Mrs. Jameson

“ O ye men! who sit in committees, and are called upon to legislate for children,—for children who are the offspring of diseased or degenerate humanity, or the victims of a yet more diseased society,—do you, when you take evidence from jailors, and policemen, and parish schoolmasters, and doctors of divinity, do you ever call up, also, the wise physician, the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother? You have accumulated facts, great blue books full of facts, but till you know in what fixed and uniform principles of nature to seek their solution, your facts remain a dead letter. ”

“ Are our conscience and our morals like articles of dress which we can take off and put on again as we fancy it convenient or expedient?—shut up in a drawer and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or a gallery of art? or are they not rather a part of ourselves—our very life—to graduate the worth, to fix the standard of all that mingles with our life? The idea that what we call taste in art has something quite distinctive from conscience, is one cause that the popular notions concerning the productions of art are abandoned to such confusion and uncertainty ”

“ That I should cease to be is not very intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my soul possess, should cease to be—there is the pang, the terror! I desire that which I love to be immortal, whether I be so myself or not.
Is not the idea which most men entertain of another, of an eternal life, merely a continuation of this present existence under pleasanter conditions? We cannot conceive another state of existence,—we only fancy we do so.
“I conceive that in all probability we have immortality already. ”

“ Derangement of the intellect is madness; is not derangement of the conscience also madness? might it not be induced, as we bring on a morbid state of the other faculties, by over use and abuse? by giving it more than its due share of power in the commonwealth of the mind? It should preside, not tyrannise; rule, not exercise a petty cramping despotism. A healthy courageous conscience gives to the powers, instincts, impulses, fair play; and having once settled the order of government with a strong hand, is not always meddling though always watchful.
Then again, how is conscience “God’s law?” ”

“ I have a great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness—especially in my own sex,—yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation, through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength; for those whose refinement and softness of nature mingling with high intellectual power and the capacity for strong passion, present to me a problem to solve, which, when solved, I take to my heart. ”

“ The love we have for Genius is to common love what the fire on the altar is to the fire on the hearth. We cherish it not for warmth or for service, but for an offering, as the expression of our worship.
All love not responded to and accepted is a species of idolatry. It is like the worship of a dumb beautiful image we have ourselves set up and deified,42 but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sympathy. ”

“ If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more. It is as if the principle, that conflict is a necessary law of progress, were applicable even to love. For there is no love like that which has roused up the intensest feelings of our nature,—revealed us to ourselves, like lightning suddenly disclosing an abyss,—yet has survived all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord and all the terror of such a revelation. ”

“ Sad is it? ungrateful is it? ungracious is it?—well, it cannot be helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of humanity. You might as well exclaim against any natural result of any natural law. Fancy a hundred years hence some brave, honest, human-hearted Thackeray standing up to discourse before our great-great-grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same stern truth, on the wits, and the poets and the artists of the present time! Hard is your fate, O ye men and women of genius! ”

“ A classical education is not now, as heretofore, the only education given; and through an honest and intense sympathy with the life of their own experience, and through a dislike to vicious associations, though clothed in classical language and classical forms, thence is it that the people have turned with a sense of relief from gods and goddesses, Ledas and Antiopes, to shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of Charity, and young ladies in the character of Innocence,—harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the same relation to classical sculpture that Watts’s hymns bear to Homer and Sophocles. ”

“ To some characters fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,—they do well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But to others, fame is “love disguised,” the love that answers to love, in its widest most exalted sense. It seems to me, that we should all bring the best that is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which God has given us) , and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity,—if not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So will the pure in heart, and the unselfish do ”

“ In schools and in families I would have some things taught by men, and some by women: but we will here put aside the art, the act of teaching: we will turn aside from the droves of children in national schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the individual child, brought up within the guarded circle of a home or a select school, watched by an intelligent, a conscientious influence. How shall we deal with that spirit which has come out of nature’s hands unless we remember what we were ourselves in the past? ”

“ What was the end of all his magnificence? of his worship of the beautiful? of his intellectual triumphs? of his political subtlety? of his ships, and his commerce, and his chariots, and his horses, and his fame which reached to the ends of the earth? All—as it is related—ended in feebleness, in scepticism, in disbelief of happiness, in sensualism, idolatry, and dotage! The whole ‘Book of Ecclesiastes,’ fine as it is, presents a picture of selfishness and epicurism. This was the King of the Jews! the King of those that know! (Il maestro di color chi sanno.) ”

“ There is no selfishness where there is a wife and family. There the house is lighted up by mutual charities; everything achieved for them is a victory; everything endured a triumph. How many vices are suppressed that there may be no bad example! How many exertions made to recommend and inculcate a good one.”
True: and I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into egotism, of which I could show you many and notable examples. ”

“ Love and Intelligence long parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and Paracelsus, who began with a self 83 sufficing scorn of his kind, dies a baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves;—yet wiser in his fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of humanity so long as humanity is content to be human; to love as well as to know;—to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire. ”

