The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's Part 9

"His understanding having totally failed soon after these melancholy expressions of grief and affection, his first state was that of violent and furious lunacy. His estate was put under the management of trustees, and his person confided to the care of Dr. Lyons, a respectable clergyman, curate to the Rev. Robert King, prebendary of Dunlavin, one of Swift's executors. This gentleman discharged his melancholy task with great fidelity, being much and gratefully attached to the object of his care. From a state of outrageous frenzy, aggravated by severe bodily suffering, the ill.u.s.trious Dean of St. Patrick's sank into the situation of a helpless changeling. In the course of about three years he is only known to have spoken once or twice. At length, when this awful moral lesson had subsisted from 1743 until the 19th of October, 1745, it pleased G.o.d to release him from this calamitous situation. He died upon that day without a single pang, so gently that his attendants were scarce aware of the moment of his dissolution."

Swift was seventy-eight years of age at the time of his death, having outlived all his contemporaries of the Queen Anne cl.u.s.ter of wits, with the exception of Bolingbroke, Ambrose Philips, and Cibber. Congreve had died in 1729; Steele in the same year; Defoe in 1731; Gay in 1732; Arbuthnot in 1735; Tickell in 1740; and Pope, who was Swift's junior by twenty-one years, in 1744. Swift, therefore, is ent.i.tled in our literary histories to the place of patriarch as well as to that of chief among the Wits of Queen Anne's reign; and he stands nearest to our own day of any of them whose writings we still read. As late as the year 1820 a person was alive who had seen Swift as he lay dead in the deanery before his burial, great crowds going to take their last look of him. "The coffin was open; he had on his head neither cap nor wig; there was not much hair on the front or very top, but it was long and thick behind, very white, and was like flax upon the pillow." Such is the last glimpse we have of Swift on earth. Exactly ninety years afterwards the coffin was taken up from its resting-place in the aisle of the cathedral; and the skull of Swift, the white locks now all mouldered away from it, became an object of scientific curiosity. Phrenologically, it was a disappointment, the extreme lowness of the forehead striking everyone, and the so-called organs of wit, causality, and comparison being scarcely developed at all.

There were peculiarities, however, in the shape of the interior, indicating larger capacity of brain than would have been inferred from the external aspect. Stella's coffin was exhumed, and her skull examined at the same time. The examiners found the skull "a perfect model of symmetry and beauty."

Have we said too much in declaring that of all the men who ill.u.s.trated that period of our literary history which lies between the Revolution of 1688 and the beginning or middle of the reign of George II. Swift alone (Pope excepted, and he only on certain definite and peculiar grounds) fulfils to any tolerable extent those conditions which would ent.i.tle him to the epithet of "great," already refused to his age as a whole? We do not think so. Swift _was_ a great genius; nay, if by _greatness_ we understand general ma.s.s and energy rather than any preconceived peculiarity of quality, he was the greatest genius of his age. Neither Addison, nor Steele, nor Pope, nor Defoe, possessed, in anything like the same degree, that which Goethe and Niebuhr, seeking a name for a certain attribute found often present, as they thought, in the higher and more forcible order of historic characters, agreed to call the _demonic_ element. Indeed very few men in our literature, from first to last, have had so much of this element in them--perhaps the sign and source of all real greatness--as Swift. In him it was so obvious as to attract notice at once. "There is something in your looks," wrote Vanessa to him, "so awful that it strikes me dumb;" and again, "Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious awe I tremble with fear;" and again, "What marks are there of a deity that you are not known by?" True, these are the words of a woman infatuated with love; but there is evidence that, wherever Swift went, and in whatever society he was, there was this magnetic power in his presence.

Pope felt it; Addison felt it; they all felt it. We question if, among all our literary celebrities, from first to last, there has been one more distinguished for being personally formidable to all who came near him.

And yet, in calling Swift a great genius, we clearly do not mean to rank him in the same order of greatness with such men among his predecessors as Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Milton, or such men among his successors as Scott, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. We even retain instinctively the right of not according to him a certain kind of admiration which we bestow on such men of his own generation as Pope, Steele, and Addison. How is this?

What is the drawback about Swift's genius which prevents us from referring him to that highest order of literary greatness to which we do refer others who in respect of hard general capacity were apparently not superior to him, and on the borders of which we also place some who in that respect were certainly his inferiors? To make the question more special, why do we call Milton great in quite a different sense from that in which we consent to confer the same epithet on Swift?

