CAUSES OF THE STERILITY OF LITERATURE

From 'Shakespeare, the Man,' etc.

The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general, an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum. The mental habits of Robert Southey, which about a year ago were so extensively praised in the public journals, are the type of literary existence, just as the praise bestowed on them shows the admiration excited by them among literary people. He wrote poetry (as if anybody could) before breakfast; he read during breakfast. He wrote history until dinner; he corrected proof-sheets between dinner and tea; he wrote an essay for the Quarterly afterwards; and after supper, by way of relaxation, composed 'The Doctor'—a lengthy and elaborate jest. Now, what can any one think of such a life?—except how clearly it shows that the habits best fitted for communicating information, formed with the best care, and daily regulated by the best motives, are exactly the habits which are likely to afford a man the least information to communicate. Southey had no events, no experiences. His wife kept house and allowed him pocket-money, just as if he had been a German professor devoted to accents, tobacco, and the dates of Horace's amours....

The critic in the 'Vicar of Wakefield' lays down that you should always say that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains; but in the case of the practiced literary man, you should often enough say that the writings would have been much better if the writer had taken less pains. He says he has devoted his life to the subject; the reply is, "Then you have taken the best way to prevent your making anything of it. Instead of reading studiously what Burgersdicius and Aenesidemus said men were, you should have gone out yourself and seen (if you can see) what they are." But there is a whole class of minds which prefer the literary delineation of objects to the actual eyesight of them. Such a man would naturally think literature more instructive than life. Hazlitt said of Mackintosh, "He might like to read an account of India; but India itself, with its burning, shining face, would be a mere blank, an endless waste to him. Persons of this class have no more to say to a matter of fact staring them in the face, without a label in its mouth, than they would to a hippopotamus."...

After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from books, since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at things for himself. Anyhow the modern system fails, for where are the amusing books from voracious students and habitual writers?

Moreover, in general, it will perhaps be found that persons devoted to mere literature commonly become devoted to mere idleness. They wish to produce a great work, but they find they cannot. Having relinquished everything to devote themselves to this, they conclude on trial that this is impossible; they wish to write, but nothing occurs to them: therefore they write nothing and they do nothing. As has been said, they have nothing to do; their life has no events, unless they are very poor; with any decent means of subsistence, they have nothing to rouse them from an indolent and musing dream. A merchant must meet his bills, or he is civilly dead and uncivilly remembered; but a student may know nothing of time, and be too lazy to wind lip his watch.

THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS

From 'William Cowper'

If there be any truly painful fact about the world now tolerably well established by ample experience and ample records, it is that an intellectual and indolent happiness is wholly denied to the children of men. That most valuable author, Lucretius, who has supplied us and others with an almost inexhaustible supply of metaphors on this topic, ever dwells on the life of his gods with a sad and melancholy feeling that no such life was possible on a crude and cumbersome earth. In general, the two opposing agencies are marriage and lack of money; either of these breaks the lot of literary and refined inaction at once and forever. The first of these, as we have seen, Cowper had escaped; his reserved and negligent reveries were still free, at least from the invasion of affection. To this invasion, indeed, there is commonly requisite the acquiescence or connivance of mortality; but all men are born—not free and equal, as the Americans maintain, but, in the Old World at least—basely subjected to the yoke of coin. It is in vain that in this hemisphere we endeavor after impecuniary fancies. In bold and eager youth we go out on our travels: we visit Baalbec and Paphos and Tadmor and Cythera,—ancient shrines and ancient empires, seats of eager love or gentle inspiration; we wander far and long; we have nothing to do with our fellow-men,—what are we, indeed, to diggers and counters? we wander far, we dream to wander forever—but we dream in vain. A surer force than the subtlest fascination of fancy is in operation; the purse-strings tie us to our kind. Our travel coin runs low, and we must return, away from Tadmor and Baalbec, back to our steady, tedious industry and dull work, to "la vieille Europe" (as Napoleon said), "qui m'ennuie." It is the same in thought: in vain we seclude ourselves in elegant chambers, in fascinating fancies, in refined reflections.

ON EARLY READING

From 'Edward Gibbon'

In school work Gibbon had uncommon difficulties and unusual deficiencies; but these were much more than counterbalanced by a habit which often accompanies a sickly childhood, and is the commencement of a studious life,—the habit of desultory reading. The instructiveness of this is sometimes not comprehended. S. T. Coleridge used to say that he felt a great superiority over those who had not read—and fondly read—fairy tales in their childhood: he thought they wanted a sense which he possessed, the perception, or apperception—we do not know which he used to say it was—of the unity and wholeness of the universe. As to fairy tales, this is a hard saying; but as to desultory reading, it is certainly true. Some people have known a time in life when there was no book they could not read. The fact of its being a book went immensely in its favor. In early life there is an opinion that the obvious thing to do with a horse is to ride it; with a cake, to eat it; with sixpence, to spend it. A few boys carry this further, and think the natural thing to do with a book is to read it. There is an argument from design in the subject: if the book was not meant for that purpose, for what purpose was it meant? Of course, of any understanding of the works so perused there is no question or idea. There is a legend of Bentham, in his earliest childhood, climbing to the height of a huge stool, and sitting there evening after evening, with two candles, engaged in the perusal of Rapin's history; it might as well have been any other book. The doctrine of utility had not then dawned on its immortal teacher; cui bono was an idea unknown to him. He would have been ready to read about Egypt, about Spain, about coals in Borneo, the teak-wood in India, the current in the River Mississippi, on natural history or human history, on theology or morals, on the state of the Dark Ages or the state of the Light Ages, on Augustulus or Lord Chatham, on the first century or the seventeenth, on the moon, the millennium, or the whole duty of man. Just then, reading is an end in itself. At that time of life you no more think of a future consequence—of the remote, the very remote possibility of deriving knowledge from the perusal of a book, than you expect so great a result from spinning a peg-top. You spin the top, and you read the book; and these scenes of life are exhausted. In such studies, of all prose, perhaps the best is history: one page is so like another, battle No. 1 is so much on a par with battle No. 2. Truth may be, as they say, stranger than fiction, abstractedly; but in actual books, novels are certainly odder and more astounding than correct history.

It will be said, What is the use of this? why not leave the reading of great books till a great age? why plague and perplex childhood with complex facts remote from its experience and inapprehensible by its imagination? The reply is, that though in all great and combined facts there is much which childhood cannot thoroughly imagine, there is also in very many a great deal which can only be truly apprehended for the first time at that age. Youth has a principle of consolidation; we begin with the whole. Small sciences are the labors of our manhood; but the round universe is the plaything of the boy. His fresh mind shoots out vaguely and crudely into the infinite and eternal. Nothing is hid from the depth of it; there are no boundaries to its vague and wandering vision. Early science, it has been said, begins in utter nonsense; it would be truer to say that it starts with boyish fancies. How absurd seem the notions of the first Greeks! Who could believe now that air or water was the principle, the pervading substance, the eternal material of all things? Such affairs will never explain a thick rock. And what a white original for a green and sky-blue world! Yet people disputed in these ages not whether it was either of those substances, but which of them it was. And doubtless there was a great deal, at least in quantity, to be said on both sides. Boys are improved; but some in our own day have asked, "Mamma, I say, what did God make the world of?" and several, who did not venture on speech, have had an idea of some one gray primitive thing, felt a difficulty as to how the red came, and wondered that marble could ever have been the same as moonshine. This is in truth the picture of life. We begin with the infinite and eternal, which we shall never apprehend; and these form a framework, a schedule, a set of co-ordinates to which we refer all which we learn later. At first, like the old Greek, "We look up to the whole sky, and are lost in the one and the all;" in the end we classify and enumerate, learn each star, calculate distances, draw cramped diagrams on the unbounded sky, write a paper on a Cygni and a treatise on e Draconis, map special facts upon the indefinite void, and engrave precise details on the infinite and everlasting. So in history: somehow the whole comes in boyhood, the details later and in manhood. The wonderful series, going far back to the times of old patriarchs with their flocks and herds, the keen-eyed Greek, the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless shifting of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical civilization, its fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages, the vague warm picture of ourselves and home,—when did we learn these? Not yesterday nor to-day: but long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in the original flow of fancy. What we learn afterwards are but the accurate littlenesses of the great topic, the dates and tedious facts. Those who begin late learn only these; but the happy first feel the mystic associations and the progress of the whole.

