Goldwin Smith

“ I find a little town, I should have thought not unpleasant to the eye, and certainly not unpleasant to the heart, where labour dwells in pure air, amidst beautiful scenery, with all the appliances of civilization, with everything that can help it to health, morality, and happiness. I find a man, who might, if he pleased, live idly in the lap of luxury, working like a horse in the management of this place, bearing calmly not only toil and trouble, but perverseness and ingratitude. ”

“ Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches. For my part I look up with admiration, as fervent as any one untrained in art can, to those divine creations of old religion which soar over the smoke and din of our cities into purity and stillness and seem to challenge us, with all our wealth and culture and science and mechanical power, to produce their peer till the age of faith shall return. ”

“ We must not forget that industrial wars, like other wars, however just and necessary, give birth to men whose trade is war, and who, for the purpose of their trade are always inflaming the passions which lead to war. Such men I have seen on both sides of the Atlantic, and most hateful pests of industry and society they are. Nor must we forget that Trade Unions, like other communities, whatever their legal constitutions may be, are apt practically to fall into the hands of a small minority of active spirits, or even into those of a single astute and ambitious man. ”

“ You can hardly imagine how those who come fresh from a new country like Canada, or parts of the United States—a land just redeemed from the wilderness, with all its untrimmed roughness, its fields half tilled and full of stumps, its snake fences, and the charred pines which stand up gaunt monuments of forest fires—are impressed, I might almost say ravished, by the sight of the lovely garden which unlimited wealth expended on a limited space has made of England. ”

“ He would not, even, think it wholly irrational that the gloom of the work-house should cast a momentary shadow on the enjoyments of the palace. I should also expect him to understand the impression that a man of "brain," even one free from any excessive tenderness of "heart," would not like to see a vast apparatus of luxury, and a great train of flunkeys devoted to his own material enjoyment—that he would feel it as a slur on his good sense, as an impeachment of his mental resources, and of his command of nobler elements of happiness, and even as a degradation of his manhood. ”

“ Fed upon such food daily, what will the mind of a nation be? I say that there is no flame at which we can light the Lamp of Fiction purer or brighter than the genius of him in honour to whose memory we are assembled here to-day. Scott does not moralize. Heaven be praised that he does not. He does not set a moral object before him, nor lay down moral rules. But his heart, brave, pure and true, is a law to itself; and by studying what he does we may find the law for all who follow his calling. If seven lamps have been lighted for architecture, Scott will light as many for fiction. ”

“ There is one part of Lincoln's early life which, though scandal may batten on it, we shall pass over lightly, we mean that part which relates to his love affairs and his marriage. Criticism, and even biography, should respect as far as possible the sanctuary of affection. That a man has dedicated his life to the service of the public is no reason why the public should be licensed to amuse itself by playing with his heart-strings. Not only as a storekeeper, but in every capacity, Mr. Lincoln was far more happy in his relations with men than with women. ”

“ Honest ignorance in the mine, on the sea, at the forge, striving to do its coarse and perilous duty, performing the lowliest functions of humanity, contributing in the humblest way to human progress, itself scarcely sunned by a ray of what more cultivated natures would deem happiness, takes in as fully as the sublimest philosopher the idea of a God who sees and cares for all, who keeps account of the work well done or the kind act, marks the secret fault, and will hereafter make up to duty for the hardness of its present lot. ”

“ Those heaps of stones broken by the hammer of a poor wretch who bends over his dull task through the weary day by the roadside, scantily clad, in sharp frost perhaps or chilling showers, are they more lovely to a painter's eye than if they had been broken, without so much human labour and suffering, by a steam stone-crusher? No one doubts the superior interest belonging to any work however imperfect, of individual mind ”

“ True, the perfect concord of art and science, like that of religion and science, may be still to come, and come, we hope, both concords will. One word more before we distribute the prizes. A system of prizes is a system of competition, and to competition some object. We can readily sympathise with their objection. Work done from love of the subject, or from a sense of duty, is better than work done for a prize, and, moreover, we cherish the hope that co-operation, not competition, will be the ultimate principle of industry, and the final state of man. ”

“ All the arguments which have been used against design seem to tell with equal force against order. We have no other universe wherewith we can compare this, so as to assure ourselves that this universe is not a chaos, but a cosmos. Both on the earth and in the heavens we see much that is not order, but disorder; not cosmos, but acosmia. If we divine, nevertheless, that order reigns, and that there is design beneath the seemingly undesigned, and good beneath the appearance of evil, it is by virtue of something not dreamed of in the philosophy of materialism. ”

“ There may be in the long lines of buildings too much of the autocratic monotony of the Empire, but the city, as a whole, is the perfect image of a brilliant civilization. From London beauty is almost banished by smoke and fog, which deny to the poor architect ornament, colour, light and shadow, leaving him nothing but outline. No doubt besides the smoke and fog there is a fatality. There is a fatality which darkly impels us to place on our finest site, and one of the finest in Europe, the niggard facade and inverted teacup dome of the National Gallery ”

“ But mythology is merely the primaeval matrix of religion. Mythology is the embodiment of man's childlike notions as to the universe in which he finds himself, and the powers which for good or evil influence his lot; and, when analysed, it is found beneath all its national variations to be merely based upon a worship of the sun, the moon, and the forces of Nature. Religion is the worship and service of a moral God and a God who is worshipped and served by virtue. We can distinctly see, in Greek literature for instance, religion disengaging itself from mythology. ”

“ Flushed with confidence at the sight of their serried phalanxes and extending lines, the unionists do like most people invested with unwonted power; they aim at more than is possible or just. They fancy that they can put the screw on the community, almost without limit. But they will soon find out their mistake. They will learn it from those very things which are filling the world with alarm—the extension of unionism, and the multiplication of strikes. ”

