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_ Avaunt, ye hypocrites! who make a whining pretence, according to a fixed rule, of verbally uttering thanks to God for every chastisement, and who say this is good for you. So do not I, being upright, and God seeing my heart, who also sees that I murmur not; but if it were not good in the end, yet I submit. He is not offended that with upright sincerity I give no thanks for it. And I say that, unless a man perceives the particular way in which it has been good for him, he cannot sincerely, truly, or so as not to mock God with his lips, give thanks simply on an _a priori_ principle, though, of course, he may submit in humbleness.
I do not believe that the faith of any man in the apparent fact that he will never again see such a person (_i.e._, by being removed by death) is real. I believe that the degree of faith in this respect is regulated by an original setting or fixing of our nature quite unconscious to ourselves. So, again, I believe that hope is never utterly withdrawn, despair is never absolute. And again, I believe that, at the lowest nadir, the resource of dying as a means of escape and translation to new chances and openings is lodged in every man far down below the sunlights of consciousness. He feels that his death is not final; were it otherwise he could not rush at the escape so lightly. Indeed, were his fate fixed immutably, I feel that it would not have been left possible for him to commit suicide.
_Justice._--You say in the usual spirit of vanity, Y or X has the same degree of the spirit of justice as V. This is easily said, but the test is, what will he _do_ for it? Suppose a man to propose rewards exclusively to those who assisted at a fire, then X and Y, suppose, have equally seen that many did _not_ assist, even refused to do so. But X perhaps will shrink from exposing them; V will encounter any hatred for truth and justice by exposing the undeserving.
It is a foolish thing to say 'Hard words break no bones.' How impossible to call up from the depths of forgotten times all the unjust or shocking insinuations, all the scornful refusals to understand one aright, etc. But surely an injury is nothing to them; for that may be measured, made sensible, and cannot be forgotten, whereas the other case is like the dispute, 'Is he wrong as a _poet_?' compared with this, 'Is he wrong as a _geometrician_?' There need be no anger with the latter dispute; it is capable of decision.
Then, again, a heart so lacerated is required by Christianity to forgive the lacerator. Hard it is to do, and imperfectly it is ever done, except through the unbuckling of human nature under higher inspirations _working together with time_.
Instead of being any compliment it is the most profound insult, the idea one can write something rapidly. It is no homage to the writer; it is villainous insensibility to the written.
Two subjects of stories occur to me. 1. For my Arabian tales, founded on the story of the Minyas Treasure-House at Orchomenus. 2. Another of an abbess, who was such by dispensation, but had been married; her accomplished son succeeds in carrying off a nun. She labours for the discovery and punishment of the unknown criminal, till she learns who he is; then parting from him for ever in the early dawn, she, sacrificing to a love that for her was to produce only hatred and the total destruction of the total hopes of her ageing life. Splendide Mendax! and the more angel she.
I find the double effect as the reason of my now reading again with profit every book, however often read in earlier times, that by and through my greater knowledge and the more numerous questions growing out of that knowledge, I have deeper interest, and by and through this deeper interest I have a value put upon those questions, and I have other questions supervening through the interest alone. The interest is incarnated in the wider knowledge; the knowledge is incarnated in the interest, or at least the curiosity and questions.
Upon trying to imprint upon my memory that at such a period the Argives ceased to be called Pelasgi, and were henceforward called Danai, I felt how impracticable (and doubtless in their degree injurious, for though an infinitesimal injury only as regards any single act doubtless, yet, _per se_, by tendency doubtless all blank efforts of the memory unsupported by the understanding are bad), must be any violent efforts of the memory not falling in with a previous preparedness.
_Music._--I am satisfied that music involves a far greater mystery than we are aware of. It is that universal language which binds together all creatures, and binds them by a profounder part of their nature than anything merely intellectual ever could.
It is remarkable (as proving to me the delibility of caste) that the Sudras of Central India, during its vast confusions under the Mahrattas have endeavoured to pass themselves for descendants of the Kshatriyas (or warrior caste) by assuming the sacred thread, also assumed by the Rajpoots, and also by some of the Sikhs.
I never see a vast crowd of faces--at theatres, races, reviews--but one thing makes them sublime to me: the fact that all these people have to die. Strange it is that this multitude of people, so many of them intellectually, but also (which is worse) morally, blind, are without forethought or sense of the realities of life.
Though I love fun, eternal jesting, buffoonery, punning absolutely kills me. Such things derive all their value from being made to intervene well with other things.
This is curious:
Shame, pain, and poverty shall I endure,
When ropes or opium can my ease procure?
