Chapter IX: Front Matter (9)

The first thing that brought Dr. Bushnell out of the world of theology into the world of literature was his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College in 1848. He had achieved a reputation as a preacher of remarkable insight for such as had ears to hear, and he was already in the thick of theological controversy; but his fine power of expression and breadth of thought had not been specially noticed. This oration introduced him into the world of letters. Mr. J. T. Fields--the most discerning critic of the day--said to the writer that the oration was heard with surprise and delight, and that it gave the speaker an assured place in the ranks of literature. That he should have been so readily welcomed by the literary guild is not strange, for the title of his oration--'Work and Play'--led the way into a discussion of the secret that underlies all works of genius. For once, the possessor of the divine gift heard its secret revealed and himself explained to himself; his work was set before him as the full play of his spirit. Beginning with nature, where our author always began, and finding there a free and sportive element, he carries it into human life; making the contention that its aim should be, and that its destiny will be, to free itself from the constraint of mere work and rise into that natural action of the faculties which may be called _play_--a moral and spiritual process. His conclusion is that--

"if the world were free,--free, I mean, of themselves; brought
up, all, out of work into the pure inspiration of truth and
charity,--new forms of personal and intellectual beauty would
appear, and society itself reveal the Orphic movement. No more
will it be imagined that poetry and rhythm are accidents or
figments of the race, one side of all ingredient or ground of
nature. But we shall know that poetry is the real and true state
of man; the proper and last ideal of souls, the free beauty they
long for, and the rhythmic flow of that universal play in which
all life would live."

The key to Dr. Bushnell is to be found in this passage, and it is safe to say of him that in hardly a page of a dozen volumes is he false to it. He is always a poet, singing out of "the pure inspiration of truth and charity," and keeping ever in mind that poetry and rhythm are not figments outside of nature, but the real and true state of man and the proper and last ideal of souls.

The centrality of this thought is seen in his style. It is a remarkable style, and is only to be appreciated when the man is understood. It is made up of long sentences full of qualifying phrases until the thought is carved into perfect exactness; or--changing the figure--shade upon shade is added until the picture and conception are alike. But with all this piling up of phrases, he not only did not lose proportion and rhythm, but so set down his words that they read like a chant and sound like the breaking of waves upon the beach. Nor does he ever part with poetry in the high sense in which he conceived it. I will not compare his style, as to merit, with that of Milton and Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, but he belongs to their class; he has the same majestic swing, and like them he cannot forbear singing, whatever he may have to say. His theme may be roads, or city plans, or agriculture, or emigration, or the growth of law; yet he never fails of lifting his subject into that higher world of the imagination where the real truth of the subject is to be found, and is made to appear as poetry. It would be unjust to identify him so thoroughly with the poets if it should lead to the thought that he was not a close and rigorous thinker. It should not be forgotten that all great prose-writers, from Plato down to Carlyle and Emerson, stand outside of poetry only by virtue of their form and not by virtue of their thought; indeed, poet and thinker are interchangeable names. Dr. Bushnell wrote chiefly on theology, and the value and efficacy of his writings lie in the fact that imagination and fact, thought and sentiment, reason and feeling, are each preserved and yet so mingled as to make a single impression.

This combination of two realms or habits of thought appears on every page. He was, as Novalis said of Spinoza, "A God-intoxicated man," but it was God as containing humanity in himself. His theology was a veritable Jacob's ladder, on which the angels of God ascend and descend; and if in his thought they descended before they ascended, it was because he conceived of humanity as existing in God before it was manifest in creation; and if his head was among the stars, his feet were always firmly planted on the earth. This twofoldness finds a curious illustration in the sub-titles of several of his books. 'The Vicarious Sacrifice' does not spring alone out of the divine nature, but is 'Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation.' 'Nature and the Supernatural'--the great antithesis in theology--constitute 'The One System of God.' 'Women's Suffrage' is 'The Reform against Nature'--the best book, I must be permitted to say, on either side of this much-debated question.

It is a popular impression of Dr. Bushnell that he was the subject of his imagination, and that it ran away with him in the treatment of themes which required only severe thought: the impression is a double mistake: theology does not call for severe thought, alone nor mainly; but first and chiefly for the imagination, and the seeing and interpreting eye that usually goes with it; its object is to find spirit under form, to discover what the _logos_ expresses. For this the imagination is the chief requisite. It is not a vagrant and irresponsible faculty, but an inner eye whose vision is to be trusted like that of the outer; it has in itself the quality of thought, and is not a mere picture-making gift. Dr. Bushnell trained his imagination to work on certain definite lines, and for a definite end--namely, to bring out the spiritual meaning hidden within the external form. He worked in the spirit of Coleridge's words:--

"I had found
That outward forms the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the Life within."

