Brothers, 1853), iv. 232-239.]
NEITHER BOND NOR FREE
The demagogues address the lower orders as if they were negroes—as if each individual were an inseparable part of the order, always to remain, nolens volens, poor and ignorant. How different from Christianity, which for ever calls on us to detach ourselves spiritually not merely from our rank, but even from our body, and from the whole world of sense!
THE MAIDEN'S PRIMER
The one mighty main defect of female education is that everything is taught but reason and the means of retaining affection. This—this—O! it is worth all the rest told ten thousand times:—how to greet a husband, how to receive him, how never to recriminate—in short, the power of pleasurable thoughts and feelings, and the mischief of giving pain, or (as often happens when a husband comes home from a party of old friends, joyous and full of heart) the love-killing effect of cold, dry, uninterested looks and manners.
THE HALFWAY HOUSE Wednesday night, May 18th, 1808
Let me record the following important remark of Stuart, with whom I never converse but to receive some distinct and rememberable improvement (and if it be not remembered, it is the defect of my memory—which, alas! grows weaker daily—or a fault from my indolence in not noting it down, as I do this)—that there is a period in a man's life, varying in various men, from thirty-five to forty-five, and operating most strongly in bachelors, widowers, or those worst and miserablest widowers, unhappy husbands, in which a man finds himself at the top of the hill, and having attained, perhaps, what he wishes, begins to ask himself, What is all this for?—begins to feel the vanity of his pursuits, becomes half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation or self-regardless drinking; and some, not content with these (not slow) poisons, destroy themselves, and leave their ingenious female or female-minded friends to fish out some motive for an act which proceeded from a motive-making impulse, which would have acted even without a motive (even as the terror5 in nightmare is a bodily sensation, and though it most often calls up consonant images, yet, as I know by experience, can take effect equally without any); or, if not so, yet like gunpowder in a smithy, though it will not go off without a spark, is sure to receive one, if not this hour, yet the next. I had felt this truth, but never saw it before clearly: it came upon me at Malta under the melancholy, dreadful feeling of finding myself to be man, by a distinct division from boyhood, youth, and "young man." Dreadful was the feeling—till then life had flown so that I had always been a boy, as it were; and this sensation had blended in all my conduct, my willing acknowledgment of superiority, and, in truth, my meeting every person as a superior at the first moment. Yet if men survive this period, they commonly become cheerful again. That is a comfort for mankind, not for me!
HIS OWN GENIUS
My inner mind does not justify the thought that I possess a genius, my strength is so very small in proportion to my power. I believe that I first, from internal feeling, made or gave light and impulse to this important distinction between strength and power, the oak and the tropic annual, or biennial, which grows nearly as high and spreads as large as the oak, but in which the wood, the heart is wanting—the vital works vehemently, but the immortal is not with it. And yet, I think, I must have some analogue of genius; because, among other things, when I am in company with Mr. Sharp, Sir J. Mackintosh, R. and Sydney Smith, Mr. Scarlett, &c. &c., I feel like a child, nay, rather like an inhabitant of another planet. Their very faces all act upon me, sometimes, as if they were ghosts, but more often as if I were a ghost among them—at all times as if we were not consubstantial.
NAME IT AND YOU BREAK IT
"The class that ought to be kept separate from all others"—and this said by one of themselves! O what a confession that it is no longer separated! Who would have said this even fifty years ago? It is the howling of ice during a thaw. When there is any just reason for saying this, it ought not to be said, it is already too late. And though it may receive the assent of the people of "the squares and places," yet what does that do, if it be the ridicule of all other classes?
THE DANGER OF OVER-BLAMING
The general experience, or rather supposed experience, prevails over the particular knowledge. So many causes oppose man to man, that he begins by thinking of other men worse than they deserve, and receives his punishment by at last thinking worse of himself than the truth is.
EXCESS OF SELF-ESTEEM
Expressions of honest self-esteem, in which self was only a diagram of the genus, will excite sympathy at the minute, and yet, even among persons who love and esteem you, be remembered and quoted as ludicrous instances of strange self-involution.
DEFECT OF SELF-ESTEEM. May 23, 1808
Those who think lowliest of themselves, perhaps with a feeling stronger than rational comparison would justify, are apt to feel and express undue asperity for the faults and defects of those whom they habitually have looked up to as to their superiors. For placing themselves very low, perhaps too low, wherever a series of experiences, struggled against for a while, have at length convinced the mind that in such and such a moral habit the long-idolised superior is far below even itself, the grief and anger will be in proportion. "If even I could never have done this, O anguish, that he, so much my superior, should do it! If even I with all my infirmities have not this defect, this selfishness, that he should have it!" This is the course of thought. Men are bad enough; and yet they often think themselves worse than they are, among other causes by a reaction from their own uncharitable thoughts. The poisoned chalice is brought back to our own lips.
A PRACTICAL MAN
He was grown, and solid from his infancy, like that most useful of domesticated animals, that never runs but with some prudent motive to the mast or the wash-tub and, at no time a slave to the present moment, never even grunts over the acorns before him without a scheming squint and the segment, at least, of its wise little eye cast toward those on one side, which his neighbour is or may be about to enjoy.
LUCUS A NON LUCENDO
Quære, whether the high and mighty Edinburghers, &c., have not been elevated into guardians and overseers of taste and poetry for much the same reason as St. Cecilia was chosen as the guardian goddess of music, because, forsooth, so far from being able to compose or play herself, she could never endure any other instrument than the jew's-harp or Scotch bag-pipe? No! too eager recensent! you are mistaken, there is no anachronism in this. We are informed by various antique bas-reliefs that the bag-pipe was well known to the Romans, and probably, therefore, that the Picts and Scots were even then fond of seeking their fortune in other countries.
LOVE AND MUSIC
"Love is the spirit of life and music the life of the spirit."
Q. What is music? A. Poetry in its grand sense! Passion and order at once! Imperative power in obedience!
Q. What is the first and divinest strain of music? A.—In the intellect—"Be able to will that thy maxims (rules of individual conduct) should be the law of all intelligent being!"
In the heart, or practical reason, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be done by." This in the widest extent involves the test, "Love thy neighbour as thyself, and God above all things." For, conceive thy being to be all-including, that is, God—thou knowest that thou wouldest command thyself to be beloved above all things.
[For the motto at the head of this note see the lines "Ad Vilmum Axiologum." P. W., 1893, p. 138.]
CONSCIENCE
