The Project Gutenberg EBook of Friends in Council (First Series)
by Sir Arthur Helps
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Title: Friends in Council (First Series)
Author: Sir Arthur Helps
Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7438]
[This file was first posted on April 30, 2003]
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, FRIENDS IN COUNCIL (FIRST SERIES) ***
This etext was produced by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.
FRIENDS IN COUNCIL (First Series)
BY SIR ARTHUR HELPS.
INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY.
Arthur Helps was born at Streatham on the 10th of July, 1813. He
went at the age of sixteen to Eton, thence to Trinity College,
Cambridge. Having graduated B.A. in 1835, he became private
secretary to the Hon. T. Spring Rice, who was Chancellor of the
Exchequer in Lord Melbourne's Cabinet, formed in April, 1835. This
was his position at the beginning of the present reign in June,
1837.
In 1839--in which year he graduated M.A.--Arthur Helps was
transferred to the service of Lord Morpeth, who was Irish Secretary
in the same ministry. Lord Melbourne's Ministry was succeeded by
that of Sir Robert Peel in September, 1841, and Helps then was
appointed a Commissioner of French, Danish, and Spanish Claims. In
1841 he published "Essays Written in the Intervals of Business."
Their quiet thoughtfulness was in accord with the spirit that had
given value to his services as private secretary to two ministers of
State. In 1844 that little book was followed by another on "The
Claims of Labour," dealing with the relations of employers to
employed. There was the same scholarly simplicity and grace of
style, the same interest in things worth serious attention. "We
say," he wrote, towards the close, "that Kings are God's Vicegerents
upon Earth; but almost every human being has, at one time or other
of his life, a portion of the happiness of those around him in his
power, which might make him tremble, if he did but see it in all its
fulness." To this book Arthur Helps added an essay "On the Means of
Improving the Health and Increasing the Comfort of the Labouring
Classes."
His next book was this First Series of "Friends in Council,"
published in 1847, and followed by other series in later years.
There were many other writings of his, less popular than they would
have been if the same abilities had been controlled by less good
taste. His "History of the Conquest of the New World" in 1848, and
of "The Spanish Conquest of America," in four volumes, from 1855 to
1861, preceded his obtaining from his University, in 1864, the
honorary degree of D.C.L. In June, 1860, Arthur Helps was made
Clerk of the Privy Council, and held that office of high trust until
his death on the 7th of March, 1875. He had become Sir Arthur in
1872.
H. M.
FRIENDS IN COUNCIL.
CHAPTER I.
None but those who, like myself, have once lived in intellectual
society, and then have been deprived of it for years, can appreciate
the delight of finding it again. Not that I have any right to
complain, if I were fated to live as a recluse for ever. I can add
little, or nothing, to the pleasure of any company; I like to listen
rather than to talk; and when anything apposite does occur to me, it
is generally the day after the conversation has taken place. I do
not, however, love good talk the less for these defects of mine; and
I console myself with thinking that I sustain the part of a
judicious listener, not always an easy one.
Great, then, was my delight at hearing last year that my old pupil,
Milverton, had taken a house which had long been vacant in our
neighbourhood. To add to my pleasure, his college friend,
Ellesmere, the great lawyer, also an old pupil of mine, came to us
frequently in the course of the autumn. Milverton was at that time
writing some essays which he occasionally read to Ellesmere and
myself. The conversations which then took place I am proud to say
that I have chronicled. I think they must be interesting to the
world in general, though of course not so much so as to me.
Milverton and Ellesmere were my favourite pupils. Many is the
heartache I have had at finding that those boys, with all their
abilities, would do nothing at the University. But it was in vain
to urge them. I grieve to say that neither of them had any ambition
of the right kind. Once I thought I had stimulated Ellesmere to the
proper care and exertion; when, to my astonishment and vexation,
going into his rooms about a month before an examination, I found
that, instead of getting up his subjects, like a reasonable man, he
was absolutely endeavouring to invent some new method for proving
something which had been proved before in a hundred ways. Over this
he had wasted two days, and from that moment I saw it was useless to
waste any more of my time and patience in urging a scholar so
indocile for the beaten path.
What tricks he and Milverton used to play me, pretending not to
understand my demonstration of some mathematical problem, inventing
all manner of subtle difficulties, and declaring they could not go
on while these stumbling-blocks lay in their way! But I am getting
into college gossip, which may in no way delight my readers. And I
am fancying, too, that Milverton and Ellesmere are the boys they
were to me; but I am now the child to them. During the years that I
have been quietly living here, they have become versed in the ways
of the busy world. And though they never think of asserting their
superiority, I feel it, and am glad to do so.
My readers would, perhaps, like one to tell them something of the
characters of Ellesmere and Milverton; but it would ill become me to
give that insight into them, which I, their college friend and
tutor, imagine I have obtained. Their friendship I could never
understand. It was not on the surface very warm, and their
congeniality seemed to result more from one or two large common
principles of thought than from any peculiar similarity of taste, or
from great affection on either side. Yet I should wrong their
friendship if I were to represent it otherwise than a most true-
hearted one; more so, perhaps, than some of softer texture. What
needs be seen of them individually will be by their words, which I
hope I have in the main retained.
The place where we generally met in fine weather was on the lawn
before Milverton's house. It was an eminence which commanded a
series of valleys sloping towards the sea. And, as the sea was not
more than nine miles off, it was a matter of frequent speculation
with us whether the landscape was bounded by air or water. In the
first valley was a little town of red brick houses, with poplars
coming up amongst them. The ruins of a castle, and some water
which, in olden times, had been the lake in "the pleasaunce," were
between us and the town. The clang of an anvil, or the clamour of a
horn, or busy wheelwright's sounds, came faintly up to us when the
wind was south.
I must not delay my readers longer with my gossip, but bring them at
once into the conversation that preceded our first reading.
-----
Milverton. I tell you, Ellesmere, these are the only heights I care
to look down from, the heights of natural scenery.
Ellesmere. Pooh! my dear Milverton, it is only because the
particular mounds which the world calls heights, you think you have
found out to be but larger ant-heaps. Whenever you have cared about
anything, a man more fierce and unphilosophical in the pursuit of it
I never saw. To influence men's minds by writing for them, is that
no ambition?
Milverton. It may be, but I have it not. Let any kind critic
convince me that what I am now doing is useless, or has been done
before, or that, if I leave it undone, some one else will do it to
my mind; and I should fold up my papers, and watch the turnips grow
in that field there, with a placidity that would, perhaps, seem very
spiritless to your now restless and ambitious nature, Ellesmere.
Ellesmere. If something were to happen which will not, then--O
Philosophy, Philosophy, you, too, are a good old nurse, and rattle
your rattles for your little people, as well as old Dame World can
do for hers. But what are we to have to-day for our first reading?
Milverton. An Essay on Truth.
Ellesmere. Well, had I known this before, it is not the novelty of
the subject which would have dragged me up the hill to your house.
By the way, philosophers ought not to live upon hills. They are
much more accessible, and I think quite as reasonable, when,
Diogenes-like, they live in tubs upon flat ground. Now for the
essay.
TRUTH.
Truth is a subject which men will not suffer to grow old. Each age
has to fight with its own falsehoods: each man with his love of
saying to himself and those around him pleasant things and things
serviceable for to-day, rather than the things which are. Yet a
child appreciates at once the divine necessity for truth; never
asks, "What harm is there in saying the thing that is not?" and an
old man finds, in his growing experience, wider and wider
applications of the great doctrine and discipline of truth.
Truth needs the wisdom of the serpent as well as the simplicity of
the dove. He has gone but a little way in this matter who supposes
that it is an easy thing for a man to speak the truth, "the thing he
troweth;" and that it is a casual function, which may be fulfilled
at once after any lapse of exercise. But, in the first place, the
man who would speak truth must know what he troweth. To do that, he
must have an uncorrupted judgment. By this is not meant a perfect
judgment or even a wise one, but one which, however it may be
biassed, is not bought--is still a judgment. But some people's
judgments are so entirely gained over by vanity, selfishness,
passion, or inflated prejudices and fancies long indulged in; or
they have the habit of looking at everything so carelessly, that
they see nothing truly. They cannot interpret the world of reality.
And this is the saddest form of lying, "the lie that sinketh in," as
Bacon says, which becomes part of the character and goes on eating
the rest away.
Again, to speak truth, a man must not only have that martial courage
which goes out, with sound of drum and trumpet, to do and suffer
great things; but that domestic courage which compels him to utter
small sounding truths in spite of present inconvenience and outraged
sensitiveness or sensibility. Then he must not be in any respect a
slave to self-interest. Often it seems as if but a little
misrepresentation would gain a great good for us; or, perhaps, we
have only to conceal some trifling thing, which, if told, might
hinder unreasonably, as we think, a profitable bargain. The true
man takes care to tell, notwithstanding. When we think that truth
interferes at one time or another with all a man's likings, hatings,
and wishes, we must admit, I think, that it is the most
comprehensive and varied form of self-denial.
Then, in addition to these great qualities, truth-telling in its
highest sense requires a well-balanced mind. For instance, much
exaggeration, perhaps the most, is occasioned by an impatient and
easily moved temperament which longs to convey its own vivid
impressions to other minds, and seeks by amplifying to gain the full
measure of their sympathy. But a true man does not think what his
hearers are feeling, but what he is saying.
More stress might be laid than has been on the intellectual
requisites for truth, which are probably the best part of
intellectual cultivation; and as much caused by truth as causing it.
{12} But, putting the requisites for truth at the fewest, see of
how large a portion of the character truth is the resultant. If you
were to make a list of those persons accounted the religious men of
their respective ages, you would have a ludicrous combination of
characters essentially dissimilar. But true people are kindred.
Mention the eminently true men, and you will find that they are a
brotherhood. There is a family likeness throughout them.
If we consider the occasions of exercising truthfulness and descend
to particulars, we may divide the matter into the following heads: -
-truth to oneself--truth to mankind in general--truth in social
relations--truth in business--truth in pleasure.
1. Truth to oneself. All men have a deep interest that each man
should tell himself the truth. Not only will he become a better
man, but he will understand them better. If men knew themselves,
they could not be intolerant to others.
It is scarcely necessary to say much about the advantage of a man
knowing himself for himself. To get at the truth of any history is
good; but a man's own history--when he reads that truly, and,
without a mean and over-solicitous introspection, knows what he is
about and what he has been about, it is a Bible to him. "And David
said unto Nathan, I have sinned before the Lord." David knew the
truth about himself. But truth to oneself is not merely truth about
oneself. It consists in maintaining an openness and justness of
soul which brings a man into relation with all truth. For this, all
the senses, if you might so call them, of the soul must be
uninjured--that is, the affections and the perceptions must be just.
For a man to speak the truth to himself comprehends all goodness;
and for us mortals can only be an aim.
2. Truth to mankind in general. This is a matter which, as I read
it, concerns only the higher natures. Suffice it to say, that the
withholding large truths from the world may be a betrayal of the
greatest trust.
3. Truth in social relations. Under this head come the practices
of making speech vary according to the person spoken to; of
pretending to agree with the world when you do not; of not acting
according to what is your deliberate and well-advised opinion
because some mischief may be made of it by persons whose judgment in
this matter you do not respect; of maintaining a wrong course for
the sake of consistency; of encouraging the show of intimacy with
those whom you never can be intimate with; and many things of the
same kind. These practices have elements of charity and prudence as
well as fear and meanness in them. Let those parts which correspond
to fear and meanness be put aside. Charity and prudence are not
parasitical plants which require boles of falsehood to climb up
upon. It is often extremely difficult in the mixed things of this
world to act truly and kindly too; but therein lies one of the great
trials of man, that his sincerity should have kindness in it, and
his kindness truth.
4. Truth in business. The more truth you can get into any
business, the better. Let the other side know the defects of yours,
let them know how you are to be satisfied, let there be as little to
be found as possible (I should say nothing), and if your business be
an honest one, it will be best tended in this way. The talking,
bargaining, and delaying that would thus be needless, the little
that would then have to be done over again, the anxiety that would
be put aside, would even in a worldly way be "great gain." It is
not, perhaps, too much to say, that the third part of men's lives is
wasted by the effect, direct or indirect, of falsehoods.
Still, let us not be swift to imagine that lies are never of any
service. A recent Prime Minister said, that he did not know about
truth always prevailing and the like; but lies had been very
successful against his government. And this was true enough. Every
lie has its day. There is no preternatural inefficacy in it by
reason of its falseness. And this is especially the case with those
vague injurious reports which are no man's lies, but all men's
carelessness. But even as regards special and unmistakable
falsehood, we must admit that it has its success. A complete being
might deceive with wonderful effect; however, as nature is always
against a liar, it is great odds in the case of ordinary mortals.
Wolsey talks of
"Negligence
Fit for a fool to fall by,"
when he gives Henry the wrong packet; but the Cardinal was quite
mistaken. That kind of negligence was just the thing of which far-
seeing and thoughtful men are capable; and which, if there were no
higher motive, should induce them to rely on truth alone. A very
close vulpine nature, all eyes, all ears, may succeed better in
deceit. But it is a sleepless business. Yet, strange to say, it is
had recourse to in the most spendthrift fashion, as the first and
easiest thing that comes to hand.
In connection with truth in business, it may be observed that if you
are a truthful man, you should be watchful over those whom you
employ; for your subordinate agents are often fond of lying for your
interests, as they think. Show them at once that you do not think
with them, and that you will disconcert any of their inventions by
breaking in with the truth. If you suffer the fear of seeming
unkind to prevent your thrusting well-meant inventions aside, you
may get as much pledged to falsehoods as if you had coined and
uttered them yourself.
5. Truth in pleasure. Men have been said to be sincere in their
pleasures; but this is only that the taste and habits of men are
more easily discernible in pleasure than in business. The want of
truth is as great a hindrance to the one as to the other. Indeed,
there is so much insincerity and formality in the pleasurable
department of human life, especially in social pleasures, that
instead of a bloom there is a slime upon it, which deadens and
corrupts the thing. One of the most comical sights to superior
beings must be to see two human creatures with elaborate speech and
gestures making each other exquisitely uncomfortable from civility:
the one pressing what he is most anxious that the other should not
accept, and the other accepting only from the fear of giving offence
by refusal. There is an element of charity in all this too; and it
will be the business of a just and refined nature to be sincere and
considerate at the same time. This will be better done by enlarging
our sympathy, so that more things and people are pleasant to us,
than by increasing the civil and conventional part of our nature, so
that we are able to do more seeming with greater skill and
endurance. Of other false hindrances to pleasure, such as
ostentation and pretences of all kinds, there is neither charity nor
comfort in them. They may be got rid of altogether, and no moaning
made over them. Truth, which is one of the largest creatures, opens
out the way to the heights of enjoyment, as well as to the depths of
self-denial.
It is difficult to think too highly of the merits and delights of
truth; but there is often in men's minds an exaggerated notion of
some bit of truth, which proves a great assistance to falsehood.
For instance, the shame of some particular small falsehood,
exaggeration, or insincerity, becomes a bugbear which scares a man
into a career of false dealing. He has begun making a furrow a
little out of the line, and he ploughs on in it to try and give some
consistency and meaning to it. He wants almost to persuade himself
that it was not wrong, and entirely to hide the wrongness from
others. This is a tribute to the majesty of truth; also to the
world's opinion about truth. It proceeds, too, upon the notion that
all falsehoods are equal, which is not the case; or on some fond
craving for a show of perfection, which is sometimes very inimical
to the reality. The practical, as well as the high-minded, view in
such cases, is for a man to think how he can be true now. To attain
that, it may, even for this world, be worth while for a man to admit
that he is inconsistent, and even that he has been untrue. His
hearers, did they know anything of themselves, would be fully aware
that he was not singular, except in the courage of owning his
insincerity.
-----
Ellesmere. That last part requires thinking about. If you were to
permit men, without great loss of reputation, to own that they had
been insincere, you might break down some of that majesty of truth
you talk about. And bad men might avail themselves of any
facilities of owning insincerity, to commit more of it. I can
imagine that the apprehension of this might restrain a man from
making any such admission as you allude to, even if he could make up
his mind to do it otherwise.
Milverton. Yes; but can anything be worse than a man going on in a
false course? Each man must look to his own truthfulness, and keep
that up as well as he can, even at the risk of saying, or doing,
something which may be turned to ill account by others. We may
think too much about this reflection of our external selves. Let
the real self be right. I am not so fanciful as to expect men to go
about clamouring that they have been false; but at no risk of
letting people see that, or of even being obliged to own it, should
they persevere in it.
Dunsford. Milverton is right, I think.
Ellesmere. Do not imagine that I am behind either of you in a wish
to hold up truth. My only doubt was as to the mode. For my own
part, I have such faith in truth that I take it mere concealment is
in most cases a mischief. And I should say, for instance, that a
wise man would be sorry that his fellows should think better of him
than he deserves. By the way, that is a reason why I should not
like to be a writer of moral essays, Milverton--one should be
supposed to be so very good.
Milverton. Only by thoughtless people then. There is a saying
given to Rousseau, not that he ever did say it, for I believe it was
a misprint, but it was a possible saying for him, "Chaque homme qui
pense est mechant." Now, without going the length of this aphorism,
we may say that what has been well written has been well suffered.
"He best can paint them who has felt them most."
And so, though we should not exactly declare that writers who have
had much moral influence have been wicked men, yet we may admit that
they have been amongst the most struggling, which implies anything
but serene self-possession and perfect spotlessness. If you take
the great ones, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, you see this at once.
Dunsford. David, St. Paul.
Milverton. Such men are like great rocks on the seashore. By their
resistance, terraces of level land are formed; but the rocks
themselves bear many scars and ugly indents, while the sea of human
difficulty presents the same unwrinkled appearance in all ages. Yet
it has been driven back.
Ellesmere. But has it lost any of its bulk, or only gone elsewhere?
One part of the resemblance certainly is that these same rocks,
which were bulwarks, become, in their turn, dangers.
Milverton. Yes, there is always loss in that way. It is seldom
given to man to do unmixed good. But it was not this aspect of the
simile that I was thinking of: it was the scarred appearance.
Dunsford. Scars not always of defeat or flight; scars in the front.
Milverton. Ah, it hardly does for us to talk of victory or defeat,
in these cases; but we may look at the contest itself as something
not bad, terminate how it may. We lament over a man's sorrows,
struggles, disasters, and shortcomings; yet they were possessions
too. We talk of the origin of evil and the permission of evil. But
what is evil? We mostly speak of sufferings and trials as good,
perhaps, in their result; but we hardly admit that they may be good
in themselves. Yet they are knowledge--how else to be acquired,
unless by making men as gods, enabling them to understand without
experience. All that men go through may be absolutely the best for
them--no such thing as evil, at least in our customary meaning of
the word. But, you will say, they might have been created different
and higher. See where this leads to. Any sentient being may set up
the same claim: a fly that it had not been made a man; and so the
end would be that each would complain of not being all.
Ellesmere. Say it all over again, my dear Milverton: it is rather
hard. [Milverton did so, in nearly the same words.] I think I have
heard it all before. But you may have it as you please. I do not
say this irreverently, but the truth is, I am too old and too
earthly to enter upon these subjects. I think, however, that the
view is a stout-hearted one. It is somewhat in the same vein of
thought that you see in Carlyle's works about the contempt of
happiness. But in all these cases, one is apt to think of the sage
in "Rasselas," who is very wise about human misery till he loses his
daughter. Your fly illustration has something in it. Certainly
when men talk big about what might have been done for man, they omit
to think what might be said, on similar grounds, for each sentient
creature in the universe. But here have we been meandering off into
origin of evil, and uses of great men, and wickedness of writers,
etc., whereas I meant to have said something about the essay. How
would you answer what Bacon maintains? "A mixture of a lie doth
ever add pleasure."
Milverton. He is not speaking of the lies of social life, but of
self-deception. He goes on to class under that head "vain opinions,
flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would."
These things are the sweetness of "the lie that sinketh in." Many a
man has a kind of mental kaleidoscope, where the bits of broken
glass are his own merits and fortunes, and they fall into harmonious
arrangements and delight him--often most mischievously and to his
ultimate detriment, but they are a present pleasure.
Ellesmere. Well, I am going to be true in my pleasures: to take a
long walk alone. I have got a difficult case for an opinion, which
I must go and think over.
Dunsford. Shall we have another reading tomorrow?
Milverton. Yes, if you are both in the humour for it.
CHAPTER II.
As the next day was fine, we agreed to have our reading in the same
spot that I have described before. There was scarcely any
conversation worth noting, until after Milverton had read us the
following essay on Conformity.
CONFORMITY.
The conformity of men is often a far poorer thing than that which
resembles it amongst the lower animals. The monkey imitates from
imitative skill and gamesomeness: the sheep is gregarious, having
no sufficient will to form an independent project of its own. But
man often loathes what he imitates, and conforms to what he knows to
be wrong.
It will ever be one of the nicest problems for a man to solve how
far he shall profit by the thoughts of other men, and not be
enslaved by them. He comes into the world, and finds swaddling
clothes ready for his mind as well as his body. There is a vast
scheme of social machinery set up about him; and he has to discern
how he can make it work with him and for him, without becoming part
of the machinery himself. In this lie the anguish and the struggle
of the greatest minds. Most sad are they, having mostly the deepest
sympathies, when they find themselves breaking off from communion
with other minds. They would go on, if they could, with the
opinions around them. But, happily, there is something to which a
man owes a larger allegiance than to any human affection. He would
be content to go away from a false thing, or quietly to protest
against it; but in spite of him the strife in his heart breaks into
burning utterance by word or deed.
Few, however, are those who venture, even for the shortest time,
into that hazy world of independent thought, where a man is not
upheld by a crowd of other men's opinions, but where he must find a
footing of his own. Among the mass of men, there is little or no
resistance to conformity. Could the history of opinions be fully
written, it would be seen how large a part in human proceedings the
love of conformity, or rather the fear of non-conformity, has
occasioned. It has triumphed over all other fears; over love, hate,
pity, sloth, anger, truth, pride, comfort, self-interest, vanity,
and maternal love. It has torn down the sense of beauty in the
human soul, and set up in its place little ugly idols which it
compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion. It has
contradicted Nature in the most obvious things, and been listened to
with abject submission. Its empire has been no less extensive than
deep-seated. The serf to custom points his finger at the slave to
fashion--as if it signified whether it is an old or a new thing
which is irrationally conformed to. The man of letters despises
both the slaves of fashion and of custom, but often runs his narrow
career of thought, shut up, though he sees it not, within close
walls which he does not venture even to peep over.
It is hard to say in what department of human thought and endeavour
conformity has triumphed most. Religion comes to one's mind first;
and well it may when one thinks what men have conformed to in all
ages in that matter. If we pass to art, or science, we shall see
there too the wondrous slavery which men have endured--from puny
fetters, moreover, which one stirring thought would, as we think,
have burst asunder. The above, however, are matters not within
every one's cognisance; some of them are shut in by learning or the
show of it; and plain "practical" men would say, they follow where
they have no business but to follow. But the way in which the human
body shall be covered is not a thing for the scientific and the
learned only: and is allowed on all hands to concern, in no small
degree, one half at least of the creation. It is in such a simple
thing as dress that each of us may form some estimate of the extent
of conformity in the world. A wise nation, unsubdued by
superstition, with the collected experience of peaceful ages,
concludes that female feet are to be clothed by crushing them. The
still wiser nations of the west have adopted a swifter mode of
destroying health, and creating angularity, by crushing the upper
part of the female body. In such matters nearly all people conform.
Our brother man is seldom so bitter against us, as when we refuse to
adopt at once his notions of the infinite. But even religious
dissent were less dangerous and more respectable than dissent in
dress. If you want to see what men will do in the way of
conformity, take a European hat for your subject of meditation. I
dare say there are twenty-two millions of people at this minute each
wearing one of these hats in order to please the rest. As in the
fine arts, and in architecture, especially, so in dress, something
is often retained that was useful when something else was beside it.
To go to architecture for an instance, a pinnacle is retained, not
that it is of any use where it is, but in another kind of building
it would have been. That style of building, as a whole, has gone
out of fashion, but the pinnacle has somehow or other kept its
ground and must be there, no one insolently going back to first
principles and asking what is the use and object of building
pinnacles. Similar instances in dress will occur to my readers.
Some of us are not skilled in such affairs; but looking at old
pictures we may sometimes see how modern clothes have attained their
present pitch of frightfulness and inconvenience. This matter of
dress is one in which, perhaps, you might expect the wise to conform
to the foolish; and they have.
When we have once come to a right estimate of the strength of
conformity, we shall, I think, be more kindly disposed to
eccentricity than we usually are. Even a wilful or an absurd
eccentricity is some support against the weighty common-place
conformity of the world. If it were not for some singular people
who persist in thinking for themselves, in seeing for themselves,
and in being comfortable, we should all collapse into a hideous
uniformity.
It is worth while to analyse that influence of the world which is
the right arm of conformity. Some persons bend to the world in all
things, from an innocent belief that what so many people think must
be right. Others have a vague fear of the world as of some wild
beast which may spring out upon them at any time. Tell them they
are safe in their houses from this myriad-eyed creature: they still
are sure that they shall meet with it some day, and would propitiate
its favour at any sacrifice. Many men contract their idea of the
world to their own circle, and what they imagine to be said in that
circle of friends and acquaintances is their idea of public opinion-
-"as if," to use a saying of Southey's, "a number of worldlings made
a world." With some unfortunate people, the much dreaded "world"
shrinks into one person of more mental power than their own, or
perhaps merely of coarser nature; and the fancy as to what this
person will say about anything they do, sits upon them like a
nightmare. Happy the man who can embark his small adventure of
deeds and thoughts upon the shallow waters round his home, or send
them afloat on the wide sea of humanity, with no great anxiety in
either case as to what reception they may meet with! He would have
them steer by the stars, and take what wind may come to them.
A reasonable watchfulness against conformity will not lead a man to
spurn the aid of other men, still less to reject the accumulated
mental capital of ages. It does not compel us to dote upon the
advantages of savage life. We would not forego the hard-earned
gains of civil society because there is something in most of them
which tends to contract the natural powers, although it vastly aids
them. We would not, for instance, return to the monosyllabic
utterance of barbarous men, because in any formed language there are
a thousand snares for the understanding. Yet we must be most
watchful of them. And in all things, a man must beware of so
conforming himself as to crush his nature and forego the purpose of
his being. We must look to other standards than what men may say or
think. We must not abjectly bow down before rules and usages; but
must refer to principles and purposes. In few words, we must think,
not whom we are following, but what we are doing. If not, why are
we gifted with individual life at all? Uniformity does not consist
with the higher forms of vitality. Even the leaves of the same tree
are said to differ, each one from all the rest. And can it be good
for the soul of a man "with a biography of his own like to no one
else's," to subject itself without thought to the opinions and ways
of others: not to grow into symmetry, but to be moulded down into
conformity?
----
Ellesmere. Well, I rather like that essay. I was afraid, at first,
it was going to have more of the fault into which you essay writers
generally fall, of being a comment on the abuse of a thing, and not
on the thing itself. There always seems to me to want another essay
on the other side. But I think, at the end, you protect yourself
against misconstruction. In the spirit of the essay, you know, of
course, that I quite agree with you. Indeed, I differ from all the
ordinary biographers of that independent gentleman, Don't Care. I
believe Don't Care came to a good end. At any rate he came to some
end. Whereas numbers of people never have beginning, or ending, of
their own. An obscure dramatist, Milverton, whom we know of, makes
one of his characters say, in reply to some world-fearing wretch:
"While you, you think
What others think, or what you think they'll say,
Shaping your course by something scarce more tangible
Than dreams, at best the shadows on the stream
Of aspen leaves by flickering breezes swayed--
Load me with irons, drive me from morn till night,
I am not the utter slave which that man is
Whose sole word, thought, and deed are built on what
The world may say of him."