No analysis or recapitulation of his works can be given in these preliminary words. Perhaps his most influential book is the first, 'Christian Nurture'; while a treatise for the household, it was surcharged with theological opinions which proved to be revolutionary and epoch-making. 'The Vicarious Sacrifice' has most affected the pulpit. 'Nature and the Supernatural,' the tenth chapter of which has become a classic, has done great service in driving out the extreme dualism that invested the subject of God's relation to creation. His ablest essay is the treatise on Language; the most literary is that on 'Work and Play'; the most penetrating in its insight is 'Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination'; the most personal and characteristic is 'The Age of Homespun.' His best sermon is always the one last read; and they are perhaps his most representative work. The sermon is not usually ranked as belonging to literature, but no canon excludes those preached by this great man. They are timeless in their truth, majestic in their diction, commanding in their moral tone, penetrating in their spirituality, and pervaded by that quality without which a sermon is not one--the divine uttering itself to the human. There is no striving and crying in the streets, no heckling of saints nor dooming of sinners, no petty debates over details of conduct, no dogmatic assumption, no logical insistence, but only the gentle and mighty persuasions of truth, coming as if breathed by the very spirit of God.

Language was to him "the sanctuary of thought," and these sermons are the uttered worship in that temple where reason and devotion are one.

WORK AND PLAY

From 'Work and Play'

Let me call to my aid, then, some thoughtful spirit in my audience: not a poet, of necessity, or a man of genius, but a man of large meditation, one who is accustomed to observe, and, by virtue of the warm affinities of a living heart, to draw out the meanings that are hid so often in the humblest things. Returning into the bosom of his family in some interval of care and labor, he shall come upon the very unclassic and certainly unimposing scene,--his children and a kitten playing on the floor together; and just there, possibly, shall meet him suggestions more fresh and thoughts of higher reach concerning himself and his race, than the announcement of a new-discovered planet or the revolution of an empire would incite. He surveys with a meditative feeling this beautiful scene of muscular play,--the unconscious activity, the exuberant life, the spirit of glee,--and there rises in his heart the conception that possibly he is here to see the prophecy or symbol of another and higher kind of play, which is the noblest exercise and last end of man himself. Worn by the toils of years, perceiving with a sigh that the unconscious joy of motion here displayed is spent in himself, and that now he is effectually tamed to the doom of a working creature, he may yet discover, in the lively sympathy with play that bathes his inward feeling, that his soul is playing now,--enjoying, without the motions, all it could do in them; manifold more than it could if he were down upon the floor himself, in the unconscious activity and lively frolic of childhood. Saddened he may be to note how time and work have changed his spirit and dried away the playful springs of animal life in his being; yet he will find, or ought, a joy playing internally over the face of his working nature, which is fuller and richer as it is more tranquil; which is to the other as fulfillment to prophecy, and is in fact the prophecy of a better and far more glorious fulfillment still.

Having struck in this manner the great world-problem of WORK AND PLAY, his thoughts kindle under the theme, and he pursues it. The living races are seen at a glance to be offering in their history everywhere a faithful type of his own. They show him what he himself is doing and preparing--all that he finds in the manifold experience of his own higher life. They have, all, their gambols; all, their sober cares and labors. The lambs are sporting on the green knoll; the anxious dams are bleating to recall them to their side. The citizen beaver is building his house by a laborious carpentry; the squirrel is lifting his sail to the wind on the swinging top of the tree. In the music of the morning, he hears the birds playing with their voices, and when the day is up, sees them sailing round in circles on the upper air, as skaters on a lake, folding their wings, dropping and rebounding, as if to see what sport they can make of the solemn laws that hold the upper and lower worlds together. And yet these play-children of the air he sees again descending to be carriers and drudges; fluttering and screaming anxiously about their nest, and confessing by that sign that not even wings can bear them clear of the stern doom of work. Or, passing to some quiet shade, meditating still on this careworn life, playing still internally with ideal fancies and desires unrealized, there returns upon him there, in the manifold and spontaneous mimicry of nature, a living show of all that is transpiring in his own bosom; in every flower some bee humming over his laborious chemistry and loading his body with the fruits of his toil; in the slant sunbeam, populous nations of motes quivering with animated joy, and catching, as in play, at the golden particles of the light with their tiny fingers. Work and play, in short, are the universal ordinance of God for the living races; in which they symbolize the fortune and interpret the errand of man. No creature lives that must not work and may not play.

Returning now to himself and to man, and meditating yet more deeply, as he is thus prepared to do, on work and play, and play and work, as blended in the compound of our human life; asking again what is work and what is play, what are the relations of one to the other, and which is the final end of all, he discovers in what he was observing round him a sublimity of import, a solemnity even, that is deep as the shadow of eternity.

I believe in a future age yet to be revealed, which is to be distinguished from all others as the godly or godlike age,--an age not of universal education simply, or universal philanthropy, or external freedom, or political well-being, but a day of reciprocity and free intimacy between all souls and God. Learning and religion, the scholar and the Christian, will not be divided as they have been. The universities will be filled with a profound spirit of religion, and the _bene orasse_ will be a fountain of inspiration to all the investigations of study and the creations of genius.