“ It is not when we think of the loss of anything to which a taint of selfishness can adhere—it is not even when we think of intellectual effort cut short for ever by death just as the intellect has ripened and equipped itself with the necessary knowledge—that the nothingness of this immortality of conservated forces is most keenly felt: it is when we think of the miserable end of affection. ”

“ They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest expression our language has yet found of the first charm of country life, not as that life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered student, issuing at early dawn or at sunset into the fields from his chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and smells are here blended in that ineffable combination which once or twice perhaps in our lives has saluted our young senses, before their perceptions were blunted by alcohol, by lust or ambition, or diluted by the social distractions of great cities. ”

“ Capital is the fruit of labour past, the condition of labour present, without it no man could do a stroke of work, at least of work requiring tools or food for him who uses them. Let us dismiss from our language and our minds these impersonations, which though mere creatures of fancy playing with abstract nouns end by depraving our sentiments and misdirecting our actions, let us think and speak of capital impersonally and sensibly as an economical force and as we would think and speak of the force of gravitation. ”

“ The great need of the world was public virtue—the spirit of self- sacrifice for the common good. This the empire could not possibly call into being. The public virtue of the ancient world resided in the nationalities which the conquering republic had broken up, and of which the empire only sealed the doom. The empire could never call forth even the lowest form of public virtue, loyalty to the hereditary right of a royal family, because the empire never presented itself as a right, but merely as a personal power. ”

“ But what is to prevent the withdrawal of the traditional sanction from producing its natural effect upon the morality of the mass of mankind? The commercial swindler or the political sharper, when the divine authority of conscience is gone, will feel that he has only the opinion of society to reckon with, and he knows how to reckon with the opinion of society. If Macbeth is ready, provided he can succeed in this world, to "jump the life to come," much more ready will villainy be to "jump" the bad consequences of its actions to humanity when its own conscious existence shall have closed. ”

“ No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they were done with, nature broke the mould. But the mould is broken, and it is broken for ever. Through aesthetic pining for a past age, we may become unjust to our own, and thus weaken our practical sense of duty, and lessen our power of doing good. I will call the age bad when it makes me so, is a wise saying, and worth all our visionary cynicism, be it never so eloquent. ”

“ And when the country householder has the suffrage there will soon be an end of those laws of primogeniture and entail, which are deemed so Conservative, but are in fact most revolutionary, since they divorce the nation from its own soil. And then there will be a happier and a more United England in country as well as in town: the poor law, the hateful, degrading, demoralizing poor law will cease to exist; the huge poor- house will no longer darken the rural landscape with its shadow, in hideous contrast with the palace. ”

“ One day labour strikes; finds a leader in Spartacus, a slave devoted as a gladiator to the vilest of Roman pleasures; wages a long and terrible servile war. The revolt is put down at last, after shaking the foundations of the state. Six thousand slaves are crucified along the road from Rome to Capua. Labour had its revenge, for slavery brought the doom of Rome.
In the twilight of history, between the fall of Rome and the rise of the new nationalities, we dimly see the struggle going on. There is a great insurrection of the oppressed peasantry, under the name of Bagaudae, in Gaul. ”

“ To the labour movement, mainly, we owe those efforts to establish better relations between the employer and the employed, which are known by the general name of co-operation. The Comtists, in the name of their autocrat, denounce the whole co-operative system as rotten. Their plan, if you get to the bottom of it, is in fact a permanent division of the industrial world into capitalists. And workmen; the capitalists exercising a rule controlled only by the influence of philosophers; the workmen remaining in a perpetual state of tutelage, not to say of babyhood. ”

“ What if his powers of work are being impaired by debauchery and he is thus surely losing the footing which he has won on the higher round of the industrial ladder and lapsing back into penury and despair? What if instead of gaining he is really losing in manhood and real independence? I see nothing shocking in the fact that a mechanic's wages are now equal to those of a clergyman, or an officer in the army who has spent perhaps thousands of dollars on his education. Every man has a right to whatever his labour will fetch. ”

“ But he is always struggling to do right and repentant when he does wrong. "We use a very dangerous freedom and looseness of speech among ourselves; this by degrees makes wickedness and debauchery less odious than it should be, if not familiar, and sets truth, religion, and virtue at a great distance. I hear things every day said that would shock your ears, and often say things myself that are not fit to be repeated, perhaps without any ill intention, but merely by the force of custom. The best that can be offered in our defence is that some of us see the evil and wish to avoid it." ”

“ Nobody can deny that genius is impressed upon the upper part of the front, which reminds one of a beautiful building in an Italian city, though the structure at the side recalls the mind to Glastonbury, and the galaxy of chimneys has certainly no parallel in Italy. The front ought to stand in a street, but as it stands in a field its flanks have to be covered by devices which are inevitably weak. What is to be done with the back always seems to me one of the darkest enigmas of the future. ”

“ The great man received the bearers of the mandate with stately courtesy, with princely hospitality, showed them that he had read in the stars the predominance of Maximilian over Ferdinand, slightly glanced at the Emperor's weakness, then withdrew to that palace at Prague, so like its mysterious lord, so regal and so fantastic in its splendour, yet so gloomy, so jealously guarded, so full of the spirit of dark ambition, so haunted by the shadow of the dagger. ”

“ But a vivid interest—such an interest as will act both as a restraint and as a comfort—in the condition and future of humanity can surely exist only in those who have a knowledge of history sufficient to enable them to embrace the unity of the past, and an imagination sufficiently cultivated to glow with anticipation of the future. For the bulk of mankind the humanity worshippers point of view seems unattainable at least within any calculable time. ”