Martin Farquhar Tupper

“ Thus, then, we might get, by way of counterpoise to the voting power of a bare and overwhelming proletariat, the worthier and far sweeter voices of those who have virtues and excellences of various kinds to recommend them,—so that if the lowest constituent counts for one, the highest may add up to six or eight. And thus, while no one of the mob is denied his one vote, those who rise above the crowd receive the more than one they have earned by good-doing or position, and plump them all accordingly to the worthiest candidate. ”

“ What has Martin Luther done and suffered that we at this distant interval of four centuries should reverence his memory with gratitude and admiration? What was the lifework he was raised up to do, and how did he do it? and what influence have his labours of old on the times in which we live?—We must remember that in the sixteenth century priestcraft had culminated to its rankest height of fraud, cruelty, vice, and superstition: the lay-folk everywhere were its serfs and victims, not to mention also numbers of the worthier clerics who hated but could, not break their bonds. ”

“ Or, which of us has not had experience of some unjust will, stealing our rights by evil influence? Or of the seemingly luckless accident killing off our intending benefactor just before that promised codicil? Or of the ruinous investment? Or of the bankrupt Life Assurance? Or of the unhappy fact of your autograph, "a mere matter of form," on the back of some dishonoured bill of one's defaulting friend? Yet all these are providences too,—lessons of life, and parts of our schools and schoolmasters. ”

“ Extract from Proverbial Philosophy (Series iv. p. 375) .
Of Change and Travel.
"All of us have within us the wandering Crusoe spirit;
We come of Norse sea-rovers, and adventurers full of hope:
And man was bade to tame his earth, to rule it and subdue it,—
Whereby our feet-soles tingle at an untrod Alpine peak—
But shall we not fly anon with wings, to shame these creeping paces,
Even as steam hath worked all speed on land and sea before?
Is not this firmament of air part of the human heritage,
Which man must conquer duteously, as first his Maker willed? ”

“ Of this Scotch tour, full of interest, thus very curtly. Turn we now to Ireland in 1835. My record of just fifty years ago is much what it might be now, starvation, beggary, and human wretchedness of all sorts in the midst of a rich land, through indolence relapsed into a jungle of thorns and briars, quaking bogs, and sterile mountains; whisky, and the idle uncertain potato, combining with ignorance and priestcraft, to demoralise the excitable unreasoning race of modern Celts. Let us turn from the sad scenes of which my said diary is full, to my day at the spar caverns of Kingston. ”

“ So the tour paid better every way, albeit the toil and excitement of being always to the front, either on platforms or at dinner-parties, was excessive though not exhausting. It is astonishing what one can do if one tries, and if the sympathy of friends and a really good success are at hand to cheer one. I wish there was space here to say more about all this; but the great book before me would print up into several volumes. ”

“ Those sterile-looking isles of the North Sea are so swept by stormy winds as to be absolutely treeless: insomuch that it is jocularly said, that for cutting down a tree at Kirkwall, the penalty is death! simply because no trees exist there. Well, the wealthy Baron of Shapinshay conquers nature thus; he has dug round the castle vast hollow gardens (not a continuous moat) in which flourishes a profusion of flowers and shrubs and even trees,—till arboriculture is cut shear off, if it dares to look over the mounds. ”

“ Truly it were enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive,—to be fitted with a colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaïdes might not keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to ramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal, perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have often cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of a man, fret, wear, worry him,—to be irritable is the conditional tax laid of old upon an author's intellect ”

“ Ancient, now nearing the close of my career, at least in this the caterpillar and soon to be chrysalis condition of my being, to give my testimony seriously and practically to the fact (disputed by too many from their own worse experience) that it is quite possible to live from youth to age in many scenes and under many circumstantial difficulties, preserving still through them all the innocent purity of childhood. True, the crown of greater knowledge is added to the Man; but although it be a knowledge both of evil and of good, theoretically,—it need not practically be a guilty knowledge. ”

“ In a nation self-governed through its own representatives, it seems reasonable to admit that each citizen should have a vote; each citizen, we say, simply as such; whether male or female, labourer, pauper, civil, military, naval, or official, every one not convicted of crime nor an attested lunatic, of full age, of sufficient capacity (evidenced by being able to read and write) , celibate or married, rich or poor,—every person in our commonwealth should equitably, it may well be conceded, have his or her single vote in the government of the country. ”

“ In the upper school the single really excellent teacher and good clergyman, Edward Churton, had but one fault, a meek subserviency to the tyrannic Russell, who domineered over all to our universal terror; and I remember kindly Mr. Churton once affected to tears at the cruelty of his chief. What should we think nowadays of an irate schoolmaster smashing a child's head between two books in his shoulder-of-mutton hands till the nose bled, as I once saw? ”

“ The single vote system (so far as the franchise has any influence at all) depresses and demoralises every class, as reducing all to one dead level. The ballot plan is now law and cannot well be done away with; but it is manifestly a humiliation for intelligence to have to sign with "his mark" in order that ignorance may thus feel itself on an equality; and for honest geniality to be hushed into silent secresy, that it may not put to shame the cunning fraud of a partizan who wishes to hide his real opinion. ”

