Short Studies on Great Subjects Part 28

How far we are in these days from approximating to such a combination we need not here insist. Criticism in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems to have accomplished great intellectual triumphs; and in Germany and France, and among ourselves, we have our new schools of the philosophy of history: yet their real successes have hitherto only been destructive. When philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a theory: and what is a theory but an imperfect generalisation caught up by a predisposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras but a theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which he can mould to ill.u.s.trate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory be what it will? Intellect can destroy, but it cannot restore life; call in the creative faculties--call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have living figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which ever lived before. The high faith in which Love and Intellect can alone unite in their fulness, has not yet found utterance in modern historians.

The greatest man who has as yet given himself to the recording of human affairs is, beyond question, Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a serene calmness of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling. He took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may have been Republican, but he has left no sign whether he was either: he appears to have sifted facts with scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn, his hatred, according only to individual merit: and his sentiments are rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of his portraits, than expressed in words by himself. Yet such a power of seeing into things was only possible to him, because there was no party left with which he could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in Rome through which he could feel. The spirit of Rome, the spirit of life had gone away to seek other forms, and the world of Tacitus was a heap of decaying inst.i.tutions; a stage where men and women, as they themselves were individually base or n.o.ble, played over their little parts. Life indeed was come into the world, was working in it, and silently shaping the old dead corpse into fresh and beautiful being. Tacitus alludes to it once only, in one brief scornful chapter; and the most poorly gifted of those forlorn biographers whose unreasoning credulity was piling up the legends of St. Mary and the Apostles, which now drive the ecclesiastical historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among mankind, than the keenest and gravest intellect which ever set itself to contemplate them.

And now having in some degree cleared the ground of difficulties, let us go back to the Lives of the Saints. If Bede tells us lies about St.

Cuthbert, we will disbelieve his stories; but we will not call Bede a liar, even though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the clearest evidence.

We are driven to no such alternative; our canons of criticism are different from Bede's, and so are our notions of probability. Bede would expect _a priori_, and would therefore consider as sufficiently attested by a consent of popular tradition, what the oaths of living witnesses would fail to make credible to a modern English jury. We will call Bede a liar only if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert as a picture of a life which he considered admirable and excellent, as one after which he was endeavouring to model his own, and which he held up as a pattern of imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it admirable at all, when he was making no effort at the austerities which he was lauding. The histories of the saints are written as ideals of a Christian life; they have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and straightforward as they are,--if they are not this they are nothing. For fourteen centuries the religious mind of the Catholic world threw them out as its form of hero wors.h.i.+p, as the heroic patterns of a form of human life which each Christian within his own limits was endeavouring to realise. The first martyrs and confessors were to those poor monks what the first Dorian conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrtaeus, what Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were wherever Homer was sung or read; or in more modern times, what the Knights of the Round Table were in the halls of the Norman castles. The Catholic mind was expressing its conception of the highest human excellence; and the result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As with the battle heroes, too, the inspiration lies in the universal idea; the varieties of character (with here and there an exception) are slight and unimportant; the object being to create examples for universal human imitation. Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spirit of chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain, or Antony in the desert, are equal models of patient austerity. The knights fight with giants, enchanters, robbers, unknightly n.o.bles, or furious wild beasts; the Christians fight with the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight leaves the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint in quest of penance, and on the bare rocks or in desolate wildernesses subdues the devil in his flesh with prayers and penances; and so alien is it all to the whole thought and system of the modern Christian, that he either rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures, or receives them with disdainful wonder, as one more shameful form of superst.i.tion with which human nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.

Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of monastic asceticism, it seems necessary to insist that there really was such a thing; there is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many centuries lead the sort of life which saints are said to have led. We have got a notion that the friars were a snug, comfortable set, after all; and the life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern university, where the old monks' language and affectation of unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist with as large a ma.s.s of bodily enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate. Very likely this was the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen in the fifteenth century. It was a symptom of a very rapid disorder which had set in among them, and which promptly terminated in dissolution. But long, long ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which, wisely or foolishly, these old monks and hermits did make themselves a very hard life of it; and the legend only exceeded the reality in being a very slightly idealised portrait. We are not speaking of the miracles; that is a wholly different question. When men knew little of the order of nature, whatever came to pa.s.s without an obvious cause was at once set down to influences beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad powers, of course the especial servants of G.o.d would not be left without graces to outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were many other reasons why the saints should work miracles. They had done so under the old dispensation, and there was no obvious reason why Christians should be worse off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the modern phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest natural is the highest supernatural, nevertheless natural facts permit us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working miracles, but they worked miracles because they had become saints; and the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they had used to make themselves what they were: and as we said, in this part of the business there is unquestionable basis of truth--scarcely even exaggeration. We have doc.u.mentary evidence, which has been filtered through the sharp ordeal of party hatred, of the way in which some men (and those, not mere ignorant fanatics, but men of vast mind and vast influence in their days) conducted themselves, where _myth_ has no room to enter. We know something of the hair-s.h.i.+rt of Thomas a Becket; and there was another poor monk, whose asceticism imagination could not easily outrun; he who, when the earth's mighty ones were banded together to crush him under their armed heels, spoke but one little word, and it fell among them like the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their hands against each other, and the armies melted away; and the proudest monarch of the earth lay at that monk's threshold three winter nights in the scanty clothing of penance, suing miserably for forgiveness. Or again, to take a fairer figure. There is a poem extant, the genuineness of which, we believe, has not been challenged, composed by Columbkill, commonly called St. Columba. He was a hermit in Arran, a rocky island in the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was summoned, we do not know how, but in a manner which appeared to him to be a Divine call, to go away and be Bishop of Iona. The poem is a 'Farewell to Arran,' which he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us see something of a hermit's life there. 'Farewell,' he begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), 'a long farewell to thee, Arran of my heart. Paradise is with thee; the garden of G.o.d within the sound of thy bells. The angels love Arran. Each day an angel comes there to join in its services.' And then he goes on to describe his 'dear cell,' and the holy happy hours which he had spent there, 'with the wind whistling through the loose stones, and the sea spray hanging on his hair.' Arran is no better than a wild rock. It is strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of the old hermitages; and at their best they could have been but such places as sheep would huddle under in a storm, and s.h.i.+ver in the cold and wet which would pierce through the c.h.i.n.ks of the walls.

Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there are silent witnesses which cannot lie, that tell the same touching story. Whoever loiters among the ruins of a monastery will see, commonly leading out of the cloisters, rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept up) a perpetual ooze; for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light. Such as they are, a well-kept dog would object to accept a night's lodging in them; and if they had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic tongues would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger perhaps supposes that they were the very dungeons of which he has heard such terrible things. He asks his guide, and his guide tells him they were the monks' dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping roof above them, was the self-chosen home of those poor men. Through winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer suns.h.i.+ne, generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at last lay down and died.

It is all gone now--gone as if it had never been; and it was as foolish as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would have been mischievous, to revive a devotional interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have produced but one more unreality in an age already too full of such. No one supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived; that any man, however earnest in his religion, would have gone looking for earth floors and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he could get anything better. Either we are wiser, or more humane, or more self-indulgent; at any rate we are something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by an impa.s.sable gulf which this age or this epoch will not see bridged over. Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists, however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected, and were endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in our educational system; a very serious blank indeed, and one which, somehow, we must contrive to get filled if the education of character is ever to be more than a name with us. To try and teach people how to live without giving them examples in which our rules are ill.u.s.trated, is like teaching them to draw by the rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without designs in which to study the effects; or to write verse by the laws of rhyme and metre, without song or poem in which rhyme and metre are exhibited. It is a principle which we have forgotten, and it is one which the old Catholics did not forget. We do not mean that they set out with saying to themselves, 'We must have examples, we must have ideals;' very likely they never thought about it at all; love for their holy men, and a thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and love unconsciously working gave them the best for which they could have wished. The boy at school at the monastery, the young monk disciplining himself as yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had devoted himself, the old one halting on toward the close of his pilgrimage,--all of them had before their eyes, in the legend of the patron saint, a personal realisation of all they were trying after; leading them on, beckoning to them, and pointing, as they stumbled among their difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had left, as he had trod that hard path before them. It was as if the Church was for ever saying to them:--'You have doubts and fears, and trials and temptations, outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and feel the burden of your sin. Here was one who, like you, _in this very spot_, under the same sky, treading the same soil, among the same hills and woods and rocks and rivers, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did penance, and washed out his sins; he fought the fight, he vanquished the Evil One, he triumphed, and now he reigns a saint with Christ in heaven. The same ground which yields you your food, once supplied him; he breathed, and lived, and felt, and died _here_; and now, from his throne in the sky, he is still looking lovingly down on his children, making intercession for you that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by he may himself offer you at G.o.d's throne as his own.' It is impossible to measure the influence which a personal reality of this kind must have exercised on the mind, thus daily and hourly impressed upon it through a life; there is nothing vague any more, no abstract excellences to strain after; all is distinct, personal, palpable. It is no dream. The saint's bones are under the altar; nay, perhaps, his very form and features undissolved. Under some late abbot the coffin may have been opened and the body seen without mark or taint of decay. Such things have been, and the emaciation of a saint will account for it without a miracle. Daily some incident of his story is read aloud, or spoken of, or preached upon. In quaint beautiful forms it lives in light in the long chapel windows; and in the summer matins his figure, lighted up in splendour, gleams down on the congregation as they pray, or streams in mysterious tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft celestial glory, and s.h.i.+ning as he s.h.i.+nes in heaven. Alas, alas! where is it all gone?