I raise this expectation of the future, not because some prophet of old time has spoken of a day to come when "the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof" (for I know not that he meant to be so interpreted), but because I find a prophecy of play in our nature itself which it were a violation of all insight not to believe will sometime be fulfilled. And when it is fulfilled it will be found that Christianity has at last developed a new literary era, the era of religious love.

Hitherto the passion of love has been the central fire of the world's literature. The dramas, epics, odes, novels, and even histories, have spoken to the world's heart chiefly through this passion, and through this have been able to get their answer. For this passion is a state of play, wherein the man loses himself in the ardor of a devotion regardless of interest, fear, care, prudence, and even of life itself. Hence there gathers round the lover a tragic interest, and we hang upon his destiny as if some natural charm or spell were in it. Now this passion of love, which has hitherto been the staple of literature, is only a crude symbol in the life of nature, by which God designs to interpret, and also to foreshadow, the higher love of religion,--nature's gentle Beatrice, who puts her image in the youthful Dante, by that to attend him afterwards in the spirit-flight of song, and be his guide up through the wards of Paradise to the shining mount of God. What then are we to think, but that God will sometime bring us up out of the literature of the lower love, into that of the higher?--that as the age of passion yields to the age of reason, so the crude love of instinct will give place to the loftier, finer, more impelling love of God? And then around that nobler love, or out of it, shall arise a new body of literature, as much more gifted as the inspiration is purer and more intellectual. Beauty, truth, and worship; song, science, and duty, will all be unfolded together in this common love.

FROM 'THE AGE OF HOMESPUN'

Most of all to be remembered are those friendly circles gathered so often round the winter's fire; not the stove, but the fire, the brightly blazing, hospitable fire. In the early dusk, the home circle is drawn more closely and quietly round it; but a good neighbor and his wife drop in shortly from over the way, and the circle begins to spread. Next, a few young folk from the other end of the village, entering in brisker mood, find as many more chairs set in as wedges into the periphery to receive them also. And then a friendly sleighful of old and young that have come down from the hill to spend an hour or two, spread the circle again, moving it still farther back from the fire; and the fire blazes just as much higher and more brightly, having a new stick added for every guest. There is no restraint, certainly no affectation of style. They tell stories, they laugh, they sing. They are serious and gay by turns, or the young folks go on with some play, while the fathers and mothers are discussing some hard point of theology in the minister's last sermon, or perhaps the great danger coming to sound morals from the multiplication of turnpikes and newspapers! Meantime the good housewife brings out her choice stock of home-grown exotics, gathered from three realms--doughnuts from the pantry, hickory-nuts from the chamber, and the nicest, smoothest apples from the cellar; all which, including, I suppose I must add, the rather unpoetic beverage that gave its acid smack to the ancient hospitality, are discussed as freely, with no fear of consequences. And then, as the tall clock in the corner of the room ticks on majestically towards nine, the conversation takes, it may be, a little more serious turn, and it is suggested that a very happy evening may fitly be ended with a prayer. Whereupon the circle breaks up with a reverent, congratulative look on every face, which is itself the truest language of a social nature blessed in human fellowship.

Such, in general, was the society of the homespun age....

Passing to the church, or rather I should say, to the meeting-house--good translation, whether meant or not, of what is older and more venerable than _church_, viz., _synagogue_--here again you meet the picture of a sturdy homespun worship. Probably it stands on some hill, midway between three or four valleys, whither the tribes go up to worship, and, when the snow-drifts are deepest, go literally from strength to strength. There is no furnace or stove save the foot-stoves that are filled from the fires of the neighboring houses, and brought in partly as a rather formal compliment to the delicacy of the tender sex, and sometimes because they are really wanted. The dress of the assembly is mostly homespun, indicating only slight distinctions of quality in the worshipers. They are seated according to age,--the old king Lemuels and their queens in front, near the pulpit, and the younger Lemuels farther back, inclosed in pews, sitting back to back, impounded, all, for deep thought and spiritual digestion; only the deacons, sitting close under the pulpit by themselves, to receive, as their distinctive honor, the more perpendicular droppings of the Word. Clean round the front of the gallery is drawn a single row of choir, headed by the key-pipe in the centre. The pulpit is overhung by an august wooden canopy called a sounding-board--study general, of course, and first lesson of mystery to the eyes of the children, until what time their ears are opened to understand the spoken mysteries.

There is no affectation of seriousness in the assembly, no mannerism of worship; some would say too little of the manner of worship. They think of nothing, in fact, save what meets their intelligence and enters into them by that method. They appear like men who have a digestion for strong meat, and have no conception that trifles more delicate can be of any account to feed the system. Nothing is dull that has the matter in it, nothing long that has not exhausted the matter. If the minister speaks in his great-coat and thick gloves or mittens, if the howling blasts of winter drive in across the assembly fresh streams of ventilation that move the hair upon their heads, they are none the less content, if only he gives them good strong exercise. Under their hard and, as some would say, stolid faces, great thoughts are brewing, and these keep them warm. Free-will, fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute, trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity--give them anything high enough, and the tough muscle of their inward man will be climbing sturdily into it; and if they go away having something to think of, they have had a good day. A perceptible glow will kindle in their hard faces only when some one of the chief apostles, a Day, a Smith, or a Bellamy, has come to lead them up some higher pinnacle of thought or pile upon their sturdy minds some heavier weight of argument--fainting never under any weight, even that which, to the foreign critics of the discourses preached by them and others of their day, it seems impossible for any, the most cultivated audience in the world, to have supported. These royal men of homespun--how great a thing to them was religion!

