A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 27

Is love, like faith, enn.o.bled through its own depth and fervour and sincerity? or is it enn.o.bled through the n.o.bility, and degraded through the degradation of its object? Is it with love as with wors.h.i.+p? Is it a _religion_, and holy when the object is pure and good? Is it a _superst.i.tion_, and unholy when the object is impure and unworthy?

Of all the histories I have read of the aberrations of human pa.s.sion, nothing ever so struck me with a sort of amazed and painful pity as Hazlitt's "Liber Amoris." The man was in love with a servant girl, who in the eyes of others possessed no particular charms of mind or person, yet did the mighty love of this strong, masculine, and gifted being, lift her into a sort of G.o.ddess-s.h.i.+p; and make his idolatry in its intense earnestness and reality a.s.sume something of the sublimity of an act of faith, and in its expression take a flight equal to anything that poetry or fiction have left us. It was all so terribly real, he sued with such a vehemence, he suffered with such resistance, that the powerful intellect reeled, tempest-tost, and might have foundered but for the gift of expression. He might have said like Ta.s.so-like Goethe rather-"Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen was ich leide!" And this faculty of utterance, eloquent utterance, was perhaps the only thing which saved life, or reason, or both. In such moods of pa.s.sion, the poor uneducated man, dumb in the midst of the strife and the storm, unable to comprehend his intolerable pain or make it comprehended, throws himself in a blind fury on the cause of his torture, or hangs himself in his neckcloth.

91.

Hazlitt takes up his pen, dips it in fire and thus he writes:-

"Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of it nothing farther to desire. There is one object (at least), in which the soul finds absolute content;-for which it seeks to live or dares to die. The heart has, as it were, filled up the moulds of the imagination; the truth of pa.s.sion keeps pace with, and outvies, the extravagance of mere language. There are no words so fine, no flattery so soft, that there is not a sentiment beyond them that it is impossible to express, at the bottom of the heart where true love is. What idle sounds the common phrases _adorable creature_, _divinity_, _angel_, are!

What a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these, rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable, to which all other feelings are light and vain! Perfect love reposes on the object of its choice, like the halcyon on the wave, and the air of heaven is around it!"

92.

"She stood (while I pleaded my cause before her with all the earnestness and fondness in the world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes, her head drooping, her att.i.tude fixed, with the finest expression that ever was seen of mixed regret, pity, and stubborn resolution, but without speaking a word-without altering a feature. _It was like a petrifaction of a human face in the softest moment of pa.s.sion._"

93.

"Shall I not love her," he exclaims, "for herself alone, in spite of fickleness and folly? to love her for her regard for me, is not to love her but myself. She has robbed me of herself, shall she also rob me of my love of her? did I not live on her smile? is it less sweet because it is withdrawn from me? Did I not adore her every grace? and does she bend less enchantingly because she has turned from me to another? Is my love then in the power of fortune or of her caprice? No, I will have it lasting as it is pure; and I will make a G.o.ddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and wors.h.i.+p her on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her, and my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled symmetry of form. And when that fails, the memory of it shall survive, and my bosom shall be proof to scorn as hers has been to pity; and I will pursue her with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave and tend her steps without notice, and without reward; and serve her living, and mourn for her when dead; and thus my love will have shown itself superior to her hate, and I shall triumph and then die. This is my idea of the only true and heroic love, and such is mine for her."

Hazlitt, when he wrote all this, seemed to himself full of high and calm resolve. The hand did not fail, the pen did not stagger over the paper in a formless scrawl, yet the brain was reeling like a tower in an earthquake. "Pa.s.sion," as it has been well said, "when in a state of solemn and omnipotent vehemence, always appears to be calmness to him whom it domineers;" not unfrequently to others also, as the tide at its highest flood looks tranquil, and "neither way inclines."

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THE NIGHTINGALE.

94.

Reading the Life and Letters of Francis Horner, in the midst of a correspondence about Statistics and Bullion, and Political Economy, and the Balance of Parties, I came upon the following exquisite pa.s.sage in a letter to his friend Mrs. Spencer:-

"I was amused by your interrogatory to me about the Nightingale's note.

