Anima Poetae Part 31

Like some spendthrift Lord, after we have disposed of nature's great masterpiece and [priceless] heirloom, the wisdom of innocence, we hang up as a poor copy our [own base] cunning.

[Sidenote: A PLEA FOR SCHOLASTIC TERMS]

The revival of cla.s.sical literature, like all other revolutions, was not an unmixed good. One evil was the pa.s.sion for pure Latinity, and a consequent contempt for the barbarism of the scholastic style and terminology. For awhile the schoolmen made head against their a.s.sailants; but, alas! all the genius and eloquence of the world was against them, and by an additional misfortune the scholastic logic was professed by those who had no other attainments, namely, the monks, and these, from monkishness, were the enemies of all genius and liberal knowledge. They were, of course, laughed out of the field as soon as they lost the power of aiding their logic by the post-predicaments of dungeon, fire, and f.a.ggot. Henceforward speculative philosophy must be written cla.s.sically, that is, without technical terms--therefore popularly--and the inevitable consequence was that those sciences only were progressive which were permitted by the apparent as well as real necessity of the case to have a scientific terminology--as mathesis, geometry, astronomy and so forth--while metaphysic sank and died, and an empirical highly superficial psychology took its place. And so it has remained in England to the present day. A man must have felt the pain of being compelled to express himself either laxly or paraphrastically (which latter is almost as great an impediment in intellectual construction as the translation of letters and symbols into the thought they represent would be in Algebra), in order to understand how much a metaphysician suffers from not daring to adopt the _ivitates_ and _eitates_ of the schoolmen as objectivity, subjectivity, negativity, positivity. April 29, 1817, Tuesday night.

[Sidenote: THE BODY OF THIS DEATH]

The sentimental _cantilena_ respecting the benignity and loveliness of nature--how does it not sink before the contemplation of the pravity of nature, on whose reluctance and inaptness a form is forced (the mere reflex of that form which is itself absolute substance!) and which it struggles against, bears but for a while and then sinks with the alacrity of self-seeking into dust or _sanies_, which falls abroad into endless nothings or creeps and cowers in poison or explodes in havock!

What is the beginning? what the end? And how evident an alien is the supernatural in the brief interval!

[Sidenote: SPIRITUALISM AND MYSTICISM]

There are many, alas! too many, either born or who have become deaf and dumb. So there are too many who have perverted the religion of the spirit into the superst.i.tion of spirits that mutter and mock and mow, like deaf and dumb idiots. Plans of teaching the deaf and dumb have been invented. For these the deaf and dumb owe thanks, and we for their sakes. _Homines sumus et nihil humani a n.o.bis alienum._ But does it follow, therefore, that in _all_ schools these plans of teaching should be followed? Yet in the other case this is insisted on--and the Holy Ghost must not be our guide because mysticism and ghosts may come in under this name. Why? Because the deaf and dumb have been promoted to superintendents of education at large for all!

[Sidenote: IDEALISM AND SUPERSt.i.tION]

Save only in that in which I have a right to demand of every man that he should be able to understand me, the experience or inward witnessing of the conscience, and in respect of which every man in real life (even the very disputant who affects doubt or denial in the moment of metaphysical arguing) would hold himself insulted by the supposition that he did not understand it--save in this only, and in that which if it be at all must be _unique_, and therefore cannot be supported by an a.n.a.logue, and which, if it be at all, must be first, and therefore cannot have an antecedent, and therefore may be _monstrated_, but cannot be _de_monstrated.--I am no ghost-seer, I am no believer in apparitions. I do not contend for indescribable sensations, nor refer to, much less ground my convictions on, blind feelings or incommunicable experiences, but far rather contend against these superst.i.tions in the mechanic sect, and impeach you as guilty, habitually and systematically guilty, of the same. Guilty, I say, of superst.i.tions, which at worst are but exceptions and _fits_ in the poor self-misapprehending pietists, with whom, under the name mystics, you would fain confound and discredit _all_ who receive and wors.h.i.+p G.o.d in spirit and in truth, and in the former as the only possible mode of the latter. According to your own account, your own scheme, you know nothing but your own sensations, indescribable inasmuch as they are sensations--for the appropriate expression even of which we must fly not merely to the indeclinables in the lowest parts of speech, but to human articulations that only (like musical notes) _stand for_ inarticulate sounds--the [Greek: oi, oi, papai] of the Greek tragedies, or, rather, Greek oratorios. You see nothing, but only by a sensation that conjures up an image in your own brain, or optic nerve (as in a nightmare), have an apparition, in consequence of which, as again in the nightmare, you are _forced_ to believe for the moment, and are _inclined_ to infer the existence of a corresponding reality out of your brain, but by what intermediation you cannot even form an intelligible conjecture. During the years of ill-health from disturbed digestion, I saw a host of apparitions, and heard them too--but I attributed them to an act in my brain. You, according to your own showing, see and hear nothing but apparitions in your brain, and strangely attribute them to things that _are_ outside your skull. Which of the two notions is most like the philosopher, which the superst.i.tionist? The philosopher who makes my apparitions nothing but apparitions--a brain-image nothing more than a brain-image--and affirm _nihil super stare_--or you and yours who vehemently contend that it is but a brain-image, and yet cry, "_ast superst.i.tit aliquid. Est super st.i.tio alicujus quod in externo, id est, in apparenti non apparet_."

