Pages from a Journal with Other Papers

A notion, self-begotten in me, of the limitations of my friend is answerable for the barrenness of my intercourse with him.  I set him down as hard; I speak to him as if he were hard and from that which is hard in myself.  Naturally I evoke only that which is hard, although there may be fountains of tenderness in him of which I am altogether unaware.  It is far better in conversation not to regulate it according to supposed capacities or tempers, which are generally those of some fictitious being, but to be simply ourselves.  We shall often find unexpected and welcome response.

Our estimates of persons, unless they are frequently revived by personal intercourse, are apt to alter insensibly and to become untrue.  They acquire increased definiteness but they lose in comprehensiveness.

Especially is this true of those who are dead.  If I do not read a great author for some time my mental abstract of him becomes summary and false.  I turn to him again, all summary judgments upon him become impossible, and he partakes of infinitude.  Writers, and people who are in society and talk much are apt to be satisfied with an algebraic symbol for a man of note, and their work is done not with him but with x.

We ought to let Time have his own way in the settlement of our disputes.  It is a commonplace how much he is able to do with some of our troubles, such as loss of friends or wealth; but we do not sufficiently estimate his power to help our arguments.  If I permit myself to dispute, I always go beyond what is necessary for my purpose, and my continual iteration and insistence do nothing but provoke opposition.  Much better would it be simply to state my case and leave it.  To do more is not only to distrust it, but to distrust that in my friend which is my best ally, and will more surely assist me than all my vehemence.  Sometimes—nay, often—it is better to say nothing, for there is a constant tendency in Nature towards rectification, and her quiet protest and persuasiveness are hindered by personal interference.  If anybody very dear to me were to fall into any heresy of belief or of conduct, I am not sure that I ought to rebuke him, and that he would not sooner be converted by observing my silent respect for him than by preaching to him.

We may talk about our troubles to those persons who can give us direct help, but even in this case we ought as much as possible to come to a provisional conclusion before consultation; to be perfectly clear to ourselves within our own limits.  Some people have a foolish trick of applying for aid before they have done anything whatever to aid themselves, and in fact try to talk themselves into perspicuity.  The only way in which they can think is by talking, and their speech consequently is not the expression of opinion already and carefully formed, but the manufacture of it.

We may also tell our troubles to those who are suffering if we can lessen their own.  It may be a very great relief to them to know that others have passed through trials equal to theirs and have survived.  There are obscure, nervous diseases, hypochondriac fancies, almost uncontrollable impulses, which terrify by their apparent singularity.  If we could believe that they are common, the worst of the fear would vanish.

But, as a rule, we should be very careful for our own sake not to speak much about what distresses us.  Expression is apt to carry with it exaggeration, and this exaggerated form becomes henceforth that under which we represent our miseries to ourselves, so that they are thereby increased.  By reserve, on the other hand, they are diminished, for we attach less importance to that which it was not worth while to mention.  Secrecy, in fact, may be our salvation.

It is injurious to be always treated as if something were the matter with us.  It is health-giving to be dealt with as if we were healthy, and the man who imagines his wits are failing becomes stronger and sounder by being entrusted with a difficult problem than by all the assurances of a doctor.

They are poor creatures who are always craving for pity.  If we are sick, let us prefer conversation upon any subject rather than upon ourselves.  Let it turn on matters that lie outside the dark chamber, upon the last new discovery, or the last new idea.  So shall we seem still to be linked to the living world.  By perpetually asking for sympathy an end is put to real friendship.  The friend is afraid to intrude anything which has no direct reference to the patient’s condition lest it should be thought irrelevant.  No love even can long endure without complaint, silent it may be, an invalid who is entirely self-centred; and what an agony it is to know that we are tended simply as a duty by those who are nearest to us, and that they will really be relieved when we have departed!  From this torture we may be saved if we early apprentice ourselves to the art of self-suppression and sternly apply the gag to eloquence upon our own woes.  Nobody who really cares for us will mind waiting on us even to the long-delayed last hour if we endure in fortitude.

There is no harm in confronting our disorders or misfortunes.  On the contrary, the attempt is wholesome.  Much of what we dread is really due to indistinctness of outline.  If we have the courage to say to ourselves, What is this thing, then? let the worst come to the worst, and what then? we shall frequently find that after all it is not so terrible.  What we have to do is to subdue tremulous, nervous, insane fright.  Fright is often prior to an object; that is to say, the fright comes first and something is invented or discovered to account for it.  There are certain states of body and mind which are productive of objectless fright, and the most ridiculous thing in the world is able to provoke it to activity.  It is perhaps not too much to say that any calamity the moment it is apprehended by the reason alone loses nearly all its power to disturb and unfix us.  The conclusions which are so alarming are not those of the reason, but, to use Spinoza’s words, of the “affects.”

Faith is nobly seen when a man, standing like Columbus upon the shore with a dark, stormy Atlantic before him, resolves to sail, and although week after week no land be visible, still believes and still sails on; but it is nobler when there is no America as the goal of our venture, but something which is unsubstantial, as, for example, self-control and self-purification.  It is curious, by the way, that discipline of this kind should almost have disappeared.  Possibly it is because religion is now a matter of belief in certain propositions; but, whatever the cause may be, we do not train ourselves day by day to become better as we train ourselves to learn languages or science.  To return from this parenthesis, we say that when no applause nor even recognition is expected, to proceed steadily and alone for its own sake in the work of saving the soul is truer heroism than that which leads a martyr cheerfully to the stake.