You meant to put me in a dilemma with my politics on one side and my gallantry on the other. Of course you consider it as a plaintive note, and you were in hopes that no idolater of Charles Fox would venture to agree with that opinion. In this difficulty I must make the best escape I can by saying, that it seems to me neither cheerful nor melancholy,-but always according to the circ.u.mstances in which you hear it, the scenery, your own temper of mind, and so on. I settled it so with myself early in this month, when I heard them every night and all day long at Wells. In daylight, when all the other birds are in active concert, the Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emulous, and successful of the whole band. At night, especially if it is a calm one, with light enough to give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary music of this bird takes quite another character, from all the a.s.sociations of the scene, from the languor one feels at the close of the day, and from the stillness of spirits and elevation of mind which comes upon one when walking out at that time. But it is not always so-different circ.u.mstances will vary in every possible way the effect.

Will the Nightingale's note sound alike to the man who is going on an adventure to meet his mistress (supposing he heeds it at all), and when he loiters along upon his return? The last time I heard the Nightingale it was an experiment of another sort. It was after a thunderstorm in a mild night, while there was silent lightning opening every few minutes, first on one side of the heavens then on the other. The careless little fellow was piping away in the midst of all this terror. To _me_, there was no melancholy in his note, but a sort of sublimity; yet it was the same song which I had heard in the morning, and which then seemed nothing but bustle."

And in the same spirit Portia moralises:-

The nightingale, if she should sing by day, When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren.

How many things by season, seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection!

Nor will Coleridge allow the song of the nightingale to be always plaintive,-"most musical, most _melancholy_;" he defies the epithet though it be Milton's.

'Tis the _merry_ nightingale, That crowds and hurries and precipitates With thick fast warble his delicious notes, As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chaunt, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music.

As a poetical commentary on these beautiful pa.s.sages, every reader of Joanna Baillie will remember the night scene in De Montfort, where the cry of the Owl suggests such different feelings and a.s.sociations to the two men who listen to it, under such different circ.u.mstances. To De Montfort it is the screech-owl, foreboding death and horror,-and he stands and shudders at the "instinctive wailing." To Rezenvelt it is the sound which recalls his boyish days, when he merrily mimicked the night-bird till it returned him cry for cry,-and he pauses to listen with a fanciful delight.

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THACKERAY'S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS

(1833.)

95.

A Lecture should not read like an essay; and, therefore, it surprises me that these lectures so carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet the requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable reading. As _lectures_, they wanted only a little more point, and emphasis and animation on the part of the speaker: as _essays_, they atone in eloquence and earnestness for what they want in finish and purity of style.

Genius and suns.h.i.+ne have this in common that they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when I heard them, (and it strikes me now in turning over the written pages,) is this: we deal here with writers and artists, yet the purpose, from beginning to end, is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray tells us himself that he has not a.s.sembled his hearers to bring them better acquainted with the writings of these writers, or to ill.u.s.trate the wit of these wits, or to enhance the humour of these humourists;-no; but to deal justice on the men as _men_-to tell us how _they_ lived, and loved, suffered and made suffer, who still have power to pain or to please; to settle _their_ claims to our praise or blame, our love or hate, whose right to fame was settled long ago, and remains undisputed.

This is his purpose. Thus then he has laid down and acted on the principle that "morals have something to do with art;" that there is a moral account to be settled with men of genius; that the power and the right remains with us to do justice on those who being dead yet rule our spirits from their urns; to try them by a standard which perhaps neither themselves, nor those around them, would have admitted. Did Swift when he bullied men, lampooned women, trampled over decency and humanity, flung round him filth and fire, did he antic.i.p.ate the time when before a company of intellectual men, and thinking, feeling women, in both hemispheres, he should be called up to judgment, hands bound, tongue-tied? Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors? Thackeray turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, a warning; probes the lacerated self-love, holds up to scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable egotism, the half-distempered brain. O Stella! O Vanessa! are you not avenged?