“ If I fear God it is because I love him, and believe in his love; I cannot conceive myself as standing in fear of any spiritual or human being in whose love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersonation of Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may devour, the image brings to me no fear, only intense disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his love for me that I fear to offend against God; it is because of his love that his displeasure must be terrible. And with regard to human beings, only the being I love has the power to give me pain or inspire me with fear ”

“ Then a light-minded, good-natured, dissipated brother, and two suitors. All these love her according to their masculine individuality. To the men of her own family she is as a part of the furniture—something they are accustomed to see—necessary to the daily well-being of the house, without whom the fire would not be on the hearth, nor the soup on the table; and they are proud of her charms and good qualities as belonging to them. By her lovers she is loved as an object they desire to possess—and dispute with each other. ”

“ I always go to see her whenever I can. I admire her as what she is—the Parisian actress, practised in every trick of her métier. I admire what she does, I think how well it is all done, and am inclined to clap and applaud her drapery, perfect and ostentatiously studied in every fold, just with the same feeling that I applaud herself.
As to the last scene of Adrienne Lecouvreur, (which those who are avides de sensation, athirst for painful emotion, go to see as they would drink a dram, and critics laud as a miracle of art,) it is altogether a mistake and a failure ”

“ Christ taught the moral law. Solomon illustrated the aspects of nature; Christ helped the aspirations of the spirit. Solomon left as a legacy the saying that ‘in much wisdom there is much grief;’ and Christ preached to us the lowly wisdom which can consecrate grief; making it lead to the elevation of our whole being and to ultimate happiness. The two majesties—the two kings—how different! Not till we are old, and have suffered, and have laid our experience to heart, do we feel the immeasurable distance between the teaching of Christ and the teaching of Solomon! ”

“ In the moment that she presents the apple to Adam she looks—perhaps she ought to look—like the Venus Vincitrice of the antique time; but I am not sure; and, at all events, the less of the classical sentiment the better.
ADAM.
I have seen no statue of Adam; but surely he is a fine subject, either alone or as the companion of Eve; and the Miltonic type is here all-sufficient, combining the heroic ideal of Greek art with something higher still—
whence true authority in men—in fact, essential manliness. ”

“ It is this: every object that we behold we see not with the eye only, but with the soul; and this is especially true of the human countenance, which in so far as it is the expression of mind we see through the medium of our own individual mind. Thus a portrait is satisfactory in so far as the painter has sympathy with his subject, and delightful to us in proportion as the resemblance reflected through his sympathies is in accordance with our own. Now in the Daguerreotype there is no such medium, and the face comes before us without passing through the human mind and brain to our apprehension. ”

“ Goethe speaks of “polishing up life with the varnish of fiction;” the artistic turn of the man’s mind showed itself in this love of creating an effect in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. But what can fiction—what can poetry do for life, but present some one or two out of the multitudinous aspects of that grand, beautiful, terrible, and infinite mystery? or by life, does he mean here the mere external forms of society?—for it is not clear. ”

“ A woman’s patriotism is more of a sentiment than a man’s,—more passionate: it is only an extension of the domestic affections, and with her la patrie is only an enlargement of home. In the same manner, a woman’s idea of fame is always a more extended sympathy, and is much more of a presence than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is only the echo—fainter and more distant—of the voice of love. ”

“ At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life diverges from mine—whose dwelling house is far off;—with whom I am united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and interests by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a double life ”

“ In my younger days I have known men conspicuous for their want of elevated principle, and for their dissipated habits, held up as arbiters and judges of art; but it was to them only another form of epicurism and self-indulgence; and I have seen them led into such absurd and fatal mistakes for want of the power to distinguish and to generalise, that I have despised their judgment, and have come to the conclusion that a really high standard of taste and a low standard of morals are incompatible with each other. ”

“ As I do not always subscribe to his theories of Art, I am the more delighted with this anticipation of a moral agreement between us.
“We have much studied and much perfected of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men:—divided into mere segments of men,—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. ”

“ In daylight, when all the other birds are in active concert, the Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emulous, and successful of the whole band. At night, especially if it is a calm one, with light enough to give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary music of this bird takes quite another character, from all the associations of the scene, from the languor one feels at the close of the day, and from the stillness of spirits and elevation of mind which comes upon one when walking out at that time. ”

“ But not music only, every production of art ought to excite emotions greater and thoughts larger than itself. Thoughts and emotions which never perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were anticipated, never were intended by him—may be strongly suggested by his work. This is an important part of the morals of art, which we must never lose sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit, but for good and for evil. ”

“ Nature is boundless in her powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of art and its capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite,327 has circumscribed the bounds of finite art; the one is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if poetic art in the interpreting of nature share in her infinitude, yet in representing nature through material, form, and colour, she is,—oh, how limited! ”