Chapter IX: Part II: Literature and Art (2)

Madame de Coeslin (whom he describes as an impersonation of aristocratic _morgue_ and all the pretension and prejudices of the _ancien régime_), "lisant dans un journal la mort de plusieurs rois, elle ôta ses lunettes et dit en se mouchant, 'Il y a donc une _épizootie sur ces bêtes à couronne_!"

I once counted among my friends an elderly lady of high rank, who had spent the whole of a long life in intimacy with royal and princely personages. In three different courts she had filled offices of trust and offices of dignity. In referring to her experience she never either moralised or generalised; but her scorn of "ces bêtes à couronne," was habitually expressed with just such a cool epigrammatic bluntness as that of Madame de Coeslin.

63.

"L'aristocratie a trois âges successifs; l'âge des supériorités, l'âge des priviléges, l'âge des vanités; sortie du premier, elle dégénère dans le second et s'éteint dans le dernier."

In Germany they are still in the first epoch. In England we seem to have arrived at the second. In France they are verging on the third.

64.

Chateaubriand says of himself:--

"Dans le premier moment d'une offense je la sens à peine; mais elle se grave dans ma mémoire; son souvenir au lieu de décroître, s'augmente avec le temps. Il dort dans mon coeur des mois, des années entières, puis il se réveille à la moindre circonstance avec une force nouvelle, et ma blessure devient plus vive que le prémier jour: mais si je ne pardonne point à mes ennemis je ne leur fais aucun mal; je suis _rancunier_ et ne suis point _vindicatif_."

A very nice and true distinction in point of feeling and character, yet hardly to be expressed in English. We always attach the idea of malignity to the word _rancour_, whereas the French words _rancune_, _rancunier_, express the relentless without the vengeful or malignant spirit.

Such characters make me turn pale, as I have done at sight of a tomb in which an offending wretch had been buried alive. There is in them always something acute and deep and indomitable in the internal and exciting emotion; slow, scrupulous, and timid in the external demonstration. Cordelia is such a character.

65.

Chateaubriand says of his friend Pelletrie,--"Il n'avait pas précisément des vices, mais il était rongé d'une vermine de petits défauts dont on ne pouvait l'épurer." I know such a man; and if he had committed a murder every morning, and a highway robbery every night,--if he had killed his father and eaten him with any possible sauce, he could not be more intolerable, more detestable than he is!

66.

"Un homme nous protège par ce qu'il vaut; une femme par ce que vous valez: voilà pourquoi de ces deux empires l'un est si odieux, l'autre si doux."

67.

He says of Madame Roland, "Elle avait du caractère plutôt que du génie; le premier peut donner le second, le second ne peut donner le premier." What does the man mean? this is a mistake surely. What the French call _caractère_ never could give genius, nor genius, _caractère_. _Au reste_, I am not sure that Madame Roland--admirable creature!--had genius; but for talent, and _caractère_--first rate.

68.

"Soyons doux si nous voulons être regrettés. La hauteur du génie et les qualités supérieures ne sont pleurées que des anges."

"Veillons bien sur notre caractère. Songeons que nous pouvons avec un attachement profond n'en pas moins empoisonner des jours que nous rachéterions au prix de tout notre sang. Quand nos amis sont descendus dans la tombe, quels moyens avons nous de réparer nos torts? nos inutiles regrets, nos vains repentirs, sont ils un remède aux peines que nous leurs avons faites? Ils auraient mieux aimé de nous un sourire pendant leur vie que toutes nos larmes après leur mort."

69.

"L'amour est si bien la félicité qu'il est poursuivi de la chimère d'être toujours; il ne veut prononcer que des serments irrévocables; au défaut de ses joies, il cherche à éterniser ses douleurs; ange tombé, il parle encore le langage qu'il parlait au séjour incorruptible; son espérance est de ne cesser jamais. Dans sa double nature et dans sa double illusion, ici-bas il prétend se perpétuer par d'immortelles pensées et par des générations intarissables."

70.

Madame d'Houdetot, after the death of Saint Lambert, always before she went to bed used to rap three times with her slipper on the floor, saying,--"Bon soir, mon ami; bon soir, bon soir!"

So then, she thought of her lover as gone _down_--not _up_?

BISHOP CUMBERLAND.

BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH IN 1691.

71.

Bishop Cumberland founds the law of God, as revealed in the Scriptures, upon the general law of nature. He does not attempt to found the laws of nature upon the Bible. "We believe," he says, "in the truth of Scripture, because it promotes and illustrates the fundamental laws of nature in the government of the world."

Then does the Bishop mean here that the Bible is not the WORD nor the WILL of God, but the exposition of the WORD and the record of the WILL, so far as either could be rendered communicable to human comprehension through the medium of human language and intelligence?

There is a striking passage in Bunsen's Hippolytus, which may be considered with reference to this opinion of the Bishop.

He (Bunsen) says, that "what relates the history of 'the word of God' in his humanity, and in this world, and what records its teachings, and warnings, and promises (that is, the Bible?) was mistaken for 'the word of God' itself, in its proper sense."