Altogether, it will be said, Milton was a greater man than Swift; his intellect was higher, richer, deeper, grander, his views of things were more profound, grave, stately, and exalted. This is a true enough statement of the case; and one likes that comprehensive use of the word intellect which it implies, wrapping up, as it were, all that is in and about a man in this one word, so as to dispense with the distinctions between imaginative and non-imaginative, spiritual and unspiritual natures, and make every possible question about a man a mere question in the end as to the size or degree of his intellect. But such a mode of speaking is too violent and recondite for common purposes. According to the common use of the word intellect, it might be maintained (we do not say it would) that Swift's intellect, his strength of mental grasp, was equal to Milton's, and yet that, by reason of the fact that his intellectual style was different, or that he did not grasp things precisely in the Miltonic way, a distinction might be drawn unfavourable to his genius as compared with that of Milton. According to such a view, we must seek for that in Swift's genius upon which it depends that, while we accord to it all the admiration we bestow on strength, our sympathies with height or sublimity are left unmoved. Nor have we far to seek. When Goethe and Niebuhr generalized in the phrase "the demonic element" that mystic something which they seemed to detect in men of unusual potency among their fellows, they used the word "demonic," not in its English sense, as signifying what appertains specially to the demons or powers of darkness, but in its Greek sense, as equally implying the unseen agencies of light and good. The demonic element in a man, therefore, may in one case be the demonic of the etherial and celestial, in another the demonic of the Tartarean and infernal. There is a demonic of the _super_natural--angels, and seraphs, and white-winged airy messengers, swaying men's phantasies from above; and there is a demonic of the _infra_-natural--fiends and shapes of horror tugging at men's thoughts from beneath. The demonic in Swift was of the latter kind. It is false, it would be an entire mistake as to his genius, to say that he regarded, or was inspired by, only the worldly and the secular--that men, women, and their relations in the little world of visible life, were all that his intellect cared to recognise. He also, like our Miltons and our Shakespeares, and all our men who have been anything more than prudential and pleasant writers, had his being anch.o.r.ed in things and imaginations beyond the visible verge. But, while it was given to them to hold rather by things and imaginations belonging to the region of the celestial, to hear angelic music and the rustling of seraphic wings, it was his unhappier lot to be related rather to the darker and subterranean mysteries. One might say of Swift that he had far less of belief in a G.o.d than of belief in a Devil. He is like a man walking on the earth and among the busy haunts of his fellow-mortals, observing them and their ways, and taking his part in the bustle, all the while, however, conscious of the tuggings downward of secret chains reaching into the world of the demons.

Hence his ferocity, his misanthropy, his _sva indignatio_, all of them true forms of energy, imparting unusual potency to a life, but forms of energy bred of communion with what outlies nature on the lower or infernal side.

Swift, doubtless, had this melancholic tendency in him const.i.tutionally from the beginning. From the first we see him an unruly, rebellious, gloomy, revengeful, unforgiving spirit, loyal to no authority, and gnashing under every restraint. With nothing small or weak in his nature, too proud to be dishonest, bold and fearless in his opinions, capable of strong attachments and of hatred as strong, it was to be predicted that, if the swarthy Irish youth, whom Sir William Temple received into his house when his college had all but expelled him for contumacy, should ever be eminent in the world, it would be for fierce and controversial, and not for beautiful or harmonious, activity. It is clear, however, on a survey of Swift's career, that the gloom and melancholy which characterized it were not altogether congenital, but, in part at least, grew out of some special circ.u.mstance, or set of circ.u.mstances, having a precise date and locality among the facts of his life. In other words, there was some secret in Swift's life, some root of bitterness or remorse, diffusing a black poison throughout his whole existence. That communion with the invisible almost exclusively on the infernal side--that consciousness of chains wound round his own moving frame at the one end, and at the other held by demons in the depths of their populous pit, while no cords of love were felt sustaining him from the countervailing heaven--had its origin, in part at least, in some one recollection or cause of dread. It was some one demon down in that pit that held the chains; the others but a.s.sisted him. Thackeray's perception seems to us exact when he says of Swift that "he goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil;" or again, changing the form of the figure, that "like Abudah, in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the night will come, and the inevitable hag with it." What was this Fury, this hag that duly came in the night, making the mornings horrible by the terrors of recollection, the evenings horrible by those of antic.i.p.ation, and leaving but a calm hour at full mid-day? There was a secret in Swift's life: what was it? His biographers as yet have failed to agree on this dark topic. Thackeray's hypothesis, that the cause of Swift's despair was chiefly his consciousness of disbelief in the creed to which he had sworn his professional faith, does not seem to us sufficient. In Swift's days, and even with his frank nature, we think that difficulty could have been got over. There was nothing, at least, so unique in the case as to justify the supposition that this was what Archbishop King referred to in that memorable saying to Dr. Delany, "You have just met the most miserable man on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question." Had Swift made a confession of scepticism to the Archbishop, we do not think the prelate would have been taken so very much by surprise.