We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide question, what possibly may have been the meaning of so large a portion of the human race, and so many centuries of Christianity, having been surrendered and seemingly sacrificed to the working out this dreary asceticism. If right once, then it is right now; if now worthless, then it could never have been more than worthless; and the energies which spent themselves on it were like corn sown upon the rock, or substance given for that which is not bread. We supposed ourselves challenged recently for our facts. Here is an enormous fact which there is no evading. It is not to be slurred over with indolent generalities, with unmeaning talk of superst.i.tion, of the twilight of the understanding, of barbarism, and of nursery credulity; it is matter for the philosophy of history, if the philosophy has yet been born which can deal with it; one of the solid, experienced facts in the story of mankind which must be accepted and considered with that respectful deference which all facts claim of their several sciences, and which will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing it to have a meaning) except to reverence, to sympathy, to love. We must remember that the men who wrote these stories, and who practised these austerities, were the same men who composed our liturgies, who built our churches and our cathedrals--and the gothic cathedral is, perhaps, on the whole, the most magnificent creation which the mind of man has as yet thrown out of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy of history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being certain progressive organising laws in which the fretful lives of each of us are gathered into and subordinated in some larger unity, through which age is linked to age, as we move forward, with an horizon expanding and advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of any human phenomenon is a criterion of its importance, and definite forms of thought working through long historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast laws--imply a distinct step in human progress. Something previously unrealised is being lived out, and rooted into the heart of mankind.

Nature never half does her work. She goes over it, and over it, to make a.s.surance sure, and makes good her ground with wearying repet.i.tion. A single section of a short paper is but a small s.p.a.ce to enter on so vast an enterprise; nevertheless, a few very general words shall be ventured as a suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may possibly have meant.

First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the world, whatever form the spirit of the world a.s.sumes, the ideals of Christianity will of course be their opposite; as one verges into one extreme, the other will verge into the contrary. In those rough times the law was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart which guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded; and monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would be the destruction and abnegation of the animal nature. The war hero in the battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis of the fleshly man--the saint in the desert of the spiritual.

But this interpretation is slight, imperfect, and if true at all only partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not contradictories; they are the complements in the perfect character; and in the middle ages, as in all ages of genuine earnestness, they interfused and penetrated each other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors; and those grand old figures which sleep cross-legged in the cathedral aisles were something higher than only one more form of the beast of prey.

Monasticism represented something more positive than a protest against the world. We believe it to have been the realisation of the infinite loveliness and beauty of personal purity.

In the earlier civilisation, the Greeks, however genuine their reverence for the G.o.ds, do not seem to have supposed any part of their duty to the G.o.ds to consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as was their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as beauty of form, with all their loftiness and their n.o.bleness, with their ready love of moral excellence when manifested, as fort.i.tude, or devotion to liberty and to home, they had little or no idea of what we mean by morality. With a few rare exceptions, pollution, too detestable to be even named among ourselves, was of familiar and daily occurrence among their greatest men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman; and was not supposed to be incompatible, and was not, in fact, incompatible with any of those especial excellences which we so admire in the Greek character.

Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of the republic), there was a sufficiently austere morality. A public officer of state, whose business was to enquire into the private lives of the citizens, and to punish offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only once on this planet. There was never a nation before, and there has been none since, with sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality was not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself. It was obedience to law, practised and valued, loved for what resulted from it, for the strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved for itself. The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and it submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as the energy of the old spirit endured. But as soon as that energy grew slack--when the religion was no longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in, and there was no more danger to face, and the world was at their feet, all was swept away as before a whirlwind; there was no loveliness in virtue to make it desired, and the Rome of the Caesars presents, in its later ages, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the coa.r.s.est animal desire, with means unlimited to gratify it. In Latin literature, as little as in the Greek, is there any sense of the beauty of purity.

Moral essays on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the wise man whose pa.s.sions and whose appet.i.tes are trained into obedience to reason. But this is no more than the philosophy of the old Roman life, which got itself expressed in words when men were tired of the reality.

It involves no sense of sin. If sin could be indulged without weakening self-command, or without hurting other people, Roman philosophy would have nothing to say against it.

The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy. Without speculating on the _why_, they felt that indulgence of animal pa.s.sion did, in fact, pollute them, and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.

Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces of the universe, giving the spirit to G.o.d, but declaring matter to be eternally and incurably evil; and looking forward to the time when the spirit should be emanc.i.p.ated from the body, as the beginning of, or as the return to, its proper existence, a man like Plotinus took no especial care what became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of flesh. If the body sinned, sin was its element; it could not do other than sin; purity of conduct could not make the body clean, and no amount of bodily indulgence could shed a taint upon the spirit--a very comfortable doctrine, and one which, under various disguises, has appeared a good many times on the earth. But Christianity, shaking all this off, would present the body to G.o.d as a pure and holy sacrifice, as so much of the material world conquered from the appet.i.tes and l.u.s.ts, and from the devil whose abode they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and scourgings, the penances and night-watchings; it was this which sent St. Anthony to the tombs and set Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh, and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much as one corrupt thought.

And they may have been absurd and extravagant. When the feeling is stronger than the judgment, men are very apt to be extravagant. If, in the recoil from Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint thus purified had contracted supernatural virtue and could work miracles, they had not sufficiently attended to the facts, and so far are not unexceptionable witnesses to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and in virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage--we are lifted forward a mighty step which we can never again retrace. Personal purity is not the whole for which we have to care: it is but one feature in the ideal character of man. The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us poor, mean, and emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is with science; generations of men have given themselves exclusively to single branches, which, when mastered, form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in life, so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years to make good a single step. Weary and tedious enough it seems when we cease to speak in large language, and remember the numbers of individual souls who have been at work at the process; but who knows whereabouts we are in the duration of the race? Is humanity crawling out of the cradle, or tottering into the grave? Is it in nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood? Who knows? It is enough for us to be sure of our steps when we have taken them, and thankfully to accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it is impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to any character which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth we require, not greatness only, but goodness; and not that goodness only which begins and ends in conduct correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure feeling for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and susceptible as woman's modesty.

So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil which hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.

If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of modern Christianity, they either revile the superst.i.tion or pity the ignorance which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion--and, loud in their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross along their journey through life, they set it by, pa.s.s it over, dismiss it out of history, with some poor commonplace simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will not do.

Mankind have not been so long on this planet altogether, that we can allow so large a chasm to be scooped out of their spiritual existence.

We intended to leave our readers with something lighter than all this in the shape of literary criticism, and a few specimens of the biographical style: in both of these we must now, however, be necessarily brief.

Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals, should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never read a late life when he can command an early one; for the genius in them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like river-water, is most pure nearest to the fountain. We are lucky in possessing several specimens of the mode of their growth in late and early lives of the same saints, and the process in all is similar. Out of the unnumbered lives of St. Bride, three are left; out of the sixty-six of St. Patrick, there are eight; the first of each belonging to the sixth century, the latest to the thirteenth. The earliest in each instance are in verse; they belong to a time when there was no one to write such things, and were popular in form and popular in their origin. The flow is easy, the style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and we exchange the exuberance of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. The marvellous in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the after-miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of poets'

metaphors for literal truth. There is often real, genial, human beauty in the old verse. The first two stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's Hymn are of high merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a translation:--

Bride the queen, she loved not the world; She floated on the waves of the world As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.

Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps In the far land of her captivity, Mourning for her child at home.

What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage!

The poetical 'Life of St. Patrick,' too, is full of fine, wild, natural imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and leaving a gigantic footprint on a rock from which he sprang back into heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature of the spot; as it is first told, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy; but in the later prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again, when Patrick is described, as the after-apostle, raising the dead Celts to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force, and we have a long weary list of literal deaths and literal raisings. So in many ways the freshness and individuality was lost with time. The larger saints swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits; chasms were supplied by an ever ready fancy; and, like the stock of good works laid up for general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready when any defect was to be supplied. So it was that, after the first impulse, the progressive life of a saint rolled on like a s...o...b..ll down a mountain side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend, appropriate or inappropriate--sometimes real jewels of genuine old tradition, sometimes the debris of the old creeds and legends of heathenism; and on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and was dashed in pieces on the Reformation.

One more ill.u.s.tration shall serve as evidence of what the really greatest, most vigorous, minds in the twelfth century could accept as possible or probable, which they could relate (on what evidence we do not know) as really ascertained facts. We remember something of St.

Anselm: both as a statesman and as a theologian, he was unquestionably among the ablest men of his time alive in Europe. Here is a story which Anselm tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran. The saint, with thirty of his companions, was preaching within the frontiers of a lawless Pagan prince; and, disregarding all orders to be quiet or to leave the country, continued to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the ears of the prince himself. Things took their natural course.

Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers was sent, and the saint and his little band were decapitated. The scene of the execution was a wood, and the heads and trunks were left lying there for the wolves and the wild birds.

But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the Church in the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by Divine Providence to preserve the bodies of these saints from profanation. The trunk of Kieran rose from the ground, and selecting first his own head, and carrying it to a stream, and there carefully was.h.i.+ng it, and afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of his companions, giving each body its own head, he dug graves for them and buried them, and last of all buried himself.

It is even so. So it stands written in a life claiming Anselm's authors.h.i.+p; and there is no reason why the authors.h.i.+p should not be his.

Out of the heart come the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the intellect or the understanding. Men are not good or bad, n.o.ble or base--thank G.o.d for it!--as they judge well or ill of the probabilities of nature, but as they love G.o.d and hate the devil. And yet the story is instructive. We have heard grave good men--men of intellect and influence--with all the advantages of modern science, learning, experience; men who would regard Anselm with sad and serious pity; yet tell us stories, as having fallen within their own experience, of the marvels of mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is ridiculous) as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.

Mutato nomine, de te Fabula narratur.

We see our natural faces in the gla.s.s of history, and turn away and straightway forget what manner of men we are. The superst.i.tion of science scoffs at the superst.i.tion of faith.

FOOTNOTES:

[Z] Written in 1850.

REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

1850.

From St. Anselm to Mr. Emerson, from the 'Acta Sanctorum' to the 'Representative Men;' so far in seven centuries we have travelled. The races of the old Ideals have become extinct like the Preadamite Saurians; and here are our new pattern specimens on which we are to look, and take comfort and encouragement to ourselves.

The philosopher, the mystic, the poet, the sceptic, the man of the world, the writer; these are the present moral categories, the _summa genera_ of human greatness as Mr. Emerson arranges them. From every point of view an exceptionable catalogue. They are all thinkers, to begin with, except one: and thought is but a poor business compared to action. Saints did not earn canonisation by the number of their folios; and if the necessities of the times are now driving our best men out of action into philosophy and verse-making, so much the worse for them and so much the worse for the world. The one pattern actor, 'the man of the world,' is Napoleon Bonaparte, not in the least a person, as we are most of us at present feeling, whose example the world desires to see followed. Mr. Emerson would have done better if he had kept to his own side of the Atlantic. He is paying his own countrymen but a poor compliment by coming exclusively to Europe for his heroes; and he would be doing us in Europe more real good by a great deal if he would tell us something of the backwoodsmen in Kentucky and Ohio. However, to let that pa.s.s; it is not our business here to quarrel either with him or his book; and the book stands at the head of our article rather because it presents a very noticeable deficiency of which its writer is either unaware or careless.