Faith is at its best when we have to wrestle with despair, not only of ourselves but of the Universe; when we strain our eyes and see nothing but blackness.  In the Gorgias Socrates maintains, not only that it is always better to suffer injustice than to commit it, but that it is better to be punished for injustice than to escape, and better to die than to do wrong; and it is better not only because of the effect on others but for our own sake.  We are naturally led to ask what support a righteous man unjustly condemned could find, supposing he were about to be executed, if he had no faith in personal immortality and knew that his martyrdom could not have the least effect for good.  Imagine him, for example, shut up in a dungeon and about to be strangled in it and that not a single inquiry will be made about him—where will he look for help? what hope will compose him?  He may say that in a few hours he will be asleep, and that nothing will then be of any consequence to him, but that thought surely will hardly content him.  He may reflect that he at least prevents the evil which would be produced by his apostasy; and very frequently in life, when we abstain from doing wrong, we have to be satisfied with a negative result and with the simple absence (which nobody notices) of some direct mischief, although the abstention may cost more than positive well-doing.  This too, however, is but cold consolation when the cord is brought and the grave is already dug.

It must be admitted that Reason cannot give any answer.  Socrates, when his reasoning comes to an end, often permits himself to tell a story.  “My dialectic,” he seems to say, “is of no further use; but here is a tale for you,” and as he goes on with it we can see his satyr eyes gleam with an intensity which shows that he did not consider he was inventing a mere fable.  That was the way in which he taught theology.  Perhaps we may find that something less than logic and more than a dream may be of use to us.  We may figure to ourselves that this universe of souls is the manifold expression of the One, and that in this expression there is a purpose which gives importance to all the means of which it avails itself.  Apparent failure may therefore be a success, for the mind which has been developed into perfect virtue falls back into the One, having served (by its achievements) the end of its existence.  The potential in the One has become actual, has become real, and the One is the richer thereby.

What is most to be envied in really religious people of the earlier type is their intellectual and moral peace.  They had obtained certain convictions, a certain conception of the Universe, by which they could live.  Their horizon may have been encompassed with darkness; experience sometimes contradicted their faith, but they trusted—nay, they knew—that the opposition was not real and that the truths were not to be shaken.  Their conduct was marked by a corresponding unity.  They determined once for all that there were rules which had to be obeyed, and when any particular case arose it was not judged according to the caprice of the moment, but by statute.

We, on the other hand, can only doubt.  So far as those subjects are concerned on which we are most anxious to be informed, we are sure of nothing.  What we have to do is to accept the facts and wait.  We must take care not to deny beauty and love because we are forced also to admit ugliness and hatred.  Let us yield ourselves up utterly to the magnificence and tenderness of the sunrise, though the East End of London lies over the horizon.  That very same Power, and it is no other, which blasts a country with the cholera or drives the best of us to madness has put the smile in a child’s face and is the parent of Love.  It is curious, too, that the curse seems in no way to qualify the blessing.  The sweetness and majesty of Nature are so exquisite, so pure, that when they are before us we cannot imagine they could be better if they proceeded from an omnipotently merciful Being and no pestilence had ever been known.  We must not worry ourselves with attempts at reconciliation.  We must be satisfied with a hint here and there, with a ray of sunshine at our feet, and we must do what we can to make the best of what we possess.  Hints and sunshine will not be wanting, and science, which was once considered to be the enemy of religion, is dissolving by its later discoveries the old gross materialism, the source of so much despair.

The conduct of life is more important than speculation, but the lives of most of us are regulated by no principle whatever.  We read our Bible, Thomas à Kempis, and Bunyan, and we are persuaded that our salvation lies in the perpetual struggle of the higher against the lower self, the spirit against the flesh, and that the success of the flesh is damnation.  We take down Horace and Rabelais and we admit that the body also has its claims.  We have no power to dominate both sets of books, and consequently they supersede one another alternately.  Perhaps life is too large for any code we can as yet frame, and the dissolution of all codes, the fluid, unstable condition of which we complain, may be a necessary antecedent of new and more lasting combinations.  One thing is certain, that there is not a single code now in existence which is not false; that the graduation of the vices and virtues is wrong, and that in the future it will be altered.  We must not hand ourselves over to a despotism with no Divine right, even if there be a risk of anarchy.  In the determination of our own action, and in our criticism of other people, we must use the whole of ourselves and not mere fragments.  If we do this we need not fear.  We may suppose we are in danger because the stone tables of the Decalogue have gone to dust, but it is more dangerous to attempt to control men by fictions.  Better no chart whatever than one which shows no actually existing perils, but warns us against Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops.  If we are perfectly honest with ourselves we shall not find it difficult to settle whether we ought to do this or that particular thing, and we may be content.  The new legislation will come naturally at the appointed time, and it is not impossible to live while it is on the way.