Nor can we think, with some, that Swift's vertigo (now p.r.o.nounced to have been increasing congestion of the brain), and his life-long certainty that it would end in idiocy or madness, are the true explanation of this interview and of the mystery which it shrouds. There was cause enough for melancholy here, but not exactly the cause that meets the case. Another hypothesis there is of a physical kind, which Scott and others hint at, and which finds great acceptance with the medical philosophers. Swift, it is said, was of "a cold temperament," &c., &c. But why a confession on the part of Swift that he was not a marriageable man, even had he added that he desired, above all things in the world, to be a person of that sort, should have so moved the heart of an Archbishop as to make him shed tears, one cannot conceive. Besides, although this hypothesis might explain much of the Stella and Vanessa imbroglio, it would not explain all; nor do we see on what foundation it could rest. Scott's a.s.sertion that all through Swift's writings there is no evidence of his having felt the tender pa.s.sion is simply untrue. On the whole, the hypothesis which has been started of a too near consanguinity between Swift and Stella, either known from the first to one or both, or discovered too late, would most nearly suit the conditions of the case. And yet, as far as we have seen, this hypothesis also rests on air, with no one fact to support it. Could we suppose that Swift, like another Eugene Aram, went through the world with a murder on his mind, it might be taken as a solution of the mystery; but, as we cannot do this, we must be content with supposing that either some one of the foregoing hypotheses, or some combination of them, is to be accepted, or that the matter is altogether inscrutable.

Such by const.i.tution as we have described him--with an intellect strong as iron, much acquired knowledge, an ambition all but insatiable, and a decided desire to be wealthy--Swift, almost as a matter of course, flung himself impetuously into that Whig and Tory controversy which was the question paramount in his time. In that he laboured as only a man of his powers could, bringing to the side of the controversy on which he chanced to be (and we believe when he was on a side it was honestly because he found a certain preponderance of right in it) a hard and ruthless vigour which served it immensely. But from the first, or at all events after the disappointments of a political career had been experienced by him, his nature would not work merely in the narrow warfare of Whiggism and Toryism, but overflowed in general bitterness of reflection on all the customs and ways of humanity. The following pa.s.sage in _Gulliver's Voyage to Brobdingnag_, describing how the politics of Europe appeared to the King of Brobdingnag, shows us Swift himself in his larger mood of thought.

"This prince took a pleasure in conversing with me, inquiring into the manners, religion, laws, government, and learning of Europe; wherein I gave him the best account I was able. His apprehension was so clear, and his judgment so exact, that he made very wise reflections and observations upon all I said. But I confess that, after I had been a little too copious in talking of my own beloved country, of our trade, and wars by sea and land, of our schisms in religion and parties in the state, the prejudices of his education prevailed so far that he could not forbear taking me up in his right hand, and, stroking me gently with the other, after a hearty fit of laughing asking me whether _I_ was a Whig or Tory. Then, turning to his first minister, who waited behind him with a white staff nearly as tall as the mainmast of the 'Royal Sovereign,' he observed how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I; 'And yet,' says he, 'I dare engage these creatures have their t.i.tles and distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray.' And thus he continued on, while my colour came and went several times with indignation to hear our n.o.ble country, the mistress of arts and arms, the scourge of France, the arbitress of Europe, the seat of virtue, piety, honour, truth, the pride and envy of the world, so contemptuously treated."

Swift's writings, accordingly, divide themselves, in the main, into two cla.s.ses,--pamphlets, tracts, lampoons, and the like, bearing directly on persons and topics of the day, and written with the ordinary purpose of a partisan; and satires of a more general aim, directed, in the spirit of a cynic philosopher, against humanity on the whole, or against particular human cla.s.ses, arrangements, and modes of thinking. In some of his writings the politician and the general satirist are seen together. The _Drapier's Letters_ and most of the poetical lampoons exhibit Swift in his direct character as a party-writer; in the _Tale of a Tub_ we have the ostensible purpose of a partisan masking a reserve of general scepticism; in the _Battle of the Books_ we have a satire partly personal to individuals, partly with a reference to a prevailing tone of opinion; in the _Voyage to Laputa_ we have a satire on a great cla.s.s of men; and in the _Voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag_, and still more in the story of the _Houyhnhnms_ and _Yahoos_, we have human nature itself a.n.a.lysed and laid bare.

Swift took no care of his writings, never acknowledged some of them, never collected them, and suffered them to find their way about the world as chance, demand, and the piracy of publishers, directed. As all know, it is in his character as a humourist, an inventor of the preposterous as a medium for the reflective, and above all as a master of irony, that he takes his place as one of the chiefs of English literature. There can be no doubt that, as regards the literary form which he affected most, he took hints from Rabelais as the greatest original in the realm of the absurd. Sometimes, as in his description of the Strulbrugs in the _Voyage to Laputa_, he approaches the ghastly power of that writer; but on the whole there is more of stern English realism in him, and less of sheer riot and wildness. Sometimes, however, Swift throws off the disguise of the humourist, and speaks seriously and in his own name. On such occasions we find ourselves in the presence of a man of strong, sagacious, and thoroughly English mind, content, as is the habit of most Englishmen, with vigorous proximate sense, expressed in plain and rather coa.r.s.e idiom. For the speculative he shows in these cases neither liking nor apt.i.tude: he takes obvious reasons and arguments as they come to hand, and uses them in a robust, downright, Saxon manner. In one respect he stands out conspicuously even among plain Saxon writers--his total freedom from cant.