The sons and daughters grew up, all, as you will perceive, in the closest habits of industry. The keen jocky way of whittling out a living by small bargains sharply turned, which many suppose to be an essential characteristic of the Yankee race, is yet no proper inbred distinction, but only a casual result, or incident, that pertains to the transition period between the small, stringent way of life in the previous times of home-production and the new age of trade. In these olden times, these genuine days of homespun, they supposed, in their simplicity, that thrift represented work, and looked about seldom for any more delicate and sharper way of getting on. They did not call a man's property his _fortune_, but they spoke of one or another as being _worth_ so much; conceiving that he had it laid up as the reward or fruit of his deservings. The house was a factory on the farm, the farm a grower and producer for the house. The exchanges went on briskly enough, but required neither money nor trade. No affectation of polite living, no languishing airs of delicacy and softness indoors, had begun to make the fathers and sons impatient of hard work out of doors, and set them at contriving some easier and more plausible way of living. Their very dress represented work, and they went out as men whom the wives and daughters had dressed for work; facing all weather, cold and hot, wet and dry, wrestling with the plow on the stony-sided hills, digging out the rocks by hard lifting and a good many very practical experiments in mechanics, dressing the flax, threshing the rye, dragging home, in the deep snows, the great woodpile of the year's consumption; and then when the day is ended--having no loose money to spend in taverns--taking their recreation all together in reading or singing or happy talk or silent looking in the fire, and finally in sleep--to rise again with the sun and pray over the family Bible for just such another good day as the last. And so they lived, working out, each year, a little advance of thrift, just within the line of comfort.

No mode of life was ever more expensive: it was life at the expense of labor too stringent to allow the highest culture and the most proper enjoyment. Even the dress of it was more expensive than we shall ever see again. Still it was a life of honesty and simple content and sturdy victory. Immoralities that rot down the vigor and humble the consciousness of families were as much less frequent as they had less thought of adventure; less to do with travel and trade and money, and were closer to nature and the simple life of home.

It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt--a closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed all together into the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread and grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with meanness--simply because they knew things only in the small; or, what is not far different, because they were too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big operations by which other men are wont to get their money without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will be found, is really anything but meanness.

THE FOUNDERS

From 'Work and Play'

There is a class of writers and critics in our country, who imagine it is quite clear that our fathers cannot have been the proper founders of our American liberties, because it is in proof that they were so intolerant and so clearly unrepublican often in their avowed sentiments. They suppose the world to be a kind of professor's chair, and expect events to transpire logically in it. They see not that casual opinions, or conventional and traditional prejudices, are one thing, and that principles and morally dynamic forces are often quite another; that the former are the connectives only of history, the latter its springs of life; and that if the former serve well enough as providential guards and moderating weights overlying the deep geologic fires and subterranean heavings of the new moral instincts below, these latter will assuredly burst up at last in strong mountains of rock, to crest the world. Unable to conceive such a truth, they cast about them accordingly to find the paternity of our American institutions in purely accidental causes. We are clear of aristocratic orders, they say, because there was no blood of which to make an aristocracy; independent of king and parliament, because we grew into independence under the natural effects of distance and the exercise of a legislative power; republican, because our constitutions were cast in the molds of British law; a wonder of growth in riches, enterprise, and population, because of the hard necessities laid upon us, and our simple modes of life.

There is yet another view of this question, that has a far higher significance. We do not understand, as it seems to me, the real greatness of our institutions when we look simply at the forms under which we hold our liberties. It consists not in these, but in the magnificent possibilities that underlie these forms as their fundamental supports and conditions. In these we have the true paternity and spring of our institutions; and these, beyond a question, are the gift of our founders.

We see this, first of all, in the fixed relation between freedom and intelligence, and the remarkable care they had of popular education. It was not their plan to raise up a body of republicans. But they believed in mind as in God. Their religion was the choice of mind. The gospel they preached must have minds to hear it; and hence the solemn care they had, even from the first day of their settlement, of the education of every child. And, as God would have it, the children whom they trained up for pillars in the church turned out also to be more than tools of power. They grew up into magistrates, leaders of the people, debaters of right and of law, statesmen, generals, and signers of declarations for liberty. Such a mass of capacity had never been seen before in so small a body of men. And this is the first condition of liberty--the Condensation of Power. For liberty is not the license of an hour; it is not the butchery of a royal house, or the passion that rages behind a barricade, or the caps that are swung or the _vivas_ shouted at the installing of a liberator. But it is the compact, impenetrable matter of much manhood, the compressed energy of good sense and public reason, having power to see before and after and measure action by counsel--this it is that walls about the strength and liberty of a people. To be free is not to fly abroad as the owls of the night when they take the freedom of the air, but it is to settle and build and be strong--a commonwealth as much better compacted in the terms of reason, as it casts off more of the restraints of force.