However exalted may seem the praises which we have given to loose and unplanned reading, we are not saying that it is the sole ingredient of a good education. Besides this sort of education, which some boys will voluntarily and naturally give themselves, there needs, of course, another and more rigorous kind, which must be impressed upon them from without. The terrible difficulty of early life—the use of pastors and masters really is, that they compel boys to a distinct mastery of that which they do not wish to learn. There is nothing to be said for a preceptor who is not dry. Mr. Carlyle describes, with bitter satire, the fate of one of his heroes who was obliged to acquire whole systems of information in which he, the hero, saw no use, and which he kept, as far as might be, in a vacant corner of his mind. And this is the very point: dry language, tedious mathematics, a thumbed grammar, a detested slate form gradually an interior separate intellect, exact in its information, rigid in its requirements, disciplined in its exercises. The two grow together; the early natural fancy touching the far extremities of the universe, lightly playing with the scheme of all things; the precise, compacted memory slowly accumulating special facts, exact habits, clear and painful conceptions. At last, as it were in a moment, the cloud breaks up, the division sweeps away; we find that in fact these exercises which puzzled us, these languages which we hated, these details which we despised, are the instruments of true thought; are the very keys and openings, the exclusive access to the knowledge which we loved.

THE CAVALIERS. Photogravure from a Painting by F. Vinea.



THE CAVALIERS

From 'Thomas Babington Macaulay'

What historian has ever estimated the Cavalier character? There is Clarendon, the grave, rhetorical, decorous lawyer, piling words, congealing arguments; very stately, a little grim. There is Hume, the Scotch metaphysician, who has made out the best case for such people as never were, for a Charles who never died, for a Strafford who would never have been attainted; a saving, calculating North-country man, fat, impassive, who lived on eightpence a day. What have these people to do with an enjoying English gentleman? It is easy for a doctrinaire to bear a post-mortem examination,—it is much the same whether he be alive or dead; but not so with those who live during their life, whose essence is existence, whose being is in animation. There seem to be some characters who are not made for history, as there are some who are not made for old age. A Cavalier is always young. The buoyant life arises before us, rich in hope, strong in vigor, irregular in action; men young and ardent, "framed in the prodigality of nature"; open to every enjoyment, alive to every passion, eager, impulsive; brave without discipline, noble without principle; prizing luxury, despising danger; capable of high sentiment, but in each of whom the

"Addiction was to courses vain, His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow, His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports, And never noted in him any study, Any retirement, any sequestration From open haunts and popularity."

We see these men setting forth or assembling to defend their king or church, and we see it without surprise; a rich daring loves danger, a deep excitability likes excitement. If we look around us, we may see what is analogous: some say that the battle of the Alma was won by the "uneducated gentry"; the "uneducated gentry" would be Cavaliers now. The political sentiment is part of the character; the essence of Toryism is enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading a wholesome conservatism throughout this country! Give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts (and perhaps this is as well,—you may be able to give an argumentative answer to a few objections, you may diffuse a distinct notion of the dignified dullness of politics); but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concerned, try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is to enjoy that state of things. Over the "Cavalier" mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exaltation in a daily event, zest in the "regular thing," joy at an old feast.

MORALITY AND FEAR

From 'Bishop Butler'

The moral principle (whatever may be said to the contrary by complacent thinkers) is really and to most men a principle of fear. The delights of a good conscience may be reserved for better things, but few men who know themselves will say that they have often felt them by vivid and actual experience; a sensation of shame, of reproach, of remorse, of sin (to use the word we instinctively shrink from because it expresses the meaning), is what the moral principle really and practically thrusts on most men. Conscience is the condemnation of ourselves; we expect a penalty. As the Greek proverb teaches, "where there is shame there is fear"; where there is the deep and intimate anxiety of guilt,—the feeling which has driven murderers and other than murderers forth to wastes and rocks and stones and tempests,—we see, as it were, in a single complex and indivisible sensation, the pain and sense of guilt and the painful anticipation of its punishment. How to be free from this, is the question; how to get loose from this; how to be rid of the secret tie which binds the strong man and cramps his pride, and makes him angry at the beauty of the universe,—which will not let him go forth like a great animal, like the king of the forest, in the glory of his might, but restrains him with an inner fear and a secret foreboding that if he do but exalt himself he shall be abased, if he do but set forth his own dignity he will offend ONE who will deprive him of it. This, as has often been pointed out, is the source of the bloody rites of heathendom. You are going to battle, you are going out in the bright sun with dancing plumes and glittering spear; your shield shines, and your feathers wave, and your limbs are glad with the consciousness of strength, and your mind is warm with glory and renown; with coming glory and unobtained renown: for who are you to hope for these; who are you to go forth proudly against the pride of the sun, with your secret sin and your haunting shame and your real fear? First lie down and abase yourself; strike your back with hard stripes; cut deep with a sharp knife, as if you would eradicate the consciousness; cry aloud; put ashes on your head; bruise yourself with stones,—then perhaps God may pardon you. Or, better still (so runs the incoherent feeling), give him something—your ox, your ass, whole hecatombs if you are rich enough; anything, it is but a chance,—you do not know what will please him; at any rate, what you love best yourself,—that is, most likely, your first-born son. Then, after such gifts and such humiliation, he may be appeased, he may let you off; he may without anger let you go forth, Achilles-like, in the glory of your shield; he may not send you home as he would else, the victim of rout and treachery, with broken arms and foul limbs, in weariness and humiliation. Of course, it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute to a prelate of the English Church; human sacrifices are not respectable, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope. But though the costume and circumstances of life change, the human heart does not; its feelings remain. The same anxiety, the same consciousness of personal sin which led in barbarous times to what has been described, show themselves in civilized life as well. In this quieter period, their great manifestation is scrupulosity: a care about the ritual of life; an attention to meats and drinks, and "cups and washings." Being so unworthy as we are, feeling what we feel, abased as we are abased, who shall say that those are beneath us? In ardent, imaginative youth they may seem so; but let a few years come, let them dull the will or contract the heart or stain the mind; then the consequent feeling will be, as all experience shows, not that a ritual is too mean, too low, too degrading for human nature, but that it is a mercy we have to do no more,—that we have only to wash in Jordan, that we have not even to go out into the unknown distance to seek for Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. We have no right to judge; we cannot decide; we must do what is laid down for us,—we fail daily even in this; we must never cease for a moment in our scrupulous anxiety to omit by no tittle and to exceed by no iota.

THE TYRANNY OF CONVENTION

From 'Sir Robert Peel'

It might be said that this [necessity for newspapers and statesmen of following the crowd] is only one of the results of that tyranny of commonplace which seems to accompany civilization. You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor. What law is so cruel as the law of doing what he does? What yoke is so galling as the necessity of being like him? What espionage of despotism comes to your door so effectually as the eye of the man who lives at your door? Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits. Of course, if we do not, no formal ban issues; no corporeal pain, no coarse penalty of a barbarous society is inflicted on the offender; but we are called "eccentric"; there is a gentle murmur of "most unfortunate ideas," "singular young man," "well-intentioned, I dare say; but unsafe, sir, quite unsafe."

Whatever truth there may be in these splenetic observations might be expected to show itself more particularly in the world of politics: people dread to be thought unsafe in proportion as they get their living by being thought to be safe. Those who desire a public career must look to the views of the living public; an immediate exterior influence is essential to the exertion of their faculties. The confidence of others is your fulcrum: you cannot—many people wish you could—go into Parliament to represent yourself; you must conform to the opinions of the electors, and they, depend on it, will not be original. In a word, as has been most wisely observed, "under free institutions it is necessary occasionally to defer to the opinions of other people; and as other people are obviously in the wrong, this is a great hindrance to the improvement of our political system and the progress of our species."