Does he mean that we deem erroneously the collection of writings we call the Bible to be "the word of God;" whereas, in fact, it is "the history, the record of the word of God?" that is, of all that God has spoken to man--in various revelations--through human life--by human deeds?--because this is surely a most important and momentous distinction.

72.

According to Bishop Cumberland, _benevolence_, in its large sense,--that is, a regard for all GOOD, universal and particular,--is the primary law of nature; and _justice_ is one form, and a secondary form, of this law: a moral virtue, not a law of nature,--if I understand his meaning rightly.

Then which would he place _highest_, the law of nature or the moral law?

If you place them in contradistinction, then are we to conclude that the law of nature _precedes_ the moral law, but that the moral law _supersedes_ the law of nature? Yet no law of nature (as I understand the word) _can_ be superseded, though the moral law may be based upon it, and in that sense may be _above_ it.

73.

In this following passage the Bishop seems to have anticipated what in more modern times has been called the "_greatest happiness principle_." He says:--

"The good of all rational beings is a complex whole, being nothing but the aggregate of good enjoyed by each." "We can only act in our proper spheres, labouring to do good, but this labour will be fruitless, or rather mischievous, if we do not keep in mind the higher gradations which terminate in universal benevolence. Thus, no man must seek his own pleasure or advantage otherwise than as his family permits; or provide for his family to the detriment of his country; or promote the good of his country at the expense of mankind; or serve mankind, if it were possible, without regard to the majesty of God."

74.

Paley deems the recognition of a future state so essential that he even makes the definition of virtue to consist in this, that it is good performed for the sake of everlasting happiness. That is to say, he makes it a sort of bargain between God and man, a contract, or a covenant, instead of that obedience to a primal law, from which if we stray in will, we do so at the necessary expense of our happiness. Bishop Cumberland has no reference to this doctrine of Paley's;--seems, indeed, to set it aside altogether, as contrary to the essence of virtue.

On the whole, this good Bishop appears to have treated ethics not as an ecclesiastic, but as Bacon treated natural philosophy;--the pervading spirit is the perpetual appeal to experience, and not to authority.

COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY.

1852.

75.

Comte makes out three elements of progress, "les philosophes, les prolétaires, et les femmes;"--types of intellect, material activity, and sentiment.

From Woman, he says, is to proceed the preponderance of the social duties and affections over egotism and ambition. (La prépondérance de la sociabilité sur la personalité.) He adds:--"Ce sexe est certainement supérieure au notre quant à l'attribut le plus fondamentale de l'espèce humaine, la tendence de faire prévaloir la _sociabilité_ sur la_ personalité_."

76.

"S'il ne fallait _qu'aimer_ comme dans l'Utopie Chrétienne, sur une vie future affranchie de toute égoïste necessité matérielle, la femme régnerait; mais il faut surtout _agir_ et _penser_ pour combattre contre les rigueurs de notre vraie destinée: dès-lors l'homme doit commander malgré sa moindre moralité."

"Malgré?" Sometimes man commands _because_ of the "moindre moralité:"--it spares much time in scruples.

77.

"L'influence feminine devient l'auxiliaire indispensable de tout pouvoir spirituel, comme le moyen âge l'a tant montré."

"Au moyen âge la Catholicisme occidentale ébaucha la systématisation de la puissance morale en superposant à l'ordre pratique une libre autorité spirituelle, habituellement secondée par les femmes."

78.

"La Force, proprement dite, c'est ce qui régit les actes, sans régler les volontés."

Herein lies a distinction between Force and Power; for Power, properly so called, does both.

79.

He insists throughout on the predominance of _sociabilité_ over _personalité_--and what is that but the Christian law philosophised? and again, "Il n'y a de directement morale dans notre nature que l'amour." Where did he get this, if not in the Epistle of St. John?

"Celui qui se croirait indépendant des autres dans ses affections, ses pensées, ou ses actes, ne pourrait même formuler un tel blasphème sans une contradiction immédiate--puisque son langage même ne lui appartient pas."

80.

He says that if the women regret the age of chivalry, it is not for the external homage then paid to them, but because "l'élément le plus moral de l'humanité" (woman, to wit), "doit préférer à tout autre le seul régime qui érigea directement en principe la préponderance de la morale sur la politique. Si elles regrettent leur douce influence antérieure, c'est surtout comme s'effaçant aujourd'hui sous un grossier égoïsme.

"Leurs voeux spontanés seconderont toujours les efforts directes des philosophes et des prolétaires pour transformer enfin les débats politiques en transactions sociales en faisant prévaloir les _dévoirs_ sur les _droits_."

This is admirable; for we are all inclined to think more about our _rights_ (and our wrongs too) than about our _duties_.

81.

"Si donc aimer nous satisfait mieux que d'être aimé, cela constate la supériorité naturelle des affections désintéressées."

Meaning--what is true--that the love we bear to another, much more fills the whole soul and is more a possession of an actuating principle, than the love of another for us:--but both are necessary to the complement of our moral life. The first is as the air we breathe; the last is as our daily bread.

