Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books Part 22

MY DEAR LORD,

I thank you with all my heart for the gift of your book,[41] and yet more for the kindly inscription, which affected me much.

[Footnote 41: _The Book of Job_, translated from the Hebrew Text by John, Bishop of Fredericton.]

As one gets older one feels distance--or whatever parts one from people one cares for--worse and worse, I think!--However, whatever helps to remedy the separation is all the dearer!

I had devoured enough of your notes, to have laughed more than once and almost to have heard you speak, before I moved from the chair in which the book found me, and had read all the Introduction. I could HEAR you say that "Bildad uttered a few trusims in a pompous tone"!

What I have read of your version seems to me grand, bits here and there I certainly had never felt the poetical power of before. Rex will be delighted with it!

I fully receive all you say about Satan and the Sons of G.o.d. But I think a certain painfulness about such portions of Holy Writ--does not come from (1) Unwillingness to lay one's hand upon one's mouth and be silent before G.o.d. (2) Or difficulty about the Personality of Satan. I fancy it is because in spite of oneself it is painful that one of the rare liftings of the Great Veil between us and the "ways" of the Majesty of G.o.d should disclose a scene of such petty features--a sort of wrangling and experimentalizing, that it would be _pleasanter_ to be able to believe was a parable brought home to our vulgar understandings rather than a real vision of the Lord our Strength.

I am, my dear Lord, Your grateful and ever affectionate old friend, J.H.E.

TO J.H.E.

_Fredericton._ April 8, 1880.

MY DEAR MRS. EWING,

I will not let the mail go out without proving that I am not a bad correspondent, and without thanking you for your delightful letter.

Oh! why don't you squeeze yourself sometimes into that funny little house opposite Miss Bailey's, and let me take a cup of tea off the cushions, or some other place where the books would allow it to be put? And why don't you allow me to stumble over my German? And why doesn't Rex, Esq. (for Rex is too familiar even for a Bishop) correct my musical efforts? How terrible this word _past_ is! The past is at all events _real_, but the future is so shadowy, and like the ghosts of Ulysses it entirely eludes one's grasp. I speak of course of things that belong to this life. It was (I a.s.sure you) a treat to lay hold of you and your letters, and (a minor consideration) to find that even your handwriting had not degenerated, and had not become like spiders'

legs dipped in ink and crawling on the paper, as is the case of some nameless correspondents. There was only one word I could not make out.

In personal appearance the letters stood thus, _[Greek: us]_. It looks like "us," or like the Greek _[Greek: un]_, which being interpreted is "pig." But M----, who is far cleverer than I am, at once oracularly p.r.o.nounced it "very," and I believe her and you too....

I was greatly tickled in your getting _amus.e.m.e.nt_ out of "Job," the last book where one would have expected to find it; but stop--I recollect it is out of _me_, not the patriarch, that you find something to smile at, and no doubt you are right, for no doubt I say ridiculous things sometimes. _Au serieux_, it pleases me much that you enter into my little book, and evidently have _read_ it, for I have had complimentary letters from people who plainly had not read a word, and to the best of my belief never will. I wish you had been more critical, and had pointed out the faults and defects of the book, of which there are no doubt some, if not many, to be found. I flatter myself that I have made more clear some pa.s.sages utterly unintelligible in our A.V., such as, "He shall deliver the island of the innocent, yea," etc., chap. xxii. 30, and chap, x.x.xvi. 33, and the whole of chap. xxiv. and chap. xx. What a fierce, cruel, hot-headed Arab Zophar is! How the wretch gloats over Job's miseries. Yet one admires his word-painting while one longs to kick him! I am glad to see the _Church Times_ agrees with me in the early character of the book. There is not a trace in it of later Jewish history or feeling.

The argument on the other side is derived from Aramaic words only, which words are not unsuitable to a writer who either lived, _or had lived_ out of Palestine, and scholars agree now that they may belong either to a very late or a very early time, and are used by people familiar with the cognate languages of the East.

A word about your very natural feeling on the subject of Satan. I suppose that Inspiration does not interfere with the character of mind belonging to the inspired person. The writer thinks Orientally, within the range of thought common to the age, and patriarchal knowledge, so that he could neither think nor write as S. Paul or S. John, even though inspired. We criticize his writing (when we do criticize it) from the standpoint of the nineteenth century, _i.e._ from the acc.u.mulated knowledge, successive revelations, and refined civilization of several thousand years.