Their word was "Reformation"--"the completion of the Reformation"; not Luther's nor Calvin's, they expressly say; they cannot themselves imagine it. Hitherto it is unconceived by men. God must reveal it in the light that breaks forth from him. And this he will do in his own good time. It is already clear to us that, in order to any further progress in this direction, it was necessary for a new movement to begin that should loosen the joints of despotism and emancipate the mind of the world. And in order to this a new republic must be planted and have time to grow. It must be seen rising up in the strong majesty of freedom and youth, outstripping the old prescriptive world in enterprise and the race of power, covering the ocean with its commerce, spreading out in populous swarms of industry,--planting, building, educating, framing constitutions, rushing to and fro in the smoke and thunder of travel along its mighty rivers, across its inland seas, over its mountain-tops from one shore to the other, strong in order as in liberty,--a savage continent become the field of a colossal republican empire, whose name is a name of respect and a mark of desire to the longing eyes of mankind. And then, as the fire of new ideas and hopes darts electrically along the nerves of feeling in the millions of the race, it will be seen that a new Christian movement also begins with it. Call it reformation, or formation, or by whatever name, it is irresistible because it is intangible. In one view it is only destruction. The State is loosened from the Church. The Church crumbles down into fragments. Superstition is eaten away by the strong acid of liberty, and spiritual despotism flies affrighted from the broken loyalty of its metropolis. Protestantism also, divided and subdivided by its dialectic quarrels, falls into the finest, driest powder of disintegration. Be not afraid. The new order crystallizes only as the old is dissolved; and no sooner is the old unity of orders and authorities effectually dissolved than the reconstructive affinities of a new and better unity begin to appear in the solution. Repugnances melt away. Thought grows catholic. Men look for good in each other as well as evil. The crossings of opinion by travel and books, and the intermixture of races and religions, issue in freer, broader views of the Christian truth; and so the "Church of the Future," as it has been called, gravitates inwardly towards those terms of brotherhood in which it may coalesce and rest. I say not or believe that Christendom will be Puritanized or Protestantized; but what is better than either, it will be Christianized. It will settle thus into a unity, probably not of form, but of practical assent and love--a Commonwealth of the Spirit, as much stronger in its unity than the old satrapy of priestly despotism, as our republic is stronger than any other government of the world.

RELIGIOUS MUSIC

From 'Work and Play'

As we are wont to argue the invisible things of God, even his eternal power and Godhead, from the things that are seen, finding them all images of thought and vehicles of intelligence, so we have an argument for God more impressive, in one view, because the matter of it is so deep and mysterious, from the fact that a grand, harmonic, soul-interpreting law of music pervades all the objects of the material creation, and that things without life, all metals and woods and valleys and mountains and waters, are tempered with distinctions of sound, and toned to be a language to the feeling of the heart. It is as if God had made the world about us to be a grand organ of music, so that our feelings might have play in it, as our understanding has in the light of the sun and the outward colors and forms of things. What is called the musical scale, or octave, is fixed in the original appointments of sound just as absolutely and definitely as the colors of the rainbow or prism in the optical properties and laws of light. And the visible objects of the world are not more certainly shaped and colored to us under the exact laws of light and the prism, than they are tempered and toned, as objects audible, to give distinctions of sound by their vibrations in the terms of the musical octave. It is not simply that we hear the sea roar and the floods clap their hands in anthems of joy; it is not that we hear the low winds sigh, or the storms howl dolefully, or the ripples break peacefully on the shore, or the waters dripping sadly from the rock, or the thunders crashing in horrible majesty through the pavements of heaven; not only do all the natural sounds we hear come to us in tones of music as interpreters of feeling, but there is hid in the secret temper and substance of all matter a silent music, that only waits to sound and become a voice of utterance to the otherwise unutterable feeling of our heart--a voice, if we will have it, of love and worship to the God of all.

First, there is a musical scale in the laws of the air itself, exactly answering to the musical sense or law of the soul. Next, there is in all substances a temperament of quality related to both; so that whatever kind of feeling there may be in a soul--war and defiance, festivity and joy, sad remembrance, remorse, pity, penitence, self-denial, love, adoration--may find some fit medium of sound in which to express itself. And, what is not less remarkable, connected with all these forms of substances there are mathematical laws of length and breadth, or definite proportions of each, and reflective angles, that are every way as exact as those which regulate the colors of the prism, the images of the mirror, or the telescopic light of astronomic worlds--mathematics for the heart as truly as for the head.

