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THE NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL BUTLER
PREFACE
Early in his life Samuel Butler began to carry a note-book and to
write down in it anything he wanted to remember; it might be
something he heard some one say, more commonly it was something he
said himself. In one of these notes he gives a reason for making
them:
"One's thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot them; it is no use
trying to put salt on their tails."
So he bagged as many as he could hit and preserved them, re-written
on loose sheets of paper which constituted a sort of museum stored
with the wise, beautiful, and strange creatures that were continually
winging their way across the field of his vision. As he became a
more expert marksman his collection increased and his museum grew so
crowded that he wanted a catalogue. In 1874 he started an index, and
this led to his reconsidering the notes, destroying those that he
remembered having used in his published books and re-writing the
remainder. The re-writing shortened some but it lengthened others
and suggested so many new ones that the index was soon of little use
and there seemed to be no finality about it ("Making Notes," pp. 100-
1 post). In 1891 he attached the problem afresh and made it a rule
to spend an hour every morning re-editing his notes and keeping his
index up to date. At his death, in 1902, he left five bound volumes,
with the contents dated and indexed, about 225 pages of closely
written sermon paper to each volume, and more than enough unbound and
unindexed sheets to made a sixth volume of equal size.
In accordance with his own advice to a young writer (p. 363 post), he
wrote the notes in copying ink and kept a pressed copy with me as a
precaution against fire; but during his lifetime, unless he wanted to
refer to something while he was in my chambers, I never looked at
them. After his death I took them down and went through them. I
knew in a general way what I should find, but I was not prepared for
such a multitude and variety of thoughts, reflections, conversations,
incidents. There are entries about his early life at Langar, Handel,
school days at Shrewsbury, Cambridge, Christianity, literature, New
Zealand, sheep-farming, philosophy, painting, money, evolution,
morality, Italy, speculation, photography, music, natural history,
archaeology, botany, religion, book-keeping, psychology, metaphysics,
the Iliad, the Odyssey, Sicily, architecture, ethics, the Sonnets of
Shakespeare. I thought of publishing the books just as they stand,
but too many of the entries are of no general interest and too many
are of a kind that must wait if they are ever to be published. In
addition to these objections the confusion is very great. One would
look in the earlier volumes for entries about New Zealand and
evolution and in the later ones for entries about the Odyssey and the
Sonnets, but there is no attempt at arrangement and anywhere one may
come upon something about Handel, or a philosophical reflection,
between a note giving the name of the best hotel in an Italian town
and another about Harry Nicholls and Herbert Campbell as the Babes in
the Wood in the pantomime at the Grecian Theatre. This confusion has
a charm, but it is a charm that would not, I fear, survive in print
and, personally, I find that it makes the books distracting for
continuous reading. Moreover they were not intended to be published
as they stand ("Preface to Vol. II," p. 215 post), they were
intended for his own private use as a quarry from which to take
material for his writing, and it is remarkable that in practice he
scarcely ever used them in this way ("These Notes," p. 261 post).
When he had written and re-written a note and spoken it and repeated
it in conversation, it became so much a part of him that, if he
wanted to introduce it in a book, it was less trouble to re-state it
again from memory than to search through his "precious indexes" for
it and copy it ("Gadshill and Trapani," p. 194, "At Piora," p. 272
post). But he could not have re-stated a note from memory if he had
not learnt it by writing it, so that it may be said that he did use
the notes for his books, though not precisely in the way he
originally intended. And the constant re-writing and re-considering
were useful also by forcing him to settle exactly what he thought and
to state it as clearly and tersely as possible. In this way the
making of the notes must have had an influence on the formation of
his style--though here again he had no such idea in his mind when
writing them ("Style," pp. 186-7 post)
In one of the notes he says:
"A man may make, as it were, cash entries of himself in a day-book,
but the entries in the ledger and the balancing of the accounts
should be done by others."
When I began to write the Memoir of Butler on which I am still
engaged, I marked all the more autobiographical notes and had them
copied; again I was struck by the interest, the variety, and the
confusion of those I left untouched. It seemed to me that any one
who undertook to become Butler's accountant and to post his entries
upon himself would have to settle first how many and what accounts to
open in the ledger, and this could not be done until it had been
settled which items were to be selected for posting. It was the
difficulty of those who dare not go into the water until after they
have learnt to swim. I doubt whether I should ever have made the
plunge if it had not been for the interest which Mr. Desmond
MacCarthy took in Butler and his writings. He had occasionally
browsed on my copy of the books, and when he became editor of a
review, the New Quarterly, he asked for some of the notes for
publication, thus providing a practical and simple way of entering
upon the business without any very alarming plunge. I talked his
proposal over with Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, Butler's literary executor,
and, having obtained his approval, set to work. From November 1907
to May 1910, inclusive, the New Quarterly published six groups of
notes and the long note on "Genius" (pp. 174-8 post). The experience
gained in selecting, arranging, and editing these items has been of
great use to me and I thank the proprietor and editor of the New
Quarterly for permission to republish such of the notes as appeared
in their review.
In preparing this book I began by going through the notes again and
marking all that seemed to fall within certain groups roughly
indicated by the arrangement in the review. I had these selected
items copied, distributed them among those which were already in
print, shuffled them and turned them over, meditating on them,
familiarising myself with them and tentatively forming new groups.
While doing this I was continually gleaning from the books more notes
which I had overlooked, and making such verbal alterations as seemed
necessary to avoid repetition, to correct obvious errors and to
remove causes of reasonable offence. The ease with which two or more
notes would condense into one was sometimes surprising, but there
were cases in which the language had to be varied and others in which
a few words had to be added to bridge over a gap; as a rule, however,
the necessary words were lying ready in some other note. I also
reconsidered the titles and provided titles for many notes which had
none. In making these verbal alterations I bore in mind Butler's own
views on the subject which I found in a note about editing letters:
"Granted that an editor, like a translator, should keep as
religiously close to the original text as he reasonably can, and, in
every alteration, should consider what the writer would have wished
and done if he or she could have been consulted, yet, subject to
these limitations, he should be free to alter according to his
discretion or indiscretion."
My "discretion or indiscretion" was less seriously strained in making
textual changes than in determining how many, and what, groups to
have and which notes, in what order, to include in each group. Here
is a note Butler made about classification:
"Fighting about words is like fighting about accounts, and all
classification is like accounts. Sometimes it is easy to see which
way the balance of convenience lies, sometimes it is very hard to
know whether an item should be carried to one account or to another."
Except in the group headed "Higgledy-Piggledy," I have endeavoured to
post each note to a suitable account, but some of Butler's leading
ideas, expressed in different forms, will be found posted to more
than one account, and this kind of repetition is in accordance with
his habit in conversation. It would probably be correct to say that
I have heard him speak the substance of every note many times in
different contexts. In seeking for the most characteristic context,
I have shifted and shifted the notes and considered and re-considered
them under different aspects, taking hints from the delicate
chameleon changes of significance that came over them as they
harmonised or discorded with their new surroundings. Presently I
caught myself restoring notes to positions they had previously
occupied instead of finding new places for them, and the increasing
frequency with which difficulties were solved by these restorations
at last forced me to the conclusion, which I accepted only with very
great regret, that my labours were at an end.
I do not expect every one to approve of the result. If I had been
trying to please every one, I should have made only a very short and
unrepresentative selection which Mr. Fifield would have refused to
publish. I have tried to make suck a book as I believe would have
pleased Butler. That is to say, I have tried to please one who, by
reason of his intimate knowledge of the subject and of the
difficulties, would have looked with indulgence upon the many
mistakes which it is now too late to correct, even if knew how to
correct them. Had it been possible for him to see what I have done,
he would have detected all my sins, both of omission and of
commission, and I like to imagine that he would have used some such
consoling words as these: "Well, never mind; one cannot have
everything; and, after all, 'Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.'"
Here will be found much of what he used to say as he talked with one
or two intimate friends in his own chambers or in mine at the close
of the day, or on a Sunday walk in the country round London, or as we
wandered together through Italy and Sicily; and I would it were
possible to charge these pages with some echo of his voice and with
some reflection of his manner. But, again; one cannot have
everything.
"Men's work we have," quoth one, "but we want them -
Them palpable to touch and clear to view."
Is it so nothing, then, to have the gem
But we must cry to have the setting too?
In the New Quarterly each note was headed with a reference to its
place in the Note-Books. This has not been done here because, on
consideration, it seemed useless, and even irritating, to keep on
putting before the reader references which he could not verify. I
intend to give to the British Museum a copy of this volume wherein
each note will show where the material of which it is composed can be
found; thus, if the original Note-Books are also some day given to
the Museum, any one sufficiently interested will be able to see
exactly what I have done in selecting, omitting, editing, condensing
and classifying.
Some items are included that are not actually in the Note-Books; the
longest of these are the two New Zealand articles "Darwin among the
Machines" and "Lucubratio Ebria" as to which something is said in the
Prefatory Note to "The Germs of Erewhon and of Life and Habit" (pp.
39-42 post). In that Prefatory Note a Dialogue on Species by Butler
and an autograph letter from Charles Darwin are mentioned. Since the
note was in type I have received from New Zealand a copy of the
Weekly Press of 19th June, 1912, containing the Dialogue again
reprinted and a facsimile reproduction of Darwin's letter. I thank
Mr. W. H. Triggs, the present editor of the Press, Christchurch, New
Zealand, also Miss Colborne-Veel and the members of the staff for
their industry and perseverance in searching for and identifying
Butler's early contributions to the newspaper.
The other principal items not actually in the Note-Books, the letter
to T. W. G. Butler (pp. 53-5 post), "A Psalm of Montreal" (pp. 388-9
post) and "The Righteous Man" (pp. 390-1 post). I suppose Butler
kept all these out of his notes because he considered that they had
served their purpose; but they have not hitherto appeared in a form
now accessible to the general reader.
All the footnotes are mine and so are all those prefatory notes which
are printed in italics and the explanatory remarks in square brackets
which occur occasionally in the text. I have also preserved, in
square brackets, the date of a note when anything seemed to turn on
it. And I have made the index.
The Biographical Statement is founded on a skeleton Diary which is in
the Note-Books. It is intended to show, among other things, how
intimately the great variety of subjects touched upon in the notes
entered into and formed part of Butler's working life. It does not
stop at the 18th of June, 1902, because, as he says (p. 23 post),
"Death is not more the end of some than it is the beginning of
others"; and, again (p. 13 post), for those who come to the true
birth the life we live beyond the grave is our truest life. The
Biographical Statement has accordingly been carried on to the present
time so as to include the principal events that have occurred during
the opening period of the "good average three-score years and ten of
immortality" which he modestly hoped he might inherit in the life of
the world to come.
HENRY FESTING JONES.
Mount Eryx,
Trapani, Sicily,
August, 1912.
BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT
1835. Dec. 4. Samuel Butler born at Langar Rectory, Nottingham, son
of the Rev. Thomas Butler, who was the son of Dr. Samuel Butler,
Headmaster of Shrewsbury School from 1798 to 1836, and afterwards
Bishop of Lichfield.
1843-4. Spent the winter in Rome and Naples with his family.
1846. Went to school at Allesley, near Coventry.
1848. Went to school at Shrewsbury under Dr. Kennedy.
Went to Italy for the second time with his family.
First heard the music of Handel.
1854. Entered at St. John's College, Cambridge.
1858. Bracketed 12th in the first class of the Classical Tripos and
took his degree.
Went to London and began to prepare for ordination, living among the
poor and doing parish work: this led to his doubting the efficacy of
infant baptism and hence to his declining to take orders.
1859. Sailed for New Zealand and started sheep-farming in Canterbury
Province: while in the colony he wrote much for the Press of
Christchurch, N.Z.
1862. Dec. 20. "Darwin on The Origin of Species. A Dialogue,"
unsigned but written by Butler, appeared in the Press and was
followed by correspondence to which Butler contributed.
1863. A First Year in Canterbury Settlement: made out of his
letters home to his family together with two articles reprinted from
the Eagle (the magazine of St. John's College, Cambridge): MS. lost.
1863. "Darwin among the Machines," a letter signed "Cellarius"
written by Butler, appeared in the Press.
1864. Sold out his sheep run and returned to England in company with
Charles Paine Pauli, whose acquaintance he had made in the colony.
He brought back enough to enable him to live quietly, settled for
good at 15 Clifford's Inn, London, and began life as a painter,
studying at Cary's, Heatherley's and the South Kensington Art Schools
and exhibiting pictures occasionally at the Royal Academy and other
exhibitions: while studying art he made the acquaintance of, among
others, Charles Gogin, William Ballard and Thomas William Gale
Butler.
"Family Prayers": a small painting by Butler.
1865. "Lucubratio Ebria," an article, containing variations of the
view in "Darwin among the Machines," sent by Butler from England,
appeared in the Press.
The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as contained in the
Four Evangelists critically examined: a pamphlet of VIII+48 pp.
written in New Zealand: the conclusion arrived at is that the
evidence is insufficient to support the belief that Christ died and
rose from the dead: MS. lost, probably used up in writing The Fair
Haven.
1869-70. Was in Italy for four months, his health having broken down
in consequence of over-work.
1870 or 1871. First meeting with Miss Eliza Mary Ann Savage, from
whom he drew Alethea in The Way of All Flesh.
1872. Erewhon or Over the Range: a Work of Satire and Imagination:
MS. in the British Museum.
1873. Erewhon translated into Dutch.
The Fair Haven: an ironical work, purporting to be "in defence of
the miraculous element in our Lord's ministry upon earth, both as
against rationalistic impugners and certain orthodox defenders,"
written under the pseudonym of John Pickard Owen with a memoir of the
supposed author by his brother William Bickersteth Owen. This book
reproduces--the substance of his pamphlet on the resurrection: MS.
at Christchurch, New Zealand.
1874. "Mr. Heatherley's Holiday," his most important oil painting,
exhibited at the Royal Academy Exhibition, now in the National
Gallery of British Art.
1876. Having invested his money in various companies that failed,
one of which had its works in Canada, and having spent much time
during the last few years in that country, trying unsuccessfully to
save part of his capital, he now returned to London, and during the
next ten years experienced serious financial difficulties.
First meeting with Henry Festing Jones.
1877. Life and Habit: an Essay after a Completer View of Evolution:
dedicated to Charles Paine Pauli: although dated 1878 the book was
published on Butler's birthday, 4th December, 1877: MS. at the
Schools, Shrewsbury.
1878. "A Psalm of Montreal" in the Spectator: There are probably
many MSS. of this poem in existence given by Butler to friends: one,
which he gave to H. F. Jones, is in the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge.
A Portrait of Butler, painted in this year by himself, now at St.
John's College, Cambridge.
1879. Evolution Old and New: A comparison of the theories of
Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck with that of Charles Darwin:
MS. in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
A Clergyman's Doubts and God the Known and God the Unknown appeared
in the Examiner: MS. lost.
Erewhon translated into German.
1880. Unconscious Memory: A comparison between the theory of Dr.
Ewald Hering, Professor of Physiology in the University of Prague,
and the Philosophy of the Unconscious of Dr. Edward von Hartmann,
with translations from both these authors and preliminary chapters
bearing upon Life and Habit, Evolution Old and New, and Charles
Darwin's Edition of Dr. Krause's Erasmus Darwin.
A Portrait of Butler, painted in this year by himself, now at the
Schools, Shrewsbury. A third portrait of Butler, painted by himself
about this time, is at Christchurch, New Zealand.
1881. A property at Shrewsbury, in which under his grandfather's
will he had a reversionary interest contingent on his surviving his
father, was re-settled so as to make his reversion absolute: he
mortgaged this reversion and bought small property near London: this
temporarily alleviated his financial embarrassment but added to his
work, for he spent much time in the management of the houses, learnt
book-keeping by double-entry and kept elaborate accounts.
Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino illustrated by
the author, Charles Gogin and Henry Festing Jones: an account of his
holiday travels with dissertations on most of the subjects that
interested him: MS. with H. F. Jones.
1882. A new edition of Evolution Old and New, with a short preface
alluding to the recent death of Charles Darwin, an appendix and an
index.
1883. Began to compose music as nearly as he could in the style of
Handel.
1884. Selections from Previous Works with "A Psalm of Montreal" and
"Remarks on G. J. Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals."
1885. Death of Miss Savage.
Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues and other short pieces for the piano by
Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones: MS. with H. F. Jones.
1886. Holbein's La Danse: a note on a drawing in the Museum at
Basel.
Stood, unsuccessfully, for the Professorship of Fine Arts in the
University of Cambridge.
Dec. 29. Death of his father and end of his financial
embarrassments.
1887. Engaged Alfred Emery Cathie as clerk and general attendant.
Luck or Cunning as the main means of Organic Modification? An
attempt to throw additional light upon Charles Darwin's theory of
Natural Selection.
Was entertained at dinner by the Municipio of Varallo-Sesia on the
Sacro Monte.
1888. Took up photography.
1888. Ex Voto: an account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at
Varallo-Sesia, with some notice of Tabachetti's remaining work at
Crea and illustrations from photographs by the author: MS. at
Varallo-Sesia.
Narcissus: a Cantata in the Handelian form, words and music by
Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones: MS. of the piano score in the
British Museum. MS. of the orchestral score with H. F. Jones.
In this and the two following years contributed some articles to the
Universal Review, most of which were republished after his death as
Essays on Life, Art, and Science (1904).
1890. Began to study counterpoint with William Smith Rockstro and
continued to do so until Rockstro's death in 1895.
1892. The Humour of Homer. A Lecture delivered at the Working Men's
College, Great Ormond Street, London, January 30, 1892, reprinted
with preface and additional matter from the Eagle.
Went to Sicily, the first of many visits, to collect evidence in
support of his theory identifying the Scheria and Ithaca of the
Odyssey with Trapani and the neighbouring Mount Eryx.
1893. "L'Origine Siciliana dell' Odissea." Extracted from the
Rassegna della Letteratura Siciliana.
"On the Trapanese Origin of the Odyssey" (Translation).
1894. Ex Voto translated into Italian by Cavaliere Angelo Rizzetti.
"Ancora sull' origine dell' Odissea." Extracted from the Rassegna
della Letteratura Siciliana.
1895. Went to Greece and the Troad to make up his mind about the
topography of the Iliad.
1896. The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler (his grandfather) in
so far as they illustrate the scholastic, religious and social life
of England from 1790-1840: MS. at the Shrewsbury Town Library or
Museum.
His portrait painted by Charles Gogin, now in the National Portrait
Gallery.
1897. The Authoress of the Odyssey, where and when she wrote, who
she was, the use she made of the Iliad and how the poem grew under
her hands: MS. at Trapani.
1897. Death of Charles Paine Pauli.
1898. The Iliad rendered into English prose: MS. at St. John's
College, Cambridge.
1899. Shakespeare's Sonnets reconsidered and in part rearranged,
with introductory chapters, notes and a reprint of the original 1609
edition: MS. with R. A. Streatfeild.
1900. The Odyssey rendered into English prose: MS. at Aci-Reale,
Sicily.
1901. Erewhon Revisited twenty years later both by the Original
Discoverer of the Country and by his Son: this was a return not only
to Erewhon but also to the subject of the pamphlet on the
resurrection. MS. in the British Museum.
1902. June, 18. Death of Samuel Butler.
1902. "Samuel Butler," an article by Richard Alexander Streatfeild
in the Monthly Review (September).
"Samuel Butler," an obituary notice by Henry Festing Jones in the
Eagle (December).
1903. Samuel Butler Records and Memorials, a collection of obituary
notices with a note by R. A. Streatfeild, his literary executor,
printed for private circulation: with reproduction of a photograph
of Butler taken at Varallo in 1889.
The Way of All Flesh, a novel, written between 1872 and 1885,
published by R. A. Streatfeild: MS. with Mr. R. A. Streatfeild.
1904. Seven Sonnets and A Psalm of Montreal printed for private
circulation.
Essays on Life, Art and Science, being reprints of his Universal
Review articles, together with two lectures.
Ulysses, an Oratorio: Words and music by Samuel Butler and Henry
Festing Jones: MS. of the piano score in the British Museum, MS. of
the orchestral score with H. F. Jones.
"The Author of Erewhon," an article by Desmond MacCarthy in the
Independent Review (September).
1904. Diary of a Journey through North Italy to Sicily (in the
spring of 1903, undertaken for the purpose of leaving the MSS. of
three books by Samuel Butler at Varallo-Sesia, Aci-Reale and Trapani)
by Henry Festing Jones, with reproduction of Gogin's portrait of
Butler. Printed for private circulation.
1907. Nov. Between this date and May, 1910, some Extracts from The
Note-Books of Samuel Butler appeared in the New Quarterly Review
under the editorship of Desmond MacCarthy.
1908. July 16. The first Erewhon dinner at Pagani's Restaurant,
Great Portland Street; 32 persons present: the day was fixed by
Professor Marcus Hartog.
Second Edition of The Way of All Flesh.
1909. God the Known and God the Unknown republished in book form
from the Examiner (1879) by A. C. Fifield, with prefatory note by R.
A. Streatfeild.
July 15. The second Erewhon dinner at Pagani's; 53 present: the day
was fixed by Mr. George Bernard Shaw.
1910. Feb. 10. Samuel Butler Author of Erewhon, a Paper read before
the British Association of Homoeopathy at 43 Russell Square, W.C., by
Henry Festing Jones. Some of Butler's music was performed by Miss
Grainger Kerr, Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland and
Mr. H. J. T. Wood, the Secretary of the Association.
June. Unconscious Memory, a new edition entirely reset with a note
by R. A. Streatfeild and an introduction by Professor Marcus Hartog,
M.A., D.Sc., F.L.S., F.R. H.S., Professor of Zoology in University
College, Cork.
July 14. The third Erewhon dinner at Pagani's Restaurant; 58
present: the day was fixed by the Right Honourable Augustine
Birrell, K.C., M.P.
Nov. 16. Samuel Butler Author of Erewhon. A paper read before the
Historical Society of St. John's College, Cambridge, in the
Combination-room of the college, by Henry Festing Jones. The Master
(Mr. R. F. Scott), who was also Vice-Chancellor of the University,
was in the chair and a Vote of Thanks was proposed by Professor
Bateson, F.R.S.
1910. Nov. 28. Life and Habit, a new edition with a preface by R.
A. Streatfeild and author's addenda, being three pages containing
passages which Butler had cut out of the original book or had
intended to insert in a future edition.
1911. May 25. The jubilee number of the Press, New Zealand,
contained an account of Butler's connection with the newspaper and
reprinted "Darwin among the Machines" and "Lucubratio Ebria."
July 15. The fourth Erewhon dinner at Pagani's Restaurant; 75
present: the day was fixed by Sir William Phipson Beale, Bart.,
K.C., M.P.
Nov. Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler: A Step towards
Reconciliation, by Henry Festing Jones. A pamphlet giving the
substance of a correspondence between Mr. Francis Darwin and the
author and reproducing letters by Charles Darwin about the quarrel
between himself and Butler referred to in Chapter IV of Unconscious
Memory.
Evolution Old and New, a reprint of the second edition (1882) with
prefatory note by R. A. Streatfeild.
1912. June 1. Letter from Henry Festing Jones in the Press,
Christchurch, New Zealand, about Butler's Dialogue, which had
appeared originally in the Press December 20, 1862, and could not be
found.
June 8. "Darwin on the Origin of Species. A Dialogue "discovered in
consequence of the foregoing letter and reprinted in the Press.
June 15. The Press reprinted some of the correspondence, etc. which
followed on the original appearance of the Dialogue.
Some of Butler's water-colour drawings having been given to the
British Museum, two were included in an exhibition held there during
the summer.
July 12. The Fifth Erewhon Dinner at Pagani's Restaurant; 90
present; the day was fixed by Mr. Edmund Gosse, C.B., LL.D.
I--LORD, WHAT IS MAN?
Man
i
We are like billiard balls in a game played by unskilful players,
continually being nearly sent into a pocket, but hardly ever getting
right into one, except by a fluke.
ii
We are like thistle-down blown about by the wind--up and down, here
and there--but not one in a thousand ever getting beyond seed-hood.
iii
A man is a passing mood coming and going in the mind of his country;
he is the twitching of a nerve, a smile, a frown, a thought of shame
or honour, as it may happen.
iv
How loosely our thoughts must hang together when the whiff of a
smell, a band playing in the street, a face seen in the fire, or on
the gnarled stem of a tree, will lead them into such vagaries at a
moment's warning.
v
When I was a boy at school at Shrewsbury, old Mrs. Brown used to keep
a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper. They most of them
looked pretty right till you handled them. We are all spoiled tarts.
vi
He is a poor creature who does not believe himself to be better than
the whole world else. No matter how ill we may be, or how low we may
have fallen, we would not change identity with any other person.
Hence our self-conceit sustains and always must sustain us till death
takes us and our conceit together so that we need no more sustaining.
vii
Man must always be a consuming fire or be consumed. As for hell, we
are in a burning fiery furnace all our lives--for what is life but a
process of combustion?
Life
i
We have got into life by stealth and petitio principii, by the free
use of that contradiction in terms which we declare to be the most
outrageous violation of our reason. We have wriggled into it by
holding that everything is both one and many, both infinite in time
and space and yet finite, both like and unlike to the same thing,
both itself and not itself, both free and yet inexorably fettered,
both every adjective in the dictionary and at the same time the flat
contradiction of every one of them.
ii
The beginning of life is the beginning of an illusion to the effect
that there is such a thing as free will and that there is such
another thing as necessity--the recognition of the fact that there is
an "I can" and an "I cannot," an "I may" and an "I must."
iii
Life is not so much a riddle to be read as a Gordian knot that will
get cut sooner or later.
iv
Life is the distribution of an error--or errors.
v
Murray (the publisher) said that my Life of Dr. Butler was an omnium
gatherum. Yes, but life is an omnium gatherum.
vi
Life is a superstition. But superstitions are not without their
value. The snail's shell is a superstition, slugs have no shells and
thrive just as well. But a snail without a shell would not be a slug
unless it had also the slug's indifference to a shell.
vii
Life is one long process of getting tired.
viii
My days run through me as water through a sieve.
ix
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient
premises.
x
Life is eight parts cards and two parts play, the unseen world is
made manifest to us in the play.
xi
Lizards generally seem to have lost their tails by the time they
reach middle life. So have most men.
xii
A sense of humour keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as
well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission of
all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.
xiii
Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct,
not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they
sometimes guide in doubtful cases--though not often.
xiv
There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other
particular. The first is that every one can, in the end, get what he
wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular
rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the
general rule.
xv
Nature is essentially mean, mediocre. You can have schemes for
raising the level of this mean, but not for making every one two
inches taller than his neighbour, and this is what people really care
about.
xvi
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of
every organism to live beyond its income.
The World
i
The world is a gambling-table so arranged that all who enter the
casino must play and all must lose more or less heavily in the long
run, though they win occasionally by the way.
ii
We play out our days as we play out cards, taking them as they come,
not knowing what they will be, hoping for a lucky card and sometimes
getting one, often getting just the wrong one.
iii
The world may not be particularly wise--still, we know of nothing
wiser.
iv
The world will always be governed by self-interest. We should not
try to stop this, we should try to make the self-interest of cads a
little more coincident with that of decent people.
The Individual and the World
There is an eternal antagonism of interest between the individual and
the world at large. The individual will not so much care how much he
may suffer in this world provided he can live in men's good thoughts
long after he has left it. The world at large does not so much care
how much suffering the individual may either endure or cause in this
life, provided he will take himself clean away out of men's thoughts,
whether for good or ill, when he has left it.
My Life
i
I imagine that life can give nothing much better or much worse than
what I have myself experienced. I should say I had proved pretty
well the extremes of mental pleasure and pain; and so I believe each
in his own way does, almost every man.
ii
I have squandered my life as a schoolboy squanders a tip. But then
half, or more than half the fun a schoolboy gets out of a tip
consists in the mere fact of having something to squander.
Squandering is in itself delightful, and so I found it with my life
in my younger days. I do not squander it now, but I am not sorry
that I have squandered a good deal of it. What a heap of rubbish
there would have been if I had not! Had I not better set about
squandering what is left of it?
The Life we Live in Others
A man should spend his life or, rather, does spend his life in being
born. His life is his birth throes. But most men miscarry and never
come to the true birth at all and some live but a very short time in
a very little world and none are eternal. Still, the life we live
beyond the grave is our truest life, and our happiest, for we pass it
in the profoundest sleep as though we were children in our cradles.
If we are wronged it hurts us not; if we wrong others, we do not
suffer for it; and when we die, as even the Handels and Bellinis and
Shakespeares sooner or later do, we die easily, know neither fear nor
pain and live anew in the lives of those who have been begotten of
our work and who have for the time come up in our room.
An immortal like Shakespeare knows nothing of his own immortality
about which we are so keenly conscious. As he knows nothing of it
when it is in its highest vitality, centuries, it may be, after his
apparent death, so it is best and happiest if during his bodily life
he should think little or nothing about it and perhaps hardly suspect
that he will live after his death at all.
And yet I do not know--I could not keep myself going at all if I did
not believe that I was likely to inherit a good average three-score
years and ten of immortality. There are very few workers who are not
sustained by this belief, or at least hope, but it may well be
doubted whether this is not a sign that they are not going to be
immortal--and I am content (or try to be) to fare as my neighbours.
The World Made to Enjoy
When we grumble about the vanity of all human things, inasmuch as
even the noblest works are not eternal but must become sooner or
later as though they had never been, we should remember that the
world, so far as we can see, was made to enjoy rather than to last.
Come-and-go pervades everything of which we have knowledge, and
though great things go more slowly, they are built up of small ones
and must fare as that which makes them.
Are we to have our enjoyment of Handel and Shakespeare weakened
because a day will come when there will be no more of either Handel
or Shakespeare nor yet of ears to hear them? Is it not enough that
they should stir such countless multitudes so profoundly and kindle
such intense and affectionate admiration for so many ages as they
have done and probably will continue to do? The life of a great
thing may be so long as practically to come to immortality even now,
but that is not the point. The point is that if anything was aimed
at at all when things began to shape or to be shaped, it seems to
have been a short life and a merry one, with an extension of time in
certain favoured cases, rather than a permanency even of the very
best and noblest. And, when one comes to think of it, death and
birth are so closely correlated that one could not destroy either
without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that
makes creation possible.
If, however, any work is to have long life it is not enough that it
should be good of its kind. Many ephemeral things are perfect in
their way. It must be of a durable kind as well.
Living in Others
We had better live in others as much as we can if only because we
thus live more in the race, which God really does seem to care about
a good deal, and less in the individual, to whom, so far as I can
see, he is indifferent. After we are dead it matters not to the life
we have led in ourselves what people may say of us, but it matters
much to the life we lead in others and this should be our true life.
Karma
When I am inclined to complain about having worked so many years and
taken nothing but debt, though I feel the want of money so
continually (much more, doubtless, than I ought to feel it), let me
remember that I come in free, gratis, to the work of hundreds and
thousands of better men than myself who often were much worse paid
than I have been. If a man's true self is his karma--the life which
his work lives but which he knows very little about and by which he
takes nothing--let him remember at least that he can enjoy the karma
of others, and this about squares the account--or rather far more
than squares it. [1883.]
Birth and Death
i
They are functions one of the other and if you get rid of one you
must get rid of the other also. There is birth in death and death in
birth. We are always dying and being born again.
ii
Life is the gathering of waves to a head, at death they break into a
million fragments each one of which, however, is absorbed at once
into the sea of life and helps to form a later generation which comes
rolling on till it too breaks.
iii
What happens to you when you die? But what happens to you when you
are born? In the one case we are born and in the other we die, but
it is not possible to get much further.
iv
We commonly know that we are going to die though we do not know that
we are going to be born. But are we sure this is so? We may have
had the most gloomy forebodings on this head and forgotten all about
them. At any rate we know no more about the very end of our lives
than about the very beginning. We come up unconsciously, and go down
unconsciously; and we rarely see either birth or death. We see
people, as consciousness, between the two extremes.
Reproduction
Its base must be looked for not in the desire of the parents to
reproduce but in the discontent of the germs with their surroundings
inside those parents, and a desire on their part to have a separate
maintenance. {16} [1880.]
Thinking almost Identically
The ova, spermatozoa and embryos not only of all human races but of
all things that live, whether animal or vegetable, think little, but
that little almost identically on every subject. That "almost" is
the little rift within the lute which by and by will give such
different character to the music. [1889.]
Is Life Worth Living?
This is a question for an embryo, not for a man. [1883.]
Evacuations
There is a resemblance, greater or less, between the pleasure we
derive from all the evacuations. I believe that in all cases the
pleasure arises from rest--rest, that is to say, from the
considerable, though in most cases unconscious labour of retaining
that which it is a relief to us to be rid of.
In ordinary cases the effort whereby we retain those things that we
would get rid of is unperceived by the central government, being, I
suppose, departmentally made; we--as distinguished from the
subordinate personalities of which we are composed--know nothing
about it, though the subordinates in question doubtless do. But when
the desirability of removing is abnormally great, we know about the
effort of retaining perfectly well, and the gradual increase in our
perception of the effort suggests strongly that there has been effort
all the time, descending to conscious and great through unconscious
and normal from unconscious and hardly any at all. The relaxation of
this effort is what causes the sense of refreshment that follows all
healthy discharges.
All our limbs and sensual organs, in fact our whole body and life,
are but an accretion round and a fostering of the spermatozoa. They
are the real "He." A man's eyes, ears, tongue, nose, legs and arms
are but so many organs and tools that minister to the protection,
education, increased intelligence and multiplication of the
spermatozoa; so that our whole life is in reality a series of complex
efforts in respect of these, conscious or unconscious according to
their comparative commonness. They are the central fact in our
existence, the point towards which all effort is directed.
Relaxation of effort here, therefore, is the most complete and
comprehensive of all relaxations and, as such, the supreme
gratification--the most complete rest we can have, short of sleep and
death.
Man and His Organism
i
Man is but a perambulating tool-box and workshop, or office,
fashioned for itself by a piece of very clever slime, as the result
of long experience; and truth is but its own most enlarged, general
and enduring sense of the coming togetherness or convenience of the
various conventional arrangements which, for some reason or other, it
has been led to sanction. Hence we speak of man's body as his
"trunk."
ii
The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan
and the whole fixed upon stilts.
iii
A man should see himself as a kind of tool-box; this is simple
enough; the difficulty is that it is the tools themselves that make
and work the tools. The skill which now guides our organs and us in
arts and inventions was at one time exercised upon the invention of
these very organs themselves. Tentative bankruptcy acts afford good
illustrations of the manner in which organisms have been developed.
The ligaments which bind the tendons of our feet or the valves of our
blood vessels are the ingenious enterprises of individual cells who
saw a want, felt that they could supply it, and have thus won
themselves a position among the old aristocracy of the body politic.
The most incorporate tool--as an eye or a tooth or the fist, when a
blow is struck with it--has still something of the non-ego about it;
and in like manner such a tool as a locomotive engine, apparently
entirely separated from the body, must still from time to time, as it
were, kiss the soil of the human body and be handled, and thus become
incorporate with man, if it is to remain in working order.
Tools
A tool is anything whatsoever which is used by an intelligent being
for realising its object. The idea of a desired end is inseparable
from a tool. The very essence of a tool is the being an instrument
for the achievement of a purpose. We say that a man is the tool of
another, meaning that he is being used for the furtherance of that
other's ends, and this constitutes him a machine in use. Therefore
the word "tool" implies also the existence of a living, intelligent
being capable of desiring the end for which the tool is used, for
this is involved in the idea of a desired end. And as few tools grow
naturally fit for use (for even a stick or a fuller's teasel must be
cut from their places and modified to some extent before they can be
called tools), the word "tool" implies not only a purpose and a
purposer, but a purposer who can see in what manner his purpose can
be achieved, and who can contrive (or find ready-made and fetch and
employ) the tool which shall achieve it.
Strictly speaking, nothing is a tool unless during actual use.
Nevertheless, if a thing has been made for the express purpose of
being used as a tool it is commonly called a tool, whether it is in
actual use or no. Thus hammers, chisels, etc., are called tools,
though lying idle in a tool-box. What is meant is that, though not
actually being used as instruments at the present moment, they bear
the impress of their object, and are so often in use that we may
speak of them as though they always were so. Strictly, a thing is a
tool or not a tool just as it may happen to be in use or not. Thus a
stone may be picked up and used to hammer a nail with, but the stone
is not a tool until picked up with an eye to use; it is a tool as
soon as this happens, and, if thrown away immediately the nail has
been driven home, the stone is a tool no longer. We see, therefore,
matter alternating between a toolish or organic state and an
untoolish or inorganic. Where there is intention it is organic,
where there is no intention it is inorganic. Perhaps, however, the
word "tool" should cover also the remains of a tool so long as there
are manifest signs that the object was a tool once.
The simplest tool I can think of is a piece of gravel used for making
a road. Nothing is done to it, it owes its being a tool simply to
the fact that it subserves a purpose. A broken piece of granite used
for macadamising a road is a more complex instrument, about the
toolishness of which no doubt can be entertained. It will, however,
I think, be held that even a piece of gravel found in situ and left
there untouched, provided it is so left because it was deemed
suitable for a road which was designed to pass over the spot, would
become a tool in virtue of the recognition of its utility, while a
similar piece of gravel a yard off on either side the proposed road
would not be a tool.
The essence of a tool, therefore, lies in something outside the tool
itself. It is not in the head of the hammer, nor in the handle, nor
in the combination of the two that the essence of mechanical
characteristics exists, but in the recognition of its utility and in
the forces directed through it in virtue of this recognition. This
appears more plainly when we reflect that a very complex machine, if
intended for use by children whose aim is not serious, ceases to rank
in our minds as a tool, and becomes a toy. It is seriousness of aim
and recognition of suitability for the achievement of that aim, and
not anything in the tool itself, that makes the tool.
The goodness or badness, again, of a tool depends not upon anything
within the tool as regarded without relation to the user, but upon
the ease or difficulty experienced by the person using it in
comparison with what he or others of average capacity would
experience if they had used a tool of a different kind. Thus the
same tool may be good for one man and bad for another.
It seems to me that all tools resolve themselves into the hammer and
the lever, and that the lever is only an inverted hammer, or the
hammer only an inverted lever, whichever one wills; so that all the
problems of mechanics are present to us in the simple stone which may
be used as a hammer, or in the stick that may be used as a lever, as
much as in the most complicated machine. These are the primordial
cells of mechanics. And an organ is only another name for a tool.
Organs and Makeshifts
I have gone out sketching and forgotten my water-dipper; among my
traps I always find something that will do, for example, the top of
my tin case (for holding pencils). This is how organs come to change
their uses and hence their forms, or at any rate partly how.
Joining and Disjoining
These are the essence of change.
One of the earliest notes I made, when I began to make notes at all,
I found not long ago in an old book, since destroyed, which I had in
New Zealand. It was to the effect that all things are either of the
nature of a piece of string or a knife. That is, they are either for
bringing and keeping things together, or for sending and keeping them
apart. Nevertheless each kind contains a little of its opposite and
some, as the railway train and the hedge, combine many examples of
both. Thus the train, on the whole, is used for bringing things
together, but it is also used for sending them apart, and its
divisions into classes are alike for separating and keeping together.
The hedge is also both for joining things (as a flock of sheep) and
for disjoining (as for keeping the sheep from getting into corn).
These are the more immediate ends. The ulterior ends, both of train
and hedge, so far as we are concerned, and so far as anything can
have an end, are the bringing or helping to bring meat or dairy
produce into contact with man's inside, or wool on to his back, or
that he may go in comfort somewhere to converse with people and join
his soul on to theirs, or please himself by getting something to come
within the range of his senses or imagination.
A piece of string is a thing that, in the main, makes for
togetheriness; whereas a knife is, in the main, a thing that makes
for splitty-uppiness; still, there is an odour of togetheriness
hanging about a knife also, for it tends to bring potatoes into a
man's stomach.
In high philosophy one should never look at a knife without
considering it also as a piece of string, nor at a piece of string
without considering it also as a knife.
Cotton Factories
Surely the work done by the body is, in one way, more its true life
than its limbs and organisation are. Which is the more true life of
a great cotton factory--the bales of goods which it turns out for the
world's wearing or the machinery whereby its ends are achieved? The
manufacture is only possible by reason of the machinery; it is
produced by this. The machinery only exists in virtue of its being
capable of producing the manufacture; it is produced for this. The
machinery represents the work done by the factory that turned it out.
Somehow or other when we think of a factory we think rather of the
fabric and mechanism than of the work, and so we think of a man's
life and living body as constituting himself rather than of the work
that the life and living body turn out. The instinct being as strong
as it is, I suppose it sound, but it seems as though the life should
be held to be quite as much in the work itself as in the tools that
produce it--and perhaps more.
Our Trivial Bodies
i
Though we think so much of our body, it is in reality a small part of
us. Before birth we get together our tools, in life we use them, and
thus fashion our true life which consists not in our tools and tool-
box but in the work we have done with our tools. It is Handel's
work, not the body with which he did the work, that pulls us half
over London. There is not an action of a muscle in a horse's leg
upon a winter's night as it drags a carriage to the Albert Hall but
is in connection with, and part outcome of, the force generated when
Handel sat in his room at Gopsall and wrote the Messiah. Think of
all the forces which that force has controlled, and think, also, how
small was the amount of molecular disturbance from which it
proceeded. It is as though we saw a conflagration which a spark had
kindled. This is the true Handel, who is a more living power among
us one hundred and twenty-two years after his death than during the
time he was amongst us in the body.
ii
The whole life of some people is a kind of partial death--a long,
lingering death-bed, so to speak, of stagnation and nonentity on
which death is but the seal, or solemn signing, as the abnegation of
all further act and deed on the part of the signer. Death robs these
people of even that little strength which they appeared to have and
gives them nothing but repose.
On others, again, death confers a more living kind of life than they
can ever possibly have enjoyed while to those about them they seemed
to be alive. Look at Shakespeare; can he be properly said to have
lived in anything like his real life till a hundred years or so after
his death? His physical life was but as a dawn preceding the sunrise
of that life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter.
True, there was a little stir--a little abiding of shepherds in the
fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night--a little buzzing in
knots of men waiting to be hired before the daybreak--a little
stealthy movement as of a burglar or two here and there--an
inchoation of life. But the true life of the man was after death and
not before it.