What is outness, external and the like, but either the generalisation of apparence or the result of a given degree, a comparative intensity of the same? "I see it in my mind's eye," exclaims Hamlet, when his thoughts were in his own purview the same phantom, yea! in a higher intensity, became his father's ghost and marched along the platform. I quoted your own exposition, and dare you with these opinions charge others with superst.i.tion? You who deny aught permanent in our being, you with whom the soul, yea, the soul of the soul, our conscience and morality, are but the _tune_ from a fragile barrel-organ played by air and water, and whose life, therefore, must of course be a _pointing_ to--as of a Marcellus or a Hamlet--"Tis here! 'Tis gone!" Were it possible that I could actually believe such a system, I should not be scared from striking it, from its being so _majestical_!

[Sidenote: THE GREATER d.a.m.nATION]

The old law of England punishes those who dig up the bones of the dead for superst.i.tious or magical purposes, that is, in order to injure the living. What then are they guilty of who uncover the dormitories of the departed, and throw their souls into h.e.l.l, in order to cast odium on a living truth?

[Sidenote: DARWIN'S BOTANICAL GARDEN]

Darwin possesses the _epidermis_ of poetry but not the _cutis_; the _cortex_ without the _liber_, _alburnum_, _lignum_, or _medulla_. And no wonder! for the inner bark or _liber_, alburnum, and wood are one and the same substance, in different periods of existence.

[Sidenote: SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY YARDS NOT EXACTLY A MILE]

"It is a mile and a half in height." "How much is that in yards or feet?" The mind rests satisfied in producing a correspondency in its own thoughts, and in the exponents of those thoughts. This seems to be a matter purely a.n.a.lytic, not yet properly synthetic. It is rather an interchange of equivalent acts, but not the same acts. In the yard I am prospective; in the mile I seem to be retrospective. Come, a hundred strides more, and we shall have come a mile. This, if true, may be a subtlety, but is it necessarily a trifle? May not many common but false conclusions originate in the neglect of this distinction--in the confounding of objective and subjective logic?

[Sidenote: OF A TOO WITTY BOOK]

I like salt to my meat so well that I can scarce say grace over meat without salt. But salt to one's salt! Ay! a sparkling, dazzling, lit-up saloon or subterranean minster in a vast mine of rock-salt--what of it?--full of white pillars and aisles and altars of eye-dazzling salt.

Well, what of it?--'twere an uncomfortable lodging or boarding-house--in short, _all my eye_. Now, I am content with a work if it be but my eye and Betty Martin, because, having never heard any charge against the author of the adage, candour obliges me to conclude that Eliza Martin is "sense for certain." In short, never was a metaphor more lucky, apt, ramescent, and fructiferous--a hundred branches, and each hung with a different graft-fruit--than salt as typical of wit--the uses of both being the same, not to nourish, but to season and preserve nourishment.

Yea! even when there is plenty of good substantial meat to incorporate with, stout aitch-bone and b.u.t.tock, still there may be too much; and they who confine themselves to such meals will contract a s...o...b..tic habit of intellect (_i.e._, a scurvy taste), and, with loose teeth and tender gums, become incapable of chewing and digesting hard matters of mere plain thinking.

[Sidenote: SPOOKS]

It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, they a.s.sume the facts as objectively as if the question related to the experimentable of our senses. Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility--that is, that the [a.s.sumed] facts involve no contradiction, [as if it were] a scientific possibility. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs of a spiritual world and our own immortality. This last [I hold to] be the greatest insult to conscience and the greatest incongruity with the objects of religion.

N.B.--It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., that the recorders are "the farthest in the world from being credulous," or "as far from believing such things as any man."

If a man could pa.s.s through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke--Aye! and what then?

The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it.

Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest springs turbid.

For compa.s.sion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy with joy, an angel's.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote G: A projected satire, of which, perhaps, the lines headed "A Character" were an instalment. See _P. W._, 1893, pp. 195-642. _Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 631.]

CHAPTER X

_1819-1828_

Where'er I find the Good, the True, the Fair, I ask no names--G.o.d's spirit dwelleth there!

The unconfounded, undivided Three, Each for itself, and all in each, to see In man and Nature, is Philosophy.

S. T. C.

[Sidenote: THE MOON'S HALO AN EMBLEM OF HOPE]

The moon, rus.h.i.+ng onward through the coursing clouds, advances like an indignant warrior through a fleeing army; but the amber halo in which she moves--O! it is a circle of Hope. For what she leaves behind her has not lost its radiance as it is melting away into oblivion, while, still, the other semi-circle catches the rich light at her approach, and heralds her ongress.

[Sidenote: A COMPLEX VEXATION]

It is by strength of mind that we are to untwist the tie or copula of the besom of affliction, which not nature but the strength of imagination had twisted round it, and thus resolve it into its component twigs, and conquer in detail "one down and t'other come on"! _Dividendo diminuitur_--which forms the true ground of the advantage accruing from communicating our griefs to another. We enable ourselves to see them each in its true magnitude.

[Sidenote: THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ENGLAND]

After re-perusal of my inefficient, yet not feeble efforts in behalf of the poor little white slaves in the cotton-factories, I ask myself, "But still are we not better than the other nations of Christendom?"

Yes--Perhaps. I don't know. I dare not affirm it. Better than the French certainly! Mammon _versus_ Moloch and Belial. But Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Tyrol? No.