These six predicables, as the logician would call them, what are they?

Are they _ultimate genera_ refusing to be cla.s.sified farther? or is there any other larger type of greatness under which they fall? In the naturalist's catalogue, poet, sceptic, and the rest will all be cla.s.sified as men--man being an intelligible ent.i.ty. Has Mr. Emerson any similar clear idea of great man or good man? If so, where is he? what is he? It is desirable that we should know. Men will not get to heaven because they lie under one or other of these predicables. What is that supreme type of character which is in itself good or great, unqualified with any farther _differentia_? Is there any such? and if there be, where is the representative of this? It may be said that the generic man exists nowhere in an ideal unity--that if considered at all, he must be abstracted from the various sorts of men, black and white, tame or savage. So if we would know what a great man or a good man means, we must look to some specific line in which he is good, and abstract our general idea. And that is very well, provided we know what we are about; provided we understand, in our abstracting, how to get the essential idea distinctly out before ourselves, without entangling ourselves in the accidents. Human excellence, after all the teaching of the last eighteen hundred years, ought to be something palpable by this time. It is the one thing which we are all taught to seek and to aim at forming in ourselves; and if representative men are good for anything at all, it can only be, not as they represent merely curious combinations of phenomena, but as they ill.u.s.trate us in a completely realised form, what we are, every single one of us, equally interested in understanding. It is not the 'great man' as 'man of the world' that we care for, but the 'man of the world' as a 'great man'--which is a very different thing.

Having to live in this world, how to live greatly here is the question for us; not, how, being great, we can cast our greatness in a worldly mould. There may be endless successful 'men of the world' who are mean or little enough all the while; and the Emersonian att.i.tude will confuse success with greatness, or turn our ethics into a chaos of absurdity. So it is with everything which man undertakes and works in. Life has grown complicated; and for one employment in old times there are a hundred now. But it is not _they_ which are anything, but _we_. We are the end, they are but the means, the material--like the clay, or the marble, or the bronze in which the sculptor carves his statue. The _form_ is everything; and what is the form? From nursery to pulpit every teacher rings on the one note--be good, be n.o.ble, be men. What is goodness then?

and what is n.o.bleness? and where are the examples? We do not say that there are none. G.o.d forbid! That is not what we are meaning at all. If the earth had ceased to bear men pleasant in G.o.d's sight, it would have pa.s.sed away like the cities in the plain. But who are they? which are they? how are we to know them? They are our leaders in this life campaign of ours. If we could see them, we would follow them, and save ourselves many and many a fall, and many an enemy whom we could have avoided, if we had known of him. It cannot be that the thing is so simple, when names of highest reputation are wrangled over, and such poor counterfeits are mobbed with applauding followers. In art and science we can detect the charlatan, but in life we do not recognise him so readily--we do not recognise the charlatan, and we do not recognise the true man. Rajah Brooke is alternately a hero or a pirate; and fifty of the best men among us are likely to have fifty opinions on the merits of Elizabeth or Cromwell.

But surely, men say, the thing is simple. The commandments are simple.

It is not that people do not know, but that they will not act up to what they know. We hear a great deal of this in sermons, and elsewhere; and of course, as everybody's experience will tell him, there is a great deal too much reason why we should hear of it. But there are two sorts of duty, positive and negative; what we ought to do, and what we ought not to do. To the latter of these, conscience is pretty much awake; but by cunningly concentrating its attention on one side of the matter, conscience has contrived to forget altogether that any other sort exists at all. 'Doing wrong' is breaking a commandment which forbids us to do some particular thing. That is all the notion which in common language is attached to the idea. Do not kill, steal, lie, swear, commit adultery, or break the Lord's day--these are the commandments; very simple, doubtless, and easy to be known. But, after all, what are they?