Then Sterne-how he takes to pieces his feigned originality, his feigned benevolence, his feigned misanthropy-all feigned!-the licentious parson, the trader in sentiment, the fas.h.i.+onable lion of his day, the man without a heart for those who loved him, without a conscience for those who trusted him! yet the same man who gave us the pathos of "Le Fevre,"

and the humours of "Uncle Toby!" Sad is it? ungrateful is it? ungracious is it?-well, it cannot be helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of humanity. You might as well exclaim against any natural result of any natural law. Fancy a hundred years hence some brave, honest, human-hearted Thackeray standing up to discourse before our great-great-grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same stern truth, on the wits, and the poets and the artists of the present time! Hard is your fate, O ye men and women of genius! very hard and pitiful, if ye must be subjected to the scalpel of such a dissector! You, gifted sinner, whoever you may be, walking among us now in all the impunity of conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and sentimentalisms, performing great things, teaching good things, you are set up as one of the lights of the world:-Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out of your hand, and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a face? "Off, off ye lendings!" O G.o.d! how much wiser, as well as better, not to study how to _seem_, but how to _be_! How much wiser and better, not to have to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine; not to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who "shall pluck out the heart of your mystery," and shall anatomise you, and deliver lectures upon you, to ill.u.s.trate the standard of morals and manners in Queen Victoria's reign!

In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative pa.s.sages on character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies in the novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No woman resents his Rebecca-inimitable Becky!-no woman but feels and acknowledges with a s.h.i.+ver the completeness of that wonderful and finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish inane Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the author's own words when speaking of 'Tom Jones:'-"I can't say that I think Amelia a virtuous character. I can't say but I think Mr. Thackeray's evident liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that the great humourist's moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in art and ethics there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we are to admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable."

Laura, in 'Pendennis,' is a yet more fatal mistake. She is drawn with every generous feeling, every good gift. We do not complain that she loves that poor creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her childhood.

She grew up with that love in her heart; it came between her and the perception of his faults; it is a necessity indivisible from her nature.

Hallowed, through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless to that first affection; Laura, waked up to the appreciation of a far more manly and n.o.ble nature, in love with Warrington, and then going back to Pendennis, and marrying _him_! Such infirmity might be true of some women, but not of such a woman as Laura; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy of the portrait.

And then Lady Castlewood,-so evidently a favourite of the author, what shall we say of her? The virtuous woman, _par excellence_, who "never sins and never forgives," who never resents, nor relents, nor repents; the mother, who is the rival of her daughter; the mother, who for years is the _confidante_ of a man's delirious pa.s.sion for her own child, and then consoles him by marrying him herself! O Mr. Thackeray! this will never do! such women _may_ exist, but to hold them up as examples of excellence, and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and proves a low standard in ethics and in art. "When an author presents to us a heroine whom we are called upon to admire, let him at least take care that she is admirable." If in these, and in some other instances, Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the lectures we may thank him for some amends: he has shown us what he conceives true womanhood and true manliness ought to be; so with this expression of grat.i.tude, and a far deeper debt of grat.i.tude left unexpressed, I close his book, and say, good night!

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Notes on Art.

96.

Sometimes, in thoughtful moments, I am struck by those beautiful a.n.a.logies between things apparently dissimilar-those awful approximations between things apparently far asunder-which many people would call fanciful and imaginary, but they seem to bring all G.o.d's creation, spiritual and material, into one comprehensive whole; they give me, thus a.s.sociated, a glimpse, a perception of that overwhelming unity which we call the universe, the mult.i.tudinous ONE.

Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art, as conceived by the Greeks, and unsurpa.s.sed in its purity and beauty, lay in considering well the characteristics which distinguish the _human_ form from the brute form; and then, in rendering the human form, the first aim was to soften down, or, if possible, throw out wholly, those characteristics which belong to the brute nature, or are common to the brute and the man; and the next, to bring into prominence and even enlarge the proportions of those manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity; till, at last, the _human_ merged into the _divine_, and the G.o.d in look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.

Let us now suppose this broad principle which the Greeks applied to form, ethically carried out, and made the basis of all education-the training of men as a race. Suppose we started with the general axiom that all propensities which we have in common with the lower animals are to be kept subordinate, and so far as is consistent with the truth of nature refined away; and that all the qualities which elevate, all the aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are to be cultivated and rendered more and more prominent, till at last the human being, in faculties as well as form, approaches the G.o.d-like-I only say-suppose?--

Again: it has been said of natural philosophy (Zoology) that in order to make any real progress in the science, as such, we must more and more disregard _differences_, and more and more attend to the obscured but essential conditions which are revealed in _resemblances_, in the constant and similar relations of primitive structure. Now if the same principle were carried out in theology, in morals, in art, as well as in science, should we not come nearer to the essential truth in _all_?

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97.