Various

“ The gale has abated, the courses are clewed up, topsails thrown aback, and the starry flag flies half-mast high, as they “commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption; looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.” A sudden, shooting plunge into the sparkling water, and Francis Drury’s place on earth will know him no more. Gone is the gallant spirit, stilled the eager heart for ever, and Leslie’s tears fall thick and heavy—no one there deeming them shame to his manhood—as the bellying canvas urges the ship swiftly onward on her course. ”

“ Our political and social confusions I admit; what Parliament is at this moment, I see and deplore. Yet nowhere but in England even now, not in France, not in Germany, not in America, could there be found public men of that quality—so capable of fair dealing, of trusting one another, keeping their word to one another—as to make possible such a settlement of the Franchise and Seat Bills as that which we have lately seen. Plato says with most profound truth: “The man who would think to good purpose must be able to take many things into his view together.” ”

“ So let us begin the year resolved to do our duty as citizens, fearlessly and honestly, striving to show our neighbors that social morality is a real religion in itself, by which men can order their lives and purify their hearts. Let us seek to be gentler as fathers, husbands, comrades, or masters; more dutiful as sons and daughters, learners or helpers; more diligent as workers, students, or teachers; more loving and self-denying as men and as women everywhere. Let us think less about calling on Humanity and more about being humane. ”

“ In a word, narcotics, one and all, are, to those who have once fallen under their power, tyrants whose hold can hardly ever be shaken off, which punish rebellion with the rack, and with all those devices of torture which mediæval and ecclesiastical cruelty found even more terrible than the rack itself; while the most absolute submission is rewarded with sufferings only less unendurable than the punishment of revolt. De Quincey’s dreams under the influence of opium were to the tortures of resistance what the highest circle of purgatory may be to the lowest pit of the Inferno. ”

“ It is the one mode in which at present the religion of the future can put forth its yearnings for a sacred art worthy to compare with the highest types of Christian art. We meet not to listen to a musical display—not to hear the history of the musician’s life—not to commemorate his career by any formal ceremony; but we mingle with our words of gratitude, and honor and affection for the artist, the worthy rehearsing of his consummate ideas in a spirit of devotion for him and the glorious company of whom he is one of the most splendid chiefs. ”

“ Wealth excites the most savage enmity there, because it is conceived as a means for gratifying appetites of the most selfish and vile kind. But in America Faublas is no more the ideal than Coriolanus. Wealth is no more conceived as the minister to the pleasures of a class of rakes, than as the minister to the magnificence of a class of nobles. It is conceived as a thing which almost any American may attain, and which almost every American will use respectably. ”

“ In the light of this duty to Humanity as a whole, how feeble is our work, how poor the result! And yet, looking back on the year that is just departed, we need not be down-hearted. Surely and firmly we advance. Not as the spiritualist movements advance, by leaps and bounds, as the tares spring up, as the stubble blazes forth, but by conviction, with system, with slow consolidation of belief resting on proof and tested by experience. ”

“ Thought and vision soar over the immense fields and expand with the extended view, and this consciousness is doubly emphasised by the sense of depression we have just experienced under the overhanging mountains in the narrow Sæter’s valley. One feels as if away from the world one is wont to move in, as if parted from life on earth and brought suddenly face to face with the Almighty Creator of Nature. One is compelled to acknowledge one’s own lowliness and impotence. ”

“ The tribe of Cleon, and the Sausage-seller are the same in every age. I will not believe that the policy of a great nation can be long dictated by firms of advertising touts, who will puff the new soap, a comic singer, and an imperial war in the same page; who are equally at home in the partition of Africa or a penny dreadful. Nations are not seriously led by the arts which make village bumpkins crowd to the show of the fat girl and the woolly pig. In the rapid degradation of the press to the lower American standard we may see an escape from its mischief. The age is one of democracy. ”

“ The Americans themselves use such strong language in describing the corruption prevalent amongst them that they cannot be surprised if strangers believe them. For myself, I had heard and read so much to the discredit of American political life, how all the best men kept aloof from it, and those who gave themselves to it were unworthy, that I ended by supposing that the thing must actually be so, and the good Americans must be looked for elsewhere than in politics. ”

“ If Art would always blossom so, she might be forgiven if she blossomed only for her own sake; yet this controversy regarding Art for Art need hardly have arisen, since Art may certainly bloom for her own sake, if only she consent to assimilate in her blooming, and so exhale for her votaries, in due proportion, all elements essential to Nature, and Humanity: for in the highest artist all faculties are transfigured into one supreme organ; while among forms her form is the most consummate, among fruits her fruit offers the most satisfying refreshment. ”

“ The commerce, the property of Englishmen on the seas must protect itself, like that of other nations, by just, prudent, and civilised bearing, and not by an exclusive dominion which other great nations do very well without. The commerce and the honor of Americans are safe all over the world, though their navy is not one-tenth of ours. And Germany can speak with us face to face on every ocean, though she can hardly put a first-rate ship in array of battle. To talk big about refusing to trust the greatness of England to the sufferance of her neighbors is mere clap-trap. ”

“ Let us just ask ourselves, looking at the thing as people simply desirous of finding the truth, how men who saw and thought straight would proceed, how an American, for instance—whose seeing and thinking has, I have said, if not in all matters, yet commonly in political and social concerns, this quality of straightness—how an American would proceed in the three confusions which I have given as instances of the many confusions now embarrassing us: the confusion of our foreign affairs, the confusion of the House of Commons, the confusion of Ireland. ”

