A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 13

"Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteenpence a day, but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will not suffice." And _thence_ do you infer the superiority of sense over phantasy? Shallow reasoning! G.o.d who made the soul of man of sufficient capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby a foretaste of our immortality.

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113.

"Faith in the _hereafter_ is as necessary for the intellectual as the moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence."-_Southey._

Goethe did not think so. "Genutzt dem Augenblick," "_Use_ the present,"

was _his_ favourite maxim; and always this notion of sacrificing or slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past and lay the foundation for the future.

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114.

"Je allseitigen, je individueller," is a beautiful significant phrase, quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that mind becomes.

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115.

"I wonder," said C., "that facts should be called _stubborn_ things." I wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent a fact into twenty different forms. "Il n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi facilement que les faits,"-Nothing so _tractable_ as facts,-said Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,-or as one should say, mere matter of fact,-you can modify them to a purpose, turn them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling, and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing.

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116.

Every human being is born to influence some other human being; or many, or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the sympathies, rather than of the intellect.

It was said, and very beautifully said, that "one man's wit becomes all men's wisdom." Even more true is it that one man's virtue becomes a standard which raises our antic.i.p.ation of possible goodness in all men.

117.

It is curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet be much more retentive of feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember with such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it seems even to renew itself through the medium of thought; yet, at the same time, we perhaps find difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the causes of that pain.

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118.

"Truth has never manifested itself to me in such a broad stream of light as seems to be poured upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my mental eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star in a storm, now appearing for a moment with a beauty that enraptured, now lost in such clouds, as, had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous clear sight had been a delusion."-_Blanco White._

Very exquisite in the aptness as well as poetry of the comparison! Some walk by daylight, some walk by starlight. Those who see the sun do not see the stars; those who see the stars do not see the sun.

He says in another place:-

"I am averse to too much activity of the imagination on the future life.

I hope to die full of confidence that no evil awaits me: but any picture of a future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of existence were already an insupportable burden on my soul."

How characteristic of that la.s.situde of the soul and sickness of the heart which "asks not happiness, but longs for rest!"

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119.

"Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their fame when G.o.d hath commanded them to stand on high for an example."

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120.

Carlyle thus apostrophised a celebrated orator, who abused his gift of eloquence to insincere purposes of vanity, self-interest, and expediency:-"You blasphemous scoundrel! G.o.d gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a m.u.f.fin-man's bell!"

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121.

I think, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks this is too _young_ a feeling, and that as the truth is sure to conquer in the end, it is not worth while to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into every infected hole. Perhaps not, so far as we are ourselves concerned; but we should think of others. While secure in our own antidote, or wise in our own caution, we should not leave the miasma to poison the healthful, or the briars to entangle the unwary. There is no occasion perhaps for truth to sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every vizor, but neither should she sit self-a.s.sured in her tower of strength, leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the blind to fall into.

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122.

"There is a way to separate memory from imagination-we may narrate without painting. I am convinced that the mind can employ certain indistinct signs to represent even its most vivid impressions; that instead of picture writing, it can use something like algebraic symbols: such is the language of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has pa.s.sed, and the wounds it received formerly are skinned over, not healed:-it is a language very opposite to that used by the poet and the novel-writer."-_Blanco White._

True; but a language in which the soul can converse only with itself; or else a language more conventional than words, and like paper as a tender for gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified. There is a proverb we have heard quoted: "Speech is silver, silence is golden." But better is the silver diffused than the talent of gold buried.

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123.

However distinguished and gifted, mentally and morally, we find that in conduct and in our external relations with, society there is ever a levelling influence at work. Seldom in our relations with the world, and in the ordinary commerce of life, are the best and highest within us brought forth; for the whole system of social intercourse is levelling.

As it is said that law knows no distinction of persons but that which it has itself inst.i.tuted; so of society it may be said, that it allows of no distinction but those which it can recognise-external distinctions.

We hear it said that general society-the _world_, as it is called-and a public school, are excellent educators; because in one the man, in the other the boy, "finds, as the phrase is, his own level." He does not; he finds the level of others. _That_ may be good for those below mediocrity, but for those above it _bad_: and it is for those we should most care, for if once brought down in early life by the levelling influence of numbers, they seldom rise again, or only partially. Nothing so dangerous as to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what is beneath us, feeling our superiority to that which we force ourselves to a.s.similate to. This has been the perdition of many a schoolboy and many a man.

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124.