82.

He says that the only true and firm friendship is that between man and woman, because it is the only affection "exempte de toute concurrence actuelle ou possible."

In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to regret that our conventional morality or immorality, and the too early severance of the two sexes in education, place men and women in such a relation to each other, socially, as to render such friendships difficult and rare.

83.

"En vérité l'amour ne saurait être profond, s'il n'est pas pur."

Christianity, he says, "a favorisé l'essor de la véritable passion, tandisque le polythéisme consacrait surtout les appétits."

He is speaking here as teacher, philosopher, and legislator, not as poet or sentimentalist. Perhaps it will come to be recognised sooner or later, that what people are pleased to call the _romance_ of life is founded on the deepest and most immutable laws of our being, and that any system of ecclesiastical polity, or civil legislation, or moral philosophy, which takes no account of the primal instincts and affections, which are the springs of life and on which God made the continuation of his world to depend, _must_ of necessity fail.

I have just read a volume of Psychological Essays by one of the most celebrated of living surgeons, and closed the book with a feeling of amazement: a long life spent in physiological experiences, dissecting dead bodies, and mending broken bones, has then led him, at last, to some of the most obvious, most commonly known facts in mental philosophy? So some of our profound politicians, after a long life spent in governing and reforming men, may arrive, _at last_, at some of the commonest facts in social morals.

84.

He contends for the indissolubility of marriage, and against divorce; and he thinks that education should be in the hands of women to the age of ten or twelve, "Afin que le coeur y prévale toujours sur l'esprit:" all very excellent principles, but supposing a _hypothetical_ social and moral state, from which we are as yet far removed. What he says, however, of the indissolubility of the marriage bond is so beautiful and eloquent, and so in accordance with my own moral theories, that I cannot help extracting it from a mass of heavy and sometimes unintelligible matter. He begins by laying it down as a principle that the "amélioration morale de l'homme constitue la principale mission de la femme," and that "une telle destination indique aussitôt que le lien conjugal doit être unique et indissoluble, afin que les relations domestiques puissent acquérir la plénitude et la fixité qu'exige leur efficacité morale." This, however, supposes the holiest and completest of all bonds to be sealed on terms of equality, not that the latter end of a man's life, _la vie usée et la jeunesse épuisée_, are to be tacked on to the beginning of a woman's fresh and innocent existence; for then influences are reversed, and instead of the amelioration of the masculine, we have the demoralisation of the feminine, nature. He supposes the possibility of circumstances which demand a personal separation, but even then _sans permettre un nouveau mariage_. In such a case his religion imposes on the innocent victim (whether man or woman) "une chasteté compatible d'ailleurs avec la plus profonde tendresse. Si cette condition lui semble rigoureuse, il doit l'accepter, d'abord, en vue de l'ordre général; puis, comme une juste conséquence de son erreur primitive."

There would be much to say upon all this, if it were worth while to discuss a theory which it is not possible to reduce to general practice. We cannot imagine the possibility of a second marriage where the first, though perhaps unhappy or early ruptured, has been, not a personal relation only, but an interfusion of our moral being,--of the deepest impulses of life--with those of another; _these_ we cannot have a second time to surrender to a second object;--but this might be left to Nature and her holy instincts to settle. However, he goes on in a strain of eloquence and dignity, quite unusual with him, to this effect:--"Ce n'est que par l'assurance d'une inaltérable perpetuité que les liens intimes peuvent acquérir la consistance et la plénitude indispensable à leur efficacité morale. La plus méprisable des sectes éphémères que suscita l'anarchie moderne (the Mormons, for instance?) me parait être celle qui voulut ériger l'inconstance en condition de bonheur.".... "Entre deux êtres aussi complexes et aussi divers que l'homme et la femme, ce n'est pas trop de toute la vie pour se bien connaître et s'aimer dignement. Loin de taxer d'illusion la haute idée que deux vrais époux se forment souvent l'un de l'autre, je l'ai presque toujours attribuée à l'appréciation plus profonde que procure seule une pleine intimité, que d'ailleurs développe des qualités inconnues aux indifférents. On doit même regarder comme très-honorable pour notre espèce, cette grande estime que ses membres s'inspirent mutuellement quand ils s'étudient beaucoup. _Car la haine et l'indifférence mériteraient seules le reproche d'aveuglement qu'une appréciation superficielle applique à l'amour._ Il faut donc juger pleinement conforme à la nature humaine l'institution qui prolonge au-delà du tombeau l'indentification de deux dignes époux."

He lays down as one of the primal instincts of human kind "_l'homme doit nourrir la femme_." This may have been, as he says, a universal _instinct_; perhaps it ought to be one of our social ordinations; perhaps it may be so at some future time; but we know that it is not a present fact; that the woman must in many cases maintain herself or perish, and she asks nothing more than to be allowed to do so.

However, I agree with Comte that the position of a woman, enriched and independent by her own labour, is anomalous and seldom happy. It is a remark I have heard somewhere, and it appears to me true, that there exists no being so hard, so keen, so calculating, so unscrupulous, so merciless in money matters as the wife of a Parisian shopkeeper, where she holds the purse and manages the concern, as is generally the case.