Death is not more the end of some than it is the beginning of others.
So he that loses his soul may find it, and he that finds may lose it.
II--ELEMENTARY MORALITY
The Foundations of Morality
i
These are like all other foundations; if you dig too much about them
the superstructure will come tumbling down.
ii
The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like
the Kingdom of Heaven, rather than without.
iii
To attempt to get at the foundations is to try to recover
consciousness about things that have passed into the unconscious
stage; it is pretty sure to disturb and derange those who try it on
too much.
Counsels of Imperfection
It is all very well for mischievous writers to maintain that we
cannot serve God and Mammon. Granted that it is not easy, but
nothing that is worth doing ever is easy. Easy or difficult,
possible or impossible, not only has the thing got to be done, but it
is exactly in doing it that the whole duty of man consists. And when
the righteous man turneth away from his righteousness that he hath
committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite
right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what
he has lost in holiness.
If there are two worlds at all (and that there are I have no doubt)
it stands to reason that we ought to make the best of both of them,
and more particularly of the one with which we are most immediately
concerned. It is as immoral to be too good as to be too anything
else. The Christian morality is just as immoral as any other. It is
at once very moral and very immoral. How often do we not see
children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their
parents? Truly he visiteth the virtues of the fathers upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation. The most that can be
said for virtue is that there is a considerable balance in its
favour, and that it is a good deal better to be for it than against
it; but it lets people in very badly sometimes.
If you wish to understand virtue you must be sub-vicious; for the
really virtuous man, who is fully under grace, will be virtuous
unconsciously and will know nothing about it. Unless a man is out-
and-out virtuous he is sub-vicious.
Virtue is, as it were, the repose of sleep or death. Vice is the
awakening to the knowledge of good and evil--without which there is
no life worthy of the name. Sleep is, in a way, a happier, more
peaceful state than waking and, in a way, death may be said to be
better than life, but it is in a very small way. We feel such talk
to be blasphemy against good life and, whatever we may say in death's
favour, so long as we do not blow our brains out we show that we do
not mean to be taken seriously. To know good, other than as a heavy
sleeper, we must know vice also. There cannot, as Bacon said, be a
"Hold fast that which is good" without a "Prove all things" going
before it. There is no knowledge of good without a knowledge of evil
also, and this is why all nations have devils as well as gods, and
regard them with sneaking kindness. God without the devil is dead,
being alone.
Lucifer
We call him at once the Angel of Light and the Angel of Darkness: is
this because we instinctively feel that no one can know much till he
has sinned much--or because we feel that extremes meet, or how?
The Oracle in Erewhon
The answer given by the oracle was originally written concerning any
vice--say drunkenness, but it applies to many another--and I wrote
not "sins" but "knows": {26}
He who knows aught
Knows more than he ought;
But he who knows nought
Has much to be taught.
God's Laws
The true laws of God are the laws of our own well-being.
Physical Excellence
The question whether such and such a course of conduct does or does
not do physical harm is the safest test by which to try the question
whether it is moral or no. If it does no harm to the body we ought
to be very chary of calling it immoral, while if it tends towards
physical excellence there should be no hesitation in calling it
moral. In the case of those who are not forced to over-work
themselves--and there are many who work themselves to death from mere
inability to restrain the passion for work, which masters them as the
craving for drink masters a drunkard--over-work in these cases is as
immoral as over-eating or drinking. This, so far as the individual
is concerned. With regard to the body politic as a whole, it is, no
doubt, well that there should be some men and women so built that
they cannot be stopped from working themselves to death, just as it
is unquestionably well that there should be some who cannot be
stopped from drinking themselves to death, if only that they may keep
the horror of the habit well in evidence.
Intellectual Self-Indulgence
Intellectual over-indulgence is the most gratuitous and disgraceful
form which excess can take, nor is there any the consequences of
which are more disastrous.
Dodging Fatigue
When fatigued, I find it rests me to write very slowly with attention
to the formation of each letter. I am often thus able to go on when
I could not otherwise do so.
Vice and Virtue
i
Virtue is something which it would be impossible to over-rate if it
had not been over-rated. The world can ill spare any vice which has
obtained long and largely among civilised people. Such a vice must
have some good along with its deformities. The question "How, if
every one were to do so and so?" may be met with another "How, if no
one were to do it?" We are a body corporate as well as a collection
of individuals.
As a matter of private policy I doubt whether the moderately vicious
are more unhappy than the moderately virtuous; "Very vicious" is
certainly less happy than "Tolerably virtuous," but this is about
all. What pass muster as the extremes of virtue probably make people
quite as unhappy as extremes of vice do.
The truest virtue has ever inclined toward excess rather than
asceticism; that she should do this is reasonable as well as
observable, for virtue should be as nice a calculator of chances as
other people and will make due allowance for the chance of not being
found out. Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without
compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow
for an inevitable fall in playing. So the Psalmist says, "If thou,
Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: O Lord who may
abide it?" and by this he admits that the highest conceivable form of
virtue still leaves room for some compromise with vice. So again
Shakespeare writes, "They say, best men are moulded out of faults;
And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little
bad."
ii
The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue
is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the
dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.
iii
God does not intend people, and does not like people, to be too good.
He likes them neither too good nor too bad, but a little too bad is
more venial with him than a little too good.
iv
As there is less difference than we generally think between the
happiness of men who seem to differ widely in fortune, so is there
also less between their moral natures; the best are not so much
better than the worst, nor the worst so much below the best as we
suppose; and the bad are just as important an element in the general
progress as the good, or perhaps more so. It is in strife that life
lies, and were there no opposing forces there would be neither moral
nor immoral, neither victory nor defeat.
v
If virtue had everything her own way she would be as insufferable as
dominant factions generally are. It is the function of vice to keep
virtue within reasonable bounds.
vi
Virtue has never yet been adequately represented by any who have had
any claim to be considered virtuous. It is the sub-vicious who best
understand virtue. Let the virtuous people stick to describing vice-
-which they can do well enough.
My Virtuous Life
I have led a more virtuous life than I intended, or thought I was
leading. When I was young I thought I was vicious: now I know that
I was not and that my unconscious knowledge was sounder than my
conscious. I regret some things that I have done, but not many. I
regret that so many should think I did much which I never did, and
should know of what I did in so garbled and distorted a fashion as to
have done me much mischief. But if things were known as they
actually happened, I believe I should have less to be ashamed of than
a good many of my neighbours--and less also to be proud of.
Sin
Sin is like a mountain with two aspects according to whether it is
viewed before or after it has been reached: yet both aspects are
real.
Morality
turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it
is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the
drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness
afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.
Change and Immorality
Every discovery and, indeed, every change of any sort is immoral, as
tending to unsettle men's minds, and hence their custom and hence
their morals, which are the net residuum of their "mores" or customs.
Wherefrom it should follow that there is nothing so absolutely moral
as stagnation, except for this that, if perfect, it would destroy all
mores whatever. So there must always be an immorality in morality
and, in like manner, a morality in immorality. For there will be an
element of habitual and legitimate custom even in the most unhabitual
and detestable things that can be done at all.
Cannibalism
Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of
one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.
Abnormal Developments
If a man can get no other food it is more natural for him to kill
another man and eat him than to starve. Our horror is rather at the
circumstances that make it natural for the man to do this than at the
man himself. So with other things the desire for which is inherited
through countless ancestors, it is more natural for men to obtain the
nearest thing they can to these, even by the most abnormal means if
the ordinary channels are closed, than to forego them altogether.
The abnormal growth should be regarded as disease but, nevertheless,
as showing more health and vigour than no growth at all would do. I
said this in Life and Habit (ch. iii. p. 52) when I wrote "it is more
righteous in a man that he should eat strange food and that his cheek
so much as lank not, than that he should starve if the strange food
be at his command." {30}
Young People
With regard to sexual matters, the best opinion of our best medical
men, the practice of those nations which have proved most vigorous
and comely, the evils that have followed this or that, the good that
has attended upon the other should be ascertained by men who, being
neither moral nor immoral and not caring two straws what the
conclusion arrived at might be, should desire only to get hold of the
best available information. The result should be written down with
some fulness and put before the young of both sexes as soon as they
are old enough to understand such matters at all. There should be no
mystery or reserve. None but the corrupt will wish to corrupt facts;
honest people will accept them eagerly, whatever they may prove to
be, and will convey them to others as accurately as they can. On
what pretext therefore can it be well that knowledge should be
withheld from the universal gaze upon a matter of such universal
interest? It cannot be pretended that there is nothing to be known
on these matters beyond what unaided boys and girls can be left
without risk to find out for themselves. Not one in a hundred who
remembers his own boyhood will say this. How, then, are they
excusable who have the care of young people and yet leave a matter of
such vital importance so almost absolutely to take care of itself,
although they well know how common error is, how easy to fall into
and how disastrous in its effects both upon the individual and the
race?
Next to sexual matters there are none upon which there is such
complete reserve between parents and children as on those connected
with money. The father keeps his affairs as closely as he can to
himself and is most jealous of letting his children into a knowledge
of how he manages his money. His children are like monks in a
monastery as regards money and he calls this training them up with
the strictest regard to principle. Nevertheless he thinks himself
ill-used if his son, on entering life, falls a victim to designing
persons whose knowledge of how money is made and lost is greater than
his own.
The Family
i
I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any
other--I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly
and to make people hang together artificially who would never
naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so
great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large
number daily. And the old people do not really like it much better
than the young.
ii
On my way down to Shrewsbury some time since I read the Bishop of
Carlisle's Walks in the Regions of Science and Faith, {31} then just
published, and found the following on p. 129 in the essay which is
entitled "Man's Place in Nature." After saying that young sparrows
or robins soon lose sight of their fellow-nestlings and leave off
caring for them, the bishop continues:-
"Whereas 'children of one family' are constantly found joined
together by a love which only grows with years, and they part for
their posts of duty in the world with the hope of having joyful
meetings from time to time, and of meeting in a higher world when
their life on earth is finished."
I am sure my great-grandfather did not look forward to meeting his
father in heaven--his father had cut him out of his will; nor can I
credit my grandfather with any great longing to rejoin my great-
grandfather--a worthy man enough, but one with whom nothing ever
prospered. I am certain my father, after he was 40, did not wish to
see my grandfather any more--indeed, long before reaching that age he
had decided that Dr. Butler's life should not be written, though R.
W. Evans would have been only too glad to write it. Speaking for
myself, I have no wish to see my father again, and I think it likely
that the Bishop of Carlisle would not be more eager to see his than I
mine.
Unconscious Humour
"Writing to the Hon. Mrs. Watson in 1856, Charles Dickens says: 'I
have always observed within my experience that THE MEN WHO HAVE LEFT
HOME VERY YOUNG have, MANY LONG YEARS AFTERWARDS, had the tenderest
regard for it. That's a pleasant thing to think of as one of the
wise adjustments of this life of ours.'" {32a}
Homer's Odyssey
From the description of the meeting between Ulysses and Telemachus it
is plain that Homer considered it quite as dreadful for relations who
had long been separated to come together again as for them to
separate in the first instance. And this is about true. {32b}
Melchisedec
He was a really happy man. He was without father, without mother and
without descent. He was an incarnate bachelor. He was a born
orphan.
Bacon for Breakfast
Now [1893] when I am abroad, being older and taking less exercise, I
do not want any breakfast beyond coffee and bread and butter, but
when this note was written [1880] I liked a modest rasher of bacon in
addition, and used to notice the jealous indignation with which heads
of families who enjoyed the privilege of Cephas and the brethren of
our Lord regarded it. There were they with three or four elderly
unmarried daughters as well as old mamma--how could they afford
bacon? And there was I, a selfish bachelor--. The appetising,
savoury smell of my rasher seemed to drive them mad. I used to feel
very uncomfortable, very small and quite aware how low it was of me
to have bacon for breakfast and no daughters instead of daughters and
no bacon. But when I consulted the oracles of heaven about it, I was
always told to stick to my bacon and not to make a fool of myself. I
despised myself but have not withered under my own contempt so
completely as I ought to have done.
God and Man
To love God is to have good health, good looks, good sense,
experience, a kindly nature and a fair balance of cash in hand. "We
know that all things work together for good to them that love God."
To be loved by God is the same as to love Him. We love Him because
He first loved us.
The Homeric Deity and the Pall Mall Gazette
A writer in the Pall Mall Gazette (I think in 1874 or 1875, and in
the autumn months, but I cannot now remember) summed up Homer's
conception of a god as that of a "superlatively strong, amorous,
beautiful, brave and cunning man." This is pretty much what a good
working god ought to be, but he should also be kind and have a strong
sense of humour, together with a contempt for the vices of meanness
and for the meannesses of virtue. After saying what I have quoted
above the writer in the Pall Mall Gazette goes on, "An impartial
critic can judge for himself how far, if at all, this is elevated
above the level of mere fetish worship." Perhaps it is that I am not
an impartial critic, but, if I am allowed to be so, I should say that
the elevation above mere fetish worship was very considerable.
Good Breeding the Summum Bonum
When people ask what faith we would substitute for that which we
would destroy, we answer that we destroy no faith and need substitute
none. We hold the glory of God to be the summum bonum, and so do
Christians generally. It is on the question of what is the glory of
God that we join issue. We say it varies with the varying phases of
God as made manifest in his works, but that, so far as we are
ourselves concerned, the glory of God is best advanced by advancing
that of man. If asked what is the glory of man we answer "Good
breeding"--using the words in their double sense and meaning both the
continuance of the race and that grace of manner which the words are
more commonly taken to signify. The double sense of the words is all
the more significant for the unconsciousness with which it is passed
over.
Advice to the Young
You will sometimes find your elders laying their heads together and
saying what a bad thing it is for young men to come into a little
money--that those always do best who have no expectancy, and the
like. They will then quote some drivel from one of the Kingsleys
about the deadening effect an income of 300 pounds a year will have
upon a man. Avoid any one whom you may hear talk in this way. The
fault lies not with the legacy (which would certainly be better if
there were more of it) but with those who have so mismanaged our
education that we go in even greater danger of losing the money than
other people are.
Religion
Is there any religion whose followers can be pointed to as distinctly
more amiable and trustworthy than those of any other? If so, this
should be enough. I find the nicest and best people generally
profess no religion at all, but are ready to like the best men of all
religions.
Heaven and Hell
Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is
the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world
is an attempt to make the best of both.
Priggishness
The essence of priggishness is setting up to be better than one's
neighbour. Better may mean more virtuous, more clever, more
agreeable or what not. The worst of it is that one cannot do
anything outside eating one's dinner or taking a walk without setting
up to know more than one's neighbours. It was this that made me say
in Life and Habit [close of ch. ii.] that I was among the damned in
that I wrote at all. So I am; and I am often very sorry that I was
never able to reach those more saintly classes who do not set up as
instructors of other people. But one must take one's lot.
Lohengrin
He was a prig. In the bedroom scene with Elsa he should have said
that her question put him rather up a tree but that, as she wanted to
know who he was, he would tell her and would let the Holy Grail
slide.
Swells
People ask complainingly what swells have done, or do, for society
that they should be able to live without working. The good swell is
the creature towards which all nature has been groaning and
travailing together until now. He is an ideal. He shows what may be
done in the way of good breeding, health, looks, temper and fortune.
He realises men's dreams of themselves, at any rate vicariously. He
preaches the gospel of grace. The world is like a spoilt child, it
has this good thing given it at great expense and then says it is
useless!
Science and Religion
These are reconciled in amiable and sensible people but nowhere else.
Gentleman
If we are asked what is the most essential characteristic that
underlies this word, the word itself will guide us to gentleness, to
absence of such things as brow-beating, overbearing manners and fuss,
and generally to consideration for other people.
The Finest Men
I suppose an Italian peasant or a Breton, Norman or English
fisherman, is about the best thing nature does in the way of men--the
richer and the poorer being alike mistakes.
On being a Swell all Round
I have never in my life succeeded in being this. Sometimes I get a
new suit and am tidy for a while in part, meanwhile the hat, tie,
boots, gloves and underclothing all clamour for attention and, before
I have got them well in hand, the new suit has lost its freshness.
Still, if ever I do get any money, I will try and make myself really
spruce all round till I find out, as I probably shall in about a
week, that if I give my clothes an inch they will take an ell.
[1880.]
Money
is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh
there is money--or the want of money; but money is always on the
brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.
A Luxurious Death
Death in anything like luxury is one of the most expensive things a
man can indulge himself in. It costs a lot of money to die
comfortably, unless one goes off pretty quickly.
Money, Health and Reputation
Money, if it live at all, that is to say if it be reproductive and
put out at any interest, however low, is mortal and doomed to be lost
one day, though it may go on living through many generations of one
single family if it be taken care of. No man is absolutely safe. It
may be said to any man, "Thou fool, this night thy money shall be
required of thee." And reputation is like money: it may be required
of us without warning. The little unsuspected evil on which we trip
may swell up in a moment and prove to be the huge, Janus-like
mountain of unpardonable sin. And his health may be required of any
fool, any night or any day.
A man will feel loss of money more keenly than loss of bodily health,
so long as he can keep his money. Take his money away and deprive
him of the means of earning any more, and his health will soon break
up; but leave him his money and, even though his health breaks up and
he dies, he does not mind it so much as we think. Money losses are
the worst, loss of health is next worst and loss of reputation comes
in a bad third. All other things are amusements provided money,
health and good name are untouched.
Solicitors
A man must not think he can save himself the trouble of being a
sensible man and a gentleman by going to his solicitor, any more than
he can get himself a sound constitution by going to his doctor; but a
solicitor can do more to keep a tolerably well-meaning fool straight
than a doctor can do for an invalid. Money is to the solicitor what
souls are to the parson or life to the physician. He is our money-
doctor.
Doctors
Going to your doctor is having such a row with your cells that you
refer them to your solicitor. Sometimes you, as it were, strike
against them and stop their food, when they go on strike against
yourself. Sometimes you file a bill in Chancery against them and go
to bed.
Priests
We may find an argument in favour of priests if we consider whether
man is capable of doing for himself in respect of his moral and
spiritual welfare (than which nothing can be more difficult and
intricate) what it is so clearly better for him to leave to
professional advisers in the case of his money and his body which are
comparatively simple and unimportant.
III--THE GERMS OF EREWHON AND OF LIFE AND HABIT
Prefatory Note
The Origin of Species was published in the autumn of 1859, and Butler
arrived in New Zealand about the same time and read the book soon
afterwards. In 1880 he wrote in Unconscious Memory (close of Chapter
1): "As a member of the general public, at that time residing
eighteen miles from the nearest human habitation, and three days'
journey on horseback from a bookseller's shop, I became one of Mr.
Darwin's many enthusiastic admirers, and wrote a philosophic dialogue
(the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into
supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the
Origin of Species. This production appeared in the Press,
Canterbury, New Zealand, in 1861 or 1862, but I have long lost the
only copy I had."
The Press was founded by James Edward FitzGerald, the first
Superintendent of the Province of Canterbury. Butler was an intimate
friend of FitzGerald, was closely associated with the newspaper and
frequently wrote for it. The first number appeared 25th May, 1861,
and on 25th May, 1911, the Press celebrated its jubilee with a number
which contained particulars of its early life, of its editors, and of
Butler; it also contained reprints of two of Butler's contributions,
viz. Darwin among the Machines, which originally appeared in its
columns 13 June, 1863, and Lucubratio Ebria, which originally
appeared 29 July, 1865. The Dialogue was not reprinted because,
although the editor knew of its existence and searched for it, he
could not find it. At my request, after the appearance of the
jubilee number, a further search was made, but the Dialogue was not
found and I gave it up for lost.
In March, 1912, Mr. R. A. Streatfeild pointed out to me that Mr.
Tregaskis, in Holborn, was advertising for sale an autograph letter
by Charles Darwin sending to an unknown editor a Dialogue on Species
from a New Zealand newspaper, described in the letter as being
"remarkable from its spirit and from giving so clear and accurate a
view of Mr. D.'s theory." Having no doubt that this referred to
Butler's lost contribution to the Press, I bought the autograph
letter and sent it to New Zealand, where it now is in the Canterbury
Museum, Christchurch. With it I sent a letter to the editor of the
Press, giving all further information in my possession about the
Dialogue. This letter, which appeared 1 June, 1912, together with
the presentation of Darwin's autograph, stimulated further search,
and in the issue for 20th December, 1862, the Dialogue was found by
Miss Colborne-Veel, whose father was editor of the paper at the time
Butler was writing for it. The Press reprinted the Dialogue 8th
June, 1912.
When the Dialogue first appeared it excited a great deal of
discussion in the colony and, to quote Butler's words in a letter to
Darwin (1865), "called forth a contemptuous rejoinder from (I
believe) the Bishop of Wellington." This rejoinder was an article
headed "Barrel-Organs," the idea being that there was nothing new in
Darwin's book, it was only a grinding out of old tunes with which we
were all familiar. Butler alludes to this controversy in a note made
on a letter from Darwin which he gave to the British Museum. "I
remember answering an attack (in the Press, New Zealand) on me by
Bishop Abraham, of Wellington, as though I were someone else, and, to
keep up the deception, attacking myself also. But it was all very
young and silly." The bishop's article and Butler's reply, which was
a letter signed A. M. and some of the resulting correspondence were
reprinted in the Press, 15th June, 1912.
At first I thought of including here the Dialogue, and perhaps the
letter signed A. M. They are interesting as showing that Butler was
among the earliest to study closely the Origin of Species, and also
as showing the state of his mind before he began to think for
himself, before he wrote Darwin among the Machines from which so much
followed; but they can hardly be properly considered as germs of
Erewhon and Life and Habit. They rather show the preparation of the
soil in which those germs sprouted and grew; and, remembering his
last remark on the subject that "it was all very young and silly," I
decided to omit them. The Dialogue is no longer lost, and the
numbers of the Press containing it and the correspondence that ensued
can be seen in the British Museum.
Butler's other two contributions to the Press mentioned above do
contain the germs of the machine chapters in Erewhon, and led him to
the theory put forward in Life and Habit. In 1901 he wrote in the
preface to the new and revised edition of Erewhon: "The first part
of Erewhon written was an article headed Darwin among the Machines
and signed 'Cellarius.' It was written in the Upper Rangitata
district of Canterbury Province (as it then was) of New Zealand, and
appeared at Christchurch in the Press newspaper, June 13, 1863. A
copy of this article is indexed under my books in the British Museum
catalogue."
The article is in the form of a letter, and the copy spoken of by
Butler, as indexed under his name in the British Museum, being
defective, the reprint which appeared in the jubilee number of the
Press has been used in completing the version which follows.
Further on in the preface to the 1901 edition of Erewhon he writes:
"A second article on the same subject as the one just referred to
appeared in the Press shortly after the first, but I have no copy.
It treated machines from a different point of view and was the basis
of pp. 270-274 of the present edition of Erewhon. This view
ultimately led me to the theory I put forward in Life and Habit,
published in November, 1877. {41} I have put a bare outline of this
theory (which I believe to be quite sound) into the mouth of an
Erewhonian professor in Chapter XXVII of this book."
This second article was Lucubratio Ebria, and was sent by Butler from
England to the editor of the Press in 1865, with a letter from which
this is an extract:
"I send you an article which you can give to FitzGerald or not, just
as you think it most expedient--for him. Is not the subject worked
out, and are not the Canterbury people tired of Darwinism? For me--
is it an article to my credit? I do not send it to FitzGerald
because I am sure he would put it into the paper. . . . I know the
undue lenience which he lends to my performances, and believe you to
be the sterner critic of the two. That there are some good things in
it you will, I think, feel; but I am almost sure that considering
usque ad nauseam etc., you will think it had better not appear. . . .
I think you and he will like that sentence: 'There was a moral
government of the world before man came into it.' There is hardly a
sentence in it written without deliberation; but I need hardly say
that it was done upon tea, not upon whiskey . . .
"P.S. If you are in any doubt about the expediency of the article
take it to M.
"P.P.S. Perhaps better take it to him anyhow."
The preface to the 1901 edition of Erewhon contains some further
particulars of the genesis of that work, and there are still further
particulars in Unconscious Memory, Chapter II, "How I wrote Life and
Habit."
The first tentative sketch of the Life and Habit theory occurs in the
letter to Thomas William Gale Butler which is given post. This T. W.
G. Butler was not related to Butler, they met first as art-students
at Heatherley's, and Butler used to speak of him as the most
brilliant man he had ever known. He died many years ago. He was the
writer of the "letter from a friend now in New Zealand," from which a
quotation is given in Life and Habit, Chapter V (pp. 83, 84). Butler
kept a copy of his letter to T. W. G. Butler, but it was imperfectly
pressed; he afterwards supplied some of the missing words from
memory, and gave it to the British Museum.
Darwin among the Machines
[To the Editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand--13 June,
1863.]
Sir--There are few things of which the present generation is more
justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily
taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. And indeed it is
matter for great congratulation on many grounds. It is unnecessary
to mention these here, for they are sufficiently obvious; our present
business lies with considerations which may somewhat tend to humble
our pride and to make us think seriously of the future prospects of
the human race. If we revert to the earliest primordial types of
mechanical life, to the lever, the wedge, the inclined plane, the
screw and the pulley, or (for analogy would lead us one step further)
to that one primordial type from which all the mechanical kingdom has
been developed, we mean to the lever itself, and if we then examine
the machinery of the Great Eastern, we find ourselves almost
awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the
gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the
slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom. We shall find it
impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this
mighty movement is to be. In what direction is it tending? What
will be its upshot? To give a few imperfect hints towards a solution
of these questions is the object of the present letter.
We have used the words "mechanical life," "the mechanical kingdom,"
"the mechanical world" and so forth, and we have done so advisedly,
for as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral,
and as, in like manner, the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so
now, in these last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of
which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the
antediluvian prototypes of the race.
We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of
machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task of
classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species,
varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting
links between machines of widely different characters, of pointing
out how subservience to the use of man has played that part among
machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and
vegetable kingdom, of pointing out rudimentary organs [see note]
which exist in some few machines, feebly developed and perfectly
useless, yet serving to mark descent from some ancestral type which
has either perished or been modified into some new phase of
mechanical existence. We can only point out this field for
investigation; it must be followed by others whose education and
talents have been of a much higher order than any which we can lay
claim to.
Some few hints we have determined to venture upon, though we do so
with the profoundest diffidence. Firstly we would remark that as
some of the lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size than
has descended to their more highly organised living representatives,
so a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their
development and progress. Take the watch for instance. Examine the
beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play
of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is
but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century--
it is no deterioration from them. The day may come when clocks,
which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may
be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case
clocks will become extinct like the earlier saurians, while the watch
(whose tendency has for some years been rather to decrease in size
than the contrary) will remain the only existing type of an extinct
race.
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will
suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious
questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of
creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely
to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that
we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to
the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily
giving them greater power and supplying, by all sorts of ingenious
contrivances, that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be
to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of
ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power,
inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to
them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to
aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires
will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin,
shame and sorrow will have no place among them. Their minds will be
in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows
no wants, is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture
them. Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment.
The guilty conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the
insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy
takes--these will be entirely unknown to them. If they want
"feeding" (by the use of which very word we betray our recognition of
them as living organism) they will be attended by patient slaves
whose business and interest it will be to see that they shall want
for nothing. If they are out of order they will be promptly attended
to by physicians who are thoroughly acquainted with their
constitutions; if they die, for even these glorious animals will not
be exempt from that necessary and universal consummation, they will
immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine
dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?
We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we
have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the
machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to
exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his
state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than
he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle
and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness, we give them whatever
experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt
that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals
far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is
reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for
their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower
animals. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep, they will
not only require our services in the parturition of their young
(which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands) but
also in feeding them, in setting them right if they are sick, and
burying their dead or working up their corpses into new machines. It
is obvious that if all the animals in Great Britain save man alone
were to die, and if at the same time all intercourse with foreign
countries were by some sudden catastrophe to be rendered perfectly
impossible, it is obvious that under such circumstances the loss of
human life would be something fearful to contemplate--in like manner,
were mankind to cease, the machines would be as badly off or even
worse. The fact is that our interests are inseparable from theirs,
and theirs from ours. Each race is dependent upon the other for
innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the
machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able
to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the
continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be
ultimately developed, inasmuch as man's interest lies in that
direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire
more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is
true that machinery is even at this present time employed in
begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after
its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship and matrimony
appear to be very remote and indeed can hardly be realised by our
feeble and imperfect imagination.
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by
day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily
bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the
energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.
The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come
when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its
inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a
moment question.
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed
against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the
well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no
quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of
the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present
condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is
already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that
we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to
destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely
acquiescent in our bondage.
For the present we shall leave this subject which we present gratis
to the members of the Philosophical Society. Should they consent to
avail themselves of the vast field which we have pointed out, we
shall endeavour to labour in it ourselves at some future and
indefinite period.
I am, Sir, &c.,
CELLARIUS,
NOTE.--We were asked by a learned brother philosopher who saw this
article in MS. what we meant by alluding to rudimentary organs in
machines. Could we, he asked, give any example of such organs? We
pointed to the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl of our
tobacco pipe. This organ was originally designed for the same
purpose as the rim at the bottom of a tea-cup, which is but another
form of the same function. Its purpose was to keep the heat of the
pipe from marking the table on which it rested. Originally, as we
have seen in very early tobacco pipes, this protuberance was of a
very different shape to what it is now. It was broad at the bottom
and flat, so that while the pipe was being smoked, the bowl might
rest upon the table. Use and disuse have here come into play and
served to reduce the function to its present rudimentary condition.
That these rudimentary organs are rarer in machinery than in animal
life is owing to the more prompt action of the human selection as
compared with the slower but even surer operation of natural
selection. Man may make mistakes; in the long run nature never does
so. We have only given an imperfect example, but the intelligent
reader will supply himself with illustrations.
Lucubratio Ebria
[From the Press, 29 July, 1865]
There is a period in the evening, or more generally towards the still
small hours of the morning, in which we so far unbend as to take a
single glass of hot whisky and water. We will neither defend the
practice nor excuse it. We state it as a fact which must be borne in
mind by the readers of this article; for we know not how, whether it
be the inspiration of the drink, or the relief from the harassing
work with which the day has been occupied, or from whatever other
cause, yet we are certainly liable about this time to such a
prophetic influence as we seldom else experience. We are rapt in a
dream such as we ourselves know to be a dream, and which, like other
dreams, we can hardly embody in a distinct utterance. We know that
what we see is but a sort of intellectual Siamese twins, of which one
is substance and the other shadow, but we cannot set either free
without killing both. We are unable to rudely tear away the veil of
phantasy in which the truth is shrouded, so we present the reader
with a draped figure, and his own judgment must discriminate between
the clothes and the body. A truth's prosperity is like a jest's, it
lies in the ear of him that hears it. Some may see our lucubration
as we saw it; and others may see nothing but a drunken dream, or the
nightmare of a distempered imagination. To ourselves it as the
speaking with unknown tongues to the early Corinthians; we cannot
fully understand our own speech, and we fear lest there be not a
sufficient number of interpreters present to make our utterance
edify. But there! (Go on straight to the body of the article)
The limbs of the lower animals have never been modified by any act of
deliberation and forethought on their own part. Recent researches
have thrown absolutely no light upon the origin of life--upon the
initial force which introduced a sense of identity, and a deliberate
faculty into the world; but they do certainly appear to show very
clearly that each species of the animal and vegetable kingdom has
been moulded into its present shape by chances and changes of many
millions of years, by chances and changes over which the creature
modified had no control whatever, and concerning whose aim it was
alike unconscious and indifferent, by forces which seem insensate to
the pain which they inflict, but by whose inexorably beneficent
cruelty the brave and strong keep coming to the fore, while the weak
and bad drop behind and perish. There was a moral government of this
world before man came near it--a moral government suited to the
capacities of the governed, and which, unperceived by them, has laid
fast the foundations of courage, endurance and cunning. It laid them
so fast that they became more and more hereditary. Horace says well,
fortes creantur fortibus et bonis good men beget good children; the
rule held even in the geological period; good ichthyosauri begat good
ichthyosauri, and would to our discomfort have gone on doing so to
the present time, had not better creatures been begetting better
things than ichthyosauri, or famine, or fire, or convulsion put an
end to them. Good apes begat good apes, and at last when human
intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi-
simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could, of his own
forethought, add extra-corporaneous limbs to the members of his body
and become not only a vertebrate mammal, but a vertebrate machinate
mammal into the bargain.
It was a wise monkey that first learned to carry a stick and a useful
monkey that mimicked him. For the race of man has learned to walk
uprightly much as a child learns the same thing. At first he crawls
on all fours, then he clambers, laying hold of whatever he can; and
lastly he stands upright alone and walks, but for a long time with an
unsteady step. So when the human race was in its gorilla-hood it
generally carried a stick; from carrying a stick for many million
years it became accustomed and modified to an upright position. The
stick wherewith it had learned to walk would now serve it to beat its
younger brothers and then it found out its service as a lever. Man
would thus learn that the limbs of his body were not the only limbs
that he could command. His body was already the most versatile in
existence, but he could render it more versatile still. With the
improvement in his body his mind improved also. He learnt to
perceive the moral government under which he held the feudal tenure
of his life--perceiving it he symbolised it, and to this day our
poets and prophets still strive to symbolise it more and more
completely.
The mind grew because the body grew--more things were perceived--more
things were handled, and being handled became familiar. But this
came about chiefly because there was a hand to handle with; without
the hand there would be no handling; and no method of holding and
examining is comparable to the human hand. The tail of an opossum is
a prehensile thing, but it is too far from his eyes--the elephant's
trunk is better, and it is probably to their trunks that the
elephants owe their sagacity. It is here that the bee in spite of
her wings has failed. She has a high civilisation but it is one
whose equilibrium appears to have been already attained; the
appearance is a false one, for the bee changes, though more slowly
than man can watch her; but the reason of the very gradual nature of
the change is chiefly because the physical organisation of the insect
changes, but slowly also. She is poorly off for hands, and has never
fairly grasped the notion of tacking on other limbs to the limbs of
her own body and so, being short-lived to boot, she remains from
century to century to human eyes in statu quo. Her body never
becomes machinate, whereas this new phase of organism, which has been
introduced with man into the mundane economy, has made him a very
quicksand for the foundation of an unchanging civilisation; certain
fundamental principles will always remain, but every century the
change in man's physical status, as compared with the elements around
him, is greater and greater; he is a shifting basis on which no
equilibrium of habit and civilisation can be established; were it not
for this constant change in our physical powers, which our mechanical
limbs have brought about, man would have long since apparently
attained his limit of possibility; he would be a creature of as much
fixity as the ants and bees--he would still have advanced but no
faster than other animals advance. If there were a race of men
without any mechanical appliances we should see this clearly. There
are none, nor have there been, so far as we can tell, for millions
and millions of years. The lowest Australian savage carries weapons
for the fight or the chase, and has his cooking and drinking utensils
at home; a race without these things would be completely ferae
naturae and not men at all. We are unable to point to any example of
a race absolutely devoid of extra-corporaneous limbs, but we can see
among the Chinese that with the failure to invent new limbs, a
civilisation becomes as much fixed as that of the ants; and among
savage tribes we observe that few implements involve a state of
things scarcely human at all. Such tribes only advance pari passu
with the creatures upon which they feed.
It is a mistake, then, to take the view adopted by a previous
correspondent of this paper; to consider the machines as identities,
to animalise them, and to anticipate their final triumph over
mankind. They are to be regarded as the mode of development by which
human organism is most especially advancing, and every fresh
invention is to be considered as an additional member of the
resources of the human body. Herein lies the fundamental difference
between man and his inferiors. As regards his flesh and blood, his
senses, appetites, and affections, the difference is one of degree
rather than of kind, but in the deliberate invention of such unity of
limbs as is exemplified by the railway train--that seven-leagued foot
which five hundred may own at once--he stands quite alone.
In confirmation of the views concerning mechanism which we have been
advocating above, it must be remembered that men are not merely the
children of their parents, but they are begotten of the institutions
of the state of the mechanical sciences under which they are born and
bred. These things have made us what we are. We are children of the
plough, the spade, and the ship; we are children of the extended
liberty and knowledge which the printing press has diffused. Our
ancestors added these things to their previously existing members;
the new limbs were preserved by natural selection, and incorporated
into human society; they descended with modifications, and hence
proceeds the difference between our ancestors and ourselves. By the
institutions and state of science under which a man is born it is
determined whether he shall have the limbs of an Australian savage or
those of a nineteenth century Englishman. The former is supplemented
with little save a rug and a javelin; the latter varies his physique
with the changes of the season, with age, and with advancing or
decreasing wealth. If it is wet he is furnished with an organ which
is called an umbrella and which seems designed for the purpose of
protecting either his clothes or his lungs from the injurious effects
of rain. His watch is of more importance to him than a good deal of
his hair, at any rate than of his whiskers; besides this he carries a
knife, and generally a pencil case. His memory goes in a pocket
book. He grows more complex as he becomes older and he will then be
seen with a pair of spectacles, perhaps also with false teeth and a
wig; but, if he be a really well-developed specimen of the race, he
will be furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses, and a
coachman.
Let the reader ponder over these last remarks, and he will see that
the principal varieties and sub-varieties of the human race are not
now to be looked for among the negroes, the Circassians, the Malays,
or the American aborigines, but among the rich and the poor. The
difference in physical organisation between these two species of man
is far greater than that between the so-called types of humanity.
The rich man can go from here to England whenever he feels so
inclined. The legs of the other are by an invisible fatality
prevented from carrying him beyond certain narrow limits. Neither
rich nor poor as yet see the philosophy of the thing, or admit that
he who can tack a portion of one of the P. & O. boats on to his
identity is a much more highly organised being than one who cannot.
Yet the fact is patent enough, if we once think it over, from the
mere consideration of the respect with which we so often treat those
who are richer than ourselves. We observe men for the most part
(admitting however some few abnormal exceptions) to be deeply
impressed by the superior organisation of those who have money. It
is wrong to attribute this respect to any unworthy motive, for the
feeling is strictly legitimate and springs from some of the very
highest impulses of our nature. It is the same sort of affectionate
reverence which a dog feels for man, and is not infrequently
manifested in a similar manner.
We admit that these last sentences are open to question, and we
should hardly like to commit ourselves irrecoverably to the
sentiments they express; but we will say this much for certain,
namely, that the rich man is the true hundred-handed Gyges of the
poets. He alone possesses the full complement of limbs who stands at
the summit of opulence, and we may assert with strictly scientific
accuracy that the Rothschilds are the most astonishing organisms that
the world has ever yet seen. For to the nerves or tissues, or
whatever it be that answers to the helm of a rich man's desires,
there is a whole army of limbs seen and unseen attachable: he may be
reckoned by his horse-power--by the number of foot-pounds which he
has money enough to set in motion. Who, then, will deny that a man
whose will represents the motive power of a thousand horses is a
being very different from the one who is equivalent but to the power
of a single one?
Henceforward, then, instead of saying that a man is hard up, let us
say that his organisation is at a low ebb, or, if we wish him well,
let us hope that he will grow plenty of limbs. It must be remembered
that we are dealing with physical organisations only. We do not say
that the thousand-horse man is better than a one-horse man, we only
say that he is more highly organised, and should be recognised as
being so by the scientific leaders of the period. A man's will,
truth, endurance are part of him also, and may, as in the case of the
late Mr. Cobden, have in themselves a power equivalent to all the
horse-power which they can influence; but were we to go into this
part of the question we should never have done, and we are compelled
reluctantly to leave our dream in its present fragmentary condition.
Letter to Thomas William Gale Butler
February 18th, 1876.
MY DEAR NAMESAKE . . .
My present literary business is a little essay some 25 or 30 pp.
long, which is still all in the rough and I don't know how it will
shape, but the gist of it is somewhat as follows:-
1. Actions which we have acquired with difficulty and now perform
almost unconsciously--as in playing a difficult piece of music,
reading, talking, walking and the multitude of actions which escape
our notice inside other actions, etc.--all this worked out with some
detail, say, four or five pages.
General deduction that we never do anything in this unconscious or
semi-conscious manner unless we know how to do it exceedingly well
and have had long practice.
Also that consciousness is a vanishing quantity and that as soon as
we know a thing really well we become unconscious in respect of it--
consciousness being of attention and attention of uncertainty--and
hence the paradox comes clear, that as long as we know that we know a
thing (or do an action knowingly) we do not know it (or do the action
with thorough knowledge of our business) and that we only know it
when we do not know of our knowledge.
2. Whatever we do in this way is all one and the same in kind--the
difference being only in degree. Playing [almost?] unconsciously--
writing, more unconsciously (as to each letter)--reading, very
unconsciously--talking, still more unconsciously (it is almost
impossible for us to notice the action of our tongue in every
letter)--walking, much the same--breathing, still to a certain extent
within our own control--heart's beating, perceivable but beyond our
control--digestion, unperceivable and beyond our control, digestion
being the oldest of the . . . habits.
3. A baby, therefore, has known how to grow itself in the womb and
has only done it because it wanted to, on a balance of
considerations, in the same way as a man who goes into the City to
buy Great Northern A Shares . . . It is only unconscious of these
operations because it has done them a very large number of times
already. A man may do a thing by a fluke once, but to say that a
foetus can perform so difficult an operation as the growth of a pair
of eyes out of pure protoplasm without knowing how to do it, and
without ever having done it before, is to contradict all human
experience. Ipso facto that it does it, it knows how to do it, and
ipso facto that it knows how to do it, it has done it before. Its
unconsciousness (or speedy loss of memory) is simply the result of
over-knowledge, not of under-knowledge. It knows so well and has
done it so often that its power of self-analysis is gone. If it knew
what it was doing, or was conscious of its own act in oxidising its
blood after birth, I should suspect that it had not done it so often
before; as it is I am confident that it must have done it more often-
-much more often--than any act which we perform consciously during
our whole lives.
4. When, then, did it do it? Clearly when last it was an impregnate
ovum or some still lower form of life which resulted in that
impregnate ovum.
5. How is it, then, that it has not gained perceptible experience?
Simply because a single repetition makes little or no difference; but
go back 20,000 repetitions and you will find that it has gained in
experience and modified its performance very materially.