Milverton. Never mind the obscure dramatist. But, Ellesmere, you
really are unreasonable, if you suppose that, in the limits of a
short essay, you can accurately distinguish all you write between
the use and the abuse of a thing. The question is, will people
misunderstand you--not, is the language such as to be logically
impregnable? Now, in the present case, no man will really suppose
it is a wise and just conformity that I am inveighing against.
Ellesmere. I am not sure of that. If everybody is to have
independent thought, would there not be a fearful instability and
want of compactness? Another thing, too--conformity often saves so
much time and trouble.
Milverton. Yes; it has its uses. I do not mean, in the world of
opinion and morality, that it should be all elasticity and no
gravitation; but at least enough elasticity to preserve natural form
and independent being.
Ellesmere. I think it would have been better if you had turned the
essay another way, and instead of making it on conformity, had made
it on interference. That is the greater mischief and the greater
folly, I think. Why do people unreasonably conform? Because they
feel unreasonable interference. War, I say, is interference on a
small scale compared with the interference of private life. Then
the absurdity on which it proceeds; that men are all alike, or that
it is desirable that they should be; and that what is good for one
is good for all.
Dunsford. I must say, I think, Milverton, you do not give enough
credit for sympathy, good-nature, and humility as material elements
in the conformity of the world.
Ellesmere. I am not afraid, my dear Dunsford, of the essay doing
much harm. There is a power of sleepy conformity in the world. You
may just startle your conformists for a minute, but they gravitate
into their old way very soon. You talk of their humility, Dunsford,
but I have heard people who have conformed to opinions, without a
pretence of investigation, as arrogant and intolerant towards
anybody who differed from them, as if they stood upon a pinnacle of
independent sagacity and research.
Dunsford. One never knows, Ellesmere, on which side you are. I
thought you were on mine a minute or two ago; and now you come down
upon me with more than Milverton's anti-conforming spirit.
Ellesmere. The greatest mischief, as I take it, of this slavish
conformity, is in the reticence it creates. People will be, what
are called, intimate friends, and yet no real interchange of opinion
takes place between them. A man keeps his doubts, his difficulties,
and his peculiar opinions to himself. He is afraid of letting
anybody know that he does not exactly agree with the world's
theories on all points. There is no telling the hindrance that this
is to truth.
Milverton. A great cause of this, Ellesmere, is in the little
reliance you can have on any man's secrecy. A man finds that what,
in the heat of discussion, and in the perfect carelessness of
friendship, he has said to his friend, is quoted to people whom he
would never have said it to; knowing that it would be sure to be
misunderstood, or half-understood, by them. And so he grows
cautious; and is very loth to communicate to anybody his more
cherished opinions, unless they fall in exactly with the stream.
Added to which, I think there is in these times less than there ever
was of a proselytising spirit; and people are content to keep their
opinions to themselves--more perhaps from indifference than from
fear.
Ellesmere. Yes, I agree with you.
By the way, I think your taking dress as an illustration of extreme
conformity is not bad. Really it is wonderful the degree of square
and dull hideousness to which, in the process of time and tailoring,
and by severe conformity, the human creature's outward appearance
has arrived. Look at a crowd of men from a height, what an ugly set
of ants they appear! Myself, when I see an Eastern man, one of the
people attached to their embassies, sweeping by us in something
flowing and stately, I feel inclined to take off my hat to him (only
that I think the hat might frighten him), and say, Here is a great,
unhatted, uncravated, bearded man, not a creature clipt and twisted
and tortured into tailorhood.
Dunsford. Ellesmere broke in upon me just now, so that I did not
say all that I meant to say. But, Milverton, what would you admit
that we are to conform to? In silencing the general voice, may we
not give too much opportunity to our own headstrong suggestions, and
to wilful licence?
Milverton. Yes: to be somewhat deaf to the din of the world may be
no gain, even loss, if then we only listen more to the worst part of
ourselves; but in itself it is a good thing to silence that din. It
is at least a beginning of good. If anything good is then gained,
it is not a sheepish tendency, but an independent resolve growing
out of our nature. And, after all, when we talk of non-conformity,
it may only be that we non-conform to the immediate sect of thought
or action about us, to conform to a much wider thing in human
nature.
Ellesmere. Ah me! how one wants a moral essayist always at hand to
enable one to make use of moral essays.
Milverton. Your rules of law are grand things--the proverbs of
justice; yet has not each case its specialities, requiring to be
argued with much circumstance, and capable of different
interpretations? Words cannot be made into men.
Dunsford. I wonder you answer his sneers, Milverton.
Ellesmere. I must go and see whether words cannot be made into
guineas: and then guineas into men is an easy thing. These trains
will not wait even for critics, so, for the present, good-bye.
CHAPTER III.
Ellesmere soon wrote us word that he would be able to come down
again; and I agreed to be at Worth-Ashton (Milverton's house) on the
day of his arrival. I had scarcely seated myself at our usual place
of meeting before the friends entered, and after greeting me, the
conversation thus began:
Ellesmere. Upon my word, you people who live in the country have a
pleasant time of it. As Milverton was driving me from the station
through Durley Wood, there was such a rich smell of pines, such a
twittering of birds, so much joy, sunshine, and beauty, that I began
to think, if there were no such place as London, it really would be
very desirable to live in the country.
Milverton. What a climax! But I am always very suspicious, when
Ellesmere appears to be carried away by any enthusiasm, that it will
break off suddenly, like the gallop of a post-horse.
Dunsford. Well, what are we to have for our essay!
Milverton. Despair.
Ellesmere. I feel equal to anything just now, and so, if it must be
read sometime or other, let us have it now.
Milverton. You need not be afraid. I want to take away, not to add
gloom. Shall I read?
We assented, and he began.
DESPAIR.
Despair may be serviceable when it arises from a temporary
prostration of spirits: during which the mind is insensibly
healing, and her scattered power silently returning. This is better
than to be the sport of a teasing hope without reason. But to
indulge in despair as a habit is slothful, cowardly, short-sighted;
and manifestly tends against Nature. Despair is then the paralysis
of the soul.
These are the principal causes of despair--remorse, the sorrows of
the affections, worldly trouble, morbid views of religion, native
melancholy.
REMORSE.
Remorse does but add to the evil which bred it, when it promotes,
not penitence, but despair. To have erred in one branch of our
duties does not unfit us for the performance of all the rest, unless
we suffer the dark spot to spread over our whole nature, which may
happen almost unobserved in the torpor of despair. This kind of
despair is chiefly grounded on a foolish belief that individual
words or actions constitute the whole life of man: whereas they are
often not fair representatives of portions even of that life. The
fragments of rock in a mountain stream may tell much of its history,
are in fact results of its doings, but they are not the stream.
They were brought down when it was turbid; it may now be clear:
they are as much the result of other circumstances as of the action
of the stream; their history is fitful: they give us no sure
intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the nature of
its waters; and may scarcely show more than that it has not been
always as it is. The actions of men are often but little better
indications of the men themselves.
A prolonged despair arising from remorse is unreasonable at any age,
but if possible, still more so when felt by the young. To think,
for example, that the great Being who made us could have made
eternal ruin and misery inevitable to a poor half-fledged creature
of eighteen or nineteen! And yet how often has the profoundest
despair from remorse brooded over children of that age and eaten
into their hearts.
There is frequently much selfishness about remorse. Put what has
been done at the worst. Let a man see his own evil word, or deed,
in full light, and own it to be black as hell itself. He is still
here. He cannot be isolated. There still remain for him cares and
duties; and, therefore, hopes. Let him not in imagination link all
creation to his fate. Let him yet live in the welfare of others,
and, if it may be so, work out his own in this way: if not, be
content with theirs. The saddest cause of remorseful despair is
when a man does something expressly contrary to his character: when
an honourable man, for instance, slides into some dishonourable
action; or a tender-hearted man falls into cruelty from
carelessness; or, as often happens, a sensitive nature continues to
give the greatest pain to others from temper, feeling all the time,
perhaps, more deeply than the persons aggrieved. All these cases
may be summed up in the words, "That which I would not that I do,"
the saddest of all human confessions, made by one of the greatest
men. However, the evil cannot be mended by despair. Hope and
humility are the only supports under this burden. As Mr. Carlyle
says,
"What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the
inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled,
never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten. 'It is not in man that
walketh to direct his steps.' Of all acts, is not, for a man,
repentance the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that
same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death: the heart
so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact; is
dead: it is 'pure' as dead dry sand is pure. David's life and
history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be
the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare
here below. All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful
struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best.
Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet
a struggle never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true
unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature! is not a
man's walking, in truth, always that: a 'succession of falls!' Man
can do no other. In this wild element of a Life, he has to struggle
onwards; now fallen, deep abased; and ever, with tears, repentance,
with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still
onwards. That his struggle be a faithful unconquerable one: this
is the question of questions."
THE SORROWS OF THE AFFECTIONS.
The loss by death of those we love has the first place in these
sorrows. Yet the feeling in this case, even when carried to the
highest, is not exactly despair, having too much warmth in it for
that. Not much can be said in the way of comfort on this head.
Queen Elizabeth, in her hard, wise way, writing to a mother who had
lost her son, tells her that she will be comforted in time; and why
should she not do for herself what the mere lapse of time will do
for her? Brave words! and the stern woman, more earnest than the
sage in "Rasselas," would have tried their virtue on herself. But I
fear they fell somewhat coldly on the mother's ear. Happily, in
these bereavements, kind Nature with her opiates, day by day
administered, does more than all the skill of the physician
moralists. Sir Thomas Browne says,
"Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares
with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly
remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction
leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and
sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.
Afflictions induce callosities, miseries are slippery, or fall like
snow upon us, which, notwithstanding, is no unhappy stupidity. To
be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a
merciful provision in Nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our
few and evil days, and our delivered senses not relapsing into
cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of
repetitions."
The good knight thus makes much comfort out of our physical
weakness. But something may be done in a very different direction,
namely, by spiritual strength. By elevating and purifying the
sorrow, we may take it more out of matter, as it were, and so feel
less the loss of what is material about it.
The other sorrows of the affections which may produce despair, are
those in which the affections are wounded, as jealousy, love
unrequited, friendship betrayed and the like. As, in despair from
remorse, the whole life seems to be involved in one action: so in
the despair we are now considering, the whole life appears to be
shut up in the one unpropitious affection. Yet human nature, if
fairly treated, is too large a thing to be suppressed into despair
by one affection, however potent. We might imagine that if there
were anything that would rob life of its strength and favour, it is
domestic unhappiness. And yet how numerous is the bond of those
whom we know to have been eminently unhappy in some domestic
relation, but whose lives have been full of vigorous and kindly
action. Indeed the culture of the world has been largely carried on
by such men. As long as there is life in the plant, though it be
sadly pent in, it will grow towards any opening of light that is
left for it.
WORLDLY TROUBLE.
This appears too mean a subject for despair, or, at least, unworthy
of having any remedy, or soothing thought out of it. Whether a man
lives in a large room or a small one, rides or is obliged to walk,
gets a plenteous dinner every day, or a sparing one, do not seem
matters for despair. But the truth is, that worldly trouble, such
for instance, as loss of fortune, is seldom the simple thing that
poets would persuade us.
"The little or the much she gave is quietly resigned;
Content with poverty, my soul I arm,
And virtue, though in rags will keep me warm."
So sings Dryden, paraphrasing Horace, but each of them with their
knowledge of the world, cross-questioned in prose, could have told
us how the stings of fortune really are felt. The truth is, that
fortune is not exactly a distinct isolated thing which can be taken
away--"and there an end." But much has to be severed, with
undoubted pain in the operation. A man mostly feels that his
reputation for sagacity, often his honour, the comfort, too, or
supposed comfort, of others are embarked in his fortunes. Mere
stoicism, and resolves about fitting fortune to oneself, not oneself
to fortune, though good things enough in their way, will not always
meet the whole of the case. And a man who could bear personal
distress of any kind with Spartan indifference, may suffer himself
to be overwhelmed by despair growing out of worldly trouble. A
frequent origin of such despair, as indeed of all despair (not by
any means excluding despair from remorse), is pride. Let a man say
to himself, "I am not the perfect character I meant to be; this is
not the conduct I had imagined for myself; these are not the
fortunate circumstances I had always intended to be surrounded by."
Let him at once admit that he is on a lower level than his ideal
one; and then see what is to be done there. This seems the best way
of treating all that part of worldly trouble which consists of self-
reproval. We scarcely know of any outward life continuously
prosperous (and a very dull one it would be): why should we expect
the inner life to be one course of unbroken self-improvement, either
in prudence, or in virtue?
Before a man gives way to excessive grief about the fortunes of his
family being lost with his own, he should think whether he really
knows wherein lies the welfare of others. Give him some fairy
power, inexhaustible purses or magic lamps, not, however, applying
to the mind; and see whether he could make those whom he would
favour good or happy. In the East, they have a proverb of this
kind, Happy are the children of those fathers who go to the Evil
One. But for anything that our Western experience shows, the
proverb might be reversed, and, instead of running thus, Happy are
the sons of those who have got money anyhow, it might be, Happy are
the sons of those who have failed in getting money. In fact, there
is no sound proverb to be made about it either way. We know nothing
about the matter. Our surest influence for good or evil over others
is, through themselves. Our ignorance of what is physically good
for any man may surely prevent anything like despair with regard to
that part of the fortunes of others dear to us, which, as we think,
is bound up with our own.
MORBID VIEWS OF RELIGION.
As religion is the most engrossing subject that can be presented to
us, it will be considered in all states of mind and by all minds.
It is impossible but that the most hideous and perverted views of
religion must arise. To combat the particular views which may be
supposed to cause religious despair, would be too theological an
undertaking for this essay. One thing only occurs to me to say,
namely, that the lives and the mode of speaking about themselves
adopted by the founders of Christianity, afford the best
contradiction to religious melancholy that I believe can be met
with.
NATIVE MELANCHOLY.
There is such a thing. Jacques, without the "sundry contemplation"
of his travels, or any "simples" to "compound" his melancholy form,
would have ever been wrapped in a "most humorous sadness." It was
innate. This melancholy may lay its votaries open to any other
cause of despair, but having mostly some touch of philosophy (if it
be not absolutely morbid), it is not unlikely to preserve them from
any extremity. It is not acute, but chronic.
It may be said in its favour that it tends to make men indifferent
to their own fortunes. But then the sorrow of the world presses
more deeply upon them. With large open hearts, the untowardness of
things present, the miseries of the past, the mischief, stupidity,
and error which reign in the world, at times almost crush your
melancholy men. Still, out of their sadness may come their
strength, or, at least, the best direction of it. Nothing, perhaps,
is lost; not even sin--much less sorrow.
Ellesmere. I am glad you have ended as you have: for, previously,
you seemed to make too much of getting rid of all distress of mind.
I always liked that passage in "Philip van Artevelde," where Father
John says,
"He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
Eternity mourns that."
You have a better memory than I have: how does it go on?
Milverton.
"'Tis an ill cure
For life's worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow's held intrusive and turned out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity."
Still this does not justify despair, which was what I was writing
about.
Ellesmere. Perhaps it was not a just criticism of mine. One part
of the subject you have certainly omitted. You do not tell us how
much there often is of physical disorder in despair. I dare say you
will think it a coarse and unromantic mode of looking at things; but
I must confess I agree with what Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, that
one can walk down distress of mind--even remorse, perhaps.
Milverton. Yes; I am for the Peripatetics against all other
philosophers.
Ellesmere. By the way, there is a passage in one of Hazlitt's
essays, I thought of while you were reading, about remorse and
religious melancholy. He speaks of mixing up religion and morality;
and then goes on to say, that Calvinistic notions have obscured and
prevented self-knowledge. {42}
Give me the essay--there is a passage I want to look at. This
comparison of life to a mountain stream, the rocks brought down by
it being the actions, is too much worked out. When we speak of
similes not going on four legs, it implies, I think, that a simile
is at best but a four-legged animal. Now this is almost a centipede
of a simile. I think I have had the same thought as yours here, and
I have compared the life of an individual to a curve. You both
smile. Now I thought that Dunsford at any rate would be pleased
with this reminiscence of college days. But to proceed with my
curve. You may have numbers of the points through which it passes
given, and yet know nothing of the nature of the curve itself. See,
now, it shall pass through here and here, but how it will go in the
interval, what is the law of its being, we know not. But this
simile would be too mathematical, I fear.
Milverton. I hold to the centipede.
Ellesmere. Not a word has Dunsford said all this time.
Dunsford. I like the essay. I was not criticising as we went
along, but thinking that perhaps the greatest charm of books is,
that we see in them that other men have suffered what we have. Some
souls we ever find who could have responded to all our agony, be it
what it may. This at least robs misery of its loneliness.
Ellesmere. On the other hand, the charm of intercourse with our
fellows, when we are in sadness, is that they do not reflect it in
any way. Each keeps his own trouble to himself, and often
pretending to think and care about other things, comes to do so for
the time.
Dunsford. Well, but you might choose books which would not reflect
your troubles.
Ellesmere. But the fact of having to make a choice to do this, does
away, perhaps, with some part of the benefit: whereas, in
intercourse with living men, you take what you find, and you find
that neither your trouble, nor any likeness of it, is absorbing
other people. But this is not the whole reason: the truth is, the
life and impulses of other men are catching; you cannot explain
exactly how it is that they take you out of yourself.
Milverton. No man is so confidential as when he is addressing the
whole world. You find, therefore, more comfort for sorrow in books
than in social intercourse. I mean more direct comfort; for I agree
with what Ellesmere says about society.
Ellesmere. In comparing men and books, one must always remember
this important distinction--that one can put the books down at any
time. As Macaulay says, "Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never
petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays
too long."
Milverton. Besides, one can manage to agree so well,
intellectually, with a book; and intellectual differences are the
source of half the quarrels in the world.
Ellesmere. Judicious shelving!
Milverton. Judicious skipping will nearly do. Now when one's
friend, or oneself, is crotchety, dogmatic, or disputatious, one
cannot turn over to another day.
Ellesmere. Don't go, Dunsford. Here is a passage in the essay I
meant to have said something about--"why should we expect the inner
life to be one course of unbroken self-improvement," etc.--You
recollect? Well, it puts me in mind of a conversation between a
complacent poplar and a grim old oak, which I overheard the other
day. The poplar said that it grew up quite straight, heavenwards,
that all its branches pointed the same way, and always had done so.
Turning to the oak, which it had been talking at before for some
time, the poplar went on to remark, that it did not wish to say
anything unfriendly to a brother of the forest, but those warped and
twisted branches seemed to show strange struggles. The tall thing
concluded its oration by saying, that it grew up very fast, and that
when it had done growing, it did not suffer itself to be made into
huge floating engines of destruction. But different trees had
different tastes. There was then a sound from the old oak, like an
"ah" or a "whew," or, perhaps, it was only the wind amongst its
resisting branches; and the gaunt creature said that it had had ugly
winds from without and cross-grained impulses from within; that it
knew it had thrown out awkwardly a branch here and a branch there,
which would never come quite right again it feared; that men worked
it up, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil--but that at any
rate it had not lived for nothing. The poplar began again
immediately, for this kind of tree can talk for ever, but I patted
the old oak approvingly and went on.
Milverton. Well, your trees divide their discourse somewhat
Ellesmerically: they do not talk with the simplicity La Fontaine's
would; but there is a good deal in them. They are not altogether
sappy.
Ellesmere. I really thought of this fable of mine the other day, as
I was passing the poplar at the end of the valley, and I determined
to give it you on the first occasion.
Dunsford. I hope, Ellesmere, you do not intend to put sarcastic
notions into the sap of our trees hereabouts. There's enough of
sarcasm in you to season a whole forest.
Ellesmere. Dunsford is afraid of what the trees may say to the
country gentlemen, and whether they will be able to answer them. I
will be careful not to make the trees too clever.
Milverton. Let us go and try if we can hear any more forest talk.
The winds, shaped into voices by the leaves, say many things to us
at all times.
CHAPTER IV.
In the course of our walk Milverton promised to read the following
essay on Recreation the next day. I have no note of anything that
was said before the reading.
RECREATION.
This subject has not had the thought it merits. It seems trivial.
It concerns some hours in the daily life of each of us; but it is
not connected with any subject of human grandeur, and we are rather
ashamed of it. Schiller has some wise, but hard words that relate
to it. He perceives the pre-eminence of the Greeks, who could do
many things. He finds that modern men are units of great nations;
but not great units themselves. And there is some room for this
reasoning of his.
Our modern system of division of labour divides wits also. The more
necessity there is, therefore, for funding in recreation something
to expand men's intelligence. There are intellectual pursuits
almost as much divided as pin-making; and many a man goes through
some intellectual process, for the greater part of his working
hours, which corresponds with the making of a pin's head. Must
there not be some danger of a general contraction of mind from this
convergence of attention upon something very small, for so
considerable a portion of a man's life?
What answer can civilisation give to this? It can say that greater
results are worked out by the modern system; that though each man is
doing less himself than he might have done in former days, he sees
greater and better things accomplished; and that his thoughts, not
bound down by his petty occupation, travel over the work of the
human family. There is a great deal, doubtless, in this argument;
but man is not altogether an intellectual recipient. He is a
constructive animal also. It is not the knowledge that you can pour
into him that will satisfy him, or enable him to work out his
nature. He must see things for himself; he must have bodily work
and intellectual work different from his bread-getting work; or he
runs the danger of becoming a contracted pedant with a poor mind and
a sickly body.
I have seen it quoted from Aristotle, that the end of labour is to
gain leisure. It is a great saying. We have in modern times a
totally wrong view of the matter. Noble work is a noble thing, but
not all work. Most people seem to think that any business is in
itself something grand; that to be intensely employed, for instance,
about something which has no truth, beauty, or usefulness in it,
which makes no man happier or wiser, is still the perfection of
human endeavour, so that the work be intense. It is the intensity,
not the nature, of the work that men praise. You see the extent of
this feeling in little things. People are so ashamed of being
caught for a moment idle, that if you come upon the most industrious
servants or workmen whilst they are standing looking at something
which interests them, or fairly resting, they move off in a fright,
as if they were proved, by a moment's relaxation, to be neglectful
of their work. Yet it is the result that they should mainly be
judged by, and to which they should appeal. But amongst all
classes, the working itself, incessant working, is the thing
deified. Now what is the end and object of most work? To provide
for animal wants. Not a contemptible thing by any means, but still
it is not all in all with man. Moreover, in those cases where the
pressure of bread-getting is fairly past, we do not often find men's
exertions lessened on that account. There enter into their minds as
motives, ambition, a love of hoarding, or a fear of leisure--things
which, in moderation, may be defended or even justified; but which
are not so peremptory, and upon the face of them excellent, that
they at once dignify excessive labour.
The truth is, that to work insatiably requires much less mind than
to work judiciously, and less courage than to refuse work that
cannot be done honestly. For a hundred men whose appetite for work
can be driven on by vanity, avarice, ambition, or a mistaken notion
of advancing their families, there is about one who is desirous of
expanding his own nature and the nature of others in all directions,
of cultivating many pursuits, of bringing himself and those around
him in contact with the universe in many points, of being a man and
not a machine.
It may seem as if the preceding arguments were directed rather
against excessive work than in favour of recreation. But the first
object in an essay of this kind should be to bring down the absurd
estimate that is often formed of mere work. What ritual is to the
formalist, or contemplation to the devotee, business is to the man
of the world. He thinks he cannot be doing wrong as long as he is
doing that.
No doubt hard work is a great police agent. If everybody were
worked from morning till night and then carefully locked up, the
register of crimes might be greatly diminished. But what would
become of human nature? Where would be the room for growth in such
a system of things? It is through sorrow and mirth, plenty and
need, a variety of passions, circumstances, and temptations, even
through sin and misery, that men's natures are developed.
Again, there are people who would say, "Labour is not all; we do not
object to the cessation of labour--a mere provision for bodily ends;
but we fear the lightness and vanity of what you call recreation."
Do these people take heed of the swiftness of thought--of the
impatience of thought? What will the great mass of men be thinking
of, if they are taught to shun amusements and the thoughts of
amusement? If any sensuality is left open to them, they will think
of that. If not sensuality, then avarice, or ferocity for "the
cause of God," as they would call it. People who have had nothing
else to amuse them have been very apt to indulge themselves in the
excitement of persecuting their fellow creatures.
Our nation, the northern part of it especially, is given to believe
in the sovereign efficacy of dulness. To be sure, dulness and solid
vice are apt to go hand in hand. But then, according to our
notions, dulness is in itself so good a thing--almost a religion.
Now, if ever a people required to be amused, it is we sad-hearted
Anglo-Saxons. Heavy eaters, hard thinkers, often given up to a
peculiar melancholy of our own, with a climate that for months
together would frown away mirth if it could--many of us with very
gloomy thoughts about our hereafter--if ever there were a people who
should avoid increasing their dulness by all work and no play, we
are that people. "They took their pleasure sadly," says Froissart,
"after their fashion." We need not ask of what nation Froissart was
speaking.
There is a theory which has done singular mischief to the cause of
recreation and of general cultivation. It is that men cannot excel
in more things than one; and that if they can, they had better be
quiet about it. "Avoid music, do not cultivate art, be not known to
excel in any craft but your own," says many a worldly parent,
thereby laying the foundation of a narrow, greedy character, and
destroying means of happiness and of improvement which success, or
even real excellence, in one profession only cannot give. This is,
indeed, a sacrifice of the end of living for the means.
Another check to recreation is the narrow way in which people have
hitherto been brought up at schools and colleges. The classics are
pre-eminent works. To acquire an accurate knowledge of them is an
admirable discipline. Still, it would be well to give a youth but
few of these great works, and so leave time for various arts,
accomplishments, and knowledge of external things exemplified by
other means than books. If this cannot be done but by over-working,
then it had better not be done; for of all things, that must be
avoided. But surely it can be done. At present, many a man who is
versed in Greek metre, and afterwards full of law reports, is
childishly ignorant of Nature. Let him walk with an intelligent
child for a morning, and the child will ask him a hundred questions
about sun, moon, stars, plants, birds, building, farming, and the
like, to which he can give very sorry answers, if any; or, at the
best, he has but a second-hand acquaintance with Nature. Men's
conceits are his main knowledge. Whereas, if he had any pursuits
connected with Nature, all Nature is in harmony with it, is brought
into his presence by it, and it affords at once cultivation and
recreation.
But, independently of those cultivated pursuits which form a high
order of recreation, boyhood should never pass without the boy's
learning several modes of recreation of the humbler kind. A parent
or teacher seldom does a kinder thing by the child under his care
than when he instructs it in some manly exercise, some pursuit
connected with Nature out of doors, or even some domestic game. In
hours of fatigue, anxiety, sickness, or worldly ferment, such means
of amusement may delight the grown-up man when other things would
fail.
An indirect advantage, but a very considerable one, attendant upon
various modes of recreation, is, that they provide opportunities of
excelling in something to boys and men who are dull in things which
form the staple of education. A boy cannot see much difference
between the nominative and the genitive cases--still less any
occasion for aorists--but he is a good hand at some game or other;
and he keeps up his self-respect, and the respect of others for him,
upon his prowess in that game. He is better and happier on that
account. And it is well, too, that the little world around him
should know that excellence is not all of one form.