They are no more than the very first and rudimental conditions of goodness. Obedience to these is not more than a small part of what is required of us; it is no more than the foundation on which the superstructure of character is to be raised. To go through life, and plead at the end of it that we have not broken any of these commandments, is but what the unprofitable servant did, who kept his talent carefully unspent, and yet was sent to outer darkness for his uselessness. Suppose these commandments obeyed--what then? It is but a small portion of our time which, we will hope, is spent in resisting temptation to break them. What are we to do with the rest of it? Or suppose them (and this is a high step indeed) resolved into love of G.o.d and love of our neighbour. Suppose we know that it is our duty to love our neighbour as ourselves. What are we to do, then, for our neighbour, besides abstaining from doing him injury? The saints knew very well what _they_ were to do; but our duties, we suppose, lie in a different direction; and it does not appear that we have found them. 'We have duties so positive to our neighbour,' says Bishop Butler, 'that if we give more of our time and of our attention to ourselves and our own matters than is our just due, we are taking what is not ours, and are guilty of fraud.' What does Bishop Butler mean? It is easy to answer generally. In detail, it is not only difficult, it is impossible to answer at all. The modern world says--'Mind your own business, and leave others to take care of theirs;' and whoever among us aspires to more than the negative abstaining from wrong, is left to his own guidance.

There is no help for him, no instruction, no modern ideal which shall be to him what the heroes were to the young Greek or Roman, or the martyrs to the middle age Christian. There is neither track nor footprint in the course which he will have to follow, while, as in the old fairy tale, the hillside which he is climbing is strewed with black stones mocking at him with their thousand voices. We have no moral criterion, no idea, no counsels of perfection; and surely this is the reason why education is so little prosperous with us; because the only education worth anything is the education of character, and we cannot educate a character unless we have some notion of what we would form. Young men, as we know, are more easily led than driven. It is a very old story that to forbid this and that (so curious and contradictory is our nature) is to stimulate a desire to do it. But place before a boy a figure of a n.o.ble man; let the circ.u.mstances in which he has earned his claim to be called n.o.ble be such as the boy himself sees round himself; let him see this man rising over his temptation, and following life victoriously and beautifully forward, and, depend on it, you will kindle his heart as no threat of punishment here or anywhere will kindle it.

People complain of the sameness in the 'Lives of the Saints.' It is that very sameness which is the secret of their excellence. There is a sameness in the heroes of the 'Iliad;' there is a sameness in the historical heroes of Greece and Rome. A man is great as he contends best with the circ.u.mstances of his age, and those who fight best with the same circ.u.mstances, of course grow like each other. And so with our own age--if we really could have the lives of our best men written for us (and written well, by men who knew what to look for, and what it was on which they should insist), they would be just as like as each other too, and would for that reason be of such infinite usefulness. They would not be like the old Ideals. Times are changed; they were one thing, we have to be another--their enemies are not ours. There is a moral metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lineament of form or feature remains identical; yet surely not because less is demanded of us--not less, but more--more, as we are again and again told on Sundays from the pulpits; if the preachers would but tell us in what that 'more'

consists. The loftiest teaching we ever hear is, that we are to work in the spirit of love; but we are still left to generalities, while action divides and divides into ever smaller details. It is as if the Church said to the painter or to the musician whom she was training, you must work in the spirit of love and in the spirit of truth; and then adding, that the Catholic painting or the Catholic music was what he was _not_ to imitate, supposed that she had sent him out into the world equipped fully for his enterprise.