In these latter days of anarchy and tumult, when there is no gospel of faith or morals, when democracy seems bent on falsifying every prediction of earlier democratic enthusiasts by developing worse dangers to liberty than any which our forefathers had to encounter, and when the misery of cities is so great, it appears absurd, not to say wrong, that we should sit still and read books.  I am ashamed when I go into my own little room and open Milton or Shakespeare after looking at a newspaper or walking through the streets of London.  I feel that Milton and Shakespeare are luxuries, and that I really belong to the class which builds palaces for its pleasure, although men and women may be starving on the roads.

Nevertheless, if I were placed on a platform I should be obliged to say, “My brethren, I plainly perceive the world is all wrong, but I cannot see how it is to be set right,” and I should descend the steps and go home.  There may be others who have a clearer perception than mine, and who may be convinced that this way or that way lies regeneration.  I do not wish to discourage them; I wish them God-speed, but I cannot help them nor become their disciple.  Possibly I am doing nothing better than devising excuses for lotus-eating, but here they are.

To take up something merely because I am idle is useless.  The message must come to me, and with such urgency that I cannot help delivering it.  Nor is it of any use to attempt to give my natural thoughts a force which is not inherent in them.

The disease is often obvious, but the remedies are doubtful.  The accumulation of wealth in a few hands, generally by swindling, is shocking, but if it were distributed to-morrow we should gain nothing.  The working man objects to the millionaire, but would gladly become a millionaire himself, even if his million could be piled up in no other way than by sweating thousands of his fellows.  The usurpation of government by the ignorant will bring disaster, but how in these days could a wise man reign any longer than ignorance permitted him?  The everlasting veerings of the majority, without any reason meanwhile for the change, show that, except on rare occasions of excitement, the opinion of the voters is of no significance.  But when we are asked what substitute for elections can be proposed, none can be found.  So with the relationship between man and woman, the marriage laws and divorce.  The calculus has not been invented which can deal with such complexities.  We are in the same position as that in which Leverrier and Adams would have been, if, observing the irregularities of Uranus, which led to the discovery of Neptune, they had known nothing but the first six books of Euclid and a little algebra.

There has never been any reformation as yet without dogma and supernaturalism.  Ordinary people acknowledge no real reasons for virtue except heaven and hell-fire.  When heaven and hell-fire cease to persuade, custom for a while is partly efficacious, but its strength soon decays.  Some good men, knowing the uselessness of rational means to convert or to sustain their fellows, have clung to dogma with hysterical energy, but without any genuine faith in it.  They have failed, for dogma cannot be successful unless it be the inevitable expression of the inward conviction.

The voices now are so many and so contradictory that it is impossible to hear any one of them distinctly, no matter what its claim on our attention may be.  The newspaper, the circulating library, the free library, and the magazine are doing their best to prevent unity of direction and the din and confusion of tongues beget a doubt whether literature and the printing press have actually been such a blessing to the race as enlightenment universally proclaims them to be.

The great currents of human destiny seem more than ever to move by forces which tend to no particular point.  There is a drift, tremendous and overpowering, due to nobody in particular, but to hundreds of millions of small impulses.  Achilles is dead, and the turn of the Myrmidons has come.

“Myrmdons, race féconde
Myrmidons,
Enfin nous commandons:
Jupiter livre le monde
Aux Myrmidons, aux Myrmidons.

Voyant qu’ Achille succombe,
Ses Myrmidons, hors des rangs,
Disent: Dansons sur sa tombe
Ses petits vont être grands.”

My last defence is that the Universe is an organic unity, and so subtle and far-reaching are the invisible threads which pass from one part of it to another that it is impossible to limit the effect which even an insignificant life may have.  “Were a single dust-atom destroyed, the universe would collapse.”

            “ . . . who of men can tell
That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell
To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail,
The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,
The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones,
The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,
Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet
If human souls did never kiss and greet?”

True belief is rare and difficult.  There is no security that the fictitious beliefs which have been obtained by no genuine mental process, that is to say, are not vitally held, may not be discarded for those which are exactly contrary.  We flatter ourselves that we have secured a method and freedom of thought which will not permit us to be the victims of the absurdities of the Middle Ages, but, in fact, there is no solid obstacle to our conversion to some new grotesque religion more miraculous than Roman Catholicism.  Modern scepticism, distinguishing it from scholarly scepticism, is nothing but stupidity or weakness.  Few people like to confess outright that they do not believe in a God, although the belief in a personal devil is considered to be a sign of imbecility.  Nevertheless, men, as a rule, have no ground for believing in God a whit more respectable than for disbelief in a devil.  The devil is not seen nor is God seen.  The work of the devil is as obvious as that of God.  Nay, as the devil is a limited personality, belief in him is not encumbered with the perplexities which arise when we attempt to apprehend the infinite Being.  Belief may often be tested; that is to say, we may be able to discover whether it is an active belief or not by inquiring what disbelief it involves.  So also the test of disbelief is its correspondent belief.

Superstition is a name generally given to a few only of those beliefs for which it is imagined that there is no sufficient support, such as the belief in ghosts, witches, and, if we are Protestants, in miracles performed after a certain date.  Why these particular beliefs have been selected as solely deserving to be called superstitious it is not easy to discover.  If the name is to be extended to all beliefs which we have not attempted to verify, it must include the largest part of those we possess.  We vote at elections as we are told to vote by the newspaper which we happen to read, and our opinions upon a particular policy are based upon no surer foundation than those of the Papist on the authenticity of the lives of the Saints.