There are no details about recreation in this essay, the object here
being mainly to show the worth of recreation, and to defend it
against objections from the over-busy and the over-strict. The
sense of the beautiful, the desire for comprehending Nature, the
love of personal skill and prowess, are not things implanted in men
merely to be absorbed in producing and distributing the objects of
our most obvious animal wants. If civilisation required this,
civilisation would be a failure. Still less should we fancy that we
are serving the cause of godliness when we are discouraging
recreation. Let us be hearty in our pleasures, as in our work, and
not think that the gracious Being Who has made us so open-hearted to
delight, looks with dissatisfaction at our enjoyment, as a hard
taskmaster might, who in the glee of his slaves could see only a
hindrance to their profitable working. And with reference to our
individual cultivation, we may remember that we are not here to
promote incalculable quantities of law, physic, or manufactured
goods, but to become men--not narrow pedants, but wide-seeing, mind-
travelled men. Who are the men of history to be admired most?
Those whom most things became--who could be weighty in debate, of
much device in council, considerate in a sick-room, genial at a
feast, joyous at a festival, capable of discourse with many minds,
large-souled, not to be shrivelled up into any one form, fashion, or
temperament. Their contemporaries would have told us that men might
have various accomplishments and hearty enjoyments, and not for that
be the less effective in business, or less active in benevolence. I
distrust the wisdom of asceticism as much as I do that of
sensuality; Simeon Stylites no less than Sardanapalus.
-----
Ellesmere. You alluded to Schiller at the beginning of the essay:
can you show me his own words? I have a lawyer's liking for the
best evidence.
Milverton. When we go in, I will show you some passages which bear
me out in what I have made him say--at least, if the translation is
faithful. {53}
Ellesmere. I have had a great respect for Schiller ever since I
heard that saying of his about death, "Death cannot be an evil, for
it is universal."
Dunsford. Very noble and full of faith.
Ellesmere. Touching the essay, I like it well enough; but, perhaps,
people will expect to find more about recreation itself--not only
about the good of it, but what it is, and how it is to be got.
Milverton. I do not incline to go into detail about the matter.
The object was to say something for the respectability of
recreation, not to write a chapter of a book of sports. People must
find out their own ways of amusing themselves.
Ellesmere. I will tell you what is the paramount thing to be
attended to in all amusements--that they should be short. Moralists
are always talking about "short-lived" pleasures: would that they
were!
Dunsford. Hesiod told the world, some two thousand years ago, how
much greater the half is than the whole.
Ellesmere. Dinner-givers and managers of theatres should forthwith
be made aware of that fact. What a sacrifice of good things, and of
the patience and comfort of human beings, a cumbrous modern dinner
is! I always long to get up and walk about.
Dunsford. Do not talk of modern dinners. Think what a Roman dinner
must have been.
Milverton. Very true. It has always struck me that there is
something quite military in the sensualism of the Romans--an
"arbiter bibendi" chosen, and the whole feast moving on with fearful
precision and apparatus of all kinds. Come, come! the world's
improving, Ellesmere.
Ellesmere. Had the Romans public dinners? Answer me that. Imagine
a Roman, whose theory, at least, of a dinner was that it was a thing
for enjoyment, whereas we often look on it as a continuation of the
business of the day--I say, imagine a Roman girding himself up,
literally girding himself up to make an after-dinner speech.
Milverton. I must allow that is rather a barbarous practice.
Ellesmere. If charity, or politics, cannot be done without such
things, I suppose they are useful in their way; but let nobody ever
imagine that they are a form of pleasure. People smearing each
other over with stupid flattery, and most of the company being in
dread of receiving some compliment which should oblige them to
speak!
Dunsford. I should have thought, now, that you would always have
had something to say, and therefore that you would not be so bitter
against after-dinner speaking.
Ellesmere. No; when I have nothing to say, I can say nothing.
Milverton. Would it not be a pleasant thing if rich people would
ask their friends sometimes to public amusements--order a play for
them, for instance--or at any rate, provide some manifest amusement?
They might, occasionally with great advantage, abridge the expense
of their dinners; and throw it into other channels of hospitality.
Ellesmere. Ah, if they would have good acting at their houses, that
would be very delightful; but I cannot say that the being taken to
any place of public amusement would much delight me. By the way,
Milverton, what do you say of theatres in the way of recreation?
This decline of the drama, too, is a thing you must have thought
about: let us hear your notions.
Milverton. I think one of the causes sometimes assigned, that
reading is more spread, is a true and an important one; but,
otherwise, I fancy that the present decline of the drama depends
upon very small things which might be remedied. As to a love of the
drama going out of the human heart, that is all nonsense. Put it at
the lowest, what a great pleasure it is to hear a good play read.
And again, as to serious pursuits unfitting men for dramatic
entertainments, it is quite the contrary. A man, wearied with care
and business, would find more change of ideas with less fatigue, in
seeing a good play, than in almost any other way of amusing himself.
Dunsford. What are the causes then of the decline of the drama?
Milverton. In England, or rather in London,--for London is England
for dramatic purposes; in London, then, theatrical arrangements seem
to be framed to drive away people of sense. The noisome atmosphere,
the difficult approach, the over-size of the great theatres, the
intolerable length of performances.
Ellesmere. Hear! hear!
Milverton. The crowding together of theatres in one part of the
town, the lateness of the hours--
Ellesmere. The folly of the audience, who always applaud in the
wrong place--
Dunsford. There is no occasion to say any more; I am quite
convinced.
Milverton. But these annoyances need not be. Build a theatre of
moderate dimensions; give it great facility of approach; take care
that the performances never exceed three hours; let lions and dwarfs
pass by without any endeavour to get them within the walls; lay
aside all ambition of making stage waves which may almost equal real
Ramsgate waves to our cockney apprehensions. Of course there must
be good players and good plays.
Ellesmere. Now we come to the part of Hamlet.
Milverton. Good players and good plays are both to be had if there
were good demand for them. But, I was going to say, let there be
all these things, especially let there be complete ventilation, and
the theatre will have the most abundant success. Why, that one
thing alone, the villainous atmosphere at most public places, is
enough to daunt any sensible man from going to them.
Dunsford. There should be such a choice of plays--not merely
Chamberlain-clipt--as any man or woman could go to.
Milverton. There should be certainly, but how is such a choice to
be made, if the people who could regulate it, for the most part,
stay away? It is a dangerous thing, the better classes leaving any
great source of amusement and instruction wholly, or greatly, to the
less refined classes.
Dunsford. Yes, I must confess it is.
Great part of your arguments apply to musical as well as to
theatrical entertainments. Do you find similar results with respect
to them?
Milverton. Why, they are not attended by any means as they would
be, or made what they might be, if the objections I mentioned were
removed.
Dunsford. What do you say to the out-of-door entertainments for a
town population?
Milverton. As I said before, my dear Dunsford, I cannot give you a
chapter of a "Book of Sports." There ought, of course, to be parks
for all quarters of the town: and I confess it would please me
better to see, in holiday times and hours of leisure, hearty games
going on in these parks, than a number of people sauntering about in
uncomfortably new and unaccustomed clothes.
Ellesmere. Do you not see, Dunsford, that, like a cautious official
man, he does not want to enter into small details, which have always
an air of ridicule? He is not prepared to pledge himself to
cricket, golf, football, or prisoner's bars; but in his heart he is
manifestly a Young Englander--without the white waistcoat. Nothing
would please him better than to see in large letters, on one of
those advertising vans, "Great match! Victoria Park!! Eleven of
Fleet Street against the Eleven of Saffron Hill!!!"
Milverton. Well, there is a great deal in the spirit of Young
England that I like very much, indeed that I respect.
Ellesmere. I should like the Young England party better myself if I
were quite sure there was no connection between them and a clan of
sour, pity-mongering people, who wash one away with eternal talk
about the contrast between riches and poverty; with whom a poor man
is always virtuous; and who would, if they could, make him as
envious and as discontented as possible.
Milverton. Nothing can be more strikingly in contrast with such
thinkers than Young England. Young Englanders, according to the
best of their theories, ought to be men of warm sympathy with all
classes. There is no doubt of this, that very seldom does any good
thing arise, but there comes an ugly phantom of a caricature of it,
which sidles up against the reality, mouths its favourite words as a
third-rate actor does a great part, under-mimics its wisdom, over-
acts its folly, is by half the world taken for it, goes some way to
suppress it in its own time, and, perhaps, lives for it in history.
Ellesmere. Well brought out, that metaphor, but I don't know that
it means more than that the followers of a system do in general a
good deal to corrupt it, or that when a great principle is worked
into human affairs, a considerable accretion of human folly and
falseness mostly grows round it: which things some of us had a
suspicion of before.
Dunsford. To go back to the subject. What would you do for country
amusements, Milverton? That is what concerns me, you know.
Milverton. Athletic amusements go on naturally here: do not
require so much fostering as in towns. The commons must be
carefully kept: I have quite a Cobbettian fear of their being taken
away from us under some plausible pretext or other. Well, then, it
strikes me that a great deal might be done to promote the more
refined pleasures of life among our rural population. I hope we
shall live to see many of Hullah's pupils playing an important part
in this way. Of course, the foundation for these things may best be
laid at schools; and is being laid in some places, I am happy to
say.
Ellesmere. Humph, music, sing-song!
Milverton. Don't you observe, Dunsford, that when Ellesmere wants
to attack us, and does not exactly see how, he mutters to himself
sarcastically, sneering himself up, as it were, to the attack.
Ellesmere. You and Dunsford are both wild for music, from barrel-
organs upwards.
Milverton. I confess to liking the humblest attempts at melody.
Dunsford. I feel as Sir Thomas Browne tells us he felt, that "even
that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another
mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound
contemplation of the first composer. There is something in it of
divinity more than the ear discovers; it is an hieroglyphical and
shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of God: such a
melody to the ear as the whole world well understood, would afford
the understanding."
Milverton. Apropos of music in country places, when I was going
about last year in the neighbouring county, I saw such a pretty
scene at one of the towns. They had got up a band, which played
once a week in the evening. It was a beautiful summer evening, and
the window of my room at the end overlooked the open space they had
chosen for their performances. There was the great man of the
neighbourhood in his carriage looking as if he came partly on duty,
as well as for pleasure. Then there were burly tradesmen, with an
air of quiet satisfaction, sauntering about, or leaning against
railings. Some were no doubt critical--thought that Will Miller did
not play as well as usual this evening. Will's young wife, who had
come out to look again at him in his band dress (for the band had a
uniform), thought differently. Little boys broke out into imaginary
polkas, having some distant reference to the music: not without
grace though. The sweep was pre-eminent: as if he would say,
"Dirty and sooty as I am I have a great deal of fun in me. Indeed,
what would May-day be but for me?" Studious little boys of the
free-school, all green grasshopper-looking, walked about as boys
knowing something of Latin. Here and there went a couple of them in
childish loving way, with their arms about each other's necks.
Matrons and shy young maidens sat upon the door-steps near. Many a
merry laugh filled up the interludes of music. And when evening
came softly down upon us, the band finished with "God save the
Queen," the little circle of those who would hear the last note
moved off, there was a clattering of shutters, a shining of lights
through casement-windows, and soon the only sound to be heard was
the rough voice of some villager, who would have been too timid to
adventure anything by daylight, but now sang boldly out as he went
homewards.
Ellesmere. Very pretty, but it sounds to me somewhat fabulous.
Milverton. I assure you--
Ellesmere. Yes, you were tired, had a good dinner, read a speech
for or against the corn-laws, fell asleep of course, and had this
ingenious dream, which, to this day, you believe to have been a
reality. I understand it all.
Milverton. I wish I could have many more such dreams.
CHAPTER V.
Our last conversation broke off abruptly on the entrance of a
visitor: we forgot to name a time for our next meeting; and when I
came again, I found Milverton alone in his study. He was reading
Count Rumford's essays.
Dunsford. So you are reading Count Rumford. What is it that
interests you there?
Milverton. Everything he writes about. He is to me a delightful
writer. He throws so much life into all his writings. Whether they
are about making the most of food or fuel, or propounding the
benefits of bathing, or inveighing against smoke, it is that he went
and saw and did and experimented himself upon himself. His
proceedings at Munich to feed the poor are more interesting than
many a novel. It is surprising, too, how far he was before the
world in all the things he gave his mind to.
Here Ellesmere entered.
Ellesmere. I heard you were come, Dunsford: I hope we shall have
an essay to-day. My critical faculties have been dormant for some
days, and want to be roused a little. Milverton was talking to you
about Count Rumford when I came in, was he not? Ah, the Count is a
great favourite with Milverton when he is down here; but there is a
book upstairs which is Milverton's real favourite just now, a
portentous-looking book; some relation to a blue-book, something
about sewerage, or health of towns, or public improvements, over
which said book our friend here goes into enthusiasms. I am sure if
it could be reduced to the size of that tatterdemalion Horace that
he carries about, the poor little Horace would be quite supplanted.
Milverton. Now, I must tell you, Dunsford, that Ellesmere himself
took up this book he talks about, and it was a long time before he
put it down.
Ellesmere. Yes, there is something in real life, even though it is
in the unheroic part of it, that interests one. I mean to get
through the book.
Dunsford. What are we to have to-day for our essay?
Milverton. Let us adjourn to the garden, and I will read you an
essay on Greatness, if I can find it.
We went to our favourite place, and Milverton read us the following
essay.
GREATNESS.
You cannot substitute any epithet for great, when you are talking of
great men. Greatness is not general dexterity carried to any
extent; nor proficiency in any one subject of human endeavour.
There are great astronomers, great scholars, great painters, even
great poets who are very far from great men. Greatness can do
without success and with it. William is greater in his retreats
than Marlborough in his victories. On the other hand, the
uniformity of Caesar's success does not dull his greatness.
Greatness is not in the circumstances, but in the man.
What does this greatness then consist in? Not in a nice balance of
qualities, purposes, and powers. That will make a man happy, a
successful man, a man always in his right depth. Nor does it
consist in absence of errors. We need only glance back at any list
that can be made of great men, to be convinced of that. Neither
does greatness consist in energy, though often accompanied by it.
Indeed, it is rather the breadth of the waters than the force of the
current that we look to, to fulfil our idea of greatness. There is
no doubt that energy acting upon a nature endowed with the qualities
that we sum up in the word cleverness, and directed to a few clear
purposes, produces a great effect, and may sometimes be mistaken for
greatness. If a man is mainly bent upon his own advancement, it
cuts many a difficult knot of policy for him, and gives a force and
distinctness to his mode of going on which looks grand. The same
happens if he has one pre-eminent idea of any kind, even though it
should be a narrow one. Indeed, success in life is mostly gained by
unity of purpose; whereas greatness often fails by reason of its
having manifold purposes, but it does not cease to be greatness on
that account.
If greatness can be shut up in qualities, it will be found to
consist in courage and in openness of mind and soul. These
qualities may not seem at first to be so potent. But see what
growth there is in them. The education of a man of open mind is
never ended. Then, with openness of soul, a man sees some way into
all other souls that come near him, feels with them, has their
experience, is in himself a people. Sympathy is the universal
solvent. Nothing is understood without it. The capacity of a man,
at least for understanding, may almost be said to vary according to
his powers of sympathy. Again, what is there that can counteract
selfishness like sympathy? Selfishness may be hedged in by minute
watchfulness and self-denial, but it is counteracted by the nature
being encouraged to grow out and fix its tendrils upon foreign
objects.
The immense defect that want of sympathy is, may be strikingly seen
in the failure of the many attempts that have been made in all ages
to construct the Christian character, omitting sympathy. It has
produced numbers of people walking up and down one narrow plank of
self-restraint, pondering over their own merits and demerits,
keeping out, not the world exactly, but their fellow-creatures from
their hearts, and caring only to drive their neighbours before them
on this plank of theirs, or to push them headlong. Thus, with many
virtues, and much hard work at the formation of character, we have
had splendid bigots or censorious small people.
But sympathy is warmth and light too. It is, as it were, the moral
atmosphere connecting all animated natures. Putting aside, for a
moment, the large differences that opinions, language, and education
make between men, look at the innate diversity of character.
Natural philosophers were amazed when they thought they had found a
new-created species. But what is each man but a creature such as
the world has not before seen? Then think how they pour forth in
multitudinous masses, from princes delicately nurtured to little
boys on scrubby commons, or in dark cellars. How are these people
to be understood, to be taught to understand each other, but by
those who have the deepest sympathies with all? There cannot be a
great man without large sympathy. There may be men who play loud-
sounding parts in life without it, as on the stage, where kings and
great people sometimes enter who are only characters of secondary
import--deputy great men. But the interest and the instruction lie
with those who have to feel and suffer most.
Add courage to this openness we have been considering, and you have
a man who can own himself in the wrong, can forgive, can trust, can
adventure, can, in short, use all the means that insight and
sympathy endow him with.
I see no other essential characteristics in the greatness of nations
than there are in the greatness of individuals. Extraneous
circumstances largely influence nations as individuals; and make a
larger part of the show of the former than of the latter; as we are
wont to consider no nation great that is not great in extent or
resources, as well as in character. But of two nations, equal in
other respects, the superiority must belong to the one which excels
in courage and openness of mind and soul.
Again, in estimating the relative merits of different periods of the
world, we must employ the same tests of greatness that we use to
individuals. To compare, for instance, the present and the past.
What astounds us most in the past is the wonderful intolerance and
cruelty: a cruelty constantly turning upon the inventors: an
intolerance provoking ruin to the thing it would foster. The most
admirable precepts are thrown from time to time upon this cauldron
of human affairs, and oftentimes they only seem to make it blaze the
higher. We find men devoting the best part of their intellects to
the invariable annoyance and persecution of their fellows. You
might think that the earth brought forth with more abundant
fruitfulness in the past than now, seeing that men found so much
time for cruelty, but that you read of famines and privations which
these latter days cannot equal. The recorded violent deaths amount
to millions. And this is but a small part of the matter. Consider
the modes of justice; the use of torture, for instance. What must
have been the blinded state of the wise persons (wise for their day)
who used torture? Did they ever think themselves, "What should we
not say if we were subjected to this?" Many times they must really
have desired to get at the truth; and such was their mode of doing
it. Now, at the risk of being thought "a laudator" of time present,
I would say, here is the element of greatness we have made progress
in. We are more open in mind and soul. We have arrived (some of us
at least) at the conclusion that men may honestly differ without
offence. We have learned to pity each other more. There is a
greatness in modern toleration which our ancestors knew not.
Then comes the other element of greatness, courage. Have we made
progress in that? This is a much more dubious question. The
subjects of terror vary so much in different times that it is
difficult to estimate the different degrees of courage shown in
resisting them. Men fear public opinion now as they did in former
times the Star Chamber; and those awful goddesses, Appearances, are
to us what the Fates were to the Greeks. It is hardly possible to
measure the courage of a modern against that of an ancient; but I am
unwilling to believe but that enlightenment must strengthen courage.
The application of the tests of greatness, as in the above instance,
is a matter of detail and of nice appreciation, as to the results of
which men must be expected to differ largely: the tests themselves
remain invariable--openness of nature to admit the light of love and
reason, and courage to pursue it.
-----
Ellesmere. I agree to your theory, as far as openness of nature is
concerned; but I do not much like to put that half-brute thing,
courage, so high.
Milverton. Well, you cannot have greatness without it: you may
have well-intentioned people and far-seeing people; but if they have
no stoutness of heart, they will only be shifty or remonstrant,
nothing like great.
Ellesmere. You mean will, not courage. Without will, your open-
minded, open-hearted man may be like a great, rudderless vessel
driven about by all winds: not a small craft, but a most uncertain
one.
Milverton. No, I mean both: both will and courage. Courage is the
body to will.
Ellesmere. I believe you are right in that; but do not omit will.
It amused me to see how you brought in one of your old notions--that
this age is not contemptible. You scribbling people are generally
on the other side.
Milverton. You malign us. If I must give any account for my
personal predilection for modern times, it consists perhaps in this,
that we may now speak our mind. What Tennyson says of his own land,
"The land where, girt with friend or foe,
A man may say the thing he will,"--
may be said, in some measure, of the age in which we live. This is
an inexpressible comfort. This doubles life. These things surely
may be said in favour of the present age, not with a view to puff it
up, but so far to encourage ourselves, as we may by seeing that the
world does not go on for nothing, that all the misery, blood, and
toil that have been spent, were not poured out in vain. Could we
have our ancestors again before us, would they not rejoice at seeing
what they had purchased for us: would they think it any compliment
to them to extol their times at the expense of the present, and so
to intimate that their efforts had led to nothing?
Ellesmere. "I doubt," as Lord Eldon would have said; no, upon
second thoughts, I do not doubt. I feel assured that a good many of
these said ancestors you are calling up would be much discomforted
at finding that all their suffering had led to no sure basis of
persecution of the other side.
Dunsford. I wonder, Ellesmere, what you would have done in
persecuting times. What escape would your sarcasm have found for
itself?
Milverton. Some orthodox way, I daresay. I do not think he would
have been particularly fond of martyrdom.
Ellesmere. No. I have no taste for making torches for truth, or
being one: I prefer humane darkness to such illumination. At the
same time one cannot tell lies; and if one had been questioned about
the incomprehensibilities which men in former days were so fierce
upon, one must have shown that one disagreed with all parties.
Dunsford. Do not say "one:" _I_ should not have disagreed with the
great Protestant leaders in the Reformation, for instance.
Ellesmere. Humph.
Milverton. If we get aground upon the Reformation, we shall never
push off again--else would I say something far from complimentary to
those Protestant proceedings which we may rather hope were
Tudoresque than Protestant.
Ellesmere. No, that is not fair. The Tudors were a coarse, fierce
race; but it will not do to lay the faults of their times upon them
only. Look at Elizabeth's ministers. They had about as much notion
of religious tolerance as they had of Professor Wheatstone's
telegraph. It was not a growth of that age.
Milverton. I do not know. You have Cardinal Pole and the Earl of
Essex, both tolerant men in the midst of bigots.
Ellesmere. Well, as you said, Milverton, we shall never push off,
if we once get aground on this subject.
Dunsford. I am in fault: so I will take upon myself to bring you
quite away from the Reformation. I have been thinking of that
comparison in the essay of the present with the past. Such
comparisons seem to me very useful, as they best enable us to
understand our own times. And, then, when we have ascertained the
state and tendency of our own age, we ought to strive to enrich it
with those qualities which are complementary to its own. Now with
all this toleration, which delights you so much, dear Milverton, is
it not an age rather deficient in caring about great matters?
Milverton. If you mean great speculative matters, I might agree
with you; but if you mean what I should call the greatest matters,
such as charity, humanity, and the like, I should venture to differ
with you, Dunsford.
Dunsford. I do not like to see the world indifferent to great
speculative matters. I then fear shallowness and earthiness.
Milverton. It is very difficult to say what the world is thinking
of now. It is certainly wrong to suppose that this is a shallow age
because it is not driven by one impulse. As civilisation advances,
it becomes more difficult to estimate what is going on, and we set
it all down as confusion. Now there is not one "great antique
heart," whose beatings we can count, but many impulses, many circles
of thought in which men are moving many objects. Men are not all in
the same state of progress, so cannot be moved in masses as of old.
At one time chivalry urged all men, then the Church, and the
phenomena were few, simple, and broad, or at least they seem so in
history.
Ellesmere. Very true; still I agree somewhat with Dunsford, that
men are not agitated as they used to be by the great speculative
questions. I account for it in this way, that the material world
has opened out before us, and we cannot but look at that, and must
play with it and work at it. I would say, too, that philosophy had
been found out, and there is something in that. Still, I think if
it were not for the interest now attaching to material things, great
intellectual questions, not exactly of the old kind, would arise and
agitate the world.
Milverton. There is one thing in my mind that may confirm your
view. I cannot but think that the enlarged view we have of the
universe must in some measure damp personal ambition. What is it to
be a King, Sheik, Tetrarch, or Emperor, over a bit of a little bit?
Macbeth's speech, "we'd jump the life to come," is a thing a man
with modern lights, however madly ambitious, would hardly utter.
Dunsford. Religious lights, Milverton.
Milverton. Of course not, if he had them; but I meant scientific
lights. Sway over our fellow-creatures, at any rate anything but
mental sway, has shrunk into less proportions.
Ellesmere. I have been looking over the essay. I think you may put
in somewhere--that that age would probably be the greatest in which
there was the least difference between great men and the people in
general--when the former were only neglected, not hunted down.
Milverton. Yes.
Ellesmere. You are rather lengthy here about the cruelties to be
found in history; but we are apt to forget these matters.
Milverton. They always press upon my mind.
Dunsford. And on mine. I do not like to read much of history for
that very reason. I get so sick at heart about it all.
Milverton. Ah, yes, history is a stupendous thing. To read it is
like looking at the stars; we turn away in awe and perplexity. Yet
there is some method running through the little affairs of man as
through the multitude of suns, seemingly to us as confused as routed
armies in full flight.
Dunsford. Some law of love.
Ellesmere. I am afraid it is not in the past alone that we should
be awestruck with horrors: we, who have a slave-trade still on
earth. But, to go back to the essay, I like what you say about the
theory of constructing the Christian character without geniality;
only you do not go far enough. You are afraid. People are for ever
talking, especially you philanthropical people, about making others
happy. I do not know any way so sure of making others happy as of
being so oneself, to begin with. I do not mean that people are to
be self-absorbed; but they are to drink in nature and life a little.
From a genial, wisely-developed man good things radiate; whereas you
must allow, Milverton, that benevolent people are very apt to be
one-sided and fussy, and not of the sweetest temper if others will
not be good and happy in their way.
Milverton. That is really not fair. Of course, acid, small-minded
people carry their narrow notions and their acidity into their
benevolence. Benevolence is no abstract perfection. Men will
express their benevolence according to their other gifts or want of
gifts. If it is strong, it overcomes other things in the character
which would be hindrances to it; but it must speak in the language
of the soul it is in.
Ellesmere. Come, let us go and see the pigs. I hear them grunting
over their dinners in the farmyard. I like to see creatures who can
be happy without a theory.
CHAPTER VI.
The next time that I came over to Worth-Ashton it was raining, and I
found my friends in the study.
"Well, Dunsford," said Ellesmere, "is it not comfortable to have our
sessions here for once, and to be looking out on a good solid
English wet day?"
Dunsford. Rather a fluid than a solid. But I agree with you in
thinking it is very comfortable here.
Ellesmere. I like to look upon the backs of books. First I think
how much of the owner's inner life and character is shown in his
books; then perhaps I wonder how he got such a book which seems so
remote from all that I know of him--
Milverton. I shall turn my books the wrong side upwards when you
come into the study.
Ellesmere. But what amuses me most is to see the odd way in which
books get together, especially in the library of a man who reads his
books and puts them up again wherever there is room. Now here is a
charming party: "A Treatise on the Steam-Engine" between "Locke on
Christianity" and Madame de Stael's "Corinne." I wonder what they
talk about at night when we are all asleep. Here is another happy
juxtaposition: old Clarendon next to a modern metaphysician whom he
would positively loathe. Here is Sadler next to Malthus, and
Horsley next to Priestley; but this sort of thing happens most in
the best regulated libraries. It is a charming reflection for
controversial writers, that their works will be put together on the
same shelves, often between the same covers; and that, in the minds
of educated men, the name of one writer will be sure to recall the
name of the other. So they go down to posterity as a brotherhood.
Milverton. To complete Ellesmere's theory, we may say that all
those injuries to books which we choose to throw upon some wretched
worm, are but the wounds from rival books.
Ellesmere. Certainly. But now let us proceed to polish up the
weapons of another of these spiteful creatures.
Dunsford. Yes. What is to be our essay to-day, Milverton?
Milverton. Fiction.
Ellesmere. Now, that is really unfortunate. Fiction is just the
subject to be discussed--no, not discussed, talked over--out of
doors on a hot day, all of us lying about in easy attitudes on the
grass, Dunsford with his gaiters forming a most picturesque and
prominent figure. But there is nothing complete in this life.
"Surgit amari aliquid:" and so we must listen to Fiction in arm-
chairs.
FICTION.