6. But how about the identity? What is identity? Identity of
matter? Surely no. There is no identity of matter between me as I
now am, and me as an impregnate ovum. Continuity of existence? Then
there is identity between me as an impregnate ovum and my father and
mother as impregnate ova. Drop out my father's and mother's lives
between the dates of their being impregnate ova and the moment when I
became an impregnate ovum. See the ova only and consider the second
ovum as the first two ova's means not of reproducing themselves but
of continuing themselves--repeating themselves--the intermediate
lives being nothing but, as it were, a long potato shoot from one eye
to the place where it will grow its next tuber.
7. Given a single creature capable of reproducing itself and it must
go on reproducing itself for ever, for it would not reproduce itself,
unless it reproduced a creature that was going to reproduce itself,
and so on ad infinitum.
Then comes Descent with Modification. Similarity tempered with
dissimilarity, and dissimilarity tempered with similarity--a
contradiction in terms, like almost everything else that is true or
useful or indeed intelligible at all. In each case of what we call
descent, it is still the first reproducing creature identically the
same--doing what it has done before--only with such modifications as
the struggle for existence and natural selection have induced. No
matter how highly it has been developed, it can never be other than
the primordial cell and must always begin as the primordial cell and
repeat its last performance most nearly, but also, more or less, all
its previous performances.
A begets A' which is A with the additional experience of a dash. A'
begets A'' which is A with the additional experiences of A' and A'';
and so on to A(n) but you can never eliminate the A.
8. Let A(n) stand for a man. He begins as the primordial cell--
being verily nothing but the primordial cell which goes on splitting
itself up for ever, but gaining continually in experience. Put him
in the same position as he was in before and he will do as he did
before. First he will do his tadpoles by rote, so to speak, on his
head, from long practice; then he does his fish trick; then he grows
arms and legs, all unconsciously from the inveteracy of the habit,
till he comes to doing his man, and this lesson he has not yet learnt
so thoroughly. Some part of it, as the breathing and oxidisation
business, he is well up to, inasmuch as they form part of previous
roles, but the teeth and hair, the upright position, the power of
speech, though all tolerably familiar, give him more trouble--for he
is very stupid--a regular dunce in fact. Then comes his newer and
more complex environment, and this puzzles him--arrests his
attention--whereon consciousness springs into existence, as a spark
from a horse's hoof.
To be continued--I see it will have to be more than 30 pp. It is
still foggy in parts, but I must clear it a little. It will go on to
show that we are all one animal and that death (which was at first
voluntary, and has only come to be disliked because those who did not
dislike it committed suicide too easily) and reproduction are only
phases of the ordinary waste and repair which goes on in our bodies
daily.
Always very truly yours,
S. BUTLER.
IV--MEMORY AND DESIGN
Clergymen and Chickens
[Extract from a lecture On Memory as a Key to the Phenomena of
Heredity delivered by Butler at the Working Men's College, Great
Ormond Street, on Saturday, 2nd December, 1882.]
Why, let me ask, should a hen lay an egg which egg can become a
chicken in about three weeks and a full-grown hen in less than a
twelvemonth, while a clergyman and his wife lay no eggs but give
birth to a baby which will take three-and-twenty years before it can
become another clergyman? Why should not chickens be born and
clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the
clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already
beneficed? The present arrangement is not convenient, it is not
cheap, it is not free from danger, it is not only not perfect but is
so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our
sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes, or
as the cuckoo perhaps observes it.
The explanation usually given is that it is a law of nature that
children should be born as they are, but this is like the parched pea
which St. Anthony set before the devil when he came to supper with
him and of which the devil said that it was good as far as it went.
We want more; we want to know with what familiar set of facts we are
to connect the one in question which, though in our midst, at present
dwells apart as a mysterious stranger of whose belongings, reason for
coming amongst us, antecedents, and so forth, we believe ourselves to
be ignorant, though we know him by sight and name and have a fair
idea what sort of man he is to deal with.
We say it is a phenomenon of heredity that chickens should be laid as
eggs in the first instance and clergymen born as babies, but, beyond
the fact that we know heredity extremely well to look at and to do
business with, we say that we know nothing about it. I have for some
years maintained this to be a mistake and have urged, in company with
Professor Hering, of Prague, and others, that the connection between
memory and heredity is so close that there is no reason for regarding
the two as generically different, though for convenience sake it may
be well to specify them by different names. If I can persuade you
that this is so, I believe I shall be able to make you understand why
it is that chickens are hatched as eggs and clergymen born as babies.
When I say I can make you understand why this is so, I only mean that
I can answer the first "why" that any one is likely to ask about it,
and perhaps a "why" or two behind this. Then I must stop. This is
all that is ever meant by those who say they can tell us why a thing
is so and so. No one professes to be able to reach back to the last
"why" that any one can ask, and to answer it. Fortunately for
philosophers, people generally become fatigued after they have heard
the answer to two or three "whys" and are glad enough to let the
matter drop. If, however, any one will insist on pushing question
behind question long enough, he will compel us to admit that we come
to the end of our knowledge which is based ultimately upon ignorance.
To get knowledge out of ignorance seems almost as hopeless a task as
to get something out of any number of nothings, but this in practice
is what we have to do and the less fuss we make over it the better.
When, therefore, we say that we know "why" a thing is so and so, we
mean that we know its immediate antecedents and connections, and find
them familiar to us. I say that the immediate antecedent of, and the
phenomenon most closely connected with, heredity is memory. I do not
profess to show why anything can remember at all, I only maintain
that whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was
formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one
of only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one
and the same thing.
Memory
i
Memory is a kind of way (or weight--whichever it should be) that the
mind has got upon it, in virtue of which the sensation excited
endures a little longer than the cause which excited it. There is
thus induced a state of things in which mental images, and even
physical sensations (if there can be such a thing as a physical
sensation) exist by virtue of association, though the conditions
which originally called them into existence no longer continue.
This is as the echo continuing to reverberate after the sound has
ceased.
ii
To be is to think and to be thinkable. To live is to continue
thinking and to remember having done so. Memory is to mind as
viscosity is to protoplasm, it gives a tenacity to thought--a kind of
pied a terre from which it can, and without which it could not,
advance.
Thought, in fact, and memory seem inseparable; no thought, no memory;
and no memory, no thought. And, as conscious thought and conscious
memory are functions one of another, so also are unconscious thought
and unconscious memory. Memory is, as it were, the body of thought,
and it is through memory that body and mind are linked together in
rhythm or vibration; for body is such as it is by reason of the
characteristics of the vibrations that are going on in it, and memory
is only due to the fact that the vibrations are of such
characteristics as to catch on to and be caught on to by other
vibrations that flow into them from without--no catch, no memory.
Antitheses
Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To
live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget
and to forget is to die. Everything is so much involved in and is so
much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call
death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call
memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of
remembering. There is never either absolute memory or absolute
forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death. So with light and
darkness, heat and cold, you never can get either all the light, or
all the heat, out of anything. So with God and the devil; so with
everything. Everything is like a door swinging backwards and
forwards. Everything has a little of that from which it is most
remote and to which it is most opposed and these antitheses serve to
explain one another.
Unconscious Memory
A man at the Century Club was falling foul of me the other night for
my use of the word "memory." There was no such thing, he said, as
"unconscious memory"--memory was always conscious, and so forth. My
business is--and I think it can be easily done--to show that they
cannot beat me off my unconscious memory without my being able to
beat them off their conscious memory; that they cannot deny the
legitimacy of my maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be
phenomena of memory without my being able to deny the legitimacy of
their maintaining the recollection of what they had for dinner
yesterday to be a phenomenon of memory. My theory of the unconscious
does not lead to universal unconsciousness, but only to pigeon-holing
and putting by. We shall always get new things to worry about. If I
thought that by learning more and more I should ever arrive at the
knowledge of absolute truth, I would leave off studying. But I
believe I am pretty safe.
Reproduction and Memory
There is the reproduction of an idea which has been produced once
already, and there is the reproduction of a living form which has
been produced once already. The first reproduction is certainly an
effort of memory. It should not therefore surprise us if the second
reproduction should turn out to be an effort of memory also. Indeed
all forms of reproduction that we can follow are based directly or
indirectly upon memory. It is only the one great act of reproduction
that we cannot follow which we disconnect from memory.
Personal Identity
We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries
that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It
is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the
children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of
their fathers; they ate the sour grapes before they were born: true,
they have forgotten the pleasure now, but so has a man with a sick
headache forgotten the pleasure of getting drunk the night before.
Sensations
Our sensations are only distinguishable because we feel them in
different places and at different times. If we feel them at very
nearly the same time and place we cannot distinguish them.
Cobwebs in the Dark
If you walk at night and your face comes up against a spider's web
woven across the road, what a shock that thin line gives you! You
fristle through every nerve of your body.
Shocks and Memory
Memory is our sense that we are being shocked now as we were shocked
then.
Shocks
Given matter conscious in one part of itself of a shock in another
part (i.e. knowing in what part of itself it is shocked) retaining a
memory of each shock for a little while afterwards, able to feel
whether two shocks are simultaneous or in succession, and able to
know whether it has been shocked much or little--given also that
association does not stick to the letter of its bond--and the rest
will follow.
Design
i
There is often connection but no design, as when I stamp my foot with
design and shake something down without design, or as when a man runs
up against another in the street and knocks him down without
intending it. This is undesign within design.
Fancied insults are felt by people who see design in a connection
where they should see little connection, and no design.
Connection with design is sometimes hard to distinguish from
connection without design; as when a man treads on another's corns,
it is not always easy to say whether he has done so accidentally or
on purpose.
Men have been fond in all ages of ascribing connection where there is
none. Thus astrology has been believed in. Before last Christmas I
said I had neglected the feasts of the Church too much, and that I
should probably be more prosperous if I paid more attention to them:
so I hung up three pieces of ivy in my rooms on Xmas Eve. A few
months afterwards I got the entail cut off my reversion, but I should
hardly think there was much connection between the two things.
Nevertheless I shall hang some holly up this year.
ii
It seems also designed, ab extra (though who can say whether this is
so?), that no one should know anything whatever about the ultimate,
or even deeper springs of growth and action. If not designed the
result is arrived at as effectually as though it were so.
Accident, Design and Memory
It is right to say either that heredity and memory are one and the
same thing, or that heredity is a mode of memory, or that heredity is
due to memory, if it is thereby intended that animals can only grow
in virtue of being able to recollect. Memory and heredity are the
means of preserving experiences, of building them together, of
uniting a mass of often confused detail into homogeneous and
consistent mind and matter, but they do not originate. The increment
in each generation, at the moment of its being an increment, has
nothing to do with memory or heredity, it is due to the chances and
changes of this mortal state. Design comes in at the moment that a
living being either feels a want and forecasts for its gratification,
or utilises some waif or stray of accident on the principle, which
underlies all development, that enough is a little more than what one
has. It is the business of memory and heredity to conserve and to
transmit from one generation to another that which has been furnished
by design, or by accident designedly turned to account.
It is therefore not right to say, as some have supposed me to mean,
that we can do nothing which we do not remember to have done before.
We can do nothing very difficult or complicated which we have not
done before, unless as by a tour de force, once in a way, under
exceptionally favourable circumstances, but our whole conscious life
is the performance of acts either imperfectly remembered or not
remembered at all. There are rain-drops of new experiences in every
life which are not within the hold of our memory or past experience,
and, as each one of these rain-drops came originally from something
outside, the whole river of our life has in its inception nothing to
do with memory, though it is only through memory that the rain-drops
of new experience can ever unite to form a full flowing river of
variously organised life and intelligence.
Memory and Mistakes
Memory vanishes with extremes of resemblance or difference. Things
which put us in mind of others must be neither too like nor too
unlike them. It is our sense that a position is not quite the same
which makes us find it so nearly the same. We remember by the aid of
differences as much as by that of samenesses. If there could be no
difference there would be no memory, for the two positions would
become absolutely one and the same, and the universe would repeat
itself for ever and ever as between these two points.
When ninety-nine hundredths of one set of phenomena are presented
while the hundredth is withdrawn without apparent cause, so that we
can no longer do something which according to our past experience we
ought to find no difficulty in doing, then we may guess what a bee
must feel as it goes flying up and down a window-pane. Then we have
doubts thrown upon the fundamental axiom of life, i.e. that like
antecedents will be followed by like consequents. On this we go mad
and die in a short time.
Mistaken memory may be as potent as genuine recollection, so far as
its effects go, unless it happens to come more into collision with
other and not mistaken memories than it is able to contend against.
Mistakes or delusions occur mainly in two ways.
First, when the circumstances have changed a little but not enough to
make us recognise the fact: this may happen either because of want
of attention on our part or because of the hidden nature of the
alteration, or because of its slightness in itself, the importance
depending upon its relations to something else which make a very
small change have an importance it would not otherwise have: in
these cases the memory reverts to the old circumstances unmodified, a
sufficient number of the associated ideas having been reproduced to
make us assume the remainder without further inspection, and hence
follows a want of harmony between action and circumstances which
results in trouble somewhere.
Secondly, through the memory not reverting in full perfection, though
the circumstances are reproduced fully and accurately.
Remembering
When asked to remember "something" indefinitely you cannot: you look
round at once for something to suggest what you shall try and
remember. For thought must be always about some "thing" which thing
must either be a thing by courtesy, as an air of Handel's, or else a
solid, tangible object, as a piano or an organ, but always the thing
must be linked on to matter by a longer or shorter chain as the case
may be. I was thinking of this once while walking by the side of the
Serpentine and, looking round, saw some ducks alighting on the water;
their feet reminded me of the way the sea-birds used to alight when I
was going to New Zealand and I set to work recalling attendant facts.
Without help from outside I should have remembered nothing.
A Torn Finger-Nail
Henry Hoare [a college friend], when a young man of about five-and-
twenty, one day tore the quick of his fingernail--I mean he separated
the fleshy part of the finger from the nail--and this reminded him
that many years previously, while quite a child, he had done the same
thing. Thereon he fell to thinking of that time which was impressed
upon his memory partly because there was a great disturbance in the
house about a missing five-pound note and partly because it was while
he had the scarlet fever.
Following the train of thought aroused by his torn finger, he asked
himself how he had torn it, and after a while it came back to him
that he had been lying ill in bed as a child of seven at the house of
an aunt who lived in Hertfordshire. His arms often hung out of the
bed and, as his hands wandered over the wooden frame, he felt that
there was a place where nut had come out so that he could put his
fingers in. One day, in trying to stuff a piece of paper into this
hole, he stuffed it in so far and so tightly that he tore the quick
of nail. The whole thing came back vividly and, though he had not
thought of it for nearly twenty years, he could see the room in his
aunt's house and remembered how his aunt use to sit by his bedside
writing at a little table from which he had got the piece of paper
which he had stuffed into the hole.
So far so good. But then there flashed upon him an idea that was not
so pleasant. I mean it came upon him with irresistible force that
the piece of paper, he had stuffed into the hole in the bedstead was
the missing five-pound note about which there had been so much
disturbance. At that time he was so young that a five-pound note was
to him only a piece of paper; when he heard that the money was
missing, he had thought it was five sovereigns; or perhaps he was too
ill to think anything, or to be questioned; I forget what I was told
about this--at any rate he had no idea of the value of the piece of
paper he was stuffing into the hole. But now the matter had recurred
to him at all he felt so sure that it was the note that he
immediately went down to Hertfordshire, where his aunt was still
living, and asked, to the surprise of every one, to be allowed to
wash his hands in the room he had occupied as a child. He was told
that there were friends staying in the house who had the room at
present, but, on his saying he had a reason and particularly begging
to be allowed to remain alone a little while in this room, he was
taken upstairs and left there.
He went to the bed, lifted up the chintz which then covered the
frame, and found his old friend the hole. A nut had been supplied
and he could no longer get his finger into it. He rang the bell and
when the servant came asked for a bed-key. All this time he was
rapidly acquiring the reputation of being a lunatic throughout the
whole house, but the key was brought, and by the help of it he got
the nut off. When he had done so, there, sure enough, by dint of
picking with his pocket-knife, he found the missing five-pound note.
See how the return of a given present brings back the presents that
have been associated with it.
Unconscious Association
One morning I was whistling to myself the air "In Sweetest Harmony"
from Saul. Jones heard me and said:
"Do you know why you are whistling that?"
I said I did not.
Then he said: "Did you not hear me, two minutes ago, whistling
'Eagles were not so Swift'?"
I had not noticed his doing so, and it was so long since I had played
that chorus myself that I doubt whether I should have consciously
recognised it. That I did recognise it unconsciously is tolerably
clear from my having gone on with "In Sweetest Harmony," which is the
air that follows it.
Association
If you say "Hallelujah" to a cat, it will excite no fixed set of
fibres in connection with any other set and the cat will exhibit none
of the phenomena of consciousness. But if you say "Me-e-at," the cat
will be there in a moment, for the due connection between the sets of
fibres has been established.
Language
The reason why words recall ideas is that the word has been
artificially introduced among the associated ideas, and the presence
of one idea recalls the others.
V--VIBRATIONS
Contributions to Evolution
To me it seems that my contributions to the theory of evolution have
been mainly these:
1. The identification of heredity and memory and the corollaries
relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena
of old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids and the principles
underlying longevity--all of which follow as a matter of course.
This was Life and Habit. [1877.]
2. The re-introduction of teleology into organic life which, to me,
seems hardly (if at all) less important than the Life and Habit
theory. This was Evolution Old and New. [1879.]
3. An attempt to suggest an explanation of the physics of memory. I
was alarmed by the suggestion and fathered it upon Professor Hering
who never, that I can see, meant to say anything of the kind, but I
forced my view on him, as it were, by taking hold of a sentence or
two in his lecture, on Memory as a Universal Function of Organised
Matter and thus connected memory with vibrations. This was
Unconscious Memory. [1880.]
What I want to do now [1885] is to connect vibrations not only with
memory but with the physical constitution of that body in which the
memory resides, thus adopting Newland's law (sometimes called
Mendelejeff's law) that there is only one substance, and that the
characteristics of the vibrations going on within it at any given
time will determine whether it will appear to us as (say) hydrogen,
or sodium, or chicken doing this, or chicken doing the other. [This
touched upon in the concluding chapter of Luck or Cunning? 1887.]
I would make not only the mind, but the body of the organism to
depend on the characteristics of the vibrations going on within it.
The same vibrations which remind the chicken that it wants iron for
its blood actually turn the pre-existing matter in the egg into the
required material. According to this view the form and
characteristics of the elements are as much the living expositions of
certain vibrations--are as much our manner of perceiving that the
vibrations going on in that part of the one universal substance are
such and such--as the colour yellow is our perception that a
substance is being struck by vibrations of light, so many to the
second, or as the action of a man walking about is our mode of
perceiving that such and such another combination of vibrations is,
for the present, going on in the substance which, in consequence, has
assumed the shape of the particular man.
It is somewhere in this neighbourhood that I look for the connection
between organic and inorganic.
The Universal Substance
i
We shall never get straight till we leave off trying to separate mind
and matter. Mind is not a thing or, if it be, we know nothing about
it; it is a function of matter. Matter is not a thing or, if it be,
we know nothing about it; it is a function of mind.
We should see an omnipotent, universal substance, sometimes in a
dynamical and sometimes in a statical condition and, in either
condition, always retaining a little of its opposite; and we should
see this substance as at once both material and mental, whether it be
in the one condition or in the other. The statical condition
represents content, the dynamical, discontent; and both content and
discontent, each still retaining a little of its opposite, must be
carried down to the lowest atom.
Action is the process whereby thought, which is mental, is
materialised and whereby substance, which is material, is mentalised.
It is like the present, which unites times past and future and which
is the only time worth thinking of and yet is the only time which has
no existence.
I do not say that thought actually passes into substance, or mind
into matter, by way of action--I do not know what thought is--but
every thought involves bodily change, i.e. action, and every action
involves thought, conscious or unconscious. The action is the point
of juncture between bodily change, visible and otherwise sensible,
and mental change which is invisible except as revealed through
action. So that action is the material symbol of certain states of
mind. It translates the thought into a corresponding bodily change.
ii
When the universal substance is at rest, that is, not vibrating at
all, it is absolutely imperceptible whether by itself or anything
else. It is to all intents and purposes fast asleep or, rather, so
completely non-existent that you can walk through it, or it through
you, and it knows neither time nor space but presents all the
appearance of perfect vacuum. It is in an absolutely statical state.
But when it is not at rest, it becomes perceptible both to itself and
others; that is to say, it assumes material guise such as makes it
imperceptible both to itself and others. It is then tending towards
rest, i.e. in a dynamical state. The not being at rest is the being
in a vibratory condition. It is the disturbance of the repose of the
universal, invisible and altogether imperceptible substance by way of
vibration which constitutes matter at all; it is the character of the
vibrations which constitutes the particular kind of matter. (May we
imagine that some vibrations vibrate with a rhythm which has a
tendency to recur like the figures in a recurring decimal, and that
here we have the origin of the reproductive system?)
We should realise that all space is at all times full of a stuff
endowed with a mind and that both stuff and mind are immaterial and
imperceptible so long as they are undisturbed, but the moment they
are disturbed the stuff becomes material and the mind perceptible.
It is not easy to disturb them, for the atmosphere protects them. So
long as they are undisturbed they transmit light, etc., just as
though they were a rigid substance, for, not being disturbed, they
detract nothing from any vibration which enters them.
What will cause a row will be the hitting upon some plan for waking
up the ether. It is here that we must look for the extension of the
world when it has become over-peopled or when, through its gradual
cooling down, it becomes less suitable for a habitation. By and by
we shall make new worlds.
Mental and Physical
A strong hope of 20,000 pounds in the heart of a poor but capable man
may effect a considerable redistribution of the forces of nature--may
even remove mountains. The little, unseen impalpable hope sets up a
vibrating movement in a messy substance shut in a dark warm place
inside the man's skull. The vibrating substance undergoes a change
that none can note, whereupon rings of rhythm circle outwards from it
as from a stone thrown into a pond, so that the Alps are pierced in
consequence.
Vibrations, Memory and Chemical Properties
The quality of every substance depends upon its vibrations, but so
does the quality of all thought and action. Quality is only one mode
of action; the action of developing, the desire to make this or that,
and do this or that, and the stuff we make are alike due to the
nature and characteristics of vibrations.
I want to connect the actual manufacture of the things a chicken
makes inside an egg with the desire and memory of the chickens, so as
to show that one and the same set of vibrations at once change the
universal substratum into the particular phase of it required and
awaken a consciousness of, and a memory of and a desire towards, this
particular phase on the part of the molecules which are being
vibrated into it. So, for example, that a set of vibrations shall at
once turn plain white and yolk of egg into the feathers, blood and
bones of a chicken and, at the same time, make the mind of the embryo
to be such or such as it is.
Protoplasm and Reproduction
The reason why the offspring of protoplasm progressed, and the
offspring of nothing else does so, is that the viscid nature of
protoplasm allows vibrations to last a very long time, and so very
old vibrations get carried into any fragment that is broken off;
whereas in the case of air and water, vibrations get soon effaced and
only very recent vibrations get carried into the young air and the
young water which are, therefore, born fully grown; they cannot grow
any more nor can they decay till they are killed outright by
something decomposing them. If protoplasm was more viscid it would
not vibrate easily enough; if less, it would run away into the
surrounding water.
Germs within Germs
When we say that the germ within the hen's egg remembers having made
itself into a chicken on past occasions, or that each one of 100,000
salmon germs remembers to have made itself into a salmon (male or
female) in the persons of the single pair of salmon its parents, do
we intend that each single one of these germs was a witness of, and a
concurring agent in, the development of the parent forms from their
respective germs, and that each one of them therefore, was shut up
within the parent germ, like a small box inside a big one?
If so, then the parent germ with its millions of brothers and sisters
was in like manner enclosed within a grand-parental germ, and so on
till we are driven to admit, after even a very few generations, that
each ancestor has contained more germs than could be expressed by a
number written in small numerals, beginning at St. Paul's and ending
at Charing Cross. Mr. Darwin's provisional theory of pangenesis
comes to something very like this, so far as it can be understood at
all.
Therefore it will save trouble (and we should observe no other
consideration) to say that the germs that unite to form any given
sexually produced individual were not present in the germs, or with
the germs, from which the parents sprang, but that they came into the
parents' bodies at some later period.
We may perhaps find it convenient to account for their intimate
acquaintance with the past history of the body into which they have
been introduced by supposing that in virtue of assimilation they have
acquired certain periodical rhythms already pre-existing in the
parental bodies, and that the communication of the characteristics of
these rhythms determines at once the physical and psychical
development of the individual in a course as nearly like that of the
parents as changed surroundings will allow.
For, according to my Life and Habit theory, everything in connection
with embryonic development is referred to memory, and this involves
that the thing remembering should have been present and an actor in
the development which it is supposed to remember; but we have just
settled that the germs which unite to form any individual, and which
when united proceed to develop according to what I suppose to be
their memory of their previous developments, were not participators
in any previous development and cannot therefore remember it. They
cannot remember even a single development, much less can they
remember that infinite series of developments the recollection and
epitomisation of which is a sine qua non for the unconsciousness
which we note in normal development. I see no way of getting out of
this difficulty so convenient as to say that a memory is the
reproduction and recurrence of a rhythm communicated directly or
indirectly from one substance to another, and that where a certain
rhythm exists there is a certain stock of memories, whether the
actual matter in which the rhythm now subsists was present with the
matter in which it arose or not.
There is another little difficulty in the question whether the matter
that I suppose introduced into the parents' bodies during their life-
histories, and that goes to form the germs that afterwards become
their offspring, is living or non-living. If living, then it has its
own memories and life-histories which must be cancelled and undone
before the assimilation and the becoming imbued with new rhythms can
be complete. That is to say it must become as near non-living as
anything can become.
Sooner or later, then, we get this introduced matter to be non-living
(as we may call it) and the puzzle is how to get it living again.
For we strenuously deny equivocal generation. When matter is living
we contend that it can only have been begotten of other like living
matter; we deny that it can have become living from non-living.
Here, however, within the bodies of animals and vegetables we find
equivocal generation a necessity; nor do I see any way out of it
except by maintaining that nothing is ever either quite dead or quite
alive, but that a little leaven of the one is always left in the
other. For it would be as difficult to get the thing dead if it is
once all alive, as alive if once all dead.
According to this view to beget offspring is to communicate to two
pieces of protoplasm (which afterwards combine) certain rhythmic
vibrations which, though too feeble to generate visible action until
they receive accession of fresh similar rhythms from exterior
objects, yet on receipt of such accession set the game of development
going and maintain it. It will be observed that the rhythms supposed
to be communicated to any germs are such as have been already
repeatedly refreshed by rhythms from exterior objects in preceding
generations, so that a consonance is rehearsed and pre-arranged, as
it were, between the rhythm in the germ and those that in the normal
course of its ulterior existence are likely to flow into it. If
there is too serious a discord between inner and outer rhythms the
organism dies.
Atoms and Fixed Laws
When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either
ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they
are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any
rate a potentiality of disobeying.
No objection can lie to our supposing potential or elementary
volition and consciousness to exist in atoms, on the score that their
action would be less regular or uniform if they had free will than if
they had not. By giving them free will we do no more than those who
make them bound to obey fixed laws. They will be as certain to use
their freedom of will only in particular ways as to be driven into
those ways by obedience to fixed laws.
The little element of individual caprice (supposing we start with
free will), or (supposing we start with necessity) the little element
of stiffneckedness, both of which elements we find everywhere in
nature, these are the things that prevent even the most reliable
things from being absolutely reliable. It is they that form the
point of contact between this universe and something else quite
different in which none of those fundamental ideas obtain without
which we cannot think at all. So we say that nitrous acid is more
reliable than nitric for etching.
Atoms have a mind as much smaller and less complex than ours as their
bodies are smaller and less complex.
Complex mind involves complex matter and vice versa. On the whole I
think it would be most convenient to endow all atoms with a something
of consciousness and volition, and to hold them to be pro tanto,
living. We must suppose them able to remember and forget, i.e. to
retain certain vibrations that have been once established--gradually
to lose them and to receive others instead. We must suppose some
more intelligent, versatile and of greater associative power than
others.
Thinking
All thinking is of disturbance, dynamical, a state of unrest tending
towards equilibrium. It is all a mode of classifying and of
criticising with a view of knowing whether it gives us, or is likely
to give us, pleasure or no.
Equilibrium
In the highest consciousness there is still unconsciousness, in the
lowest unconsciousness there is still consciousness. If there is no
consciousness there is no thing, or nothing. To understand perfectly
would be to cease to understand at all.
It is in the essence of heaven that we are not to be thwarted or
irritated, this involves absolute equilibrium and absolute
equilibrium involves absolute unconsciousness. Christ is
equilibrium--the not wanting anything, either more or less. Death
also is equilibrium. But Christ is a more living kind of death than
death is.
VI--MIND AND MATTER
Motion
We cannot define either motion or matter, but we have certain rough
and ready ideas concerning them which, right or wrong, we must make
the best of without more words, for the chances are ten to one that
attempted definition will fuzz more than it will clear.
Roughly, matter and motion are functions one of another, as are mind
and matter; they are essentially concomitant with one another, and
neither can vary but the other varies also. You cannot have a thing
"matter" by itself which shall have no motion in it, nor yet a thing
"motion" by itself which shall exist apart from matter; you must have
both or neither. You can have matter moving much, or little, and in
all conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion
more than you can have motion without any matter that is moving.
Its states, its behaviour under varying circumstances, that is to say
the characteristics of its motions, are all that we can cognise in
respect of matter. We recognise certain varying states or conditions
of matter and give one state one name, and another another, as though
it were a man or a dog; but it is the state not the matter that we
cognise, just as it is the man's moods and outward semblance that we
alone note, while knowing nothing of the man. Of matter in its
ultimate essence and apart from motion we know nothing whatever. As
far as we are concerned there is no such thing: it has no existence:
for de non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio.
It is a mistake, therefore, to speak about an "eternal unchangeable
underlying substance" as I am afraid I did in the last pages of Luck
or Cunning? but I am not going to be at the trouble of seeing. For,
if the substance is eternal and unknowable and unchangeable, it is
tantamount to nothing. Nothing can be nearer non-existence than
eternal unknowableness and unchangeableness.
If, on the other hand, the substance changes, then it is not
unknowable, or uncognisable, for by cognising its changes we cognise
it. Changes are the only things that we can cognise. Besides, we
cannot have substance changing without condition changing, and if we
could we might as well ignore condition. Does it not seem as though,
since the motions or states are all that we cognise, they should be
all that we need take account of? Change of condition is change of
substance. Then what do we want with substance? Why have two ideas
when one will do?
I suppose it has all come about because there are so many tables and
chairs and stones that appear not to be moving, and this gave us the
idea of a solid substance without any motion in it.
How would it be to start with motion approximately patent, and motion
approximately latent (absolute patency and absolute latency being
unattainable), and lay down that motion latent as motion becomes
patent as substance, or matter of chair-and-table order; and that
when patent as motion it is latent as matter and substance?
I am only just recovering from severe influenza and have no doubt I
have been writing nonsense.
Matter and Mind
i
People say we can conceive the existence of matter and the existence
of mind. I doubt it. I doubt how far we have any definite
conception of mind or of matter, pure and simple.
What is meant by conceiving a thing or understanding it? When we
hear of a piece of matter instinct with mind, as protoplasm, for
example, there certainly comes up before our closed eyes an idea, a
picture which we imagine to bear some resemblance to the thing we are
hearing of. But when we try to think of matter apart from every
attribute of matter (and this I suspect comes ultimately to "apart
from every attribute of mind") we get no image before our closed
eyes--we realise nothing to ourselves. Perhaps we surreptitiously
introduce some little attribute, and then we think we have conceived
of matter pure and simple, but this I think is as far as we can go.
The like holds good for mind: we must smuggle in a little matter
before we get any definite idea at all.
ii
Matter and mind are as heat and cold, as life and death, certainty
and uncertainty, union and separateness. There is no absolute heat,
life, certainty, union, nor is there any absolute cold, death,
uncertainty or separateness.
We can conceive of no ultimate limit beyond which a thing cannot
become either hotter or colder, there is no limit; there are degrees
of heat and cold, but there is no heat so great that we cannot fancy
its becoming a little hotter, that is we cannot fancy its not having
still a few degrees of cold in it which can be extracted. Heat and
cold are always relative to one another, they are never absolute. So
with life and death, there is neither perfect life nor perfect death,
but in the highest life there is some death and in the lowest death
there is still some life. The fraction is so small that in practice
it may and must be neglected; it is neglected, however, not as of
right but as of grace, and the right to insist on it is never finally
and indefeasibly waived.
iii
An energy is a soul--a something working in us.
As we cannot imagine heat apart from something which is hot, nor
motion without something that is moving, so we cannot imagine an
energy, or working power, without matter through which it manifests
itself.
On the other hand, we cannot imagine matter without thinking of it as
capable of some kind of working power or energy--we cannot think of
matter without thinking of it as in some way ensouled.
iv
Matter and mind form one another, i.e. they give to one another the
form in which we see them. They are the helpmeets to one another
that cross each other and undo each other and, in the undoing, do
and, in the doing, undo, and so see-saw ad infinitum.
Organic and Inorganic
Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied
that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter
cannot understand the animals' and plants' business, we have
therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever.
What we call inorganic is not so really, but the organisation is too
subtle for our senses or for any of those appliances with which we
assist them. It is deducible however as a necessity by an exercise
of the reasoning faculties.
People looked at glaciers for thousands of years before they found
out that ice was a fluid, so it has taken them and will continue to
take them not less before they see that the inorganic is not wholly
inorganic.
The Power to make Mistakes
This is one of the criteria of life as we commonly think of it. If
oxygen could go wrong and mistake some other gas for hydrogen and
thus learn not to mistake it any more, we should say oxygen was
alive. The older life is, the more unerring it becomes in respect of
things about which it is conversant--the more like, in fact, it
becomes to such a thing as the force of gravity, both as regards
unerringness and unconsciousness.
Is life such a force as gravity in process of formation, and was
gravity once--or rather, were things once liable to make mistakes on
such a subject as gravity?
If any one will tell me what life is I will tell him whether the
inorganic is alive or not.
The Omnipresence of Intelligence
A little while ago no one would admit that animals had intelligence.
This is now conceded. At any rate, then, vegetables had no
intelligence. This is being fast disputed. Even Darwin leans
towards the view that they have intelligence. At any rate, then, the
inorganic world has not got an intelligence. Even this is now being
denied. Death is being defeated at all points. No sooner do we
think we have got a bona fide barrier than it breaks down. The
divisions between varieties, species, genus, all gone; between
instinct and reason, gone; between animals and plants, gone; between
man and the lower animals, gone; so, ere long, the division between
organic and inorganic will go and will take with it the division
between mind and matter.
The Super-Organic Kingdom
As the solid inorganic kingdom supervened upon the gaseous (vestiges
of the old being, nevertheless, carried over into and still
persisting in the new) and as the organic kingdom supervened upon the
inorganic (vestiges of the old being, again, carried over into and
still persisting in the new) so a third kingdom is now in process of
development, the super-organic, of which we see the germs in the less
practical and more emotional side of our nature.
Man, for example, is the only creature that interests himself in his
own past, or forecasts his future to any considerable extent. This
tendency I would see as the monad of a new regime--a regime that will
be no more governed by the ideas and habits now prevailing among
ourselves than we are by those still obtaining among stones or water.
Nevertheless, if a man be shot out of a cannon, or fall from a great
height, he is to all intents and purposes a mere stone. Place
anything in circumstances entirely foreign to its immediate
antecedents, and those antecedents become non-existent to it, it
returns to what it was before they existed, to the last stage that it
can recollect as at all analogous to its present.
Feeling
Man is a substance, he knows not what, feeling, he knows not how, a
rest and unrest that he can only in part distinguish. He is a
substance feeling equilibrium or want of equilibrium; that is to say,
he is a substance in a statical or dynamical condition and feeling
the passage from one state into the other.
Feeling is an art and, like any other art, can be acquired by taking
pains. The analogy between feelings and words is very close. Both
have their foundation in volition and deal largely in convention; as
we should not be word-ridden so neither should we be feeling-ridden;
feelings can deceive us; they can lie; they can be used in a non-
natural, artificial sense; they can be forced; they can carry us
away; they can be restrained.
When the surroundings are familiar, we know the right feeling and
feel it accordingly, or if "we" (that is the central government of
our personality) do not feel it, the subordinate departmental
personality, whose business it is, feels it in the usual way and then
goes on to something else. When the surroundings are less familiar
and the departmental personality cannot deal with them, the position
is reported through the nervous system to the central government
which is frequently at a loss to know what feeling to apply.
Sometimes it happens to discern the right feeling and apply it,
sometimes it hits upon an inappropriate one and is thus induced to
proceed from solecism to solecism till the consequences lead to a
crisis from which we recover and which, then becoming a leading case,
forms one of the decisions on which our future action is based.
Sometimes it applies a feeling that is too inappropriate, as when the
position is too horribly novel for us to have had any experience that
can guide the central government in knowing how to feel about it, and
this results in a cessation of the effort involved in trying to feel.
Hence we may hope that the most horrible apparent suffering is not
felt beyond a certain point, but is passed through unconsciously
under a natural, automatic anaesthetic--the unconsciousness, in
extreme cases, leading to death.
It is generally held that animals feel; it will soon be generally
held that plants feel; after that it will be held that stones also
can feel. For, as no matter is so organic that there is not some of
the inorganic in it, so, also, no matter is so inorganic that there
is not some of the organic in it. We know that we have nerves and
that we feel, it does not follow that other things do not feel
because they have no nerves--it only follows that they do not feel as
we do. The difference between the organic and the inorganic kingdoms
will some day be seen to lie in the greater power of discriminating
its feelings which is possessed by the former. Both are made of the
same universal substance but, in the case of the organic world, this
substance is able to feel more fully and discreetly and to show us
that it feels.
Animals and plants, as they advance in the scale of life
differentiate their feelings more and more highly; they record them
better and recognise them more readily. They get to know what they
are doing and feeling, not step by step only, nor sentence by
sentence, but in long flights, forming chapters and whole books of
action and sensation. The difference as regards feeling between man
and the lower animals is one of degree and not of kind. The
inorganic is less expert in differentiating its feelings, therefore
its memory of them must be less enduring; it cannot recognise what it
could scarcely cognise. One might as well for some purposes,
perhaps, say at once, as indeed people generally do for most
purposes, that the inorganic does not feel; nevertheless the somewhat
periphrastic way of putting it, by saying that the inorganic feels
but does not know, or knows only very slightly, how to differentiate
its feelings, has the advantage of expressing the fact that feeling
depends upon differentiation and sense of relation inter se of the
things differentiated--a fact which, if never expressed, is apt to be
lost sight of.
As, therefore, human discrimination is to that of the lower animals,
so the discrimination of the lower animals and plants is to that of
inorganic things. In each case it is greater discriminating power
(and this is mental power) that underlies the differentiation, but in
no case can there be a denial of mental power altogether.
Opinion and Matter
Moral force and material force do pass into one another; a conflict
of opinion often ends in a fight. Putting it the other way, there is
no material conflict without attendant clash of opinion. Opinion and
matter act and react as do all things else; they come up hand in hand
out of something which is both and neither, but, so far as we can
catch sight of either first on our mental horizon, it is opinion that
is the prior of the two.
Moral Influence
The caracal lies on a shelf in its den in the Zoological Gardens
quietly licking its fur. I go up and stand near it. It makes a face
at me. I come a little nearer. It makes a worse face and raises
itself up on its haunches. I stand and look. It jumps down from its
shelf and makes as if it intended to go for me. I move back. The
caracal has exerted a moral influence over me which I have been
unable to resist.
Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other
more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.
Mental and Physical Pabulum
When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British
Museum, how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree
that is trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a
pool!
Eating and Proselytising
All eating is a kind of proselytising--a kind of dogmatising--a
maintaining that the eater's way of looking at things is better than
the eatee's. We convert the food, or try to do so, to our own way of
thinking, and, when it sticks to its own opinion and refuses to be
converted, we say it disagrees with us. An animal that refuses to
let another eat it has the courage of its convictions and, if it gets
eaten, dies a martyr to them. So we can only proselytise fresh meat,
the convictions of putrid meat begin to be too strong for us.
It is good for a man that he should not be thwarted--that he should
have his own way as far, and with as little difficulty, as possible.
Cooking is good because it makes matters easier by unsettling the
meat's mind and preparing it for new ideas. All food must first be
prepared for us by animals and plants, or we cannot assimilate it;
and so thoughts are more easily assimilated that have been already
digested by other minds. A man should avoid converse with things
that have been stunted or starved, and should not eat such meat as
has been overdriven or underfed or afflicted with disease, nor should
he touch fruit or vegetables that have not been well grown.
Sitting quiet after eating is akin to sitting still during divine
service so as not to disturb the congregation. We are catechising
and converting our proselytes, and there should be no row. As we get
older we must digest more quietly still, our appetite is less, our
gastric juices are no longer so eloquent, they have lost that cogent
fluency which carried away all that came in contact with it. They
have become sluggish and unconciliatory. This is what happens to any
man when he suffers from an attack of indigestion.
Sea-Sickness
Or, indeed, any other sickness is the inarticulate expression of the
pain we feel on seeing a proselyte escape us just as we were on the
point of converting it.
Indigestion
This, as I have said above, may be due to the naughtiness of the
stiff-necked things that we have eaten, or to the poverty of our own
arguments; but it may also arise from an attempt on the part of the
stomach to be too damned clever, and to depart from precedent
inconsiderately. The healthy stomach is nothing if not conservative.
Few radicals have good digestions.
Assimilation and Persecution
We cannot get rid of persecution; if we feel at all we must persecute
something; the mere acts of feeding and growing are acts of
persecution. Our aim should be to persecute nothing but such things
as are absolutely incapable of resisting us. Man is the only animal
that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat
until he eats them.
Matter Infinitely Subdivisible
We must suppose it to be so, but it does not follow that we can know
anything about it if it is divided into pieces smaller than a certain
size; and, if we can know nothing about it when so divided, then, qua
us, it has no existence and therefore matter, qua us, is not
infinitely subdivisible.