It cannot be said that music is a human creation, and as far as the substances of the world are concerned, a mere accident. As well can it be said that man creates the colors of the prism, and that they are not in the properties of the light, because he shapes the prism by his own mechanical art. Or if still we doubt; if it seems incredible that the soul of music is in the heart of all created being; then the laws of harmony themselves shall answer, one string vibrating to another, when it is not struck itself, and uttering its voice of concord simply because the concord is in it and it feels the pulses on the air to which it cannot be silent. Nay, the solid mountains and their giant masses of rock shall answer; catching, as they will, the bray of horns or the stunning blast of cannon, rolling it across from one top to another in reverberating pulses, till it falls into bars of musical rhythm and chimes and cadences of silver melody. I have heard some fine music, as men are wont to speak--the play of orchestras, the anthems of choirs, the voices of song that moved admiring nations. But in the lofty passes of the Alps I heard a music overhead from God's cloudy orchestra, the giant peaks of rock and ice, curtained in by the driving mist and only dimly visible athwart the sky through its folds, such as mocks all sounds our lower worlds of art can ever hope to raise. I stood (excuse the simplicity) calling to them, in the loudest shouts I could raise, even till my power was spent, and listening in compulsory trance to their reply. I heard them roll it up through their cloudy worlds of snow, sifting out the harsh qualities that were tearing in it as demon screams of sin, holding on upon it as if it were a hymn they were fining to the ear of the great Creator, and sending it round and round in long reduplications of sweetness, minute after minute; till finally receding and rising, it trembled, as it were, among the quick gratulations of angels, and fell into the silence of the pure empyrean. I had never any conception before of what is meant by _quality_ in sound. There was more power upon the soul in one of those simple notes than I ever expect to feel from anything called music below, or ever can feel till I hear them again in the choirs of the angelic world. I had never such a sense of purity, or of what a simple sound may tell of purity by its own pure quality; and I could not but say, O my God, teach me this! Be this in me forever! And I can truly affirm that the experience of that hour has consciously made me better able to think of God ever since--better able to worship. All other sounds are gone; the sounds of yesterday, heard in the silence of enchanted multitudes, are gone; but that is with me still, and I hope will never cease to ring in my spirit till I go down to the slumber of silence itself.

SAMUEL BUTLER

(1612-1680)

A pretty picture of the time is the glimpse of young Mr. Pepys at the bookseller's in London Strand on a February morning in 1663, making haste to buy a new copy of 'Hudibras,' and carefully explaining that it was "ill humor of him to be so against that which all the world cries up to be an example of wit." The Clerk of the Admiralty had connections at court; and between that February morning and a December day when Mr. Battersby was at the Wardrobe using the King's time in gossip about the new book of drollery, the merry Stuart had found out Sam Butler's poem and had given it the help of his royal approval. Erstwhile, Samuel the courtier had thought the work of Samuel the poet silly, and had given warranty of his opinion by suffering loss of one shilling eightpence on his purchase of the book. A view not to be wondered at in one who sets down "Midsummer Night's Dream" as "insipid and ridiculous," and "Othello" as a "mean thing"! Perhaps it was because Butler had a keen knowledge of Shakespeare, and unconsciously used much of the actor's quick-witted method, that his delicately feathered barbs made no dent on the hard head of Pepys. Like his neighbor of the Avon, the author of "Hudibras" was a merciless scourge to the vainglorious follies of the time in which he poorly and obscurely lived; and like the truths which he told in his inimitable satires, the virtue and decency of his life was obscured by the disorder of the Commonwealth and the unfaith of the restored monarchy.

Samuel Butler was born near Strensham, Worcestershire, in 1612, the fifth child and second son of a farmer of that parish, whose homestead was known to within the present century as "Butler's tenement." The elder Butler was not well-to-do, but had enough to educate his son at the Worcester Grammar School, and to send him to a university. Whether or what time he was at Oxford or Cambridge remains doubtful. A Samuel Butler went up from Westminster to Christ Church, Oxford, 1623, too soon for the Worcester lad of eleven years. Another doubtful tradition places him at Cambridge in 1620. There is evidence that he was employed as a clerk by Mr. Jeffreys, a justice of the peace at Earl's Croombe in Worcestershire, and that while in this position he studied painting under Samuel Cooper. A portrait of Oliver Cromwell attributed to his hand was once in existence, and a number of paintings, said to have been by him, hung on the walls at Earl's Croombe until they were used to patch broken windows there in the last century. Butler went into the service of Elizabeth, Countess of Kent, at Wrest in Bedfordshire, where he had the use of a good library and the friendship of John Selden, then steward of the Countess's estate. It was there and in association with Selden that he began his literary work. Some time afterward he held a servitor's position in the family of an officer of Cromwell's army, Sir Samuel Luke, of Woodend, Bedfordshire. A manuscript note in an old edition of 'Hudibras,' 1710, "from the books of Phil. Lomax by gift of his father, G. Lomax," confirms the tradition that this Cromwellian colonel was the original of Hudibras. The elder Lomax is said to have been an intimate friend of Butler. Another name on the list of candidates for this humorous honor--the honor of contributing with Don Quixote to the increase of language--is that of Sir Henry Rosewell of Ford Abbey, Devonshire. But it is unnecessary to limit to an individual sample the satirist and poet of the whole breadth of human nature. A presumption that Butler was in France and Holland for a time arises from certain references in his writings. It was about 1659, when the decline of the Cromwells became assured, that Butler ventured, but anonymously, into print with a tract warmly advocating the recall of the King. At the Restoration, and probably in reward for this evidence of loyalty, he was made secretary to the Earl of Carbury, President of Wales, by whom he was appointed steward of Ludlow Castle. About this time he married a gentlewoman of small fortune, and is said to have lived comfortably upon her money until it was lost by bad investments. The King having come to his own again, Butler obtained permission in November 1662 to print the first part of 'Hudibras.' The quaint title of this poem has attracted much curious cavil. The name is used by Milton, Spenser, and Robert of Gloucester for an early king of Britain, the grandfather of King Lear; and by Ben Jonson--from whom Butler evidently adopted it--for a swaggering fellow in the 'Magnetic Lady':--