The influence of works of fiction is unbounded. Even the minds of
well-informed people are often more stored with characters from
acknowledged fiction than from history or biography, or the real
life around them. We dispute about these characters as if they were
realities. Their experience is our experience; we adopt their
feelings, and imitate their acts. And so there comes to be
something traditional even in the management of the passions.
Shakespeare's historical plays were the only history to the Duke of
Marlborough. Thousands of Greeks acted under the influence of what
Achilles or Ulysses did, in Homer. The poet sings of the deeds that
shall be. He imagines the past; he forms the future.
Yet how surpassingly interesting is real life when we get an insight
into it. Occasionally a great genius lifts up the veil of history,
and we see men who once really were alive, who did not always live
only in history; or, amidst the dreary page of battles, levies,
sieges, and the sleep-inducing weavings and unweavings of political
combination, we come, ourselves, across some spoken or written words
of the great actors of the time, and are then fascinated by the life
and reality of these things. Could you have the life of any man
really portrayed to you, sun-drawn as it were, its hopes, its fears,
its revolutions of opinion in each day, its most anxious wishes
attained, and then, perhaps, crystallising into its blackest
regrets--such a work would go far to contain all histories, and be
the greatest lesson of love, humility, and tolerance, that men had
ever read.
Now fiction does attempt something like the above. In history we
are cramped by impertinent facts that must, however, be set down; by
theories that must be answered; evidence that must be weighed; views
that must be taken. Our facts constantly break off just where we
should wish to examine them most closely. The writer of fiction
follows his characters into the recesses of their hearts. There are
no closed doors for him. His puppets have no secrets from their
master. He plagues you with no doubts, no half-views, no criticism.
Thus they thought, he tells you; thus they looked, thus they acted.
Then, with every opportunity for scenic arrangement (for though his
characters are confidential with him, he is only as confidential
with his reader as the interest of the story will allow), it is not
to be wondered at that the majority of readers should look upon
history as a task, but tales of fiction as a delight.
The greatest merit of fiction is the one so ably put forward by Sir
James Mackintosh, namely, that it creates and nourishes sympathy.
It extends this sympathy, too, in directions where, otherwise, we
hardly see when it would have come. But it may be objected that
this sympathy is indiscriminate, and that we are in danger of mixing
up virtue and vice, and blurring both, if we are led to sympathise
with all manner of wrong-doers. But, in the first place, virtue and
vice are so mixed in real life, that it is well to be somewhat
prepared for that fact; and, moreover, the sympathy is not wrongly
directed. Who has not felt intense sympathy for Macbeth? Yet could
he be alive again, with evil thoughts against "the gracious Duncan,"
and could he see into all that has been felt for him, would that be
an encouragement to murder? The intense pity of wise people for the
crimes of others, when rightly represented, is one of the strongest
antidotes against crime. We have taken the extreme case of sympathy
being directed towards bad men. How often has fiction made us
sympathise with obscure suffering and retiring greatness, with the
world-despised, and especially with those mixed characters in whom
we might otherwise see but one colour--with Shylock and with Hamlet,
with Jeanie Deans and with Claverhouse, with Sancho Panza as well as
with Don Quixote.
On the other hand, there is a danger of too much converse with
fiction leading us into dream-land, or rather into lubber-land. Of
course this "too much converse" implies large converse with inferior
writers. Such writers are too apt to make life as they would have
it for themselves. Sometimes, also, they must make it to suit
booksellers' rules. Having such power over their puppets they abuse
it. They can kill these puppets, change their natures suddenly,
reward or punish them so easily, that it is no wonder they are led
to play fantastic tricks with them. Now, if a sedulous reader of
the works of such writers should form his notions of real life from
them, he would occasionally meet with rude shocks when he
encountered the realities of that life.
For my own part, notwithstanding all the charms of life in swiftly-
written novels, I prefer real life. It is true that, in the former,
everything breaks off round, every little event tends to some great
thing, everybody one meets is to exercise some great influence for
good or ill upon one's fate. I take it for granted one fancies
oneself the hero. Then all one's fancy is paid in ready money, or
at least one can draw upon it at the end of the third volume. One
leaps to remote wealth and honour by hairbreadth chances; and one's
uncle in India always dies opportunely. To be sure the thought
occurs, that if this novel life could be turned into real life, one
might be the uncle in India and not the hero of the tale. But that
is a trifling matter, for at any rate one should carry on with
spirit somebody else's story. On the whole, however, as I said
before, I prefer real life, where nothing is tied up neatly, but all
in odds and ends; where the doctrine of compensation enters largely,
where we are often most blamed when we least deserve it, where there
is no third volume to make things straight, and where many an
Augustus marries many a Belinda, and, instead of being happy ever
afterwards, finds that there is a growth of trials and troubles for
each successive period of man's life.
In considering the subject of fiction, the responsibility of the
writers thereof is a matter worth pointing out. We see clearly
enough that historians are to be limited by facts and probabilities;
but we are apt to make a large allowance for the fancies of writers
of fiction. We must remember, however, that fiction is not
falsehood. If a writer puts abstract virtues into book-clothing,
and sends them upon stilts into the world, he is a bad writer: if
he classifies men, and attributes all virtue to one class and all
vice to another, he is a false writer. Then, again, if his ideal is
so poor, that he fancies man's welfare to consist in immediate
happiness; if he means to paint a great man and paints only a greedy
one, he is a mischievous writer and not the less so, although by
lamplight and amongst a juvenile audience, his coarse scene-painting
should be thought very grand. He may be true to his own fancy, but
he is false to Nature. A writer, of course, cannot get beyond his
own ideal: but at least he should see that he works up to it: and
if it is a poor one, he had better write histories of the utmost
concentration of dulness, than amuse us with unjust and untrue
imaginings.
-----
Ellesmere. I am glad you have kept to the obvious things about
fiction. It would have been a great nuisance to have had to follow
you through intricate theories about what fiction consists in, and
what are its limits, and so on. Then we should have got into
questions touching the laws of representation generally, and then
into art, of which, between ourselves, you know very little.
Dunsford. Talking of representation, what do you two, who have now
seen something of the world, think about representative government?
Ellesmere. Dunsford plumps down upon us sometimes with awful
questions: what do you think of all philosophy? or what is your
opinion of life in general? Could not you throw in a few small
questions of that kind, together with your representative one, and
we might try to answer them all at once. Dunsford is only laughing
at us, Milverton.
Milverton. No, I know what was in Dunsford's mind when he asked
that question. He has had his doubts and misgivings, when he has
been reading a six nights' debate (for the people in the country I
daresay do read those things), whether representative government is
the most complete device the human mind could suggest for getting at
wise rulers.
Ellesmere. It is a doubt which has crossed my mind.
Milverton. And mine; but the doubt, if it has ever been more than
mere petulance, has not had much practical weight with me. Look how
the business of the world is managed. There are a few people who
think out things, and a few who execute. The former are not to be
secured by any device. They are gifts. The latter may be well
chosen, have often been well chosen, under other forms of government
than the representative one. I believe that the favourites of kings
have been a superior race of men. Even a fool does not choose a
fool for a favourite. He knows better than that: he must have
something to lean against. But between the thinkers and the doers
(if, indeed, we ought to make such a distinction), WHAT A NUMBER OF
USEFUL LINKS THERE ARE IN A REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT on account of
the much larger number of people admitted into some share of
government. What general cultivation must come from that, and what
security! Of course, everything has its wrong side; and from this
number of people let in there comes declamation and claptrap and
mob-service, which is much the same thing as courtiership was in
other times. But then, to make the comparison a fair one, you must
take the wrong side of any other form of government that has been
devised.
Dunsford. Well, but so much power centring in the lower house of
Parliament, and the getting into Parliament being a thing which is
not very inviting to the kind of people one would most like to see
there, do you not think that the ablest men are kept away?
Milverton. Yes; but if you make your governing body a unit or a
ten, or any small number, how is this power, unless it is Argus-
eyed, and myriad-minded, and right-minded too, to choose the right
men any better than they are found now? The great danger, as it
appears to me, of representative government is lest it should slide
down from representative government to delegate government. In my
opinion, the welfare of England, in great measure, depends upon what
takes place at the hustings. If, in the majority of instances,
there were abject conduct there, electors and elected would be alike
debased; upright public men could not be expected to arise from such
beginnings; and thoughtful persons would begin to consider whether
some other form of government could not forthwith be made out.
Ellesmere. I have a supreme disgust for the man who at the hustings
has no opinion beyond or above the clamour round him. How such a
fellow would have kissed the ground before a Pompadour, or waited
for hours in a Buckingham's antechamber, only to catch the faintest
beam of reflected light from royalty.
But I declare we have been just like schoolboys talking about forms
of government and so on.
"For forms of government let fools contest,
That which is WORST administered is best,"--
that is, representative government.
Milverton. I should not like either of you to fancy, from what I
have been saying about representative government, that I do not see
the dangers and the evils of it. In fact, it is a frequent thought
with me of what importance the House of Lords is at present, and of
how much greater importance it might be made. If there were Peers
for life, and official members of the House of Commons, it would, I
think, meet most of your objections, Dunsford.
Dunsford. I suppose I am becoming a little rusty and disposed to
grumble, as I grow old; but there is a good deal in modern
government which seems to me very rude and absurd. There comes a
clamour, partly reasonable; power is deaf to it, overlooks it, says
there is no such thing; then great clamour; after a time, power
welcomes that, takes it to its arms, says that now it is loud it is
very wise, wishes it had always been clamour itself.
Ellesmere. How many acres do you farm, Dunsford? How spiteful you
are!
Dunsford. I am not thinking of Corn Laws alone, as you fancy,
Master Ellesmere. But to go to other things. I quite agree,
Milverton, with what you were saying just now about the business of
the world being carried on by few, and the thinking few being in the
nature of gifts to the world, not elicited by King or Kaiser.
Milverton. The mill-streams that turn the clappers of the world
arise in solitary places.
Ellesmere. Not a bad metaphor, but untrue. Aristotle, Bacon--
Milverton. Well, I believe it would be much wiser to say, that we
cannot lay down rules about the highest work; either when it is
done, where it will be done, or how it can be made to be done. It
is too immaterial for our measurement; for the highest part even of
the mere business of the world is in dealing with ideas. It is very
amusing to observe the misconceptions of men on these points. They
call for what is outward--can understand that, can praise it.
Fussiness and the forms of activity in all ages get great praise.
Imagine an active, bustling little praetor under Augustus, how he
probably pointed out Horace to his sons as a moony kind of man,
whose ways were much to be avoided, and told them it was a weakness
in Augustus to like such idle men about him instead of men of
business.
Ellesmere. Or fancy a bustling Glasgow merchant of Adam Smith's day
watching him. How little would the merchant have dreamt what a
number of vessels were to be floated away by the ink in the
Professor's inkstand; and what crashing of axes, and clearing of
forests in distant lands, the noise of his pen upon the paper
portended.
Milverton. It is not only the effect of the still-working man that
the busy man cannot anticipate, but neither can he comprehend the
present labour. If Horace had told my praetor that
"Abstinuit Venere et vino, sudavit et alsit,"
"What, to write a few lines!" would his praetorship have cried out.
"Why, I can live well and enjoy life; and I flatter myself no one in
Rome does more business."
Dunsford. All of it only goes to show how little we know of each
other, and how tolerant we ought to be of others' efforts.
Milverton. The trials that there must be every day without any
incident that even the most minute household chronicler could set
down: the labours without show or noise!
Ellesmere. The deep things that there are which, with unthinking
people, pass for shallow things, merely because they are clear as
well as deep. My fable of the other day, for instance--which
instead of producing any moral effect upon you two, only seemed to
make you both inclined to giggle.
Milverton. I am so glad you reminded me of that. I, too, fired
with a noble emulation, have invented a fable since we last met
which I want you to hear. I assure you I did not mean to laugh at
yours: it was only that it came rather unexpectedly upon me. You
are not exactly the person from whom one should expect fables.
Dunsford. Now for the fable.
Milverton. There was a gathering together of creatures hurtful and
terrible to man, to name their king. Blight, mildew, darkness,
mighty waves, fierce winds, Will-o'-the-wisps, and shadows of grim
objects, told fearfully their doings and preferred their claims,
none prevailing. But when evening came on, a thin mist curled up,
derisively, amidst the assemblage, and said, "I gather round a man
going to his own home over paths made by his daily footsteps; and he
becomes at once helpless and tame as a child. The lights meant to
assist him, then betray. You find him wandering, or need the aid of
other Terrors to subdue him. I am, alone, confusion to him." And
all the assemblage bowed before the mist, and made it king, and set
it on the brow of many a mountain, where, when it is not doing evil,
it may be often seen to this day.
Dunsford. Well, I like that fable: only I am not quite clear about
the meaning.
Ellesmere. You had no doubt about mine.
Dunsford. Is the mist calumny, Milverton?
Ellesmere. No, prejudice, I am sure.
Dunsford. Familiarity with the things around us, obscuring
knowledge?
Milverton. I would rather not explain. Each of you make your own
fable of it.
Dunsford. Well, if ever I make a fable, it shall be one of the old-
fashioned sort, with animals for the speakers, and a good easy
moral.
Ellesmere. Not a thing requiring the notes of seven German
metaphysicians. I must go and talk a little to my friends the
trees, and see if I can get any explanation from them. It is
turning out a beautiful day after all, notwithstanding my praise of
its solidity.
CHAPTER VII.
We met as usual at our old spot on the lawn for our next reading. I
forget what took place before reading, except that Ellesmere was
very jocose about our reading "Fiction" in-doors, and the following
"November Essay," as he called it, "under a jovial sun, and with the
power of getting up and walking away from each other to any extent."
ON THE ART OF LIVING WITH OTHERS.
The "Iliad" for war; the "Odyssey" for wandering; but where is the
great domestic epic? Yet it is but commonplace to say, that
passions may rage round a tea-table, which would not have misbecome
men dashing at one another in war-chariots; and evolutions of
patience and temper are performed at the fireside, worthy to be
compared with the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. Men have worshipped
some fantastic being for living alone in a wilderness; but social
martyrdoms place no saints upon the calendar.
We may blind ourselves to it if we like, but the hatreds and
disgusts that there are behind friendship, relationship, service,
and, indeed, proximity of all kinds, is one of the darkest spots
upon earth. The various relations of life, which bring people
together, cannot, as we know, be perfectly fulfilled except in a
state where there will, perhaps, be no occasion for any of them. It
is no harm, however, to endeavour to see whether there are any
methods which may make these relations in the least degree more
harmonious now.
In the first place, if people are to live happily together, they
must not fancy, because they are thrown together now, that all their
lives have been exactly similar up to the present time, that they
started exactly alike, and that they are to be for the future of the
same mind. A thorough conviction of the difference of men is the
great thing to be assured of in social knowledge: it is to life
what Newton's law is to astronomy. Sometimes men have a knowledge
of it with regard to the world in general: they do not expect the
outer world to agree with them in all points, but are vexed at not
being able to drive their own tastes and opinions into those they
live with. Diversities distress them. They will not see that there
are many forms of virtue and wisdom. Yet we might as well say, "Why
all these stars; why this difference; why not all one star?"
Many of the rules for people living together in peace follow from
the above. For instance, not to interfere unreasonably with others,
not to ridicule their tastes, not to question and re-question their
resolves, not to indulge in perpetual comment on their proceedings,
and to delight in their having other pursuits than ours, are all
based upon a thorough perception of the simple fact that they are
not we.
Another rule for living happily with others is to avoid having stock
subjects of disputation. It mostly happens, when people live much
together, that they come to have certain set topics, around which,
from frequent dispute, there is such a growth of angry words,
mortified vanity, and the like, that the original subject of
difference becomes a standing subject for quarrel; and there is a
tendency in all minor disputes to drift down to it.
Again, if people wish to live well together, they must not hold too
much to logic, and suppose that everything is to be settled by
sufficient reason. Dr. Johnson saw this clearly with regard to
married people, when he said, "Wretched would be the pair above all
names of wretchedness, who should be doomed to adjust by reason
every morning all the minute detail of a domestic day." But the
application should be much more general than he made it. There is
no time for such reasonings, and nothing that is worth them. And
when we recollect how two lawyers, or two politicians, can go on
contending, and that there is no end of one-sided reasoning on any
subject, we shall not be sure that such contention is the best mode
for arriving at truth. But certainly it is not the way to arrive at
good temper.
If you would be loved as a companion, avoid unnecessary criticism
upon those with whom you live. The number of people who have taken
out judges' patents for themselves is very large in any society.
Now it would be hard for a man to live with another who was always
criticising his actions, even if it were kindly and just criticism.
It would be like living between the glasses of a microscope. But
these self-elected judges, like their prototypes, are very apt to
have the persons they judge brought before them in the guise of
culprits.
One of the most provoking forms of the criticism above alluded to is
that which may be called criticism over the shoulder. "Had I been
consulted," "Had you listened to me," "But you always will," and
such short scraps of sentences may remind many of us of
dissertations which we have suffered and inflicted, and of which we
cannot call to mind any soothing effect.
Another rule is, not to let familiarity swallow up all courtesy.
Many of us have a habit of saying to those with whom we live such
things as we say about strangers behind their backs. There is no
place, however, where real politeness is of more value than where we
mostly think it would be superfluous. You may say more truth, or
rather speak out more plainly, to your associates, but not less
courteously than you do to strangers.
Again, we must not expect more from the society of our friends and
companions than it can give, and especially must not expect contrary
things. It is something arrogant to talk of travelling over other
minds (mind being, for what we know, infinite); but still we become
familiar with the upper views, tastes, and tempers of our
associates. And it is hardly in man to estimate justly what is
familiar to him. In travelling along at night, as Hazlitt says, we
catch a glimpse into cheerful-looking rooms with light blazing in
them, and we conclude involuntarily how happy the inmates must be.
Yet there is heaven and hell in those rooms--the same heaven and
hell that we have known in others.
There are two great classes of promoters of social happiness--
cheerful people, and people who have some reticence. The latter are
more secure benefits to society even than the former. They are non-
conductors of all the heats and animosities around them. To have
peace in a house, or a family, or any social circle, the members of
it must beware of passing on hasty and uncharitable speeches, which,
the whole of the context seldom being told, is often not conveying
but creating mischief. They must be very good people to avoid doing
this; for let Human Nature say what it will, it likes sometimes to
look on at a quarrel, and that not altogether from ill-nature, but
from a love of excitement, for the same reason that Charles II.
liked to attend the debates in the Lords, because they were "as good
as a play."
We come now to the consideration of temper, which might have been
expected to be treated first. But to cut off the means and causes
of bad temper is, perhaps, of as much importance as any direct
dealing with the temper itself. Besides, it is probable that in
small social circles there is more suffering from unkindness than
ill-temper. Anger is a thing that those who live under us suffer
more from than those who live with us. But all the forms of ill-
humour and sour-sensitiveness, which especially belong to equal
intimacy (though indeed, they are common to all), are best to be met
by impassiveness. When two sensitive persons are shut up together,
they go on vexing each other with a reproductive irritability. {93}
But sensitive and hard people get on well together. The supply of
temper is not altogether out of the usual laws of supply and demand.
Intimate friends and relations should be careful when they go out
into the world together, or admit others to their own circle, that
they do not make a bad use of the knowledge which they have gained
of each other by their intimacy. Nothing is more common than this,
and did it not mostly proceed from mere carelessness, it would be
superlatively ungenerous. You seldom need wait for the written life
of a man to hear about his weaknesses, or what are supposed to be
such, if you know his intimate friends, or meet him in company with
them.
Lastly, in conciliating those we live with, it is most surely done,
not by consulting their interests, nor by giving way to their
opinions, so much as by not offending their tastes. The most
refined part of us lies in this region of taste, which is perhaps a
result of our whole being rather than a part of our nature, and, at
any rate, is the region of our most subtle sympathies and
antipathies.
It may be said that if the great principles of Christianity were
attended to, all such rules, suggestions, and observations as the
above would be needless. True enough! Great principles are at the
bottom of all things; but to apply them to daily life, many little
rules, precautions, and insights are needed. Such things hold a
middle place between real life and principles, as form does between
matter and spirit, moulding the one and expressing the other.
-----
Ellesmere. Quite right that last part. Everybody must have known
really good people, with all Christian temper, but having so little
Christian prudence as to do a great deal of mischief in society.
Dunsford. There is one case, my dear Milverton, which I do not
think you have considered: the case where people live unhappily
together, not from any bad relations between them, but because they
do not agree about the treatment of others. A just person, for
instance, who would bear anything for himself or herself, must
remonstrate, at the hazard of any disagreement, at injustice to
others.
Milverton. Yes. That, however, is a case to be decided upon higher
considerations than those I have been treating of. A man must do
his duty in the way of preventing injustice, and take what comes of
it.
Ellesmere. For people to live happily together, the real secret is
that they should not live too much together. Of course, you cannot
say that; it would sound harsh, and cut short the essay altogether.
Again, you talk about tastes and "region of subtle sympathies," and
all that. I have observed that if people's vanity is pleased, they
live well enough together. Offended vanity is the great separator.
You hear a man (call him B) saying that he is really not himself
before So-and-so; tell him that So-and-so admires him very much and
is himself rather abashed before B, and B is straightway
comfortable, and they get on harmoniously together, and you hear no
more about subtle sympathies or antipathies.
Dunsford. What a low view you do take of things sometimes,
Ellesmere!
Milverton. I should not care how low it was, but it is not fair--at
least, it does not contain the whole matter. In the very case he
has put, there was a subtle embarrassment between B and So-and-so.
Well, now, let these people not merely meet occasionally, but be
obliged to live together, without any such explanation as Ellesmere
has imagined, and they will be very uncomfortable from causes that
you cannot impute to vanity. It takes away much of the savour of
life to live amongst those with whom one has not anything like one's
fair value. It may not be mortified vanity, but unsatisfied
sympathy, which causes this discomfort. B thinks that the other
does not know him; he feels that he has no place with the other.
When there is intense admiration on one side, there is hardly a care
in the mind of the admiring one as to what estimation he is held in.
But, in ordinary cases, some clearly defined respect and
acknowledgment of worth is needed on both sides. See how happy a
man is in any office or service who is acknowledged to do something
well. How comfortable he is with his superiors! He has his place.
It is not exactly a satisfaction of his vanity, but an
acknowledgment of his useful existence that contents him. I do not
mean to say that there are not innumerable claims for acknowledgment
of merit and service made by rampant vanity and egotism, which
claims cannot be satisfied, ought not to be satisfied, and which,
being unsatisfied, embitter people. But I think your word Vanity
will not explain all the feelings we have been talking about.
Ellesmere. Perhaps not.
Dunsford. Certainly not.
Ellesmere. Well, at any rate, you will admit that there is a class
of dreadfully humble people who make immense claims at the very time
that they are explaining that they have no claims. They say they
know they cannot be esteemed; they are well aware that they are not
wanted, and so on, all the while making it a sort of grievance and a
claim that they are not what they know themselves not to be;
whereas, if they did but fall back upon their humility, and keep
themselves quiet about their demerits, they would be strong then,
and in their place and happy, doing what they could.
Milverton. It must be confessed that these people do make their
humility somewhat obnoxious. Yet, after all, you allow that they
know their deficiencies, and they only say, "I know I have not much
to recommend me, but I wish to be loved, nevertheless."
Ellesmere. Ah, if they only said it a few times! Besides, there is
a little envy mixed up with the humility that I mean.
Dunsford. Travelling is a great trial of people's ability to live
together.
Ellesmere. Yes. Lavater says that you do not know a man until you
have divided an inheritance with him; but I think a long journey
with him will do.
Milverton. Well, and what is it in travelling that makes people
disagree? Not direct selfishness, but injudicious management;
stupid regrets, for instance, at things not being different from
what they are, or from what they might have been, if "the other
route" had been chosen; fellow-travellers punishing each other with
each other's tastes; getting stock subjects of disputation; laughing
unseasonably at each other's vexations and discomforts; and
endeavouring to settle everything by the force of sufficient reason,
instead of by some authorised will, or by tossing up. Thus, in the
short time of a journey, almost all modes and causes of human
disagreement are brought into action.
Ellesmere. My favourite one not being the least--over-much of each
other's company.
For my part, I think one of the greatest bores of companionship is,
not merely that people wish to fit tastes and notions on you just as
they might the first pair of ready-made shoes they meet with, a
process amusing enough to the bystander, but exquisitely
uncomfortable to the person being ready-shod: but that they bore
you with never-ending talk about their pursuits, even when they know
that you do not work in the same groove with them, and that they
cannot hope to make you do so.
Dunsford. Nobody can accuse you of that fault, Ellesmere: I never
heard you dilate much upon anything that interested you, though I
have known you have some pet subject, and to be working at it for
months. But this comes of your coldness of nature.
Ellesmere. Well, it might bear a more favourable construction. But
to go back to the essay. It only contemplates the fact of people
living together as equals, if we may so say; but in general, of
course, you must add some other relationship or connection than that
of merely being together.
Milverton. I had not overlooked that; but there are certain general
rules in the matter that may be applied to nearly all relationship,
just as I have taken that one from Johnson, applied by him to
married life, about not endeavouring to settle all things by
reasoning, and have given it a general application which, I believe,
it will bear.
Ellesmere. There is one thing that I should think must often make
women very unreasonable and unpleasant companions. Oh, you may both
hold up your hands and eyes, but I am not married, and can say what
I please. Of course you put on the proper official look of
astonishment; and I will duly report it. But I was going to say
that Chivalry, which has doubtless done a great deal of good, has
also done a great deal of harm. Women may talk the greatest
unreason out of doors, and nobody kindly informs them that it is
unreason. They do not talk much before clever men, and when they
do, their words are humoured and dandled as children's sayings are.
Now, I should fancy--mind, I do not want either of you to say that
my fancy is otherwise than quite unreasonable--I should fancy that
when women have to hear reason at home it must sound odd to them.
The truth is, you know, we cannot pet anything much without doing it
mischief. You cannot pet the intellect, any more than the will,
without injuring it. Well then, again, if you put people upon a
pedestal and do a great deal of worship around them, I cannot think
but the will in such cases must become rather corrupted, and that
lessons of obedience must fall rather harshly--
Dunsford. Why, you Mahometan, you Turk of a lawyer--would you do
away with all the high things of courtesy, tenderness for the
weaker, and--
Milverton. No, I see what he means; and there is something in it.
Many a woman is brought up in unreason and self-will from these
causes that he has given, as many a man from other causes; but there
is one great corrective that he has omitted, and which is, that all
forms, fashions, and outward things have a tendency to go down
before realities when they come hand to hand together. Knowledge
and judgment prevail. Governing is apt to fall to the right person
in private as in public affairs.
Ellesmere. Those who give way in public affairs, and let the men
who can do a thing do it, are so far wise that they know what is to
be done, mostly. But the very things I am arguing against are the
unreason and self-will, which being constantly pampered, do not
appreciate reason or just sway. Besides, is there not a force in
ill-humour and unreason to which you constantly see the wisest bend?
You will come round to my opinion some day. I do not want, though,
to convince you. It is no business of mine.
Milverton. Well, I may be wrong, but I think, when we come to
consider education, I can show you how the dangers you fear may be
greatly obviated, without Chivalry being obliged to put on a wig and
gown, and be wise.
Dunsford. Meanwhile, let us enjoy the delightful atmosphere of
courtesy, unreasonable sometimes, if you like, which saves many
people being put down with the best arguments in the most convincing
manner, or being weighed, estimated, and given way to, so as not to
spoil them.
Ellesmere. Do not tell, either of you, what I have been saying. I
shall always be poked up into some garret when I come to see you, if
you do.
Dunsford. I think the most curious thing, as regards people living
together, is the intense ignorance they sometimes are in of each
other. Many years ago, one or other of you said something of this
kind to me, and I have often thought of it since.