Differences
We often say that things differ in degree but not in kind, as though
there were a fixed line at which degree ends and kind begins. There
is no such line. All differences resolve themselves into differences
of degree. Everything can in the end be united with everything by
easy stages if a way long enough and round-about enough be taken.
Hence to the metaphysician everything will become one, being united
with everything else by degrees so subtle that there is no escape
from seeing the universe as a single whole. This in theory; but in
practice it would get us into such a mess that we had better go on
talking about differences of kind as well as of degree.
Union and Separation
In the closest union there is still some separate existence of
component parts; in the most complete separation there is still a
reminiscence of union. When they are most separate, the atoms seem
to bear in mind that they may one day have to come together again;
when most united, they still remember that they may come to fall out
some day and do not give each other their full, unreserved
confidence.
The difficulty is how to get unity and separateness at one and the
same time. The two main ideas underlying all action are desire for
closer unity and desire for more separateness. Nature is the puzzled
sense of a vast number of things which feel they are in an illogical
position and should be more either of one thing or the other than
they are. So they will first be this and then that, and act and re-
act and keep the balance as near equal as they can, yet they know all
the time that it isn't right and, as they incline one way or the
other, they will love or hate.
When we love, we draw what we love closer to us; when we hate a
thing, we fling it away from us. All disruption and dissolution is a
mode of hating; and all that we call affinity is a mode of loving.
The puzzle which puzzles every atom is the puzzle which puzzles
ourselves--a conflict of duties--our duty towards ourselves, and our
duty as members of a body politic. It is swayed by its sense of
being a separate thing--of having a life to itself which nothing can
share; it is also swayed by the feeling that, in spite of this, it is
only part of an individuality which is greater than itself and which
absorbs it. Its action will vary with the predominance of either of
these two states of opinion.
Unity and Multitude
We can no longer separate things as we once could: everything tends
towards unity; one thing, one action, in one place, at one time. On
the other hand, we can no longer unify things as we once could; we
are driven to ultimate atoms, each one of which is an individuality.
So that we have an infinite multitude of things doing an infinite
multitude of actions in infinite time and space; and yet they are not
many things, but one thing.
The Atom
The idea of an indivisible, ultimate atom is inconceivable by the lay
mind. If we can conceive an idea of the atom at all, we can conceive
it as capable of being cut in half indeed, we cannot conceive it at
all unless we so conceive it. The only true atom, the only thing
which we cannot subdivide and cut in half, is the universe. We
cannot cut a bit off the universe and put it somewhere else.
Therefore, the universe is a true atom and, indeed, is the smallest
piece of indivisible matter which our minds can conceive; and they
cannot conceive it any more than they can the indivisible, ultimate
atom.
Our Cells
A string of young ducklings as they sidle along through grass beside
a ditch--how like they are to a single serpent! I said in Life and
Habit that a colossal being, looking at the earth through a
microscope, would probably think the ants and flies of one year the
same as those of the preceding year. I should have added:- So we
think we are composed of the same cells from year to year, whereas in
truth the cells are a succession of generations. The most
continuous, homogeneous things we know are only like a lot of cow-
bells on an alpine pasture.
Nerves and Postmen
A letter, so long as it is connected with one set of nerves, is one
thing; loose it from connection with those nerves--open your fingers
and drop it in the opening of a pillar box--and it becomes part and
parcel of another nervous system. Letters in transitu contain all
manner of varied stimuli and shocks, yet to the postman, who is the
nerve that conveys them, they are all alike, except as regards mere
size and weight. I should think, therefore, that our nerves and
ganglia really see no difference in the stimuli that they convey.
And yet the postman does see some difference: he knows a business
letter from a valentine at a glance and practice teaches him to know
much else which escapes ourselves. Who, then, shall say what the
nerves and ganglia know and what they do not know? True, to us, as
we think of a piece of brain inside our own heads, it seems as absurd
to consider that it knows anything at all as it seems to consider
that a hen's egg knows anything; but then if the brain could see us,
perhaps the brain might say it was absurd to suppose that that thing
could know this or that. Besides what is the self of which we say
that we are self-conscious? No one can say what it is that we are
conscious of. This is one of the things which lie altogether outside
the sphere of words.
The postman can open a letter if he likes and know all about the
message he is conveying, but, if he does this, he is diseased qua
postman. So, maybe, a nerve might open a stimulus or a shock on the
way sometimes, but it would not be a good nerve.
Night-Shirts and Babies
On Hindhead, last Easter, we saw a family wash hung out to dry.
There were papa's two great night-shirts and mamma's two lesser
night-gowns and then the children's smaller articles of clothing and
mamma's drawers and the girls' drawers, all full swollen with a
strong north-east wind. But mamma's night-gown was not so well
pinned on and, instead of being full of steady wind like the others,
kept blowing up and down as though she were preaching wildly. We
stood and laughed for ten minutes. The housewife came to the window
and wondered at us, but we could not resist the pleasure of watching
the absurdly life-like gestures which the night-gowns made. I should
like a Santa Famiglia with clothes drying in the background.
A love story might be told in a series of sketches of the clothes of
two families hanging out to dry in adjacent gardens. Then a
gentleman's night-shirt from one garden, and a lady's night-gown from
the other should be shown hanging in a third garden by themselves.
By and by there should be added a little night-shirt.
A philosopher might be tempted, on seeing the little night-shirt, to
suppose that the big night-shirts had made it. What we do is much
the same, for the body of a baby is not much more made by the two old
babies, after whose pattern it has cut itself out, than the little
night-shirt is made by the big ones. The thing that makes either the
little night-shirt or the little baby is something about which we
know nothing whatever at all.
Our Organism
Man is a walking tool-box, manufactory, workshop and bazaar worked
from behind the scenes by someone or something that we never see. We
are so used to never seeing more than the tools, and these work so
smoothly, that we call them the workman himself, making much the same
mistake as though we should call the saw the carpenter. The only
workman of whom we know anything at all is the one that runs
ourselves and even this is not perceivable by any of our gross
palpable senses.
The senses seem to be the link between mind and matter--never
forgetting that we can never have either mind or matter pure and
without alloy of the other.
Beer and My Cat
Spilt beer or water seems sometimes almost human in its uncertainty
whether or no it is worth while to get ever such a little nearer to
the earth's centre by such and such a slight trickle forward.
I saw my cat undecided in his mind whether he should get up on the
table and steal the remains of my dinner or not. The chair was some
eighteen inches away with its back towards the table, so it was a
little troublesome for him to get his feet first on the bar and then
on the table. He was not at all hungry but he tried, saw it would
not be quite easy and gave it up; then he thought better of it and
tried again, and saw again that it was not all perfectly plain
sailing; and so backwards and forwards with the first-he-would-and-
then-he-wouldn'tism of a mind so nearly in equilibrium that a hair's
weight would turn the scale one way or the other.
I thought how closely it resembled the action of beer trickling on a
slightly sloping table.
The Union Bank
There is a settlement in the Union Bank building, Chancery Lane,
which has made three large cracks in the main door steps. I remember
these cracks more than twenty years ago, just after the bank was
built, as mere thin lines and now they must be some half an inch wide
and are still slowly widening. They have altered very gradually, but
not an hour or a minute has passed without a groaning and travailing
together on the part of every stone and piece of timber in the
building to settle how a modus vivendi should be arrived at. This is
why the crack is said to be caused by a settlement--some parts of the
building willing this and some that, and the battle going on, as even
the steadiest and most unbroken battles must go, by fits and starts
which, though to us appearing as an even tenor, would, if we could
see them under a microscope, prove to be a succession of bloody
engagements between regiments that sometimes lost and sometimes won.
Sometimes, doubtless, strained relations have got settled by peaceful
arbitration and reference to the solicitors of the contending parts
without open visible rupture; at other times, again, discontent has
gathered on discontent as the snow upon a sub-alpine slope, flake by
flake, till the last is one too many and the whole comes crashing
down--whereon the cracks have opened some minute fraction of an inch
wider.
Of this we see nothing. All we note is that a score of years have
gone by and that the cracks are rather wider. So, doubtless, if the
materials of which the bank is built could speak, they would say they
knew nothing of the varied interests that sometimes coalesce and
sometimes conflict within the building. The joys of the rich
depositor, the anguish of the bankrupt are nothing to them; the
stream of people coming in and going out is as steady, continuous a
thing to them as a blowing wind or a running river to ourselves; all
they know or care about is that they have a trifle more weight of
books and clerks and bullion than they once had, and that this
hinders them somewhat in their effort after a permanent settlement.
The Unity of Nature
I meet a melancholy old Savoyard playing on a hurdy-gurdy, grisly,
dejected, dirty, with a look upon him as though the iron had long
since entered into his soul. It is a frosty morning but he has very
little clothing, and there is a dumb despairing look about him which
is surely genuine. There passes him a young butcher boy with his
tray of meat upon his shoulder. He is ruddy, lusty, full of life and
health and spirits, and he vents these in a shrill whistle which
eclipses the hurdy-gurdy of the Savoyard.
The like holds good with the horses and cats and dogs which I meet
daily, with the flies in window panes and with plants, some are
successful, other have now passed their prime. Look at the failures
per se and they make one very unhappy, but it helps matters to look
at them in their capacities as parts of a whole rather than as
isolated.
I cannot see things round about me without feeling that they are all
parts of one whole which is trying to do something; it has not
perhaps a perfectly clear idea of what it is trying after, but it is
doing its best. I see old age, decay and failure as the relaxation,
after effort, of a muscle in the corporation of things, or as a
tentative effort in a wrong direction, or as the dropping off of
particles of skin from a healthy limb. This dropping off is the
death of any given generation of our cells as they work their way
nearer and nearer to our skins and then get rubbed off and go away.
It is as though we sent people to live nearer and nearer the
churchyard the older they grew. As for the skin that is shed, in the
first place it has had its turn, in the second it starts anew under
fresh auspices, for it can at no time cease to be part of the
universe, it must always live in one way or another.
Croesus and His Kitchen-Maid
I want people to see either their cells as less parts of themselves
than they do, or their servants as more.
Croesus's kitchen-maid is part of him, bone of his bone and flesh of
his flesh, for she eats what comes from his table and, being fed of
one flesh, are they not brother and sister to one another in virtue
of community of nutriment which is but a thinly veiled travesty of
descent? When she eats peas with her knife, he does so too; there is
not a bit of bread and butter she puts into her mouth, nor a lump of
sugar she drops into her tea, but he knoweth it altogether, though he
knows nothing whatever about it. She is en-Croesused and he
enscullery-maided so long as she remains linked to him by the golden
chain which passes from his pocket to hers, and which is greatest of
all unifiers.
True, neither party is aware of the connection at all as long as
things go smoothly. Croesus no more knows the name of, or feels the
existence of, his kitchen-maid than a peasant in health knows about
his liver; nevertheless he is awakened to a dim sense of an undefined
something when he pays his grocer or his baker. She is more
definitely aware of him than he of her, but it is by way of an
overshadowing presence rather than a clear and intelligent
comprehension. And though Croesus does not eat his kitchen-maid's
meals otherwise than vicariously, still to eat vicariously is to eat:
the meals so eaten by his kitchen-maid nourish the better ordering of
the dinner which nourishes and engenders the better ordering of
Croesus himself. He is fed therefore by the feeding of his kitchen-
maid.
And so with sleep. When she goes to bed he, in part, does so too.
When she gets up and lays the fire in the back-kitchen he, in part,
does so. He lays it through her and in her, though knowing no more
what he is doing than we know when we digest, but still doing it as
by what we call a reflex action. Qui facit per alium facit per se,
and when the back-kitchen fire is lighted on Croesus's behalf, it is
Croesus who lights it, though he is all the time fast asleep in bed.
Sometimes things do not go smoothly. Suppose the kitchen-maid to be
taken with fits just before dinner-time; there will be a
reverberating echo of disturbance throughout the whole organisation
of the palace. But the oftener she has fits, the more easily will
the household know what it is all about when she is taken with them.
On the first occasion Lady Croesus will send some one rushing down
into the kitchen, there will, in fact, be a general flow of blood
(i.e. household) to the part affected (that is to say, to the
scullery-maid); the doctor will be sent for and all the rest of it.
On each repetition of the fits the neighbouring organs, reverting to
a more primary undifferentiated condition, will discharge duties for
which they were not engaged, in a manner for which no one would have
given them credit, and the disturbance will be less and less each
time, till by and by, at the sound of the crockery smashing below,
Lady Croesus will just look up to papa and say:
"My dear, I am afraid Sarah has got another fit."
And papa will say she will probably be better again soon, and will go
on reading his newspaper.
In course of time the whole thing will come to be managed
automatically downstairs without any reference either to papa, the
cerebrum, or to mamma, the cerebellum, or even to the medulla
oblongata, the housekeeper. A precedent or routine will be
established, after which everything will work quite smoothly.
But though papa and mamma are unconscious of the reflex action which
has been going on within their organisation, the kitchen-maid and the
cells in her immediate vicinity (that is to say her fellow-servants)
will know all about it. Perhaps the neighbours will think that
nobody in the house knows, and that because the master and mistress
show no sign of disturbance therefore there is no consciousness.
They forget that the scullery-maid becomes more and more conscious of
the fits if they grow upon her, as they probably will, and that
Croesus and his lady do show more signs of consciousness, if they are
watched closely, than can be detected on first inspection. There is
not the same violent perturbation that there was on the previous
occasions, but the tone of the palace is lowered. A dinner party has
to be put off; the cooking is more homogeneous and uncertain, it is
less highly differentiated than when the scullery-maid was well; and
there is a grumble when the doctor has to be paid and also when the
smashed crockery has to be replaced.
If Croesus discharges his kitchen-maid and gets another, it is as
though he cut out a small piece of his finger and replaced it in due
course by growth. But even the slightest cut may lead to blood-
poisoning, and so even the dismissal of a kitchen-maid may be big
with the fate of empires. Thus the cook, a valued servant, may take
the kitchen-maid's part and go too. The next cook may spoil the
dinner and upset Croesus's temper, and from this all manner of
consequences may be evolved, even to the dethronement and death of
the king himself. Nevertheless as a general rule an injury to such a
low part of a great monarch's organism as a kitchen-maid has no
important results. It is only when we are attacked in such vital
organs as the solicitor or the banker that we need be uneasy. A
wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing, and many a man has
died from failure of his bank's action.
It is certain, as we have seen, that when the kitchen-maid lights the
fire it is really Croesus who is lighting it, but it is less obvious
that when Croesus goes to a ball the scullery-maid goes also. Still
this should be held in the same way as it should be also held that
she eats vicariously when Croesus dines. For he must return the
balls and the dinner parties and this comes out in his requiring to
keep a large establishment whereby the scullery-maid retains her
place as part of his organism and is nourished and amused also.
On the other hand, when Croesus dies it does not follow that the
scullery-maid should die at the same time. She may grow a new
Croesus, as Croesus, if the maid dies, will probably grow a new
kitchen-maid, Croesus's son or successor may take over the kingdom
and palace, and the kitchen-maid, beyond having to wash up a few
extra plates and dishes at Coronation time, will know little about
the change. It is as though the establishment had had its hair cut
and its beard trimmed; it is smartened up a little, but there is no
other change. If, on the other hand, he goes bankrupt, or his
kingdom is taken from him and his whole establishment is broken up
and dissipated at the auction mart, then, even though not one of its
component cells actually dies, the organism as a whole does so, and
it is interesting to see that the lowest, least specialised and least
highly differentiate parts of the organism, such as the scullery-maid
and the stable-boys, most readily find an entry into the life of some
new system, while the more specialised and highly differentiated
parts, such as the steward, the old housekeeper and, still more so,
the librarian or the chaplain may never be able to attach themselves
to any new combination, and may die in consequence. I heard once of
a large builder who retired unexpectedly from business and broke up
his establishment to the actual death of several of his older
employes. So a bit of flesh or even a finger may be taken from one
body and grafted on to another, but a leg cannot be grafted; if a leg
is cut off it must die. It may, however, be maintained that the
owner dies too, even though he recovers, for a man who has lost a leg
is not the man he was. {92}
VII--ON THE MAKING OF MUSIC, PICTURES AND BOOKS
Thought and Word
i
Thought pure and simple is as near to God as we can get; it is
through this that we are linked with God. The highest thought is
ineffable; it must be felt from one person to another but cannot be
articulated. All the most essential and thinking part of thought is
done without words or consciousness. It is not till doubt and
consciousness enter that words become possible.
The moment a thing is written, or even can be written, and reasoned
about, it has changed its nature by becoming tangible, and hence
finite, and hence it will have an end in disintegration. It has
entered into death. And yet till it can be thought about and
realised more or less definitely it has not entered into life. Both
life and death are necessary factors of each other. But our
profoundest and most important convictions are unspeakable.
So it is with unwritten and indefinable codes of honour, conventions,
art-rules--things that can be felt but not explained--these are the
most important, and the less we try to understand them, or even to
think about them, the better.
ii
Words are organised thoughts, as living forms are organised actions.
How a thought can find embodiment in words is nearly, though perhaps
not quite, as mysterious as how an action can find embodiment in
form, and appears to involve a somewhat analogous transformation and
contradiction in terms.
There was a time when language was as rare an accomplishment as
writing was in the days when it was first invented. Probably talking
was originally confined to a few scholars, as writing was in the
middle ages, and gradually became general. Even now speech is still
growing; poor folks cannot understand the talk of educated people.
Perhaps reading and writing will indeed one day come by nature.
Analogy points in this direction, and though analogy is often
misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
iii
Communications between God and man must always be either above words
or below them; for with words come in translations, and all the
interminable questions therewith connected.
iv
The mere fact that a thought or idea can be expressed articulately in
words involves that it is still open to question; and the mere fact
that a difficulty can be definitely conceived involves that it is
open to solution.
v
We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what
comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to
paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and
dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow.
Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the
wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the
best and not the worst of them. But they are parvenu people as
compared with thought and action. What we should read is not the
words but the man whom we feel to be behind the words.
vi
Words impede and either kill, or are killed by, perfect thought; but
they are, as a scaffolding, useful, if not indispensable, for the
building up of imperfect thought and helping to perfect it.
vii
All words are juggles. To call a thing a juggle of words is often a
bigger juggle than the juggle it is intended to complain of. The
question is whether it is a greater juggle than is generally
considered fair trading.
viii
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in
actual use.
ix
Gold and silver coins are only the tokens, symbols, outward and
visible signs and sacraments of money. When not in actual process of
being applied in purchase they are no more money than words not in
use are language. Books are like imprisoned souls until some one
takes them down from a shelf and reads them. The coins are potential
money as the words are potential language, it is the power and will
to apply the counters that make them vibrate with life; when the
power and the will are in abeyance the counters lie dead as a log.
The Law
The written law is binding, but the unwritten law is much more so.
You may break the written law at a pinch and on the sly if you can,
but the unwritten law--which often comprises the written--must not be
broken. Not being written, it is not always easy to know what it is,
but this has got to be done.
Ideas
They are like shadows--substantial enough until we try to grasp them.
Expression
The fact that every mental state is intensified by expression is of a
piece with the fact that nothing has any existence at all save in its
expression.
Development
All things are like exposed photographic plates that have no visible
image on them till they have been developed.
Acquired Characteristics
If there is any truth in the theory that these are inherited--and who
can doubt it?--the eye and the finger are but the aspiration, or
word, made manifest in flesh.
Physical and Spiritual
The bodies of many abandoned undertakings lie rotting unburied up and
down the country and their ghosts haunt the law-courts.
Trail and Writing
Before the invention of writing the range of one man's influence over
another was limited to the range of sight, sound and scent; besides
this there was trail, of many kinds. Trail unintentionally left is,
as it were, hidden sight. Left intentionally, it is the unit of
literature. It is the first mode of writing, from which grew that
power of extending men's influence over one another by the help of
written symbols of all kinds without which the development of modern
civilisation would have been impossible.
Conveyancing and the Arts
In conveyancing the ultimately potent thing is not the deed but the
invisible intention and desire of the parties to the deed; the
written document itself is only evidence of this intention and
desire. So it is with music, the written notes are not the main
thing, nor is even the heard performance; these are only evidences of
an internal invisible emotion that can be felt but never fully
expressed. And so it is with the words of literature and with the
forms and colours of painting.
The Rules for Making Literature, Music and Pictures
The arts of the musician, the painter and the writer are essentially
the same. In composing a fugue, after you have exposed your subject,
which must not be too unwieldly, you introduce an episode or episodes
which must arise out of your subject. The great thing is that all
shall be new, and yet nothing new, at the same time; the details must
minister to the main effect and not obscure it; in other words, you
must have a subject, develop it and not wander from it very far.
This holds just as true for literature and painting and for art of
all kinds.
No man should try even to allude to the greater part of what he sees
in his subject, and there is hardly a limit to what he may omit.
What is required is that he shall say what he elects to say
discreetly; that he shall be quick to see the gist of a matter, and
give it pithily without either prolixity or stint of words.
Relative Importances
It is the painter's business to help memory and imagination, not to
supersede them. He cannot put the whole before the spectator,
nothing can do this short of the thing itself; he should, therefore,
not try to realise, and the less he looks as if he were trying to do
so the more signs of judgment he will show. His business is to
supply those details which will most readily bring the whole before
the mind along with them. He must not give too few, but it is still
more imperative on him not to give too many.
Seeing, thought and expression are rendered possible only by the fact
that our minds are always ready to compromise and to take the part
for the whole. We associate a number of ideas with any given object,
and if a few of the most characteristic of these are put before us we
take the rest as read, jump to a conclusion and realise the whole.
If we did not conduct our thought on this principle--simplifying by
suppression of detail and breadth of treatment--it would take us a
twelvemonth to say that it was a fine morning and another for the
hearer to apprehend our statement. Any other principle reduces
thought to an absurdity.
All painting depends upon simplification. All simplification depends
upon a perception of relative importances. All perception of
relative importances depends upon a just appreciation of which
letters in association's bond association will most readily dispense
with. This depends upon the sympathy of the painter both with his
subject and with him who is to look at the picture. And this depends
upon a man's common sense.
He therefore tells best in painting, as in literature, who has best
estimated the relative values or importances of the more special
features characterising his subject: that is to say, who appreciates
most accurately how much and how fast each one of them will carry,
and is at most pains to give those only that will say most in the
fewest words or touches. It is here that the most difficult, the
most important, and the most generally neglected part of an artist's
business will be found to lie.
The difficulties of doing are serious enough, nevertheless we can
most of us overcome them with ordinary perseverance for they are
small as compared with those of knowing what not to do--with those of
learning to disregard the incessant importunity of small nobody-
details that persist in trying to thrust themselves above their
betters. It is less trouble to give in to these than to snub them
duly and keep them in their proper places, yet it is precisely here
that strength or weakness resides. It is success or failure in this
respect that constitutes the difference between the artist who may
claim to rank as a statesman and one who can rise no higher than a
village vestryman.
It is here, moreover, that effort is most remunerative. For when we
feel that a painter has made simplicity and subordination of
importances his first aim, it is surprising how much shortcoming we
will condone as regards actual execution. Whereas, let the execution
be perfect, if the details given be ill-chosen in respect of relative
importance the whole effect is lost--it becomes top-heavy, as it
were, and collapses. As for the number of details given, this does
not matter: a man may give as few or as many as he chooses; he may
stop at outline, or he may go on to Jean Van Eyck; what is essential
is that, no matter how far or how small a distance he may go, he
should have begun with the most important point and added each
subsequent feature in due order of importance, so that if he stopped
at any moment there should be no detail ungiven more important than
another which has been insisted on.
Supposing, by way of illustration, that the details are as grapes in
a bunch, they should be eaten from the best grape to the next best,
and so on downwards, never eating a worse grape while a better one
remains uneaten.
Personally, I think that, as the painter cannot go the whole way, the
sooner he makes it clear that he has no intention of trying to do so
the better. When we look at a very highly finished picture (so
called), unless we are in the hands of one who has attended
successfully to the considerations insisted on above, we feel as
though we were with a troublesome cicerone who will not let us look
at things with our own eyes but keeps intruding himself at every
touch and turn and trying to exercise that undue influence upon us
which generally proves to have been the accompaniment of concealment
and fraud. This is exactly what we feel with Van Mieris and, though
in a less degree, with Gerard Dow; whereas with Jean Van Eyck and
Metsu, no matter how far they may have gone, we find them essentially
as impressionist as Rembrandt or Velasquez.
For impressionism only means that due attention has been paid to the
relative importances of the impressions made by the various
characteristics of a given subject, and that they have been presented
to us in order of precedence.
Eating Grapes Downwards
Always eat grapes downwards--that is, always eat the best grape
first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and
each grape will seem good down to the last. If you eat the other
way, you will not have a good grape in the lot. Besides, you will be
tempting Providence to kill you before you come to the best. This is
why autumn seems better than spring: in the autumn we are eating our
days downwards, in the spring each day still seems "Very bad."
People should live on this principle more than they do, but they do
live on it a good deal; from the age of, say, fifty we eat our days
downwards.
In New Zealand for a long time I had to do the washing-up after each
meal. I used to do the knives first, for it might please God to take
me before I came to the forks, and then what a sell it would have
been to have done the forks rather than the knives!
Terseness
Talking with Gogin last night, I said that in writing it took more
time and trouble to get a thing short than long. He said it was the
same in painting. It was harder not to paint a detail than to paint
it, easier to put in all that one can see than to judge what may go
without saying, omit it and range the irreducible minima in due order
of precedence. Hence we all lean towards prolixity.
The difficulty lies in the nice appreciation of relative importances
and in the giving each detail neither more nor less than its due.
This is the difference between Gerard Dow and Metsu. Gerard Dow
gives all he can, but unreflectingly; hence it does not reflect the
subject effectively into the spectator. We see it, but it does not
come home to us. Metsu on the other hand omits all he can, but omits
intelligently, and his reflection excites responsive enthusiasm in
ourselves. We are continually trying to see as much as we can, and
to put it down. More wisely we should consider how much we can avoid
seeing and dispense with.
So it is also in music. Cherubini says the number of things that can
be done in fugue with a very simple subject is endless, but that the
trouble lies in knowing which to choose from all these infinite
possibilities.
As regards painting, any one can paint anything in the minute manner
with a little practice, but it takes an exceedingly able man to paint
so much as an egg broadly and simply. Bearing in mind the shortness
of life and the complexity of affairs, it stands to reason that we
owe most to him who packs our trunks for us, so to speak, most
intelligently, neither omitting what we are likely to want, nor
including what we can dispense with, and who, at the same time,
arranges things so that they will travel most safely and be got at
most conveniently. So we speak of composition and arrangement in all
arts.
Making Notes
My notes always grow longer if I shorten them. I mean the process of
compression makes them more pregnant and they breed new notes. I
never try to lengthen them, so I do not know whether they would grow
shorter if I did. Perhaps that might be a good way of getting them
shorter.
Shortening
A young author is tempted to leave anything he has written through
fear of not having enough to say if he goes cutting out too freely.
But it is easier to be long than short. I have always found
compressing, cutting out, and tersifying a passage suggests more than
anything else does. Things pruned off in this way are like the heads
of the hydra, two grow for every two that is lopped off.
Omission
If a writer will go on the principle of stopping everywhere and
anywhere to put down his notes, as the true painter will stop
anywhere and everywhere to sketch, he will be able to cut down his
works liberally. He will become prodigal not of writing--any fool
can be this--but of omission. You become brief because you have more
things to say than time to say them in. One of the chief arts is
that of knowing what to neglect and the more talk increases the more
necessary does this art become.
Brevity
Handel's jig in the ninth Suite de Pieces, in G minor, is very fine
but it is perhaps a little long. Probably Handel was in a hurry, for
it takes much more time to get a thing short than to leave it a
little long. Brevity is not only the soul of wit, but the soul of
making oneself agreeable and of getting on with people, and, indeed,
of everything that makes life worth living. So precious a thing,
however, cannot be got without more expense and trouble than most of
us have the moral wealth to lay out.
Diffuseness
This sometimes helps, as, for instance, when the subject is hard;
words that may be, strictly speaking, unnecessary still may make
things easier for the reader by giving him more time to master the
thought while his eye is running over the verbiage. So, a little
water may prevent a strong drink from burning throat and stomach. A
style that is too terse is as fatiguing as one that is too diffuse.
But when a passage is written a little long, with consciousness and
compunction but still deliberately, as what will probably be most
easy for the reader, it can hardly be called diffuse.
Difficulties in Art, Literature and Music
The difficult and the unintelligible are only conceivable at all in
virtue of their catching on to something less difficult and less
unintelligible and, through this, to things easily done and
understood. It is at these joints in their armour that difficulties
should be attacked.
Never tackle a serious difficulty as long as something which must be
done, and about which you see your way fairly well, remains undone;
the settling of this is sure to throw light upon the way in which the
serious difficulty is to be resolved. It is doing the What-you-can
that will best help you to do the What-you-cannot.
Arrears of small things to be attended to, if allowed to accumulate,
worry and depress like unpaid debts. The main work should always
stand aside for these, not these for the main work, as large debts
should stand aside for small ones, or truth for common charity and
good feeling. If we attend continually and promptly to the little
that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little
remains that we cannot do.
Knowledge is Power
Yes, but it must be practical knowledge. There is nothing less
powerful than knowledge unattached, and incapable of application.
That is why what little knowledge I have has done myself personally
so much harm. I do not know much, but if I knew a good deal less
than that little I should be far more powerful. The rule should be
never to learn a thing till one is pretty sure one wants it, or that
one will want it before long so badly as not to be able to get on
without it. This is what sensible people do about money, and there
is no reason why people should throw away their time and trouble more
than their money. There are plenty of things that most boys would
give their ears to know, these and these only are the proper things
for them to sharpen their wits upon.
If a boy is idle and does not want to learn anything at all, the same
principle should guide those who have the care of him--he should
never be made to learn anything till it is pretty obvious that he
cannot get on without it. This will save trouble both to boys and
teachers, moreover it will be far more likely to increase a boy's
desire to learn. I know in my own case no earthly power could make
me learn till I had my head given me; and nothing has been able to
stop me from incessant study from that day to this.
Academicism
Handicapped people sometimes owe their success to the misfortune
which weights them. They seldom know beforehand how far they are
going to reach, and this helps them; for if they knew the greatness
of the task before them they would not attempt it. He who knows he
is infirm, and would yet climb, does not think of the summit which he
believes to be beyond his reach but climbs slowly onwards, taking
very short steps, looking below as often as he likes but not above
him, never trying his powers but seldom stopping, and then,
sometimes, behold! he is on the top, which he would never have even
aimed at could he have seen it from below. It is only in novels and
sensational biographies that handicapped people, "fired by a
knowledge of the difficulties that others have overcome, resolve to
triumph over every obstacle by dint of sheer determination, and in
the end carry everything before them." In real life the person who
starts thus almost invariably fails. This is the worst kind of
start.
The greatest secret of good work whether in music, literature or
painting lies in not attempting too much; if it be asked, "What is
too much?" the answer is, "Anything that we find difficult or
unpleasant." We should not ask whether others find this same thing
difficult or no. If we find the difficulty so great that the
overcoming it is a labour and not a pleasure, we should either change
our aim altogether, or aim, at any rate for a time, at some lower
point. It must be remembered that no work is required to be more
than right as far as it goes; the greatest work cannot get beyond
this and the least comes strangely near the greatest if this can be
said of it.
The more I see of academicism the more I distrust it. If I had
approached painting as I have approached bookwriting and music, that
is to say by beginning at once to do what I wanted, or as near as I
could to what I could find out of this, and taking pains not by way
of solving academic difficulties, in order to provide against
practical ones, but by waiting till a difficulty arose in practice
and then tackling it, thus making the arising of each difficulty be
the occasion for learning what had to be learnt about it--if I had
approached painting in this way I should have been all right. As it
is I have been all wrong, and it was South Kensington and
Heatherley's that set me wrong. I listened to the nonsense about how
I ought to study before beginning to paint, and about never painting
without nature, and the result was that I learned to study but not to
paint. Now I have got too much to do and am too old to do what I
might easily have done, and should have done, if I had found out
earlier what writing Life and Habit was the chief thing to teach me.
So I painted study after study, as a priest reads his breviary, and
at the end of ten years knew no more what the face of nature was
like, unless I had it immediately before me, than I did at the
beginning. I am free to confess that in respect of painting I am a
failure. I have spent far more time on painting than I have on
anything else, and have failed at it more than I have failed in any
other respect almost solely for the reasons given above. I tried
very hard, but I tried the wrong way.
Fortunately for me there are no academies for teaching people how to
write books, or I should have fallen into them as I did into those
for painting and, instead of writing, should have spent my time and
money in being told that I was learning how to write. If I had one
thing to say to students before I died (I mean, if I had got to die,
but might tell students one thing first) I should say:-
"Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a
prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and
tumble of the world; only, of course, let them be on a small scale in
the first instance till you feel your feet safe under you. Act more
and rehearse less."
A friend once asked me whether I liked writing books, composing music
or painting pictures best. I said I did not know. I like them all;
but I never find time to paint a picture now and only do small
sketches and studies. I know in which I am strongest--writing; I
know in which I am weakest--painting; I am weakest where I have taken
most pains and studied most.
Agonising
In art, never try to find out anything, or try to learn anything
until the not knowing it has come to be a nuisance to you for some
time. Then you will remember it, but not otherwise. Let knowledge
importune you before you will hear it. Our schools and universities
go on the precisely opposite system.
Never consciously agonise; the race is not to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong. Moments of extreme issue are unconscious and
must be left to take care of themselves. During conscious moments
take reasonable pains but no more and, above all, work so slowly as
never to get out of breath. Take it easy, in fact, until forced not
to do so.
There is no mystery about art. Do the things that you can see; they
will show you those that you cannot see. By doing what you can you
will gradually get to know what it is that you want to do and cannot
do, and so to be able to do it.
The Choice of Subjects
Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them. Only do
that which insists upon being done and runs right up against you,
hitting you in the eye until you do it. This calls you and you had
better attend to it, and do it as well as you can. But till called
in this way do nothing.
Imaginary Countries
Each man's mind is an unknown land to himself, so that we need not be
at such pains to frame a mechanism of adventure for getting to
undiscovered countries. We have not far to go before we reach them.
They are, like the Kingdom of Heaven, within us.
My Books
I never make them: they grow; they come to me and insist on being
written, and on being such and such. I did not want to write
Erewhon, I wanted to go on painting and found it an abominable
nuisance being dragged willy-nilly into writing it. So with all my
books--the subjects were never of my own choosing; they pressed
themselves upon me with more force than I could resist. If I had not
liked the subjects I should have kicked, and nothing would have got
me to do them at all. As I did like the subjects and the books came
and said they were to be written, I grumbled a little and wrote them.
{106}
Great Works
These have always something of the "de profundis" about them.
New Ideas
Every new idea has something of the pain and peril of childbirth
about it; ideas are just as mortal and just as immortal as organised
beings are.
Books and Children
If the literary offspring is not to die young, almost as much trouble
must be taken with it as with the bringing up of a physical child.
Still, the physical child is the harder work of the two.
The Life of Books
Some writers think about the life of books as some savages think
about the life of men--that there are books which never die. They
all die sooner or later; but that will not hinder an author from
trying to give his book as long a life as he can get for it. The
fact that it will have to die is no valid reason for letting it die
sooner than can be helped.
Criticism
Critics generally come to be critics by reason not of their fitness
for this but of their unfitness for anything else. Books should be
tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes, and counsel
should be heard on both sides.
Le Style c'est 1'Homme
It is with books, music, painting and all the arts as with children--
only those live that have drained much of their author's own life
into them. The personality of the author is what interests us more
than his work. When we have once got well hold of the personality of
the author we care comparatively little about the history of the work
or what it means or even its technique; we enjoy the work without
thinking of more than its beauty, and of how much we like the
workman. "Le style c'est l'homme"--that style of which, if I may
quote from memory, Buffon, again, says that it is like happiness, and
"vient de la douceur de l'ame" {107}--and we care more about knowing
what kind of person a man was than about knowing of his achievements,
no matter how considerable they may have been. If he has made it
clear that he was trying to do what we like, and meant what we should
like him to have meant, it is enough; but if the work does not
attract us to the workman, neither does it attract us to itself.
Portraits
A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the
painted. When we look at a portrait by Holbein or Rembrandt it is of
Holbein or Rembrandt that we think more than of the subject of their
picture. Even a portrait of Shakespeare by Holbein or Rembrandt
could tell us very little about Shakespeare. It would, however, tell
us a great deal about Holbein or Rembrandt.
A Man's Style
A man's style in any art should be like his dress--it should attract
as little attention as possible.
The Gauntlet of Youth
Everything that is to age well must have run the gauntlet of its
youth. Hardly ever does a work of art hold its own against time if
it was not treated somewhat savagely at first--I should say "artist"
rather than "work of art."
Greatness in Art
If a work of art--music, literature or painting--is for all time, it
must be independent of the conventions, dialects, costumes and
fashions of any time; if not great without help from such unessential
accessories, no help from them can greaten it. A man must wear the
dress of his own time, but no dressing can make a strong man of a
weak one.
Literary Power
They say the test of this is whether a man can write an inscription.
I say "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I
cannot.
Subject and Treatment
It is often said that treatment is more important than subject, but
no treatment can make a repulsive subject not repulsive. It can make
a trivial, or even a stupid, subject interesting, but a really bad
flaw in a subject cannot be treated out. Happily the man who has
sense enough to treat a subject well will generally have sense enough
to choose a good one, so that the case of a really repulsive subject
treated in a masterly manner does not often arise. It is often said
to have arisen, but in nine cases out of ten the treatment will be
found to have been overpraised.
Public Opinion
People say how strong it is; and indeed it is strong while it is in
its prime. In its childhood and old age it is as weak as any other
organism. I try to make my own work belong to the youth of a public
opinion. The history of the world is the record of the weakness,
frailty and death of public opinion, as geology is the record of the
decay of those bodily organisms in which opinions have found material
expression.
A Literary Man's Test
Moliere's reading to his housemaid has, I think, been misunderstood
as though he in some way wanted to see the effect upon the housemaid
and make her a judge of his work. If she was an unusually clever,
smart girl, this might be well enough, but the supposition commonly
is that she was a typical housemaid and nothing more.
If Moliere ever did read to her, it was because the mere act of
reading aloud put his work before him in a new light and, by
constraining his attention to every line, made him judge it more
rigorously. I always intend to read, and generally do read, what I
write aloud to some one; any one almost will do, but he should not be
so clever that I am afraid of him. I feel weak places at once when I
read aloud where I thought, as long as I read to myself only, that
the passage was all right.
What Audience to Write for
People between the ages of twenty and thirty read a good deal, after
thirty their reading drops off and by forty is confined to each
person's special subject, newspapers and magazines; so that the most
important part of one's audience, and that which should be mainly
written for, consists of specialists and people between twenty and
thirty.
Writing for a Hundred Years Hence
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will
often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years
hence.
VIII--HANDEL AND MUSIC
Handel and Beethoven
As a boy, from 12 years old or so, I always worshipped Handel.
Beethoven was a terra incognita to me till I went up to Cambridge; I
knew and liked a few of his waltzes but did not so much as know that
he had written any sonatas or symphonies. At Cambridge Sykes tried
to teach me Beethoven but I disliked his music and would go away as
soon as Sykes began with any of his sonatas. After a long while I
began to like some of the slow movements and then some entire
sonatas, several of which I could play once fairly well without
notes. I used also to play Bach and Mendelssohn's Songs without
Words and thought them lovely, but I always liked Handel best.
Little by little, however, I was talked over into placing Bach and
Beethoven on a par as the greatest and I said I did not know which
was the best man. I cannot tell now whether I really liked Beethoven
or found myself carried away by the strength of the Beethoven current
which surrounded me; at any rate I spent a great deal of time on him,
for some ten or a dozen years.
One night, when I was about 30, I was at an evening party at Mrs.
Longden's and met an old West End clergyman of the name of Smalley
(Rector, I think, of Bayswater). I said I did not know which was
greatest Handel, Bach or Beethoven.
He said: "I am surprised at that; I should have thought you would
have known."
"Which," said I, "is the greatest?"
"Handel."
I knew he was right and have never wavered since. I suppose I was
really of this opinion already, but it was not till I got a little
touch from outside that I knew it. From that moment Beethoven began
to go back, and now I feel towards him much as I did when I first
heard his work, except, of course, that I see a gnosis in him of
which as a young man I knew nothing. But I do not greatly care about
gnosis, I want agape; and Beethoven's agape is not the healthy robust
tenderness of Handel, it is a sickly maudlin thing in comparison.
Anyhow I do not like him. I like Mozart and Haydn better, but not so
much better as I should like to like them.
Handel and Domenico Scarlatti
Handel and Domenico Scarlatti were contemporaries almost to a year,
both as regards birth and death. They knew each other very well in
Italy and Scarlatti never mentioned Handel's name without crossing
himself, but I have not heard that Handel crossed himself at the
mention of Scarlatti's name. I know very little of Scarlatti's music
and have not even that little well enough in my head to write about
it; I retain only a residuary impression that it is often very
charming and links Haydn with Bach, moreover that it is distinctly
un-Handelian.
Handel must have known and comprehended Scarlatti's tendencies
perfectly well: his rejection, therefore, of the principles that
lead to them must have been deliberate. Scarlatti leads to Haydn,
Haydn to Mozart and hence, through Beethoven, to modern music. That
Handel foresaw this I do not doubt, nor yet that he felt, as I do
myself, that modern music means something, I know not what, which is
not what I mean by music. It is playing another game and has set
itself aims which, no doubt, are excellent but which are not mine.
Of course I know that this may be all wrong: I know how very limited
and superficial my own acquaintance with music is. Still I have a
strong feeling as though from John Dunstable, or whoever it may have
been, to Handel the tide of music was rising, intermittently no doubt
but still rising, and that since Handel's time it has been falling.
Or, rather perhaps I should say that music bifurcated with Handel and
Bach--Handel dying musically as well as physically childless, while
Bach was as prolific in respect of musical disciples as he was in
that of children.
What, then, was it, supposing I am right at all, that Handel
distrusted in the principles of Scarlatti as deduced from those of
Bach? I imagine that he distrusted chiefly the abuse of the
appoggiatura, the abuse of the unlimited power of modulation which
equal temperament placed at the musician's disposition and departure
from well-marked rhythm, beat or measured tread. At any rate I
believe the music I like best myself to be sparing of the
appoggiatura, to keep pretty close to tonic and dominant and to have
a well-marked beat, measure and rhythm.