And what comes of this? Emersonianism has come, modern hagiology has come, and Ainsworth novels and Bulwer novels, and a thousand more unclean spirits. We have cast out the Catholic devil, and the Puritan has swept the house and garnished it; but as yet we do not see any symptoms showing of a healthy incoming tenant, and there may be worse states than Catholicism. If we wanted proof of the utter spiritual disintegration into which we have fallen, it would be enough that we have no biographies. We do not mean that we have no written lives of our fellow-creatures; there are enough and to spare. But not any one is there in which the ideal tendencies of this age can be discerned in their true form; not one, or hardly any one, which we could place in a young man's hands, with such warm confidence as would let us say of it--'Read that; there is a man--such a man as you ought to be; read it, meditate on it; see what he was, and how he made himself what he was, and try and be yourself like him.' This, as we saw lately, is what Catholicism did. It had its one broad type of perfection, which in countless thousands of instances was perpetually reproducing itself--a type of character not especially belonging to any one profession; it was a type to which priest and layman, knight or bishop, king or peasant, might equally aspire: men of all sorts aspired to it, and men of all sorts attained to it; and as fast as she had realised them (so to say), the Church took them in her arms, and held them up before the world as fresh and fresh examples of victory over the devil. This is what that Church was able to do, and it is what we cannot do; and yet, till we can learn to do it, no education which we can offer has any chance of prospering. Perfection is not easy; it is of all things most difficult; difficult to know and difficult to practise. Rules of life will not do; even if our a.n.a.lysis of life in all its possible forms were as complete as it is in fact rudimentary, they would still be inefficient. The philosophy of the thing might be understood, but the practice would be as far off as ever. In life, as in art, and as in mechanics, the only profitable teaching is the teaching by example. Your mathematician, or your man of science, may discourse excellently on the steam engine, yet he cannot make one; he cannot make a bolt or a screw. The master workman in the engine-room does not teach his apprentice the theory of expansion, or of atmospheric pressure; he guides his hand upon the turnc.o.c.k, he practises his eye upon the index, and he leaves the science to follow when the practice has become mechanical. So it is with everything which man learns to do; and yet for the art of arts, the trade of trades, for _life_, we content ourselves with teaching our children the catechism and the commandments; we preach them sermons on the good of being good, and the evil of being evil; in our higher education we advance to the theory of habit and the freedom of the will; and then, when failure follows failure, _ipsa experientia reclamante_, we hug ourselves with a complacent self-satisfied reflection that the fault is not ours, that all which men could do we have done. The freedom of the will!--as if a blacksmith would ever teach a boy to make a horseshoe, by telling him he could make one if he chose.

In setting out on our journey through life, we are like strangers set to find their way across a difficult and entangled country. It is not enough for us to know that others have set out as we set out, that others have faced the lions in the path and overcome them, and have arrived at last at the journey's end. Such a knowledge may give us heart--but the help it gives is nothing beyond teaching us that the difficulties are not insuperable. It is the _track_, which these others, these pioneers of G.o.dliness, have beaten in, that we cry to have shown us; not a mythic 'Pilgrim's Progress,' but a real path trodden in by real men. Here is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be climbed; here is a mora.s.s or a river, and there is a bridge in one place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in this forest, and wild beasts in that; the tracks cross and recross, and, as in the old labyrinth, only one will bring us right. The age of the saints has pa.s.sed; they are no longer any service to us; we must walk in their spirit, but not along their road; and in this sense we say, that we have no pattern great men, no biographies, no history, which are of real service to us. It is the remarkable characteristic of the present time, as far as we know--a new phenomenon since history began to be written; one more proof, if we wanted proof, that we are entering on another era.

In our present efforts at educating, we are like workmen setting about to make a machine which they know is to be composed of plates and joints, and wheels and screws and springs:--they temper their springs, and smooth their plates, and carve out carefully their wheels and screws, but having no idea of the machine in its combination, they either fasten them together at random, and create some monster of disjointed undirected force, or else pile the finished materials into a heap together, and trust to some organic spirit in themselves which will shape them into unity. We do not know what we would be at--make our children into men, says one--but what sort of men? The Greeks were men, so were the Jews, so were the Romans, so were the old Saxons, the Normans, the Duke of Alva's Spaniards, and Cromwell's Puritans. These were all men, and strong men too; yet all different, and all differently trained. 'Into Christian men,' say others: but the saints were Christian men; yet the modern Englishmen have been offered the saints'

biographies, and have with sufficient clearness expressed their opinion of them.

Alas! in all this confusion, only those keen-eyed children of this world find their profit; their idea does not readily forsake them. In their substantial theory of life, the business of man in it is to get on, to thrive, to prosper, to have riches in possession. They will have their little ones taught, by the law of demand, what will fetch its price in the market; and this is clear, bold, definite, straightforward--and therefore it is strong, and works its way. It works and will prevail for a time; for a time--but not for ever, unless indeed religion be all a dream, and our airy notions of ourselves a vision out of which our wise age is the long-waited-for awakening.