85.

Here is a passage wherein he attacks that egotism which with many good people enters so largely into the notion of another world:--which Paley inculcated, and which Coleridge ridiculed, when he spoke of "_this_ worldliness," and the "_other_ worldliness."

"La sagesse sacerdotale, digne organe de l'instinct public, y avait intimement rattaché les principales obligations sociales à titre de condition indispensable du salut personnel: mais la récompense infinie promise ainsi à tous les sacrifices ne pouvait jamais permettre une affection pleinement désinteressée."

This perpetual iteration of a system of future reward and punishment, as a principle of our religion and a motive of action, has in some sort demoralised Christianity; especially in minds where love is not a chief element, and which do not love Christ for his love's sake, but for his power's sake, and because judgment and punishment are supposed to be in his hand.

86.

Putting the test of revelation out of the question, and dealing with the philosopher philosophically, the best refutation of Comte's system is contained in the following criticism: it seems to me final.

"In limiting religion to the relations in which we stand to each other, and towards _Humanity_, Comte omits one very important consideration. Even upon his own showing, this _Humanity_ can only be the _supreme being_ of _our_ planet, it cannot be the _Supreme Being_ of the Universe. Now, although in this our terrestrial sojourn, all we can distinctly know must be limited to the sphere of our planet; yet, standing on this ball and looking forth into infinitude, we know that it is but an atom of the infinitude, and that the humanity we worship _here_, cannot extend its dominion _there_. If our relations to humanity may be systematised into a cultus, and made a religion as they have formerly been made a morality, and if the whole of our practical priesthood be limited to this religion, there will, nevertheless remain for us, outlying this terrestrial sphere,--the sphere of the infinite, in which our thoughts must wander, and our emotions will follow our thoughts; so that besides the religion of humanity there must ever be a religion of the Universe. Or, to bring this conception within ordinary language, there must ever remain the old distinctions between _religion_ and _morality_, our relations to God, and our relations towards man. The only difference being, that in the _old_ theology moral precepts were inculcated with a view to a celestial habitat; in the _new_, the moral precepts are inculcated with a view to the general progress of the race."--_Westminster Review._

In fact the doctrine of the non-plurality of worlds as recently set forth by an eminent professor and D. D. would exactly harmonise with Comte's "Culte du Positif," as not merely limiting our sympathies to this one form of intellectual being, but our religious notions to this one habitable orb.

But to those who take other views, the argument above contains the _philosophical_ objection to Comte's _system_, as such; and I repeat, that it seems to me unanswerable; but there are excellent things in his theory, notwithstanding;--things that make us pause and think. In some parts it is like Christianity with Christ, as a _personalité_, omitted. For Christ the humanised divine, he substitutes an abstract deified humanity. 1854.

GOETHE.

(DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT.)

87.

"As a man embraces the determination to become a soldier and go to the wars, bravely resolved to bear dangers, and difficulties, and wounds, and death itself, but at the same time never anticipating the particular form in which those evils may surprise us in an extremely unpleasant manner;--just so we rush into authorship!"

88.

Goethe says of Lavater, "that the conception of humanity which had been formed in himself, and in his own humanity, was so akin to the living image of Christ, that it was impossible for him to conceive how a man could live and breathe without being a Christian. He had, so to speak, a physical affinity with Christianity; it was to him a necessity, not only morally, but from organisation."

Lavater's individual feeling was, perhaps, but an anticipation of that which may become general, universal. As we rise in the scale of being, as we become more gentle, spiritualised, refined, and intelligent, will not our "physical affinity" with the religion of Christ become more and more apparent, till it is less a doctrine than a principle of life? So its Divine Author knew, who prepared it for us, and is preparing and moulding us through progressive improvement to comprehend and receive it.

89.

Goethe speaks of "polishing up life with the varnish of fiction;" the artistic turn of the man's mind showed itself in this love of creating an effect in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. But what can fiction--what can poetry do for life, but present some one or two out of the multitudinous aspects of that grand, beautiful, terrible, and infinite mystery? or by _life_, does he mean here the mere external forms of society?--for it is not clear.

HAZLITT'S "LIBER AMORIS."

1827.

90.

Is love, like faith, ennobled through its own depth and fervour and sincerity? or is it ennobled through the nobility, and degraded through the degradation of its object? Is it with love as with worship? Is it a _religion_, and holy when the object is pure and good? Is it a _superstition_, and unholy when the object is impure and unworthy?

Of all the histories I have read of the aberrations of human passion, nothing ever so struck me with a sort of amazed and painful pity as Hazlitt's "Liber Amoris." The man was in love with a servant girl, who in the eyes of others possessed no particular charms of mind or person, yet did the mighty love of this strong, masculine, and gifted being, lift her into a sort of goddess-ship; and make his idolatry in its intense earnestness and reality assume something of the sublimity of an act of faith, and in its expression take a flight equal to anything that poetry or fiction have left us. It was all so terribly real, he sued with such a vehemence, he suffered with such resistance, that the powerful intellect reeled, tempest-tost, and might have foundered but for the gift of expression. He might have said like Tasso--like Goethe rather--"Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen was ich leide!" And this faculty of utterance, eloquent utterance, was perhaps the only thing which saved life, or reason, or both. In such moods of passion, the poor uneducated man, dumb in the midst of the strife and the storm, unable to comprehend his intolerable pain or make it comprehended, throws himself in a blind fury on the cause of his torture, or hangs himself in his neckcloth.

91.

Hazlitt takes up his pen, dips it in fire and thus he writes:--

"Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of it nothing farther to desire. There is one object (at least), in which the soul finds absolute content;--for which it seeks to live or dares to die. The heart has, as it were, filled up the moulds of the imagination; the truth of passion keeps pace with, and outvies, the extravagance of mere language. There are no words so fine, no flattery so soft, that there is not a sentiment beyond them that it is impossible to express, at the bottom of the heart where true love is. What idle sounds the common phrases _adorable creature_, _divinity_, _angel_, are! What a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these, rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable, to which all other feelings are light and vain! Perfect love reposes on the object of its choice, like the halcyon on the wave, and the air of heaven is around it!"

92.

"She stood (while I pleaded my cause before her with all the earnestness and fondness in the world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes, her head drooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest expression that ever was seen of mixed regret, pity, and stubborn resolution, but without speaking a word--without altering a feature. _It was like a petrifaction of a human face in the softest moment of passion._"

93.

"Shall I not love her," he exclaims, "for herself alone, in spite of fickleness and folly? to love her for her regard for me, is not to love her but myself. She has robbed me of herself, shall she also rob me of my love of her? did I not live on her smile? is it less sweet because it is withdrawn from me? Did I not adore her every grace? and does she bend less enchantingly because she has turned from me to another? Is my love then in the power of fortune or of her caprice? No, I will have it lasting as it is pure; and I will make a goddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her, and my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled symmetry of form. And when that fails, the memory of it shall survive, and my bosom shall be proof to scorn as hers has been to pity; and I will pursue her with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave and tend her steps without notice, and without reward; and serve her living, and mourn for her when dead; and thus my love will have shown itself superior to her hate, and I shall triumph and then die. This is my idea of the only true and heroic love, and such is mine for her."

Hazlitt, when he wrote all this, seemed to himself full of high and calm resolve. The hand did not fail, the pen did not stagger over the paper in a formless scrawl, yet the brain was reeling like a tower in an earthquake. "Passion," as it has been well said, "when in a state of solemn and omnipotent vehemence, always appears to be calmness to him whom it domineers;" not unfrequently to others also, as the tide at its highest flood looks tranquil, and "neither way inclines."

THE NIGHTINGALE.

94.

Reading the Life and Letters of Francis Horner, in the midst of a correspondence about Statistics and Bullion, and Political Economy, and the Balance of Parties, I came upon the following exquisite passage in a letter to his friend Mrs. Spencer:--

"I was amused by your interrogatory to me about the Nightingale's note. You meant to put me in a dilemma with my politics on one side and my gallantry on the other. Of course you consider it as a plaintive note, and you were in hopes that no idolater of Charles Fox would venture to agree with that opinion. In this difficulty I must make the best escape I can by saying, that it seems to me neither cheerful nor melancholy,--but always according to the circumstances in which you hear it, the scenery, your own temper of mind, and so on. I settled it so with myself early in this month, when I heard them every night and all day long at Wells. In daylight, when all the other birds are in active concert, the Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emulous, and successful of the whole band. At night, especially if it is a calm one, with light enough to give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary music of this bird takes quite another character, from all the associations of the scene, from the languor one feels at the close of the day, and from the stillness of spirits and elevation of mind which comes upon one when walking out at that time. But it is not always so--different circumstances will vary in every possible way the effect. Will the Nightingale's note sound alike to the man who is going on an adventure to meet his mistress (supposing he heeds it at all), and when he loiters along upon his return? The last time I heard the Nightingale it was an experiment of another sort. It was after a thunderstorm in a mild night, while there was silent lightning opening every few minutes, first on one side of the heavens then on the other. The careless little fellow was piping away in the midst of all this terror. To _me_, there was no melancholy in his note, but a sort of sublimity; yet it was the same song which I had heard in the morning, and which then seemed nothing but bustle."

And in the same spirit Portia moralises:--

The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season, seasoned are
To their right praise and true perfection!

Nor will Coleridge allow the song of the nightingale to be always plaintive,--"most musical, most _melancholy_;" he defies the epithet though it be Milton's.

'Tis the _merry_ nightingale,
That crowds and hurries and precipitates
With thick fast warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chaunt, and disburthen his full soul
Of all its music.

As a poetical commentary on these beautiful passages, every reader of Joanna Baillie will remember the night scene in De Montfort, where the cry of the Owl suggests such different feelings and associations to the two men who listen to it, under such different circumstances. To De Montfort it is the screech-owl, foreboding death and horror,--and he stands and shudders at the "instinctive wailing." To Rezenvelt it is the sound which recalls his boyish days, when he merrily mimicked the night-bird till it returned him cry for cry,--and he pauses to listen with a fanciful delight.

THACKERAY'S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS

(1833.)

95.

A Lecture should not read like an essay; and, therefore, it surprises me that these lectures so carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet the requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable reading. As _lectures_, they wanted only a little more point, and emphasis and animation on the part of the speaker: as _essays_, they atone in eloquence and earnestness for what they want in finish and purity of style.

Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when I heard them, (and it strikes me now in turning over the written pages,) is this: we deal here with writers and artists, yet the purpose, from beginning to end, is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray tells us himself that he has not assembled his hearers to bring them better acquainted with the writings of these writers, or to illustrate the wit of these wits, or to enhance the humour of these humourists;--no; but to deal justice on the men as _men_--to tell us how _they_ lived, and loved, suffered and made suffer, who still have power to pain or to please; to settle _their_ claims to our praise or blame, our love or hate, whose right to fame was settled long ago, and remains undisputed. This is his purpose. Thus then he has laid down and acted on the principle that "morals have something to do with art;" that there is a moral account to be settled with men of genius; that the power and the right remains with us to do justice on those who being dead yet rule our spirits from their urns; to try them by a standard which perhaps neither themselves, nor those around them, would have admitted. Did Swift when he bullied men, lampooned women, trampled over decency and humanity, flung round him filth and fire, did he anticipate the time when before a company of intellectual men, and thinking, feeling women, in both hemispheres, he should be called up to judgment, hands bound, tongue-tied? Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors? Thackeray turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, a warning; probes the lacerated self-love, holds up to scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable egotism, the half-distempered brain. O Stella! O Vanessa! are you not avenged?

Then Sterne--how he takes to pieces his feigned originality, his feigned benevolence, his feigned misanthropy--all feigned!--the licentious parson, the trader in sentiment, the fashionable lion of his day, the man without a heart for those who loved him, without a conscience for those who trusted him! yet the same man who gave us the pathos of "Le Fevre," and the humours of "Uncle Toby!" Sad is it? ungrateful is it? ungracious is it?--well, it cannot be helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of humanity. You might as well exclaim against any natural result of any natural law. Fancy a hundred years hence some brave, honest, human-hearted Thackeray standing up to discourse before our great-great-grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same stern truth, on the wits, and the poets and the artists of the present time! Hard is your fate, O ye men and women of genius! very hard and pitiful, if ye must be subjected to the scalpel of such a dissector! You, gifted sinner, whoever you may be, walking among us now in all the impunity of conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and sentimentalisms, performing great things, teaching good things, you are set up as one of the lights of the world:--Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out of your hand, and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a face? "Off, off ye lendings!" O God! how much wiser, as well as better, not to study how to _seem_, but how to _be_! How much wiser and better, not to have to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine; not to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who "shall pluck out the heart of your mystery," and shall anatomise you, and deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard of morals and manners in Queen Victoria's reign!

In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative passages on character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies in the novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No woman resents his Rebecca--inimitable Becky!--no woman but feels and acknowledges with a shiver the completeness of that wonderful and finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish inane Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the author's own words when speaking of 'Tom Jones:'--"I can't say that I think Amelia a virtuous character. I can't say but I think Mr. Thackeray's evident liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that the great humourist's moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in art and ethics there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we are to admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable."

Laura, in 'Pendennis,' is a yet more fatal mistake. She is drawn with every generous feeling, every good gift. We do not complain that she loves that poor creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her childhood. She grew up with that love in her heart; it came between her and the perception of his faults; it is a necessity indivisible from her nature. Hallowed, through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless to that first affection; Laura, waked up to the appreciation of a far more manly and noble nature, in love with Warrington, and then going back to Pendennis, and marrying _him_! Such infirmity might be true of some women, but not of such a woman as Laura; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy of the portrait.

And then Lady Castlewood,--so evidently a favourite of the author, what shall we say of her? The virtuous woman, _par excellence_, who "never sins and never forgives," who never resents, nor relents, nor repents; the mother, who is the rival of her daughter; the mother, who for years is the _confidante_ of a man's delirious passion for her own child, and then consoles him by marrying him herself! O Mr. Thackeray! this will never do! such women _may_ exist, but to hold them up as examples of excellence, and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and proves a low standard in ethics and in art. "When an author presents to us a heroine whom we are called upon to admire, let him at least take care that she is admirable." If in these, and in some other instances, Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the lectures we may thank him for some amends: he has shown us what he conceives true womanhood and true manliness ought to be; so with this expression of gratitude, and a far deeper debt of gratitude left unexpressed, I close his book, and say, good night!

Notes on Art.

96.

Sometimes, in thoughtful moments, I am struck by those beautiful analogies between things apparently dissimilar--those awful approximations between things apparently far asunder--which many people would call fanciful and imaginary, but they seem to bring all God's creation, spiritual and material, into one comprehensive whole; they give me, thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that overwhelming unity which we call the universe, the multitudinous ONE.

Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art, as conceived by the Greeks, and unsurpassed in its purity and beauty, lay in considering well the characteristics which distinguish the _human_ form from the brute form; and then, in rendering the human form, the first aim was to soften down, or, if possible, throw out wholly, those characteristics which belong to the brute nature, or are common to the brute and the man; and the next, to bring into prominence and even enlarge the proportions of those manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity; till, at last, the _human_ merged into the _divine_, and the God in look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.

Let us now suppose this broad principle which the Greeks applied to form, ethically carried out, and made the basis of all education--the training of men as a race. Suppose we started with the general axiom that all propensities which we have in common with the lower animals are to be kept subordinate, and so far as is consistent with the truth of nature refined away; and that all the qualities which elevate, all the aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are to be cultivated and rendered more and more prominent, till at last the human being, in faculties as well as form, approaches the God-like--I only say--suppose?----

Again: it has been said of natural philosophy (Zoology) that in order to make any real progress in the science, as such, we must more and more disregard _differences_, and more and more attend to the obscured but essential conditions which are revealed in _resemblances_, in the constant and similar relations of primitive structure. Now if the same principle were carried out in theology, in morals, in art, as well as in science, should we not come nearer to the essential truth in _all_?

97.

"There is an instinctive sense of propriety and reality in every mind; and it is not true, as some great authority has said, that in art we are satisfied with contemplating the work without thinking of the artist. On the contrary, the artist himself is one great object in the work. It is as embodying the energies and excellences of the human mind, as exhibiting the efforts of genius, as symbolising high feeling, that we most value the creations of art; without design the representations of art are merely fantastical, and without the thought of a design acting upon fixed principles in accordance with a high standard of goodness and truth, half the charm of design is lost."

98.

"Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanising nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation. Colour, form, motion, sound, are the elements which it combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a _moral_ idea."

This is Coleridge's definition:--Art then is nature, _humanised_; and in proportion as humanity is elevated by the interfusion into our life of noble aims and pure affections will art be spiritualised and moralised.

99.

If faith has elevated art, superstition has everywhere debased it.

100.

Goethe observes that there is no patriotic art and no patriotic science--that both are universal.

There is, however, _national_ art, but not _national_ science: we say "national art," "natural science."

101.

"Verse is in itself music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry as contradistinguished from history civil or natural."--_Coleridge._

In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse is to prose--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.

102.

Subjects and representations in art not elevated nor interesting in themselves, become instructive and interesting to higher minds from the _manner_ in which they have been treated; perhaps because they have passed through the medium of a higher mind in taking form.

This is one reason, though we are not always conscious of it, that the Dutch pictures of common and vulgar life give us a pleasure apart from their wonderful finish and truth of detail. In the mind of the artist there must have been the power to throw himself into a sphere _above_ what he represents. Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been something far better than a sot; Ostade something higher than a boor; though the habits of both led them into companionship with sots and boors. In the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a depth of feeling and observation which remind me of the humour of Goldsmith; and Teniers, we know, was in his habits a refined gentleman; the brilliant elegance of his pencil contrasting with the grotesque vulgarity of his subjects. To a thinking mind, some of these Dutch pictures of character are full of material for thought, pathetic even where least sympathetic: no doubt, because of a latent sympathy with the artist, apart from his subject.

103.

Coleridge says,--"Every human feeling is greater and larger than the exciting cause." (A philosophical way of putting Rochefoucauld's neatly expressed apophthegm: "Nous ne sommes jamais ni si heureux ni si malheureux que nous l'imaginons.") "A proof," he proceeds, "that man is designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied in music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate expression."

But not music only, every production of art ought to excite emotions greater and thoughts larger than itself. Thoughts and emotions which never perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were anticipated, never were intended by him--may be strongly suggested by his work. This is an important part of the morals of art, which we must never lose sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit, but for good and for evil.

Goethe (in the _Dichtung und Wahrheit_) describes the reception of Marie Antoinette at Strasbourg, where she passed the frontier to enter her new kingdom. She was then a lovely girl of sixteen. He relates that on visiting before her arrival the reception room on the bridge over the Rhine, where her German attendants were to deliver her into the hands of the French authorities, he found the walls hung with tapestries representing the ominous story of Jason and Medea--of all the marriages on record the most fearful, the most tragic in its consequences. "What!" he exclaims, his poetical imagination struck with the want of moral harmony, "was there among these French architects and decorators no man who could perceive that pictures represent things,--that they have a meaning in themselves,--that they can impress sense and feeling,--that they can awaken presentiments of good or evil?" But, as he tells us, his exclamations of horror were met by the mockery of his French companions, who assured him that it was not everybody's concern to look for significance in pictures.

These self-same tapestries of the story of Jason and Medea were after the Restoration presented by Louis XVIII. to George IV., and at present they line the walls of the Ball-room in Windsor Castle. We might repeat, with some reason, the question of Goethe; for if pictures have a significance, and speak to the imagination, what has the tragedy of Jason and Medea to do in a ball-room?

Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that works of art speak to the feelings and the conscience, and can awaken associations tending to good and evil, by some strange inconsistency places art and artists out of the sphere of morals. He speaks somewhere with contempt and ridicule of those who take their conscience and their morality with them to an opera or a picture gallery. Yet surely he is wrong. Why should we not? Are our conscience and our morals like articles of dress which we can take off and put on again as we fancy it convenient or expedient?--shut up in a drawer and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or a gallery of art? or are they not rather a part of ourselves--our very life--to graduate the worth, to fix the standard of all that mingles with our life? The idea that what we call _taste_ in art has something quite distinctive from conscience, is one cause that the popular notions concerning the productions of art are abandoned to such confusion and uncertainty; that simple people regard _taste_ as something forensic, something to be learned, as they would learn a language, and mastered by a study of rules and a dictionary of epithets; and they look up to a professor of taste, just as they would look up to a professor of Greek or of Hebrew. Either they listen to judgments lightly and confidently promulgated with a sort of puzzled faith and a surrender of their own moral sense, which are pitiable; as if art also had its infallible church and its hierarchy of dictators!--or they fly into the opposite extreme, and seeing themselves deceived and misled, fall away into strange heresies. All from ignorance of a few laws simple in their form, yet infinite in their application;--_natural_ laws we must call them, though here applied to art.

In my younger days I have known men conspicuous for their want of elevated principle, and for their dissipated habits, held up as arbiters and judges of art; but it was to them only another form of epicurism and self-indulgence; and I have seen them led into such absurd and fatal mistakes for want of the power to distinguish and to generalise, that I have despised their judgment, and have come to the conclusion that a really high standard of taste and a low standard of morals are incompatible with each other.

104.

"The fact of the highest artistic genius having manifested itself in a polytheistic age, and among a people whose moral views were essentially degraded, has, we think, fostered the erroneous notion that the sphere of art has no connection with that of morality. The Greeks, with penetrative insight, dilated the essential characteristics of man's organism as a vehicle of superior intelligence, while their intense sympathy with physical beauty made them alive to its most subtle manifestations; and reproducing their impressions through the medium of art, they have given birth to models of the human form, which reveal its highest possibilities, and the excellence of which depends upon their being individual expressions of ideal truth. Thus, too, in their descriptions of nature, instead of multiplying insignificant details, they seized instinctively upon the characteristic features of her varying aspects, and not unfrequently embodied a finished picture in one comprehensive and harmonious word. In association with their marvellous genius, however, we find a cruelty, a treachery, and a licence which would be revolting if it were not for the historical interest which attaches to every genuine record of a bygone age. Their low moral standard cannot excite surprise when we consider the debasing tendency of their worship, the objects of their adoration being nothing more than their own degraded passions invested with some of the attributes of deity. Now, among the modifications of thought introduced by Christianity, there is perhaps none more pregnant with important results than the harmony which it has established between religion and morality. The great law of right and wrong has acquired a sacred character, when viewed as an expression of the divine will; it takes its rank among the eternal verities, and to ignore it in our delineations of life, or to represent sin otherwise than as treason against the supreme ruler, is to retain in modern civilisation one of the degrading elements of heathenism. Conscience is as great a fact of our inner life as the sense of beauty, and the harmonious action of both these instinctive principles is essential to the highest enjoyment of art, for any internal dissonance disturbs the repose of the mind, and thereby shatters the image mirrored in its depths."--_A. S._

105.

"Mais vous autres artistes, vous ne considerez pour la plupart dans les oeuvres que la beauté ou la singularité de l'exécution, sans vous pénétrer de l'idée dont cet oeuvre est la forme; ainsi votre intelligence adore souvent l'expression d'un sentiment que votre coeur repousserait s'il en avait la conscience."--_George Sand._

106.

Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual, the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.

What then shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted the hands of his men and women, not from individual nature, but from a model hand--his own very often?--and every one who considers for a moment will see in Van Dyck's portraits, that, however well painted and elegant the hands, they in very few instances harmonise with the _personalité_;--that the position is often affected, and as if intended for display,--the display of what is in itself a positive fault, and from which some little knowledge of comparative physiology would have saved him.

There are hands of various character; the hand to catch, and the hand to hold; the hand to clasp, and the hand to grasp. The hand that has worked or could work, and the hand that has never done anything but hold itself out to be kissed, like that of Joanna of Arragon in Raphael's picture.

Let any one look at the hands in Titian's portrait of old Paul IV.: though exquisitely modelled, they have an expression which reminds us of claws; they belong to the face of that grasping old man, and could belong to no other.

107.

Mozart and Chopin, though their genius was differently developed, were alike in some things: in nothing more than this, that the artistic element in both minds wholly dominated over the social and practical, and that their art was the element in which they moved and lived, through which they felt and thought. I doubt whether either of them could have said, "_D'abord je suis homme et puis je suis artiste_;" whereas this could have been said with truth by Mendelsohn and by Litzst. In Mendelsohn the enormous creative power was modified by the intellect and the conscience. Litzst has no creative power.