Superstition is a matter of relative evidence.  A thousand years ago it was not so easy as it is now to obtain rigid demonstration in any department except mathematics.  Much that was necessarily the basis of action was as incapable of proof as the story of St. George and the Dragon, and consequently it is hardly fair to say that the dark ages were more superstitious than our own.  Nor does every belief, even in supernatural objects, deserve the name of superstition.  Suppose that the light which struck down St. Paul on his journey to Damascus was due to his own imagination, the belief that it came from Jesus enthroned in the heavens was a sign of strength and not of weakness.  Beliefs of this kind, in so far as they exalt man, prove greatness and generosity, and may be truer than the scepticism which is formally justified in rejecting them.  If Christ never rose from the dead, the women who waited at the sepulchre were nearer to reality than the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection.

There is a half-belief, which we find in Virgil that is not superstition, nor inconstancy, nor cowardice.  A child-like faith in the old creed is no longer possible, but it is equally impossible to surrender it.  I refer now not to those who select from it what they think to be in accordance with their reason, and throw overboard the remainder with no remorse, but rather to those who cannot endure to touch with sacrilegious hands the ancient histories and doctrines which have been the depositaries of so much that is eternal, and who dread lest with the destruction of a story something precious should also be destroyed.  The so-called superstitious ages were not merely transitionary.  Our regret that they have departed is to be explained not by a mere idealisation of the past, but by a conviction that truths have been lost, or at least have been submerged.  Perhaps some day they may be recovered, and in some other form may again become our religion.

Judas Iscariot has become to Christian people an object of horror more loathsome than even the devil himself.  The devil rebelled because he could not brook subjection to the Son of God, a failing which was noble compared with treachery to the Son of man.  The hatred of Judas is not altogether virtuous.  We compound thereby for our neglect of Jesus and His precepts: it is easier to establish our Christianity by cursing the wretched servant than by following his Master.  The heinousness also of the crime in Gethsemane has been aggravated by the exaltation of Jesus to the Redeemership of the world.  All that can be known of Judas is soon collected.  He was chosen one of the twelve apostles, and received their high commission to preach the kingdom of heaven, to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out devils.  He was appointed treasurer to the community.  John in telling the story of the anointing at Bethany says that he was a thief, but John also makes him the sole objector to the waste of the ointment.  According to the other evangelists all the disciples objected.  Since he remained in office it could hardly have been known at the time of the visit to Bethany that he was dishonest, nor could it have been known at any time to Matthew and Mark, for they would not have lost the opportunity of adding such a touch to the portrait.  The probability, therefore, is that the robbery of the bag is unhistorical.  When the chief priests and scribes sought how they might apprehend Jesus they made a bargain with Judas to deliver Him to them for thirty pieces of silver.  He was present at the Last Supper but went and betrayed his Lord.  A few hours afterwards, when he found out that condemnation to death followed, he repented himself and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to his employers, declared that he had sinned in betraying innocent blood, cast down the money at their feet, and went and hanged himself.

This is all that is discoverable about Judas, and it has been considered sufficient for a damnation deeper than any allotted to the worst of the sons of Adam.  Dante places him in the lowest round of the ninth or last of the hellish circles, where he is eternally “champed” by Satan, “bruised as with ponderous engine,” his head within the diabolic jaws and “plying the feet without.”  In the absence of a biography with details, it is impossible to make out with accuracy what the real Judas was.  We can, however, by dispassionate examination of the facts determine their sole import, and if we indulge in inferences we can deduce those which are fairly probable.  As Judas was treasurer, he must have been trusted.  He could hardly have been naturally covetous, for he had given up in common with the other disciples much, if not all, to follow Jesus.  The thirty pieces of silver—some four or five pounds of our money—could not have been considered by him as a sufficient bribe for the ignominy of a treason which was to end in legal murder.  He ought perhaps to have been able to measure the ferocity of an established ecclesiastical order and to have known what would have been the consequence of handing over to it perfect, and therefore heretical, sincerity and purity, but there is no evidence that he did know: nay, we are distinctly informed, as we have just seen, that when he became aware what was going to happen his sorrow for his wicked deed took a very practical shape.