Johnson's advice to Boswell, "above all things to clear his mind of cant,"

was perhaps never better ill.u.s.trated than in the case of Dean Swift.

Indeed, it might be given as a summary definition of Swift's character that he had cleared his mind of cant without having succeeded in filling the void with song. It was Swift's intense hatred of cant--cant in religion, cant in morality, cant in literature--that occasioned many of those peculiarities which shock people in his writings. His principle being to view things as they are, with no regard to the acc.u.mulated cant of orators and poets, he naturally prosecuted his investigations into those cla.s.ses of facts which orators and poets have omitted as unsuitable for their purposes. If they had viewed men as Angels, he would view them as Yahoos. If they had placed the springs of action among the fine phrases and the sublimities, he would trace them down into their secret connections with the b.e.s.t.i.a.l and the obscene. Hence, as much as for any of those physiological reasons which some of his biographers a.s.sign for it, his undisguised delight in filth. And hence, also, probably--since among the forms of cant he included the traditional manner of speaking of women in their relations to men--his studious contempt, whether in writing for men or for women, of all the accustomed decencies. It was not only the more obvious forms of cant, however, that Swift had in aversion. Even to that minor form of cant which consists in the "trite" he gave no quarter.

Whatever was habitually said by the majority of people seemed to him, for that very reason, not worthy of being said at all, much less put into print. A considerable portion of his writings, as, for example, his _Tritical Essay on the Faculties of the Mind_, and his _Art of Polite Conversation_--in the one of which he strings together a series of the most threadbare maxims and quotations to be found in books, offering the compilation as a gravely original disquisition, while in the other he imitates the insipidity of ordinary table-talk in society--may be regarded as showing a systematic determination on his part to turn the trite into ridicule. Hence, in his own writings, though he refrains from the profound, he never falls into the commonplace. Apart from Swift's other views, there are to be found scattered through his writings not a few distinct propositions of an innovative character respecting our social arrangements. We have seen his doctrine as to the education of women; and we may mention, as another instance of the same kind, his denunciation of the system of standing armies as incompatible with freedom. Curiously enough, also, it was Swift's belief that, Yahoos though we are, the world is always in the right.

HOW LITERATURE MAY ILl.u.s.tRATE HISTORY.

HOW LITERATURE MAY ILl.u.s.tRATE HISTORY.[8]

Some of the ways in which Literature may ill.u.s.trate History are obvious enough. In the poems, the songs, the dramas, the novels, the satires, the speeches, even the speculative treatises, of any time or nation, there is imbedded a wealth of direct particulars respecting persons and events, additional to the information that has been transmitted in the formal records of that time or nation, or in its express histories of itself. "It has often come to my ears that it is a saying too frequently in your mouth that you have lived long enough for yourself:" so did Cicero, if the speech in which the pa.s.sage occurs is really his, address Csar face to face, in the height of his power, and not long before his a.s.sa.s.sination, remonstrating with him on his melancholy, and his carelessness of a life so precious to Rome and to the world. If the words are any way authentic, what a flash they are into the mind of the great Roman in his last years, when, _blas_ with wars and victories, and all the sensations that the largest life on earth could afford, he walked about the streets of Rome, consenting to live on so long as there might be need, but, so far as he himself was concerned, heedless when the end might come, the conspirators in a ring round him, the short scuffle, the first sharp stab of the murderous knife!

Let this pa.s.s as one instance of a valuable ill.u.s.tration of Biography and History derived from casual reading. Literature teems with such: no one can tell what particles of direct historical and biographical information lie yet undiscovered and unappropriated in miscellaneous books. But there is an extension of the use for the historian of the general literature of the time with which he may be concerned. Not only does Literature teem with yet unappropriated anecdotes respecting the persons and events of most prominent interest in the consecutive history of the world; but quite apart from this, the books, and especially the popular books, of any time, are the richest possible storehouses of the kind of information the historian wants. Whatever may be the main thread of his narrative, he has to re-imagine more or less vividly what is called the general life of the time, its manners, customs, humours, ways of thinking, the working of its inst.i.tutions, all the peculiarities of that patch of the never-ending, ever-changing rush and bustle of human affairs, to-day above the ground, and to-morrow under. Well, here in the books of the time he has his materials and aids. They were formed in the conditions of the time; the time played itself into them; they are saturated with its spirit; and costumes, customs, modes of eating and drinking, town-life, country life, the traveller on horseback to his inn, the shoutings of mobs in riot, what grieved them, what they hated, what they laughed at, all are there. No matter of what kind the book is, or what was its author's aim; it is, in spite of itself, a bequest out of the very body and being of that time, reminding us thereof by its structure through and through, and by a crust of innumerable allusions. It has been remarked by Hallam, and by others, how particularly useful in this way for the historian, as furnishing him with social details of past times, are popular books more especially of the humorous order--comic dramas and farces, poems of occasion, and novels and works of prose-fiction generally. How the plays of Aristophanes admit us to the public life of Athens! How, as we read the Satires and Epistles of Horace, we see old Rome, like another huge London, only with taller houses, and the masons mending the houses, and the poet himself, like a modern official in Somerset House, trudging along to his office, jostled by the crowds, and having to get out of the way of the ladders and the falling rubbish, thinking all the while of his appointment with Mcenas!