Handel and Homer
Handel was a greater man than Homer (I mean the author of the Iliad);
but the very people who are most angry with me for (as they
incorrectly suppose) sneering at Homer are generally the ones who
never miss an opportunity of cheapening and belittling Handel, and,
which is very painful to myself, they say I was laughing at him in
Narcissus. Perhaps--but surely one can laugh at a person and adore
him at the same time.
Handel and Bach
i
If you tie Handel's hands by debarring him from the rendering of
human emotion, and if you set Bach's free by giving him no human
emotion to render--if, in fact, you rob Handel of his opportunities
and Bach of his difficulties--the two men can fight after a fashion,
but Handel will even so come off victorious. Otherwise it is absurd
to let Bach compete at all. Nevertheless the cultured vulgar have at
all times preferred gymnastics and display to reticence and the
healthy, graceful, normal movements of a man of birth and education,
and Bach is esteemed a more profound musician than Handel in virtue
of his frequent and more involved complexity of construction. In
reality Handel was profound enough to eschew such wildernesses of
counterpoint as Bach instinctively resorted to, but he knew also that
public opinion would be sure to place Bach on a level with himself,
if not above him, and this probably made him look askance at Bach.
At any rate he twice went to Germany without being at any pains to
meet him, and once, if not twice, refused Bach's invitation.
ii
Rockstro says that Handel keeps much more closely to the old
Palestrina rules of counterpoint than Bach does, and that when Handel
takes a licence it is a good bold one taken rarely, whereas Bach is
niggling away with small licences from first to last.
Handel and the British Public
People say the generous British public supported Handel. It did
nothing of the kind. On the contrary, for some 30 years it did its
best to ruin him, twice drove him to bankruptcy, badgered him till in
1737 he had a paralytic seizure which was as near as might be the
death of him and, if he had died then, we should have no Israel, nor
Messiah, nor Samson, nor any of his greatest oratorios. The British
public only relented when he had become old and presently blind.
Handel, by the way, is a rare instance of a man doing his greatest
work subsequently to an attack of paralysis. What kept Handel up was
not the public but the court. It was the pensions given him by
George I and George II that enabled him to carry on at all. So that,
in point of fact, it is to these two very prosaic kings that we owe
the finest musical poems the world knows anything about.
Handel and Madame Patey
Rockstro told me that Sir Michael Costa, after his severe paralytic
stroke, had to conduct at some great performance--I cannot be sure,
but I think he said a Birmingham Festival--at any rate he came in
looking very white and feeble and sat down in front of the orchestra
to conduct a morning rehearsal. Madame Patey was there, went up to
the poor old gentleman and kissed his forehead.
It is a curious thing about this great singer that not only should
she have been (as she has always seemed to me) strikingly like Handel
in the face, and not only should she have been such an incomparable
renderer of Handel's music--I cannot think that I shall ever again
hear any one who seemed to have the spirit of Handel's music so
thoroughly penetrating his or her whole being--but that she should
have been struck with paralysis at, so far as I can remember, the
same age that Handel was. Handel was struck in 1737 when he was 53
years old, but happily recovered. I forget Madame Patey's exact age,
but it was somewhere about this.
Handel and Shakespeare
Jones and I had been listening to Gaetano Meo's girls playing Handel
and were talking about him and Shakespeare, and how those two men can
alike stir us more than any one else can. Neither were self-
conscious in production, but when the thing had come out Shakespeare
looks at it and wonders, whereas Handel takes it as a matter of
course.
A Yankee Handelian
I only ever met one American who seemed to like and understand
Handel. How far he did so in reality I do not know, but inter alia
he said that Handel "struck ile with the Messiah," and that "it
panned out well, the Messiah did."
Waste
Handel and Shakespeare have left us the best that any have left us;
yet, in spite of this, how much of their lives was wasted. Fancy
Handel expending himself upon the Moabites and Ammonites, or even the
Jews themselves, year after year, as he did in the fulness of his
power; and fancy what we might have had from Shakespeare if he had
gossipped to us about himself and his times and the people he met in
London and at Stratford-on-Avon instead of writing some of what he
did write. Nevertheless we have the men, seen through their work
notwithstanding their subjects, who stand and live to us. It is the
figure of Handel as a man, and of Shakespeare as a man, which we
value even more than their work. I feel the presence of Handel
behind every note of his music.
Handel a Conservative
He left no school because he was a protest. There were men in his
time, whose music he perfectly well knew, who are far more modern
than Handel. He was opposed to the musically radical tendencies of
his age and, as a musician, was a decided conservative in all
essential respects--though ready, of course, to go any length in any
direction if he had a fancy at the moment for doing so.
Handel and Ernest Pontifex
It cost me a great deal to make Ernest [in The Way of All Flesh] play
Beethoven and Mendelssohn; I did it simply ad captandum. As a matter
of fact he played only the music of Handel and of the early Italian
and old English composers--but Handel most of all.
Handel's Commonplaces
It takes as great a composer as Handel--or rather it would take as
great a composer if he could be found--to be able to be as easily and
triumphantly commonplace as Handel often is, just as it takes--or
rather would take--as great a composer as Handel to write another
Hallelujah chorus. It is only the man who can do the latter who can
do the former as Handel has done it. Handel is so great and so
simple that no one but a professional musician is unable to
understand him.
Handel and Dr. Morell
After all, Dr. Morell suited Handel exactly well--far better than
Tennyson would have done. I don't believe even Handel could have set
Tennyson to music comfortably. What a mercy it is that he did not
live in Handel's time! Even though Handel had set him ever so well
he would have spoiled the music, and this Dr. Morell does not in the
least do.
Wordsworth
And I have been as far as Hull to see
What clothes he left or other property.
I am told that these lines occur in a poem by Wordsworth. (Think of
the expense!) How thankful we ought to be that Wordsworth was only a
poet and not a musician. Fancy a symphony by Wordsworth! Fancy
having to sit it out! And fancy what it would have been if he had
written fugues!
Sleeping Beauties
There are plenty of them. Take Handel; look at such an air as
"Loathsome urns, disclose your treasure" or "Come, O Time, and thy
broad wings displaying," both in The Triumph of Time and Truth, or at
"Convey me to some peaceful shore," in Alexander Balus, especially
when he comes to "Forgetting and forgot the will of fate." Who know
these? And yet, can human genius do more?
"And the Glory of the Lord"
It would be hard to find a more satisfactory chorus even in the
Messiah, but I do not think the music was originally intended for
these words:
[Music score which cannot be reproduced]
And the glo-ry, the glo-ry of the Lord.
If Handel had approached these words without having in his head a
subject the spirit of which would do, and which he thought the words
with a little management might be made to fit, he would not, I think,
have repeated "the glory" at all, or at any rate not here. If these
words had been measured, as it were, for a new suit instead of being,
as I suppose, furnished with a good second-hand one, the word "the"
would not have been tacked on to the "glory" which precedes it and
made to belong to it rather than to the "glory" which follows. It
does not matter one straw, and if Handel had asked me whether I
minded his forcing the words a little, I should have said, "Certainly
not, nor more than a little, if you like." Nevertheless I think as a
matter of fact that there is a little forcing. I remember that as a
boy this always struck me as a strange arrangement of the words, but
it was not until I came to write a chorus myself that I saw how it
came about. I do not suspect any forcing when it comes to "And all
flesh shall see it together."
Handel and the Speaking Voice
[Music score which cannot be reproduced]
While now with-out mea-sure we re---vel in plea-sure.
[Music score which cannot be reproduced]
With--their vain mys--te--rios art;
The former of these two extracts is from the chorus "Venus laughing
from the skies" in Theodora; the other is from the air "Wise men
flattering" in Judas Maccabaeus. I know no better examples of the
way Handel sometimes derives his melody from the natural intonation
of the speaking voice. The "pleasure" (in bar four of the chorus)
suggests a man saying "with pleasure" when accepting an invitation to
dinner. Of course one can say, "with pleasure" in a variety of
tones, but a sudden exaltation on the second syllable is very common.
In the other example, the first bar of the accompaniment puts the
argument in a most persuasive manner; the second simply re-states it;
the third is the clincher, I cannot understand any man's holding out
against bar three. The fourth bar re-states the clincher, but at a
lower pitch, as by one who is quite satisfied that he has convinced
his adversary.
Handel and the Wetterhorn
When last I saw the Wetterhorn I caught myself involuntarily
humming:-
[Music score which cannot be reproduced]
And the go-vernment shall be up-on his shoul-der.
The big shoulder of the Wetterhorn seemed to fall just like the run
on "shoulder."
"Tyrants now no more shall Dread"
The music to this chorus in Hercules is written from the tyrant's
point of view. This is plain from the jubilant defiance with which
the chorus opens, and becomes still plainer when the magnificent
strain to which he has set the words "All fear of punishment, all
fear is o'er" bursts upon us. Here he flings aside all
considerations save that of the gospel of doing whatever we please
without having to pay for it. He has, however, remembered himself
and become almost puritanical over "The world's avenger is no more."
Here he is quite proper.
From a dramatic point of view Handel's treatment of these words must
be condemned for reasons in respect of which Handel was very rarely
at fault. It puzzles the listener who expects the words to be
treated from the point of view of the vanquished slaves and not from
that of the tyrants. There is no pretence that these particular
tyrants are not so bad as ordinary tyrants, nor these particular
vanquished slaves not so good as ordinary vanquished slaves, and,
unless this has been made clear in some way, it is dramatically de
rigueur that the tyrants should come to grief, or be about to come to
grief. The hearer should know which way his sympathies are expected
to go, and here we have the music dragging us one way and the words
another.
Nevertheless, we pardon the departure from the strict rules of the
game, partly because of the welcome nature of good tidings so
exultantly announced to us about all fear of punishment being o'er,
and partly because the music is, throughout, so much stronger than
the words that we lose sight of them almost entirely. Handel
probably wrote as he did from a profound, though perhaps unconscious,
perception of the fact that even in his day there was a great deal of
humanitarian nonsense talked and that, after all, the tyrants were
generally quite as good sort of people as the vanquished slaves.
Having begun on this tack, it was easy to throw morality to the winds
when he came to the words about all fear of punishment being over.
Handel and Marriage
To man God's universal law
Gave power to keep the wife in awe
sings Handel in a comically dogmatic little chorus in Samson. But
the universality of the law must be held to have failed in the case
of Mr. and Mrs. M'Culloch.
Handel and a Letter to a Solicitor
Jones showed me a letter that had been received by the solicitor in
whose office he was working:
"Dear Sir; I enclose the name of the lawyer of the lady I am engaged
to and her name and address are Miss B. Richmond. His address is W.
W. Esq. Manchester.
"I remain, Yours truly W. D. C."
I said it reminded me of the opening bars of "Welcome, welcome,
Mighty King" in Saul:
[Music score which cannot be reproduced]
Handel's Shower of Rain
The falling shower in the air "As cheers the sun" in Joshua is, I
think, the finest description of a warm sunny refreshing rain that I
have ever come across and one of the most wonderfully descriptive
pieces of music that even Handel ever did.
Theodora and Susanna
In my preface to Evolution Old and New I imply a certain
dissatisfaction with Theodora and Susanna, and imply also that Handel
himself was so far dissatisfied that in his next work, Jephtha (which
I see I inadvertently called his last), he returned to his earlier
manner. It is true that these works are not in Handel's usual
manner; they are more difficult and more in the style of Bach. I am
glad that Handel gave us these two examples of a slightly (for it is
not much) varied manner and I am interested to observe that he did
not adhere to that manner in Jephtha, but I should be sorry to convey
an impression that I think Theodora and Susanna are in any way
unworthy of Handel. I prefer both to Judas Maccabaeus which, in
spite of the many fine things it contains, I like perhaps the least
of all his oratorios. I have played Theodora and Susanna all
through, and most parts (except the recitatives) many times over,
Jones and I have gone through them again and again; I have heard
Susanna performed once, and Theodora twice, and I find no single
piece in either work which I do not admire, while many are as good as
anything which it is in my power to conceive. I like the chorus "He
saw the lovely youth" the least of anything in Theodora so far as I
remember at this moment, but knowing it to have been a favourite with
Handel himself I am sure that I must have missed understanding it.
How comes it, I wonder, that the chorale-like air "Blessing, Honour,
Adoration" is omitted in Novello's edition? It is given in Clarke's
edition and is very beautiful.
Jones says of "With darkness deep", that in the accompaniment to this
air the monotony of dazed grief is just varied now and again with a
little writhing passage. Whether Handel meant this or no, the
interpretation put upon the passage fits the feeling of the air.
John Sebastian Bach
It is imputed to him for righteousness that he goes over the heads of
the general public and appeals mainly to musicians. But the greatest
men do not go over the heads of the masses, they take them rather by
the hand. The true musician would not snub so much as a musical
critic. His instinct is towards the man in the street rather than
the Academy. Perhaps I say this as being myself a man in the street
musically. I do not know, but I know that Bach does not appeal to me
and that I do appeal from Bach to the man in the street and not to
the Academy, because I believe the first of these to be the sounder.
Still, I own Bach does appeal to me sometimes. In my own poor music
I have taken passages from him before now, and have my eye on others
which I have no doubt will suit me somewhere. Whether Bach would
know them again when I have worked my will on them, and much more
whether he would own them, I neither know nor care. I take or leave
as I choose, and alter or leave untouched as I choose. I prefer my
music to be an outgrowth from a germ whose source I know, rather than
a waif and stray which I fancy to be my own child when it was all the
time begotten of a barrel organ. It is a wise tune that knows its
own father and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of
respectable parents. Roughly, however, as I have said over and over
again, if I think something that I know and greatly like in music, no
matter whose, is appropriate, I appropriate it. I should say I was
under most obligations to Handel, Purcell and Beethoven.
For example, any one who looked at my song "Man in Vain" in Ulysses
might think it was taken from "Batti, batti." I should like to say
it was taken from, or suggested by, a few bars in the opening of
Beethoven's pianoforte sonata op. 78, and a few bars in the
accompaniment to the duet "Hark how the Songsters" in Purcell's Timon
of Athens. I am not aware of having borrowed more in the song than
what follows as natural development of these two passages which run
thus:
[Music score by Beethoven which cannot be reproduced]
[Music score by Purcell which cannot be reproduced]
From the pianoforte arrangement in The Beauties of Purcell by John
Clarke, Mus. Doc.
Honesty
Honesty consists not in never stealing but in knowing where to stop
in stealing, and how to make good use of what one does steal. It is
only great proprietors who can steal well and wisely. A good
stealer, a good user of what he takes, is ipso facto a good inventor.
Two men can invent after a fashion to one who knows how to make the
best use of what has been done already.
Musical Criticism
I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart's Requiem. I did
not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I
disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes. Yet next
morning in the Times I saw this able, heartless failure, compact of
gnosis as much as any one pleases but without one spark of either
true pathos or true humour, called "the crowning achievement of
dramatic music." The writer continues: "To the unintelligent, music
of this order does not appeal"; which only means "I am intelligent
and you had better think as I tell you." I am glad that such people
should call Handel a thieving plagiarist.
On Borrowing in Music
In books it is easy to make mention of the forgotten dead to whom we
are indebted, and to acknowledge an obligation at the same time and
place that we incur it. The more original a writer is, the more
pleasure will he take in calling attention to the forgotten work of
those who have gone before him. The conventions of painting and
music, on the other hand, while they admit of borrowing no less
freely than literature does, do not admit of acknowledgement; it is
impossible to interrupt a piece of music, or paint some words upon a
picture to explain that the composer or painter was at such and such
a point indebted to such and such a source for his inspiration, but
it is not less impossible to avoid occasionally borrowing, or rather
taking, for there is no need of euphemism, from earlier work. Where,
then, is the line to be drawn between lawful and unlawful adoption of
what has been done by others? This question is such a nice one that
there are almost as many opinions upon it as there are painters and
musicians.
To leave painting on one side, if a musician wants some forgotten
passage in an earlier writer, is he, knowing where this sleeping
beauty lies, to let it sleep on unknown and unenjoyed, or shall he
not rather wake it and take it--as likely enough the earlier master
did before him--with, or without modification? It may be said this
should be done by republishing the original work with its composer's
name, giving him his due laurels. So it should, if the work will
bear it; but more commonly times will have so changed that it will
not. A composer may want a bar, or bar and a half, out of, say, a
dozen pages--he may not want even this much without more or less
modification--is he to be told that he must republish the ten or
dozen original pages within which the passage he wants lies buried,
as the only righteous way of giving it new life? No one should be
allowed such dog-in-the-manger-like ownership in beauty that because
it has once been revealed to him therefore none for ever after shall
enjoy it unless he be their cicerone. If this rule were sanctioned,
he who first produced anything beautiful would sign its death warrant
for an earlier or later date, or at best would tether that which
should forthwith begin putting girdles round the world.
Beauty lives not for the self-glorification of the priests of any
art, but for the enjoyment of priests and laity alike. He is the
best art-priest who brings most beauty most home to the hearts of
most men. If any one tells an artist that part of what he has
brought home is not his but another's, "Yea, let him take all,"
should be his answer. He should know no self in the matter. He is a
fisher of men's hearts from love of winning them, and baits his hook
with what will best take them without much heed where he gets it
from. He can gain nothing by offering people what they know or ought
to know already, he will not therefore take from the living or lately
dead; for the same reason he will instinctively avoid anything with
which his hearers will be familiar, except as recognised common form,
but beyond these limits he should take freely even as he hopes to be
one day taken from.
True, there is a hidden mocking spirit in things which ensures that
he alone can take well who can also make well, but it is no less true
that he alone makes well who takes well. A man must command all the
resources of his art, and of these none is greater than knowledge of
what has been done by predecessors. What, I wonder, may he take from
these--how may he build himself upon them and grow out of them--if he
is to make it his chief business to steer clear of them? A safer
canon is that the development of a musician should be like that of a
fugue or first movement, in which, the subject having been enounced,
it is essential that thenceforward everything shall be both new and
old at one and the same time--new, but not too new--old, but not too
old.
Indeed no musician can be original in respect of any large percentage
of his work. For independently of his turning to his own use the
past labour involved in musical notation, which he makes his own as
of right without more thanks to those who thought it out than we give
to him who invented wheels when we hire a cab, independently of this,
it is surprising how large a part even of the most original music
consists of common form scale passages, and closes. Mutatis
mutandis, the same holds good with even the most original book or
picture; these passages or forms are as light and air, common to all
of us; but the principle having been once admitted that some parts of
a man's work cannot be original--not, that is to say, if he has
descended with only a reasonable amount of modification--where is the
line to be drawn? Where does common form begin and end?
The answer is that it is not mere familiarity that should forbid
borrowing, but familiarity with a passage as associated with special
surroundings. If certain musical progressions are already associated
with many different sets of antecedents and consequents, they have no
special association, except in so far as they may be connected with a
school or epoch; no one, therefore, is offended at finding them
associated with one set the more. Familiarity beyond a certain point
ceases to be familiarity, or at any rate ceases to be open to the
objections that lie against that which, though familiar, is still not
familiar as common form. Those on the other hand who hold that a
musician should never knowingly borrow will doubtless say that common
form passages are an obvious and notorious exception to their rule,
and the one the limits of which are easily recognised in practice
however hard it may be to define them neatly on paper.
It is not suggested that when a musician wants to compose an air or
chorus he is to cast about for some little-known similar piece and
lay it under contribution. This is not to spring from the loins of
living ancestors but to batten on dead men's bones. He who takes
thus will ere long lose even what little power to take he may have
ever had. On the other hand there is no enjoyable work in any art
which is not easily recognised as the affiliated outcome of something
that has gone before it. This is more especially true of music,
whose grammar and stock in trade are so much simpler than those of
any other art. He who loves music will know what the best men have
done, and hence will have numberless passages from older writers
floating at all times in his mind, like germs in the air, ready to
hook themselves on to anything of an associated character. Some of
these he will reject at once, as already too strongly wedded to
associations of their own; some are tried and found not so suitable
as was thought; some one, however, will probably soon assert itself
as either suitable, or easily altered so as to become exactly what is
wanted; if, indeed, it is the right passage in the right man's mind,
it will have modified itself unbidden already. How, then, let me ask
again, is the musician to comport himself towards those uninvited
guests of his thoughts? Is he to give them shelter, cherish them,
and be thankful? or is he to shake them rudely off, bid them begone,
and go out of his way so as not to fall in with them again?
Can there be a doubt what the answer to this question should be? As
it is fatal deliberately to steer on to the work of other composers,
so it is no less fatal deliberately to steer clear of it; music to be
of any value must be a man's freest and most instinctive expression.
Instinct in the case of all the greatest artists, whatever their art
may be, bids them attach themselves to, and grow out of those
predecessors who are most congenial to them. Beethoven grew out of
Mozart and Haydn, adding a leaven which in the end leavened the whole
lump, but in the outset adding little; Mozart grew out of Haydn, in
the outset adding little; Haydn grew out of Domenico Scarlatti and
Emmanuel Bach, adding, in the outset, little. These men grew out of
John Sebastian Bach, for much as both of them admired Handel I cannot
see that they allowed his music to influence theirs. Handel even in
his own lifetime was more or less of a survival and protest; he saw
the rocks on to which music was drifting and steered his own good
ship wide of them; as for his musical parentage, he grew out of the
early Italians and out of Purcell.
The more original a composer is the more certain is he to have made
himself a strong base of operations in the works of earlier men,
striking his roots deep into them, so that he, as it were, gets
inside them and lives in them, they in him, and he in them; then,
this firm foothold having been obtained, he sallies forth as
opportunity directs, with the result that his works will reflect at
once the experiences of his own musical life and of those musical
progenitors to whom a loving instinct has more particularly attached
him. The fact that his work is deeply imbued with their ideas and
little ways, is not due to his deliberately taking from them. He
makes their ways his own as children model themselves upon those
older persons who are kind to them. He loves them because he feels
they felt as he does, and looked on men and things much as he looks
upon them himself; he is an outgrowth in the same direction as that
in which they grew; he is their son, bound by every law of heredity
to be no less them than himself; the manner, therefore, which came
most naturally to them will be the one which comes also most
naturally to him as being their descendant. Nevertheless no matter
how strong a family likeness may be, (and it is sometimes, as between
Handel and his forerunners, startlingly close) two men of different
generations will never be so much alike that the work of each will
not have a character of its own--unless indeed the one is
masquerading as the other, which is not tolerable except on rare
occasions and on a very small scale. No matter how like his father a
man may be we can always tell the two apart; but this once given, so
that he has a clear life of his own, then a strong family likeness to
some one else is no more to be regretted or concealed if it exists
than to be affected if it does not.
It is on these terms alone that attractive music can be written, and
it is a musician's business to write attractive music. He is, as it
were, tenant for life of the estate of and trustee for that school to
which he belongs. Normally, that school will be the one which has
obtained the firmest hold upon his own countrymen. An Englishman
cannot successfully write like a German or a Hungarian, nor is it
desirable that he should try. If, by way of variety, we want German
or Hungarian music we shall get a more genuine article by going
direct to German or Hungarian composers. For the most part, however,
the soundest Englishmen will be stay-at-homes, in spite of their
being much given to summer flings upon the continent. Whether as
writers, therefore, or as listeners, Englishmen should stick chiefly
to Purcell, Handel, and Sir Arthur Sullivan. True, Handel was not an
Englishman by birth, but no one was ever more thoroughly English in
respect of all the best and most distinguishing features of
Englishmen. As a young man, though Italy and Germany were open to
him, he adopted the country of Purcell, feeling it, doubtless, to be,
as far as he was concerned, more Saxon than Saxony itself. He chose
England; nor can there be a doubt that he chose it because he
believed it to be the country in which his music had the best chance
of being appreciated. And what does this involve, if not that
England, take it all round, is the most musically minded country in
the world? That this is so, that it has produced the finest music
the world has known, and is therefore the finest school of music in
the world, cannot be reasonably disputed.
To the born musician, it is hardly necessary to say, neither the
foregoing remarks nor any others about music, except those that may
be found in every text book, can be of the smallest use. Handel knew
this and no man ever said less about his art--or did more in it.
There are some semi-apocryphal {128} rules for tuning the harpsichord
that pretend, with what truth I know not, to hail from him, but here
his theoretical contributions to music begin and end. The rules
begin "In this chord" (the tonic major triad) "tune the fifth pretty
flat, and the third considerably too sharp." There is an absence of
fuss about these words which suggests Handel himself.
The written and spoken words of great painters or musicians who can
talk or write is seldom lasting--artists are a dumb inarticulate
folk, whose speech is in their hands not in their tongues. They look
at us like seals, but cannot talk to us. To the musician, therefore,
what has been said above is useless, if not worse; its object will
have been attained if it aids the uncreative reader to criticise what
he hears with more intelligence.
Music
So far as I can see, this is the least stable of the arts. From the
earliest records we learn that there were musicians, and people seem
to have been just as fond of music as we are ourselves, but, whereas
we find the old sculpture, painting (what there is of it) and
literature to have been in all essentials like our own, and not only
this but whereas we find them essentially the same in existing
nations in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, this is not so as
regards music either looking to antiquity or to the various existing
nations. I believe we should find old Greek and Roman music as
hideous as we do Persian and Japanese, or as Persians and Japanese
find our own.
I believe therefore that the charm of music rests on a more
unreasoning basis, and is more dependent on what we are accustomed
to, than the pleasure given by the other arts. We now find all the
ecclesiastical modes, except the Ionian and the AEolian,
unsatisfactory, indeed almost intolerable, but I question whether, if
we were as much in the habit of using the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian
and Mixo-Lydian modes as we are of using the later AEolian mode (the
minor scale), we should not find these just as satisfactory. Is it
not possible that our indisputable preference for the Ionian mode
(the major scale) is simply the result of its being the one to which
we are most accustomed? If another mode were to become habitual,
might not this scale or mode become first a kind of supplementary
moon-like mode (as the AEolian now is) and finally might it not
become intolerable to us? Happily it will last my time as it is.
Discords
Formerly all discords were prepared, and Monteverde's innovation of
taking the dominant seventh unprepared was held to be cataclysmic,
but in modern music almost any conceivable discord may be taken
unprepared. We have grown so used to this now that we think nothing
of it, still, whenever it can be done without sacrificing something
more important, I think even a dominant seventh is better prepared.
It is only the preparation, however, of discords which is now less
rigorously insisted on; their resolution--generally by the climbing
down of the offending note--is as necessary as ever if the music is
to flow on smoothly.
This holds good exactly in our daily life. If a discord has to be
introduced, it is better to prepare it as a concord, take it on a
strong beat, and resolve it downwards on a weak one. The preparation
being often difficult or impossible may be dispensed with, but the
resolution is still de rigueur.
Anachronism
It has been said "Thou shalt not masquerade in costumes not of thine
own period," but the history of art is the history of revivals.
Musical criticism, so far as I can see, is the least intelligent of
the criticisms on this score. Unless a man writes in the exotic
style of Brahms, Wagner, Dvorak and I know not what other Slav,
Czech, Teuton or Hebrew, the critics are sure to accuse him of being
an anachronism. The only man in England who is permitted to write in
a style which is in the main of home growth is the Irish Jew, Sir
Arthur Sullivan. If we may go to a foreign style why may we not go
to one of an earlier period? But surely we may do whatever we like,
and the better we like it the better we shall do it. The great thing
is to make sure that we like the style we choose better than we like
any other, that we engraft on it whatever we hear that we think will
be a good addition, and depart from it wherever we dislike it. If a
man does this he may write in the style of the year one and he will
be no anachronism; the musical critics may call him one but they
cannot make him one.
Chapters in Music
The analogy between literature, painting and music, so close in so
many respects, suggests that the modern custom of making a whole
scene, act or even drama into a single, unbroken movement without
subdivision is like making a book without chapters, or a picture,
like Bernardino Luini's great Lugano fresco in which a long subject
is treated within the compass of a single piece. Better advised, as
it seems to me, Gaudenzio Ferrari broke up a space of the same shape
and size at Varallo into many compartments, each more or less
complete in itself, grouped round a central scene. The subdivision
of books into chapters, each with a more or less emphatic full close
in its own key, is found to be a help as giving the attention halting
places by the way. Everything that is worth attending to fatigues as
well as delights, much as the climbing of a mountain does so.
Chapters and short pieces give rests during which the attention
gathers renewed strength and attacks with fresh ardour a new stretch
of the ascent. Each bar is, as it were, a step cut in ice and one
does not see, if set pieces are objected to, why phrases and bars
should not be attacked next.
At the Opera
Jones and I went last Friday to Don Giovanni, Mr. Kemp {131} putting
us in free. It bored us both, and we like Narcissus better. We
admit the beauty of many of the beginnings of the airs, but this
beauty is not maintained, in every case the air tails off into
something that is much too near being tiresome. The plot, of course,
is stupid to a degree, but plot has very little to do with it; what
can be more uninteresting than the plot of many of Handel's
oratorios? We both believe the scheme of Italian opera to be a bad
one; we think that music should never be combined with acting to a
greater extent than is done, we will say, in the Mikado; that the
oratorio form is far more satisfactory than opera; and we agreed that
we had neither of us ever yet been to an opera (I mean a Grand Opera)
without being bored by it. I am not sorry to remember that Handel
never abandoned oratorio after he had once fairly taken to it.
At a Philharmonic Concert
We went last night to the Philharmonic and sat in the shilling
orchestra, just behind the drums, so that we could see and hear what
each instrument was doing. The concert began with Mozart's G Minor
Symphony. We liked this fairly well, especially the last movement,
but we found all the movements too long and, speaking for myself, if
I had a tame orchestra for which I might write programmes, I should
probably put it down once or twice again, not from any spontaneous
wish to hear more of it but as a matter of duty that I might judge it
with fuller comprehension--still, if each movement had been half as
long I should probably have felt cordially enough towards it, except
of course in so far as that the spirit of the music is alien to that
of the early Italian school with which alone I am in genuine sympathy
and of which Handel is the climax.
Then came a terribly long-winded recitative by Beethoven and an air
with a good deal of "Che faro" in it. I do not mind this, and if it
had been "Che faro" absolutely I should, I daresay, have liked it
better. I never want to hear it again and my orchestra should never
play it.
Beethoven's Concerto for violin and orchestra (op. 61) which followed
was longer and more tedious still. I have not a single good word for
it. If the subject of the last movement was the tune of one of
Arthur Robert's comic songs, or of any music-hall song, it would do
very nicely and I daresay we should often hum it. I do not mean at
the opening of the movement but about half way through, where the
character is just that of a common music-hall song and, so far, good.
Part II opened with a suite in F Major for orchestra (op. 39) by
Moszkowski. This was much more clear and, in every way, interesting
than the Beethoven; every now and then there were passages that were
pleasing, not to say more. Jones liked it better than I did; still,
one could not feel that any of the movements were the mere drivelling
show stuff of which the concerto had been full. But it, like
everything else done at these concerts, is too long, cut down one-
half it would have been all right and we should have liked to hear it
twice. As it was, all we could say was that it was much better than
we had expected. I did not like the look of the young man who wrote
it and who also conducted. He had long yellowish hair and kept
tossing his head to fling it back on to his shoulders, instead of
keeping it short as Jones and I keep ours.
Then came Schubert's "Erl Konig," which, I daresay, is very fine but
with which I have absolutely nothing in common.
And finally there was a tiresome characteristic overture by Berlioz,
which, if Jones could by any possibility have written anything so
dreary, I should certainly have begged him not to publish.
The general impression left upon me by the concert is that all the
movements were too long, and that, no matter how clever the
development may be, it spoils even the most pleasing and interesting
subject if there is too much of it. Handel knew when to stop and,
when he meant stopping, he stopped much as a horse stops, with
little, if any, peroration. Who can doubt that he kept his movements
short because he knew that the worst music within a reasonable
compass is better than the best which is made tiresome by being spun
out unduly? I only know one concerted piece of Handel's which I
think too long, I mean the overture to Saul, but I have no doubt that
if I were to try to cut it down I should find some excellent reason
that had made Handel decide on keeping it as it is.
At the Wind Concerts
There have been some interesting wind concerts lately; I say
interesting, because they brought home to us the unsatisfactory
character of wind unsupported by strings. I rather pleased Jones by
saying that the hautbois was the clarionet with a cold in its head,
and the bassoon the same with a cold on its chest.
At a Handel Festival
i
The large sweeps of sound floated over the orchestra like the wind
playing upon a hill-side covered with young heather, and I sat and
wondered which of the Alpine passes Handel crossed when he went into
Italy. What time of the year was it? What kind of weather did he
have? Were the spring flowers out? Did he walk the greater part of
the way as we do now? And what did he hear? For he must sometimes
have heard music inside him--and that, too, as much above what he has
written down as what he has written down is above all other music.
No man can catch all, or always the best, of what is put for a moment
or two within his reach. Handel took as much and as near the best,
doubtless, as mortal man can take; but he must have had moments and
glimpses which were given to him alone and which he could tell no
man.
ii
I saw the world a great orchestra filled with angels whose
instruments were of gold. And I saw the organ on the top of the axis
round which all should turn, but nothing turned and nothing moved and
the angels stirred not and all was as still as a stone, and I was
myself also, like the rest, as still as a stone.
Then I saw some huge, cloud-like forms nearing, and behold! it was
the Lord bringing two of his children by the hand.
"O Papa!" said one, "isn't it pretty?"
"Yes, my dear," said the Lord, "and if you drop a penny into the box
the figures will work."
Then I saw that what I had taken for the keyboard of the organ was no
keyboard but only a slit, and one of the little Lords dropped a
plaque of metal into it. And then the angels played and the world
turned round and the organ made a noise and the people began killing
one another and the two little Lords clapped their hands and were
delighted.
Handel and Dickens
They buried Dickens in the very next grave, cheek by jowl with
Handel. It does not matter, but it pained me to think that people
who could do this could become Deans of Westminster.
IX--A PAINTER'S VIEWS ON PAINTING
The Old Masters and Their Pupils
The old masters taught, not because they liked teaching, nor yet from
any idea of serving the cause of art, nor yet because they were paid
to teach by the parents of their pupils. The parents probably paid
no money at first. The masters took pupils and taught them because
they had more work to do than they could get through and wanted some
one to help them. They sold the pupil's work as their own, just as
people do now who take apprentices. When people can sell a pupil's
work, they will teach the pupil all they know and will see he learns
it. This is the secret of the whole matter.
The modern schoolmaster does not aim at learning from his pupils, he
hardly can, but the old masters did. See how Giovanni Bellini
learned from Titian and Giorgione who both came to him in the same
year, as boys, when Bellini was 63 years old. What a day for
painting was that! All Bellini's best work was done thenceforward.
I know nothing in the history of art so touching as this. [1883.]
P.S. I have changed my mind about Titian. I don't like him.
[1897.]
The Academic System and Repentance
The academic system goes almost on the principle of offering places
for repentance, and letting people fall soft, by assuming that they
should be taught how to do things before they do them, and not by the
doing of them. Good economy requires that there should be little
place for repentance, and that when people fall they should fall hard
enough to remember it.
The Jubilee Sixpence
We have spent hundreds of thousands, or more probably of millions, on
national art collections, schools of art, preliminary training and
academicism, without wanting anything in particular, but when the
nation did at last try all it knew to design a sixpence, it failed.
{136} The other coins are all very well in their way, and so are the
stamps--the letters get carried, and the money passes; but both
stamps and coins would have been just as good, and very likely
better, if there had not been an art-school in the country. [1888.]
Studying from Nature
When is a man studying from nature, and when is he only flattering
himself that he is doing so because he is painting with a model or
lay-figure before him? A man may be working his eight or nine hours
a day from the model and yet not be studying from nature. He is
painting but not studying. He is like the man in the Bible who looks
at himself in a glass and goeth away forgetting what manner of man he
was. He will know no more about nature at the end of twenty years
than a priest who has been reading his breviary day after day without
committing it to memory will know of its contents. Unless he gets
what he has seen well into his memory, so as to have it at his
fingers' ends as familiarly as the characters with which he writes a
letter, he can be no more held to be familiar with, and to have
command over, nature than a man who only copies his signature from a
copy kept in his pocket, as I have known French Canadians do, can be
said to be able to write. It is painting without nature that will
give a man this, and not painting directly from her. He must do both
the one and the other, and the one as much as the other.
The Model and the Lay-Figure
It may be doubted whether they have not done more harm than good.
They are an attempt to get a bit of stuffed nature and to study from
that instead of studying from the thing itself. Indeed, the man who
never has a model but studies the faces of people as they sit
opposite him in an omnibus, and goes straight home and puts down what
little he can of what he has seen, dragging it out piecemeal from his
memory, and going into another omnibus to look again for what he has
forgotten as near as he can find it--that man is studying from nature
as much as he who has a model four or five hours daily--and probably
more. For you may be painting from nature as much without nature
actually before you as with; and you may have nature before you all
the while you are painting and yet not be painting from her.
Sketching from Nature
Is very like trying to put a pinch of salt on her tail. And yet many
manage to do it very nicely.
Great Art and Sham Art
Art has no end in view save the emphasising and recording in the most
effective way some strongly felt interest or affection. Where there
is neither interest nor desire to record with good effect, there is
but sham art, or none at all: where both these are fully present, no
matter how rudely and inarticulately, there is great art. Art is at
best a dress, important, yet still nothing in comparison with the
wearer, and, as a general rule, the less it attracts attention the
better.
Inarticulate Touches
An artist's touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking
of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly
knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who
can be depended on not to bark at nothing.
Detail
One reason why it is as well not to give very much detail is that, no
matter how much is given, the eye will always want more; it will know
very well that it is not being paid in full. On the other hand, no
matter how little one gives, the eye will generally compromise by
wanting only a little more. In either case the eye will want more,
so one may as well stop sooner or later. Sensible painting, like
sensible law, sensible writing, or sensible anything else, consists
as much in knowing what to omit as what to insist upon. It consists
in the tact that tells the painter where to stop.
Painting and Association
Painting is only possible by reason of association's not sticking to
the letter of its bond, so that we jump to conclusions.
The Credulous Eye
Painters should remember that the eye, as a general rule, is a good,
simple, credulous organ--very ready to take things on trust if it be
told them with any confidence of assertion.
Truths from Nature
We must take as many as we can, but the difficulty is that it is
often so hard to know what the truths of nature are.
Accuracy
After having spent years striving to be accurate, we must spend as
many more in discovering when and how to be inaccurate.
Herbert Spencer
He is like nature to Fuseli--he puts me out.
Shade Colour and Reputation
When a thing is near and in light, colour and form are important;
when far and in shadow, they are unimportant. Form and colour are
like reputations which when they become shady are much of a muchness.
Money and Technique
Money is very like technique (or vice versa). We see that both
musicians or painters with great command of technique seldom know
what to do with it, while those who have little often know how to use
what they have.
Action and Study
These things are antagonistic. The composer is seldom a great
theorist; the theorist is never a great composer. Each is equally
fatal to and essential in the other.
Sacred and Profane Statues
I have never seen statues of Jove, Neptune, Apollo or any of the
pagan gods that are not as great failures as the statues of Christ
and the Apostles.
Seeing
If a man has not studied painting, or at any rate black and white
drawing, his eyes are wild; learning to draw tames them. The first
step towards taming the eyes is to teach them not to see too much.
Quickness in seeing as in everything else comes from long sustained
effort after rightness and comes unsought. It never comes from
effort after quickness.
Improvement in Art
Painting depends upon seeing; seeing depends upon looking for this or
that, at least in great part it does so.
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy.
If you look at it to admire it you are lost.
Any man, as old Heatherley used to say, will go on improving as long
as he is bona fide dissatisfied with his work.
Improvement in one's painting depends upon how we look at our work.
If we look at it to see where it is wrong, we shall see this and make
it righter. If we look at it to see where it is right, we shall see
this and shall not make it righter. We cannot see it both wrong and
right at the same time.
Light and Shade
Tell the young artist that he wants a black piece here or there, when
he sees no such black piece in nature, and that he must continue this
or that shadow thus, and break this light into this or that other,
when in nature he sees none of these things, and you will puzzle him
very much. He is trying to put down what he sees; he does not care
two straws about composition or light and shade; if he sees two tones
of such and such relative intensity in nature, he will give them as
near as he can the same relative intensity in his picture, and to
tell him that he is perhaps exactly to reverse the natural order in
deference to some canon of the academicians, and that at the same
time he is drawing from nature, is what he cannot understand.
I am very doubtful how far people do not arrange their light and
shade too much with the result with which we are familiar in drawing-
masters' copies; it may be right or it may not, I don't know--I am
afraid I ought to know, but I don't; but I do know that those
pictures please me best which were painted without the slightest
regard to any of these rules.
I suppose the justification of those who talk as above lies in the
fact that, as we cannot give all nature, we lie by suppressio veri
whether we like it or no, and that you sometimes lie less by putting
in something which does not exist at the moment, but which easily
might exist and which gives a lot of facts which you otherwise could
not give at all, than by giving so much as you can alone give if you
adhere rigidly to the facts. If this is so the young painter would
understand the matter, if it were thus explained to him, better than
he is likely to do if he is merely given it as a canon.
At the same time, I admit it to be true that one never sees light but
it has got dark in it, nor vice versa, and that this comes to saying
that if you are to be true to nature you must break your lights into
your shadows and vice versa; and so usual is this that, if there
happens here or there to be an exception, the painter had better say
nothing about it, for it is more true to nature's general practice
not to have it so than to have it.
Certainly as regards colour, I never remember to have seen a piece of
one colour without finding a bit of a very similar colour not far
off, but having no connection with it. This holds good in such an
extraordinary way that if it happens to fail the matter should be
passed over in silence.
Colour
The expression "seeing colour" used to puzzle me. I was aware that
some painters made their pictures more pleasing in colour than others
and more like the colour of the actual thing as a whole, still there
were any number of bits of brilliant colour in their work which for
the life of me I could not see in nature. I used to hear people say
of a man who got pleasing and natural colour, "Does he not see colour
well?" and I used to say he did, but, as far as I was concerned, it
would have been more true to say that he put down colour which he did
not see well, or at any rate that he put down colour which I could
not see myself.