We cannot allege with confidence that it was any permanent loss of personal attachment to Jesus which brought about his defection.  It came when the belief in a theocracy near at hand filled the minds of the disciples.  These ignorant Galilean fishermen expected that in a very short time they would sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.  The custodian of the bag, gifted with more common sense than his colleagues, probably foresaw the danger of a collision with Rome, and may have desired by a timely arrest to prevent an open revolt, which would have meant immediate destruction of the whole band with women and children.  Can any position be imagined more irritating that that of a careful man of business who is keeper of the purse for a company of heedless enthusiasts professing complete indifference to the value of money, misunderstanding the genius of their chief, and looking out every morning for some sign in the clouds, a prophecy of their immediate appointment as vicegerents of a power that would supersede the awful majesty of the Imperial city?  He may have been heated by a long series of petty annoyances to such a degree that at last they may have ended in rage and a sudden flinging loose of himself from the society.  It is the impulsive man who frequently suffers what appears to be inversion, and Judas was impulsive exceedingly.  Matthew, and Matthew only, says that Judas asked for money from the chief priests.  “What will ye give me, and I will deliver Him unto you?”  According to Mark, whose account of the transaction is the same as Luke’s, “Judas . . . went unto the chief priests to betray Him unto them.  And when they heard it, they were glad, and promised to give him money.”  If the priests were the tempters, a slight difference is established in favour of Judas, but this we will neglect.  The sin of taking money and joining in that last meal in any case is black enough, although, as we have before pointed out, Judas did not at the time know what the other side of the bargain was.  Admitting, however, everything that can fairly be urged against him, all that can be affirmed with certainty is that we are in the presence of strange and unaccountable inconsistency, and that an apostle who had abandoned his home, who had followed Jesus for three years amidst contempt and persecution, and who at last slew himself in self-reproach, could be capable of committing the meanest of sins.  Is the co-existence of irreconcilable opposites in human nature anything new?  The story of Judas may be of some value if it reminds us that man is incalculable, and that, although in theory, and no doubt in reality, he is a unity, the point from which the divergent forces in him rise is often infinitely beyond our exploration; a lesson not merely in psychology but for our own guidance, a warning that side by side with heroic virtues there may sleep in us not only detestable vices, but vices by which those virtues are contradicted and even for the time annihilated.  The mode of betrayal, with a kiss, has justly excited loathing, but it is totally unintelligible.  Why should he have taken the trouble to be so base when the movement of a finger would have sufficed?  Why was any sign necessary to indicate one who was so well known?  The supposition that the devil compelled him to superfluous villainy in order that he might be secured with greater certainty and tortured with greater subtlety is one that can hardly be entertained except by theologians.  It is equally difficult to understand why Jesus submitted to such an insult, and why Peter should not have smitten down its perpetrator.  Peter was able to draw his sword, and it would have been safer and more natural to kill Judas than to cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant.  John, who shows a special dislike to Judas, knows nothing of the kiss.  According to John, Jesus asked the soldiers whom they sought, and then stepped boldly forward and declared Himself.  “Judas,” adds John, “was standing with them.”  As John took such particular notice of what happened, the absence of the kiss in his account can hardly have been accidental.  It is a sound maxim in criticism that what is simply difficult of explanation is likely to be authentic.  An awkward reading in a manuscript is to be preferred to one which is easier.  But an historical improbability, especially if no corroboration of it is to be found in a better authority, may be set aside, and in this case we are justified in neglecting the kiss.  Whatever may have been the exact shade of darkness in the crime of Judas, it was avenged with singular swiftness, and he himself was the avenger.  He did not slink away quietly and poison himself in a ditch.  He boldly encountered the sacred college, confessed his sin and the innocence of the man they were about to crucify.  Compared with these pious miscreants who had no scruples about corrupting one of the disciples, but shuddered at the thought of putting back into the treasury the money they had taken from it, Judas becomes noble.  His remorse is so unendurable that it drives him to suicide.

If a record could be kept of those who have abjured Jesus through love of gold, through fear of the world or of the scribes and Pharisees, we should find many who are considered quite respectable, or have even been canonised, and who, nevertheless, much more worthily than Iscariot, are entitled to “champing” by the jaws of Sathanas.  Not a single scrap from Judas himself has reached us.  He underwent no trial, and is condemned without plea or excuse on his own behalf, and with no cross-examination of the evidence.  No witnesses have been called to his character.  What would his friends at Kerioth have said for him?  What would Jesus have said?  If He had met Judas with the halter in his hand would He not have stopped him?  Ah!  I can see the Divine touch on the shoulder, the passionate prostration of the repentant in the dust, the hands gently lifting him, the forgiveness because he knew not what he did, and the seal of a kiss indeed from the sacred lips.

The supernatural machinery in Sir Walter Scott’s Monastery is generally and, no doubt, correctly, set down as a mistake.  Sir Walter fails, not because the White Lady of Avenel is a miracle, but because being miraculous, she is made to do what sometimes is not worthy of her.  This, however, is not always true, for nothing can be finer than the change in Halbert Glendinning after he has seen the spirit, and the great master himself has never drawn a nobler stroke than that in which he describes the effect which intercourse with her has had upon Mary.  Halbert, on the morning of the duel between himself and Sir Piercie Shafton, is trying to persuade her that he intends no harm, and that he and Sir Piercie are going on a hunting expedition.  “Say not thus,” said the maiden, interrupting him, “say not thus to me.  Others thou may’st deceive, but me thou can’st not.  There has been that in me from the earliest youth which fraud flies from, and which imposture cannot deceive.”  The transforming influence of the Lady is here just what it should be, and the consequence is that she becomes a reality.