“ If enthusiastic Positivists, more Comtist than Comte, ever gave countenance to such an extravagance, I can only say that they no more represent Positivism than General Booth’s brass band represents Christianity. If words of Auguste Comte have been understood to mean that the religion of Humanity can be summed up in the repetition of phrases, or can be summed up in anything less than a moral and scientific education of man’s complex nature, I can only treat it as a caricature unworthy of notice. ”

“ The utmost that we can do now as an isolated knot of scattered believers is so immeasurably short of what may be done by a united nation, familiar from generation to generation with the sense of duty to Humanity, saturated from infancy with the consciousness of Humanity, and with all the resources of an organised public opinion, and a disciplined body of teachers, poets, and artists, to secure its convictions and express its emotions, that I am always dreading lest our puny attempts in the movement be stereotyped as adequate. ”

“ Sport is therefore let alone. The lingering agony and death of the wounded birds, the anguish of the coursed hare, the misery of the hunted fox, even when not aggravated by the veritable auto da fé of smoking or burning him out if he has taken to earth, the abominable cruelty of rabbit traps; these forms of cruelty and “torture,” inasmuch as their sole object is the amusement of our idle classes, do not move the indignant compassion of the anti-vivisectionist. The sportsman may steal a horse when the biologist may not look over a hedge. ”

“ It is perhaps difficult for men of middle age to estimate Tennyson aright. For we who love poetry were brought up, as it were, at his feet, and he cast the magic of his fascination over our youth. We have gone away, we have travelled in other lands, absorbed in other preoccupations, often revolving problems different from those concerning which we took counsel with him; and we hear new voices, claiming authority, who aver that our old master has been superseded, that he has no message for a new generation, that his voice is no longer a talisman of power. ”

“ The envy with which its holder is regarded diminishes, society is safer. I think whatever may be said of the worship of the almighty dollar in America, it is indubitable that rich men are regarded there with less envy and hatred than rich men are in Europe. Why is this? Because their condition is less fixed, because government and legislation do not take them more seriously than other people, make grandees of them, aid them to found families and endure. With us, the chief holders of property are grandees already, and every rich man aspires to become a grandee if possible. ”

“ A workman (he was an engine-pattern maker,) he chose to live and die a workman, proud of his order, and confident in its destinies; all through his long life without fortune, or luxury, or ambition; a highly-trained man of science; a thoroughly trained politician, loyal unshakenly to his great teacher and his successor; of all the men I have ever known the most perfect type of the cultivated, incorruptible, simple, courageous man of the people. ”

“ Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Elaine, Galahad, Vivien, are types, gracious or hateful. My own feeling, therefore, would rather be that there is too much human nature in the Idylls, than that there is too little; or at any rate that, while Arthur remains a mighty Shadow, whose coming and going are attended with supernatural portents, a worthy symbol of the Spirit of divine humanity, Vivien, for instance, is a too real and unlovely harlot, too gross and veritably breathing, to be in proportionate harmony with the general design. ”

“ Living in a time when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over the folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of destiny. ”

“ We are so parochial in our views, taking us as a species, that I dare say very few English people really know how immensely useful a plant is the common banana. To most of us it envisages itself merely as a curious tropical fruit, largely imported at Covent Garden, and a capital thing to stick on one of the tall dessert-dishes when you give a dinner-party, because it looks delightfully foreign, and just serves to balance the pine-apple at the opposite end of the hospitable mahogany. ”

“ The ceremony of interring a dead friend, or naming a child is cult, though we do not worship our dead friend, nor do we worship the baby when brought for presentation. Cult, as we understand it, is a process that concerns the person or persons who worship, not the being worshipped. Whatever stimulates the sense of social duty and kindles the noblest emotions, whether by a mere historical lecture, or a grand piece of music, or by a solemn act, or by some expression of emotion—this is cult. ”

“ Do you wish to paint a beautiful picture of a rich ambrosial tropical island à la Tennyson—a summer-isle of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of sea?—then you introduce a group of coco-nuts, whispering in odorous heights of even, in the very foreground of your pretty sketch, just to let your public understand at a glance that these are the delicious poetical tropics. Do you desire to create an ideal paradise, à la Bernardin de St. ”

“ The Irish themselves, the all-important personages in this case, are not taken in; our make-believe does not produce in them the very least gratitude, the very least softening. At the same time it adds an hundred fold to the difficulties of an absolute government.
The working of our institutions being thus awry, is the working of our thoughts upon them more smooth and natural? I imagine to myself an American, his own institutions and his habits of thought being such as we have seen, listening to us as we talk politics and discuss the strained state of things over here. ”

“ Before us lies a grand glacier, the Smörstabsbræen, from whose icy lap our old acquaintance the Bæver river starts on his laborious journey to the Western Ocean. The bright rays of the noonday sun are playing on the burnished surface of the glacier, which now flashes like a rivière of the choicest diamonds, now glitters clear and transparent as crystal, and now gleams in green and blue like a mass of emeralds and sapphires, the rapid transformation of tint being ten times multiplied by the play of the shadow of the clouds fleeting across the azure heavens. ”

“ So service is a word I avoid; because the service of Humanity consists in the thousand ways in which we fulfil our social duties, and not in uttering exclamations which may or may not lead to anything in conduct, and which we have no reason to suppose are heard by any one, or affect any one outside the room where they are uttered. The commemoration of a great man such as William the Silent or Corneille is cult, though we do not worship him; the solemn delight in a piece of music in such a spirit is cult, though it is not worship, or service, in the modern English sense of these words. ”

“ It may tempt him to make his work too much like a delicate mosaic of costly stone, too hard and unblended, from excessive elaboration of detail. One may even prefer to art thus highly wrought a more glowing and careless strain, that lifts us off our feet, and carries us away as on a more rapid, if more turbid torrent of inspiration, such as we find in Byron, Shelley, or Victor Hugo. ”