"_Rut_--Where is your captain
Rudhudibrass de Ironside?"

_Act iii., Scene 3._

Charles II. was so delighted with the satire that he not only read and reread it, but gave many copies to his intimates. The royal generosity, lavish in promises, never exerted itself further than to give Butler--or Boteler, as he is writ in the warrant--a monopoly of printing his own poem.

The second part of 'Hudibras' appeared in 1664, and the third and last in 1678.

The Duke of Buckingham was, we are told by Aubrey, well disposed towards Butler, and Wycherley was a constant suitor in his behalf; but the fickle favorite forgot his promises as easily as did the King. Lord Clarendon, who had the witty poet's portrait painted for his library, was no better at promise-keeping. It is natural that such neglect should have provoked the sharp but just satires which Butler wrote against the manners of Charles's dissolute court.

'Hudibras' was never finished; for Butler, who had been confined by his infirmities to his room in Rose Court, Covent Garden, since 1676, died on September 25th, 1680. William Longueville, a devoted friend but for whose kindness the poet might have starved, buried the remains at his own expense in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden. In 1721 John Barber, Lord Mayor of London, set up in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey an inscription to Butler's memory, which caused later satirists to suggest that this was giving a stone to him who had asked for bread.

Butler was a plain man of middle stature, strong-set, high-colored, with a head of sorrel hair. He possessed a severe and sound judgment, but was "a good fellow," according to his friend Aubrey.

Many of Butler's writings were not published in his lifetime, during which only the three parts of 'Hudibras' and some trifles appeared. Longueville, who received his papers, left them, unpublished, to his son Charles; from whom they came to John Clarke of Cheshire, by whose permission the 'Genuine Remains' in two volumes were published in 1759. The title of this book is due to the fact that poor Butler, as is usual with his kind, became very popular immediately after his death, and the ghouls of literature supplied the book-shops with forgeries. Butler's manuscripts, many of which have never been published, were placed in the British Museum in 1885.

HUDIBRAS DESCRIBED

When civil fury first grew high,
And men fell out, they knew not why;
When hard words, jealousies, and fears
Set folks together by the ears,
And made them fight, like mad or drunk,
For dame Religion as for Punk,
Whose honesty they all durst swear for,
Tho' not a man of them knew wherefore;
When Gospel-Trumpeter, surrounded
With long-ear'd rout, to battle sounded,
And pulpit, drum ecclesiastick,
Was beat with fist, instead of a stick;
Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling,
And out he rode a-colonelling.

A Wight he was, whose very sight would
Entitle him Mirror of Knighthood,
That never bent his stubborn knee
To anything but chivalry;
Nor put up blow, but that which laid
Right worshipful on shoulder-blade;
Chief of domestic knights, and errant,
Either for chartel or for warrant;
Great on the bench, great in the saddle,
That could as well bind o'er, as swaddle:
Mighty he was at both of these,
And styl'd of War as well as Peace.
So some rats of amphibious nature
Are either for the land or water.
But here our authors make a doubt,
Whether he were more wise, or stout.
Some hold the one, and some the other;
But howsoe'er they make a pother,
The diff'rence was so small, his brain
Outweigh'd his rage but half a grain;
Which made some take him for a tool
That knaves do work with, call'd a Fool;
And offer'd to lay wagers that
As Montaigne, playing with his cat,
Complains she thought him but an ass,
Much more she wou'd Sir Hudibras:
For that's the name our valiant knight
To all his challenges did write.
But they're mistaken very much;
'Tis plain enough he was no such:
We grant, although he had much wit,
H' was very shy of using it,
As being loth to wear it out;
And therefore bore it not about,
Unless on holy-days, or so,
As men their best apparel do.