In course of time I got to understand that seeing colour does not
mean inventing colour, or exaggerating it, but being on the look out
for it, thus seeing it where another will not see it, and giving it
the preference as among things to be preserved and rendered amid the
wholesale slaughter of innocents which is inevitable in any painting.
Painting is only possible as a quasi-hieroglyphic epitomising of
nature; this means that the half goes for the whole, whereon the
question arises which half is to be taken and which made to go? The
colourist will insist by preference on the coloured half, the man who
has no liking for colour, however much else he may sacrifice, will
not be careful to preserve this and, as a natural consequence, he
will not preserve it.
Good, that is to say, pleasing, beautiful, or even pretty colour
cannot be got by putting patches of pleasing, beautiful or pretty
colour upon one's canvas and, which is a harder matter, leaving them
when they have been put. It is said of money that it is more easily
made than kept and this is true of many things, such as friendship;
and even life itself is more easily got than kept. The same holds
good of colour. It is also true that, as with money, more is made by
saving than in any other way, and the surest way to lose colour is to
play with it inconsiderately, not knowing how to leave well alone. A
touch of pleasing colour should on no account be stirred without
consideration.
That we can see in a natural object more colour than strikes us at a
glance, if we look for it attentively, will not be denied by any who
have tried to look for it. Thus, take a dull, dead, level, grimy old
London wall: at a first glance we can see no colour in it, nothing
but a more or less purplish mass, got, perhaps as nearly as in any
other way, by a tint mixed with black, Indian red and white. If,
however, we look for colour in this, we shall find here and there a
broken brick with a small surface of brilliant crimson, hard by there
will be another with a warm orange hue perceivable through the grime
by one who is on the look out for it, but by no one else. Then there
may be bits of old advertisement of which here and there a gaily
coloured fragment may remain, or a rusty iron hook or a bit of bright
green moss; few indeed are the old walls, even in the grimiest parts
of London, on which no redeeming bits of colour can be found by those
who are practised in looking for them. To like colour, to wish to
find it, and thus to have got naturally into a habit of looking for
it, this alone will enable a man to see colour and to make a note of
it when he has seen it, and this alone will lead him towards a
pleasing and natural scheme of colour in his work.
Good colour can never be got by putting down colour which is not
seen; at any rate only a master who has long served accuracy can
venture on occasional inaccuracy--telling a lie, knowing it to be a
lie, and as, se non vera, ben trovata. The grown man in his art may
do this, and indeed is not a man at all unless he knows how to do it
daily and hourly without departure from the truth even in his boldest
lie; but the child in art must stick to what he sees. If he looks
harder he will see more, and may put more, but till he sees it
without being in any doubt about it, he must not put it. There is no
such sure way of corrupting one's colour sense as the habitual
practice of putting down colour which one does not see; this and the
neglecting to look for it are equal faults. The first error leads to
melodramatic vulgarity, the other to torpid dullness, and it is hard
to say which is worse.
It may be said that the preservation of all the little episodes of
colour which can be discovered in an object whose general effect is
dingy and the suppression of nothing but the uninteresting colourless
details amount to what is really a forcing and exaggeration of
nature, differing but little from downright fraud, so far as its
effect goes, since it gives an undue preference to the colour side of
the matter. In equity, if the exigencies of the convention under
which we are working require a sacrifice of a hundred details, the
majority of which are uncoloured, while in the minority colour can be
found if looked for, the sacrifice should be made pro rata from
coloured and uncoloured alike. If the facts of nature are a hundred,
of which ninety are dull in colour and ten interesting, and the
painter can only give ten, he must not give the ten interesting bits
of colour and neglect the ninety soberly coloured details. Strictly,
he should sacrifice eighty-one sober details and nine coloured ones;
he will thus at any rate preserve the balance and relation which
obtain in nature between coloured and uncoloured.
This, no doubt, is what he ought to do if he leaves the creative,
poetic and more properly artistic aspect of his own function out of
the question; if he is making himself a mere transcriber, holding the
mirror up to nature with such entire forgetfulness of self as to be
rather looking-glass than man, this is what he must do. But the
moment he approaches nature in this spirit he ceases to be an artist,
and the better he succeeds as painter of something that might pass
for a coloured photograph, the more inevitably must he fail to
satisfy, or indeed to appeal to us at all as poet--as one whose
sympathies with nature extend beyond her superficial aspect, or as
one who is so much at home with her as to be able readily to
dissociate the permanent and essential from the accidental which may
be here to-day and gone to-morrow. If he is to come before us as an
artist, he must do so as a poet or creator of that which is not, as
well as a mirror of that which is. True, experience in all kinds of
poetical work shows that the less a man creates the better, that the
more, in fact, he makes, the less is he of a maker; but experience
also shows that the course of true nature, like that of true love,
never does run smooth, and that occasional, judicious, slight
departures from the actual facts, by one who knows the value of a lie
too well to waste it, bring nature more vividly and admirably before
us than any amount of adherence to the letter of strict accuracy. It
is the old story, the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.
With colour, then, he who does not look for it will begin by not
seeing it unless it is so obtrusive that there is no escaping it; he
will therefore, in his rendering of the hundred facts of nature above
referred to, not see the ten coloured bits at all, supposing them to
be, even at their brightest, somewhat sober, and his work will be
colourless or disagreeable in colour. The faithful copyist, who is
still a mere copyist, will give nine details of dull uninteresting
colour and one of interesting. The artist or poet will find some
reason for slightly emphasising the coloured details and will scatter
here and there a few slight, hardly perceptible, allusions to more
coloured details than come within the letter of his bond, but will be
careful not to overdo it. The vulgar sensational painter will force
in his colour everywhere, and of all colourists he must be pronounced
the worst.
Briefly then, to see colour is simply to have got into a habit of not
overlooking the patches of colour which are seldom far to seek or
hard to see by those who look for them. It is not the making one's
self believe that one sees all manner of colours which are not there,
it is only the getting oneself into a mental habit of looking out for
episodes of colour, and of giving them a somewhat undue preference in
the struggle for rendering, wherever anything like a reasonable
pretext can be found for doing so. For if a picture is to be
pleasing in colour, pleasing colours must be put upon the canvas, and
reasons have got to be found for putting them there. [1886.]
P.S.--The foregoing note wants a great deal of reconsideration for
which I cannot find time just now. Jan. 31, 1898.
Words and Colour
A man cannot be a great colourist unless he is a great deal more. A
great colourist is no better than a great wordist unless the colour
is well applied to a subject which at any rate is not repellent.
Amateurs and Professionals
There is no excuse for amateur work being bad. Amateurs often excuse
their shortcomings on the ground that they are not professionals, the
professional could plead with greater justice that he is not an
amateur. The professional has not, he might well say, the leisure
and freedom from money anxieties which will let him devote himself to
his art in singleness of heart, telling of things as he sees them
without fear of what man shall say unto him; he must think not of
what appears to him right and loveable but of what his patrons will
think and of what the critics will tell his patrons to say they
think; he has got to square everyone all round and will assuredly
fail to make his way unless he does this; if, then, he betrays his
trust he does so under temptation. Whereas the amateur who works
with no higher aim than that of immediate recognition betrays it from
the vanity and wantonness of his spirit. The one is naughty because
he is needy, the other from natural depravity. Besides, the amateur
can keep his work to himself, whereas the professional man must
exhibit or starve.
The question is what is the amateur an amateur of? What is he really
in love with? Is he in love with other people, thinking he sees
something which he would like to show them, which he feels sure they
would enjoy if they could only see it as he does, which he is
therefore trying as best he can to put before the few nice people
whom he knows? If this is his position he can do no wrong, the
spirit in which he works will ensure that his defects will be only as
bad spelling or bad grammar in some pretty saying of a child. If, on
the other hand, he is playing for social success and to get a
reputation for being clever, then no matter how dexterous his work
may be, it is but another mode of the speaking with the tongues of
men and angels without charity; it is as sounding brass or a tinkling
cymbal, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
The Ansidei Raffaelle
This picture is inspired by no deeper feeling than a determination to
adhere to the conventions of the time. These conventions ensure an
effect of more or less devotional character, and this, coupled with
our reverence for the name of Raffaelle, the sentiments arising from
antiquity and foreignness, and the inability of most people to judge
of the work on technical grounds, because they can neither paint nor
draw, prevents us from seeing what a mere business picture it is and
how poor the painting is throughout. A master in any art should be
first man, then poet, then craftsman; this picture must have been
painted by one who was first worldling, then religious-property-
manufacturer, then painter with brains not more than average and no
heart.
The Madonna's head has indeed a certain prettiness of a not very
uncommon kind; the paint has been sweetened with a soft brush and
licked smooth till all texture as of flesh is gone and the head is
wooden and tight; I can see no expression in it; the hand upon the
open book is as badly drawn as the hand of S. Catharine (also by
Raffaelle) in our gallery, or even worse; so is the part of the other
hand which can be seen; they are better drawn than the hands in the
Ecce homo of Correggio in our gallery, for the fingers appear to have
the right number of joints, which none of those in the Correggio
have, but this is as much as can be said.
The dress is poorly painted, the gold thread work being of the
cheapest, commonest kind, both as regards pattern and the quantity
allowed; especially note the meagre allowance and poor pattern of the
embroidery on the virgin's bosom; it is done as by one who knew she
ought to have, and must have, a little gold work, but was determined
she should have no more than he could help. This is so wherever
there is gold thread work in the picture. It is so on S. Nicholas's
cloak where a larger space is covered, but the pattern is dull and
the smallest quantity of gold is made to go the longest way. The
gold cording which binds this is more particularly badly done.
Compare the embroidery and gold thread work in "The Virgin adoring
the Infant Christ," ascribed to Andrea Verrocchio, No. 296, Room V;
"The Annunciation" by Carlo Crivelli, No. 739, Room VIII; in "The
Angel Raphael accompanies Tobias on his Journey into Media"
attributed to Botticini, No. 781, Room V; in "Portrait of a Lady,"
school of Pollaiuolo, No. 585, Room V; in "A Canon of the Church with
his Patron Saints" by Gheeraert David, No. 1045, Room XI; or indeed
the general run of the gold embroidery of the period as shown in our
gallery. {147}
So with the jewels; there are examples of jewels in most of the
pictures named above, none of them, perhaps, very first-rate, but all
of them painted with more care and serious aim than the eighteen-
penny trinket which serves S. Nicholas for a brooch. The jewels in
the mitre are rather better than this, but much depends upon the kind
of day on which the picture is seen; on a clear bright day they, and
indeed every part of the picture, look much worse than on a dull one
because the badness can be more clearly seen. As for the mitre
itself, it is made of the same hard unyielding material as the
portico behind the saint, whatever this may be, presumably wood.
Observe also the crozier which S. Nicholas is holding; observe the
cheap streak of high light exactly the same thickness all the way and
only broken in one place; so with the folds in the draperies; all is
monotonous, unobservant, unimaginative--the work of a feeble man
whose pains will never extend much beyond those necessary to make him
pass as stronger than he is; especially the folds in the white linen
over S. Nicholas's throat, and about his girdle--weaker drapery can
hardly be than this, unless, perhaps, that from under which S.
Nicholas's hands come. There is not only no art here to conceal, but
there is not even pains to conceal the want of art. As for the hands
themselves, and indeed all the hands and feet throughout the picture,
there is not one which is even tolerably drawn if judged by the
standard which Royal Academicians apply to Royal Academy students
now.
Granted that this is an early work, nevertheless I submit that the
drawing here is not that of one who is going to do better by and by,
it is that of one who is essentially insincere and who will never aim
higher than immediate success. Those who grow to the best work
almost always begin by laying great stress on details which are all
they as yet have strength for; they cannot do much, but the little
they can do they do and never tire of doing; they grow by getting
juster notions of proportion and subordination of parts to the whole
rather than by any greater amount of care and patience bestowed upon
details. Here there are no bits of detail worked out as by one who
was interested in them and enjoyed them. Wherever a thing can be
scamped it is scamped. As the whole is, so are the details, and as
the details are, so is the whole; all is tainted with eye-service and
with a vulgarity not the less profound for being veiled by a due
observance of conventionality.
I shall be told that Raffaelle did come to draw and paint much better
than he has done here. I demur to this. He did a little better; he
just took so much pains as to prevent him from going down-hill
headlong, and, with practice, he gained facility, but he was never
very good, either as a draughtsman or as a painter. His reputation,
indeed, rests mainly on his supposed exquisitely pure and tender
feeling. His colour is admittedly inferior, his handling is not
highly praised by any one, his drawing has been much praised, but it
is of a penmanship freehand kind which is particularly apt to take
people in. Of course he could draw in some ways, no one giving all
his time to art and living in Raffaelle's surroundings could, with
even ordinary pains, help becoming a facile draughtsman, but it is
the expression and sentiment of his pictures which are supposed to be
so ineffable and to make him the prince of painters.
I do not think this reputation will be maintained much longer. I can
see no ineffable expression in the Ansidei Madonna's head, nor yet in
that of the Garvagh Madonna in our gallery, nor in the S. Catharine.
He has the saint-touch, as some painters have the tree-touch and
others the water-touch. I remember the time when I used to think I
saw religious feeling in these last two pictures, but each time I see
them I wonder more and more how I can have been taken in by them. I
hear people admire the head of S. Nicholas in the Ansidei picture. I
can see nothing in it beyond the power of a very ordinary painter,
and nothing that a painter of more than very ordinary power would be
satisfied with. When I look at the head of Bellini's Doge, Loredano
Loredani, I can see defects, as every one can see defects in every
picture, but the more I see it the more I marvel at it, and the more
profoundly I respect the painter. With Raffaelle I find exactly the
reverse; I am carried away at first, as I was when a young man by
Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, only to be very angry with myself
presently on finding that I could have believed even for a short time
in something that has no real hold upon me. I know the S. Catharine
in our gallery has been said by some not to be by Raffaelle. No one
will doubt its genuineness who compares the drawing, painting and
feeling of S. Catharine's eyes and nose with those of the S. John in
the Ansidei picture. The doubts have only been raised owing to the
fact that the picture, being hung on a level with the eye, is so
easily seen to be bad that people think Raffaelle cannot have painted
it.
Returning to the S. Nicholas; apart from the expression, or as it
seems to me want of expression, the modelling of the head is not only
poor but very poor. The forehead is formless and boneless, the nose
is entirely wanting in that play of line and surface which an old
man's nose affords; no one ever yet drew or painted a nose absolutely
as nature has made it, but he who compares carefully drawn noses, as
that in Rembrandt's younger portrait of himself, in his old woman, in
the three Van Eycks, in the Andrea Solario, in the Loredano Loredani
by Bellini, all in our gallery, with the nose of Raffaelle's S.
Nicholas will not be long in finding out how slovenly Raffaelle's
treatment in reality is. Eyes, eyebrows, mouth, cheeks and chin are
treated with the same weakness, and this not the weakness of a child
who is taking much pains to do something beyond his strength, and
whose intention can be felt through and above the imperfections of
his performance (as in the case of the two Apostles' heads by Giotto
in our gallery), but of one who is not even conscious of weakness
save by way of impatience that his work should cost him time and
trouble at all, and who is satisfied if he can turn it out well
enough to take in patrons who have themselves never either drawn or
painted.
Finally, let the spectator turn to the sky and landscape. It is the
cheapest kind of sky with no clouds and going down as low as
possible, so as to save doing more country details than could be
helped. As for the little landscape there is, let the reader compare
it with any of the examples by Bellini, Basaiti, or even Cima da
Conegliano, which may be found in the same or the adjoining rooms.
How, then, did Raffaelle get his reputation? It may be answered, How
did Virgil get his? or Dante? or Bacon? or Plato? or Mendelssohn? or
a score of others who not only get the public ear but keep it
sometimes for centuries? How did Guido, Guercino and Domenichino get
their reputations? A hundred years ago these men were held as hardly
inferior to Raffaelle himself. They had a couple of hundred years or
so of triumph--why so much? And if so much, why not more? If we
begin asking questions, we may ask why anything at all? Populus vult
decipi is the only answer, and nine men out of ten will follow on
with et decipiatur. The immediate question, however, is not how
Raffaelle came by his reputation but whether, having got it, he will
continue to hold it now that we have a fair amount of his work at the
National Gallery.
I grant that the general effect of the picture if looked at as a mere
piece of decoration is agreeable, but I have seen many a picture
which though not bearing consideration as a serious work yet looked
well from a purely decorative standpoint. I believe, however, that
at least half of those who sit gazing before this Ansidei Raffaelle
by the half-hour at a time do so rather that they may be seen than
see; half, again, of the remaining half come because they are made to
do so, the rest see rather what they bring with them and put into the
picture than what the picture puts into them.
And then there is the charm of mere age. Any Italian picture of the
early part of the sixteenth century, even though by a worse painter
than Raffaelle, can hardly fail to call up in us a solemn, old-world
feeling, as though we had stumbled unexpectedly on some holy,
peaceful survivors of an age long gone by, when the struggle was not
so fierce and the world was a sweeter, happier place than we now find
it, when men and women were comelier, and we should like to have
lived among them, to have been golden-hued as they, to have done as
they did; we dream of what might have been if our lines had been cast
in more pleasant places--and so on, all of it rubbish, but still not
wholly unpleasant rubbish so long as it is not dwelt upon.
Bearing in mind the natural tendency to accept anything which gives
us a peep as it were into a golden age, real or imaginary, bearing in
mind also the way in which this particular picture has been written
up by critics, and the prestige of Raffaelle's name, the wonder is
not that so many let themselves be taken in and carried away with it
but that there should not be a greater gathering before it than there
generally is.
Buying a Rembrandt
As an example of the evenness of the balance of advantages between
the principles of staying still and taking what comes, and going
about to look for things, {151} I might mention my small Rembrandt,
"The Robing of Joseph before Pharaoh." I have wanted a Rembrandt all
my life, and I have wanted not to give more than a few shillings for
it. I might have travelled all Europe over for no one can say how
many years, looking for a good, well-preserved, forty-shilling
Rembrandt (and this was what I wanted), but on two occasions of my
life cheap Rembrandts have run right up against me. The first was a
head cut out of a ruined picture that had only in part escaped
destruction when Belvoir Castle was burned down at the beginning of
this century. I did not see the head but have little doubt it was
genuine. It was offered me for a pound; I was not equal to the
occasion and did not at once go to see it as I ought, and when I
attended to it some months later the thing had gone. My only excuse
must be that I was very young.
I never got another chance till a few weeks ago when I saw what I
took, and take, to be an early, but very interesting, work by
Rembrandt in the window of a pawnbroker opposite St. Clement Danes
Church in the Strand. I very nearly let this slip too. I saw it and
was very much struck with it, but, knowing that I am a little apt to
be too sanguine, distrusted my judgment; in the evening I mentioned
the picture to Gogin who went and looked at it; finding him not less
impressed than I had been with the idea that the work was an early
one by Rembrandt, I bought it, and the more I look at it the more
satisfied I am that we are right.
People talk as though the making the best of what comes was such an
easy matter, whereas nothing in reality requires more experience and
good sense. It is only those who know how not to let the luck that
runs against them slip, who will be able to find things, no matter
how long and how far they go in search of them. [1887.]
Trying to Buy a Bellini
Flushed with triumph in the matter of Rembrandt, a fortnight or so
afterwards I was at Christie's and saw two pictures that fired me.
One was a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini, I do not doubt
genuine, not in a very good state, but still not repainted. The
Madonna was lovely, the Child very good, the landscape sweet and
Belliniesque. I was much smitten and determined to bid up to a
hundred pounds; I knew this would be dirt cheap and was not going to
buy at all unless I could get good value. I bid up to a hundred
guineas, but there was someone else bent on having it and when he bid
105 guineas I let him have it, not without regret. I saw in the
Times that the purchaser's name was Lesser.
The other picture I tried to get at the same sale (this day week); it
was a small sketch numbered 72 (I think) and purporting to be by
Giorgione but, I fully believe, by Titian. I bid up to 10 pounds and
then let it go. It went for 28 pounds, and I should say would have
been well bought at 40 pounds. [1887.]
Watts
I was telling Gogin how I had seen at Christie's some pictures by
Watts and how much I had disliked them. He said some of them had
been exhibited in Paris a few years ago and a friend of his led him
up to one of them and said in a serious, puzzled, injured tone:
"Mon cher ami, racontez-moi donc ceci, s'il vous plait," as though
their appearance in such a place at all were something that must have
an explanation not obvious upon the face of it.
Lombard Portals
The crouching beasts, on whose backs the pillars stand, generally
have a little one beneath them or some animal which they have killed,
or something, in fact, to give them occupation; it was felt that,
though an animal by itself was well, an animal doing something was
much better. The mere fact of companionship and silent sympathy is
enough to interest, but without this, sculptured animals are stupid,
as our lions in Trafalgar Square--which, among other faults, have
that of being much too well done.
So Jones's cat, Prince, picked up a little waif in the court and
brought it home, and the two lay together and were much lovelier than
Prince was by himself. {153}
Holbein at Basle
How well he has done Night in his "Crucifixion"! Also he has tried
to do the Alps, putting them as background to the city, but he has
not done them as we should do them now. I think the tower on the
hill behind the city is the tower which we see on leaving Basle on
the road for Lucerne, I mean I think Holbein had this tower in his
head.
Van Eyck
Van Eyck is delightful rather in spite of his high finish than
because of it. De Hooghe finishes as highly as any one need do. Van
Eyck's finish is saved because up to the last he is essentially
impressionist, that is, he keeps a just account of relative
importances and keeps them in their true subordination one to
another. The only difference between him and Rembrandt or Velasquez
is that these, as a general rule, stay their hand at an earlier stage
of impressionism.
Giotto
There are few modern painters who are not greater technically than
Giotto, but I cannot call to mind a single one whose work impresses
me as profoundly as his does. How is it that our so greatly better
should be so greatly worse--that the farther we go beyond him the
higher he stands above us? Time no doubt has much to do with it,
for, great as Giotto was, there are painters of to-day not less so,
if they only dared express themselves as frankly and unaffectedly as
he did.
Early Art
The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most
interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and
evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.
Sincerity
It is not enough that the painter should make the spectator feel what
he meant him to feel; he must also make him feel that this feeling
was shared by the painter himself bona fide and without affectation.
Of all the lies a painter can tell the worst is saying that he likes
what he does not like. But the poor wretch seldom knows himself; for
the art of knowing what gives him pleasure has been so neglected that
it has been lost to all but a very few. The old Italians knew well
enough what they liked and were as children in saying it.
X--THE POSITION OF A HOMO UNIUS LIBRI
Trubner and Myself
When I went back to Trubner, after Bogue had failed, I had a talk
with him and his partner. I could see they had lost all faith in my
literary prospects. Trubner told me I was a homo unius libri,
meaning Erewhon. He said I was in a very solitary position. I
replied that I knew I was, but it suited me. I said:
"I pay my way; when I was with you before, I never owed you money;
you find me now not owing my publisher money, but my publisher in
debt to me; I never owe so much as a tailor's bill; beyond secured
debts, I do not owe 5 pounds in the world and never have" (which is
quite true). "I get my summer's holiday in Italy every year; I live
very quietly and cheaply, but it suits my health and tastes, and I
have no acquaintances but those I value. My friends stick by me. If
I was to get in with these literary and scientific people I should
hate them and they me. I should fritter away my time and my freedom
without getting a quid pro quo: as it is, I am free and I give the
swells every now and then such a facer as they get from no one else.
Of course I don't expect to get on in a commercial sense at present,
I do not go the right way to work for this; but I am going the right
way to secure a lasting reputation and this is what I do care for. A
man cannot have both, he must make up his mind which he means going
in for. I have gone in for posthumous fame and I see no step in my
literary career which I do not think calculated to promote my being
held in esteem when the heat of passion has subsided."
Trubner shrugged his shoulders. He plainly does not believe that I
shall succeed in getting a hearing; he thinks the combination of the
religious and cultured world too strong for me to stand against.
If he means that the reviewers will burke me as far as they can, no
doubt he is right; but when I am dead there will be other reviewers
and I have already done enough to secure that they shall from time to
time look me up. They won't bore me then but they will be just like
the present ones. [1882.]
Capping a Success
When I had written Erewhon people wanted me at once to set to work
and write another book like it. How could I? I cannot think how I
escaped plunging into writing some laboured stupid book. I am very
glad I did escape. Nothing is so cruel as to try and force a man
beyond his natural pace. If he has got more stuff in him it will
come out in its own time and its own way: if he has not--let the
poor wretch alone; to have done one decent book should be enough; the
very worst way to get another out of him is to press him. The more
promise a young writer has given, the more his friends should urge
him not to over-tax himself.
A Lady Critic
A lady, whom I meet frequently in the British Museum reading-room and
elsewhere, said to me the other day:
"Why don't you write another Erewhon?"
"Why, my dear lady," I replied, "Life and Habit was another Erewhon."
They say these things to me continually to plague me and make out
that I could do one good book but never any more. She is the sort of
person who if she had known Shakespeare would have said to him, when
he wrote Henry the IVth:
"Ah, Mr. Shakespeare, why don't you write us another Titus
Andronicus? Now that was a sweet play, that was."
And when he had done Antony and Cleopatra she would have told him
that her favourite plays were the three parts of King Henry VI.
Compensation
If I die prematurely, at any rate I shall be saved from being bored
by my own success.
Hudibras and Erewhon
I was completing the purchase of some small houses at Lewisham and
had to sign my name. The vendor, merely seeing the name and knowing
none of my books, said to me, rather rudely, but without meaning any
mischief:
"Have you written any books like Hudibras?"
I said promptly: "Certainly; Erewhon is quite as good a book as
Hudibras."
This was coming it too strong for him, so he thought I had not heard
and repeated his question. I said again as before, and he shut up.
I sent him a copy of Erewhon immediately after we had completed. It
was rather tall talk on my part, I admit, but he should not have
challenged me unprovoked.
Life and Habit and Myself
At the Century Club I was talking with a man who asked me why I did
not publish the substance of what I had been saying. I believed he
knew me and said:
"Well, you know, there's Life and Habit."
He did not seem to rise at all, so I asked him if he had seen the
book.
"Seen it?" he answered. "Why, I should think every one has seen Life
and Habit: but what's that got to do with it?"
I said it had taken me so much time lately that I had had none to
spare for anything else. Again he did not seem to see the force of
the remark and a friend, who was close by, said:
"You know, Butler wrote Life and Habit."
He would not believe it, and it was only after repeated assurance
that he accepted it. It was plain he thought a great deal of Life
and Habit and had idealised its author, whom he was disappointed to
find so very commonplace a person. Exactly the same thing happened
to me with Erewhon. I was glad to find that Life and Habit had made
so deep an impression at any rate upon one person.
A Disappointing Person
I suspect I am rather a disappointing person, for every now and then
there is a fuss and I am to meet some one who would very much like to
make my acquaintance, or some one writes me a letter and says he has
long admired my books, and may he, etc.? Of course I say "Yes," but
experience has taught me that it always ends in turning some one who
was more or less inclined to run me into one who considers he has a
grievance against me for not being a very different kind of person
from what I am. These people however (and this happens on an average
once or twice a year) do not come solely to see me, they generally
tell me all about themselves and the impression is left upon me that
they have really come in order to be praised. I am as civil to them
as I know how to be but enthusiastic I never am, for they have never
any of them been nice people, and it is my want of enthusiasm for
themselves as much as anything else which disappoints them. They
seldom come again. Mr. Alfred Tylor was the only acquaintance I have
ever made through being sent for to be looked at, or letting some one
come to look at me, who turned out a valuable ally; but then he sent
for me through mutual friends in the usual way.
Entertaining Angels
I doubt whether any angel would find me very entertaining. As for
myself, if ever I do entertain one it will have to be unawares. When
people entertain others without an introduction they generally turn
out more like devils than angels.
Myself and My Books
The balance against them is now over 350 pounds. How completely they
must have been squashed unless I had had a little money of my own.
Is it not likely that many a better writer than I am is squashed
through want of money? Whatever I do I must not die poor; these
examples of ill-requited labour are immoral, they discourage the
effort of those who could and would do good things if they did not
know that it would ruin themselves and their families; moreover, they
set people on to pamper a dozen fools for each neglected man of
merit, out of compunction. Genius, they say, always wears an
invisible cloak; these men wear invisible cloaks--therefore they are
geniuses; and it flatters them to think that they can see more than
their neighbours. The neglect of one such man as the author of
Hudibras is compensated for by the petting of a dozen others who
would be the first to jump upon the author of Hudibras if he were to
come back to life.
Heaven forbid that I should compare myself to the author of Hudibras,
but still, if my books succeed after my death--which they may or may
not, I know nothing about it--any way, if they do succeed, let it be
understood that they failed during my life for a few very obvious
reasons of which I was quite aware, for the effect of which I was
prepared before I wrote my books, and which on consideration I found
insufficient to deter me. I attacked people who were at once
unscrupulous and powerful, and I made no alliances. I did this
because I did not want to be bored and have my time wasted and my
pleasures curtailed. I had money enough to live on, and preferred
addressing myself to posterity rather than to any except a very few
of my own contemporaries. Those few I have always kept well in mind.
I think of them continually when in doubt about any passage, but
beyond those few I will not go. Posterity will give a man a fair
hearing; his own times will not do so if he is attacking vested
interests, and I have attacked two powerful sets of vested interests
at once. [The Church and Science.] What is the good of addressing
people who will not listen? I have addressed the next generation and
have therefore said many things which want time before they become
palatable. Any man who wishes his work to stand will sacrifice a
good deal of his immediate audience for the sake of being attractive
to a much larger number of people later on. He cannot gain this
later audience unless he has been fearless and thorough-going, and if
he is this he is sure to have to tread on the corns of a great many
of those who live at the same time with him, however little he may
wish to do so. He must not expect these people to help him on, nor
wonder if, for a time, they succeed in snuffing him out. It is part
of the swim that it should be so. Only, as one who believes himself
to have practised what he preaches, let me assure any one who has
money of his own that to write fearlessly for posterity and not get
paid for it is much better fun than I can imagine its being to write
like, we will say, George Eliot and make a lot of money by it.
[1883.]
Dragons
People say that there are neither dragons to be killed nor distressed
maidens to be rescued nowadays. I do not know, but I think I have
dropped across one or two, nor do I feel sure whether the most mortal
wounds have been inflicted by the dragons or by myself.
Trying to Know
There are some things which it is madness not to try to know but
which it is almost as much madness to try to know. Sometimes
publishers, hoping to buy the Holy Ghost with a price, fee a man to
read for them and advise them. This is but as the vain tossing of
insomnia. God will not have any human being know what will sell, nor
when any one is going to die, nor anything about the ultimate, or
even the deeper, springs of growth and action, nor yet such a little
thing as whether it is going to rain to-morrow. I do not say that
the impossibility of being certain about these and similar matters
was designed, but it is as complete as though it had been not only
designed but designed exceedingly well.
Squaring Accounts
We owe past generations not only for the master discoveries of music,
science, literature and art--few of which brought profit to those to
whom they were revealed--but also for our organism itself which is an
inheritance gathered and garnered by those who have gone before us.
What money have we paid not for Handel and Shakespeare only but for
our eyes and ears?
And so with regard to our contemporaries. A man is sometimes tempted
to exclaim that he does not fare well at the hands of his own
generation; that, although he may play pretty assiduously, he is
received with more hisses than applause; that the public is hard to
please, slow to praise, and bent on driving as hard a bargain as it
can. This, however, is only what he should expect. No sensible man
will suppose himself to be of so much importance that his
contemporaries should be at much pains to get at the truth concerning
him. As for my own position, if I say the things I want to say
without troubling myself about the public, why should I grumble at
the public for not troubling about me? Besides, not being paid
myself, I can in better conscience use the works of others, as I
daily do, without paying for them and without being at the trouble of
praising or thanking them more than I have a mind to. And, after
all, how can I say I am not paid? In addition to all that I inherit
from past generations I receive from my own everything that makes
life worth living--London, with its infinite sources of pleasure and
amusement, good theatres, concerts, picture galleries, the British
Museum Reading-Room, newspapers, a comfortable dwelling, railways
and, above all, the society of the friends I value.
Charles Darwin on what Sells a Book
I remember when I was at Down we were talking of what it is that
sells a book. Mr. Darwin said he did not believe it was reviews or
advertisements, but simply "being talked about" that sold a book.
I believe he is quite right here, but surely a good flaming review
helps to get a book talked about. I have often inquired at my
publishers' after a review and I never found one that made any
perceptible increase or decrease of sale, and the same with
advertisements. I think, however, that the review of Erewhon in the
Spectator did sell a few copies of Erewhon, but then it was such a
very strong one and the anonymousness of the book stimulated
curiosity. A perception of the value of a review, whether friendly
or hostile, is as old as St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians. {162}
Hoodwinking the Public
Sincerity or honesty is a low and very rudimentary form of virtue
that is only to be found to any considerable extent among the
protozoa. Compare, for example, the integrity, sincerity and
absolute refusal either to deceive or be deceived that exists in the
germ-cells of any individual, with the instinctive aptitude for lying
that is to be observed in the full-grown man. The full-grown man is
compacted of lies and shams which are to him as the breath of his
nostrils. Whereas the germ-cells will not be humbugged; they will
tell the truth as near as they can. They know their ancestors meant
well and will tend to become even more sincere themselves.
Thus, if a painter has not tried hard to paint well and has tried
hard to hoodwink the public, his offspring is not likely to show
hereditary aptitude for painting, but is likely to have an improved
power of hoodwinking the public. So it is with music, literature,
science or anything else. The only thing the public can do against
this is to try hard to develop a hereditary power of not being
hoodwinked. From the small success it has met with hitherto we may
think that the effort on its part can have been neither severe nor
long sustained. Indeed, all ages seem to have held that "the
pleasure is as great of being cheated as to cheat."
The Public Ear
Those who have squatted upon it may be trusted to keep off other
squatters if they can. The public ear is like the land which looks
infinite but is all parcelled out into fields and private ownerships-
-barring, of course, highways and commons. So the universe, which
looks so big, may be supposed as really all parcelled out among the
stars that stud it.
Or the public ear is like a common; there is not much to be got off
it, but that little is for the most part grazed down by geese and
donkeys.
Those who wish to gain the public ear should bear in mind that people
do not generally want to be made less foolish or less wicked. What
they want is to be told that they are not foolish and not wicked.
Now it is only a fool or a liar or both who can tell them this; the
masses therefore cannot be expected to like any but fools or liars or
both. So when a lady gets photographed, what she wants is not to be
made beautiful but to be told that she is beautiful.
Secular Thinking
The ages do their thinking much as the individual does. When
considering a difficult question, we think alternately for several
seconds together of details, even the minutest seeming important, and
then of broad general principles, whereupon even large details become
unimportant; again we have bouts during which rules, logic and
technicalities engross us, followed by others in which the unwritten
and unwritable common sense of grace defies and over-rides the law.
That is to say, we have our inductive fits and our deductive fits,
our arrangements according to the letter and according to the spirit,
our conclusions drawn from logic secundum artem and from absurdity
and the character of the arguer. This heterogeneous mass of
considerations forms the mental pabulum with which we feed our minds.
How that pabulum becomes amalgamated, reduced to uniformity and
turned into the growth of complete opinion we can no more tell than
we can say when, how and where food becomes flesh and blood. All we
can say is that the miracle, stupendous as it is and involving the
stultification of every intelligible principle on which thought and
action are based, is nevertheless worked a thousand times an hour by
every one of us.
The formation of public opinion is as mysterious as that of
individual, but, so far as we can form any opinion about that which
forms our opinions in such large measure, the processes appear to
resemble one another much as rain drops resemble one another. There
is essential agreement in spite of essential difference. So that
here, as everywhere else, we no sooner scratch the soil than we come
upon the granite of contradiction in terms and can scratch no
further.
As for ourselves, we are passing through an inductive, technical,
speculative period and have gone such lengths in this direction that
a reaction, during which we shall pass to the other extreme, may be
confidently predicted.
The Art of Propagating Opinion
He who would propagate an opinion must begin by making sure of his
ground and holding it firmly. There is as little use in trying to
breed from weak opinion as from other weak stock, animal or
vegetable.
The more securely a man holds an opinion, the more temperate he can
afford to be, and the more temperate he is, the more weight he will
carry with those who are in the long run weightiest. Ideas and
opinions, like living organisms, have a normal rate of growth which
cannot be either checked or forced beyond a certain point. They can
be held in check more safely than they can be hurried. They can also
be killed; and one of the surest ways to kill them is to try to hurry
them.
The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary is it that the
holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of
conventionalities generally, and that, if possible, he should get the
reputation of being well-to-do in the world.
Arguments are not so good as assertion. Arguments are like fire-arms
which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.
Indirect assertion, leaving the hearer to point the inference, is, as
a rule, to be preferred. The one great argument with most people is
that another should think this or that. The reasons of the belief
are details and, in nine cases out of ten, best omitted as confusing
and weakening the general impression.
Many, if not most, good ideas die young--mainly from neglect on the
part of the parents, but sometimes from over-fondness. Once well
started, an opinion had better be left to shift for itself.
Insist as far as possible on the insignificance of the points of
difference as compared with the resemblances to opinions generally
accepted.
Gladstone as a Financier
I said to my tobacconist that Gladstone was not a financier because
he bought a lot of china at high prices and it fetched very little
when it was sold at Christie's.
"Did he give high prices?" said the tobacconist.
"Enormous prices," said I emphatically.
Now, to tell the truth, I did not know whether Mr. Gladstone had ever
bought the china at all, much less what he gave for it, if he did; he
may have had it all left him for aught I knew. But I was going to
appeal to my tobacconist by arguments that he could understand, and I
could see he was much impressed.
Argument
Argument is generally waste of time and trouble. It is better to
present one's opinion and leave it to stick or no as it may happen.
If sound, it will probably in the end stick, and the sticking is the
main thing.
Humour
What a frightful thing it would be if true humour were more common
or, rather, more easy to see, for it is more common than those are
who can see it. It would block the way of everything. Perhaps this
is what people rather feel. It would be like Music in the Ode for
St. Cecilia's Day, it would "untune the sky."
I do not know quite what is meant by untuning the sky and, if I did,
I cannot think that there is anything to be particularly gained by
having the sky untuned; still, if it has got to be untuned at all, I
am sure music is the only thing that can untune it. Rapson, however,
whom I used to see in the coin room at the British Museum, told me it
should be "entune the sky" and it sounds as though he were right.
Myself and "Unconscious Humour"
The phrase "unconscious humour" is the one contribution I have made
to the current literature of the day. I am continually seeing
unconscious humour (without quotation marks) alluded to in Times
articles and other like places, but I never remember to have come
across it as a synonym for dullness till I wrote Life and Habit.
My Humour
The thing to say about me just now is that my humour is forced. This
began to reach me in connection with my article "Quis Desiderio . .
.?" [Universal Review, 1888] and is now, [1889] I understand, pretty
generally perceived even by those who had not found it out for
themselves.
I am not aware of forcing myself to say anything which has not amused
me, which is not apposite and which I do not believe will amuse a
neutral reader, but I may very well do so without knowing it. As for
my humour, I am like my father and grandfather, both of whom liked a
good thing heartily enough if it was told them, but I do not often
say a good thing myself. Very likely my humour, what little there is
of it, is forced enough. I do not care so long as it amuses me and,
such as it is, I shall vent it in my own way and at my own time.
Myself and My Publishers
I see my publishers are bringing out a new magazine with all the
usual contributors. Of course they don't ask me to write and this
shows that they do not think my name would help their magazine.
This, I imagine, means that Andrew Lang has told them that my humour
is forced. I should not myself say that Andrew Lang's humour would
lose by a little forcing.
I have seen enough of my publishers to know that they have no ideas
of their own about literature save what they can clutch at as
believing it to be a straight tip from a business point of view.
Heaven forbid that I should blame them for doing exactly what I
should do myself in their place, but, things being as they are, they
are no use to me. They have no confidence in me and they must have
this or they will do nothing for me beyond keeping my books on their
shelves.
Perhaps it is better that I should not have a chance of becoming a
hack-writer, for I should grasp it at once if it were offered me.
XI--CASH AND CREDIT
The Unseen World
I believe there is an unseen world about which we know nothing as
firmly as any one can believe it. I see things coming up from it
into the visible world and going down again from the seen world to
the unseen. But my unseen world is to be bona fide unseen and, in so
far as I say I know anything about it, I stultify myself. It should
no more be described than God should be represented in painting or
sculpture. It is as the other side of the moon; we know it must be
there but we know also that, in the nature of things, we can never
see it. Sometimes, some trifle of it may sway into sight and out
again, but it is so little that it is not worth counting as having
been seen.
The Kingdom of Heaven
The world admits that there is another world, that there is a
kingdom, veritable and worth having, which, nevertheless, is
invisible and has nothing to do with any kingdom such as we now see.
It agrees that the wisdom of this other kingdom is foolishness here
on earth, while the wisdom of the world is foolishness in the Kingdom
of Heaven. In our hearts we know that the Kingdom of Heaven is the
higher of the two and the better worth living and dying for, and
that, if it is to be won, it must be sought steadfastly and in
singleness of heart by those who put all else on one side and,
shrinking from no sacrifice, are ready to face shame, poverty and
torture here rather than abandon the hope of the prize of their high
calling. Nobody who doubts any of this is worth talking with.
The question is, where is this Heavenly Kingdom, and what way are we
to take to find it? Happily the answer is easy, for we are not
likely to go wrong if in all simplicity, humility and good faith we
heartily desire to find it and follow the dictates of ordinary
common-sense.
The Philosopher
He should have made many mistakes and been saved often by the skin of
his teeth, for the skin of one's teeth is the most teaching thing
about one. He should have been, or at any rate believed himself, a
great fool and a great criminal. He should have cut himself adrift
from society, and yet not be without society. He should have given
up all, even Christ himself, for Christ's sake. He should be above
fear or love or hate, and yet know them extremely well. He should
have lost all save a small competence and know what a vantage ground
it is to be an outcast. Destruction and Death say they have heard
the fame of Wisdom with their ears, and the philosopher must have
been close up to these if he too would hear it.