Or, if it is the reign of George II. in Britain that we are studying, where shall we find better ill.u.s.tration of much of the life, and especially the London life, of that coa.r.s.e, wig-wearing age, than in the novels of Fielding and Smollett?

These, and perhaps other ways in which Literature may ill.u.s.trate History, are tolerably obvious, and need no farther exposition. There is, however, a higher and somewhat more subtle service which Literature may perform towards ill.u.s.trating History and modifying our ideas of the Past.

What the historian chiefly and finally wants to get at, through all his researches, and by all his methods of research, is the _mind_ of the time that interests him, its mode of thinking and feeling. Through all the trappings, all the colours, all the costumes, all those circ.u.mstances of the picturesque which delight us in our recollections of the past, this is what we seek, or ought to seek. The trappings and picturesque circ.u.mstances are but our optical helps in our quest of this; they are the thickets of metaphor through which we push the quest, interpreting as we go. The metaphors resolve themselves; and at last it is as if we had reached that vital and essential something--a clear transparency, we seem to fancy it, and yet a kind of throbbing transparency, a transparency with pulses and powers--which we call the mind or spirit of the time. As in the case of the individual, so in that of a time or a people, we seem to have got at the end of our language when we use this word, mind or spirit. We know what we mean, and it is the last thing that we can mean; but, just on that account, it eludes description or definition. At best we can go to and fro among a few convenient synonyms and images. Soul, mind, spirit, these old and simple words are the strongest, the profoundest, the surest; age cannot antiquate them, nor science undo them; they last with the rocks, and still go beyond. But, having in view rather the operation than the cause, we find a use also in such alternative phrases as "mode of thinking," "mode of feeling and thinking," "habit of thought," "moral and intellectual character or const.i.tution," and the like. Or, again, if we will have an image of that which from its nature is unimaginable, then, in our efforts to be as pure and abstract as possible, we find ourselves driven, as I have said, into a fancy of mind as a kind of clear arial transparency, unbounded or of indefinite bounds, and yet not a dead transparency, but a transparency full of pulses, powers, motions, and whirls, capable in a moment of clouding itself, ceasing to be a transparency, and becoming some strange solid phantasmagory, as of a landscape smiling in sunshine or a sky dark with a storm. Yet again there is another and more mechanical conception of mind which may be of occasional use. The thinking power, the thinking principle, the substance which feels and thinks, are phrases for mind from of old: what if we were to agree, for a momentary advantage, to call mind rudely the thinking apparatus? What the advantage may be will presently appear.

Mind, mode of thinking, mode of thinking and feeling, moral and intellectual const.i.tution, that mystic transparency full of pulses and motions, this thinking apparatus,--whichever phrase or image we adopt, there are certain appertaining considerations which we have to take along with us.

(1.) There is the consideration of differences of degree, quality, and worth. Mind may be great or small, n.o.ble or mean, strong or weak; the mode of thinking of one person or one time may be higher, finer, grander than that of another; the moral and intellectual const.i.tutions of diverse individuals or peoples may present all varieties of the admirable and lovely or the despicable and unlovely; the pulses and motions in that mystic transparency which we fancy as one man's mind may be more vehement, more awful, more rhythmical and musical, than are known in that which we fancy as the mind of some other; the thinking apparatus which A possesses, and by which he performs the business of his life, may be more ma.s.sive, more complex, more exquisite, capable of longer reaches and more superb combinations, than that which has fallen to the lot of B. All this is taken for granted everywhere; all our speech and conduct proceed on the a.s.sumption.