Milverton. People fulfil a relation towards each other, and they
only know each other in that relation, especially if it is badly
managed by the superior one; but any way the relationship involves
some ignorance. They perform orbits round each other, each
gyrating, too, upon his own axis, and there are parts of the
character of each which are never brought into view of the other.
Ellesmere. I should carry this notion of yours, Milverton, farther
than you do. There is a peculiar mental relation soon constituted
between associates of any kind, which confines and prevents complete
knowledge on both sides. Each man, in some measure therefore, knows
others only through himself. Tennyson makes Ulysses say,
"I am a part of all that I have seen;"
it might have run,
"I am a part of all that I have heard."
Dunsford. Ellesmere becoming metaphysical and transcendental!
Ellesmere. Well, well, we will leave these heights, and descend in
little drops of criticism. There are two or three things you might
have pointed out, Milverton. Perhaps you would say that they are
included in what you have said, but I think not. You talk of the
mischief of much comment on each other amongst those who live
together. You might have shown, I think, that in the case of near
friends and relations this comment also deepens into interference--
at least it partakes of that nature. Friends and relations should,
therefore, be especially careful to avoid needless comments on each
other. They do just the contrary. That is one of the reasons why
they often hate one another so much.
Dunsford. Ellesmere!
Ellesmere. Protest, if you like, my dear Dunsford.
Dissentient,
1. Because I wish it were not so.
2. Because I am sorry that it is.
(Signed) DUNSFORD.
Milverton. "Hate" is too strong a word, Ellesmere; what you say
would be true enough, if you would put "are not in sympathy with."
Ellesmere. "Have a quiet distaste for." That is the proper medium.
Now, to go to another matter. You have not put the case of over-
managing people, who are tremendous to live with.
Milverton. I have spoken about "interfering unreasonably with
others."
Ellesmere. That does not quite convey what I mean. It is when the
manager and the managee are both of the same mind as to the thing to
be done; but the former insists, and instructs, and suggests, and
foresees, till the other feels that all free agency for him is gone.
Milverton. It is a sad thing to consider how much of their
abilities people turn to tiresomeness. You see a man who would be
very agreeable if he were not so observant: another who would be
charming, if he were deaf and dumb: a third delightful, if he did
not vex all around him with superfluous criticism.
Ellesmere. A hit at me that last, I suspect. But I shall go on.
You have not, I think, made enough merit of independence in
companionship. If I were to put into an aphorism what I mean, I
should say, Those who depend wholly on companionship are the worst
companions; or thus: Those deserve companionship who can do without
it. There, Mr. Aphoriser General, what do you say to that?
Milverton. Very good, but--
Ellesmere. Of course a "but" to other people's aphorisms, as if
every aphorism had not buts innumerable. We critics, you know,
cannot abide criticism. We do all the criticism that is needed
ourselves. I wonder at the presumption sometimes of you wretched
authors. But to proceed. You have not said anything about the
mischief of superfluous condolence amongst people who live together.
I flatter myself that I could condole anybody out of all peace of
mind.
Milverton. All depends upon whether condolence goes with the grain,
or against the grain, of vanity. I know what you mean, however:
For instance, it is a very absurd thing to fret much over other
people's courses, not considering the knowledge and discipline that
there is in any course that a man may take. And it is still more
absurd to be constantly showing the people fretted over that you are
fretting over them. I think a good deal of what you call
superfluous condolence would come under the head of superfluous
criticism.
Ellesmere. Not altogether. In companionship, when an evil happens
to one of the circle, the others should simply attempt to share and
lighten it, not to expound it, or dilate on it, or make it the least
darker. The person afflicted generally apprehends all the blackness
sufficiently. Now, unjust abuse by the world is to me like the
howling of the wind at night when one is warm within. Bring any
draught of it into one's house though, and it is not so pleasant.
Dunsford. Talking of companionship, do not you think there is often
a peculiar feeling of home where age or infirmity is? The arm-chair
of the sick or the old is the centre of the house. They think,
perhaps, that they are unimportant; but all the household hopes and
cares flow to them and from them.
Milverton. I quite agree with you. What you have just depicted is
a beautiful sight, especially when, as you often see, the age or
infirmity is not in the least selfish or exacting.
Ellesmere. We have said a great deal about the companionship of
human beings; but, upon my word, we ought to have kept a few words
for our dog friends. Rollo has been lolling out his great tongue,
and looking wistfully from face to face, as we each began our talk.
A few minutes ago he was quite concerned, thinking I was angry with
you, when I would not let you "but" my aphorism. I am not sure
which of the three I should rather go out walking with now:
Dunsford, Rollo, Milverton. The middle one is the safest companion.
I am sure not to get out of humour with him. But I have no
objection to try the whole three: only I vote for much continuity
of silence, as we have had floods of discussion to-day.
Dunsford. Agreed!
Ellesmere. Come, Rollo, you may bark now, as you have been silent,
like a wise dog, all the morning.
CHAPTER VIII.
It was arranged, during our walk, that Ellesmere should come and
stay a day or two with me, and see the neighbouring cathedral, which
is nearer my house than Milverton's. The visit over, I brought him
back to Worth-Ashton. Milverton saw us coming, walked down the hill
to meet us, and after the usual greetings, began to talk to
Ellesmere.
Milverton. So you have been to see our cathedral. I say "our," for
when a cathedral is within ten miles of us, we feel a property in
it, and are ready to battle for its architectural merits.
Ellesmere. You know I am not a man to rave about cathedrals.
Milverton. I certainly do not expect you to do so. To me a
cathedral is mostly somewhat of a sad sight. You have Grecian
monuments, if anything so misplaced can be called Grecian, imbedded
against and cutting into Gothic pillars; the doors shut for the
greater part of the day; only a little bit of the building used:
beadledom predominant; the clink of money here and there; white-wash
in vigour; the singing indifferent; the sermons not indifferent but
bad; and some visitors from London forming, perhaps, the most
important part of the audience; in fact, the thing having become a
show. We look about, thinking when piety filled every corner, and
feel that the cathedral is too big for the Religion which is a
dried-up thing that rattles in this empty space.
Ellesmere. This is the boldest simile I have heard for a long time.
My theory about cathedrals is very different, I must confess.
Dunsford. Theory!
Ellesmere. Well, "theory" is not the word I ought to have used--
feeling then. My feeling is, how strong this creature was, this
worship, how beautiful, how alluring, how complete; but there was
something stronger--truth.
Milverton. And more beautiful?
Ellesmere. Yes, and far more beautiful.
Milverton. Doubtless, to the free spirits who brought truth
forward.
Ellesmere. You are only saying this, Milverton, to try what I will
say; but, despite of all sentimentalities, you sympathise with any
emancipation of the human mind, as I do, however much the meagreness
of Protestantism may be at times distasteful to you.
Milverton. I did not say I was anxious to go back. Certainly not.
But what says Dunsford? Let us sit down on his stile and hear what
he has to say.
Dunsford. I cannot talk to you about this subject. If I tell you
of all the merits (as they seem to me) of the Church of England, you
will both pick what I say to pieces, whereas if I leave you to fight
on, one or the other will avail himself of those arguments on which
our Church is based.
Milverton. Well, Dunsford, you are very candid, and would make a
complete diplomatist: truth-telling being now pronounced (rather
late in the day) the very acme of diplomacy. But do you not own
that our cathedrals are sadly misused?
Dunsford. Now, very likely, if more were made of them, you, and men
who think like you, would begin to cry out "superstition"; and would
instantly turn round and inveigh against the uses which you now,
perhaps, imagine for cathedrals.
Milverton. Well, one never can answer for oneself; but at any rate,
I do not see what is the meaning of building new churches in
neighbourhoods where there are already the noblest buildings
suitable for the same purposes. Is there a church religion, and is
there a cathedral religion?
Ellesmere. You cannot make the present fill the garb of the past,
Milverton, any more than you could make the past fill that of the
present. Now, as regards the very thing you are about to discuss
to-day, if it be the same you told us in our last walk--Education:
if you are only going to give us some institution for it, I daresay
it may be very good for to-day, or for this generation, but it will
have its sere and yellow leaf, and there will be a time when future
Milvertons, in sentimental mood, will moan over it, and wish they
had it and all that has grown up to take its place at the same time.
But all this is what I have often heard you say yourself in other
words.
Dunsford. This is very hard doctrine, and not quite sound, I think.
In getting the new gain, we always sacrifice something, and we
should look with some pious regard to what was good in the things
which are past. That good is generally one which, though it may not
be equal to the present, would make a most valuable supplement to
it.
Milverton. I would try and work in the old good thing with the new,
not as patchwork though, but making the new thing grow out in such a
way as to embrace the old advantage.
Ellesmere. Well, we must have the essay before we branch out into
our philosophy. Pleasure afterwards--I will not say what comes
first.
EDUCATION.
The word education is so large, that one may almost as well put
"world," or "the end and object of being," at the head of an essay.
It should, therefore, soon be declared what such a heading does
mean. The word education suggests chiefly to some minds what the
State can do for those whom they consider its young people--the
children of the poorer classes: to others it presents the idea of
all the training that can be got for money at schools and colleges,
and which can be fairly accomplished and shut in at the age of one-
and-twenty. This essay, however, will not be a treatise on
government education, or other school and college education, but
will only contain a few points in reference to the general subject,
which may escape more methodical and enlarged discussions.
In the first place, as regards government education, it must be kept
in mind that there is a danger of its being too interfering and
formal, of its overlying private enterprise, insisting upon too much
uniformity, and injuring local connections and regards. Education,
even in the poorest acceptance of the word, is a great thing: but
the harmonious intercourse of different ranks, if not a greater, is
a more difficult one; and we must not gain the former at any
considerable sacrifice of the latter.
There is another point connected with this branch of the subject
which requires, perhaps, to be noted. If government provision is
made in any case, might it not be combined with private payment in
other cases, or enter in the way of rewards, so as to do good
throughout each step of the social ladder? The lowest kind of
school education is a power, and it is desirable that the gradations
of this power should correspond to other influences which we know to
be good. For instance, a hard-working man saves something to
educate his children; if he can get a little better education for
them than other parents of his own rank for theirs, it is an
incentive and a reward to him, and the child's bringing up at home
is a thing which will correspond to this better education at school.
In this there are the elements at once of stability and progress.
These views may possibly seem too refined, but at any rate they
require consideration.
The next branch of the subject is the ordinary education of young
persons not of the poorest classes, with which the State has
hitherto had little or nothing to do. This may be considered under
four heads: religious, moral, intellectual, and physical education.
With regard to the first, there is not much that can be put into
rules about it. Parents and tutors will naturally be anxious to
impress those under their charge with the religious opinions which
they themselves hold. In doing this, however, they should not omit
to lay a foundation for charity towards people of other religious
opinions. For this purpose, it may be requisite to give a child a
notion that there are other creeds besides that in which it is
brought up itself. And especially, let it not suppose that all good
and wise people are of its church or chapel. However desirable it
may appear to the person teaching that there should be such a thing
as unity of religion, yet as the facts of the world are against his
wishes, and as this is the world which the child is to enter, it is
well that the child should in reasonable time be informed of these
facts. It may be said in reply that history sufficiently informs
children on these points. But the world of the young is the
domestic circle; all beyond is fabulous, unless brought home to them
by comment. The fact, therefore, of different opinions in religious
matters being held by good people should sometimes be dwelt upon,
instead of being shunned, if we would secure a ground-work of
tolerance in a child's mind.
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION.
In the intellectual part of education there is the absolute
knowledge to be acquired, and the ways of acquiring knowledge to be
gained. The latter of course form the most important branch. They
can, in some measure, be taught. Give children little to do, make
much of its being accurately done. This will give accuracy. Insist
upon speed in learning, with careful reference to the original
powers of the pupil. This speed gives the habit of concentrating
attention, one of the most valuable of mental habits. Then
cultivate logic. Logic is not the hard matter that is fancied. A
young person, especially after a little geometrical training, may
soon be taught to perceive where a fallacy exists, and whether an
argument is well sustained. It is not, however, sufficient for him
to be able to examine sharply and to pull to pieces. He must learn
how to build. This is done by method. The higher branches of
method cannot be taught at first. But you may begin by teaching
orderliness of mind. Collecting, classifying, contrasting and
weighing facts, are some of the processes by which method is taught.
When these four things, accuracy, attention, logic, and method are
attained, the intellect is fairly furnished with its instruments.
As regards the things to be taught, they will vary to some extent in
each age. The general course of education pursued at any particular
time may not be the wisest by any means, and greatness will overleap
it and neglect it, but the mass of men may go more safely and
comfortably, if not with the stream, at least by the side of it.
In the choice of studies too much deference should not be paid to
the bent of a young person's mind. Excellence in one or two things
which may have taken the fancy of a youth (or which really may suit
his genius) will ill compensate for a complete ignorance of those
branches of study which are very repugnant to him; and which are,
therefore, not likely to be learnt when he has freedom in the choice
of his studies.
Amongst the first things to be aimed at in the intellectual part of
education is variety of pursuit. A human being, like a tree, if it
is to attain to perfect symmetry, must have light and air given to
it from all quarters. This may be done without making men
superficial. Scientific method may be acquired without many
sciences being learnt. But one or two great branches of science
must be accurately known. So, too, the choice works of antiquity
may be thoroughly appreciated without extensive reacting. And
passing on from mere learning of any kind, a variety of pursuits,
even in what may be called accomplishments, is eminently
serviceable. Much may be said of the advantage of keeping a man to
a few pursuits, and of the great things done thereby in the making
of pins and needles. But in this matter we are not thinking of the
things that are to be done, but of the persons who are to do them.
Not wealth but men. A number of one-sided men may make a great
nation, though I much incline to doubt that; but such a nation will
not contain a number of great men.
The very advantage that flows from division of labour, and the
probable consequences that men's future bread-getting pursuits will
be more and more sub-divided, and therefore limited, make it the
more necessary that a man should begin life with a broad basis of
interest in many things which may cultivate his faculties and
develop his nature. This multifariousness of pursuit is needed also
in the education of the poor. Civilisation has made it easy for a
man to brutalise himself: how is this to be counteracted but by
endowing him with many pursuits which may distract him from vice?
It is not that kind of education which leads to no employment in
after-life that will do battle with vice. But when education
enlarges the field of life-long good pursuits, it becomes formidable
to the soul's worst enemies.
MORAL EDUCATION.
In considering moral education we must recollect that there are
three agents in this matter--the child himself, the influence of his
grown-up friends, and that of his contemporaries. All that his
grown-up friends tell him in the way of experience goes for very
little, except in palpable matters. They talk of abstractions which
he cannot comprehend: and the "Arabian Nights" is a truer world to
him than that they talk of. Still, though they cannot furnish
experience, they can give motives. Indeed, in their daily
intercourse with the child, they are always doing so. For instance,
truth, courage, and kindness are the great moral qualities to be
instilled. Take courage, in its highest form--moral courage. If a
child perpetually hears such phrases (and especially if they are
applied to his own conduct), as, "What people will say," "How they
will look at you," "What they will think," and the like, it tends to
destroy all just self-reliance in that child's mind, and to set up
instead an exaggerated notion of public opinion, the greatest tyrant
of these times. People can see this in such an obvious thing as
animal courage. They will avoid over-cautioning children against
physical dangers, knowing that the danger they talk much about will
become a bug-bear to the child which it may never get rid of. But a
similar peril lurks in the application of moral motives. Truth,
courage, and kindness are likely to be learnt, or not, by children,
according as they hear and receive encouragement in the direction of
these pre-eminent qualities. When attempt is made to frighten a
child with these worldly maxims, "What will be said of you?" "Are
you like such a one?" and such things, it is meant to draw him under
the rule of grown-up respectability. The last thing thought of by
the parent or teacher is, that such maxims will bring the child
under the especial guidance of the most unscrupulous of his
contemporaries. They will use ridicule and appeal to their little
world, which will be his world, and ask, "What will be said" of him.
There should be some stuff in him of his own to meet these awful
generalities.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION.
The physical education of children is a very simple matter, too
simple to be much attended to without great perseverance and
resolution on the part of those who care for the children. It
consists, as we all know, in good air, simple diet, sufficient
exercise, and judicious clothing. The first requisite is the most
important, and by far the most frequently neglected. This neglect
is not so unreasonable as it seems. It arises from pure ignorance.
If the mass of mankind knew what scientific men know about the
functions of the air, they would be as careful in getting a good
supply of it as of their other food. All the people that ever were
supposed to die of poison in the middle ages, and that means nearly
everybody whose death was worth speculating about, are not so many
as those who die poisoned by bad air in the course of any given
year. Even a slightly noxious thing, which is constant, affecting
us every moment of the day, must have considerable influence; but
the air we breathe is not a thing that slightly affects us, but one
of the most important elements of life. Moreover, children are the
most affected by impurity of air. We need not weary ourselves with
much statistics to ascertain this. One or two broad facts will
assure us of it. In Nottingham there is a district called Byron
Ward, "the densest and worst-conditioned quarter of the town." A
table has been made by Mr. William Hawksley of the mortality of
equal populations in different parts of the town:
"On comparing the diagram No. 1, relating to Park Ward, with the
diagram No. 7, relating to Byron Ward, it will be seen that the
heavier pressure of the causes of mortality occasions in the latter
district such an undue destruction of early life, that towards 100
deaths, however occurring, Byron Ward contributes fifty per cent.
more of children under five years of age than the Park Ward, for the
former sends sixty children to an early grave, while the latter
sends only forty." {116a}
Mr. Hawksley, the former witness alluded to, goes on to say--
"It has been long known that, with increase of years, up to that
period of life which has been denominated the second childhood, the
human constitution becomes gradually more resistful, and as it were
slowly hardened against the repeated attacks of those more acute
disorders, incident to an inferior degree of sanitary civilisation,
by which large portions of an infant population are continually
overcome and rapidly swept away. From the operation of these and
more extraneous influences of a disturbing character, an infant
population is almost entirely exempted; and on this account it is
considered that an infant population constitutes, as it were, a
delicate barometer, from which we may derive more early and more
certain indications of the presence and comparative force of local
causes of mortality and disease than can be obtained from the more
general methods of investigation usually pursued."
The above evidence is confirmed by Mr. Toynbee: --
"The disease of hydrocephalus, of water in the brain, so fatal to
children, I find associated with symptoms of scrofula, and arising
in abundance in these close rooms. I believe water in the brain, in
the class of patients whom I visit, to be almost wholly a scrofulous
affection." {116b}
But supposing people aware of the necessity for good air, and
therefore for ventilation, what is to be done? In houses in great
towns certainly, and I should say in all houses, some of the care
and expense that are devoted to ornamental work, which when done is
often a care, a trouble, an eyesore, and a mischief, should be given
to modes of ventilation, {117a} sound building, abundant access of
light, largeness of sleeping-rooms, and such useful things. Less
ormolu and tinsel of all kinds in the drawing-rooms, and sweeter air
in the regions above. Similar things may be done for and by the
poor. {117b} And it need hardly be said that those people who care
for their children, if of any enlightenment at all, will care
greatly for the sanitary condition of their neighbourhood generally.
At present you will find at many a rich man's door {117c} a nuisance
which is poisoning the atmosphere that his children are to breathe,
but which he could entirely cure for less than one day's ordinary
expenses.
I am afraid that ventilation is very little attended to in school-
rooms, either for rich or poor. Now it may be deliberately said
that there is very little learned in any school-room that can
compensate for the mischief of its being learned in the midst of
impure air. This is a thing which parents must look to, for the
grown-up people in the school-rooms, though suffering grievously
themselves from insufficient ventilation, will be unobservant of it.
{118} In every system of government inspection, ventilation must
occupy a prominent part.
The advantage of simple food for children is a thing that people
have found out. And as regards exercise, children happily make
great efforts to provide a sufficiency of this for themselves. In
clothing, the folly and conformity of grown-up people enter again.
Loving mothers, in various parts of the world, carry about at
present, I believe, and certainly in times past, carried their
little children strapped to a board, with nearly as little power of
motion as the board itself. Could we get the returns of stunted
miserable beings, or of deaths, from this cause, they would be
something portentous. Less in degree, but not less fatally absurd
in principle, are many of the strappings, bandages, and incipient
stays for children amongst us. They are all mischievous. Allow
children, at any rate, some freedom of limbs, some opportunity of
being graceful and healthy. Give Nature--dear motherly, much-abused
Nature--some chance of forming these little ones according to the
beneficent intentions of Providence, and not according to the
angular designs of ill-educated men and women.
I do not say that attention to the above matters of good air,
judicious clothing, and freedom from bandages, will absolutely
secure health, because these very things may have been so ill
attended to in the parents or in the parental stock as to have
introduced special maladies; but at least they are the most
important objects to be minded now; and, perhaps, the more to be
minded in the children of those who have suffered most from neglect
in these particulars.
When we are considering the health of children, it is imperative not
to omit the importance of keeping their brains fallow, as it were,
for several of the first years of their existence. The mischief
perpetrated by a contrary course in the shape of bad health, peevish
temper, and developed vanity, is incalculable. It would not be just
to attribute this altogether to the vanity of parents; they are
influenced by a natural fear lest their children should not have all
the advantages of other children. Some infant prodigy which is a
standard of mischief throughout its neighbourhood misleads them.
But parents may be assured that this early work is not by any means
all gain, even in the way of work. I suspect it is a loss; and that
children who begin their education late, as it would be called, will
rapidly overtake those who have been in harness long before them.
And what advantage can it be that the child knows more at six years
old than its compeers, especially if this is to be gained by a
sacrifice of health which may never be regained? There may be some
excuse for this early book-work in the case of those children who
are to live by manual labour. It is worth while, perhaps, to run
the risk of some physical injury to them, having only their early
years in which we can teach them book-knowledge. The chance of
mischief, too, will be less, being more likely to be counteracted by
their after-life. But for a child who has to be at book-work for
the first twenty-one years of its life, what folly it is to exhaust
in the least the mental energy, which, after all, is its surest
implement.
A similar course of argument applies to taking children early to
church, and to over-developing their minds in any way. There is no
knowing, moreover, the disgust and weariness that may grow up in the
minds of young persons from their attention being prematurely
claimed. We are now, however, looking at early study as a matter of
health; and we may certainly put it down in the same class with
impure air, stimulating diet, unnecessary bandages, and other
manifest physical disadvantages. Civilised life, as it advances,
does not seem to have so much repose in it, that we need begin early
in exciting the mind, for fear of the man being too lethargical
hereafter.
EDUCATION OF WOMEN.
It seems needful that something should be said specially about the
education of women. As regards their intellects they have been
unkindly treated--too much flattered, too little respected. They
are shut up in a world of conventionalities, and naturally believe
that to be the only world. The theory of their education seems to
be, that they should not be made companions to men, and some would
say, they certainly are not. These critics, however, in the high
imaginations they justly form of what women's society might be to
men, forget, perhaps, how excellent a thing it is already. Still
the criticism is not by any means wholly unjust. It appears rather
as if there had been a falling off since the olden times in the
education of women. A writer of modern days, arguing on the other
side, has said, that though we may talk of the Latin and Greek of
Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth, yet we are to consider that that
was the only learning of the time, and that many a modern lady may
be far better instructed, although she knew nothing of Latin and
Greek. Certain it is, she may know more facts, have read more
books: but this does not assure us that she may not be less
conversable, less companionable. Wherein does the cultivated and
thoughtful man differ from the common man? In the method of his
discourse. His questions upon a subject in which he is ignorant are
full of interest. His talk has a groundwork of reason. This
rationality must not be supposed to be dulness. Folly is dull.
Now, would women be less charming if they had more power, or at
least more appreciation, of reasoning? Their flatterers tell them
that their intuition is such that they need not man's slow processes
of thought. One would be very sorry to have a grave question of law
that concerned oneself decided upon by intuitive judges, or a
question of fact by intuitive jurymen. And so of all human things
that have to be canvassed, it is better, and more amusing too, that
they should be discussed according to reason. Moreover, the
exercise of the reasoning faculties gives much of the pleasure which
there is in solid acquirements; so that the obvious facts in life
and history will hardly be acquired by those who are not in the
habit of reasoning upon them. Hence it comes, that women have less
interest in great topics, and less knowledge of them, than they
might have.
Again, if either sex requires logical education, it is theirs. The
sharp practice of the world drives some logic into the most vague of
men; women are not so schooled.
But, supposing the deficiency we have been considering to be
admitted, how is it to be remedied? Women's education must be made
such as to ensure some accuracy and reasoning. This may be done
with any subject of education, and is done with men, whatever they
learn, because they are expected to produce and use their
requirements. But the greatest object of intellectual education,
the improvement of the mental powers, is as needful for one sex as
the other, and requires the same means in both sexes. The same
accuracy, attention, logic, and method that are attempted in the
education of men should be aimed at in that of women. This will
never be sufficiently attended to, as there are no immediate and
obvious fruits from it. And, therefore, as it is probable, from the
different career of women to that of men, that whatever women study
will not be studied with the same method and earnestness as it would
be by men, what a peculiar advantage there is in any study for them,
in which no proficiency whatever can be made without some use of
most of the qualities we desire for them. Geometry, for instance,
is such a study. It may appear pedantic, but I must confess that
Euclid seems to me a book for the young of both sexes. The severe
rules upon which the acquisition of the dead languages is built
would of course be a great means for attaining the logical habits in
question. But Latin and Greek is a deeper pedantry for women than
geometry, and much less desirable on many accounts: and geometry
would, perhaps, suffice to teach them what reasoning is. I daresay,
too, there are accomplishments which might be taught scientifically;
and so even the prejudice against the manifest study of science by
women be conciliated. But the appreciation of reasoning must be got
somehow.
It is a narrow view of things to suppose that a just cultivation of
women's mental powers will take them out of their sphere: it will
only enlarge that sphere. The most cultivated women perform their
common duties best. They see more in those duties. They can do
more. Lady Jane Grey would, I daresay, have bound up a wound, or
managed a household, with any unlearned woman of her day. Queen
Elizabeth did manage a kingdom: and we find no pedantry in her way
of doing it.
People who advocate a better training for women must not,
necessarily, be supposed to imagine that men and women are by
education to be made alike, and are intended to fulfil most of the
same offices. There seems reason for thinking that a boundary line
exists between the intellects of men and women which, perhaps,
cannot be passed over from either side. But, at any rate, taking
the whole nature of both sexes, and the inevitable circumstances
which cause them to differ, there must be such a difference between
men and women that the same intellectual training applied to both
would produce most dissimilar results. It has not, however, been
proposed in these pages to adopt the same training: and would have
been still less likely to be proposed if it could be shown that such
training would tend to make men and women unpleasantly similar to
each other. The utmost that has been thought of here is to make
more of women's faculties, not by any means to translate them into
men's--if such a thing were possible, which, we may venture to say,
is not. There are some things that are good for all trees--light,
air, room--but no one expects by affording some similar advantages
of this kind to an oak and a beech, to find them assimilate, though
by such means the best of each may be produced.
Moreover, it should be recollected that the purpose of education is
not always to foster natural gifts, but sometimes to bring out
faculties that might otherwise remain dormant; and especially so far
as to make the persons educated cognisant of excellence in those
faculties in others. A certain tact and refinement belong to women,
in which they have little to learn from the first: men, too, who
attain some portion of these qualities, are greatly the better for
them, and I should imagine not less acceptable on that account to
women. So, on the other side, there may be an intellectual
cultivation for women which may seem a little against the grain,
which would not, however, injure any of their peculiar gifts--would,
in fact, carry those gifts to the highest, and would increase
withal, both to men and women, the pleasure of each other's society.