HOW TO BE AN INFLUENTIAL POLITICIAN

From 'Bolingbroke'

It is very natural that brilliant and vehement men should depreciate Harley; for he had nothing which they possess, but had everything which they commonly do not possess. He was by nature a moderate man. In that age they called such a man a "trimmer," but they called him ill: such a man does not consciously shift or purposely trim his course,—he firmly believes that he is substantially consistent. "I do not wish in this House," he would say in our age, "to be a party to any extreme course. Mr. Gladstone brings forward a great many things which I cannot understand; I assure you he does. There is more in that bill of his about tobacco than he thinks; I am confident there is. Money is a serious thing, a very serious thing. And I am sorry to say Mr. Disraeli commits the party very much: he avows sentiments which are injudicious; I cannot go along with him, nor can Sir John. He was not taught the catechism; I know he was not. There is a want in him of sound and sober religion,—and Sir John agrees with me,—which would keep him from distressing the clergy, who are very important. Great orators are very well; but as I said, how is the revenue? And the point is, not be led away, and to be moderate, and not to go to an extreme. As soon as it seems very clear, then I begin to doubt. I have been many years in Parliament, and that is my experience." We may laugh at such speeches, but there have been plenty of them in every English Parliament. A great English divine has been described as always leaving out the principle upon which his arguments rested; even if it was stated to him, he regarded it as far-fetched and extravagant. Any politician who has this temper of mind will always have many followers; and he may be nearly sure that all great measures will be passed more nearly as he wishes them to be passed than as great orators wish. Nine-tenths of mankind are more afraid of violence than of anything else; and inconsistent moderation is always popular, because of all qualities it is most opposite to violence,—most likely to preserve the present safe existence.

CONDITIONS OF CABINET GOVERNMENT

From 'The English Constitution'

The conditions of fitness are two: first, you must get a good legislature; and next, you must keep it good. And these are by no means so nearly connected as might be thought at first sight. To keep a legislature efficient, it must have a sufficient supply of substantial business: if you employ the best set of men to do nearly nothing, they will quarrel with each other about that nothing; where great questions end, little parties begin. And a very happy community, with few new laws to make, few old bad laws to repeal, and but simple foreign relations to adjust, has great difficulty in employing a legislature,—there is nothing for it to enact and nothing for it to settle. Accordingly, there is great danger that the legislature, being debarred from all other kinds of business, may take to quarreling about its elective business; that controversies as to ministries may occupy all its time, and yet that time be perniciously employed; that a constant succession of feeble administrations, unable to govern and unfit to govern, may be substituted for the proper result of cabinet government, a sufficient body of men long enough in power to evince their sufficiency. The exact amount of non-elective business necessary for a parliament which is to elect the executive cannot, of course, be formally stated,—there are no numbers and no statistics in the theory of constitutions; all we can say is, that a parliament with little business, which is to be as efficient as a parliament with much business, must be in all other respects much better. An indifferent parliament may be much improved by the steadying effect of grave affairs; but a parliament which has no such affairs must be intrinsically excellent, or it will fail utterly.

But the difficulty of keeping a good legislature is evidently secondary to the difficulty of first getting it. There are two kinds of nations which can elect a good parliament. The first is a nation in which the mass of the people are intelligent, and in which they are comfortable. Where there is no honest poverty, where education is diffused and political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass of the people to elect a fair legislature. The ideal is roughly realized in the North American colonies of England, and in the whole free States of the Union: in these countries there is no such thing as honest poverty,—physical comfort, such as the poor cannot imagine here, is there easily attainable by healthy industry; education is diffused much, and is fast spreading,—ignorant emigrants from the Old World often prize the intellectual advantages of which they are themselves destitute, and are annoyed at their inferiority in a place where rudimentary culture is so common. The greatest difficulty of such new communities is commonly geographical: the population is mostly scattered; and where population is sparse, discussion is difficult. But in a country very large as we reckon in Europe, a people really intelligent, really educated, really comfortable, would soon form a good opinion. No one can doubt that the New England States, if they were a separate community, would have an education, a political capacity, and an intelligence such as the numerical majority of no people equally numerous has ever possessed: in a State of this sort, where all the community is fit to choose a sufficient legislature, it is possible, it is almost easy, to create that legislature. If the New England States possessed a cabinet government as a separate nation, they would be as renowned in the world for political sagacity as they now are for diffused happiness.

WHY EARLY SOCIETIES COULD NOT BE FREE

From 'Physics and Politics'

I believe the general description in which Sir John Lubbock sums up his estimate of the savage mind suits the patriarchal mind: "Savages," he says, "have the character of children with the passions and strength of men."...

And this is precisely what we should expect. "An inherited drill," science says, "makes modern nations what they are; their born structure bears the trace of the laws of their fathers:" but the ancient nations came into no such inheritance,—they were the descendants of people who did what was right in their own eyes; they were born to no tutored habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore they were at the mercy of every impulse and blown by every passion....

Again, I at least cannot call up to myself the loose conceptions (as they must have been) of morals which then existed. If we set aside all the element derived from law and polity which runs through our current moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left. The residuum was somehow and in some vague way intelligible to the ante-political man; but it must have been uncertain, wavering, and unfit to be depended upon. In the best cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty now exists in minds sensitive but untaught,—a still small voice of uncertain meaning, an unknown something modifying everything else and higher than anything else, yet in form so indistinct that when you looked for it, it was gone; or if this be thought the delicate fiction of a later fancy, then morality was at least to be found in the wild spasms of "wild justice," half punishment, half outrage: but anyhow, being unfixed by steady law, it was intermittent, vague, and hard for us to imagine....

To sum up:—Law—rigid, definite, concise law—is the primary want of early mankind; that which they need above anything else, that which is requisite before they can gain anything else. But it is their greatest difficulty as well as their first requisite; the thing most out of their reach as well as that most beneficial to them if they reach it. In later ages, many races have gained much of this discipline quickly though painfully,—a loose set of scattered clans has been often and often forced to substantial settlement by a rigid conqueror; the Romans did half the work for above half Europe. But where could the first ages find Romans or a conqueror? men conquer by the power of government, and it was exactly government which then was not. The first ascent of civilization was at a steep gradient, though when now we look down upon it, it seems almost nothing.

How the step from no polity to polity was made, distinct history does not record.... But when once polities were begun, there is no difficulty in explaining why they lasted. Whatever may be said against the principle of "natural selection" in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in early human history: the strongest killed out the weakest as they could. And I need not pause to prove that any form of polity is more efficient than none; that an aggregate of families owning even a slippery allegiance to a single head would be sure to have the better of a set of families acknowledging no obedience to any one, but scattering loose about the world and fighting where they stood. Homer's Cyclops would be powerless against the feeblest band; so far from its being singular that we find no other record of that state of man, so unstable and sure to perish was it that we should rather wonder at even a single vestige lasting down to the age when for picturesqueness it became valuable in poetry.

But though the origin of polity is dubious, we are upon the terra firma of actual records when we speak of the preservation of polities. Perhaps every young Englishman who comes nowadays to Aristotle or Plato is struck with their conservatism: fresh from the liberal doctrines of the present age, he wonders at finding in those recognized teachers so much contrary teaching. They both, unlike as they are, hold with Xenophon so unlike both, that man is "the hardest of all animals to govern." Of Plato it might indeed be plausibly said that the adherents of an intuitive philosophy, being "the Tories of speculation," have commonly been prone to conservatism in government; but Aristotle, the founder of the experience philosophy, ought according to that doctrine to have been a Liberal if any one ever was a Liberal. In fact, both of these men lived when men "had not had time to forget" the difficulties of government: we have forgotten them altogether. We reckon as the basis of our culture upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive governability, which these philosophers hoped to get as a principal result of their culture; we take without thought as a datum what they hunted as a quaesitum.