(2.) Somewhat less familiar, but not unimportant, is a consideration which I may express by calling it the necessary instability of mind, its variability from moment to moment. Your mind, my mind, every mind, is continually sustaining modifications, disintegrations, reconstructions, by all that acts upon it, by all it comes to know. We are much in the habit, indeed, of speaking of experience, of different kinds of knowledge, as so much material for the mind--material delivered into it, outspread as it were on its floor, and which it, the lord and master, may survey, let lie there for occasion, and now and then select from and employ. True! but not the whole truth! The mind does not stand amid what it knows, as something distinct and untouched; the mind is actually composed at any one moment of all that it has learnt or felt up to that moment. Every new information received, every piece of knowledge gained, every joy enjoyed, every sorrow suffered, is then and there trans.m.u.ted into mind, and becomes incorporate with the prior central substance. To resort now to that mechanical figure which I said might be found useful: every new piece of information, every fact that one comes to apprehend, every probability brought before one in the course of life, is not only so much new matter for the thinking apparatus to lay hold of and work into the warp and woof of thought; it is actually also a modification of the thinking apparatus itself. The mind thinks _with_ what it knows; and, if you alter the knowledge in any one whit, you alter the thinking instrumentality in proportion. Our whole practice of education is based on this idea, and yet somehow the idea is allowed to lurk. It may be brought out best perhaps by thinking what may happen to a mind that has pa.s.sed the period of education in the ordinary sense. A person of mature age, let us say, betakes himself, for the first time, to the study of geology. He gains thereby so much new and important knowledge of a particular kind. Yes! but he does more. He modifies his previous mind; he introduces a difference into his mode of thinking by a positive addition to that instrumentality of notions _with_ which he thinks. The geological conceptions which he has acquired become an organic part of that reason, that intellect, which he applies to all things whatsoever; he will think and imagine thenceforward with the help of an added potency, and, consequently, never again precisely as he did before.

Generalize this hint, and let it run through history. The mind of Man cannot remain the same through two consecutive generations, if only because the knowledge which feeds and makes mind, the notions that const.i.tute the thinking power, are continually varying. In this age of a hundred sciences, all tramping on Nature's outside with their flags up, and marching her round and round, and searching her through and through for her secrets, and flinging into the public forum their heaps of results, how is it possible to call mind the same as it was a generation or two ago, when the sciences were fewer, their industry more leisurely, and their discoveries less frequent? Nay, but we may go back not a generation or two only, but to generation beyond generation through a long series, still, as we ascend, finding the sciences fewer, earth's load of knowledge lighter, and man's very imagination of the physical universe which he tenants cruder and more diminutive. Till two hundred years ago the Mundus, or physical system of things, to even the most learned of men, with scarcely an exception, was a finite spectacular sphere, or succession of spheres, that of the fixed stars nearly outermost, wheeling round the central earth for her pleasure; as we penetrate through still prior centuries, even this finite spherical Mundus is seen to shrink and shrink in men's fancies of it till a radius of some hundreds of miles would sweep from the earth to the starry roof; back beyond that again the very notion of sphericity disappears, and men were walking, as it seemed, on the upper side of a flat disc, close under a concave of blue, travelled by fiery caprices. How is it possible to regard man's mode of thinking and feeling, man's mind, as in any way constant through such vicissitude in man's notions respecting his very housing in s.p.a.ce, and the whole encircling touch of his physical belongings?

(3.) A third consideration, however, administers a kind of corrective to the last. It is that, though the last consideration is not unimportant, its importance practically, and as far as the range of historic time is concerned, may be easily exaggerated. We have supposed a person betaking himself to the study of geology, and have truly said that his very mode of thinking would be thereby affected, that his geological knowledge would pa.s.s into his reason, and determine so far the very cast of his mind, the form of his ability. Well, but he might have betaken himself to something else; and who can tell, without definite investigation, but that out of that something else he might have derived as much increase of his mental power, or even greater? There are thousands of employments for all minds, and, though all may select, and select differently, there are thousands for all in common. Life itself, all the inevitable activity of life, is one vast and most complex schooling. Books or no books, sciences or no sciences, we live, we look, we love, we laugh, we fear, we hate, we wonder; we are sons, we are brothers, we have friends; the seasons return, the sun shines, the moon walks in beauty, the sea roars and beats the land, the winds blow, the leaves fall; we are young, we grow old; we commit others to their graves, we see somewhere the little gra.s.sy mound which shall conceal ourselves:--is not this a large enough primary school for all and sundry; are not these sufficient and everlasting rudiments?