Its extreme simplicity of description may appear to us trivial. But is not the fact indubitable that G.o.d tries us as He did Job, though by different methods? And is not our Lord's expression, "whom Satan hath bound, lo! these eighteen years," and S. Paul's, "to deliver such an one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh," a.n.a.logous to the account in Job? One has only to try to transfer oneself to the patriarchal age, when there was no Bible, no Lord Jesus come in the flesh, but when at intervals divine revelations were given by personal manifestations and then withdrawn, and to take out of oneself all one has known about G.o.d from a child, to view the account as an Oriental would look at it, not as a Western Christian. The "experiment" (so to speak) involves one of the grandest questions in the world--Is religion only a refined selfishness, or is there such a thing as real faith and love of G.o.d, apart from any temporal reward? The devil a.s.serts the negative and so (observe) do Job's so-called friends; but Job proves the affirmative, and hence amidst certain unadvised expressions he (in the main) speaks of G.o.d the thing that is right.

I do not know that there is in the early chapters anything that can be called "petty," more than in the speech of the devils to our Lord, and His suffering them to go into the swine.

We must, however, beware that we do not, when we say "petty," merely mean at bottom what is altogether different from our ordinary notions, formed by daily and general experience of life, as we ourselves find it.

All this long yarn, and not a word about your health, which is shameful. We both do heartily rejoice that you are better, and only hope for everybody's sake and your own, you will nurse and husband your strength....

Your affectionate old friend, JOHN FREDERICTON.

TO A.E.

April 10, 1880.

The night before last I dined with Jean Ingelow. I went in to dinner with Alfred Hunt (a water-colour painter to whose work Ruskin is devoted). A _very_ unaffected, intelligent, agreeable man; we had a very pleasant chat. On my other side sat a dear old Arctic Explorer, old _Ray_. I fell quite in love with him, and with the nice Scotch accent that overtook him when he got excited. Born and bred in the Orkneys, almost, as he said, _in the sea_; this wild boyhood of familiarity with winds and waves, and storms and sports, was the beginning of the life of adventure and exploration he has led. He told me some very interesting things about Sir John Franklin. He said that great and good as he was there were qualities which he had not, the lack of which he believed cost him his life. He said Sir John went well and gallantly at his end, if he could keep to the lines he had laid down; but he had not "fertility of resource for the unforeseen,"

and didn't _adapt_ himself. As an instance, he said, he always made his carriers _march_ along a given line. If stores were at A, and the point to be reached B, by the straight line from A to B he would send the local men he had _hired_ through bog and over boulder, whereas if he said to any of them, "B is the place you must meet me at," with the knowledge of natives and the instinct of savages they would have gone with half the labour and twice the speed. He said too that Franklin's party suffered terribly because none of his officers were _sportsmen_, which, he said, simply means starvation if your stores fail you. We had a long talk about scientific men and their _deductions_, and he said quaintly, "Ye see, I've just had a lot of rough expeerience from me childhood; and things have happened now and again that make me not just put implicit faith in all scientific dicta. I must tell you, Mrs. Ewing, that when I was a young man, and just back from America and the Arctic Regions, where I'd lived and hunted from a mere laddie, I went to a lecture delivered by one of the verra _first_ men of the day (whose name for that reason I won't give to ye) before some three thousand listeners and the late Prince Consort; and there on the table was the head and antlers of a male reindeer--beasts that, as I'm telling ye, I knew _sentimately_, and had killed at all seasons. And this man, who, as I'm telling ye, was one of the verra furrrst men of the day (which is the reason why I'm not giving ye his name) spoke on, good and bad, and then he said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, and your Royal Highness, be good enough to look at the head of this Reindeer. Here ye see the antlers,' and so forth, 'and ye'll obsairve that there's a horn that has the shape of a shovel and protrudes over the beast's eyes in a way that must be horribly inconvenient. But when ye see its shape, ye'll perceive one of the most beautiful designs of Providence, a _proveesion_ as we may say; for this inconvenient horn is so shaped that with it the beast can shovel away the deep winter snow and find its accustomed food.'

"And when I heard this I just shook with laughing till a man I knew saw me, and asked what I was laughing at, and I said, 'Because I happen to know that the male reindeer _sheds its antlers_ every year in the beginning of November, _snow shovel_ and all, and does not resume them till spring.'"!!!!!!