In early times the quantity of government is much more important than its quality. What you want is a comprehensive rule binding men together, making them do much the same things, telling them what to expect of each other,—fashioning them alike and keeping them so: what this rule is, does not matter so much. A good rule is better than a bad one, but any rule is better than none; while, for reasons which a jurist will appreciate, none can be very good. But to gain that rule, what may be called the "impressive" elements of a polity are incomparably more important than its useful elements. How to get the obedience of men, is the hard problem; what you do with that obedience is less critical.

To gain that obedience, the primary condition is the identity—not the union, but the sameness—of what we now call "church" and "state."... No division of power is then endurable without danger, probably without destruction: the priest must not teach one thing and the king another; king must be priest and prophet king,—the two must say the same because they are the same. The idea of difference between spiritual penalties and legal penalties must never be awakened,—indeed, early Greek thought or early Roman thought would never have comprehended it; there was a kind of rough public opinion, and there were rough—very rough—hands which acted on it. We now talk of "political penalties" and "ecclesiastical prohibition" and "the social censure"; but they were all one then. Nothing is very like those old communities now, but perhaps a trades-union is as near as most things: to work cheap is thought to be a "wicked" thing, and so some Broadhead puts it down.

The object of such organizations is to create what may be called a cake of custom. All the actions of life are to be submitted to a single rule for a single object,—that gradually created "hereditary drill" which science teaches to be essential, and which the early instinct of men saw to be essential too. That this regime forbids free thought is not an evil,—or rather, though an evil, it is the necessary basis for the greatest good; it is necessary for making the mold of civilization and hardening the soft fibre of early man.

BENEFITS OF FREE DISCUSSION IN MODERN TIMES

From 'Physics and Politics'

In this manner polities of discussion broke up the old bonds of custom which were now strangling mankind, though they had once aided and helped it; but this is only one of the many gifts which those polities have conferred, are conferring, and will confer on mankind. I am not going to write a eulogium on liberty, but I wish to set down three points which have not been sufficiently noticed.

Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is in many respects not at all suited to civilized circumstances. A main and principal excellence in the early times of the human races is the impulse to action. The problems before men are then plain and simple: the man who works hardest, the man who kills the most deer, the man who catches the most fish—even later on, the man who tends the largest herds or the man who tills the largest field—is the man who succeeds; the nation which is quickest to kill its enemies or which kills most of its enemies is the nation which succeeds. All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action, all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that "delays are dangerous," and that the sluggish man—the man "who roasteth not that which he took in hunting"—will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it: and in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

Pascal said that most of the evils of life arose from "man's being unable to sit still in a room"; and though I do not go that length, it is certain that we should have been a far wiser race than we are if we had been readier to sit quiet,—we should have known much better the way in which it was best to act when we came to act. The rise of physical science, the first great body of practical truth provable to all men, exemplifies this in the plainest way: if it had not been for quiet people who sat still and studied the sections of the cone, if other quiet people had not sat still and studied the theory of infinitesimals, or other quiet people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of chances (the most "dreamy moonshine," as the purely practical mind would consider, of all human pursuits), if "idle star-gazers" had not watched long and carefully the motions of the heavenly bodies,—our modern astronomy would have been impossible, and without our astronomy "our ships, our colonies, our seamen," all which makes modern life modern life, could not have existed. Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required before that noisy existence began, and without those pale preliminary students it never could have been brought into being. And nine-tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers, who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them, who as the proverb went "walked into a well from looking at the stars," who were believed to be useless if any one could be such. And the conclusion is plain that if there had been more such people, if the world had not laughed at those there were, if rather it had encouraged them, there would have been a great accumulation of proved science ages before there was. It was the irritable activity, the "wish to be doing something," that prevented it,—most men inherited a nature too eager and too restless to be quiet and find out things: and even worse, with their idle clamor they "disturbed the brooding hen"; they would not let those be quiet who wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might have come forth.

If we consider how much science has done and how much it is doing for mankind, and if the over-activity of men is proved to be the cause why science came so late into the world and is so small and scanty still, that will convince most people that our over-activity is a very great evil; but this is only part and perhaps not the greatest part, of the harm that over-activity does. As I have said, it is inherited from times when life was simple, objects were plain, and quick action generally led to desirable ends: if A kills B before B kills A, then A survives, and the human race is a race of A's. But the issues of life are plain no longer: to act rightly in modern society requires a great deal of previous study, a great deal of assimilated information, a great deal of sharpened imagination; and these prerequisites of sound action require much time, and I was going to say much "lying in the sun," a long period of "mere passiveness."

[Argument to show that the same vice of impatience damages war, philanthropy, commerce, and even speculation.]

But it will be said, What has government by discussion to do with these things? will it prevent them, or even mitigate them? It can and does do both, in the very plainest way. If you want to stop instant and immediate action, always make it a condition that the action shall not begin till a considerable number of persons have talked over it and have agreed on it. If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing or almost nothing will be done with excessive rapidity. Each kind of persons will have their spokesman; each spokesman will have his characteristic objection and each his characteristic counter-proposition: and so in the end nothing will probably be done, or at least only the minimum which is plainly urgent. In many cases this delay may be dangerous, in many cases quick action will be preferable; a campaign, as Macaulay well says, cannot be directed by a "debating society," and many other kinds of action also require a single and absolute general: but for the purpose now in hand—that of preventing hasty action and insuring elaborate consideration—there is no device like a polity of discussion.

The enemies of this object—the people who want to act quickly—see this very distinctly: they are forever explaining that the present is "an age of committees," that the committees do nothing, that all evaporates in talk. Their great enemy is parliamentary government: they call it, after Mr. Carlyle, the "national palaver"; they add up the hours that are consumed in it and the speeches which are made in it, and they sigh for a time when England might again be ruled, as it once was, by a Cromwell,—that is, when an eager absolute man might do exactly what other eager men wished, and do it immediately. All these invectives are perpetual and many-sided; they come from philosophers each of whom wants some new scheme tried, from philanthropists who want some evil abated, from revolutionists who want some old institution destroyed, from new-eraists who want their new era started forthwith: and they all are distinct admissions that a polity of discussion is the greatest hindrance to the inherited mistake of human nature,—to the desire to act promptly, which in a simple age is so excellent, but which in a later and complex time leads to so much evil.

The same accusation against our age sometimes takes a more general form: it is alleged that our energies are diminishing, that ordinary and average men have not the quick determination nowadays which they used to have when the world was younger, that not only do not committees and parliaments act with rapid decisiveness, but that no one now so acts; and I hope that in fact this is true, for according to me it proves that the hereditary barbaric impulse is decaying and dying out. So far from thinking the quality attributed to us a defect, I wish that those who complain of it were far more right than I much fear they are. Still, certainly, eager and violent action is somewhat diminished, though only by a small fraction of what it ought to be; and I believe that this is in great part due, in England at least, to our government by discussion, which has fostered a general intellectual tone, a diffused disposition to weigh evidence, a conviction that much may be said on every side of everything which the elder and more fanatic ages of the world wanted. This is the real reason why our energies seem so much less than those of our fathers. When we have a definite end in view, which we know we want and which we think we know how to obtain, we can act well enough: the campaigns of our soldiers are as energetic as any campaigns ever were; the speculations of our merchants have greater promptitude, greater audacity, greater vigor than any such speculations ever had before. In old times a few ideas got possession of men and communities, but this is happily now possible no longer: we see how incomplete these old ideas were; how almost by chance one seized on one nation and another on another; how often one set of men have persecuted another set for opinions on subjects of which neither, we now perceive, knew anything. It might be well if a greater number of effectual demonstrations existed among mankind: but while no such demonstrations exist, and while the evidence which completely convinces one man seems to another trifling and insufficient, let us recognize the plain position of inevitable doubt; let us not be bigots with a doubt and persecutors without a creed. We are beginning to see this, and we are railed at for so beginning: but it is a great benefit, and it is to the incessant prevalence of detective discussion that our doubts are due; and much of that discussion is due to the long existence of a government requiring constant debates, written and oral.