But it is in the Bride of Lammermoor more particularly that the use of the supernatural is not only blameless but indispensable.  We begin to rise to it in that scene in which the Master of Ravenswood meets Alice.  “Begone from among them,” she says, “and if God has destined vengeance on the oppressor’s house, do not you be the instrument. . . .  If you remain here, her destruction or yours, or that of both, will be the inevitable consequence of her misplaced attachment.”  A little further on, with great art, Scott having duly prepared us by what has preceded, adds intensity and colour.  He apologises for the “tinge of superstition,” but, not believing, he evidently believes, and we justly surrender ourselves to him.  The Master of Ravenswood after the insult received from Lady Ashton wanders round the Mermaiden’s Well on his way to Wolf’s Crag and sees the wraith of Alice.  Scott makes horse as well as man afraid so that we may not immediately dismiss the apparition as a mere ordinary product of excitement.  Alice at that moment was dying, and had “prayed powerfully that she might see her master’s son and renew her warning.”  Observe the difference between this and any vulgar ghost story.  From the very first we feel that the Superior Powers are against this match, and that it will be cursed.  The beginning of the curse lies far back in the hereditary temper of the Ravenswoods, in the intrigues of the Ashtons, and in the feuds of the times.  When Love intervenes we discover in an instant that he is not sent by the gods to bring peace, but that he is the awful instrument of destruction.  The spectral appearance of Alice at the hour of her departure, on the very spot “on which Lucy Ashton had reclined listening to the fatal tale of woe . . . holding up her shrivelled hand as if to prevent his coming more near,” is necessary in order to intimate that the interdict is pronounced not by a mortal human being but by a dread, supernal authority.

The year 1798 was a year of great excitement: England was alone in the struggle against Buonaparte; the mutiny at the Nore had only just been quelled: the 3 per cent. Consols had been marked at 49 or 50; the Gazettes were occupied with accounts of bloody captures of French ships; Ireland may be said to have been in rebellion, and horrible murders were committed there; the King sent a message to Parliament telling it that an invasion might be expected and that it was to be assisted by “incendiaries” at home; and the Archbishop of Canterbury and eleven bishops passed a resolution declaring that if the French should land, or a dangerous insurrection should break out, it would be the duty of the clergy to take up arms against an enemy whom the Bishop of Rochester described as “instigated by that desperate malignity against the Faith he has abandoned, which in all ages has marked the horrible character of the vile apostate.”

In the midst of this raving political excitement three human beings were to be found who although they were certainly not unmoved by it, were able to detach themselves from it when they pleased, and to seclude themselves in a privacy impenetrable even to an echo of the tumult around them.

In April or May, 1798, the Nightingale was written, and these are the sights and sounds which were then in young Coleridge’s eyes and ears:—

“No cloud, no relique of the sunken day
Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip
Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues.
Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge!
You see the glimmer of the stream beneath,
But hear no murmuring: it flows silently,
O’er its soft bed of verdure.  All is still,
A balmy night! and tho’ the stars be dim,
Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.”

We happen also to have Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal for April and May.  Here are a few extracts from it:—

Much of the criticism on Milton, if not hostile, is apologetic, and it is considered quite correct to say we “do not care” for him.  Partly this indifference is due to his Nonconformity.  The “superior” Englishman who makes a jest of the doctrines and ministers of the Established Church always pays homage to it because it is respectable, and sneers at Dissent.  Another reason why Milton does not take his proper place is that his theme is a theology which for most people is no longer vital.  A religious poem if it is to be deeply felt must embody a living faith.  The great poems of antiquity are precious to us in proportion to our acceptance, now, as fact, of what they tell us about heaven and earth.  There are only a few persons at present who perceive that in substance the account which was given in the seventeenth century of the relation between man and God is immortal and worthy of epic treatment.  A thousand years hence a much better estimate of Milton will be possible than that which can be formed to-day.  We attribute to him mechanic construction in dead material because it is dead to ourselves.  Even Mr. Ruskin who was far too great not to recognise in part at least Milton’s claims, says that “Milton’s account of the most important event in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is wholly founded on, and in a great part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod’s account of the decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans.  The rest of his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every artifice of invention is visibly and consciously employed; not a single fact being for an instant conceived as tenable by any living faith” (Sesame and Lilies, section iii.).

Mr. Mark Pattison, quoting part of this passage, remarks with justice, “on the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the poetry or the character of the poet until we feel that throughout Paradise Lost, as in Paradise Regained and Samson, Milton felt himself to be standing on the sure ground of fact and reality” (English Men of Letters—Milton, p. 186, ed. 1879).

St. Jude for ages had been sufficient authority for the angelic revolt, and in a sense it was a reasonable dogma, for although it did not explain the mystery of the origin of evil it pushed it a step further backwards, and without such a revolt the Christian scheme does not well hold together.  So also with the entrance of the devil into the serpent.  It is not expressly taught in any passage of the canonical Scriptures, but to the Church and to Milton it was as indisputable as the presence of sin in the world.  Milton, I repeat, believed in the framework of his poem, and unless we can concede this to him we ought not to attempt to criticise him.  He was impelled to turn his religion into poetry in order to bring it closer to him.  The religion of every Christian if it is real is a poem.  He pictures a background of Holy Land scenery, and he creates a Jesus who continually converses with him and reveals to him much more than is found in the fragmentary details of the Gospels.  When Milton goes beyond his documents he does not imagine for the purpose of filling up: the additions are expression.