“ Bettering good through each effort of ill,
Infinite beauty and infinite love,
Shining around and beneath and above!"
And let this simple hymn be the old man's last prayer, bridging over the long interval of well-nigh fourscore years between cradle and grave with a child's first piety:—
Love and Life. ”

“ In fact, I recognise good in everything, though sometimes hidden by evil, right (by intention, at least) in sundry doctrines and opinions otherwise to my judgment wrong, and I am willing to believe the kindliest of my opponents who appear to be honest and earnest. This is a very fair creed for a citizen of the world, whose motto is Terence's famous avowal, "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto." ”

“ Now, it cannot be denied in an ethnological sense that the Celtic nature is peculiarly sensitive; any more than it can be denied historically that its good feelings have been too often systematically crushed, and its generous impulses seared. If the Teutonic mind illustrates in sterner traits the manhood of human intelligence, the Celt shows its gayer youthfulness, if not indeed the lighter phases of its reckless childhood: and it has been a second nature for the Saxon to hold mastery over the Celt, as a weaker race is everywhere subject to a strong one. ”

“ Temperance was a fashion, a furore, on my second visit, as its opposite had been on my first: and on each occasion, I persisted in a middle course, the golden mean,—which I know to be proverbially a wisdom though not at present universally so accepted.
It is hopeless for me to look through the multitudinous large quarto pages of my first diary and its letters, comments, paragraphs, &c.; they are only too full of compliments and kindnesses from friends in many instances passed away: and I will simply record two or three of the more public hospitalities which greeted me. ”

“ However, in these infidel last times, and with our very broad-church and no-church teachings, a man has only to be utterly godless [Pg 286] (so he be moral) to make himself a name for pure reason. I'd sooner be the most unenlightened Christian than such a false philosopher. Let a Goldsmith say of me, 'No very great wit, he believed in a God,' for I refuse to deny one, like the Psalmist's fool." "I throw myself so into my readings, that I almost forget my audience, till their cheering, as it were, wakes me up,—and I feel every word I say: if I didn't, that word would fall dead. ”

“ The author of 'Proverbial Philosophy' is a writer in whom beautiful extremes meet,—the richness of the Orient, and the strength of the Occident—the stern virtue of the North and the passion of the South. At times his genius seems to possess creative power, and to open to our gaze things new and glorious, of which we have never dreamed ”

“ The great man's rock of peril, whereon to wreck both his country and himself, is that fatal eloquence by which all are captured, but (as with birdlime) are captured to their loss. But I will not reproduce invidiously—as if false to a fifty years' friendship—any harsh reproach, however conscientious, whereby I may have publicly withdrawn my praise. Rather will I pass on,—and after my own fashion will here show my ambidextrous muse in a brace of political unpublished lyrics on either side. [Pg 365] ”

“ Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job at the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth,—I must, in answer, think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us as the verity of it would have been to Job. Affection, human affection, is not so numerically nor vicariously consoled—and it is, perhaps, worth while here to have thrown out (what I suppose to be) a new view of the case, if only to rescue such wealth as children from the infidel's sneer of being confounded with such wealth as camels. ”

“ The highest authorities are at variance with each other as to the practical utility in human therapeutics of experiments upon agonised brutes; but all must be agreed that, so far as morals are concerned, vivisection only hardens the heart and sears the feelings and conscience of doctors who may surround the dying-bed of our dearest, and very possibly make capital of peculiar symptoms in their patient, by experiments transferred from dogs and rabbits to himself! ”

“ Let every man, high or low, add to his one vote others as he may and can. Be there a vote for the Victoria Cross, another for the Albert Medal, another for long good-service in the household or the farm, another for any such intellectual exploits among the poor as Samuel Smiles has recorded; all these being accessible to the humblest, and so elevating them thus far. And now to ascend a few rungs, let additional votes be given to owners of a stated number of acres, to possessors of a certain amount of money, to those who have been deemed worthy of public honours, and the like. ”

“ My Dearest Father,—I can fully, though not perhaps so fully as you can, enter into your great anxieties about your five great boys, and actuated by this sympathy I sit down to say a word more about India.—I do hope you have not yet given Lady Spencer a decisive answer, as the horizon seems a little to clear of its indigenous hurricanes. Since my last letter to you I have, I can truly say, made every effort to speak like a man, but, alas I too unsuccessfully: my tongue seems only able to say veto to the Church, and that speaking is a necessary qualification "needs no demonstration." ”

“ Not but that I could make considerable mischief, and perhaps help my publisher in sales, if I chose to make the most of the many celebrities, both American and English, with whom I have had intercourse both at Albury and elsewhere. My humble hospitalities and the constant welcome I have given to strangers, have been like their author, proverbial; but that is no reason why our converse, free and frank as private fellowship commands, should be produced in print; naturally the host was ever generous, and the guest—equally, of course—appreciative. ”

“ It was a dark night and a dense fog, and we had perilously to thread our careful way through the herring-fleet, fog-horns blowing all night, whilst our distinguished party bivouacked on deck, every cabin having been secured by folks crowding to the Kirkwall fair; and so we enjoyed a seagoing experience which, however cold and dark, was warmed and brightened by the conversation of clever friends all night through. ”