of the living love.

"Motives," said Coleridge, "imply weakness, and the reasoning powers imply the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act from impulse alone." This is the sort of angel which Angelico da Fiesole conceived and represented, and _he_ only.

Again:--"If a man's conduct can neither be ascribed to the angelic or the bestial within him, it must be fiendish. Passion without appetite is _fiendish_."

And, he might have added, appetite without passion, _bestial_. Love in which is neither appetite nor passion is _angelic_. The union of all is human; and according as one or other predominates, does the human being approximate to the fiend, the beast, or the angel.

43.

I don't mean to say that principle is not a finer thing than passion; but passions existed before principles: they came into the world with us; principles are superinduced.

There are bad principles as well as bad passions; and more bad principles than bad passions. Good principles derive life, and strength, and warmth from high and good passions; but principles do not give life, they only bind up life into a consistent whole. One great fault in education is, the pains taken to inculcate principles rather than to train feelings. It is as if we took it for granted that passions could _only_ be bad, and are to be ignored or repressed altogether,--the old mischievous monkish doctrine.

44.

It is easy to be humble where humility is a condescension--easy to concede where we know ourselves wronged--easy to forgive where vengeance is in our power.

"You and I," said H. G., yesterday, "are alike in this:--both of us so abhor injustice, that we are ready to fight it with a broomstick if we can find nothing better!"

45.

"The wise only _possess_ ideas--the greater part of mankind are _possessed by_ them. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual." This paragraph from Coleridge sounds like a _truism_ until we have felt its _truth_.

46.

"La Volonté, en se déréglant, devient passion; cette passion continuée se change en habitude, et faute de résister à cette habitude elle se transforme en besoin."--_St. Augustin_. Which may be rendered--"out of the unregulated will, springs _passion_, out of passion gratified, _habit_; out of habits unresisted, _necessity_." This, also, is one of the truths which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them, _truisms_--and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt.

47.

I wish I could realise what you call my "_grand_ idea of being independent of the absent." I have not a friend worthy the name, whose absence is not pain and dread to me;--death itself is terrible only as it is absence. At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life diverges from mine--whose dwelling house is far off;--with whom I am united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and interests by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a double life; absence, in its anxious longing, and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

"La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment où ils meurent, mais de celui où nous cessons de vivre avec eux;" or, it might rather be said, _pour eux_; but I think this arises from a want either of _faith_ or _faithfulness_.

"La peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse! c'est la plus commune et la plus barbare des profanations; _les mères ne la connaissent pas_!"--And why? Because the most _faithful_ love is the love of the mother for her child.

48.

At dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and imaginative in _his_ nature; but see what he has done for humanity, for society, for liberty, for truth,--for us women! What has Theodore Hook done that has not perished with him? Even as wits--and I have been in company with both--I could not compare them; but they say the wit of Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men--the strongest proof that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.

It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the good things at which you had laughed. Few men--wits by profession--ever said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.

49.

"When we would show any one that he is mistaken our best course is to observe on what side he considers the subject,--for his view of it is generally right on _this_ side,--and admit to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole of the case."--_Pascal._

50.

"We should reflect," says Jeremy Taylor, preaching against ambition, "that whatever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious persons is not so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and unregarded on the pavement of heaven."

Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good argument against the sin he denounces. The star is inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or our ambition is only that which we consider with hope as _accessible_. That we look up to the stars not desiring, not aspiring, but only loving--therein lies our hearts' truest, holiest, safest _devotion_ as contrasted with _ambition_.

It is the "_desire_ of the moth for the star," that leads to its burning itself in the candle.

51.

The brow stamped "with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow," is a strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor's.

He says truly: "It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly." And again: "What will not tender women suffer to hide their shame!" What indeed! And again: "Nothing is intolerable that is necessary." And again: "Nothing is to be esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions."

There is not one of these ethical sentences which might not be treated as a text and expounded, opening into as many "branches" of consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a fallacy, as it seems to me;--others a deeper, wider, and more awful signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he uttered them.

52.

The same reasons which rendered Goethe's "Werther" so popular, so passionately admired at the time it appeared--just after the seven years' war,--helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It was not the individuality of "Werther," nor the individuality of "Childe Harold" which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading power,--a _part_ of the life of their contemporaries. It was because in both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of feeling preexistent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was made visible and audible as if by an electric force; words and forms were given to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy moral excitement. "Werther" and "Childe Harold" will never perish; because, though they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there will always be, unhappily, individual minds and hearts to respond to the individuality.

Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own expression, "curdled" a whole world of meaning into the compass of one line:--

"The starry Galileo and his woes."

"The blind old man of Chio's rocky isle."

Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an idea. Such lines are _picturesque_. And I remember another, from Thomson, I think:--

"Placed far amid the melancholy main."

In general, where words are used in description, the objects and ideas flow with the words in succession. But in each of these lines the mind takes in a wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at once, as the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and action, and figures, fore-ground and background, all at once. That is the reason I call such lines _picturesque_.

53.

I have a great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness--especially in my own sex,--yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation, through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength; for those whose refinement and softness of nature mingling with high intellectual power and the capacity for strong passion, present to me a problem to solve, which, when solved, I take to my heart. The question is not, which of the two diversities of character be the highest and best, but which is most sympathetic with my own.

54.

C---- told me, that some time ago, when poor Bethune the Scotch poet first became known, and was in great hardship, C---- himself had collected a little sum (about 30_l._), and sent it to him through his publishers. Bethune wrote back to refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he had head and hands, he would not accept _charity_. C---- wrote to him in answer, still anonymously, arguing against the principle, as founded in false pride, &c. Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found untouched,--left with a friend to be returned to the donors!

This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely constituted minds feel with regard to pecuniary obligation,--my own utter repugnance to it, even from the hands of those I most love,--makes one sad to think of. It gives one such a miserable impression of our social humanity!

Goethe makes the same remark in the Wilhelm Meister:--"Es ist sonderbar welch ein wunderliches Bedenken man sich macht, Geld von Freunden und Gönnern anzunehmen, von denen man jede andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude empfangen würde."

55.

"In the celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius Areopageta, the angels of Love hold the first place, the angels of Light the second, and the Thrones and Dominations the third. Among terrestrials, the Intellects, which act through the imagination upon the heart of man--_i. e._ poets and artists--may be accounted first in order; the merely scientific intellects the second; and the merely ruling intellects--those which apply themselves to the government of mankind, without the aid of either science or imagination--will not be disparaged if they are placed last."

All government, all exercise of power--no matter in what form--which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of God, and shall not stand.

"A time will come when the operations of charity will no longer be carried on by machinery, relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by human creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise."--_Westminster Review._

56.

"Those writers who never go further into a subject than is compatible with making what they say indisputably clear to man, woman, and child, may be the lights of _this_ age, but they will not be the lights of _another_."

"It is not always necessary that truth should take a bodily form,--a material palpable form. It is sometimes better that it should dwell around us spiritually, creating harmony,--sounding through the air like the solemn sweet tone of a bell."

57.