ORIGIN OF DEPOSIT BANKING

From 'Lombard Street'

In the last century, a favorite subject of literary ingenuity was "conjectural history," as it was then called: upon grounds of probability, a fictitious sketch was made of the possible origin of things existing. If this kind of speculation were now applied to banking, the natural and first idea would be that large systems of deposit banking grew up in the early world just as they grow up now in any large English colony. As soon as any such community becomes rich enough to have much money, and compact enough to be able to lodge its money in single banks, it at once begins so to do. English colonists do not like the risk of keeping their money, and they wish to make an interest on it; they carry from home the idea and the habit of banking, and they take to it as soon as they can in their new world. Conjectural history would be inclined to say that all banking began thus; but such history is rarely of any value,—the basis of it is false. It assumes that what works most easily when established is that which it would be the most easy to establish, and that what seems simplest when familiar would be most easily appreciated by the mind though unfamiliar; but exactly the contrary is true,—many things which seem simple, and which work well when firmly established, are very hard to establish among new people and not very easy to explain to them. Deposit banking is of this sort. Its essence is, that a very large number of persons agree to trust a very few persons, or some one person: banking would not be a profitable trade if bankers were not a small number, and depositors in comparison an immense number. But to get a great number of persons to do exactly the same thing is always very difficult, and nothing but a very palpable necessity will make them on a sudden begin to do it; and there is no such palpable necessity in banking.

If you take a country town in France, even now, you will not find any such system of banking as ours: check-books are unknown, and money kept on running account by bankers is rare: people store their money in a caisse at their houses. Steady savings, which are waiting for investment and which are sure not to be soon wanted, may be lodged with bankers; but the common floating cash of the community is kept by the community themselves at home,—they prefer to keep it so, and it would not answer a banker's purpose to make expensive arrangements for keeping it otherwise. If a "branch," such as the National Provincial Bank opens in an English country town, were opened in a corresponding French one, it would not pay its expenses: you could not get any sufficient number of Frenchmen to agree to put their money there.

And so it is in all countries not of British descent, though in various degrees. Deposit banking is a very difficult thing to begin, because people do not like to let their money out of their sight; especially, do not like to let it out of sight without security; still more, cannot all at once agree on any single person to whom they are content to trust it unseen and unsecured. Hypothetical history, which explains the past by what is simplest and commonest in the present, is in banking, as in most things, quite untrue.

The real history is very different. New wants are mostly supplied by adaptation, not by creation or foundation; something having been created to satisfy an extreme want, it is used to satisfy less pressing wants or to supply additional conveniences. On this account, political government, the oldest institution in the world, has been the hardest worked: at the beginning of history, we find it doing everything which society wants done and forbidding everything which society does not wish done. In trade, at present, the first commerce in a new place is a general shop, which, beginning with articles of real necessity, comes shortly to supply the oddest accumulation of petty comforts. And the history of banking has been the same: the first banks were not founded for our system of deposit banking, or for anything like it; they were founded for much more pressing reasons, and having been founded, they or copies from them were applied to our modern uses.

[Gives a sketch of banks started as finance companies to make or float government loans, and to give good coin; and sketches their function of remitting money.]

These are all uses other than those of deposit banking, which banks supplied that afterwards became in our English sense deposit banks: by supplying these uses, they gained the credit that afterwards enabled them to gain a living as deposit banks; being trusted for one purpose, they came to be trusted for a purpose quite different,—ultimately far more important, though at first less keenly pressing. But these wants only affect a few persons, and therefore bring the bank under the notice of a few only. The real introductory function which deposit banks at first perform is much more popular; and it is only when they can perform this most popular kind of business that deposit banking ever spreads quickly and extensively.

This function is the supply of the paper circulation to the country; and it will be observed that I am not about to overstep my limits and discuss this as a question of currency. In what form the best paper currency can be supplied to a country is a question of economical theory with which I do not meddle here: I am only narrating unquestionable history, not dealing with an argument where every step is disputed; and part of this certain history is, that the best way to diffuse banking in a community is to allow the banker to issue bank notes of small amount that can supersede the metal currency. This amounts to a subsidy to each banker to enable him to keep open a bank till depositors choose to come to it....

The reason why the use of bank paper commonly precedes the habit of making deposits in banks is very plain: it is a far easier habit to establish. In the issue of notes the banker, the person to be most benefited, can do something,—he can pay away his own "promises" in loans, in wages, or in payment of debts,—but in the getting of deposits he is passive; his issues depend on himself, his deposits on the favor of others. And to the public the change is far easier too: to collect a great mass of deposits with the same banker, a great number of persons must agree to do something; but to establish a note circulation, a large number of persons need only do nothing,—they receive the banker's notes in the common course of their business, and they have only not to take those notes to the banker for payment. If the public refrain from taking trouble, a paper circulation is immediately in existence. A paper circulation is begun by the banker, and requires no effort on the part of the public,—on the contrary, it needs an effort of the public to be rid of notes once issued; but deposit banking cannot be begun by the banker, and requires a spontaneous and consistent effort in the community: and therefore paper issue is the natural prelude to deposit banking.



JENS BAGGESEN

(1764-1826)

Jens Baggesen was born in the little Danish town Korsoer in 1764, and died in exile in the year 1826. Thus he belonged to two centuries and to two literary periods. He had reached manhood when the French Revolution broke out; he witnessed Napoleon's rise, his victories, and his fall. He was a full contemporary of Goethe, who survived him only six years; he saw English literature glory in men like Byron and Moore, and lived to hear of Byron's death in Greece. In his first works he stood a true representative of the culture and literature of the eighteenth century, and was hailed as its exponent by the Danish poet Herman Wessel; towards the end of the century he was acknowledged to be the greatest of living Danish poets. Then with the new age came the Norwegian, Henrik Steffens, with his enthusiastic lectures on German romanticism, calling out the genius of Oehlenschlaeger, and the eighteenth century was doomed; Baggesen nevertheless greeted Oehlenschlaeger with sincere admiration, and when the 'Aladdin' of that poet appeared, Baggesen sent him his rhymed letter 'From Nureddin-Baggesen to Aladdin-Oehlenschlaeger.'



Baggesen was the son of poor people, and strangers helped him to his scientific education. When his first works were recognized he became the friend and protege of the Duke of Augustenborg, who provided him with the means for an extended journey through the Continent, during which he met the greatest men of his time. The Duke of Augustenborg meanwhile secured him several positions, which could not hold him for any length of time, nor keep him at home in Denmark. He went abroad a second time to study pedagogics, literature, and philosophy, came home again, wandered forth once more, returned a widower, was for some time director of the National Theatre in Copenhagen; but found no rest, married again, and in 1800 went to France to live. Eleven years later he was professor in Kiel, returning thence to Copenhagen, where meanwhile his fame had been eclipsed by the genius of Oehlenschlaeger. Secure in the knowledge of his powers, Oehlenschlaeger had carelessly published two or three dramatic poems not worthy of his pen, and Baggesen entered on a violent controversy with him in which he stood practically by himself against the entire reading public, whose sympathies were with Oehlenschlaeger. Alone and misunderstood, restless and unhappy, he left Denmark in 1820, never to return. Six years later he died, longing to see his country again, but unable to reach it.

His first poetry was published in 1785, a volume of 'Comic Tales,' which made its mark at once. The following year appeared in quick succession satires, rhymed epistles, and elegies, which, adding to his fame, added also to the purposeless ferment and unrest which had taken possession of him. He considered tragedy his proper field, yet had allowed himself to appear as humorist and satirist.

When the great historic events of the time took place, and over-threw all existing conditions, this inner restlessness drove him to and fro without purpose or will. One day he was enthusiastic over Voss's idyls, the next he was carried away by Robespierre's wildest speeches. One year he adopted Kant's Christian name Immanuel in transport over his works, the next he called the great philosopher "an empty nut, and moreover hard to crack." The romanticism in Denmark as well as in Germany reduced him to a state of utter confusion; but in spite of this he continued a child of the old order, which was already doomed. And with all his unrest and discord he remained nevertheless the champion of "form," "the poet of the graces," as he has been called.