This offends nobody, not till you say, 'I'll buy a rope.' But now:
When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,
_Self-murder_ is an honourable way--
though the same essentially, this shocks all men.
I have in the course of my misfortunes fasted for thirty years: a dreadful fate, if it had been to come. But, being past, it is lawful to regard it with satisfaction, as having, like all fasting and mortification, sharpened to an excruciating degree my intellectual faculties. Hence my love and even furor now for mathematics, from which in my youth I fled.
The _Arrow Ketch_, six guns, is recorded in the _Edinburgh Advertiser_ for June 14th, 1844, as having returned home (to Portsmouth) on Thursday, June 7th, 'after six years and upwards in commission,' most of it surveying the Falkland Islands; 'has lost only two men during this long service, and those from natural causes;' 'never lost a spar, and has ploughed the ocean for upwards of 100,000 miles.'
Anecdotes from _Edinburgh Advertiser_, for June and May. The dog of a boy that died paralytic from grief. Little child run over by railway waggon and horse, clapping its hands when the shadow passed away, leaving it unhurt. Little girl of six committing suicide from fear of a stepmother's wrath.
To note the dire reactions (?) of evils: young thieves growing to old ones, no sewers, damp, famine-engendering, desolating and wasting plagues or typhus fever, want of granaries or mendacious violence destroying food, civil feuds coming round in internecine wars, and general desolations, and, as in Persia, eight millions occupying the homesteads of three hundred millions. Here, if anywhere, is seen the almighty reactions through which the cycle of human life, oscillating, moves.
In the speech of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh (reported on June 14th, 1844), it is recited that boys 'left to stroll about the streets and closes,' acquire habits so fixed, if not of vice, at least of idleness, that in consequence of their not being trained to some kind of discipline in their early years, the habit of vagabondizing acquires such power that it is uncontrollable. And how apt and forcible was that quotation in the place assigned it: 'If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, _Behold, we knew it not_, doth not He that pondereth the heart, consider it?'--consider it, regard it, make account of it.
_Manners._--The making game of a servant before company--a thing impossible to well-bred people. Now observe how this is illustrative of H---- Street.
I confess myself wholly at a loss to comprehend the objections of the Westminster reviewer and even of my friend Dr. Nichol, to my commentary on the strange appearance in Orion. The reviewer says that this appearance (on which he seems to find my language incomprehensible) had been dispersed by Lord Rosse's telescope. True, or at least so I hear. But for all this, it was originally created by that telescope. It was in the interval between the first report and the subsequent reports from Lord Rosse's telescope that I made my commentary. But in the case of contradiction between two reports, more accurate report I have not. As regards the reviewer, there had been no time for this, because the book, which he reviews, is a simple reprint in America, which he knows I had had no opportunity of revising. But Dr. Nichol perplexes me. That a new stage of progress had altered the appearances, as doubtless further stages will alter them, concerns me nothing, though referring to a coming republication; for both alike apparently misunderstood the case as though it required a _real_ phenomenon for its basis. To understand the matter as it really is, I beg to state this case. Wordsworth in at least four different places (one being in the fourth book of 'The Excursion,' three others in Sonnets) describes most impressive appearances amongst the clouds: a monster, for instance, with a bell-hanging air, a dragon agape to swallow a golden spear, and various others of affecting beauty. Would it have been any just rebuke to Wordsworth if some friend had written to him: 'I regret most sincerely to say that the dragon and the golden spear had all vanished before nine o'clock'? So, again, of Hawthorne's face on a rock. The very beauty of such appearances is in part their evanescence.
To be or _not_ to be. 'Not to be, by G----' said Garrick. This is to be cited in relation to Pope's--
'Man never is, but always to be blessed.'
_Political Economy._--Which of these two courses shall I take? 1. Shall I revise, extend, condense my logic of Political Economy, embodying every doctrine (and numbering them) which I have amended or re-positioned, and introduce them thus in a letter to the Politico-Economical Society: 'Gentlemen, certain ideas fundamental to Political Economy I presented in a book in the endeavour to effect a certain purpose. These were too much intermingled with less elementary ideas in consequence of my defective self-command from a dreadful nervous idea, and thus by interweaving they were overlapped and lost. But I am not disposed to submit to that wrong. I affirm steadily that the foundations of Political Economy are rotten and crazy. I defy, and taking up my stand as a scholar of Aristotle, I defy all men to gainsay the following exposures of folly, one or any of them. And when I show the darkness all round the very base of the hill, all readers may judge how great is that darkness.' Or, 2. Shall I introduce them as a chapter in my Logic? _
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