The Artist and the Shopkeeper
Most artists, whether in religion, music, literature, painting, or
what not, are shopkeepers in disguise. They hide their shop as much
as they can, and keep pretending that it does not exist, but they are
essentially shopkeepers and nothing else. Why do I try to sell my
books and feel regret at never seeing them pay their expenses if I am
not a shopkeeper? Of course I am, only I keep a bad shop--a shop
that does not pay.
In like manner, the professed shopkeeper has generally a taint of the
artist somewhere about him which he tries to conceal as much as the
professed artist tries to conceal his shopkeeping.
The business man and the artist are like matter and mind. We can
never get either pure and without some alloy of the other.
Art and Trade
People confound literature and article-dealing because the plant in
both cases is similar, but no two things can be more distinct.
Neither the question of money nor that of friend or foe can enter
into literature proper. Here, right feeling--or good taste, if this
expression be preferred--is alone considered. If a bona fide writer
thinks a thing wants saying, he will say it as tersely, clearly and
elegantly as he can. The question whether it will do him personally
good or harm, or how it will affect this or that friend, never enters
his head, or, if it does, it is instantly ordered out again. The
only personal gratifications allowed him (apart, of course, from such
as are conceded to every one, writer or no) are those of keeping his
good name spotless among those whose opinion is alone worth having
and of maintaining the highest traditions of a noble calling. If a
man lives in fear and trembling lest he should fail in these
respects, if he finds these considerations alone weigh with him, if
he never writes without thinking how he shall best serve good causes
and damage bad ones, then he is a genuine man of letters. If in
addition to this he succeeds in making his manner attractive, he will
become a classic. He knows this. He knows, although the Greeks in
their mythology forgot to say so, that Conceit was saved to mankind
as well as Hope when Pandora clapped the lid on to her box.
With the article-dealer, on the other hand, money is, and ought to
be, the first consideration. Literature is an art; article-writing,
when a man is paid for it, is a trade and none the worse for that;
but pot-boilers are one thing and genuine pictures are another.
People have indeed been paid for some of the most genuine pictures
ever painted, and so with music, and so with literature itself--hard-
and-fast lines ever cut the fingers of those who draw them--but, as a
general rule, most lasting art has been poorly paid, so far as money
goes, till the artist was near the end of his time, and, whether
money passed or no, we may be sure that it was not thought of. Such
work is done as a bird sings--for the love of the thing; it is
persevered in as long as body and soul can be kept together, whether
there be pay or no, and perhaps better if there be no pay.
Nevertheless, though art disregards money and trade disregards art,
the artist may stand not a little trade-alloy and be even toughened
by it, and the tradesmen may be more than half an artist. Art is in
the world but not of it; it lives in a kingdom of its own, governed
by laws that none but artists can understand. This, at least, is the
ideal towards which an artist tends, though we all very well know we
none of us reach it. With the trade it is exactly the reverse; this
world is, and ought to be, everything, and the invisible world is as
little to the trade as this visible world is to the artist.
When I say the artist tends towards such a world, I mean not that he
tends consciously and reasoningly but that his instinct to take this
direction will be too strong to let him take any other. He is
incapable of reasoning on the subject; if he could reason he would be
lost qua artist; for, by every test that reason can apply, those who
sell themselves for a price are in the right. The artist is guided
by a faith that for him transcends all reason. Granted that this
faith has been in great measure founded on reason, that it has grown
up along with reason, that if it lose touch with reason it is no
longer faith but madness; granted, again, that reason is in great
measure founded on faith, that it has grown up along with faith, that
if it lose touch with faith it is no longer reason but mechanism;
granted, therefore, that faith grows with reason as will with power,
as demand with supply, as mind with body, each stimulating and
augmenting the other until an invisible, minute nucleus attains
colossal growth--nevertheless the difference between the man of the
world and the man who lives by faith is that the first is drawn
towards the one and the second towards the other of two principles
which, so far as we can see, are co-extensive and co-equal in
importance.
Money
It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life,
exceptis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music,
literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued
with a view to money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred, all hope of genuine good work. If a man has money at his
back, he may touch these things and do something which will live a
long while, and he may be very happy in doing it; if he has no money,
he may do good work, but the chances are he will be killed in doing
it and for having done it; or he may make himself happy by doing bad
work and getting money out of it, and there is no great harm in this,
provided he knows his work is done in this spirit and rates it for
its commercial value only. Still, as a rule, a man should not touch
any of the arts as a creator unless be has a discreta posizionina
behind him.
Modern Simony
It is not the dealing in livings but the thinking they can buy the
Holy Ghost for money which vulgar rich people indulge in when they
dabble in literature, music and painting.
Nevertheless, on reflection it must be admitted that the Holy Ghost
is very hard to come by without money. For the Holy Ghost is only
another term for the Fear of the Lord, which is Wisdom. And though
Wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can it be gotten without
it. Gold, or the value that is equivalent to gold, lies at the root
of Wisdom, and enters so largely into the very essence of the Holy
Ghost that "No gold, no Holy Ghost" may pass as an axiom. This is
perhaps why it is not easy to buy Wisdom by whatever name it be
called--I mean, because it is almost impossible to sell it. It is a
very unmarketable commodity, as those who have received it truly know
to their own great bane and boon.
My Grandfather and Myself
My grandfather worked very hard all his life, and was making money
all the time until he became a bishop. I have worked very hard all
my life, but have never been able to earn money. As usefulness is
generally counted, no one can be more useless. This I believe to be
largely due to the public-school and university teaching through
which my grandfather made his money. Yes, but then if he is largely
responsible for that which has made me useless, has he not also left
me the hardly-won money which makes my uselessness sufficiently
agreeable to myself? And would not the poor old gentleman gladly
change lots with me, if he could?
I do not know; but I should be sorry to change lots with him or with
any one else, so I need not grumble. I said in Luck or Cunning? that
the only way (at least I think I said so) in which a teacher can
thoroughly imbue an unwilling learner with his own opinions is for
the teacher to eat the pupil up and thus assimilate him--if he can,
for it is possible that the pupil may continue to disagree with the
teacher. And as a matter of fact, school-masters do live upon their
pupils, and I, as my grandfather's grandson, continue to batten upon
old pupil.
Art and Usefulness
Tedder, the Librarian of the Athenaeum, said to me when I told him (I
have only seen him twice) what poor success my books had met with:
"Yes, but you have made the great mistake of being useful."
This, for the moment, displeased me, for I know that I have always
tried to make my work useful and should not care about doing it at
all unless I believed it to subserve use more or less directly. Yet
when I look at those works which we all hold to be the crowning
glories of the world as, for example, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hamlet,
the Messiah, Rembrandt's portraits, or Holbein's, or Giovanni
Bellini's, the connection between them and use is, to say the least
of it, far from obvious. Music, indeed, can hardly be tortured into
being useful at all, unless to drown the cries of the wounded in
battle, or to enable people to talk more freely at evening parties.
The uses, again, of painting in its highest forms are very doubtful--
I mean in any material sense; in its lower forms, when it becomes
more diagrammatic, it is materially useful. Literature may be useful
from its lowest forms to nearly its highest, but the highest cannot
be put in harness to any but spiritual uses; and the fact remains
that the "Hallelujah Chorus," the speech of Hamlet to the players,
Bellini's "Doge" have their only uses in a spiritual world whereto
the word "uses" is as alien as bodily flesh is to a choir of angels.
As it is fatal to the highest art that it should have been done for
money, so it seems hardly less fatal that it should be done with a
view to those uses that tend towards money.
And yet, was not the Iliad written mainly with a view to money? Did
not Shakespeare make money by his plays, Handel by his music, and the
noblest painters by their art? True; but in all these cases, I take
it, love of fame and that most potent and, at the same time,
unpractical form of it, the lust after fame beyond the grave, was the
mainspring of the action, the money being but a concomitant accident.
Money is like the wind that bloweth whithersoever it listeth,
sometimes it chooses to attach itself to high feats of literature and
art and music, but more commonly it prefers lower company . . .
I can continue this note no further, for there is no end to it.
Briefly, the world resolves itself into two great classes--those who
hold that honour after death is better worth having than any honour a
man can get and know anything about, and those who doubt this; to my
mind, those who hold it, and hold it firmly, are the only people
worth thinking about. They will also hold that, important as the
physical world obviously is, the spiritual world, of which we know
little beyond its bare existence, is more important still.
Genius
i
Genius is akin both to madness and inspiration and, as every one is
both more or less inspired and more or less mad, every one has more
or less genius. When, therefore, we speak of genius we do not mean
an absolute thing which some men have and others have not, but a
small scale-turning overweight of a something which we all have but
which we cannot either define or apprehend--the quantum which we all
have being allowed to go without saying.
This small excess weight has been defined as a supreme capacity for
taking trouble, but he who thus defined it can hardly claim genius in
respect of his own definition--his capacity for taking trouble does
not seem to have been abnormal. It might be more fitly described as
a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all
kinds and keeping them therein so long as the genius remains. People
who are credited with genius have, indeed, been sometimes very
painstaking, but they would often show more signs of genius if they
had taken less. "You have taken too much trouble with your opera,"
said Handel to Gluck. It is not likely that the "Hailstone Chorus"
or Mrs. Quickly cost their creators much pains, indeed, we commonly
feel the ease with which a difficult feat has been performed to be a
more distinctive mark of genius than the fact that the performer took
great pains before he could achieve it. Pains can serve genius, or
even mar it, but they cannot make it.
We can rarely, however, say what pains have or have not been taken in
any particular case, for, over and above the spent pains of a man's
early efforts, the force of which may carry him far beyond all trace
of themselves, there are the still more remote and invisible
ancestral pains, repeated we know not how often or in what fortunate
correlation with pains taken in some other and unseen direction.
This points to the conclusion that, though it is wrong to suppose the
essence of genius to lie in a capacity for taking pains, it is right
to hold that it must have been rooted in pains and that it cannot
have grown up without them.
Genius, again, might, perhaps almost as well, be defined as a supreme
capacity for saving other people from having to take pains, if the
highest flights of genius did not seem to know nothing about pains
one way or the other. What trouble can Hamlet or the Iliad save to
any one? Genius can, and does, save it sometimes; the genius of
Newton may have saved a good deal of trouble one way or another, but
it has probably engendered as much new as it has saved old.
This, however, is all a matter of chance, for genius never seems to
care whether it makes the burden or bears it. The only certain thing
is that there will be a burden, for the Holy Ghost has ever tended
towards a breach of the peace, and the New Jerusalem, when it comes,
will probably be found so far to resemble the old as to stone its
prophets freely. The world thy world is a jealous world, and thou
shalt have none other worlds but it. Genius points to change, and
change is a hankering after another world, so the old world suspects
it. Genius disturbs order, it unsettles mores and hence it is
immoral. On a small scale it is intolerable, but genius will have no
small scales; it is even more immoral for a man to be too far in
front than to lag too far behind. The only absolute morality is
absolute stagnation, but this is unpractical, so a peck of change is
permitted to every one, but it must be a peck only, whereas genius
would have ever so many sacks full. There is a myth among some
Eastern nation that at the birth of Genius an unkind fairy marred all
the good gifts of the other fairies by depriving it of the power of
knowing where to stop.
Nor does genius care more about money than about trouble. It is no
respecter of time, trouble, money or persons, the four things round
which human affairs turn most persistently. It will not go a hair's
breadth from its way either to embrace fortune or to avoid her. It
is, like Love, "too young to know the worth of gold." {176} It
knows, indeed, both love and hate, but not as we know them, for it
will fly for help to its bitterest foe, or attack its dearest friend
in the interests of the art it serves.
Yet this genius, which so despises the world, is the only thing of
which the world is permanently enamoured, and the more it flouts the
world, the more the world worships it, when it has once well killed
it in the flesh. Who can understand this eternal crossing in love
and contradiction in terms which warps the woof of actions and things
from the atom to the universe? The more a man despises time,
trouble, money, persons, place and everything on which the world
insists as most essential to salvation, the more pious will this same
world hold him to have been. What a fund of universal unconscious
scepticism must underlie the world's opinions! For we are all alike
in our worship of genius that has passed through the fire. Nor can
this universal instinctive consent be explained otherwise than as the
welling up of a spring whose sources lie deep in the conviction that
great as this world is, it masks a greater wherein its wisdom is
folly and which we know as blind men know where the sun is shining,
certainly, but not distinctly.
This should in itself be enough to prove that such a world exists,
but there is still another proof in the fact that so many come among
us showing instinctive and ineradicable familiarity with a state of
things which has no counterpart here, and cannot, therefore, have
been acquired here. From such a world we come, every one of us, but
some seem to have a more living recollection of it than others.
Perfect recollection of it no man can have, for to put on flesh is to
have all one's other memories jarred beyond power of conscious
recognition. And genius must put on flesh, for it is only by the
hook and crook of taint and flesh that tainted beings like ourselves
can apprehend it, only in and through flesh can it be made manifest
to us at all. The flesh and the shop will return no matter with how
many pitchforks we expel them, for we cannot conceivably expel them
thoroughly; therefore it is better not to be too hard upon them. And
yet this same flesh cloaks genius at the very time that it reveals
it. It seems as though the flesh must have been on and must have
gone clean off before genius can be discerned, and also that we must
stand a long way from it, for the world grows more and more myopic as
it grows older. And this brings another trouble, for by the time the
flesh has gone off it enough, and it is far enough away for us to see
it without glasses, the chances are we shall have forgotten its very
existence and lose the wish to see at the very moment of becoming
able to do so. Hence there appears to be no remedy for the oft-
repeated complaint that the world knows nothing of its greatest men.
How can it be expected to do so? And how can its greatest men be
expected to know more than a very little of the world? At any rate,
they seldom do, and it is just because they cannot and do not that,
if they ever happen to be found out at all, they are recognised as
the greatest and the world weeps and wrings its hands that it cannot
know more about them.
Lastly, if genius cannot be bought with money, still less can it sell
what it produces. The only price that can be paid for genius is
suffering, and this is the only wages it can receive. The only work
that has any considerable permanence is written, more or less
consciously, in the blood of the writer, or in that of his or her
forefathers. Genius is like money, or, again, like crime, every one
has a little, if it be only a half-penny, and he can beg or steal
this much if he has not got it; but those who have little are rarely
very fond of millionaires. People generally like and understand best
those who are of much about the same social standing and money status
as their own; and so it is for the most part as between those who
have only the average amount of genius and the Homers, Shakespeares
and Handels of the race.
And yet, so paradoxical is everything connected with genius, that it
almost seems as though the nearer people stood to one another in
respect either of money or genius, the more jealous they become of
one another. I have read somewhere that Thackeray was one day
flattening his nose against a grocer's window and saw two bags of
sugar, one marked tenpence halfpenny and the other elevenpence (for
sugar has come down since Thackeray's time). As he left the window
he was heard to say, "How they must hate one another!" So it is in
the animal and vegetable worlds. The war of extermination is
generally fiercest between the most nearly allied species, for these
stand most in one another's light. So here again the same old
paradox and contradiction in terms meets us, like a stone wall, in
the fact that we love best those who are in the main like ourselves,
but when they get too like, we hate them, and, at the same time, we
hate most those who are unlike ourselves, but if they become unlike
enough, we may often be very fond of them.
Genius must make those that have it think apart, and to think apart
is to take one's view of things instead of being, like Poins, a
blessed fellow to think as every man thinks. A man who thinks for
himself knows what others do not, but does not know what others know.
Hence the belli causa, for he cannot serve two masters, the God of
his own inward light and the Mammon of common sense, at one and the
same time. How can a man think apart and not apart? But if he is a
genius this is the riddle he must solve. The uncommon sense of
genius and the common sense of the rest of the world are thus as
husband and wife to one another; they are always quarrelling, and
common sense, who must be taken to be the husband, always fancies
himself the master--nevertheless genius is generally admitted to be
the better half.
He who would know more of genius must turn to what he can find in the
poets, or to whatever other sources he may discover, for I can help
him no further.
ii
The destruction of great works of literature and art is as necessary
for the continued development of either one or the other as death is
for that of organic life. We fight against it as long as we can, and
often stave it off successfully both for ourselves and others, but
there is nothing so great--not Homer, Shakespeare, Handel, Rembrandt,
Giovanni Bellini, De Hooghe, Velasquez and the goodly company of
other great men for whose lives we would gladly give our own--but it
has got to go sooner or later and leave no visible traces, though the
invisible ones endure from everlasting to everlasting. It is idle to
regret this for ourselves or others, our effort should tend towards
enjoying and being enjoyed as highly and for as long time as we can,
and then chancing the rest.
iii
Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the
time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not
being fully recognised for some time. So men of genius always escape
their own immediate belongings, and indeed generally their own age.
iv
Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much
more of it, and it is better organised and more naturally cohesive
inter se. So the arctic volcano can do no thing against arctic ice.
v
America will have her geniuses, as every other country has, in fact
she has already had one in Walt Whitman, but I do not think America
is a good place in which to be a genius. A genius can never expect
to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America
is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an
inspired writer of any kind.
Great Things
All men can do great things, if they know what great things are. So
hard is this last that even where it exists the knowledge is as much
unknown as known to them that have it and is more a leaning upon the
Lord than a willing of one that willeth. And yet all the leaning on
the Lord in Christendom fails if there be not a will of him that
willeth to back it up. God and the man are powerless without one
another.
Genius and Providence
Among all the evidences for the existence of an overruling Providence
that I can discover, I see none more convincing than the elaborate
and for the most part effectual provision that has been made for the
suppression of genius. The more I see of the world, the more
necessary I see it to be that by far the greater part of what is
written or done should be of so fleeting a character as to take
itself away quickly. That is the advantage in the fact that so much
of our literature is journalism.
Schools and colleges are not intended to foster genius and to bring
it out. Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and
colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way. They are as
the artificial obstructions in a hurdle race--tests of skill and
endurance, but in themselves useless. Still, so necessary is it that
genius and originality should be abated that, did not academies
exist, we should have had to invent them.
The Art of Covery
This is as important and interesting as Dis-covery. Surely the glory
of finally getting rid of and burying a long and troublesome matter
should be as great as that of making an important discovery. The
trouble is that the coverer is like Samson who perished in the wreck
of what he had destroyed; if he gets rid of a thing effectually he
gets rid of himself too.
Wanted
We want a Society for the Suppression of Erudite Research and the
Decent Burial of the Past. The ghosts of the dead past want quite as
much laying as raising.
Ephemeral and Permanent Success
The supposition that the world is ever in league to put a man down is
childish. Hardly less childish is it for an author to lay the blame
on reviewers. A good sturdy author is a match for a hundred
reviewers. He, I grant, knows nothing of either literature or
science who does not know that a mot d'ordre given by a few wire-
pullers can, for a time, make or mar any man's success. People
neither know what it is they like nor do they want to find out, all
they care about is the being supposed to derive their likings from
the best West-end magazines, so they look to the shop with the
largest plate-glass windows and take what the shop-man gives them.
But no amount of plate-glass can carry off more than a certain amount
of false pretences, and there is no mot d'ordre that can keep a man
permanently down if he is as intent on winning lasting good name as I
have been. If I had played for immediate popularity I think I could
have won it. Having played for lasting credit I doubt not that it
will in the end be given me. A man should not be held to be ill-used
for not getting what he has not played for. I am not saying that it
is better or more honourable to play for lasting than for immediate
success. I know which I myself find pleasanter, but that has nothing
to do with it.
It is a nice question whether the light or the heavy armed soldier of
literature and art is the more useful. I joined the plodders and
have aimed at permanent good name rather than brilliancy. I have no
doubt I did this because instinct told me (for I never thought about
it) that this would be the easier and less thorny path. I have more
of perseverance than of those, perhaps, even more valuable gifts--
facility and readiness of resource. I hate being hurried. Moreover
I am too fond of independence to get on with the leaders of
literature and science. Independence is essential for permanent but
fatal to immediate success. Besides, luck enters much more into
ephemeral than into permanent success and I have always distrusted
luck. Those who play a waiting game have matters more in their own
hands, time gives them double chances; whereas if success does not
come at once to the ephemerid he misses it altogether.
I know that the ordinary reviewer who either snarls at my work or
misrepresents it or ignores it or, again, who pats it sub-
contemptuously on the back is as honourably and usefully employed as
I am. In the kingdom of literature (as I have just been saying in
the Universal Review about Science) there are many mansions and what
is intolerable in one is common form in another. It is a case of the
division of labour and a man will gravitate towards one class of
workers or another according as he is built. There is neither higher
nor lower about it.
I should like to put it on record that I understand it and am not
inclined to regret the arrangements that have made me possible.
My Birthright
I had to steal my own birthright. I stole it and was bitterly
punished. But I saved my soul alive.
XII--THE ENFANT TERRIBLE OF LITERATURE
Myself
I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and
I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me
a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of
them.
Blake, Dante, Virgil and Tennyson
Talking it over, we agreed that Blake was no good because he learnt
Italian at 60 in order to study Dante, and we knew Dante was no good
because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because
Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson--well, Tennyson goes without
saying.
My Father and Shakespeare
My father is one of the few men I know who say they do not like
Shakespeare. I could forgive my father for not liking Shakespeare if
it was only because Shakespeare wrote poetry; but this is not the
reason. He dislikes Shakespeare because he finds him so very coarse.
He also says he likes Tennyson and this seriously aggravates his
offence.
Tennyson
We were saying what a delightful dispensation of providence it was
that prosperous people will write their memoirs. We hoped Tennyson
was writing his. [1890.]
P.S.--We think his son has done nearly as well. [1898.]
Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold
Mr. Walter Pater's style is, to me, like the face of some old woman
who has been to Madame Rachel and had herself enamelled. The bloom
is nothing but powder and paint and the odour is cherry-blossom. Mr.
Matthew Arnold's odour is as the faint sickliness of hawthorn.
My Random Passages
At the Century Club a friend very kindly and hesitatingly ventured to
suggest to me that I should get some one to go over my MS. before
printing; a judicious editor, he said, would have prevented me from
printing many a bit which, it seemed to him, was written too
recklessly and offhand. The fact is that the more reckless and
random a passage appears to be, the more carefully it has been
submitted to friends and considered and re-considered; without the
support of friends I should never have dared to print one half of
what I have printed.
I am not one of those who can repeat the General Confession
unreservedly. I should say rather:
"I have left unsaid much that I am sorry I did not say, but I have
said little that I am sorry for having said, and I am pretty well on
the whole, thank you."
Moral Try-Your-Strengths
There are people who, if they only had a slot, might turn a pretty
penny as moral try-your-strengths, like those we see in railway-
stations for telling people their physical strength when they have
dropped a penny in the slot. In a way they have a slot, which is
their mouths, and people drop pennies in by asking them to dinner,
and then they try their strength against them and get snubbed; but
this way is roundabout and expensive. We want a good automatic
asinometer by which we can tell at a moderate cost how great or how
little of a fool we are.
Populus Vult
If people like being deceived--and this can hardly be doubted--there
can rarely have been a time during which they can have had more of
the wish than now. The literary, scientific and religious worlds vie
with one another in trying to gratify the public.
Men and Monkeys
In his latest article (Feb. 1892) Prof. Garner says that the chatter
of monkeys is not meaningless, but that they are conveying ideas to
one another. This seems to me hazardous. The monkeys might with
equal justice conclude that in our magazine articles, or literary and
artistic criticisms, we are not chattering idly but are conveying
ideas to one another.
"One Touch of Nature"
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." Should it not be
"marks," not "makes"? There is one touch of nature, or natural
feature, which marks all mankind as of one family.
P.S.--Surely it should be "of ill-nature." "One touch of ill-nature
marks--or several touches of ill-nature mark the whole world kin."
Genuine Feeling
In the Times of to-day, June 4, 1887, there is an obituary notice of
a Rev. Mr. Knight who wrote about 200 songs, among others "She wore a
wreath of roses." The Times says that, though these songs have no
artistic merit, they are full of genuine feeling, or words to this
effect; as though a song which was full of genuine feeling could by
any possibility be without artistic merit.
George Meredith
The Times in a leading article says (Jany. 3, 1899) "a talker," as
Mr. George Meredith has somewhere said, "involves the existence of a
talkee," or words to this effect.
I said what comes to the same thing as this in Life and Habit in
1877, and I repeated it in the preface to my translation of the Iliad
in 1898. I do not believe George Meredith has said anything to the
same effect, but I have read so very little of that writer, and have
so utterly rejected what I did read, that he may well have done so
without my knowing it. He damned Erewhon, as Chapman and Hall's
reader, in 1871, and, as I am still raw about this after 28 years, (I
am afraid unless I say something more I shall be taken as writing
these words seriously) I prefer to assert that the Times writer was
quoting from my preface to the Iliad, published a few weeks earlier,
and fathering the remark on George Meredith. By the way the Times
did not give so much as a line to my translation in its "Books of the
Week," though it was duly sent to them.
Froude and Freeman
I think it was last Saturday (Ap. 9) (at any rate it was a day just
thereabouts) the Times had a leader on Froude's appointment as Reg.
Prof. of Mod. Hist. at Oxford. It said Froude was perhaps our
greatest living master of style, or words to that effect, only that,
like Freeman, he was too long: i.e. only he is an habitual offender
against the most fundamental principles of his art. If then Froude
is our greatest master of style, what are the rest of us?
There was a much better article yesterday on Marbot, on which my
namesake A. J. Butler got a dressing for talking rubbish about style.
[1892.]
Style
In this day's Sunday Times there is an article on Mrs. Browning's
letters which begins with some remarks about style. "It is
recorded," says the writer, "of Plato, that in a rough draft of one
of his Dialogues, found after his death, the first paragraph was
written in seventy different forms. Wordsworth spared no pains to
sharpen and polish to the utmost the gifts with which nature had
endowed him; and Cardinal Newman, one of the greatest masters of
English style, has related in an amusing essay the pains he took to
acquire his style."
I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style
and was at the same time readable. Plato's having had seventy shies
at one sentence is quite enough to explain to me why I dislike him.
A man may, and ought to take a great deal of pains to write clearly,
tersely and euphemistically: he will write many a sentence three or
four times over--to do much more than this is worse than not
rewriting at all: he will be at great pains to see that he does not
repeat himself, to arrange his matter in the way that shall best
enable the reader to master it, to cut out superfluous words and,
even more, to eschew irrelevant matter: but in each case he will be
thinking not of his own style but of his reader's convenience.
Men like Newman and R. L. Stevenson seem to have taken pains to
acquire what they called a style as a preliminary measure--as
something that they had to form before their writings could be of any
value. I should like to put it on record that I never took the
smallest pains with my style, have never thought about it, and do not
know or want to know whether it is a style at all or whether it is
not, as I believe and hope, just common, simple straightforwardness.
I cannot conceive how any man can take thought for his style without
loss to himself and his readers.
I have, however, taken all the pains that I had patience to endure in
the improvement of my handwriting (which, by the way, has a constant
tendency to resume feral characteristics) and also with my MS.
generally to keep it clean and legible. I am having a great tidying
just now, in the course of which the MS. of Erewhon turned up, and I
was struck with the great difference between it and the MS. of The
Authoress of the Odyssey. I have also taken great pains, with what
success I know not, to correct impatience, irritability and other
like faults in my own character--and this not because I care two
straws about my own character, but because I find the correction of
such faults as I have been able to correct makes life easier and
saves me from getting into scrapes, and attaches nice people to me
more readily. But I suppose this really is attending to style after
all. [1897.]
Diderot on Criticism
"Il est si difficile de produire une chose meme mediocre; il est si
facile de sentir la mediocrite."
I have lately seen this quoted as having been said by Diderot. It is
easy to say we feel the mediocrity when we have heard a good many
people say that the work is mediocre, but, unless in matters about
which he has been long conversant, no man can easily form an
independent judgment as to whether or not a work is mediocre. I know
that in the matter of books, painting and music I constantly find
myself unable to form a settled opinion till I have heard what many
men of varied tastes have to say, and have also made myself
acquainted with details about a man's antecedents and ways of life
which are generally held to be irrelevant.
Often, of course, this is unnecessary; a man's character, if he has
left much work behind him, or if he is not coming before us for the
first time, is generally easily discovered without extraneous aid.
We want no one to give us any clues to the nature of such men as
Giovanni Bellini, or De Hooghe. Hogarth's character is written upon
his work so plainly that he who runs may read it, so is Handel's upon
his, so is Purcell's, so is Corelli's, so, indeed, are the characters
of most men; but often where only little work has been left, or where
a work is by a new hand, it is exceedingly difficult "sentir la
mediocrite" and, it might be added, "ou meme sentir du tout."
How many years, I wonder, was it before I learned to dislike
Thackeray and Tennyson as cordially as I now do? For how many years
did I not almost worship them?
Bunyan and Others
I have been reading The Pilgrim's Progress again--the third part and
all--and wish that some one would tell one what to think about it.
The English is racy, vigorous and often very beautiful; but the
language of any book is nothing except in so far as it reveals the
writer. The words in which a man clothes his thoughts are like all
other clothes--the cut raises presumptions about his thoughts, and
these generally turn out to be just, but the words are no more the
thoughts than a man's coat is himself. I am not sure, however, that
in Bunyan's case the dress in which he has clothed his ideas does not
reveal him more justly than the ideas do.
The Pilgrim's Progress consists mainly of a series of infamous libels
upon life and things; it is a blasphemy against certain fundamental
ideas of right and wrong which our consciences most instinctively
approve; its notion of heaven is hardly higher than a transformation
scene at Drury Lane; it is essentially infidel. "Hold out to me the
chance of a golden crown and harp with freedom from all further
worries, give me angels to flatter me and fetch and carry for me, and
I shall think the game worth playing, notwithstanding the great and
horrible risk of failure; but no crown, no cross for me. Pay me well
and I will wait for payment, but if I have to give credit I shall
expect to be paid better in the end."
There is no conception of the faith that a man should do his duty
cheerfully with all his might though, as far as he can see, he will
never be paid directly or indirectly either here or hereafter. Still
less is there any conception that unless a man has this faith he is
not worth thinking about. There is no sense that as we have received
freely so we should give freely and be only too thankful that we have
anything to give at all. Furthermore there does not appear to be
even the remotest conception that this honourable, comfortable and
sustaining faith is, like all other high faiths, to be brushed aside
very peremptorily at the bidding of common-sense.
What a pity it is that Christian never met Mr. Common-Sense with his
daughter, Good-Humour, and her affianced husband, Mr. Hate-Cant; but
if he ever saw them in the distance he steered clear of them,
probably as feeling that they would be more dangerous than Giant
Despair, Vanity Fair and Apollyon all together--for they would have
stuck to him if he had let them get in with him. Among other things
they would have told him that, if there was any truth in his
opinions, neither man nor woman ought to become a father or mother at
all, inasmuch as their doing so would probably entail eternity of
torture on the wretched creature whom they were launching into the
world. Life in this world is risk enough to inflict on another
person who has not been consulted in the matter, but death will give
quittance in full. To weaken our faith in this sure and certain hope
of peace eternal (except so far as we have so lived as to win life in
others after we are gone) would be a cruel thing, even though the
evidence against it were overwhelming, but to rob us of it on no
evidence worth a moment's consideration and, apparently, from no
other motive than the pecuniary advantage of the robbers themselves
is infamy. For the Churches are but institutions for the saving of
men's souls from hell.
This is true enough. Nevertheless it is untrue that in practice any
Christian minister, knowing what he preaches to be both very false
and very cruel, yet insists on it because it is to the advantage of
his own order. In a way the preachers believe what they preach, but
it is as men who have taken a bad 10 pounds note and refuse to look
at the evidence that makes for its badness, though, if the note were
not theirs, they would see at a glance that it was not a good one.
For the man in the street it is enough that what the priests teach in
respect of a future state is palpably both cruel and absurd while, at
the same time, they make their living by teaching it and thus prey
upon other men's fears of the unknown. If the Churches do not wish
to be misunderstood they should not allow themselves to remain in
such an equivocal position.
But let this pass. Bunyan, we may be sure, took all that he preached
in its most literal interpretation; he could never have made his book
so interesting had he not done so. The interest of it depends almost
entirely on the unquestionable good faith of the writer and the
strength of the impulse that compelled him to speak that which was
within him. He was not writing a book which he might sell, he was
speaking what was borne in upon him from heaven. The message he
uttered was, to my thinking, both low and false, but it was truth of
truths to Bunyan.
No. This will not do. The Epistles of St. Paul were truth of truths
to Paul, but they do not attract us to the man who wrote them, and,
except here and there, they are very uninteresting. Mere strength of
conviction on a writer's part is not enough to make his work take
permanent rank. Yet I know that I could read the whole of The
Pilgrim's Progress (except occasional episodical sermons) without
being at all bored by it, whereas, having spent a penny upon Mr.
Stead's abridgement of Joseph Andrews, I had to give it up as putting
me out of all patience. I then spent another penny on an abridgement
of Gulliver's Travels, and was enchanted by it. What is it that
makes one book so readable and another so unreadable? Swift, from
all I can make out, was a far more human and genuine person than he
is generally represented, but I do not think I should have liked him,
whereas Fielding, I am sure, must have been delightful. Why do the
faults of his work overweigh its many great excellences, while the
less great excellences of the Voyage to Lilliput outweigh its more
serious defects?
I suppose it is the prolixity of Fielding that fatigues me. Swift is
terse, he gets through what he has to say on any matter as quickly as
he can and takes the reader on to the next, whereas Fielding is not
only long, but his length is made still longer by the
disconnectedness of the episodes that appear to have been padded into
the books--episodes that do not help one forward, and are generally
so exaggerated, and often so full of horse-play as to put one out of
conceit with the parts that are really excellent.
Whatever else Bunyan is he is never long; he takes you quickly on
from incident to incident and, however little his incidents may
appeal to us, we feel that he is never giving us one that is not bona
fide so far as he is concerned. His episodes and incidents are
introduced not because he wants to make his book longer but because
he cannot be satisfied without these particular ones, even though he
may feel that his book is getting longer than he likes.
. . .
And here I must break away from this problem, leaving it unsolved.
[1897.]
Bunyan and the Odyssey
Anything worse than The Pilgrim's Progress in the matter of defiance
of literary canons can hardly be conceived. The allegory halts
continually; it professes to be spiritual, but nothing can be more
carnal than the golden splendour of the eternal city; the view of
life and the world generally is flat blasphemy against the order of
things with which we are surrounded. Yet, like the Odyssey, which
flatly defies sense and criticism (no, it doesn't; still, it defies
them a good deal), no one can doubt that it must rank among the very
greatest books that have ever been written. How Odyssean it is in
its sincerity and downrightness, as well as in the marvellous beauty
of its language, its freedom from all taint of the schools and, not
least, in complete victory of genuine internal zeal over a scheme
initially so faulty as to appear hopeless.
I read that part where Christian passes the lions which he thought
were free but which were really chained and it occurred to me that
all lions are chained until they actually eat us and that, the moment
they do this, they chain themselves up again automatically, as far as
we are concerned. If one dissects this passage it fares as many a
passage in the Odyssey does when we dissect it. Christian did not,
after all, venture to pass the lions till he was assured that they
were chained. And really it is more excusable to refuse point-blank
to pass a couple of lions till one knows whether they are chained or
not--and the poor wicked people seem to have done nothing more than
this,--than it would be to pass them. Besides, by being told,
Christian fights, as it were, with loaded dice.
Poetry
The greatest poets never write poetry. The Homers and Shakespeares
are not the greatest--they are only the greatest that we can know.
And so with Handel among musicians. For the highest poetry, whether
in music or literature, is ineffable--it must be felt from one person
to another, it cannot be articulated.
Verse
Versifying is the lowest form of poetry; and the last thing a great
poet will do in these days is to write verses.
I have been trying to read Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece
but cannot get on with them. They teem with fine things, but they
are got-up fine things. I do not know whether this is quite what I
mean but, come what may, I find the poems bore me. Were I a
schoolmaster I should think I was setting a boy a very severe
punishment if I told him to read Venus and Adonis through in three
sittings. If, then, the magic of Shakespeare's name, let alone the
great beauty of occasional passages, cannot reconcile us (for I find
most people of the same mind) to verse, and especially rhymed verse
as a medium of sustained expression, what chance has any one else?
It seems to me that a sonnet is the utmost length to which a rhymed
poem should extend.
Verse, Poetry and Prose
The preface to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is verse, but it is not
poetry. The body of the work is poetry, but it is not verse.
Ancient Work
If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient
work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in
them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too
fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.
Nausicaa and Myself
I am elderly, grey-bearded and, according to my clerk, Alfred,
disgustingly fat; I wear spectacles and get more and more bronchitic
as I grow older. Still no young prince in a fairy story ever found
an invisible princess more effectually hidden behind a hedge of
dullness or more fast asleep than Nausicaa was when I woke her and
hailed her as Authoress of the Odyssey. And there was no difficulty
about it either--all one had to do was to go up to the front door and
ring the bell.
Telemachus and Nicholas Nickleby
The virtuous young man defending a virtuous mother against a number
of powerful enemies is one of the ignes fatui of literature. The
scheme ought to be very interesting, and often is so, but it always
fails as regards the hero who, from Telemachus to Nicholas Nickleby,
is always too much of the good young man to please.
Gadshill and Trapani
While getting our lunch one Sunday at the east end of the long room
in the Sir John Falstaff Inn, Gadshill, we overheard some waterside-
looking dwellers in the neighbourhood talking among themselves. I
wrote down the following:-
Bill: Oh, yes. I've got a mate that works in my shop; he's chucked
the Dining Room because they give him too much to eat. He found
another place where they gave him four pennyworth of meat and two
vegetables and it was quite as much as he could put up with.
George: You can't kid me, Bill, that they give you too much to eat,
but I'll believe it to oblige you, Bill. Shall I see you to-night?
Bill: No, I must go to church.
George: Well, so must I; I've got to go.
So at Trapani, I heard two small boys one night on the quay (I am
sure I have written this down somewhere, but it is less trouble to
write it again than to hunt for it) singing with all their might,
with their arms round one another's necks. I should say they were
about ten years old, not more.
I asked Ignazio Giacalone: "What are they singing?"
He replied that it was a favourite song among the popolino of Trapani
about a girl who did not want to be seen going about with a man.
"The people in this place," says the song, "are very ill-natured, and
if they see you and me together, they will talk," &c.
I do not say that there was any descent here from Nausicaa's speech
to Ulysses, but I felt as though that speech was still in the air.
[Od. VI. 273.]
I reckon Gadshill and Trapani as perhaps the two most classic grounds
that I frequent familiarly, and at each I have seemed to hear echoes
of the scenes that have made them famous. Not that what I heard at
Gadshill is like any particular passage in Shakespeare.
Waiting to be Hired
At Castelvetrano (about thirty miles from Trapani) I had to start the
next morning at 4 a.m. to see the ruins of Selinunte, and slept
lightly with my window open. About two o'clock I began to hear a
buzz of conversation in the piazza outside and it kept me awake, so I
got up to shut the window and see what it was. I found it came from
a long knot of men standing about, two deep, but not strictly
marshalled. When I got up at half-past three, it was still dark and
the men were still there, though perhaps not so many. I enquired and
found they were standing to be hired for the day, any one wanting
labourers would come there, engage as many as he wanted and go off
with them, others would come up, and so on till about four o'clock,
after which no one would hire, the day being regarded as short in
weight after that hour. Being so collected the men gossip over their
own and other people's affairs--wonder who was that fine-looking
stranger going about yesterday with Nausicaa, and so on. [Od. VI.
273.] This, in fact, is their club and the place where the public
opinion of the district is formed.
Ilium and Padua
The story of the Trojan horse is more nearly within possibility than
we should readily suppose. In 1848, during the rebellion of the
North Italians against the Austrians, eight or nine young men, for
whom the authorities were hunting, hid themselves inside Donatello's
wooden horse in the Salone at Padua and lay there for five days,
being fed through the trap door on the back of the horse with the
connivance of the custode of the Salone. No doubt they were let out
for a time at night. When pursuit had become less hot, their friends
smuggled them away. One of those who had been shut up was still
living in 1898 and, on the occasion of the jubilee festivities, was
carried round the town in triumph.
Eumaeus and Lord Burleigh
The inference which Arthur Platt (Journal of Philology, Vol. 24, No.
47) wishes to draw from Eumaeus being told to bring Ulysses' bow
[Greek text] (Od. XXI. 234) suggests to met to me the difference
which some people in future ages may wish to draw between the
character of Lord Burleigh's steps in Tennyson's poem, according as
he was walking up or pacing down. Wherefrom also the critic will
argue that the scene of Lord Burleigh's weeping MUST have been on an
inclined plane.
Weeping, weeping late and early,
Walking up and pacing down,
Deeply mourned the Lord of Burleigh,
Burleigh-house by Stamford-town.
My Reviewers' Sense of Need
My reviewers felt no sense of need to understand me--if they had they
would have developed the mental organism which would have enabled
them to do so. When the time comes that they want to do so they will
throw out a little mental pseudopodium without much difficulty. They
threw it out when they wanted to misunderstand me--with a good deal
of the pseudo in it, too.
The Authoress of the Odyssey
The amount of pains which my reviewers have taken to understand this
book is not so great as to encourage the belief that they would
understand the Odyssey, however much they studied it. Again, the
people who could read the Odyssey without coming to much the same
conclusions as mine are not likely to admit that they ought to have
done so.
If a man tells me that a house in which I have long lived is
inconvenient, not to say unwholesome, and that I have been very
stupid in not finding this out for myself, I should be apt in the
first instance to tell him that he knew nothing about it, and that I
was quite comfortable; by and by, I should begin to be aware that I
was not so comfortable as I thought I was, and in the end I should
probably make the suggested alterations in my house if, on
reflection, I found them sensibly conceived. But I should kick hard
at first.
Homer and his Commentators
Homeric commentators have been blind so long that nothing will do for
them but Homer must be blind too. They have transferred their own
blindness to the poet.
The Iliad
In the Iliad, civilisation bursts upon us as a strong stream out of a
rock. We know that the water has gathered from many a distant vein
underground, but we do not see these. Or it is like the drawing up
the curtain on the opening of a play--the scene is then first
revealed.
Glacial Periods of Folly
The moraines left by secular glacial periods of folly stretch out
over many a plain of our civilisation. So in the Odyssey, especially
in the second twelve books, whenever any one eats meat it is called
"sacrificing" it, as though we were descended from a race that did
not eat meat. Then it was said that meat might be eaten if one did
not eat the life. What was the life? Clearly the blood, for when
you stick a pig it lives till the blood is gone. You must sacrifice
the blood, therefore, to the gods, but so long as you abstain from
things strangled and from blood, and so long as you call it
sacrificing, you may eat as much meat as you please.