This gift of form has given him his literary importance. He built a bridge from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century; and when the new romantic school overstepped its privileges, it was he who called it to order. The most conspicuous act of his literary life was the controversy with Oehlenschlaeger, and the wittiest product of his pen is the reckless criticism of Oehlenschlaeger's opera 'Ludlam's Cave.' Johann Ludvig Heiberg, the greatest analytical critic of whom Denmark can boast, remained Baggesen's ardent admirer; and Heiberg's influential although not always just criticism of Oehlenschlaeger as a poet was no doubt called forth by Baggesen's attack. Some years later Henrik Hertz made Baggesen his subject. In 1830 appeared 'Letters from Ghosts,' poetic epistles from Paradise. Nobody knew that Hertz was the author. It was Baggesen's voice from beyond the grave, Baggesen's criticism upon the literature of 1830. It was one of the wittiest, and in versification one of the best, books in Danish literature.

Baggesen's most important prose work is 'The Labyrinth,' afterwards called 'The Wanderings of a Poet.' It is a poetic description of his journeys, unique in its way, rich in impressions and full of striking remarks, written in a piquant, graceful, and easy style.

As long as Danish literature remains, Baggesen's name will be known; though his writings are not now widely read, and are important chiefly because of their influence on the literary spirit of his own time. His familiar poem 'There was a time when I was very little,' during the controversy with Oehlenschlaeger, was seized upon by Paul Moeller, parodied, and changed into 'There was a time when Jens was much bigger.' Equally well known is his 'Ode to My Country,' with the familiar lines:—

"Alas, in no place is the thorn as tiny, Alas, in no place blooms as red a rose, Alas, in no place is there couch as downy As where we little children found repose."

A COSMOPOLITAN

From 'The Labyrinth'

Forster, a little nervous, alert, and piquant man, with gravity written on his forehead, perspicacity in his eye, and love around his lips, conquered me completely. I spoke to him of everything except his journeys; but the traveler showed himself full of unmistakable humanity. He seemed to me the cosmopolitan spirit personified. It was as if the world were present when I was alone with him.

We talked about his friend Jacobi, about the late King of Prussia, about the literature of Germany, and about the present Pole-high standard of taste. I was much pleased to find in him the art critic I sought. He said that we must admire everything which is good and beautiful, whether it originates West, East, South, or North. The taste of the bee is the true one. Difference in language and climate, difference of nationality, must not affect my interest in fair and noble things. The unknown repels the animal, but should not repel the human creature. Suppose you say that Voltaire is animal in comparison with Shakespeare or Klopstock, or that they are animal in comparison with him: it is a blunder to demand pears of an apple-tree, as it is ridiculous to throw away the apple because it is not a pear. The entire world of nature teaches us this aesthetic tolerance, and yet we have as little acquired it as we have freedom of conscience. We plant white and red roses in the same bed, but who puts the 'Messiah' and the 'Henriade' on the same shelf? He only who reads neither the one nor the other. True religion worships God; true taste worships the beautiful without regard of person or nation. German? French? Italian? or English? All the same! But nothing mediocre.

I was flushed with pleasure; I gave him my hand. "That may be said of other things than poetry!" I said.—"Of all art!" he answered.—"Of all that is human!" we both concluded.

Deplorable indolence which clothes our mind in the first heavy cloak ready to hand, so that all the sunbeams of the world cannot persuade us to throw it off, much less to assume another! The man who is exclusively a nationalist is a snail forever chained to his house. Psyche had wings given her for a never-ending, eternal flight. We may not imprison her, be the cage ever so large.

He considered that Lessing had wronged the great representative of the French language; and the remark of Claudius, "Voltaire says he weeps, and Shakespeare does weep," appeared to him like the saying, "Much that is new and beautiful has M. Arouet said; but it is a pity that the beautiful is not new and the new not beautiful,"—more witty than true. The English think that Shakespeare, as the Germans think that Lessing, really weeps; the French think the same of Voltaire. But the first weeps for the whole world, it is said, the last only for his own people. What the French call "Le Nord" is, to be sure, rather a large territory, but not the entire world! France calls "whimpering" in one case and "blubbering" in another what we call weeping. The general mistake is that we do not understand the nature of the people and the language, in which and for whom the weeping is done.

We must be English when we read Shakespeare, German when we read Klopstock, French when we read Voltaire. The man whose soul cannot shed its national costume and don that of other nations ought not to read, much less to judge, their masterpieces. He will be looking at the moon by day and at the sun by night, and see the first without lustre and the last not at all.

PHILOSOPHY ON THE HEATH

From 'The Labyrinth'

Caillard was a man of experience, taste, and knowledge. He told me the story of his life from beginning to end, he confided to me his principles and his affairs, and I took him to be the happiest man in the world. "I have everything," he said, "all that I have wished for or can wish for: health, riches, domestic peace (being unmarried), a tolerably good conscience, books—and as much sense as I need to enjoy them. I experience only one single want, lack only one single pleasure in this world; but that one is enough to embitter my life and class me with other unfortunates."

I could not guess what might yet be wanting to such a man under such conditions, "It cannot be liberty," I said, "for how can a rich merchant in a free town lack this?"

"No! Heaven save me—I neither would nor could live one single day without liberty."

"You do not happen to be in love with some cruel or unhappy princess?"

"That is still less the case."

"Ah!—now I have it, no doubt—your soul is consumed with a thirst for truth, for a satisfactory answer to the many questions which are but philosophic riddles. You are seeking what so many brave men from Anaxagoras to Spinoza have sought in vain—the corner-stone of philosophy, the foundation of the structure of our ideas."

He assured me that in this respect he was quite at ease. "Then, in spite of your good health, you must be subject to that miserable thing, a cold in the head?" I said.

"Uno minor—Jove, dives Liber, honoratus, pulcher rex denique regum, Praecipue sanus—nisi cum pituita molesta est."

—HORACE.

When he denied this too, I gave up trying to solve the meaning of his dark words.

O happiness! of all earthly chimeras thou art the most chimerical! I would rather seek dry figs on the bottom of the sea and fresh ones on this heath,—I would rather seek liberty, or truth itself, or the philosopher's stone, than to run after thee, most deceitful of lights, will-o'-the-wisp of our human life!

I thought that at last I had found a perfectly happy, an enviable man; and now—behold! though I have not the ten-thousandth part of his wealth, though I have not the tenth part of his health, though I may not have a third of his intellect, although I have all the wants which he has not and the one want under which he suffers, yet I would not change places with him!

From this moment he was the object of my sincerest pity. But what did this awful curse prove to be? Listen and tremble!

"Of what use is it all to me?" he said: "coffee, which I love more than all the wines of this earth and more than all the women of this earth, coffee which I love madly—coffee is forbidden me!"

Laugh who lists! Inasmuch as everything in this world, viewed in a certain light, is tragic, it would be excusable to weep: but inasmuch as everything viewed in another light is comic, a little laughter could not be taken amiss; only beware of laughing at the sigh with which my happy man pronounced these words, for it might be that in laughing at him you laugh at yourself, your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandfather, and so on, including your entire family as far back as Adam.

If, in laughing at such discontent, you laugh in advance at your son, your son's son's son, and so forth to the last descendant of your entire family, this is a matter which I do not decide. It will depend upon the road humanity chooses to take. If it continues as it is going, some coffee-want or other will forever strew it with thorns.

Had he said, "Chocolate is forbidden me," or tea, or English ale, or madeira, or strawberries, you would have found his misery equally absurd.

The great Alexander is said to have wept because he found no more worlds to conquer. The man who bemoans the loss of a world and the man who bemoans the loss of coffee are to my mind equally unbalanced and equally in need of forgiveness. The desire for a cup of coffee and the desire for a crown, the hankering after the flavor or even the fragrance of the drink and the hankering after fame, are equally mad and equally—human.

If history is to be believed, Adam possessed all the advantages and comforts, all the necessities and luxuries a first man could reasonably demand.... Lord of all living things, and sharing his dominion with his beloved, what did he lack?