That so it is we all recognise. Given some original force or goodness of nature, and out of even this primary school, and from the teaching of these common rudiments, may there not come, do there not come, minds worthy of mark--the shrewd, keen wit, the upright and robust judgment, the disposition tender and true, the bold and honest man? And though, for perfection, the books and the sciences must be superadded, yet do not the rudiments persist in constant over-proportion and incessant compulsory repet.i.tion through all the process of culture, and is not the great result of culture itself a reaction on the rudiments? And so, without prejudice to our foregone conclusion that mind is variable with knowledge, that every new science or body of notions conquered for the world modifies the world's mode of thinking and feeling, alters the cast and the working trick of its reason and imagination, we can yet fall back, for historic time at least, on the notion of a human mind so essentially permanent and traditional that we cannot decide by mere chronology where we may justly be fondest of it, and certainly cannot a.s.sume that its latest individual specimens, with all their advantages, are necessarily the ablest, the n.o.blest, or the cleverest. In fact, however we may reconcile it with our theories of vital evolution and progressive civilization, we all instinctively agree in this style of sentiment. Shakespeare lived and died, we may say, in the pre-scientific period; he lived and died in the belief of the fixedness of our earth in s.p.a.ce and the diurnal wheeling round her of the ten spectacular spheres. Not the less was he Shakespeare; and none of us dares to say that there is now in the world, or has recently been, a more superb thinking apparatus of its order than his mind was, a spiritual transparency of larger diameter, or vivid with grander gleamings and pulses. Two hundred and fifty years, therefore, chock-full though they are of new knowledges and discoveries, have not been a single knife-edge of visible advance in the world's power of producing splendid individuals; and, if we add two hundred and fifty to that, and again two hundred and fifty, and four times two hundred and fifty more without stopping, still we cannot discern that there has been a knife-edge of advance in that particular. For at this last remove we are among the Romans, and beyond them there lie the Greeks; and side by side with both, and beyond both, are other Mediterranean Indo-Europeans, and, away in Asia, clumps and ma.s.ses of various Orientals. For ease of reference, let us go no farther than the Greeks. Thinking apparatuses of first-rate grip!

mental transparencies of large diameter and tremulous with great powers and pulses! What do we say to Homer, Plato, schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and the rest of the great h.e.l.lenic cl.u.s.ter which these represent! True, their cosmology was in a muddle (perhaps _ours_ is in a muddle too, for as little as we think so); but somehow they contrived to be such that the world doubts to this day whether, on the whole, at any time since, it has exhibited, in such close grouping, such a constellation of spirits of the highest magnitude. And the lesson enforced by this Greek instance may be enforced, less blazingly perhaps, but still clearly, as by the light of scattered stars, by instances from the whole course of historic time. Within that range, despite the vicissitudes of the mode of human thought caused by continued inquisitiveness and its results in new knowledges, despite the change from age to age in mankind's very image of its own whereabouts in s.p.a.ce, and the extent of that whereabouts, and the complexity of the entanglement in which it rolls, it is still true that you may probe at any point with the sure expectation of finding at least _some_ minds as good intrinsically, as strong, as n.o.ble, as valiant, as inventive, as any in our own age of latest appearances and all the newest lights. I am aware, of course, where the compensation may be sought. The philosophical historian may contend that, though some minds of early ages have been as able intrinsically as any minds of later ages, these later minds being themselves the critics and judges, yet an enormous general progress may be made out in the increased _number_ in the later ages of minds tolerably able, in the heightening of the general level, in the more equable diffusion of intelligence, in the gradual extension of freedom, and the humanizing of manners and inst.i.tutions. On that question I am not called upon to enter now, nor is my opinion on it to be inferred from anything I am now saying. I limit myself to the a.s.sertion that within historic time we find what we are obliged to call an intrinsic co-equality of _some_ minds at various successive points and at long-separated intervals, and that consequently, if the human race _is_ gradually acquiring a power of producing individuals more able than their ablest predecessors, the rate of its law in this respect is so slow that 2,500 years have not made the advance appreciable. The a.s.sertion is limited; it is reconcilable, I believe, with the most absolute and extreme doctrine of evolution; but it seems to be both important and curious, inasmuch as it has not yet been sufficiently attended to in any of the phrasings of that doctrine that have been speculatively put forward. No doctrine is rightly phrased, I would submit, when, if it were true according to that phrasing, it would be man's highest duty to proceed as if it weren't.

History itself, the mere tradition and records of the human race, would have authorized our a.s.sertion. Pericles, Epaminondas, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Csar, Charlemagne: would not the authenticated tradition of the lives and actions of those men, and others of their order, or of other orders, prove that possible capacity of the individual mind has not, for the last 2,500 years of our earth's history, been a mere affair of chronological date? But it is Literature that reads us the lesson most fully and convincingly. Some of those great men of action have left little or no direct speech of themselves. They mingled their minds with the rage of things around them; they worked, and strove, and died. But the books we have from all periods, the poems, the songs, the treatises, the pleadings--some of them from men great also in the world of action, but most from men who only looked on, and thought, and tried to rule the spirit, or to find how it might be ruled--these remain with us and can be studied yet microscopically. If what the Historian wants to get at is the mind of the time that interests him, or of the past generally, here it is for him in no disguised form, but in actual specimens. Poems, treatises, and the like, are actual transmitted _bits_ of the mind of the past; every fragment of verse or prose from a former period preserves something of the thought and sentiment of that period expressed by some one belonging to it; the masterpieces of the world's literature are the thought and feeling of successive generations expressed, in and for each generation, by those who could express them best. What a purblind perversity then it is for History, professing that its aim is to know the mind or real life of the past, to be fumbling for that mind or life amid old daggers, rusty iron caps and jingling jackets, and other such material relics as the past has transmitted, or even groping for it, as ought to be done most strictly, in statutes and charters and records, if all the while those literary remains of the past are neglected from which the very thing searched for stares us face to face!