There is a branch of general education which is not thought at all
necessary for women; as regards which, indeed, it is well if they
are not brought up to cultivate the opposite. Women are not taught
to be courageous. Indeed, to some persons courage may seem as
unnecessary for women as Latin and Greek. Yet there are few things
that would tend to make women happier in themselves, and more
acceptable to those with whom they live, than courage. There are
many women of the present day, sensible women in other things, whose
panic-terrors are a frequent source of discomfort to themselves and
those around them. Now, it is a great mistake to imagine that
harshness must go with courage; and that the bloom of gentleness and
sympathy must all be rubbed off by that vigour of mind which gives
presence of mind, enables a person to be useful in peril, and makes
the desire to assist overcome that sickliness of sensibility which
can only contemplate distress and difficulty. So far from courage
being unfeminine, there is a peculiar grace and dignity in those
beings who have little active power of attack or defence, passing
through danger with a moral courage which is equal to that of the
strongest. We see this in great things. We perfectly appreciate
the sweet and noble dignity of an Anne Bullen, a Mary Queen of
Scots, or a Marie Antoinette. We see that it is grand for these
delicately-bred, high-nurtured, helpless personages to meet Death
with a silence and a confidence like his own. But there would be a
similar dignity in women's bearing small terrors with fortitude.
There is no beauty in fear. It is a mean, ugly, dishevelled
creature. No statue can be made of it that a woman would like to
see herself like.
Women are pre-eminent in steady endurance of tiresome suffering:
they need not be far behind men in a becoming courage to meet that
which is sudden and sharp. The dangers and the troubles, too, which
we may venture to say they now start at unreasonably, are many of
them mere creatures of the imagination--such as, in their way,
disturb high-mettled animals brought up to see too little, and
therefore frightened at any leaf blown across the road.
We may be quite sure that, without losing any of the most delicate
and refined of feminine graces, women may be taught not to give way
to unreasonable fears, which should belong no more to the fragile
than to the robust.
There is no doubt that courage may in some measure be taught. We
agree that the lower kinds of courage are matter of habit, therefore
of teaching: and the same thing holds good to some extent of all
courage. Courage is as contagious as fear. The saying is, that the
brave are the sons and daughters of the brave; but we might as truly
say that they must be brought up by the brave. The great novelist,
when he wants a coward descended from a valorous race, does well to
take him from his clan and bring him up in an unwarlike home. {126}
Indeed, the heroic example of other days is in great part the source
of courage of each generation; and men walk up composedly to the
most perilous enterprises, beckoned onwards by the shades of the
brave that were. In civil courage, moral courage, or courage shown
in the minute circumstances of everyday life, the same law is true.
Courage may be taught by precept, enforced by example, and is good
to be taught to men, women, and children.
EDUCATION TO HAPPINESS.
It is a curious phenomenon in human affairs, that some of those
matters in which education is most potent should have been amongst
the least thought of as branches of it. What you teach a boy of
Latin and Greek may be good; but these things are with him but a
little time of each day in his after-life. What you teach him of
direct moral precepts may be very good seed: it may grow up,
especially if it have sufficient moisture from experience; but then,
again, a man is, happily, not doing obvious right or wrong all day
long. What you teach him of any bread-getting art may be of some
import to him, as to the quantity and quality of bread he will get;
but he is not always with his art. With himself he is always. How
important, then, it is, whether you have given him a happy or a
morbid turn of mind; whether the current of his life is a clear
wholesome stream, or bitter as Marah. The education to happiness is
a possible thing--not to a happiness supposed to rest upon
enjoyments of any kind, but to one built upon content and
resignation. This is the best part of philosophy. This enters into
the "wisdom" spoken of in the Scriptures. Now it can be taught.
The converse is taught every day and all day long.
To take an example. A sensitive disposition may descend to a child;
but it is also very commonly increased, and often created.
Captiousness, sensitiveness, and a Martha-like care for the things
of this world, are often the direct fruits of education. All these
faults of the character, and they are amongst the greatest, may be
summed up in a disproportionate care for little things. This is
rather a growing evil. The painful neatness and exactness of modern
life foster it. Long peace favours it. Trifles become more
important, great evils being kept away. And so, the tide of small
wishes and requirements gains upon us fully as fast as we can get
out of its way by our improved means of satisfying them. Now the
unwholesome concern that many parents and governors manifest as to
small things must have a great influence on the governed. You hear
a child reprimanded about a point of dress, or some trivial thing,
as if it had committed a treachery. The criticisms, too, which it
hears upon others are often of the same kind. Small omissions,
small commissions, false shame, little stumbling-blocks of offence,
trifling grievances of the kind that Dr. Johnson, who had known
hunger, stormed at Mrs. Thrale for talking about, are made much of;
general dissatisfaction is expressed that things are not complete,
and that everything in life is not turned out as neat as a Long-Acre
carriage; commands are expected to be fulfilled by agents, upon very
rapid and incomplete orders, exactly to the mind of the person
ordering;--these ways, to which children are very attentive, teach
them in their turn to be querulous, sensitive, and full of small
cares and wishes. And when you have made a child like this, can you
make a world for him that will satisfy him? Tax your civilisation
to the uttermost: a punctilious, tiresome disposition expects more.
Indeed, Nature, with her vague and flowing ways, cannot at all fit
in with a right-angled person. Besides, there are other precise,
angular creatures, and these sharp-edged persons wound each other
terribly. Of all the things which you can teach people, after
teaching them to trust in God, the most important is, to put out of
their hearts any expectation of perfection, according to their
notions, in this world. This expectation is at the bottom of a
great deal of the worldliness we hear so much reprehended, and
necessarily gives to little things a most irrational importance.
Observe the effect of this disproportionate care for little things
in the disputes of men. A man who does so care, has a garment
embroidered with hooks which catch at everything that passes by. He
finds many more causes of offence than other men; and each offence
is a more bitter thing to him than to others. He does not expect to
be offended. Poor man! He goes through life wondering that he is
the subject of general attack, and that the world is so quarrelsome.
The result of a bad education in developing undue care for trifles
may be seen in its effect on domestic government and government in
general. If those in power have this fault, they will make the
persons under them miserable by petty, constant blame; or they will
make them indifferent to all blame. If this fault is in the
governed, they will captiously object to all the ways and plans of
their superiors, not knowing the difficulty of doing anything; they
will expect miracles of attention, justice, and temper, which the
rough-hewed ways of men do not admit of; and they will repine and
tease the life out of those in authority. Sometimes both superiors
and inferiors, governors and governed, have this fault. This must
often happen in a family, and is a fearful punishment to the elders
of it. Scarcely any goodness of disposition, and what are called
great qualities, can make such difficult materials work well
together.
But I end with somewhat of the same argument as I began with,
namely, that as a man lives more with himself than with art,
science, or even with his fellows, a wise teacher, having before him
the intent to make a happy-minded man of his pupil, will try to lay
a groundwork of divine contentment in him. If he cannot make him
easily pleased, he will at least try and prevent him from being
easily disconcerted. Why, even the self-conceit that makes people
indifferent to small things, wrapping them in an atmosphere of self-
satisfaction, is welcome in a man compared to that querulousness
which makes him an enemy to all around. But most commendable is
that easiness of mind which is easy because it is tolerant, because
it does not look to have everything its own way, because it expects
anything but smooth usage in its course here, because it has
resolved to manufacture as few miseries out of small evils as can
be.
Most of us know what it is to vex our minds because we cannot recall
some name or trivial thing which has escaped our memory for the
moment. But then we think how foolish this is, what little concern
it is to us. We are right in that; yet any defect of memory is a
great concern compared to many of the trifling niceties, comforts,
offences, and rectangularities which, perhaps, we do not think it an
ignoble use of heart and time to waste ourselves upon. It would be
well enough to entertain the rabble of small troubles and offences,
if we could lay them aside with the delightful facility of children,
who, after an agony of tears, are soon found laughing or asleep.
But the chagrin and vexation of grown-up people are grown-up too;
and, however childish in their origin, are not to be laughed or
danced or slept away in childlike simple-heartedness.
We must not imagine that too much stress can well be laid upon the
importance of an education to contentment, for it comes under the
head of those things which are not adjuncts or acquisitions for a
man, but which form the texture of his being. What a man has learnt
is of importance; but what he is, what he can do, what he will
become, are more significant things. Finally, it may be remarked,
that, to make education a great work, we must have the educators
great; that book-learning is mainly good as it gives us a chance of
coming into the company of greater and better minds than the average
of men around us; and that individual greatness and goodness are the
things to be aimed at rather than the successful cultivation of
those talents which go to form some eminent membership of society.
Each man is a drama in himself--has to play all the parts in it; is
to be king and rebel, successful and vanquished, free and slave; and
needs a bringing-up fit for the universal creature that he is.
-----
Ellesmere. You have been unexpectedly merciful to us. The moment I
heard the head of the essay given out, there flitted before my
frightened mind volumes of reports, Battersea schools, Bell,
Wilderspin, normal farms, National Society, British Schools,
interminable questions about how religion might be separated
altogether from secular education, or so much religion taught as all
religious sects could agree in. These are all very good things and
people to discuss, I daresay; but, to tell the truth, the whole
subject sits heavy on my soul. I meet a man of inexhaustible
dulness, and he talks to me for three hours about some great
subject--this very one of education, for instance--till I sit
entranced by stupidity, thinking the while, "And this is what we are
to become by education--to be like you." Then I see a man like D---
, a judicious, reasonable, conversable being, knowing how to be
silent too--a man to go through a campaign with--and I find he
cannot read or write.
Milverton. This sort of contrast is just the thing to strike you,
Ellesmere: and yet you know as well as any of us that to bring
forward such contrasts by way of depreciating education would be
most unreasonable. There are three things that go to make a man--
the education that most people mean by education; then the education
that goes deeper, the education of the soul; and, thirdly, a man's
gifts of Nature. I agree with all you say about D---; he never says
a foolish thing, and does a great many judicious ones. But look
what a clever face he has. There are gifts of Nature for you.
Then, again, although he cannot read or write, he may have been most
judiciously brought up in other respects. He may have had two,
therefore, out of the three elements of education. What such
instances would show, I believe, if narrowly looked into, is the
immense importance of the education of heart and temper.
I feel with you in some measure about the dulness of the subject of
education. But then it extends to all things of the institution
kind. Men must have a great deal of pedantry, routine, and folly of
all sorts, in any large matter they undertake. I had had this
feeling for a long time (you know the way in which you have a thing
in your mind, although you have never said it out exactly even to
yourself)--well, I came upon a passage of Emerson's which I will try
to quote, and then I knew what it was that I had felt.
"We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle, and
have things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of
society are odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is
unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper societies,
are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There
are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim,
but do not arrive. Why should all virtue work in one and the same
way?" . . . "And why drag this dead weight of a Sunday-school over
the whole of Christendom? It is natural and beautiful that
childhood should inquire, and maturity should teach; but it is time
enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the
young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to
ask them questions for an hour against their will."
Now, without agreeing with him in all points, we may sympathise with
him.
Ellesmere. I agree with him.
Dunsford. I knew you would. You love an extreme.
Milverton. But look now. It is well to say, "It is natural and
beautiful that the young should ask and the old should teach"; but
then the old should be capable of teaching, which is not the case we
have to deal with. Institutions are often only to meet individual
failings. Let there be more instructed elders, and the "dead
weight" of Sunday-schools would be less needed.
I think the result of our thoughts would be, that there should be as
much life, joy, and Nature put into teaching as can be; but I, for
one, am not prepared to say that the most mechanical process is not
better than none.
Ellesmere. Well, you have now shut up the subject, according to
your fashion, in a rounded sentence; and you think after that there
is nothing more to be said. But I say it goes to my heart--
Dunsford. What is that?
Ellesmere. To my heart to see the unmerciful quantity of
instruction that little children go through on a Sunday. I suppose
I am a very wicked man; but I know how wearied I should have been,
at any time of my life, if so much virtuous precept and good
doctrine had been poured into me.
Milverton. Well, I will not fight certainly for anything that is to
make Sunday a wearisome day for children. Indeed, what I meant by
putting more joy and life into teaching was, that in such a thing as
this Sunday-schooling, for instance, a judicious man, far from being
anxious to get a certain quantity of routine done about it, would do
with the least--would endeavour to connect it with something
interesting--would, in a word, love children, and not Sunday-
schools.
Ellesmere. Ah, we will have no more about Sunday-schools. I know
we all agree in reality, although Dunsford has been looking very
grave and has not said a word. I wanted to tell you that I think
you are quite right, Milverton, in saying a good deal about
multifariousness of pursuit. You see a wretch of a pedant who knows
all about tetrameters or statutes of uses, but who, as you hinted an
essay or two ago, can hardly answer his child a question as they
walk about the garden together. The man has never given a good
thought or look to Nature. Well then, again, what a stupid thing it
is that we are not all taught music. Why learn the language of many
portions of mankind, and leave the universal language of the
feelings, as you would call it, unlearnt?
Milverton. I quite agree with you; but I thought you always set
your face, or rather your ears, against music.
Dunsford. So did I.
Ellesmere. I should like to know all about it. It is not to my
mind that a cultivated man should be quite thrown out by any topic
of conversation, or that there should be any form of human endeavour
or accomplishment which he has no conception of.
Dunsford. I liked what you said, Milverton, about the philosophy of
making light of many things, and the way of looking at life that may
thus be given to those we educate. I rather doubted at first,
though, whether you were not going to assign too much power to
education in the modification of temper. But, certainly, the mode
of looking at the daily events of life, little or great, and the
consequent habits of captiousness or magnanimity, are just the
matters which the young especially imitate their elders in.
Milverton. You see, the very worst kind of tempers are established
upon the fretting care for trifles that I want to make war upon in
the essay. A man is choleric. Well, it is a very bad thing; it
tends to frighten those about him into falseness. He has outrageous
bursts of temper. He is humble for days afterwards. His dependants
rather like him after all. They know that "his bark is worse than
his bite." Then there is your gloomy man, often a man who punishes
himself most--perhaps a large-hearted, humorous, but sad man, at the
same time liveable with. He does not care for trifles. But it is
your acid-sensitive (I must join words like Mirabeau's Grandison-
Cromwell, to get what I mean), and your cold, querulous people that
need to have angels to live with them. Now education has often had
a great deal to do with the making of these choice tempers. They
are somewhat artificial productions. And they are the worst.
Dunsford. You know a saying attributed to the Bishop of --- about
temper. No? Somebody, I suppose, was excusing something on the
score of temper, to which the Bishop replied, "Temper is nine-tenths
of Christianity."
Milverton. There is an appearance we see in Nature, not far from
here, by the way, that has often put me in mind of the effect of
temper upon men. It is in the lowlands near the sea, where, when
the tide is not up (the man out of temper), there is a slimy,
patchy, diseased-looking surface of mud and sick seaweed. You pass
by in a few hours, there is a beautiful lake, water up to the green
grass (the man in temper again), and the whole landscape brilliant
with reflected light.
Ellesmere. And to complete the likeness, the good temper and the
full tide last about the same time--with some men at least. It is
so like you, Milverton, to have that simile in your mind. There is
nothing you see in Nature, but you must instantly find a parallel
for it in man. Sermons in stones you will not see, else I am sure
you might. Here is a good hard flint for you to see your next essay
in.
Milverton. It will do very well, as my next will be on the subject
of population.
Ellesmere. What day are we to have it? I think I have a particular
engagement for that day.
Milverton. I must come upon you unawares.
Ellesmere. After the essay you certainly might. Let us decamp now
and do something great in the way of education--teach Rollo, though
he is but a short-haired dog, to go into the water. That will be a
feat.
CHAPTER IX.
Ellesmere succeeded in persuading Rollo to go into the water, which
proved more, he said, than the whole of Milverton's essay, how much
might be done by judicious education. Before leaving my friends, I
promised to come over again to Worth-Ashton in a day or two, to hear
another essay. I came early and found them reading their letters.
"You remember Annesleigh at college," said Milverton, "do you not,
Dunsford?"
Dunsford. Yes.
Milverton. Here is a long letter from him. He is evidently vexed
at the newspaper articles about his conduct in a matter of ----, and
he writes to tell me that he is totally misrepresented.
Dunsford. Why does he not explain this publicly?
Milverton. Yes, you naturally think so at first, but such a mode of
proceeding would never do for a man in office, and rarely, perhaps,
for any man. At least, so the most judicious people seem to think.
I have known a man in office bear patiently, without attempting any
answer, a serious charge which a few lines would have entirely
answered, indeed, turned the other way. But then he thought, I
imagine, that if you once begin answering, there is no end to it,
and also, which is more important, that the public journals were not
a tribunal which he was called to appear before. He had his
official superiors.
Dunsford. It should be widely known and acknowledged then, that
silence does not give consent in these cases.
Milverton. It is known, though not, perhaps, sufficiently.
Dunsford. What a fearful power this anonymous journalism is!
Milverton. There is a great deal certainly that is mischievous in
it; but take it altogether, it is a wonderful product of
civilisation--morally too. Even as regards those qualities which
would in general, to use a phrase of Bacon's, "be noted as
deficients" in the press, in courtesy and forbearance, for example,
it makes a much better figure than might have been expected; as any
one would testify, I suspect, who had observed, or himself
experienced, the temptations incident to writing on short notice,
without much opportunity of after-thought or correction, upon
subjects about which he had already expressed an opinion.
Dunsford. Is the anonymousness absolutely necessary?
Milverton. I have often thought whether it is. If the
anonymousness were taken away, the press would lose much of its
power; but then, why should it not lose a portion of its power, if
that portion is only built upon some delusion?
Ellesmere. It is a question of expediency. As government of all
kinds becomes better managed, there is less necessity for protection
for the press. It must be recollected, however, that this
anonymousness (to coin a word) may not only be useful to protect us
from any abuse of power, but that at least it takes away that
temptation to discuss things in an insufficient manner which arises
from personal fear of giving offence. Then, again, there is an
advantage in considering arguments without reference to persons. If
well-known authors wrote for the press and gave their signatures, we
should often pass by the arguments unfairly, saying, "Oh, it is only
so-and-so: that is the way he always looks at things," without
seeing whether it is the right way for the occasion in question.
Milverton. But take the other side, Ellesmere. What national
dislikes are fostered by newspaper articles, and--
Ellesmere. Articles in reviews and by books.
Milverton. Yes, but somehow or other, people imagine that
newspapers speak the opinion of a much greater number of people--
Ellesmere. Do not let us talk any more about it. We may become
wise enough and well-managed enough to do without this
anonymousness: we may not. How it would astound an ardent Whig or
Radical of the last generation if we could hear such a sentiment as
this--as a toast we will say--"The Press: and may we become so
civilised as to be able to take away some of its liberty."
Milverton. It may be put another way: "May it become so civilised
that we shall not want to take away any of its liberty." But I see
you are tired of this subject. Shall we go on the lawn and have our
essay?
We assented, and Milverton read the following: --
UNREASONABLE CLAIMS IN SOCIAL AFFECTIONS AND RELATIONS.
We are all apt to magnify the importance of whatever we are thinking
about, which is not to be wondered at; for everything human has an
outlet into infinity, which we come to perceive on considering it.
But with a knowledge of this tendency, I still venture to say that,
of all that concerns mankind, this subject has, perhaps, been the
least treated of in regard to its significance. For once that
unreasonable expectations of gratitude have been reproved,
ingratitude has been denounced a thousand times; and the same may be
said of inconstancy, unkindness in friendship, neglected merit and
the like.
To begin with ingratitude. Human beings seldom have the demands
upon each other which they imagine; and for what they have done they
frequently ask an impossible return. Moreover, when people really
have done others a service, the persons benefited often do not
understand it. Could they have understood it, the benefactor,
perhaps, would not have had to perform it. You cannot expect
gratitude from them in proportion to your enlightenment. Then,
again, where the service is a palpable one, thoroughly understood,
we often require that the gratitude for it should bear down all the
rest of the man's character. The dog is the very emblem of
faithfulness; yet I believe it is found that he will sometimes like
the person who takes him out and amuses him more than the person who
feeds him. So, amongst bipeds, the most solid service must
sometimes give way to the claims of congeniality. Human creatures
are, happily, not to be swayed by self-interest alone: they are
many-sided creatures; there are numberless modes of attaching their
affections. Not only like likes like, but unlike likes unlike.
To give an instance which must often occur. Two persons, both of
feeble will, act together: one as superior, the other as inferior.
The superior is very kind; the inferior is grateful. Circumstances
occur to break this relation. The inferior comes under a superior
of strong will, who is not, however, as tolerant and patient as his
predecessor. But this second superior soon acquires unbounded
influence over the inferior: if the first one looks on, he may
wonder at the alacrity and affection of his former subordinate
towards the new man, and talk much about ingratitude. But the
inferior has now found somebody to lean upon and to reverence. And
he cannot deny his nature and be otherwise than he is. In this case
it does not look like ingratitude, except perhaps to the complaining
person. But there are doubtless numerous instances in which, if we
saw all the facts clearly, we should no more confirm the charge of
ingratitude than we do here.
Then, again, we seldom make sufficient allowance for the burden
which there is in obligation, at least to all but great and good
minds. There are some people who can receive as heartily as they
would give; but the obligation of an ordinary person to an ordinary
person is more apt to be brought to mind as a present sore than as a
past delight.
Amongst the unreasonable views of the affections, the most absurd
one has been the fancy that love entirely depends upon the will;
still more that the love of others for us is to be guided by the
inducements which seem probable to us. We have served them; we
think only of them; we are their lovers, or fathers, or brothers:
we deserve and require to be loved and to have the love proved to
us. But love is not like property: it has neither duties nor
rights. You argue for it in vain; and there is no one who can give
it you. It is not his or hers to give. Millions of bribes and
infinite arguments cannot prevail. For it is not a substance, but a
relation. There is no royal road. We are loved as we are lovable
to the person loving. It is no answer to say that in some cases the
love is based on no reality, but is solely in the imagination--that
is, that we are loved not for what we are, but for what we are
fancied to be. That will not bring it any more into the dominions
of logic; and love still remains the same untamable creature, deaf
to advocacy, blind to other people's idea of merit, and not a
substance to be weighed or numbered at all.
Then, as to the complaints about broken friendship. Friendship is
often outgrown; and his former child's clothes will no more fit a
man than some of his former friendships. Often a breach of
friendship is supposed to occur when there is nothing of the kind.
People see one another seldom; their courses in life are different;
they meet, and their intercourse is constrained. They fancy that
their friendship is mightily cooled. But imagine the dearest
friends, one coming home after a long sojourn, the other going out
to new lands: the ships that carry these meet: the friends talk
together in a confused way not relevant at all to their friendship,
and, if not well assured of their mutual regard, might naturally
fancy that it was much abated. Something like this occurs daily in
the stream of the world. Then, too, unless people are very
unreasonable, they cannot expect that their friends will pass into
new systems of thought and action without new ties of all kinds
being created, and some modification of the old ones taking place.
When we are talking of exorbitant claims made for the regard of
others, we must not omit those of what is called neglected merit. A
man feels that he has abilities or talents of a particular kind,
that he has shown them, and still he is a neglected man. I am far
from saying that merit is sufficiently looked out for: but a man
may take the sting out of any neglect of his merits by thinking that
at least it does not arise from malice prepense, as he almost
imagines in his anger. Neither the public, nor individuals, have
the time, or will, resolutely to neglect anybody. What pleases us,
we admire and further: if a man in any profession, calling, or art,
does things which are beyond us, we are as guiltless of neglecting
him as the Caffres are of neglecting the differential calculus.
Milton sells his "Paradise Lost" for ten pounds; there is no record
of Shakespeare dining much with Queen Elizabeth. And it is Utopian
to imagine that statues will be set up to right men in their day.
The same arguments which applied to the complaints of ingratitude,
apply to the complaints of neglected merit. The merit is oftentimes
not understood. Be it ever so manifest, it cannot absorb men's
attention. When it is really great, it has not been brought out by
the hope of reward, any more than the kindest services by the hope
of gratitude. In neither case is it becoming or rational to be
clamorous about payment.
There is one thing that people hardly ever remember, or, indeed,
have imagination enough to conceive; namely, the effect of each man
being shut up in his individuality. Take a long course of sayings
and doings in which many persons have been engaged. Each one of
them is in his own mind the centre of the web, though, perhaps, he
is at the edge of it. We know that in our observations of the
things of sense, any difference in the points from which the
observation is taken gives a different view of the same thing.
Moreover, in the world of sense, the objects and the points of view
are each indifferent to the rest; but in life the points of views
are centres of action that have had something to do with the making
of the things looked at. If we could calculate the moral parallax
arising from these causes, we should see, by the mere aid of the
intellect, how unjust we often are in our complaints of ingratitude,
inconstancy, and neglect. But without these nice calculations, such
errors of view may be corrected at once by humility, a more sure
method than the most enlightened appreciation of the cause of error.
Humility is the true cure for many a needless heartache.
It must not be supposed that in thus opposing unreasonable views of
social affections, anything is done to dissever such affections.
The Duke of Wellington, writing to a man in a dubious position of
authority, says "The less you claim, the more you will have." This
is remarkably true of the affections; and there is scarcely anything
that would make men happier than teaching them to watch against
unreasonableness in their claims of regard and affection; and which
at the same time would be more likely to ensure their getting what
may be their due.
-----
Ellesmere (clapping his hands). An essay after my heart: worth
tons of soft trash. In general you are amplifying duties, telling
everybody that they are to be so good to every other body. Now it
is as well to let every other body know that he is not to expect all
he may fancy from everybody. A man complains that his prosperous
friends neglect him: infinitely overrating, in all probability, his
claims, and his friends' power of doing anything for him. Well,
then, you may think me very hard, but I say that the most absurd
claims are often put forth on the ground of relationship. I do not
deny that there is something in blood, but it must not be made too
much of. Near relations have great opportunities of attaching each
other; if they fail to use these, I do not think it is well to let
them imagine that mere relationship is to be the talisman of
affection.
Dunsford. I do not see exactly how to answer all that you or
Milverton have said; but I am not prepared, as official people say,
to agree with you. I especially disagree with what Milverton has
said about love. He leaves much too little power to the will.
Milverton. I daresay I may have done so. These are very deep
matters, and any one view about them does not exhaust them. I
remember C---- once saying to me that a man never utters anything
without error. He may even think of it rightly; but he cannot bring
it out rightly. It turns a little false, as it were, when it quits
the brain and comes into life.
Ellesmere. I thought you would soon go over to the soft side.
Here, Rollo; there's a good dog. You do not form unreasonable
expectations, do you? A very little petting puts you into an
ecstasy, and you are much wiser than many a biped who is full of his
claims for gratitude, and friendship, and love, and who is always
longing for well-merited rewards to fall into his mouth. Down, dog!
Milverton. Poor animal! it little knows that all this sudden notice
is only by way of ridiculing us. Why I did not maintain my ground
stoutly against Dunsford is, that I am always afraid of pushing
moral conclusions too far. Since we have been talking, I think I
see more clearly than I did before what I mean to convey by the
essay--namely, that men fall into unreasonable views respecting the
affections FROM IMAGINING THAT THE GENERAL LAWS OF THE MIND ARE
SUSPENDED FOR THE SAKE OF THE AFFECTIONS.
Dunsford. That seems safer ground.
Milverton. Now to illustrate what I mean by a very similar
instance. The mind is avid of new impressions. It "travels over,"
or thinks it travels over, another mind; and, though it may conceal
its wish for "fresh fields and pastures new," it does so wish.
However harsh, therefore, and unromantic it may seem, the best plan
is to humour Nature, and not to exhaust by overfrequent presence the
affection of those whom we would love, or whom we would have to love
us. I would not say, after the manner of Rochefoucauld, that the
less we see of people the more we like them; but there are certain
limits of sociality; and prudent reserve and absence may find a
place in the management of the tenderest relations.
Dunsford. Yes, all this is true enough: I do not see anything hard
in this. But then there is the other side. Custom is a great aid
to affection.
Milverton. Yes. All I say is, do not fancy that the general laws
are suspended for the sake of any one affection.