Among ten thousand pleasures, the fruit of one single tree was forbidden him. Good-by content and peace! Good-by forever all his bliss!

I acknowledge that I should have yielded to the same temptation; and he who does not see that this fate would have overtaken his entire family, past and to come, may have studied all things from the Milky Way in the sky to the milky way in his kitchen, may have studied all stones, plants, and animals, and all folios and quartos dealing therewith, but never himself or man.

As we do not know the nature of the fruit which Adam could not do without, it may as well have been coffee as any other. That it was pleasant to the eyes means no more than that it was forbidden. Every forbidden thing is pleasant to the eyes.

"Of what use is it all to me?" said Adam, looking around him in Eden, at the rising sun, the blushing hills, the light-green forest, the glorious waterfall, the laden fruit-trees, and, most beautiful of all, the smiling woman—"of what use is it all to me, when I dare not taste this—coffee bean?"

"And of what use is it all to me?" said Mr. Caillard, and looked around him on the Lueneburg heath: "coffee is forbidden me; one single cup of coffee would kill me."

"If it will be any comfort to you," I said, "I may tell you that I am in the same case." "And you do not despair at times?"—"No," I replied, "for it is not my only want. If like you I had everything else in life, I also might despair."

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I WAS VERY LITTLE

There was a time, when I, an urchin slender, Could hardly boast of having any height. Oft I recall those days with feelings tender; With smiles, and yet the tear-drops dim my sight.

Within my tender mother's arms I sported, I played at horse upon my grandsire's knee; Sorrow and care and anger, ill-reported, As little known as gold or Greek, to me.

The world was little to my childish thinking, And innocent of sin and sinful things; I saw the stars above me flashing, winking— To fly and catch them, how I longed for wings!

I saw the moon behind the hills declining, And thought, O were I on yon lofty ground, I'd learn the truth; for here there's no divining How large it is, how beautiful, how round!

In wonder, too, I saw God's sun pursuing His westward course, to ocean's lap of gold; And yet at morn the East he was renewing With wide-spread, rosy tints, this artist old.

Then turned my thoughts to God the Father gracious, Who fashioned me and that great orb on high, And the night's jewels, decking heaven spacious; From pole to pole its arch to glorify.

With childish piety my lips repeated The prayer learned at my pious mother's knee: Help me remember, Jesus, I entreated, That I must grow up good and true to Thee!

Then for the household did I make petition, For kindred, friends, and for the town's folk, last; The unknown King, the outcast, whose condition Darkened my childish joy, as he slunk past.

All lost, all vanished, childhood's days so eager! My peace, my joy with them have fled away; I've only memory left: possession meagre; Oh, never may that leave me, Lord, I pray.



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY

(1816-)

In Bailey we have a striking instance of the man whose reputation is made suddenly by a single work, which obtains an amazing popularity, and which is presently almost forgotten except as a name. When in 1839 the long poem 'Festus' appeared, its author was an unknown youth, who had hardly reached his majority. Within a few months he was a celebrity. That so dignified and suggestive a performance should have come from so young a poet was considered a marvel of precocity by the literary world, both English and American.

The author of 'Festus' was born at Basford, Nottinghamshire, England, April 22nd, 1816. Educated at the public schools of Nottingham, and at Glasgow University, he studied law, and at nineteen entered Lincoln's Inn. In 1840 he was admitted to the bar. But his vocation in life appears to have been metaphysical and spiritual rather than legal.

His 'Festus: a Poem,' containing fifty-five episodes or successive scenes,—some thirty-five thousand lines,—was begun in his twentieth year. Three years later it was in the hands of the English reading public. Like Goethe's 'Faust' in pursuing the course of a human soul through influences emanating from the Supreme Good and the Supreme Evil; in having Heaven and the World as its scene; in its inclusion of God and the Devil, the Archangels and Angels, the Powers of Perdition, and withal many earthly types in its action,—it is by no means a mere imitation of the great German. Its plan is wider. It incorporates even more impressive spiritual material than 'Faust' offers. Not only is its mortal hero, Festus, conducted through an amazing pilgrimage, spiritual and redeemed by divine Love, but we have in the poem a conception of close association with Christianity, profound ethical suggestions, a flood of theology and philosophy, metaphysics and science, picturing Good and Evil, love and hate, peace and war, the past, the present, and the future, earth, heaven, and hell, heights and depths, dominions, principalities, and powers, God and man, the whole of being and of not-being,—all in an effort to unmask the last and greatest secrets of Infinity. And more than all this, 'Festus' strives to portray the sufficiency of Divine Love and of the Divine Atonement to dissipate, even to annihilate, Evil. For even Lucifer and the hosts of darkness are restored to purity and to peace among the Sons of God, the Children of Light! The Love of God is set forth as limitless. We have before us the birth of matter at the Almighty's fiat; and we close the work with the salvation and ecstasy—described as decreed from the Beginning—of whatever creature hath been given a spiritual existence, and made a spiritual subject and agency. There is in the doctrine of 'Festus' no such thing as the "Son of Perdition" who shall be an ultimate castaway.

Few English poems have attracted more general notice from all intelligent classes of readers than did 'Festus' on its advent. Orthodoxy was not a little aghast at its theologic suggestions. Criticism of it as a literary production was hampered not a little by religious sensitiveness. The London Literary Gazette said of it:—"It is an extraordinary production, out-Heroding Kant in some of its philosophy, and out-Goetheing Goethe in the introduction of the Three Persons of the Trinity as interlocutors in its wild plot. Most objectionable as it is on this account, it yet contains so many exquisite passages of genuine poetry, that our admiration of the author's genius overpowers the feeling of mortification at its being misapplied, and meddling with such dangerous topics." The advance of liberal ideas within the churches has diminished such criticism, but the work is still a stumbling-block to the less speculative of sectaries.

The poem is far too long, and its scope too vast for even a genius of much higher and riper gifts than Bailey's. It is turgid, untechnical in verse, wordy, and involved. Had Bailey written at fifty instead of at twenty, it might have shown a necessary balance and felicity of style. But, with all these shortcomings, it is not to be relegated to the library of things not worth the time to know, to the list of bulky poetic failures. Its author blossomed and fruited marvelously early; so early and with such unlooked-for fruit that the unthinking world, which first received him with exaggerated honor, presently assailed him with undue dispraise. 'Festus' is not mere solemn and verbose commonplace. Here and there it has passages of great force and even of high beauty. The author's whole heart and brain were poured into it, and neither was a common one. With all its ill-based daring and manifest crudities, it was such a tour de force for a lad of twenty as the world seldom sees. Its sluggish current bears along remarkable knowledge, great reflection, and the imagination of a fertile as well as a precocious brain. It is a stream which carries with it things new and old, and serves to stir the mind of the onlooker with unwonted thoughts. Were it but one fourth as long, it would still remain a favorite poem. Even now it has passed through numerous editions, and been but lately republished in sumptuous form after fifty years of life; and in the catalogue of higher metaphysico-religious poetry it will long maintain an honorable place. It is cited here among the books whose fame rather than whose importance demand recognition.

FROM 'FESTUS'

LIFE

Festus— Men's callings all Are mean and vain; their wishes more so: oft The man is bettered by his part or place. How slight a chance may raise or sink a soul!

Lucifer—What men call accident is God's own part. He lets ye work your will—it is his own: But that ye mean not, know not, do not, he doth.