Milton belonged to that order of poets whom the finite does not satisfy.  Like Wordsworth, but more eminently, he was “powerfully affected” only by that “which is conversant with or turns upon infinity,” and man is to him a being with such a relationship to infinity that Heaven and Hell contend over him.  Every touch which sets forth the eternal glory of Heaven and the scarcely subordinate power of Hell magnifies him.  Johnson, whose judgment on Milton is unsatisfactory because he will not deliver himself sufficiently to beauty which he must have recognised, nevertheless says of the Paradise Lost, that “its end is to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares,” and this is true.  The other great epic poems worthy to be compared with Milton’s, the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, and Divine Comedy, all agree in representing man as an object of the deepest solicitude to the gods or God.  Milton’s conception of God is higher than Homer’s, Virgil’s, or Dante’s, but the care of the Miltonic God for his offspring is greater, and the profound truth unaffected by Copernican discoveries and common to all these poets is therefore more impressive in Milton than in the others.

There is nothing which the most gifted of men can create that is not mixed up with earth, and Milton, too, works it up with his gold.  The weakness of the Paradise Lost is not, as Johnson affirms, its lack of human interest, for the Prometheus Bound has just as little, nor is Johnson’s objection worth anything that the angels are sometimes corporeal and at other times independent of material laws.  Spirits could not be represented to a human mind unless they were in a measure subject to the conditions of time and space.  The principal defect in Paradise Lost is the justification which the Almighty gives of the creation of man with a liability to fall.  It would have been better if Milton had contented himself with telling the story of the Satanic insurrection, of its suppression, of its author’s revenge, of the expulsion from Paradise, and the promise of a Redeemer.  But he wanted to “justify the ways of God to man,” and in order to do this he thought it was necessary to show that man must be endowed with freedom of will, and consequently could not be directly preserved from yielding to the assaults of Satan.

Paradise Regained comes, perhaps, closer to us than Paradise Lost because its temptations are more nearly our own, and every amplification which Milton introduces is designed to make them more completely ours than they seem to be in the New Testament.  It has often been urged against Paradise Regained that Jesus recovered Paradise for man by the Atonement and not merely by resistance to the devil’s wiles, but inasmuch as Paradise was lost by the devil’s triumph through human weakness it is natural that Paradise Regained should present the triumph of the Redeemer’s strength.  It is this victory which proves Jesus to be the Son of God and consequently able to save us.

He who has now become incarnated for our redemption is that same Messiah who, when He rode forth against the angelic rebels,

            “into terror chang’d
His count’nance too severe to be beheld,
And full of wrath bent on his enemies.”

It is He who

         “on his impious foes right onward drove,
Gloomy as night:”

whose right hand grasped

         “ten thousand thunders, which he sent
Before him, such as in their souls infix’d
Plagues.”

(P. L. vi. 824–38.)

Now as Son of Man he is confronted with that same Archangel, and he conquers by “strong sufferance.”  He comes with no fourfold visage of a charioteer flashing thick flames, no eye which glares lightning, no victory eagle-winged and quiver near her with three-bolted thunder stored, but in “weakness,” and with this he is to “overcome satanic strength.”

Milton sees in the temptation to turn the stones into bread a devilish incitement to use miraculous powers and not to trust the Heavenly Father.

“Why dost thou then suggest to me distrust,
Knowing who I am, as I know who thou art?”

(P. R. i. 355–6.)

Finding his enemy steadfast, Satan disappears,

                     “bowing low
His gray dissimulation,”

(P. R. i. 497–8.)

and calls to council his peers.  He disregards the proposal of Belial to attempt the seduction of Jesus with women.  If he is vulnerable it will be to objects

         “such as have more shew
Of worth, of honour, glory, and popular praise,
Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck’d;
Or that which only seems to satisfy
Lawful desires of Nature, not beyond.”

(P. R. ii. 226–30.)

The former appeal is first of all renewed.  “Tell me,” says Satan,

         “‘if food were now before thee set
Would’st thou not eat?’  ‘Thereafter as I like
The giver,’ answered Jesus.”

(P. R. ii. 320–22.)

A banquet is laid, and Satan invites Jesus to partake of it.

“What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?
These are not fruits forbidd’n.”

(P. R. ii. 368–9.)

But Jesus refuses to touch the devil’s meat—

“Thy pompous delicacies I contemn,
And count thy specious gifts no gifts, but guiles.”

(P. R. ii. 390–1.)

So they were, for at a word

“Both table and provision vanish’d quite,
With sound of harpies’ wings and talons heard.”

(P. R. ii. 402–3.)

If but one grain of that enchanted food had been eaten, or one drop of that enchanted liquor had been drunk, there would have been no Cross, no Resurrection, no salvation for humanity.

The temptation on the mountain is expanded by Milton through the close of the second book, the whole of the third and part of the fourth.  It is a temptation of peculiar strength because it is addressed to an aspiration which Jesus has acknowledged.

         “Yet this not all
To which my spirit aspir’d: victorious deeds
Flam’d in my heart, heroic acts.”

(P. R. i. 214–16.)

But he denies that the glory of mob-applause is worth anything.

      “What is glory but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixt?
And what the people but a herd confus’d,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, and, well weigh’d, scarce worth the praise?”

(P. R. iii. 47–51.)

To the Jesus of the New Testament this answer is, in a measure, inappropriate.  He would not have called the people “a herd confus’d, a miscellaneous rabble.”  But although inappropriate it is Miltonic.  The devil then tries the Saviour with a more subtle lure, an appeal to duty.