There is a small corollary to our main proposition. It is that ages which we are accustomed to regard as crude, barbarous, and uncivilized, may turn out perhaps, on due investigation and a better construction of the records, to have been not so crude and barbarous after all, but to have contained a great deal of intrinsic humanity, interesting to us yet, and capable, through all intervening time and difference, of folding itself round our hearts. And here I will quit those great, but perhaps too continually obtrusive, Greeks and Romans, and will take my examples, all the homelier though they must be, from our own land and kindred.

The Fourteenth Century in our island was not what we should now hold up as a model age, a soft age, an orderly age, an instructed age, a pleasant age for a lady or gentleman that has been accustomed to modern ideas and modern comforts to be transferred back into. It was the age of the three first Edwards, Richard II., and Henry IV. in England, and of the Wallace Interregnum, Bruce, David II., and the two first Stuarts in Scotland. Much was done in it, as these names will suggest, that has come down as picturesque story and stirring popular legend. It is an age, on that account, in which schoolboys and other plain uncritical readers of both nations revel with peculiar relish. Critical inquirers, too, and real students of history, especially of late, have found it an age worth their while, and have declared it full of important facts and powerful characters. Not the less the inveterate impression among a large number of persons of a rapid modern way of thinking is that all this interesting vision of the England and Scotland of the fourteenth century is mere poetical glamour or antiquarian make-believe, and that the real state of affairs was one of mud, mindlessness, fighting and scramble generally, no tea and no newspapers, but plenty of hanging, and murder almost _ad libitum_. Now these are most wrong-headed persons, and they might be beaten black and blue by sheer force of records. But out of kindliness one may take a gentler method with them, and try to bring them right by sthetic suasion. It so chances, for example, that there are literary remains of the fourteenth century, both English and Scottish, and that the authors of the chief of these were Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English literature proper, and John Barbour, the father of the English literature of North Britain. Let us take a few bits from Chaucer and Barbour.

Purposely, we shall take bits that may be already familiar.

Here is Chaucer's often-quoted description of the scholar, or typical student of Oxford University, from the Prologue to his _Canterbury Tales_:--

A Clerk there was of Oxenford also, That unto logic hadd long ygo, As lean was his horse as is a rake, And _he_ was not right fat, I undertake; But lookd hollow, and thereto soberly.

Full threadbare was his overest courtepy; For he had getten him yet no benefice, Ne was so worldly for to have office; For him was liefer have at his bed's head A twenty books, clothd in black and red, Of Aristotle and his philosophie Than robs rich, or fiddle, or sautrie.

But, albe that he was a philospher, Yet had he but a little gold in coffer; But all that he might of his friends hent On books and on learning he it spent, And busily gan for the souls pray Of hem that gave him wherewith to scholay.

Of study took he most cure and most heed; Not oe word spak he mor than was need; And that was said in form and reverence, And short and quick, and full of high sentence; Souning in moral virtue was his speech, And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

Or take an out-of-doors' scene from one of Chaucer's reputed minor poems.

It is a description of a grove or wood in spring, or early summer:--

In which were oaks great, straight as a line, Under the which the gra.s.s, so fresh of hue, Was newly sprung, and an eight foot or nine Every tree well fro his fellow grew, With branches broad, laden with leavs new, That sprungen out agen the sunn sheen, Some very red, and some a glad light green.

Or, for a tidy scene indoors, take this from another poem:--

And, sooth to sayen, my chamber was Full well depainted, and with gla.s.s Were all the windows well yglazed Full clear, and not an hole ycrased, That to behold it was great joy; For wholly all the story of Troy Was in the glazing ywrought thus, Of Hector and of King Priamus, Of Achilles and of King Laomedon, And eke of Medea and Jason, Of Paris, Helen, and Lavine; And all the walls with colours fine Weren paint, both text and glose, And all the Rmaunt of the Rose: My windows weren shut each one, And through the gla.s.s the sunn shone Upon my bed with brighte beams.

Or take these stanzas of weighty ethical sententiousness (usually printed as Chaucer's, but whether his or not does not matter):--

Fly from the press, and dwell with soothfastness; Suffice unto thy good, though it be small; For h.o.a.rd hath hate, and climbing tickleness, Press hath envy, and weal is blent in all; Savour no more than thee behov shall; Rede well thyself that other folk canst rede; And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.

Pain thee not each crooked to redress In trust of her that turneth as a ball.

Great rest standeth in little business; Beware also to spurn against an awl; Strive not as doth a crock with a wall; Deem thyself that deemest others dead; And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.

That thee is sent receive in buxomness; The wrestling of this world asketh a fall; Here is no home, here is but wilderness: Forth, pilgrim! forth, beast, out of thy stall!

Look up on high, and thank G.o.d of all: Waiv thy l.u.s.ts, and let thy ghost thee lead; And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.