Dunsford. Still this does not go to the question whether there is
not something more of will in affection than you make out. You
would speak of inducements and counter-inducements, aids and
hindrances; but I cannot but think you are limiting the power of
will, and therefore limiting duty. Such views tend to make people
easily discontented with each other, and prevent their making
efforts to get over offences, and to find out what is lovable in
those about them.
Ellesmere. Here we are in the deep places again. I see you are
pondering, Milverton. It is a question, as a minister would say
when Parliament perplexes him, that we must go to the country upon;
each man's heart will, perhaps, tell him best about it. For my own
part, I think that the continuance of affection, as the rise of it,
depends more on the taste being satisfied, or at least not
disgusted, than upon any other single thing. Our hearts may be
touched at our being loved by people essentially distasteful to us,
whose modes of talking and acting are a continual offence to us; but
whether we can love them in return is a question.
Milverton. Yes, we can, I think. I begin to see that it is a
question of degree. The word love includes many shades of meaning.
When it includes admiration, of course we cannot be said to love
those in whom we see nothing to admire. But this seldom happens in
the mixed characters of real life. The upshot of it all seems to me
to be, that, as Guizot says of civilisation, every impulse has room;
so in the affections, every inducement and counter-inducement has
its influence; and the result is not a simple one, which can be
spoken of as if it were alike on all occasions and with all men.
Dunsford. I am still unanswered, I think, Milverton. What you say
is still wholly built upon inducements, and does not touch the power
of will.
Milverton. No; it does not.
Ellesmere. We must leave that alone. Infinite piles of books have
not as yet lifted us up to a clear view of that matter.
Dunsford. Well, then, we must leave it as a vexed question; but let
it be seen that there is such a question. Now, as to another thing;
you speak, Milverton, of men's not making allowance enough for the
unpleasant weight of obligation. I think that weight seems to have
increased in modern times. Essex could give Bacon a small estate,
and Bacon could take it comfortably, I have no doubt. That is a
much more wholesome state of things among friends than the present.
Milverton. Yes, undoubtedly. An extreme notion about independence
has made men much less generous in receiving.
Dunsford. It is a falling off, then. There was another comment I
had to make. I think, when you speak about the exorbitant demands
of neglected merit, you should say more upon the neglect of the just
demands of merit.
Milverton. I would have the Government and the public in general
try by all means to understand and reward merit, especially in those
matters wherein excellence cannot, otherwise, meet with large
present reward. But, to say the truth, I would have this done, not
with the view of fostering genius so much as of fulfilling duty: I
would say to a minister--it is becoming in you--it is well for the
nation, to reward, as far as you can, and dignify, men of genius.
Whether you will do them any good or bring forth more of them, I do
not know.
Ellesmere. Men of great genius are often such a sensitive race, so
apt to be miserable in many other than pecuniary ways and want of
public estimation, that I am not sure that distress and neglect do
not take their minds off worse discomforts. It is a kind of
grievance, too, that they like to have.
Dunsford. Really, Ellesmere, that is a most unfeeling speech.
Milverton. At any rate, it is right for us to honour and serve a
great man. It is our nature to do so, if we are worth anything. We
may put aside the question whether our honour will do him more good
than our neglect. That is a question for him to look to. The world
has not yet so largely honoured deserving men in their own time,
that we can exactly pronounce what effect it would have upon them.
Ellesmere. Come, Rollo, let us leave these men of sentiment. Oh,
you will not go, as your master does not move. Look how he wags his
tail, and almost says, "I should clearly like to have a hunt after
the water-rat we saw in the pond the other day, but master is
talking philosophy, and requires an intelligent audience." These
dogs are dear creatures, it must be owned. Come, Milverton, let us
have a walk.
CHAPTER X.
After the reading in the last chapter, my friends walked homewards
with me as far as Durley Wood, which is about half-way between
Worth-Ashton and my house. As we rested here, we bethought
ourselves that it would be a pleasant spot for us to come to
sometimes and read our essays. So we agreed to name a day for
meeting there. The day was favourable, we met as we had appointed,
and finding some beech logs lying very opportunely, took possession
of them for our council. We seated Ellesmere on one that we called
the woolsack, but which he said he felt himself unworthy to occupy
in the presence of King Log, pointing to mine. These nice points of
etiquette being at last settled, Milverton drew out his papers and
was about to begin reading, when Ellesmere thus interrupted him: --
Ellesmere. You were not in earnest, Milverton, about giving us an
essay on population? Because if so, I think I shall leave this
place to you and Dunsford and the ants.
Milverton. I certainly have been meditating something of the sort;
but have not been able to make much of it.
Ellesmere. If I had been living in those days when it first beamed
upon mankind that the earth was round, I am sure I should have said,
"We know now the bounds of the earth: there are no interminable
plains joined to the regions of the sun, allowing of indefinite
sketchy outlines at the edges of maps. That little creature man
will immediately begin to think that his world is too small for
him."
Milverton. There has probably been as much folly uttered by
political economy as against it, which is saying something. The
danger as regards theories of political economy is the obvious one
of their abstract conclusions being applied to concrete things.
Ellesmere. As if we were to expect mathematical lines to bear
weights.
Milverton. Something like that. With a good system of logic
pervading the public mind, this danger would of course be avoided;
but such a state of mind is not likely to occur in any public that
we or our grandchildren are likely to have to deal with. As it is,
an ordinary man hears some conclusion of political economy, showing
some particular tendency of things, which in real life meets with
many counteractions of all kinds: but he, perhaps, adopts the
conclusion without the least abatement, and would work it into life,
as if all went on there like a rule-of-three sum.
Ellesmere. After all, this error arises from the man's not having
enough political economy. It is not that a theory is good on paper,
but unsound in real life. It is only that in real life you cannot
get at the simple state of things to which the theory would rightly
apply. You want many other theories and the just composition of
them all to be able to work the whole problem. That being done
(which, however, scarcely can be done), the result on paper might be
read off as applicable at once to life. But now, touching the
essay; since we are not to have population, what is it to be?
Milverton. Public improvements.
Ellesmere. Nearly as bad; but as this is a favourite subject of
yours, I suppose it will not be polite to go away.
Milverton. No; you must listen.
PUBLIC IMPROVEMENTS.
What are possessions? To an individual, the stores of his own heart
and mind pre-eminently. His truth and valour are amongst the first.
His contentedness, or his resignation may be put next. Then his
sense of beauty, surely a possession of great moment to him. Then
all those mixed possessions which result from the social affections-
-great possessions, unspeakable delights, much greater than the gift
last mentioned in the former class, but held on more uncertain
tenure. Lastly, what are generally called possessions? However
often we have heard of the vanity, uncertainty, and vexation that
beset these last, we must not let this repetition deaden our minds
to the fact.
Now, national possessions must be estimated by the same gradation
that we have applied to individual possessions. If we consider
national luxury, we shall see how small a part it may add to
national happiness. Men of deserved renown, and peerless women,
lived upon what we should now call the coarsest fare, and paced the
rushes in their rooms with as high, or as contented thoughts, as
their better-fed and better-clothed descendants can boast of. Man
is limited in this direction; I mean, in the things that concern his
personal gratification; but when you come to the higher enjoyments,
the expansive power both in him and them is greater. As Keats says,
"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."
What then are a nation's possessions? The great words that have
been said in it; the great deeds that have been done in it; the
great buildings, and the great works of art, that have been made in
it. A man says a noble saying: it is a possession, first to his
own race, then to mankind. A people get a noble building built for
them: it is an honour to them, also a daily delight and
instruction. It perishes. The remembrance of it is still a
possession. If it was indeed pre-eminent, there will be more
pleasure in thinking of it than in being with others of inferior
order and design.
On the other hand, a thing of ugliness is potent for evil. It
deforms the taste of the thoughtless: it frets the man who knows
how bad it is: it is a disgrace to the nation who raised it; an
example and an occasion for more monstrosities. If it is a great
building in a great city, thousands of people pass it daily, and are
the worse for it, or at least not the better. It must be done away
with. Next to the folly of doing a bad thing is that of fearing to
undo it. We must not look at what it has cost, but at what it is.
Millions may be spent upon some foolish device which will not the
more make it into a possession, but only a more noticeable
detriment.
It must not be supposed that works of art are the only, or the
chief, public improvements needed in any country. Wherever men
congregate, the elements become scarce. The supply of air, light,
and water is then a matter of the highest public importance: and
the magnificent utilitarianism of the Romans should precede the nice
sense of beauty of the Greeks. Or rather, the former should be
worked out in the latter. Sanitary improvements, like most good
works, may be made to fulfil many of the best human objects.
Charity, social order, conveniency of living, and the love of the
beautiful, may all be furthered by such improvements. A people is
seldom so well employed as when, not suffering their attention to be
absorbed by foreign quarrels and domestic broils, they bethink
themselves of winning back those blessings of Nature which
assemblages of men mostly vitiate, exclude, or destroy.
Public improvements are sometimes most difficult in free countries.
The origination of them is difficult there, many diverse minds
having to be persuaded. The individual, or class, resistance to the
public good is harder to conquer than in despotic states. And, what
is most embarrassing, perhaps, individual progress in the same
direction, or individual doings in some other way, form a great
hindrance, sometimes, to public enterprise. On the other hand, the
energy of a free people is a mine of public welfare; and individual
effort brings many good things to bear in much shorter time than any
government could be expected to move in. A judicious statesman
considers these things; and sets himself especially to overcome
those peculiar obstacles to public improvement which belong to the
institutions of his country. Adventure in a despotic state,
combined action in a free state, are the objects which peculiarly
demand his attention.
To return to works of art. In this also the genius of the people is
to be heeded. There may have been, there may be, nations requiring
to be diverted from the love of art to stern labour and industrial
conquests. But certainly it is not so with the Anglo-Saxon race, or
with the Northern races generally. Money may enslave them; logic
may enslave them; art never will. The chief men, therefore, in
these races will do well sometimes to contend against the popular
current, and to convince their people that there are other sources
of delight, and other objects worthy of human endeavour, than severe
money-getting or more material successes of any kind.
In fine, the substantial improvement, and even the embellishment of
towns, is a work which both the central and local governing bodies
in a country should keep a steady hand upon. It especially concerns
them. What are they there for but to do that which individuals
cannot do? It concerns them, too, as it tells upon the health,
morals, education, and refined pleasures of the people they govern.
In doing it, they should avoid pedantry, parsimony, and favouritism;
and their mode of action should be large, considerate, and
foreseeing. Large; inasmuch as they must not easily be contented
with the second best in any of their projects. Considerate;
inasmuch as they have to think what their people need most, not what
will make most show. And therefore, they should be contented, for
instance, at their work going on underground for a time, or in
byways, if needful; the best charity in public works, as in private,
being often that which courts least notice. Lastly, their work
should be with foresight, recollecting that cities grow up about us
like young people, before we are aware of it.
-----
Ellesmere. Another very merciful essay! When we had once got upon
the subject of sanitary improvements, I thought we should soon be
five fathom deep in blue-books, reports, interminable questions of
sewerage, and horrors of all kinds.
Milverton. I am glad you own that I have been very tender of your
impatience in this essay. People, I trust, are now so fully aware
of the immense importance of sanitary improvements, that we do not
want the elementary talking about such things that was formerly
necessary. It is difficult, though, to say too much about sanitary
matters, that is, if by saying much one could gain attention. I am
convinced that the most fruitful source of physical evil to mankind
has been impure air, arising from circumstances which might have
been obviated. Plagues and pestilences of all kinds, cretinism too,
and all scrofulous disorders, are probably mere questions of
ventilation. A district may require ventilation as well as a house.
Ellesmere. Seriously speaking, I quite agree with you. And what
delights me in sanitary improvements is, that they can hardly do
harm. Give a poor man good air, and you do not diminish his self-
reliance. You only add to his health and vigour--make more of a man
of him. But now that the public mind, as it is facetiously called,
has got hold of the idea of these improvements, everybody will be
chattering about them.
Milverton. The very time when those who really do care for these
matters should be watchful to make the most of the tide in their
favour, and should not suffer themselves to relax their efforts
because there is no originality now about such things.
Dunsford. Custom soon melts off the wings which Novelty alone has
lent to Benevolence.
Ellesmere. And down comes the charitable Icarus. A very good
simile, my dear Dunsford, but rather of the Latin-verse order. I
almost see it worked into an hexameter and pentameter, and
delighting the heart of an Eton boy.
Dunsford. Ellesmere is more than usually vicious to-day, Milverton.
A great "public improvement" would be to clip the tongues of some of
these lawyers.
Ellesmere. Possibly. I have just been looking again at that part
of the essay, Milverton, where you talk of the little gained by
national luxury. I think with you. There is an immensity of
nonsense uttered about making people happy, which is to be done,
according to happiness-mongers, by quantities of sugar and tea, and
such-like things. One knows the importance of food, but there is no
Elysium to be got out of it.
Milverton. I know what you mean. There is a kind of pity for the
people now in vogue which is most effeminate. It is a sugared sort
of Robespierre talk about "The poor but virtuous People." To
address such stuff to the people is not to give them anything, but
to take away what they have. Suppose you could give them oceans of
tea and mountains of sugar, and abundance of any luxury that you
choose to imagine, but at the same time you inserted a hungry,
envious spirit in them, what have you done? Then, again, this
envious spirit, when it is turned to difference of station, what
good can it do? Can you give station according to merit? Is life
long enough for it?
Ellesmere. Of course we cannot always be weighing men with nicety,
and saying, "Here is your place, here yours."
Milverton. Then, again, what happiness do you confer on men by
teaching them to disrespect their superiors in rank, by turning all
the embellishments which adorn various stations wrong side out,
putting everything in its lowest form, and then saying, "What do you
see to admire here?" You do not know what injury you may do a man
when you destroy all reverence in him. It will be found out some
day that men derive more pleasure and profit from having superiors
than from having inferiors.
Dunsford. It is seldom that I bring you back to your subject, but
we are really a long way off at present; and I want to know,
Milverton, what you would do specifically in the way of public
improvements. Of course you cannot say in an essay what you would
do in such matters, but amongst ourselves. In London, for instance.
Milverton. The first thing for Government to do, Dunsford, in
London, or any other great town, is to secure open spaces in it and
about it. Trafalgar Square may be dotted with hideous absurdities,
but it is an open space. They may collect together there specimens
of every variety of meanness and bad taste; but they cannot prevent
its being a better thing than if it were covered with houses.
Public money is scarcely ever so well employed as in securing bits
of waste ground and keeping them as open spaces. Then, as under the
most favourable circumstances, we are likely to have too much carbon
in the air of any town, we should plant trees to restore the just
proportions of the air as far as we can. {161} Trees are also what
the heart and the eye desire most in towns. The Boulevards in Paris
show the excellent effect of trees against buildings. There are
many parts of London where rows of trees might be planted along the
streets. The weighty dulness of Portland Place, for instance, might
be thus relieved. Of course, in any scheme of public improvements,
the getting rid of smoke is one of the first objects.
Ellesmere. Yes, smoke is a great abuse; but then there is something
ludicrous about it, just as there is about sewerage. I believe,
myself, that for one person that the Corn Laws have injured, a dozen
have had their lives shortened and their happiness abridged in every
way by these less palpable nuisances. But there is no grandeur in
opposing them--no "good cry" to be raised. And so, as abuses cannot
be met in our days but by agitation--a committee, secretaries,
clerks, newspapers, and a review--and as agitation in this case
holds out fewer inducements than usual, we have gone on year after
year being poisoned by these various nuisances, at an incalculable
expense of life and money.
Milverton. There is something in what you say, I think, but you
press it too far; for of late these sanitary subjects have worked
themselves into notice, as you yourself admit.
Ellesmere. Late indeed.
Milverton. Well, but to go on with schemes for improving London.
Open spaces, trees--then comes the supply of water. This is one of
the first things to be done. Philadelphia has given an example
which all towns ought to imitate. It is a matter requiring great
thought, and the various plans should be thoroughly canvassed before
the choice is made. Great beauty and the highest utility may be
combined in supplying a town like London with water. By the way,
how much water do you think London requires daily?
Ellesmere. As much as the Serpentine and the water in St. James's
Park.
Milverton. You are not so far out.
Well, then, having gone through the largest things that must be
attended to, we come to minor matters. It is a great pity that the
system of building upon leases should be so commonly adopted.
Nobody expects to live out the leasehold term which he takes to
build upon. But things would be better done if people were more
averse to having anything to do with leasehold property. C. always
says that the modern lath-and-plaster system is a wickedness, and
upon my word I think he is right. It is inconceivable to me how a
man can make up his mind to build, or to do anything else, in a
temporary, slight, insincere fashion. What has a man to say for
himself who must sum up the doings of his life in this way, "I
chiefly employed myself in making or selling things which seemed to
be good and were not, and nobody has occasion to bless me for
anything I have done."
Ellesmere. Humph! you put it mildly. But the man has made perhaps
seven per cent. off his money; or, if he has made no per cent., has
ruined several men of his own trade, which is not to go for nothing
when a man is taking stock of his good deeds.
Milverton. There is one thing I forgot to say, that we want more
individual will in building, I think. As it is at present, a great
builder takes a plot of ground and turns out innumerable houses, all
alike, the same faults and merits running through each, thus adding
to the general dulness of things.
Ellesmere. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when she came from abroad,
remarked that all her friends seemed to have got into drawing-rooms
which were like a grand piano, first a large square or oblong room,
and then a small one. Quite Georgian, this style of architecture.
But now I think we are improving immensely--at any rate in the
outside of houses. By the way, Milverton, I want to ask you one
thing: How is it that Governments and Committees, and the bodies
that manage matters of taste, seem to be more tasteless than the
average run of people? I will wager anything that the cabmen round
Trafalgar Square would have made a better thing of it than it is.
If you had put before them several prints of fountains, they would
not have chosen those.
Milverton. I think with you, but I have no theory to account for
it. I suppose that these committees are frequently hampered by
other considerations than those which come before the public when
they are looking at the work done; and this may be some excuse.
There was a custom which I have heard prevailed in former days in
some of the Italian cities, of making large models of the works of
art that were to adorn the city, and putting them up in the places
intended for the works when finished, and then inviting criticism.
It would really be a very good plan in some cases.
Ellesmere. Now, Milverton, would you not forthwith pull down such
things as Buckingham Palace and the National Gallery? Dunsford
looks at me as if I were going to pull down the Constitution.
Milverton. I would pull them down to a certainty, or some parts of
them at any rate; but whether "forthwith" is another question.
There are greater things, perhaps, to be done first. We must
consider, too,
"That eternal want of pence
Which vexes public men."
Still, I think we ought always to look upon such buildings as
temporary arrangements, and they vex one less then. The Palace
ought to be in the higher part of the Park, perhaps on that slope
opposite Piccadilly.
Dunsford. Well, it does amuse me the way in which you youngsters go
on, pulling down, in your industrious imaginations, palaces and
national galleries, building aqueducts and cloacae maximae, forming
parks, destroying smoke (so large a part of every Londoner's diet),
and abridging plaster, without fear of Chancellors of the Exchequer,
and the resistance of mankind in general.
Milverton. We must begin by thinking boldly about things. That is
a larger part of any undertaking than it seems, perhaps.
Dunsford. We must, I am afraid, break off our pleasant employment
of projecting public improvements, unless we mean to be dinnerless.
Ellesmere. A frequent fate of great projectors, I fear.
Milverton. Now then, homewards.
CHAPTER XI.
My readers will, perhaps, agree with me in being sorry to find that
we are coming to the end of our present series. I say, "my
readers," though I have so little part in purveying for them, that I
mostly consider myself one of them. It is no light task, however,
to give a good account of a conversation; and I say this, and would
wish people to try whether I am not right in saying so, not to call
attention to my labour in the matter, but because it may be well to
notice how difficult it is to report anything truly. Were this
better known, it might be an aid to charity, and prevent some of
those feuds which grow out of the poverty of man's power to express,
to apprehend, to represent, rather than out of any malignant part of
his nature. But I must not go on moralising. I almost feel that
Ellesmere is looking over my shoulder, and breaking into my
discourse with sharp words; which I have lately been so much
accustomed to.
I had expected that we should have many more readings this summer,
as I knew that Milverton had prepared more essays for us. But
finding, as he said, that the other subjects he had in hand were
larger than he had anticipated, or was prepared for, he would not
read even to us what he had written. Though I was very sorry for
this--for I may not be the chronicler in another year--I could not
but say he was right. Indeed, my ideas of literature, nourished as
they have been in much solitude, and by the reading, if I may say
so, mainly of our classical authors, are very high placed, though I
hope not fantastical. And, therefore, I would not discourage anyone
in expending whatever thought and labour might be in him upon any
literary work.
In fine, then, I did not attempt to dissuade Milverton from his
purpose of postponing our readings: and we agreed that there should
only be one more for the present. I wished it to be at our
favourite place on the lawn, which had become endeared to me as the
spot of many of our friendly councils.
It was later than usual when I came over to Worth-Ashton for this
reading; and as I gained the brow of the hill, some few clouds
tinged with red were just grouping together to form the accustomed
pomp upon the exit of the setting sun. I believe I mentioned in the
introduction to our first conversation that the ruins of an old
castle could be seen from our place of meeting. Milverton and
Ellesmere were talking about it as I joined them.
Milverton. Yes, Ellesmere, many a man has looked out of those
windows upon a sunset like this, with some of the thoughts that must
come into the minds of all men on seeing this great emblem, the
setting sun--has felt, in looking at it, his coming end, or the
closing of his greatness. Those old walls must have been witness to
every kind of human emotion. Henry the Second was there; John, I
think; Margaret of Anjou and Cardinal Beaufort; William of Wykeham;
Henry the Eighth's Cromwell; and many others who have made some stir
in the world.
Ellesmere. And, perhaps, the greatest there were those who made no
stir.
"The world knows nothing of its greatest men."
Milverton. I am slow to believe that. I cannot well reconcile
myself to the idea that great capacities are given for nothing.
They bud out in some way or other.
Ellesmere. Yes, but it may not be in a noisy way.
Milverton. There is one thing that always strikes me very much in
looking at the lives of men: how soon, as it were, their course
seems to be determined. They say, or do, or think, something which
gives a bias at once to the whole of their career.
Dunsford. You may go farther back than that, and speak of the
impulses they got from their ancestors.
Ellesmere. Or the nets around them of other people's ways and
wishes. There are many things, you see, that go to make men
puppets.
Milverton. I was only noticing the circumstance that there was such
a thing, as it appeared to me, as this early direction. But, if it
has been ever so unfortunate, a man's folding his hands over it in a
melancholy mood, and suffering himself to be made a puppet by it, is
a sadly weak proceeding. Most thoughtful men have probably some
dark fountains in their souls, by the side of which, if there were
time, and it were decorous, they could let their thoughts sit down
and wail indefinitely. That long Byron wail fascinated men for a
time; because there is that in Human Nature. Luckily, a great deal
besides.
Ellesmere. I delight in the helpful and hopeful men.
Milverton. A man that I admire very much, and have met with
occasionally, is one who is always of use in any matter he is mixed
up with, simply because he wishes that the best should be got out of
the thing that is possible. There does not seem much in the
description of such a character; but only see it in contrast with
that of a brilliant man, for instance, who does not ever fully care
about the matter in hand.
Dunsford. I can thoroughly imagine the difference.
Milverton. The human race may be bound up together in some
mysterious way, each of us having a profound interest in the
fortunes of the whole, and so, to some extent, of every portion of
it. Such a man as I have described acts as though he had an
intuitive perception of that relation, and therefore a sort of
family feeling for mankind, which gives him satisfaction in making
the best out of any human affair he has to do with.
But we really must have the essay, and not talk any more. It is on
History.
HISTORY.
Among the fathomless things that are about us and within us, is the
continuity of time. This gives to life one of its most solemn
aspects. We may think to ourselves: Would there could be some
halting-place in life, where we could stay, collecting our minds,
and see the world drift by us. But no: even while you read this,
you are not pausing to read it. As one of the great French
preachers, I think, says, We are embarked upon a stream, each in his
own little boat, which must move uniformly onwards, till it ceases
to move at all. It is a stream that knows "no haste, no rest"; a
boat that knows no haven but one.
This unbated continuity suggests the past as well as the future. We
would know what mighty empires this stream of time has flowed
through, by what battle-fields it has been tinged, how it has been
employed towards fertility, and what beautiful shadows on its
surface have been seized by art, or science, or great words, and
held in time-lasting, if not in everlasting, beauty. This is what
history tells us. Often in a faltering, confused, be-darkened way,
like the deed it chronicles. But it is what we have, and we must
make the best of it.
The subject of this essay may be thus divided: Why history should
be read--how it should be read--by whom it should be written--how it
should be written--and how good writers of history should be called
forth, aided, and rewarded.
I. WHY HISTORY SHOULD BE READ.
It takes us out of too much care for the present; it extends our
sympathies; it shows us that other men have had their sufferings and
their grievances; it enriches discourse, it enlightens travel. So
does fiction. But the effect of history is more lasting and
suggestive. If we see a place which fiction has treated of, we feel
that it has some interest for us; but show us a spot where
remarkable deeds have been done, or remarkable people have lived,
and our thoughts cling to it. We employ our own imagination about
it: we invent the fiction for ourselves. Again, history is at
least the conventional account of things: that which men agree to
receive as the right account, and which they discuss as true. To
understand their talk, we must know what they are talking about.
Again, there is something in history which can seldom be got from
the study of the lives of individual men; namely, the movements of
men collectively, and for long periods--of man, in fact, not of men.
In history, the composition of the forces that move the world has to
be analysed. We must have before us the law of the progress of
opinion, the interruptions to it of individual character, the
principles on which men act in the main, the trade winds, as we may
say, in human affairs, and the recurrent storms which one man's life
does not tell us of. Again, by the study of history, we have a
chance of becoming tolerant travelling over the ways of many nations
and many periods; and we may also acquire that historic tact by
which we collect upon one point of human affairs the light of many
ages.
We may judge of the benefit of historical studies by observing what
great defects are incident to the moral and political writers who
know nothing of history. A present grievance, or what seems such,
swallows up in their minds all other considerations; their little
bottle of oil is to still the raging waves of the whole human ocean;
their system, a thing that the historian has seen before, perhaps,
in many ages, is to reconcile all diversities. Then they would
persuade you that this class of men is wholly good, that wholly bad;
or that there is no difference between good and bad. They may be
shrewd men, considering what they have seen, but would be much
shrewder if they could know how small a part that is of life. We
may all refer to our boyhood, and recollect the time when we thought
the things about us were the type of all things everywhere. That
was, perhaps, after all no silly princess who was for feeding the
famishing people on cakes. History takes us out of this confined
circle of child-like thought; and shows us what are the perennial
aims, struggles, and distractions of mankind.
History has always been set down as the especial study for
statesmen, and for men who take an interest in public affairs. For
history is to nations what biography is to individual men. History
is the chart and compass for national endeavour. Our early voyagers
are dead: not a plank remains of the old ships that first essayed
unknown waters; the sea retains no track; and were it not for the
history of these voyages contained in charts, in chronicles, in
hoarded lore of all kinds, each voyager, though he were to start
with all the aids of advanced civilisation (if you could imagine
such a thing without history), would need the boldness of the first
voyager.
And so it would be with the statesman, were the civil history of
mankind unknown. We live to some extent in peace and comfort upon
the results obtained for us by the chronicles of our forefathers.
We do not see this without some reflection. But imagine what a
full-grown nation would be if it knew no history--like a full-grown
man with only a child's experience.
The present is an age of remarkable experiences. Vast improvements
have been made in several of the outward things that concern life
nearly, from intercourse rapid as lightning to surgical operation
without pain. We accept them all; still, the difficulties of
government, the management of ourselves, our relations with others,
and many of the prime difficulties of life remain but little
subdued. History still claims our interest, is still wanted to make
us think and act with any breadth of wisdom.