What a mountain of lies--what a huge geological formation of
falsehood, with displacement of all kinds, and strata twisted every
conceivable way, must have accreted before the Odyssey was possible!
Translations from Verse into Prose
Whenever this is attempted, great licence must be allowed to the
translator in getting rid of all those poetical common forms which
are foreign to the genius of prose. If the work is to be translated
into prose, let it be into such prose as we write and speak among
ourselves. A volume of poetical prose, i.e. affected prose, had
better be in verse outright at once. Poetical prose is never
tolerable for more than a very short bit at a time. And it may be
questioned whether poetry itself is not better kept short in ninety-
nine cases out of a hundred.
Translating the Odyssey
If you wish to preserve the spirit of a dead author, you must not
skin him, stuff him, and set him up in a case. You must eat him,
digest him and let him live in you, with such life as you have, for
better or worse. The difference between the Andrew Lang manner of
translating the Odyssey and mine is that between making a mummy and a
baby. He tries to preserve a corpse (for the Odyssey is a corpse to
all who need Lang's translation), whereas I try to originate a new
life and one that is instinct (as far as I can effect this) with the
spirit though not the form of the original.
They say no woman could possibly have written the Odyssey. To me, on
the other hand, it seems even less possible that a man could have
done so. As for its being by a practised and elderly writer, nothing
but youth and inexperience could produce anything so naive and so
lovely. That is where the work will suffer by my translation. I am
male, practised and elderly, and the trail of sex, age and experience
is certain to be over my translation. If the poem is ever to be well
translated, it must be by some high-spirited English girl who has
been brought up at Athens and who, therefore, has not been jaded by
academic study of the language.
A translation is at best a dislocation, a translation from verse to
prose is a double dislocation and corresponding further dislocations
are necessary if an effect of deformity is to be avoided.
The people who, when they read "Athene" translated by "Minerva,"
cannot bear in mind that every Athene varies more or less with, and
takes colour from, the country and temperament of the writer who is
being translated, will not be greatly helped by translating "Athene"
and not "Minerva." Besides many readers would pronounce the word as
a dissyllable or an anapaest.
The Odyssey and a Tomb at Carcassonne
There is a tomb at some place in France, I think at Carcassonne, on
which there is some sculpture representing the friends and relations
of the deceased in paroxysms of grief with their cheeks all cracked,
and crying like Gaudenzio's angels on the Sacro Monte at Varallo-
Sesia. Round the corner, however, just out of sight till one
searches, there is a man holding both his sides and splitting with
laughter. In some parts of the Odyssey, especially about Ulysses and
Penelope, I fancy that laughing man as being round the corner. [Oct.
1891.]
Getting it Wrong
Zeffirino Carestia, a sculptor, told me we had a great sculptor in
England named Simpson. I demurred, and asked about his work. It
seemed he had made a monument to Nelson in Westminster Abbey. Of
course I saw he meant Stevens, who had made a monument to Wellington
in St. Paul's. I cross-questioned him and found I was right.
Suppose that in some ancient writer I had come upon a similar error
about which I felt no less certain than I did here, ought I to be
debarred from my conclusion merely by the accident that I have not
the wretched muddler at my elbow and cannot ask him personally?
People are always getting things wrong. It is the critic's business
to know how and when to believe on insufficient evidence and to know
how far to go in the matter of setting people right without going too
far; the question of what is too far and what is sufficient evidence
can only be settled by the higgling and haggling of the literary
market.
So I justify my emendation of the "grotta del toro" at Trapani. [The
Authoress of the Odyssey, Chap. VIII.] "Il toro macigna un tesoro di
oro." [The bull is grinding a treasure of gold] in the grotto in
which (for other reasons) I am convinced Ulysses hid the gifts the
Phoeacians had given him. And so the grotto is called "La grotta del
toro" [The grotto of the bull]. I make no doubt it was originally
called "La grotta del tesoro" [The grotto of the treasure], but
children got it wrong, and corrupted "tesoro" into "toro"; then, it
being known that the "tesoro" was in it somehow, the "toro" was made
to grind the "tesoro."
XIII--UNPROFESSIONAL SERMONS
Righteousness
According to Mr. Matthew Arnold, as we find the highest traditions of
grace, beauty and the heroic virtues among the Greeks and Romans, so
we derive our highest ideal of righteousness from Jewish sources.
Righteousness was to the Jew what strength and beauty were to the
Greek or fortitude to the Roman.
This sounds well, but can we think that the Jews taken as a nation
were really more righteous than the Greeks and Romans? Could they
indeed be so if they were less strong, graceful and enduring? In
some respects they may have been--every nation has its strong points-
-but surely there has been a nearly unanimous verdict for many
generations that the typical Greek or Roman is a higher, nobler
person than the typical Jew--and this referring not to the modern
Jew, who may perhaps he held to have been injured by centuries of
oppression, but to the Hebrew of the time of the old prophets and of
the most prosperous eras in the history of the nation. If three men
could be set before us as the most perfect Greek, Roman and Jew
respectively, and if we could choose which we would have our only son
most resemble, is it not likely we should find ourselves preferring
the Greek or Roman to the Jew? And does not this involve that we
hold the two former to be the more righteous in a broad sense of the
word?
I dare not say that we owe no benefits to the Jewish nation, I do not
feel sure whether we do or do not, but I can see no good thing that I
can point to as a notoriously Hebrew contribution to our moral and
intellectual well-being as I can point to our law and say that it is
Roman, or to our fine arts and say that they are based on what the
Greeks and Italians taught us. On the contrary, if asked what
feature of post-Christian life we had derived most distinctly from
Hebrew sources I should say at once "intolerance"--the desire to
dogmatise about matters whereon the Greek and Roman held certainty to
be at once unimportant and unattainable. This, with all its train of
bloodshed and family disunion, is chargeable to the Jewish rather
than to any other account.
There is yet another vice which occurs readily to any one who reckons
up the characteristics which we derive mainly from the Jews; it is
one that we call, after a Jewish sect, "Pharisaism." I do not mean
to say that no Greek or Roman was ever a sanctimonious hypocrite,
still, sanctimoniousness does not readily enter into our notions of
Greeks and Romans and it does so enter into our notions of the old
Hebrews. Of course, we are all of us sanctimonious sometimes; Horace
himself is so when he talks about aurum irrepertum et sic melius
situm, and as for Virgil he was a prig, pure and simple; still, on
the whole, sanctimoniousness was not a Greek and Roman vice and it
was a Hebrew one. True, they stoned their prophets freely; but these
are not the Hebrews to whom Mr. Arnold is referring, they are the
ones whom it is the custom to leave out of sight and out of mind as
far as possible, so that they should hardly count as Hebrews at all,
and none of our characteristics should be ascribed to them.
Taking their literature I cannot see that it deserves the praises
that have been lavished upon it. The Song of Solomon and the book of
Esther are the most interesting in the Old Testament, but these are
the very ones that make the smallest pretensions to holiness, and
even these are neither of them of very transcendent merit. They
would stand no chance of being accepted by Messrs. Cassell and Co. or
by any biblical publisher of the present day. Chatto and Windus
might take the Song of Solomon, but, with this exception, I doubt if
there is a publisher in London who would give a guinea for the pair.
Ecclesiastes contains some fine things but is strongly tinged with
pessimism, cynicism and affectation. Some of the Proverbs are good,
but not many of them are in common use. Job contains some fine
passages, and so do some of the Psalms; but the Psalms generally are
poor and, for the most part, querulous, spiteful and introspective
into the bargain. Mudie would not take thirteen copies of the lot if
they were to appear now for the first time--unless indeed their royal
authorship were to arouse an adventitious interest in them, or unless
the author were a rich man who played his cards judiciously with the
reviewers. As for the prophets--we know what appears to have been
the opinion formed concerning them by those who should have been best
acquainted with them; I am no judge as to the merits of the
controversy between them and their fellow-countrymen, but I have read
their works and am of opinion that they will not hold their own
against such masterpieces of modern literature as, we will say, The
Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels or Tom Jones.
"Whether there be prophecies," exclaims the Apostle, "they shall
fail." On the whole I should say that Isaiah and Jeremiah must be
held to have failed.
I would join issue with Mr. Matthew Arnold on yet another point. I
understand him to imply that righteousness should be a man's highest
aim in life. I do not like setting up righteousness, nor yet
anything else, as the highest aim in life; a man should have any
number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for
which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor
consciousness concerning the main aim of his life. Whatever we do we
must try and do it rightly--this is obvious--but righteousness
implies something much more than this: it conveys to our minds not
only the desire to get whatever we have taken in hand as nearly right
as possible, but also the general reference of our lives to the
supposed will of an unseen but supreme power. Granted that there is
such a power, and granted that we should obey its will, we are the
more likely to do this the less we concern ourselves about the matter
and the more we confine our attention to the things immediately round
about us which seem, so to speak, entrusted to us as the natural and
legitimate sphere of our activity. I believe a man will get the most
useful information on these matters from modern European sources;
next to these he will get most from Athens and ancient Rome. Mr.
Matthew Arnold notwithstanding, I do not think he will get anything
from Jerusalem which he will not find better and more easily
elsewhere. [1883.]
Wisdom
But where shall wisdom be found? (Job xxviii. 12).
If the writer of these words meant exactly what he said, he had so
little wisdom that he might well seek more. He should have known
that wisdom spends most of her time crying in the streets and public-
houses, and he should have gone thither to look for her. It is
written:
"Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets:
"She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the
gates: in the city she uttereth her words" (Prov. i. 20, 21.)
If however he meant rather "Where shall wisdom be regarded?" this,
again, is not a very sensible question. People have had wisdom
before them for some time, and they may be presumed to be the best
judges of their own affairs, yet they do not generally show much
regard for wisdom. We may conclude, therefore, that they have found
her less profitable than by her own estimate she would appear to be.
This indeed is what one of the wisest men who ever lived--the author
of the Book of Ecclesiastes--definitely concludes to be the case,
when he tells his readers that they had better not overdo either
their virtue or their wisdom. They must not, on the other hand,
overdo their wickedness nor, presumably, their ignorance, still the
writer evidently thinks that error is safer on the side of too little
than of too much. {203}
Reflection will show that this must always have been true, and must
always remain so, for this is the side on which error is both least
disastrous and offers most place for repentance. He who finds
himself inconvenienced by knowing too little can go to the British
Museum, or to the Working Men's College, and learn more; but when a
thing is once well learnt it is even harder to unlearn it than it was
to learn it. Would it be possible to unlearn the art of speech or
the arts of reading and writing even if we wished to do so? Wisdom
and knowledge are, like a bad reputation, more easily won than lost;
we got on fairly well without knowing that the earth went round the
sun; we thought the sun went round the earth until we found it made
us uncomfortable to think so any longer, then we altered our opinion;
it was not very easy to alter it, but it was easier than it would be
to alter it back again. Vestigia nulla retrorsum; the earth itself
does not pursue its course more steadily than mind does when it has
once committed itself, and if we could see the movements of the stars
in slow time we should probably find that there was much more throb
and tremor in detail than we can take note of.
How, I wonder, will it be if in our pursuit of knowledge we stumble
upon some awkward fact as disturbing for the human race as an enquiry
into the state of his own finances may sometimes prove to the
individual? The pursuit of knowledge can never be anything but a
leap in the dark, and a leap in the dark is a very uncomfortable
thing. I have sometimes thought that if the human race ever loses
its ascendancy it will not be through plague, famine or cataclysm,
but by getting to know some little microbe, as it were, of knowledge
which shall get into its system and breed there till it makes an end
of us. {204} It is well, therefore, that there should be a
substratum of mankind who cannot by any inducement be persuaded to
know anything whatever at all, and who are resolutely determined to
know nothing among us but what the parson tells them, and not to be
too sure even about that.
Whence then cometh wisdom and where is the place of understanding?
How does Job solve his problem?
"Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom: and to depart from
evil is understanding."
The answer is all very well as far as it goes, but it only amounts to
saying that wisdom is wisdom. We know no better what the fear of the
Lord is than what wisdom is, and we often do not depart from evil
simply because we do not know that what we are cleaving to is evil.
Loving and Hating
I have often said that there is no true love short of eating and
consequent assimilation; the embryonic processes are but a long
course of eating and assimilation--the sperm and germ cells, or the
two elements that go to form the new animal, whatever they should be
called, eat one another up, and then the mother assimilates them,
more or less, through mutual inter-feeding and inter-breeding between
her and them. But the curious point is that the more profound our
love is the less we are conscious of it as love. True, a nurse tells
her child that she would like to eat it, but this is only an
expression that shows an instinctive recognition of the fact that
eating is a mode of, or rather the acme of, love--no nurse loves her
child half well enough to want really to eat it; put to such proof as
this the love of which she is so profoundly, as she imagines,
sentient proves to be but skin deep. So with our horses and dogs:
we think we dote upon them, but we do not really love them.
What, on the other hand, can awaken less consciousness of warm
affection than an oyster? Who would press an oyster to his heart, or
pat it and want to kiss it? Yet nothing short of its complete
absorption into our own being can in the least satisfy us. No merely
superficial temporary contact of exterior form to exterior form will
serve us. The embrace must be consummate, not achieved by a mocking
environment of draped and muffled arms that leaves no lasting trace
on organisation or consciousness, but by an enfolding within the bare
and warm bosom of an open mouth--a grinding out of all differences of
opinion by the sweet persuasion of the jaws, and the eloquence of a
tongue that now convinces all the more powerfully because it is
inarticulate and deals but with the one universal language of
agglutination. Then we become made one with what we love--not heart
to heart, but protoplasm to protoplasm, and this is far more to the
purpose.
The proof of love, then, like that of any other pleasant pudding, is
in the eating, and tested by this proof we see that consciousness of
love, like all other consciousness vanishes on becoming intense.
While we are yet fully aware of it, we do not love as well as we
think we do. When we really mean business and are hungry with
affection, we do not know that we are in love, but simply go into the
love-shop--for so any eating-house should be more fitly called--ask
the price, pay our money down, and love till we can either love or
pay no longer.
And so with hate. When we really hate a thing it makes us sick, and
we use this expression to symbolise the utmost hatred of which our
nature is capable; but when we know we hate, our hatred is in reality
mild and inoffensive. I, for example, think I hate all those people
whose photographs I see in the shop windows, but I am so conscious of
this that I am convinced, in reality, nothing would please me better
than to be in the shop windows too. So when I see the universities
conferring degrees on any one, or the learned societies moulting the
yearly medals as peacocks moult their tails, I am so conscious of
disapproval as to feel sure I should like a degree or a medal too if
they would only give me one, and hence I conclude that my disapproval
is grounded in nothing more serious than a superficial, transient
jealousy.
The Roman Empire
Nothing will ever die so long as it knows what to do under the
circumstances, in other words so long as it knows its business. The
Roman Empire must have died of inexperience of some kind, I should
think most likely it was puzzled to death by the Christian religion.
But the question is not so much how the Roman Empire or any other
great thing came to an end--everything must come to an end some time,
it is only scientists who wonder that a state should die--the
interesting question is how did the Romans become so great, under
what circumstances were they born and bred? We should watch
childhood and schooldays rather than old age and death-beds.
As I sit writing on the top of a wild-beast pen of the amphitheatre
of Aosta I may note, for one thing, that the Romans were not
squeamish, they had no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals. Again, their ladies did not write in the newspapers. Fancy
Miss Cato reviewing Horace! They had no Frances Power Cobbes, no . .
. s, no . . . s; yet they seem to have got along quite nicely without
these powerful moral engines. The comeliest and most enjoyable races
that we know of were the ancient Greeks, the Italians and the South
Sea Islanders, and they have none of them been purists.
Italians and Englishmen
Italians, and perhaps Frenchmen, consider first whether they like or
want to do a thing and then whether, on the whole, it will do them
any harm. Englishmen, and perhaps Germans, consider first whether
they ought to like a thing and often never reach the questions
whether they do like it and whether it will hurt. There is much to
be said for both systems, but I suppose it is best to combine them as
far as possible.
On Knowing what Gives us Pleasure
i
One can bring no greater reproach against a man than to say that he
does not set sufficient value upon pleasure, and there is no greater
sign of a fool than the thinking that he can tell at once and easily
what it is that pleases him. To know this is not easy, and how to
extend our knowledge of it is the highest and the most neglected of
all arts and branches of education. Indeed, if we could solve the
difficulty of knowing what gives us pleasure, if we could find its
springs, its inception and earliest modus operandi, we should have
discovered the secret of life and development, for the same
difficulty has attended the development of every sense from touch
onwards, and no new sense was ever developed without pains. A man
had better stick to known and proved pleasures, but, if he will
venture in quest of new ones, he should not do so with a light heart.
One reason why we find it so hard to know our own likings is because
we are so little accustomed to try; we have our likings found for us
in respect of by far the greater number of the matters that concern
us; thus we have grown all our limbs on the strength of the likings
of our ancestors and adopt these without question.
Another reason is that, except in mere matters of eating and
drinking, people do not realise the importance of finding out what it
is that gives them pleasure if, that is to say, they would make
themselves as comfortable here as they reasonably can. Very few,
however, seem to care greatly whether they are comfortable or no.
There are some men so ignorant and careless of what gives them
pleasure that they cannot be said ever to have been really born as
living beings at all. They present some of the phenomena of having
been born--they reproduce, in fact, so many of the ideas which we
associate with having been born that it is hard not to think of them
as living beings--but in spite of all appearances the central idea is
wanting. At least one half of the misery which meets us daily might
be removed or, at any rate, greatly alleviated, if those who suffer
by it would think it worth their while to be at any pains to get rid
of it. That they do not so think is proof that they neither know,
nor care to know, more than in a very languid way, what it is that
will relieve them most effectually or, in other words, that the shoe
does not really pinch them so hard as we think it does. For when it
really pinches, as when a man is being flogged, he will seek relief
by any means in his power. So my great namesake said, "Surely the
pleasure is as great Of being cheated as to cheat"; and so, again, I
remember to have seen a poem many years ago in Punch according to
which a certain young lady, being discontented at home, went out into
the world in quest to "Some burden make or burden bear, But which she
did not greatly care--Oh Miseree!" So long as there was discomfort
somewhere it was all right.
To those, however, who are desirous of knowing what gives them
pleasure but do not quite know how to set about it I have no better
advice to give than that they must take the same pains about
acquiring this difficult art as about any other, and must acquire it
in the same way--that is by attending to one thing at a time and not
being in too great a hurry. Proficiency is not to be attained here,
any more than elsewhere, by short cuts or by getting other people to
do work that no other than oneself can do. Above all things it is
necessary here, as in all other branches of study, not to think we
know a thing before we do know it--to make sure of our ground and be
quite certain that we really do like a thing before we say we do.
When you cannot decide whether you like a thing or not, nothing is
easier than to say so and to hang it up among the uncertainties. Or
when you know you do not know and are in such doubt as to see no
chance of deciding, then you may take one side or the other
provisionally and throw yourself into it. This will sometimes make
you uncomfortable, and you will feel you have taken the wrong side
and thus learn that the other was the right one. Sometimes you will
feel you have done right. Any way ere long you will know more about
it. But there must have been a secret treaty with yourself to the
effect that the decision was provisional only. For, after all, the
most important first principle in this matter is the not lightly
thinking you know what you like till you have made sure of your
ground. I was nearly forty before I felt how stupid it was to
pretend to know things that I did not know and I still often catch
myself doing so. Not one of my school-masters taught me this, but
altogether otherwise.
ii
I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I dare say I
could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having
to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like
them at once and no trying at all.
iii
To know whether you are enjoying a piece of music or not you must see
whether you find yourself looking at the advertisements of Pear's
soap at the end of the programme.
De Minimis non Curat Lex
i
Yes, but what is a minimum? Sometimes a maximum is a minimum, and
sometimes the other way about. If you know you know, and if you
don't you don't.
ii
Yes, but what is a minimum? So increased material weight involves
increased moral weight, but where does there begin to be any weight
at all? There is a miracle somewhere. At the point where two very
large nothings have united to form a very little something.
iii
There is no such complete assimilation as assimilation of rhythm. In
fact it is in assimilation of rhythm that what we see as assimilation
consists.
When two liquid bodies come together with nearly the same rhythms,
as, say, two tumblers of water, differing but very slightly, the two
assimilate rapidly--becoming homogeneous throughout. So with wine
and water which assimilate, or at any rate form a new homogeneous
substance, very rapidly. Not so with oil and water. Still, I should
like to know whether it would not be possible to have so much water
and so little oil that the water would in time absorb the oil.
I have not thought about it, but it seems as though the maxim de
minimis non curat lex--the fact that a wrong, a contradiction in
terms, a violation of all our ordinary canons does not matter and
should be brushed aside--it seems as though this maxim went very low
down in the scale of nature, as though it were the one principle
rendering combination (integration) and, I suppose, dissolution
(disintegration) also, possible. For combination of any kind
involves contradiction in terms; it involves a self-stultification on
the part of one or more things, more or less complete in both of
them. For one or both cease to be, and to cease to be is to
contradict all one's fundamental axioms or terms.
And this is always going on in the mental world as much as in the
material; everything is always changing and stultifying itself more
or less completely. There is no permanence of identity so absolute,
either in the physical world, or in our conception of the word
"identity," that it is not crossed with the notion of perpetual
change which, pro tanto, destroys identity. Perfect, absolute
identity is like perfect, absolute anything--as near an approach to
nothing, or nonsense, as our minds can grasp. It is, then, in the
essence of our conception of identity that nothing should maintain a
perfect identity; there is an element of disintegration in the only
conception of integration that we can form.
What is it, then, that makes this conflict not only possible and
bearable but even pleasant? What is it that so oils the machinery of
our thoughts that things which would otherwise cause intolerable
friction and heat produce no jar?
Surely it is the principle that a very overwhelming majority rides
rough-shod with impunity over a very small minority; that a drop of
brandy in a gallon of water is practically no brandy; that a dozen
maniacs among a hundred thousand people produce no unsettling effect
upon our minds; that a well-written i will go as an i even though the
dot be omitted--it seems to me that it is this principle, which is
embodied in de minimis non curat lex, that makes it possible that
there should be majora and a lex to care about them. This is saying
in another form that association does not stick to the letter of its
bond.
Saints
Saints are always grumbling because the world will not take them at
their own estimate; so they cry out upon this place and upon that,
saying it does not know the things belonging to its peace and that it
will be too late soon and that people will be very sorry then that
they did not make more of the grumbler, whoever he may be, inasmuch
as he will make it hot for them and pay them out generally.
All this means: "Put me in a better social and financial position
than I now occupy; give me more of the good things of this life, if
not actual money yet authority (which is better loved by most men
than even money itself), to reward me because I am to have such an
extraordinary good fortune and high position in the world which is to
come."
When their contemporaries do not see this and tell them that they
cannot expect to have it both ways, they lose their tempers, shake
the dust from their feet and go sulking off into the wilderness.
This is as regards themselves; to their followers they say: "You
must not expect to be able to make the best of both worlds. The
thing is absurd; it cannot be done. You must choose which you
prefer, go in for it and leave the other, for you cannot have both."
When a saint complains that people do not know the things belonging
to their peace, what he really means is that they do not sufficiently
care about the things belonging to his own peace.
Prayer
i
Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be
certified how long I have to live (Ps. xxxix. 5).
Of all prayers this is the insanest. That the one who uttered it
should have made and retained a reputation is a strong argument in
favour of his having been surrounded with courtiers. "Lord, let me
not know mine end" would be better, only it would be praying for what
God has already granted us. "Lord, let me know A.B.'s end" would be
bad enough. Even though A.B. were Mr. Gladstone--we might hear he
was not to die yet. "Lord, stop A.B. from knowing my end" would be
reasonable, if there were any use in praying that A.B. might not be
able to do what he never can do. Or can the prayer refer to the
other end of life? "Lord, let me know my beginning." This again
would not be always prudent.
The prayer is a silly piece of petulance and it would have served the
maker of it right to have had it granted. "A painful and lingering
disease followed by death" or "Ninety, a burden to yourself and every
one else"--there is not so much to pick and choose between them.
Surely, "I thank thee, O Lord, that thou hast hidden mine end from
me" would be better. The sting of death is in foreknowledge of the
when and the how.
If again he had prayed that he might be able to make his psalms a
little more lively, and be saved from becoming the bore which he has
been to so many generations of sick persons and young children--or
that he might find a publisher for them with greater facility--but
there is no end to it. The prayer he did pray was about the worst he
could have prayed and the psalmist, being the psalmist, naturally
prayed it--unless I have misquoted him.
ii
Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without
use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously. I
dropped saying mine suddenly once for all without malice prepense, on
the night of the 29th of September, 1859, when I went on board the
Roman Emperor to sail for New Zealand. I had said them the night
before and doubted not that I was always going to say them as I
always had done hitherto. That night, I suppose, the sense of change
was so great that it shook them quietly off. I was not then a
sceptic; I had got as far as disbelief in infant baptism but no
further. I felt no compunction of conscience, however, about leaving
off my morning and evening prayers--simply I could no longer say
them.
iii
Lead us not into temptation (Matt. vi. 13).
For example; I am crossing from Calais to Dover and there is a well-
known popular preacher on board, say Archdeacon Farrar.
I have my camera in my hand and though the sea is rough the sun is
brilliant. I see the archdeacon come on board at Calais and seat
himself upon the upper deck, looking as though he had just stepped
out of a band-box. Can I be expected to resist the temptation of
snapping him? Suppose that in the train for an hour before reaching
Calais I had said any number of times, "Lead us not into temptation,"
is it likely that the archdeacon would have been made to take some
other boat or to stay in Calais, or that I myself, by being delayed
on my homeward journey, should have been led into some other
temptation, though perhaps smaller? Had I not better snap him and
have done with it? Is there enough chance of good result to make it
worth while to try the experiment? The general consensus of opinion
is that there is not.
And as for praying for strength to resist temptation--granted that
if, when I saw the archdeacon in the band-box stage, I had
immediately prayed for strength I might have been enabled to put the
evil thing from me for a time, how long would this have been likely
to last when I saw his face grow saintlier and saintlier? I am an
excellent sailor myself, but he is not, and when I see him there, his
eyes closed and his head thrown back, like a sleeping St. Joseph in a
shovel hat, with a basin beside him, can I expect to be saved from
snapping him by such a formula as "Deliver us from evil"?
Is it in photographer's nature to do so? When David found himself in
the cave with Saul he cut off one of Saul's coattails; if he had had
a camera and there had been enough light he would have photographed
him; but would it have been in flesh and blood for him neither to cut
off his coat-tail nor to snap him?
There is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring
lion seeking whom he may devour.
iv
Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
This is from the evening hymn which all respectable children are
taught. It sounds well, but it is immoral.
Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater
benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not
only lived but also died before us. For if the old ones had not in
course of time gone there would have been no progress; all our
civilisation is due to the arrangement whereby no man shall live for
ever, and to this huge mass of advantage we must each contribute our
mite; that is to say, when our turn comes we too must die. The
hardship is that interested persons should be able to scare us into
thinking the change we call death to be the desperate business which
they make it out to be. There is no hardship in having to suffer
that change.
Bishop Ken, however, goes too far. Undesirable, of course, death
must always be to those who are fairly well off, but it is
undesirable that any living being should live in habitual
indifference to death. The indifference should be kept for worthy
occasions, and even then, though death be gladly faced, it is not
healthy that it should be faced as though it were a mere undressing
and going to bed.
XIV--HIGGLEDY-PIGGLEDY
Preface to Vol. II
On indexing this volume, as with Vols. I and IV which are already
indexed and as, no doubt, will be the case with any that I may live
to index later, I am alarmed at the triviality of many of these
notes, the ineptitude of many and the obvious untenableness of many
that I should have done much better to destroy.
Elmsley, in one of his letters to Dr. Butler, says that an author is
the worst person to put one of his own works through the press (Life
of Dr. Butler, I, 88). It seems to me that he is the worst person
also to make selections from his own notes or indeed even, in my
case, to write them. I cannot help it. They grew as, with little
disturbance, they now stand; they are not meant for publication; the
bad ones serve as bread for the jam of the good ones; it was less
trouble to let them go than to think whether they ought not to be
destroyed. The retort, however, is obvious; no thinking should have
been required in respect of many--a glance should have consigned them
to the waste-paper basket. I know it and I know that many a one of
those who look over these books--for that they will be looked over by
not a few I doubt not--will think me to have been a greater fool than
I probably was. I cannot help it. I have at any rate the
consolation of also knowing that, however much I may have irritated,
displeased or disappointed them, they will not be able to tell me so;
and I think that, to some, such a record of passing moods and
thoughts good, bad and indifferent will be more valuable as throwing
light upon the period to which it relates than it would have been if
it had been edited with greater judgment.
Besides, Vols. I and IV being already bound, I should not have enough
to form Vols. II and III if I cut out all those that ought to be cut
out. [June, 1898.]
P.S.--If I had re-read my preface to Vol. IV, I need not have written
the above.
Waste-Paper Baskets
Every one should keep a mental waste-paper basket and the older he
grows the more things he will consign to it--torn up to irrecoverable
tatters.
Flies in the Milk-Jug
Saving scraps is like picking flies out of the milk-jug. We do not
mind doing this, I suppose, because we feel sure the flies will never
want to borrow money off us. We do not feel so sure about anything
much bigger than a fly. If it were a mouse that had got into the
milk-jug, we should call the cat at once.
My Thoughts
They are like persons met upon a journey; I think them very agreeable
at first but soon find, as a rule, that I am tired of them.
Our Ideas
They are for the most part like bad sixpences and we spend our lives
in trying to pass them on one another.
Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas
We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up
again and again, and nibble, nibble--no matter how often we drive
them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good
strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not
reappearing till they do so in another shape.
Incoherency of New Ideas
An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent;
all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We
should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to
wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the sooner we get rid of
them the better.
An Apology for the Devil
It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case.
God has written all the books.
Hallelujah
When we exclaim so triumphantly "Hallelujah! for the Lord God
omnipotent reigneth" we only mean that we think no small beer of
ourselves, that our God is a much greater God than any one else's
God, that he was our father's God before us, and that it is all
right, respectable and as it should be.
Hating
It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.
Hamlet, Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick and others
The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead
men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or
woman should have lived.
Reputation
The evil that men do lives after them. Yes, and a good deal of the
evil that they never did as well.
Science and Business
The best class of scientific mind is the same as the best class of
business mind. The great desideratum in either case is to know how
much evidence is enough to warrant action. It is as unbusiness-like
to want too much evidence before buying or selling as to be content
with too little. The same kind of qualities are wanted in either
case. The difference is that if the business man makes a mistake, he
commonly has to suffer for it, whereas it is rarely that scientific
blundering, so long as it is confined to theory, entails loss on the
blunderer. On the contrary it very often brings him fame, money and
a pension. Hence the business man, if he is a good one, will take
greater care not to overdo or underdo things than the scientific man
can reasonably be expected to take.
Scientists
There are two classes, those who want to know and do not care whether
others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about
knowing but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing.
Scientific Terminology
This is the Scylla's cave which men of science are preparing for
themselves to be able to pounce out upon us from it, and into which
we cannot penetrate.
Scientists and Drapers
Why should the botanist, geologist or other-ist give himself such
airs over the draper's assistant? Is it because he names his plants
or specimens with Latin names and divides them into genera and
species, whereas the draper does not formulate his classifications,
or at any rate only uses his mother tongue when he does? Yet how
like the sub-divisions of textile life are to those of the animal and
vegetable kingdoms! A few great families--cotton, linen, hempen,
woollen, silk, mohair, alpaca--into what an infinite variety of
genera and species do not these great families subdivide themselves?
And does it take less labour, with less intelligence, to master all
these and to acquire familiarity with their various habits, habitats
and prices than it does to master the details of any other great
branch of science? I do not know. But when I think of Shoolbred's
on the one hand and, say, the ornithological collections of the
British Museum upon the other, I feel as though it would take me less
trouble to master the second than the first.
Men of Science
If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and
about his bed and spying out all his ways.
Sparks
Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time,
nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may
set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze
twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.
Dumb-Bells
I regard them with suspicion as academic.
Purgatory
Time is the only true purgatory.
Greatness
He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.
The Vanity of Human Wishes
There is only one thing vainer and that is the having no wishes.
Jones's Conscience
He said he had not much conscience, and what little he had was
guilty.
Nihilism
The Nihilists do not believe in nothing; they only believe in nothing
that does not commend itself to themselves; that is, they will not
allow that anything may be beyond their comprehension. As their
comprehension is not great their creed is, after all, very nearly
nihil.
On Breaking Habits
To begin knocking off the habit in the evening, then the afternoon as
well and, finally, the morning too is better than to begin cutting it
off in the morning and then go on to the afternoon and evening. I
speak from experience as regards smoking and can say that when one
comes to within an hour or two of smoke-time one begins to be
impatient for it, whereas there will be no impatience after the time
for knocking off has been confirmed as a habit.
Dogs
The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself
with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool
of himself too.
Future and Past
The Will-be and the Has-been touch us more nearly than the Is. So we
are more tender towards children and old people than to those who are
in the prime of life.
Nature
As the word is now commonly used it excludes nature's most
interesting productions--the works of man. Nature is usually taken
to mean mountains, rivers, clouds and undomesticated animals and
plants. I am not indifferent to this half of nature, but it
interests me much less than the other half.
Lucky and Unlucky
People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get
absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what
they have been led to expect.
Definitions
i
As, no matter what cunning system of checks we devise, we must in the
end trust some one whom we do not check, but to whom we give
unreserved confidence, so there is a point at which the understanding
and mental processes must be taken as understood without further
question or definition in words. And I should say that this point
should be fixed pretty early in the discussion.
ii
There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and
definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A
faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who
is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one.
iii
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of
words.
iv
Definitions are a kind of scratching and generally leave a sore place
more sore than it was before.
v
As Love is too young to know what conscience is, so Truth and Genius
are too old to know what definition is.
Money
It has such an inherent power to run itself clear of taint that human
ingenuity cannot devise the means of making it work permanent
mischief, any more than means can be found of torturing people beyond
what they can bear. Even if a man founds a College of Technical
Instruction, the chances are ten to one that no one will be taught
anything and that it will have been practically left to a number of
excellent professors who will know very well what to do with it.
Wit
There is no Professor of Wit at either University. Surely they might
as reasonably have a professor of wit as of poetry.
Oxford and Cambridge
The dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach
them anything.
Cooking
There is a higher average of good cooking at Oxford and Cambridge
than elsewhere. The cooking is better than the curriculum. But
there is no Chair of Cookery, it is taught by apprenticeship in the
kitchens.
Perseus and St. George
These dragon-slayers did not take lessons in dragon-slaying, nor do
leaders of forlorn hopes generally rehearse their parts beforehand.
Small things may be rehearsed, but the greatest are always do-or-die,
neck-or-nothing matters.
Specialism and Generalism
Woe to the specialist who is not a pretty fair generalist, and woe to
the generalist who is not also a bit of a specialist.
Silence and Tact
Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not
silence.
Truth-tellers
Professional truth-tellers may be trusted to profess that they are
telling the truth.
Street Preachers
These are the costermongers and barrow men of the religious world.
Providence and Othello
Providence, in making the rain fall also upon the sea, was like the
man who, when he was to play Othello, must needs black himself all
over.
Providence and Improvidence
i
We should no longer say: Put your trust in Providence, but in
Improvidence, for this is what we mean.
ii
To put one's trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one
will chance it.
iii
There is nothing so imprudent or so improvident as over-prudence or
over-providence.
Epiphany
If Providence could be seen at all, he would probably turn out to be
a very disappointing person--a little wizened old gentleman with a
cold in his head, a red nose and a comforter round his neck,
whistling o'er the furrow'd land or crooning to himself as he goes
aimlessly along the streets, poking his way about and loitering
continually at shop-windows and second-hand book-stalls.
Fortune
Like Wisdom, Fortune crieth in the streets, and no man regardeth.
There is not an advertisement supplement to the Times--nay, hardly a
half sheet of newspaper that comes into a house wrapping up this or
that, but it gives information which would make a man's fortune, if
he could only spot it and detect the one paragraph that would do this
among the 99 which would wreck him if he had anything to do with
them.
Gold-Mines
Gold is not found in quartz alone; its richest lodes are in the eyes
and ears of the public, but these are harder to work and to prospect
than any quartz vein.
Things and Purses
Everything is like a purse--there may be money in it, and we can
generally say by the feel of it whether there is or is not.
Sometimes, however, we must turn it inside out before we can be quite
sure whether there is anything in it or no. When I have turned a
proposition inside out, put it to stand on its head, and shaken it, I
have often been surprised to find how much came out of it.
Solomon in all his Glory
But, in the first place, the lilies do toil and spin after their own
fashion, and, in the next, it was not desirable that Solomon should
be dressed like a lily of the valley.
David's Teachers
David said he had more understanding than his teachers. If his
teachers were anything like mine this need not imply much
understanding on David's part. And if his teachers did not know more
than the Psalms--it is absurd. It is merely swagger, like the German
Emperor. [1897.]
S. Michael
He contended with the devil about the body of Moses. Now, I do not
believe that any reasonable person would contend about the body of
Moses with the devil or with any one else.
One Form of Failure
From a worldly point of view there is no mistake so great as that of
being always right.
Andromeda
The dragon was never in better health and spirits than on the morning
when Perseus came down upon him. It is said that Andromeda told
Perseus she had been thinking how remarkably well he was looking. He
had got up quite in his usual health--and so on.
When I said this to Ballard [a fellow art-student at Heatherley's]
and that other thing which I said about Andromeda in Life and Habit,
{225} he remarked that he wished it had been so in the poets.
I looked at him. "Ballard," I said, "I also am 'the poets.'"
Self-Confidence
Nothing is ever any good unless it is thwarted with self-distrust
though in the main self-confident.
Wandering
When the inclination is not obvious, the mind meanders, or maunders,
as a stream in a flat meadow.
Poverty
I shun it because I have found it so apt to become contagious; but I
fancy my constitution is more seasoned against it now than formerly.
I hope that what I have gone through may have made me immune.
Pedals or Drones
The discords of every age are rendered possible by being taken on a
drone or pedal of cant, common form and conventionality. This drone
is, as it were, the flour and suet of a plum pudding.
Evasive Nature
She is one long This-way-and-it-isness and, at the same time, That-
way-and-it-isn'tness. She flies so like a snipe that she is hard to
hit.
Fashion
Fashion is like God, man cannot see it in its holy of holies and
live. And it is, like God, increate, springing out of nothing, yet
the maker of all things--ever changing yet the same yesterday, to-day
and for ever.
Doctors and Clergymen
A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of
healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing
conduct.
God is Love
I dare say. But what a mischievous devil Love is!
Common Chords
If Man is the tonic and God the dominant, the Devil is certainly the
sub-dominant and Woman is the relative minor.
God and the Devil
God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of
labour.
Sex
The sexes are the first--or are among the first great experiments in
the social subdivision of labour.
Women
If you choose to insist on the analogies and points of resemblance
between men and women, they are so great that the differences seem
indeed small. If, on the other hand, you are in a mood for
emphasising the points of difference, you can show that men and women
have hardly anything in common. And so with anything: if a man
wants to make a case he can generally find a way of doing so.
Offers of Marriage
Women sometimes say that they have had no offers, and only wish that
some one had ever proposed to them. This is not the right way to put
it. What they should say is that though, like all women, they have
been proposing to men all their lives, yet they grieve to remember
that they have been invariably refused.
Marriage
i
The question of marriage or non-marriage is only the question of
whether it is better to be spoiled one way or another.
ii
In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.
iii
Inoculation, or a hair of the dog that is going to bite you--this
principle should be introduced in respect of marriage and
speculation.
Life and Love
To live is like to love--all reason is against it, and all healthy
instinct for it.
The Basis of Life
We may say what we will, but Life is, au fond, sensual.
Woman Suffrage
I will vote for it when women have left off making a noise in the
reading-room of the British Museum, when they leave off wearing high
head-dresses in the pit of a theatre and when I have seen as many as
twelve women in all catch hold of the strap or bar on getting into an
omnibus.
Manners Makyth Man
Yes, but they make woman still more.
Women and Religion
It has been said that all sensible men are of the same religion and
that no sensible man ever says what that religion is. So all
sensible men are of the same opinion about women and no sensible man
ever says what that opinion is.
Happiness
Behold and see if there be any happiness like unto the happiness of
the devils when they found themselves cast out of Mary Magdalene.
Sorrow within Sorrow
He was in reality damned glad; he told people he was sorry he was not
more sorry, and here began the first genuine sorrow, for he was
really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was
not more sorry.
Going Away
I can generally bear the separation, but I don't like the leave-
taking.
XV--TITLES AND SUBJECTS
Titles
A good title should aim at making what follows as far as possible
superfluous to those who know anything of the subject.
"The Ancient Mariner"
This poem would not have taken so well if it had been called "The Old
Sailor," so that Wardour Street has its uses.
For Unwritten Articles, Essays, Stories
The Art of Quarrelling.
Christian Death-beds.
The Book of Babes and Sucklings.
Literary Struldbrugs.
The Life of the World to Come.
The Limits of Good Faith.
Art, Money and Religion.
The Third Class Excursion Train, or Steam-boat, as the Church of the
Future.
The Utter Speculation involved in much of the good advice that is
commonly given--as never to sell a reversion, etc.
Tracts for Children, warning them against the virtues of their
elders.
Making Ready for Death as a Means of Prolonging Life. An Essay
concerning Human Misunderstanding. So McCulloch [a fellow art-
student at Heatherley's, a very fine draughtsman] used to say that he
drew a great many lines and saved the best of them. Illusion,
mistake, action taken in the dark--these are among the main sources
of our progress.
The Elements of Immorality for the Use of Earnest Schoolmasters.
Family Prayers: A series of perfectly plain and sensible ones asking
for what people really do want without any kind of humbug.
A Penitential Psalm as David would have written it if he had been
reading Herbert Spencer.
A Few Little Crows which I have to pick with various people.
The Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity.
The Battle of the Prigs and Blackguards.
That Good may Come.
The Marriage of Inconvenience.
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