“If kingdom move thee not, let move thee zeal
And duty; zeal and duty are not slow;
But on occasion’s forelock watchful wait.
They themselves rather are occasion best,
Zeal of thy father’s house, duty to free
Thy country from her heathen servitude.”

(P. R. iii. 171–6.)

But zeal and duty, the endeavour to hurry that which cannot and must not be hurried may be a suggestion from hell.

“If of my reign prophetic writ hath told
That it shall never end, so when begin
The Father in His purpose hath decreed.”

(P. R. iii. 184–6.)

Acquiescence, a conviction of the uselessness of individual or organised effort to anticipate what only slow evolution can bring, is characteristic of increasing years, and was likely enough to be the temper of Milton when he had seen the failure of the effort to make actual on earth the kingdom of Heaven.  The temptation is developed in such a way that every point supposed to be weak is attacked.  “You may be what you claim to be,” insinuates the devil, “but are rustic.”

“Thy life hath yet been private, most part spent
At home, scarce view’d the Galilean towns,
And once a year Jerusalem.”

(P. R. iii. 232–4.)

Experience and alliances are plausibly urged as indispensable for success.  But Jesus knew that the sum total of a man’s power for good is precisely what of good there is in him and that if it be expressed even in the simplest form, all its strength is put forth and its office is fulfilled.  To suppose that it can be augmented by machinery is a foolish delusion.  The

         “projects deep
Of enemies, of aids, battles and leagues,
Plausible to the world”

(P. R. iii. 395–3.)

are to the Founder of the kingdom not of this world “worth naught.”  Another side of the mountain is tried.  Rome is presented with Tiberius at Capreæ.  Could it possibly be anything but a noble deed to

      “expel this monster from his throne
Now made a sty, and in his place ascending,
A victor people free from servile yoke!”

(P. R. iv. 100–102.)

“And with my help thou may’st.”  With the devil’s help and not without can this glorious revolution be achieved!  “For him,” is the Divine reply, “I was not sent.”  The attack is then directly pressed.

“The kingdoms of the world, to thee I give;
For, giv’n to me, I give to whom I please,
No trifle; yet with this reserve, not else,
On this condition, if thou wilt fall down
And worship me as thy superior lord.”

(P. R. iv. 163–7.)

This, then, is the drift and meaning of it all.  The answer is taken verbally from the gospel.

         “‘Thou shalt worship
The Lord thy God, and only Him shalt serve.’”

(P. R. iv. 176–7.)

That is to say, Thou shalt submit thyself to God’s commands and God’s methods and thou shalt submit thyself to no other.

Omitting the Athenian and philosophic episode, which is unnecessary and a little unworthy even of the Christian poet, we encounter not an amplification of the Gospel story but an interpolation which is entirely Milton’s own.  Night gathers and a new assault is delivered in darkness.  Jesus wakes in the storm which rages round Him.  The diabolic hostility is open and avowed and He hears the howls and shrieks of the infernals.  He cannot banish them though He is so far master of Himself that He is able to sit “unappall’d in calm and sinless peace.”  He has to endure the hellish threats and tumult through the long black hours

         “till morning fair
Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray,
Who with her radiant finger still’d the roar
Of thunder, chas’d the clouds, and laid the winds,
And grisly spectres, which the Fiend had rais’d
To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire.
But now the sun with more effectual beams
Had cheer’d the face of earth, and dri’d the wet
From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds,
Who all things now beheld more fresh and green,
After a night of storm so ruinous,
Clear’d up their choicest notes in bush and spray
To gratulate the sweet return of morn.”

(P. R. iv. 426–38.)

There is nothing perhaps in Paradise Lost which possesses the peculiar quality of this passage, nothing which like these verses brings into the eyes the tears which cannot be repressed when a profound experience is set to music.

The temptation on the pinnacle occupies but a few lines only of the poem.  Hitherto Satan admits that Jesus had conquered, but he had done no more than any wise and good man could do.

“Now show thy progeny; if not to stand,
Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God;
For it is written, ‘He will give command
Concerning thee to His angels; in their hands
They shall uplift thee, lest at any time
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.’”

(P. R. iv. 554–9.)

The promise of Divine aid is made in mockery.

“To whom thus Jesus: ‘Also it is written,
Tempt not the Lord thy God.’  He said, and stood:
But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell.”

(P. R. iv. 560–2.)

It is not meant, “thou shalt not tempt me,” but rather, “it is not permitted me to tempt God.”  In this extreme case Jesus depends on God’s protection.  This is the devil’s final defeat and the seraphic company for which our great Example had refused to ask instantly surrounds and receives him.  Angelic quires

         “the Son of God, our Saviour meek,
Sung victor, and from heavenly feast refresh’t,
Brought on His way with joy; He unobserv’d,
Home to His mother’s house private return’d.”

(P. R. iv. 636–9.)

Warton wished to expunge this passage, considering it an unworthy conclusion.  It is to be hoped that there are many readers of Milton who are able to see what is the value of these four lines, particularly of the last.

It is hardly necessary to say more in order to show how peculiarly Milton is endowed with that quality which is possessed by all great poets—the power to keep in contact with the soul of man.