Festus—What is life worth without a heart to feel The great and lovely harmonies which time And nature change responsive, all writ out By preconcertive hand which swells the strain To divine fulness; feel the poetry, The soothing rhythm of life's fore-ordered lay; The sacredness of things?—for all things are Sacred so far,—the worst of them, as seen By the eye of God, they in the aspect bide Of holiness: nor shall outlaw sin be slain, Though rebel banned, within the sceptre's length; But privileged even for service. Oh! to stand Soul-raptured, on some lofty mountain-thought, And feel the spirit expand into a view Millennial, life-exalting, of a day When earth shall have all leisure for high ends Of social culture; ends a liberal law And common peace of nations, blent with charge Divine, shall win for man, were joy indeed: Nor greatly less, to know what might be now, Worked will for good with power, for one brief hour. But look at these, these individual souls: How sadly men show out of joint with man! There are millions never think a noble thought; But with brute hate of brightness bay a mind Which drives the darkness out of them, like hounds. Throw but a false glare round them, and in shoals They rush upon perdition: that's the race. What charm is in this world-scene to such minds? Blinded by dust? What can they do in heaven, A state of spiritual means and ends? Thus must I doubt—perpetually doubt.

Lucifer—Who never doubted never half believed. Where doubt, there truth is—'tis her shadow. I Declare unto thee that the past is not. I have looked over all life, yet never seen The age that had been. Why then fear or dream About the future? Nothing but what is, is; Else God were not the Maker that he seems, As constant in creating as in being. Embrace the present. Let the future pass. Plague not thyself about a future. That Only which comes direct from God, his spirit, Is deathless. Nature gravitates without Effort; and so all mortal natures fall Deathwards. All aspiration is a toil; But inspiration cometh from above, And is no labor. The earth's inborn strength Could never lift her up to yon stars, whence She fell; nor human soul, by native worth, Claim heaven as birthright, more than man may call Cloudland his home. The soul's inheritance, Its birth-place, and its death-place, is of earth; Until God maketh earth and soul anew; The one like heaven, the other like himself. So shall the new creation come at once; Sin, the dead branch upon the tree of life Shall be cut off forever; and all souls Concluded in God's boundless amnesty.

Festus—Thou windest and unwindest faith at will. What am I to believe?

Lucifer— Thou mayest believe But that thou art forced to.

Festus— Then I feel, perforce, That instinct of immortal life in me, Which prompts me to provide for it.

Lucifer— Perhaps. Festus—Man hath a knowledge of a time to come— His most important knowledge: the weight lies Nearest the short end; and the world depends Upon what is to be. I would deny The present, if the future. Oh! there is A life to come, or all's a dream.

Lucifer—And all May be a dream. Thou seest in thine, men, deeds, Clear, moving, full of speech and order; then Why may not all this world be but a dream Of God's? Fear not! Some morning God may waken.

Festus—I would it were. This life's a mystery. The value of a thought cannot be told; But it is clearly worth a thousand lives Like many men's. And yet men love to live As if mere life were worth their living for. What but perdition will it be to most? Life's more than breath and the quick round of blood; It is a great spirit and a busy heart. The coward and the small in soul scarce do live. One generous feeling—one great thought—one deed Of good, ere night, would make life longer seem Than if each year might number a thousand days, Spent as is this by nations of mankind. We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives Who thinks most—feels the noblest—acts the best. Life's but a means unto an end—that end Beginning, mean, and end to all things—God. The dead have all the glory of the world. Why will we live and not be glorious? We never can be deathless till we die. It is the dead win battles. And the breath Of those who through the world drive like a wedge, Tearing earth's empires up, nears Death so close It dims his well-worn scythe. But no! the brave Die never. Being deathless, they but change Their country's arms for more—their country's heart. Give then the dead their due: it is they who saved us. The rapid and the deep—the fall, the gulph, Have likenesses in feeling and in life. And life, so varied, hath more loveliness In one day than a creeping century Of sameness. But youth loves and lives on change, Till the soul sighs for sameness; which at last Becomes variety, and takes its place. Yet some will last to die out, thought by thought, And power by power, and limb of mind by limb, Like lamps upon a gay device of glass, Till all of soul that's left be dry and dark; Till even the burden of some ninety years Hath crashed into them like a rock; shattered Their system as if ninety suns had rushed To ruin earth—or heaven had rained its stars; Till they become like scrolls, unreadable, Through dust and mold. Can they be cleaned and read? Do human spirits wax and wane like moons?

Lucifer—The eye dims, and the heart gets old and slow; The lithe limbs stiffen, and the sun-hued locks Thin themselves off, or whitely wither; still, Ages not spirit, even in one point, Immeasurably small; from orb to orb, Rising in radiance ever like the sun Shining upon the thousand lands of earth.

THE PASSING-BELL

Clara—True prophet mayst thou be. But list: that sound The passing-bell the spirit should solemnize; For, while on its emancipate path, the soul Still waves its upward wings, and we still hear The warning sound, it is known, we well may pray.

Festus—But pray for whom?

Clara—It means not. Pray for all. Pray for the good man's soul:

He is leaving earth for heaven, And it soothes us to feel that the best May be forgiven.

Festus—Pray for the sinful soul: It fleeth, we know not where; But wherever it be let us hope; For God is there.

Clara—Pray for the rich man's soul: Not all be unjust, nor vain; The wise he consoled; and he saved The poor from pain.

Festus—Pray for the poor man's soul: The death of this life of ours He hath shook from his feet; he is one Of the heavenly powers.

Pray for the old man's soul: He hath labored long; through life It was battle or march. He hath ceased, Serene, from strife.

Clara—Pray for the infant's soul: With its spirit crown unsoiled, He hath won, without war, a realm; Gained all, nor toiled.

Festus—Pray for the struggling soul: The mists of the straits of death Clear off; in some bright star-isle It anchoreth.

Pray for the soul assured: Though it wrought in a gloomy mine, Yet the gems it earned were its own, That soul's divine.

Clara—Pray for the simple soul: For it loved, and therein was wise; Though itself knew not, but with heaven Confused the skies.

Festus—Pray for the sage's soul: 'Neath his welkin wide of mind Lay the central thought of God, Thought undefined.

Pray for the souls of all To our God, that all may be With forgiveness crowned, and joy Eternally.

Clara—Hush! for the bell hath ceased; And the spirit's fate is sealed; To the angels known; to man Best unrevealed.

THOUGHTS

FESTUS—Well, farewell, Mr. Student. May you never Regret those hours which make the mind, if they Unmake the body; for the sooner we Are fit to be all mind, the better. Blessed Is he whose heart is the home of the great dead, And their great thoughts. Who can mistake great thoughts They seize upon the mind; arrest and search, And shake it; bow the tall soul as by wind; Rush over it like a river over reeds, Which quaver in the current; turn us cold, And pale, and voiceless; leaving in the brain A rocking and a ringing; glorious, But momentary, madness might it last, And close the soul with heaven as with a seal! In lieu of all these things whose loss thou mournest, If earnestly or not I know not, use The great and good and true which ever live; And are all common to pure eyes and true. Upon the summit of each mountain-thought Worship thou God, with heaven-uplifted head And arms horizon-stretched; for deity is seen From every elevation of the soul. Study the light; attempt the high; seek out The soul's bright path; and since the soul is fire, Of heat intelligential, turn it aye To the all-Fatherly source of light and life; Piety purifies the soul to see Visions, perpetually, of grace and power, Which, to their sight who in ignorant sin abide, Are now as e'er incognizable. Obey Thy genius, for a minister it is Unto the throne of Fate. Draw towards thy soul, And centralize, the rays which are around Of the divinity. Keep thy spirit pure From worldly taint, by the repellent strength Of virtue. Think on noble thoughts and deeds, Ever. Count o'er the rosary of truth; And practice precepts which are proven wise, It matters not then what thou fearest. Walk Boldly and wisely in that light thou hast;— There is a hand above will help thee on. I am an omnist, and believe in all Religions; fragments of one golden world To be relit yet, and take its place in heaven, Where is the whole, sole truth, in deity. Meanwhile, his word, his law, writ soulwise here, Study; its truths love; practice its behests— They will be with thee when all else have gone. Mind, body, passion all wear out; not faith Nor truth. Keep thy heart cool, or rule its heat To fixed ends; waste it not upon itself. Not all the agony maybe of the damned Fused in one pang, vies with that earthquake throb Which wakens soul from life-waste, to let see The world rolled by for aye, and we must wait For our next chance the nigh eternity; Whether it be in heaven, or elsewhere.