At the same time, however, that we claim for history great powers of
instruction, we must not imagine that the examples which it
furnishes will enable its readers to anticipate the experience of
life. An experienced man reads that Caesar did this or that, but he
says to himself, "I am not Caesar." Or, indeed, as is most
probable, the reader has not to reject the application of the
example to himself: for from first to last he sees nothing but
experience for Caesar in what Caesar was doing. I think it may be
observed, too, that general maxims about life gain the ear of the
inexperienced, in preference to historical examples. But neither
wise sayings nor historical examples can be understood without
experience. Words are only symbols. Who can know anything soundly
with respect to the complicated affections and struggles of life,
unless he has experienced some of them? All knowledge of humanity
spreads from within. So in studying history, the lessons it teaches
must have something to grow round in the heart they teach. Our own
trials, misfortunes, and enterprises are the best lights by which we
can read history. Hence it is that many an historian may see far
less into the depths of the very history he has himself written than
a man who, having acted and suffered, reads the history in question
with all the wisdom that comes from action and suffering. Sir
Robert Walpole might naturally exclaim, "Do not read history to me,
for that, I know, must be false." But if he had read it, I do not
doubt that he would have seen through the film of false and
insufficient narrative into the depth of the matter narrated, in a
way that men of great experience can alone attain to.
II. HOW HISTORY SHOULD BE READ.
I suppose that many who now connect the very word history with the
idea of dulness, would have been fond and diligent students of
history if it had had fair access to their minds. But they were set
down to read histories which were not fitted to be read
continuously, or by any but practised students. Some such works are
mere framework, a name which the author of the Statesman applies to
them; very good things, perhaps, for their purpose, but that is not
to invite readers to history. You might almost as well read
dictionaries with a hope of getting a succinct and clear view of
language. When, in any narration, there is a constant heaping up of
facts, made about equally significant by the way of telling them, a
hasty delineation of characters, and all the incidents moving on as
in the fifth act of a confused tragedy, the mind and memory refuse
to be so treated; and the reading ends in nothing but a very slight
and inaccurate acquaintance with the mere husk of the history. You
cannot epitomise the knowledge that it would take years to acquire
into a few volumes that may be read in as many weeks.
The most likely way of attracting men's attention to historical
subjects will be by presenting them with small portions of history,
of great interest, thoroughly examined. This may give them the
habit of applying thought and criticism to historical matters.
For, as it is, how are people interested in history? and how do they
master its multitudinous assemblage of facts? Mostly, perhaps, in
this way. A man cares about some one thing, or person, or event,
and plunges into its history, really wishing to master it. This
pursuit extends: other points of research are taken up by him at
other times. His researches begin to intersect. He finds a
connection in things. The texture of his historic acquisitions
gradually attains some substance and colour; and so at last he
begins to have some dim notions of the myriads of men who came, and
saw, and did not conquer--only struggled on as they best might, some
of them--and are not.
When we are considering how history should be read, the main thing
perhaps is, that the person reading should desire to know what he is
reading about, not merely to have read the books that tell of it.
The most elaborate and careful historian must omit, or pass lightly
over, many points of his subject. He writes for all readers, and
cannot indulge private fancies. But history has its particular
aspect for each man: there must be portions which he may be
expected to dwell upon. And everywhere, even where the history is
most laboured, the reader should have something of the spirit of
research which was needful for the writer: if only so much as to
ponder well the words of the writer. That man reads history, or
anything else, at great peril of being thoroughly misled, who has no
perception of any truthfulness except that which can be fully
ascertained by reference to facts; who does not in the least
perceive the truth, or the reverse, of a writer's style, of his
epithets, of his reasoning, of his mode of narration. In life, our
faith in any narration is much influenced by the personal
appearance, voice, and gesture of the person narrating. There is
some part of all these things in his writing; and you must look into
that well before you can know what faith to give him. One man may
make mistakes in names, and dates, and references, and yet have a
real substance of truthfulness in him, a wish to enlighten himself
and then you. Another may not be wrong in his facts, but have a
declamatory or sophistical vein in him, much to be guarded against.
A third may be both inaccurate and untruthful, caring not so much
for anything as to write his book. And if the reader cares only to
read it, sad work they make between them of the memories of former
days.
In studying history, it must be borne in mind that a knowledge is
necessary of the state of manners, customs, wealth, arts, and
science at the different periods treated of. The text of civil
history requires a context of this knowledge in the mind of the
reader. For the same reason, some of the main facts of the
geography of the countries in question should be present to him. If
we are ignorant of these aids to history, all history is apt to seem
alike to us. It becomes merely a narrative of men of our own time,
in our own country; and then we are prone to expect the same views
and conduct from them that we do from our contemporaries. It is
true that the heroes of antiquity have been represented on the stage
in bag-wigs, and the rest of the costume of our grandfathers: but
it was the great events of their lives that were thus told--the
crisis of their passions--and when we are contemplating the
representation of great passions and their consequences, all minor
imagery is of little moment. In a long-drawn narrative, however,
the more we have in our minds of what concerned the daily life of
the people we read about, the better. And in general it may be said
that history, like travelling, gives a return in proportion to the
knowledge that a man brings to it.
III. BY WHOM HISTORY SHOULD BE WRITTEN.
Before entering directly on this part of the subject, it is
desirable to consider a little the difficulties in the way of
writing history. We all know the difficulty of getting at the truth
of a matter which happened yesterday, and about which we can examine
the living actors upon oath. But in history the most significant
things may lack the most important part of their evidence. The
people who were making history were not thinking of the convenience
of future writers of history. Often the historian must contrive to
get his insight into matters from evidence of men and things which
is like bad pictures of them. The contemporary, if he knew the man,
said of the picture, "I should have known it, but it has very little
of him in it." The poor historian, with no original before him, has
to see through the bad picture into the man. Then, supposing our
historian rich in well-selected evidence--I say well-selected,
because, as students tell us, for many an historian one authority is
of the same weight as another, provided they are both of the same
age; still, how difficult is narration even to the man who is rich
in well-selected evidence. What a tendency there is to round off a
narrative into falsehood; or else by parenthesis to destroy its pith
and continuity. Again, the historian knows the end of many of the
transactions he narrates. If he did not, how differently often he
would narrate them. It would be a most instructive thing to give a
man the materials for the account of a great transaction, stopping
short of the end, and then see how different would be his account
from the ordinary ones. Fools have been hardly dealt with in the
saying that the event is their master ("eventus stultorum
magister"), seeing how it rules us all. And in nothing more than in
history. The event is always present to our minds; along the
pathways to it, the historian and the moralist have walked till they
are beaten pathways, and we imagine that they were so to the men who
first went along them. Indeed, we almost fancy that these ancestors
of ours, looking along the beaten path, foresaw the event as we do;
whereas, they mostly stumbled upon it suddenly in the forest. This
knowledge of the end we must, therefore, put down as one of the most
dangerous pitfalls which beset the writers of history. Then
consider the difficulty in the "composition," to use an artist's
word, of our historian's picture. Before both the artist and the
historian lies Nature as far as the horizon; how shall they choose
that portion of it which has some unity and which shall represent
the rest? What method is needful in the grouping of facts; what
learning, what patience, what accuracy!
By whom, then, should history be written? In the first place, by
men of some experience in real life; who have acted and suffered;
who have been in crowds, and seen, perhaps felt, how madly men can
care about nothings; who have observed how much is done in the world
in an uncertain manner, upon sudden impulses and very little reason;
and who, therefore, do not think themselves bound to have a deep-
laid theory for all things. They should be men who have studied the
laws of the affections, who know how much men's opinions depend on
the time in which they live, how they vary with their age and their
position. To make themselves historians, they should also have
considered the combinations amongst men and the laws that govern
such things; for there are laws. Moreover our historians, like most
men who do great things, must combine in themselves qualities which
are held to belong to opposite natures; must at the same time be
patient in research and vigorous in imagination, energetic and calm,
cautious and enterprising. Such historians, wise, as we may suppose
they will be, about the affair of other men, may, let us hope, be
sufficiently wise about their own affairs to understand that no
great work can be done without great labour, that no great labour
ought to look for its reward. But my readers will exclaim as
Rasselas to Imlac on hearing the requisites for a poet, "Enough!
thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be an historian.
Proceed with thy narration."
IV. HOW HISTORY SHOULD BE WRITTEN.
One of the first things in writing history is for the historian to
recollect that it is history he is writing. The narrative must not
be oppressed by reflections, even by wise ones. Least of all should
the historian suffer himself to become entangled by a theory or a
system. If he does, each fact is taken up by him in a particular
way: those facts that cannot be so handled cease to be his facts,
and those that offer themselves conveniently are received too fondly
by him.
Then, although our historian must not be mastered by system, he must
have some way of taking up his facts and of classifying them. They
must not be mere isolated units in his eyes, else he is mobbed by
them. And a man in the midst of a crowd, though he may know the
names and nature of all the crowd, cannot give an account of their
doings. Those who look down from the housetop must do that.
But, above all things, the historian must get out of his own age
into the time in which he is writing. Imagination is as much needed
for the historian as the poet. You may combine bits of books with
other bits of books, and so make some new combinations, and this may
be done accurately, and, in general, much of the subordinate
preparation for history may be accomplished without any great effort
of imagination. But to write history in any large sense of the
words, you must be able to comprehend other times. You must know
that there is a right and wrong which is not your right and wrong,
but yet stands upon the right and wrong of all ages and all hearts.
You must also appreciate the outward life and colours of the period
you write about. Try to think how the men you are telling of would
have spent a day, what were their leading ideas, what they cared
about. Grasp the body of the time, and give it to us. If not, and
these men could look at your history, they would say, "This is all
very well; we daresay some of these things did happen; but we were
not thinking of these things all day long. It does not represent
us."
After enlarging upon this great requisite, imagination, it seems
somewhat prosaic to come down to saying that history requires
accuracy. But I think I hear the sighs, and sounds more harsh than
sighing, of those who have ever investigated anything, and found by
dire experience the deplorable inaccuracy which prevails in the
world. And, therefore, I would say to the historian almost as the
first suggestion, "Be accurate; do not make false references, do not
mis-state: and men, if they get no light from you, will not
execrate you. You will not stand in the way, and have to be
explained and got rid of."
Another most important matter in writing history, and that indeed in
which the art lies, is the method of narrating. This is a thing
almost beyond rules, like the actual execution in music or painting.
A man might have fairness, accuracy, an insight into other times,
great knowledge of facts, some power even of arranging them, and yet
make a narrative out of it all, so protracted here, so huddled
together there, the purpose so buried or confused, that men would
agree to acknowledge the merit of the book and leave it unread.
There must be a natural line of associations for the narrative to
run along. The separate threads of the narrative must be treated
separately, and yet the subject not be dealt with sectionally, for
that is not the way in which the things occurred. The historian
must, therefore, beware that those divisions of the subject which he
makes for our ease and convenience, do not induce him to treat his
subject in a flimsy manner. He must not make his story easy where
it is not so.
After all, it is not by rule that a great history is to be written.
Most thinkers agree that the main object for the historian is to get
an insight into the things which he tells of, and then to tell them
with the modesty of a man who is in the presence of great events;
and must speak about them carefully, simply, and with but little of
himself or of his affections thrown into the narration.
V. HOW GOOD WRITERS OF HISTORY SHOULD BE CALLED FORTH, AIDED, AND
REWARDED.
Mainly by history being properly read. The direct ways of
commanding excellence of any kind are very few, if any. When a
State has found out its notable men, it should reward them, and will
show its worthiness by its measure and mode of reward. But it
cannot purchase them. It may do something in the way of aiding
them. In history, for instance, the records of a nation may be
discreetly managed, and some of the minor work, therefore, done to
the hand of the historian. But the most likely method to ensure
good historians is to have a fit audience for them. And this is a
very difficult matter. In works of general literature, the circle
of persons capable of judging is large; even in works of science or
philosophy it is considerable: but in history, it is a very
confined circle. To the general body of readers, whether the
history they read is true or not is in no way perceptible. It is
quite as amusing to them when it is told in one way as in another.
There is always mischief in error: but in this case the mischief is
remote, or seems so. For men of ordinary culture, even if of much
intelligence, the difficulty of discerning what is true or false in
the histories they read makes it a matter of the highest duty for
those few persons who can give us criticism on historical works, at
least to save us from insolent and mendacious carelessness in
historical writers, if not by just encouragement to secure for
nations some results not altogether unworthy of the great enterprise
which the writing of history holds out itself to be. "Hujus enim
fidei exempla majorum, vicissitudines rerum, fundamenta prudentiae
civilis, hominum denique nomen et fama commissa sunt." {183}
Ellesmere. Just wait a minute for me, and do not talk about the
essay till I come back. I am going for Anster's Faust.
Dunsford. What has Ellesmere got in his head?
Milverton. I see. There is a passage where Faust, in his most
discontented mood, falls foul of history--in his talk to Wagner, if
I am not mistaken.
Dunsford. How beautiful it is this evening! Look at that yellow-
green near the sunset.
Milverton. The very words that Coleridge uses. I always think of
them when I see that tint.
Dunsford. I daresay his words were in my mind, but I have forgotten
what you allude to.
Milverton.
"O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow-green:
And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel how beautiful they are."
Dunsford. Admirable! In the Ode to Dejection, is it not? where,
too, there are those lines,
"O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live."
Milverton. But here comes Ellesmere with triumphant look. You look
as jovial, my dear Ellesmere, as if you were a Bentley that had
found a false quantity in a Boyle.
Ellesmere. Listen and perpend, my historical friends.
"To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
Are a mysterious book, sealed with seven seals:
That which you call the spirit of ages past
Is but, in truth, the spirit of some few authors
In which those ages are beheld reflected,
With what distortion strange heaven only knows.
Oh! often, what a toilsome thing it is
This study of thine--at the first glance we fly it.
A mass of things confusedly heaped together;
A lumber-room of dusty documents,
Furnished with all approved court-precedents
And old traditional maxims! History!
Facts dramatised say rather--action--plot--
Sentiment, everything the writer's own,
As it bests fits the web-work of his story,
With here and there a solitary fact
Of consequence, by those grave chroniclers,
Pointed with many a moral apophthegm,
And wise old saws, learned at the puppet-shows."
Milverton. Yes; admirable lines; they describe to the life the very
faults we have been considering as the faults of badly-written
histories. I do not see that they do much more.
Ellesmere.
"To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
Are a mysterious book."--
Milverton. Those two first lines are the full expression of Faust's
discontent--unmeasured as in the presence of a weak man who could
not check him. But, if you come to look at the matter closely, you
will see that the time present is also in some sense a sealed book
to us. Men that we live with daily we often think as little of as
we do of Julius Caesar, I was going to say--but we know much less of
them than of him.
Ellesmere. I did not mean to say that Faust spoke my sentiments
about history in general. Still, there are periods of history which
we have very few authors to tell us about, and I daresay in some of
those cases the colouring of their particular minds gives us a false
idea of the whole age they lived in.
Dunsford. This may have happened, certainly.
Milverton. We must be careful not to expect too much from the
history of past ages, as a means of understanding the present age.
There is something wanted besides the preceding history to
understand each age. Each individual life may have a problem of its
own, which all other biography accurately set down for us might not
enable us to work out. So of each age. It has something in it not
known before, and tends to a result which is not down in any books.
Dunsford. Yet history must be of greatest use in discerning this
tendency.
Ellesmere. Yes; but the Wagner sort of pedant would get entangled
in his round of history--in his historical resemblances.
Dunsford. Now, Milverton, if you were called upon to say what are
the peculiar characteristics of this age, what should you say?
Ellesmere. One of Dunsford's questions this, requiring a stout
quarto volume with notes in answer.
Milverton. I would rather wait till I was called upon. I am apt to
feel, after I have left off describing the character of any
individual man, as if I had only just begun. And I do not see the
extent of discourse that would be needful in attempting to give the
characteristics of an age.
Ellesmere. I think you are prudent to avoid answering Dunsford's
question. For my own part, I should prefer giving an account of the
age we live in after we have come to the end of it--in the true
historical fashion. And so, Dunsford, you must wait for my notions.
Dunsford. I am afraid, Milverton, if you were to write history, you
would never make up your mind to condemn anybody.
Milverton. I hope I should not be so inconclusive. I certainly do
dislike to see any character, whether of a living or a dead person,
disposed of in a summary way.
Ellesmere. For once I will come to the rescue of Milverton. I
really do not see that a man's belief in the extent and variety of
human character, and in the difficulty of appreciating the
circumstances of life, should prevent him from writing history--from
coming to some conclusions. Of course such a man is not likely to
write a long course of history; but that I hold has been a frequent
error in historians--that they have taken up subjects too large for
them.
Milverton. If there is as much to be said about men's character and
conduct as I think there mostly is, why should we be content with
shallow views of them? Take the outward form of these hills and
valleys before us. When we have seen them a few times, we think we
know them, but are quite mistaken. Approaching from another
quarter, it is almost new ground to us. It is a long time before
you master the outward form and semblance of any small piece of
country that has much life and diversity in it. I often think of
this, applying it to our little knowledge of men. Now, look there a
moment: you see that house; close behind it is apparently a barren
tract. In reality there is nothing of the kind there. A fertile
valley with a great river in it, as you know, is between that house
and the moors. But the plane of those moors and of the house is
coincident from our present point of view. Had we not, as educated
men, some distrust of the conclusions of our senses, we should be
ready to swear that there was a lonely house on the border of the
moors. It is the same in judging of men. We see a man connected
with a train of action which is really not near him, absolutely
foreign to him, perhaps, but in our eyes that is what he is always
connected with. If there were not a Being who understands us
immeasurably better than other men can, immeasurably better than we
do ourselves, we should be badly off.
Such precautionary thoughts as these must be useful, I contend.
They need not make us indifferent to character, or prevent us from
forming judgments where we must form them, but they show us what a
wide thing we are talking about when we are judging the life and
nature of a man.
Ellesmere. I am sure, Dunsford, you are already convinced: you
seldom want more than a slight pretext for going over to the
charitable side of things. You are only afraid of not dealing
stoutly enough with bad things and people. Do not be afraid though.
As long as you have me to abuse, you will say many unjust things
against me, you know, so that you may waste yourself in good
thoughts about the rest of the world, past and present. Do you know
the lawyer's story I had in my mind then? "Many times when I have
had a good case," he said, "I have failed; but then I have often
succeeded with bad cases. And so justice is done."
Milverton. To return to the subject. It is not a sort of
equalising want of thought about men that I desire; only not to be
rash in a matter that requires all our care and prudence.
Dunsford. Well, I believe I am won over. But now to another point.
I think, Milverton, that you have said hardly anything about the use
of history as an incentive to good deeds and a discouragement to
evil ones.
Milverton. I ought to have done so. Bolingbroke gives in his
"Letters on History," talking of this point, a passage from Tacitus,
"Praecipuum munus annalium,"--can you go on with it, Dunsford?
Dunsford. Yes, I think I can. It is a passage I have often seen
quoted. "Praecipuum munus annalium, reor, ne virtutes sileantur;
utque pravis dictis factisque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit."
Ellesmere. Well done; Dunsford may have invented it, though, for
aught that we know, Milverton, and be passing himself off upon us
for Tacitus.
Milverton. Then Bolingbroke goes on to say (I wish I could give you
his own flowing words), that the great duty of history is to form a
tribunal like that amongst the Egyptians which Diodorus tells of,
where both common men and princes were tried after their deaths, and
received appropriate honour or disgrace. The sentence was
pronounced, he says, too late to correct or to recompense; but it
was pronounced in time to render examples of general instruction to
mankind. Now, what I was going to remark upon this is, that
Bolingbroke understates his case. History well written is a present
correction, and a foretaste of recompense, to the man who is now
struggling with difficulties and temptations, now overcast by
calumny and cloudy misrepresentation.
Ellesmere. Yes; many a man makes an appeal to posterity which will
never come before the court; but if there were no such court of
appeal--
Milverton. A man's conviction that justice will be done to him in
history is a secondary motive, and not one which, of itself, will
compel him to do just and great things; but, at any rate, it forms
one of the benefits that flow from history, and it becomes stronger
as histories are better written. Much may be said against care for
fame; much also against care for present repute. There is a diviner
impulse than either at the doing of any actions that are much worth
doing. As a correction, however, this anticipation of the judgment
of history may really be very powerful. It is a great enlightenment
of conscience to read the opinions of men on deeds similar to those
we are engaged in or meditating.
Dunsford. I think Bolingbroke's idea, which I imagine was more
general than yours, is more important: namely, that this judicial
proceeding, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, gave significant lessons
to all people, not merely to those who had any chance of having
their names in history.
Milverton. Certainly: for this is one of Bolingbroke's chief
points, if I recollect rightly.
Ellesmere. Our conversations are much better things than your
essays, Milverton.
Milverton. Of course, I am bound to say so: but what made you
think of that now?
Ellesmere. Why, I was thinking how in talk we can know exactly
where we agree or differ. But I never like to interrupt the essay.
I never know when it would come to an end if I did. And so it swims
on like a sermon, having all its own way: one cannot put in an
awkward question in a weak part, and get things looked at in various
ways.
Dunsford. I suppose, then, Ellesmere, you would like to interrupt
sermons.
Ellesmere. Why, yes, sometimes--do not throw sticks at me,
Dunsford.
Dunsford. Well, it is absurd to be angry with you; because if you
long to interrupt Milverton with his captious perhapses and
probablys, of course you will be impatient with discourses which do,
to a certain extent, assume that the preacher and the hearers are in
unison upon great matters.
Ellesmere. I am afraid to say anything about sermons, for fear of
the argumentum baculinum from Dunsford; for many essay writers, like
Milverton, delight to wind up their paragraphs with complete little
aphorisms--shutting up something certainly, but shutting out
something too. I could generally pause upon them a little.
Milverton. Of course one may err, Ellesmere, in too much aphorising
as in too much of anything. But your argument goes against all
expression of opinion, which must be incomplete, especially when
dealing with matters that cannot be circumscribed by exact
definitions. Otherwise, a code of wisdom might be made which the
fool might apply as well as the wisest man. Even the best proverb,
though often the expression of the widest experience in the choicest
language, can be thoroughly misapplied. It cannot embrace the whole
of the subject, and apply in all cases like a mathematical formula.
Its wisdom lies in the ear of the hearer.
Ellesmere. Well, I not know that there is anything more to say
about the essay. I suppose you are aware, Dunsford, that Milverton
does not intend to give us any more essays for some time. He is
distressing his mind about some facts which he wants to ascertain
before he will read any more to us. I imagine we are to have
something historical next.
Milverton. Something in which historical records are useful.
Ellesmere. Really it is wonderful to see how beautifully human
nature accommodates itself to anything, even to the listening to
essays. I shall miss them.
Milverton. You may miss the talk before and after.
Ellesmere. Well, there is no knowing how much of that is provoked
(provoked is a good word, is it not?) by the essays.
Dunsford. Then, for the present, we have come to an end of our
readings.
Milverton. Yes, but I trust at no distant time to have something
more to try your critical powers and patience upon. I hope that
that old tower will yet see us meet together here on many a sunny
day, discussing various things in friendly council.
-----
NOTES.
{12} See Statesman, p. 30.
{42} The passage which must have been alluded to is this: "The
stricter tenets of Calvinism, which allow no medium between grace
and reprobation, and doom man to eternal punishment for every breach
of the moral law, as an equal offence against Infinite truth and
justice, proceed (like the paradoxical doctrine of the Stoics), from
taking a half-view of this subject, and considering man as amenable
only to the dictates of his understanding and his conscience, and
not excusable from the temptations and frailty of human ignorance
and passion. The mixing up of religion and morality together, or
the making us accountable for every word, thought, or action, under
no less a responsibility than our everlasting future welfare or
misery, has also added incalculably to the difficulties of self-
knowledge, has superinduced a violent and spurious state of feeling,
and made it almost impossible to distinguish the boundaries between
the true and false, in judging of human conduct and motives. A
religious man is afraid of looking into the state of his soul, lest
at the same time he should reveal it to heaven; and tries to
persuade himself that by shutting his eyes to his true character and
feelings, they will remain a profound secret, both here and
hereafter."
{53} This was one of the passages which Milverton afterwards read to
us:-
"Thus, however much may be gained for the world as a whole by this
fragmentary cultivation, it is not to be denied that the individuals
whom it befalls are cursed for the benefit of the world. An
athletic frame, it is true, is fashioned by gymnastic exercises; but
a form of beauty only by free and uniform action. Just so the
exertions of single talents can create extraordinary men indeed; but
happy and perfect men only by their uniform temperature. And in
what relation should we stand, then, to the past and coming ages, if
the cultivation of human nature made necessary such a sacrifice? We
should have been the slaves of humanity, and drudged for her century
after century, and stamped upon our mutilated natures the
humiliating traces of our bondage--that the coming race might nurse
its moral healthfulness in blissful leisure, and unfold the free
growth of its humanity!
"But can it be intended that man should neglect himself for any
particular design? Ought Nature to deprive us, by its design, of a
perfection which Reason, by its own, prescribes to us? Then it must
be false that the development of single faculties makes the
sacrifice of totality necessary; or, if indeed the law of Nature
presses thus heavily, it becomes us to restore, by a higher art,
this totality in our nature which art has destroyed."--The
Philosophical and AEsthetical Letters and Essays of SCHILLER,
Translated by J. WEISS, pp. 74, 75.
{93} Madame Necker de Saussure's maxim about firmness with children
has suggested the above. "Ce que plie ne peut servir d'appui, et
l'enfant veut etre appuye. Non-seulement il en a besoin, mais il le
desire, mais sa tendresse la plus constante n'est qu'a ce prix. Si
vous lui faites l'effet d'un autre enfant, si vous partagez ses
passions, ses vacillations continuelles, si vous lui rendez tous ses
mouvements en les augmentant, soit par la contrariete, soit par un
exces de complaisance, il pourra se servir de vous comme d'un jouet,
mais non etre heureux en votre presence; il pleurera, se mutinera,
et bientot le souvenir d'un temps de desordre et d'humeur se liera
avec votre idee. Vous n'avez pas ete le soutien de votre enfant,
vous ne l'avez pas preserve de cette fluctuation perpetuelle de la
volonte, maladie des etres faibles et livres a une imagination vive;
vous n'avez assure ni sa paix, ni sa sagesse, ni son bonheur,
pourquoi vous croirait-il sa mere."--L'Education Progressive, vol.
i., p. 228.
{116a} See Health of Towns Report, vol. i., p. 336. A similar
result may be deduced from a similar table made by the Rev. J. Clay,
of Preston. See the same Report and vol., p. 175.
{116b} See Health of Towns Report, vol. i., p. 75.
{117a} See Dr. Arnott's letter, Claims of Labour, p. 282.
{117b} By zinc ventilators, for instance, in the windows and
openings into the flues at the top of the rooms. See Health of
Towns Report, 1844, vol. i., pp. 76, 77. Mr. Coulhart's evidence.-
-Ibid., pp. 307, 308.
{117c} There are several thousand gratings to sewers and drains
which are utterly useless on account of their position, and
positively injurious from their emanations.--Mr. Guthrie's
evidence.--Ibid., vol. ii., p. 255.
{118} Mr. Wood states that the masters and mistresses were generally
ignorant of the depressing and unhealthy effects of the atmosphere
which surrounded them, and he mentions the case of the mistress of a
dame-school who replied, when he pointed out this to her, "that the
children thrived best in dirt!"--Health of Towns Report, vol. i.,
pp. 146, 147.
{126} See "The Fair Maid of Perth."
{161} See "Health of Towns Report," 1844, vol. i., p. 44.
{183} Bacon, de Augmentis Scientiarum.
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