April 26, 1880.

Curious your writing to me about Dante's h.e.l.l--and Lethe. Two books in my childhood gave the outward and visible signs of that inward and spiritual interest in Death and the Life to Come which is one of the most vehement ones of childhood (and which breaks out QUITE as strongly in those who have been carefully brought up apart from "religious convictions" as in those whose minds have been soaked in them). One was Flaxman's _Dante_, the other Selous's ill.u.s.trations in the same style to the _Pilgrim's Progress_. I do not know whether I suffered more in my childhood than other children. Possibly, as my head was a good deal too big for my body! But I remember two troubles that haunted me. One that I should get tired of Eternity. Another that I couldn't be happy in Heaven unless I could _forget_. And in this latter connection I loved indescribably one of Flaxman's best designs.

[_Sketch._] I can't remember it well enough to draw decently, but this was the att.i.tude of Dante whom Beatrice was just laving in the Waters of Forgetfulness before they entered Paradise.

And even more fond was I of the pa.s.sing of the great river by Christiana and her children, and by that mixed company of the brave and the weak, the young and the old, the gentle and the impatient,--and that grand touch by which the "Mr. Ready-to-Halt" of the long Pilgrimage crossed the waters of Death without fear or fainting.

Why should you think I should differ with Dante in his estimate of sin? I doubt if I could rearrange his Circles, except that "l.u.s.t" is a wide word, as = Pa.s.sion I should probably leave it where it is; but there are hideous forms of it which are inextricably mingled, if not identical with Cruelty,--and Cruelty I should put at the lowest round of all.

_Clyst S. George._ April 30, 1880.

We have had rather a chaff with Mr. Ellacombe (who in his ninety-first year is as keen a gardener as ever!) because he has many strange sorts of _Fritillary_, and when I told him I had seen and gone wild over a sole-coloured pale yellow one which I saw exhibited in the Horticultural Gardens, he simply put me down--"No, my dear, there's no such thing; there's a white Fritillary I can show you outside, and there's _Fritillaria Lutea_ which is yellow and spotted, but there's no such plant as you describe." Still it evidently made him restless, and he kept relating anecdotes of how people are always sending him _shaves_ about flowers. "I'd a letter the other day, my dear, to describe a white Crown Imperial--a thing that has _never been_!" Later he announced--"I have written to Barr and Sugden--'Gentlemen! Here's another White Elephant. A lady has seen a sole-coloured Yellow Fritillary!'"

This morning B. and S. wrote back, and are obliged to confess that "a yellow Fritillary has been produced," but (not being the producers) they add, "It is not a good yellow." _Pour moi_, I take leave to judge of colours as well as Barr and Sugden, and can a.s.sure you it is a very lovely yellow, pale and chrome-y. It has been like a chapter out of Alphonse Karr!

One of the horticultural papers is just about to publish Mr.

Ellacombe's old list of the things he has grown in his own garden.

Three thousand species!

I hope you liked that _Daily Telegraph_ article on the Back Gardener I sent you? It is really fine workmanship in the writing line as well as being amusing. I abuse the Press often enough, but I will say such Essays (for they well deserve the name) are a great credit to the age--in Penny Dailies!!!

"The Nursery Nonsense of the Birds," "A Stratified Chronology of Occupancies," "Waves of Whims," etc., etc., are the work of a man who can use his tools with a master's hand, or at least a _skilled_ worker's!

I am reading another French novel, by Daudet, _Jack_. So far (as I have got) it is marvellous _writing_. "Le pet.i.t Roi--Dahomey" in the school "des pays chauds" is a d.i.c.kenesque character, but quite marvellous--his fate--his "gri-gri"--his final Departure to the land where all things are so "made new" that "the former" do not "come into mind"--having in that supreme hour _forgotten_ alike his sufferings, his tormentors, and his friends--and only babbling in Dahomeian in that last dream in which his spirit returned to its first earthly home before "going home" for Good!--is superb!!! The possible meanness and brutality of civilized man in Paris--the possible grandeur and obvious immortality of the smallest, youngest, "gri-gri" worshipping n.i.g.g.e.r of Dahomey oh it is wonderful altogether, and I should fancy SUCH a sketch of the _incompris_ poet and the rest of the clique!! "_C'est_ LUI."