He was in Logic a great critic,
Profoundly skill'd in Analytic;
He could distinguish and divide
A hair 'twixt south and southwest side;
On either side he would dispute,
Confute, change hands, and still confute;
He'd undertake to prove by force
Of argument, a man's no horse;
He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl,
And that a Lord may be an owl;
A calf an Alderman, a goose a Justice,
And rooks Committee-Men or Trustees.
He'd run in debt by disputation,
And pay with ratiocination.
All this by syllogism true,
In mood and figure, he would do.

For Rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope:
And when he happen'd to break off
I' th' middle of his speech, or cough,
H' had hard words, ready to shew why
And tell what rules he did it by.
Else, when with greatest art he spoke,
You'd think he talk'd like other folk.
For all a Rhetorician's rules
Teach nothing but to name his tools.

His ordinary rate of speech
In loftiness of sound was rich;
A Babylonish dialect,
Which learned pedants much affect;
It was a parti-color'd dress
Of patch'd and piebald languages:
'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin,
Like fustian heretofore on satin.
It had an odd promiscuous tone,
As if h' had talk'd three parts in one;
Which made some think, when he did gabble,
Th' had heard three laborers of Babel;
Or Cerberus himself pronounce
A leash of languages at once.
This he as volubly would vent
As if his stock would ne'er be spent:
And truly, to support that charge,
He had supplies as vast and large,
For he could coin or counterfeit
New words with little or no wit:
Words so debas'd and hard, no stone
Was hard enough to touch them on;
And when with hasty noise he spoke 'em,
The ignorant for current took 'em--
That had the orator who once
Did fill his mouth with pebble-stones
When he harangu'd, but known his phrase,
He would have us'd no other ways.

In Mathematics he was greater
Than Tycho Brahe, or Erra Pater:
For he, by geometric scale,
Could take the size of pots of ale;
Resolve, by sines and tangents straight,
If bread or butter wanted weight;
And wisely tell what hour o' th' day
The clock does strike, by Algebra.

. . . . . . .

Beside, he was a shrewd Philosopher,
And had read every text and gloss over:
Whate'er the crabbed'st author hath,
He understood b' implicit faith:
Whatever Skeptic could inquire for;
For every WHY he had a WHEREFORE:
Knew more than forty of them do,
As far as words and terms could go.
All which he understood by rote,
And, as occasion serv'd, would quote;
No matter whether right or wrong,
They might be either said or sung.
His notions fitted things so well,
That which was which he could not tell,
But oftentimes mistook the one
For th' other, as great clerks have done.
He could reduce all things to acts,
And knew their natures by abstracts;
Where entity and quiddity,
The ghost of defunct bodies, fly;
Where Truth in person does appear,
Like words congealed in northern air.
He knew what's what, and that's as high
As metaphysic wit can fly.

. . . . . . .

For his religion, it was fit
To match his learning and his wit:
'Twas Presbyterian, true blue;
For he was of that stubborn crew
Of errant saints, whom all men grant
To be the true church militant:
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;
Decide all controversy by
Infallible artillery;
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks;
Call fire and sword and desolation
A godly-thorough-Reformation,
Which always must be carry'd on,
And still be doing, never done,
As if Religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
A sect whose chief devotion lies
In odd perverse antipathies:
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss:
More peevish, cross, and splenetic,
Than dog distract, or monkey sick.
That with more care keep holy-day
The wrong, than others the right way:
Compound for sins they are inclin'd to,
By damning those they have no mind to:
Still so perverse and opposite,
As if they worship'd God for spite.
The self-same thing they will abhor
One way, and long another for.
Free-will they one way disavow,
Another, nothing else allow.
All piety consists therein
In them, in other men all sin.
Rather than fail, they will defy
That which they love most tenderly:
Quarrel with minc'd pies, and disparage
Their best and dearest friend--plum-porridge;
Fat pig and goose itself oppose,
And blaspheme custard through the nose.

. . . . . . .

His puissant sword unto his side,
Near his undaunted heart, was ty'd,
With basket-hilt, that would hold broth,
And serve for fight and dinner both.
In it he melted lead for bullets,
To shoot at foes, and sometimes pullets;
To whom he bore so fell a grutch,
He ne'er gave quarter t'any such.
The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty,
For want of fighting was grown rusty,
And ate into itself, for lack
Of somebody to hew and hack.
The peaceful scabbard where it dwelt
The rancor of its edge had felt....

This sword a dagger had, his page,
That was but little for his age:
And therefore waited on him so,
As dwarfs upon knights-errant do.
It was a serviceable dudgeon,
Either for fighting or for drudging:
When it had stabb'd, or broke a head,
It would scrape trenchers or chip bread,
Toast cheese or bacon, though it were
To bait a mouse-trap, 'twould not care:
'Twould make clean shoes, and in the earth
Set leeks and onions, and so forth:
It had been 'prentice to a brewer,
Where this, and more, it did endure;
But left the trade, as many more
Have lately done, on the same score.

LORD BYRON

(1788-1824)

BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER