Chapter XI: Epilogue: To the Rash Conjuror (6)

We cannot love a friend as a woman; but we may love a woman as a friend. Friendship satisfies the highest parts of our nature; but a wife, who is capable of friendship, satisfies all. The great business of real unostentatious virtue is--not to eradicate any genuine instinct or appetite of human nature; but--to establish a concord and unity betwixt all parts of our nature, to give a feeling and a passion to our purer intellect, and to intellectualize our feelings and passions. This a happy marriage, blest with children, effectuates in the highest degree, of which our nature is capable, and is therefore chosen by St. Paul as the symbol of the union of the church with Christ; that is, of the souls of all good men with God. "I scarcely distinguish," said once a good old man, "the wife of my old age from the wife of my youth; for when we were both young, and she was beautiful, for once that I caressed her with a meaner passion, I caressed her a thousand times with love--and these caresses still remain to us." Besides, there is another reason why friendship is of somewhat less value than love, which includes friendship, it is this--we may love many persons, all very dearly; but we cannot love many persons all equally dearly. There will be differences, there will be gradations. But our nature imperiously asks a summit, a resting-place; it is with the affections in love as with the reason in religion, we cannot diffuse and equalize; we must have a supreme, a one, the highest. What is more common than to say of a man in love, 'he idolizes her,' 'he makes a god of her?' Now, in order that a person should continue to love another better than all others, it seems necessary, that this feeling should be reciprocal. For if it be not so, sympathy is broken off in the very highest point. A. (we will say by way of illustration) loves B. above all others, in the best and fullest sense of the word, love, but B. loves C. above all others. Either, therefore, A. does not sympathize with B. in this most important feeling; and then his love must necessarily be incomplete, and accompanied with a craving after something that is not, and yet might be; or he does sympathize with B. in loving C. above all others--and then, of course, he loves C. better than B. Now it is selfishness, at least it seems so to me, to desire that your friend should love you better than all others--but not to wish that a wife should.

(S. 6.)
Another misery there is in affection, that whom we truly love like
ourselves, we forget their looks, nor can our memory retain the idea
of their faces; and it is no wonder: for they are ourselves, and our
affection makes their looks our own.

A thought I have often had, and once expressed it in almost the same language. The fact is certain, but the explanation here given is very unsatisfactory. For why do we never have an image of our own faces--an image of fancy, I mean?

(S. 7.)
I can hold there is no such thing as injury; that if there be, there
is no such injury as revenge, and no such revenge as the contempt of
an injury; that to hate another, is to malign himself, and that the
truest way to love another is to despise ourselves.

I thank God that I can, with a full and unfeigning heart, utter Amen to this passage.

(S. 10.)
In brief, there can be nothing truly alone, and by itself, which is
not truly one; and such is only God.

Reciprocity is that which alone gives stability to love. It is not mere selfishness that impels all kind natures to desire that there should be some one human being, to whom they are most dear. It is because they wish some one being to exist, who shall be the resting place and summit of their love; and this in human nature is not possible, unless the two affections coincide. The reason is, that the object of the highest love will not otherwise be the same in both parties.

(S. 11.)
I thank God for my happy dreams, &c.

I am quite different from Sir T. B. in this; for all, or almost all, the painful and fearful thoughts that I know, are in my dreams;--so much so, that when I am wounded by a friend, or receive an unpleasant letter, it throws me into a state very nearly resembling that of a dream.

(S. 13.)
Statists that labour to contrive a commonwealth without any poverty,
take away the object of our charity, not only not understanding the
commonwealth of a Christian, but forgetting the prophecies of Christ.

O, for shame! for shame! Is there no fit object of charity but abject poverty? And what sort of a charity must that be which wishes misery in order that it may have the credit of relieving a small part of it,--pulling down the comfortable cottages of independent industry to build alms-houses out of the ruins!

This book paints certain parts of my moral and intellectual being, (the best parts, no doubt,) better than any other book I have ever met with;--and the style is throughout delicious.

[Footnote 1: Communicated by Mr. Wordsworth. Ed.]

NOTES ON JUNIUS. 1807.

'Stat nominis umbra'.

As he never dropped the mask, so he too often used the poisoned dagger of an assassin.

'Dedication to the English nation'.

The whole of this dedication reads like a string of aphorisms arranged in chapters, and classified by a resemblance of subject, or a cento of points.

(Ib.)
If an honest, and I may truly affirm a laborious, zeal for the public
service has given me any weight in your esteem, let me exhort and
conjure you never to suffer an invasion of your political
constitution, however minute the instance may appear, to pass by,
without a determined persevering resistance.

A longer sentence and proportionately inelegant.

(Ib.)
If you reflect that in the changes of administration which have marked
and disgraced the present reign, although your warmest patriots have,
in their turn, been invested with the lawful and unlawful authority of
the crown, and though other reliefs or improvements have been held
forth to the people, yet that no one man in office has ever promoted
or encouraged a bill for shortening the duration of parliaments, but
that (whoever was minister) the opposition to this measure, ever since
the septennial act passed, has been constant and uniform on the part
of government.

Long, and as usual, inelegant. Junius cannot manage a long sentence; it has all the 'ins' and 'outs' of a snappish figure-dance.

Preface.

An excellent preface, and the sentences not so snipt as in the dedication. The paragraph near the conclusion beginning with "some opinion may now be expected," &c. and ending with "relation between guilt and punishment," deserves to be quoted as a master-piece of rhetorical ratiocination in a series of questions that permit no answer; or (as Junius says) carry their own answer along with them. The great art of Junius is never to say too much, and to avoid with equal anxiety a commonplace manner, and matter that is not commonplace. If ever he deviates into any originality of thought, he takes care that it shall be such as excites surprise for its acuteness, rather than admiration for its profundity. He takes care? say rather, that nature took care for him. It is impossible to detract from the merit of these Letters: they are suited to their purpose, and perfect in their kind. They impel to action, not thought. Had they been profound or subtle in thought, or majestic and sweeping in composition, they would have been adapted for the closet of a Sidney, or for a House of Lords such as it was in the time of Lord Bacon; but they are plain and sensible whenever the author is in the right, and whether right or wrong, always shrewd and epigrammatic, and fitted for the coffee-house, the exchange, the lobby of the House of Commons, and to be read aloud at a public meeting. When connected, dropping the forms of connection, desultory without abruptness or appearance of disconnection, epigrammatic and antithetical to excess, sententious and personal, regardless of right or wrong, yet well-skilled to act the part of an honest warm-hearted man, and even when he is in the right, saying the truth but never proving it, much less attempting to bottom it,--this is the character of Junius;--and on this character, and in the mould of these writings must every man cast himself, who would wish in factious times to be the important and long remembered agent of a faction. I believe that I could do all that Junius has done, and surpass him by doing many things which he has not done: for example,--by an occasional induction of startling facts, in the manner of Tom Paine, and lively illustrations and witty applications of good stories and appropriate anecdotes in the manner of Horne Tooke. I believe I could do it if it were in my nature to aim at this sort of excellence, or to be enamoured of the fame, and immediate influence, which would be its consequence and reward. But it is not in my nature. I not only love truth, but I have a passion for the legitimate investigation of truth. The love of truth conjoined with a keen delight in a strict and skillful yet impassioned argumentation, is my master-passion, and to it are subordinated even the love of liberty and all my public feelings--and to it whatever I labour under of vanity, ambition, and all my inward impulses.