Calumny

“ The most celebrated of them all, Calumny, is minutely described by Lucian. It portrayed a man, whose inclination to credit evil reports was characterized by large ears, sitting between two women, Ignorance and Mistrust, and receiving Calumny, a magnificent woman excited with passion, preceded by Envy; she drags in a youth by the hair, who vainly, with hands uplifted, calls the gods to witness. ”

“ For life, as it respects myself, I care not—but while yet I may, I would rescue my memory from the calumny, which I doubt not will be industriously heaped upon it, when it will be no longer in my power to protect it. ”

“ But bloodless calumny is a quiet, decorous weapon, always at hand, perfectly compatible with sacerdotal proprieties, and unsparingly used accordingly to gratify partisan rancour, in a state of society in which every man's hopes and fortunes depend on party successes or failures. ”

“ Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit's last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. ”

“ We are dressed up like a scarecrow to gratify, on a large scale, the passions of curiosity, fright, and hatred. Something or other men must fear, men must loathe, men must suspect, even if it be to turn away their minds from their own inward miseries.... A 373 calumny against us first appeared in 1836, it still thrives and flourishes in 1851. I have made inquiries, and I am told I may safely say that in the course of the fifteen years that it has lasted, from 200,000 to 250,000 copies have been put into circulation in America and England. ”

“ So long as he was personally present, he had the perfect mastery of his political adversaries; calumny only succeeded in his absence. ”

“ Wind and rain, frost and snow, will spoil our Temple in time; but the Temple of the mortals lives on, and is never destroyed."
"Do tell us about it, dear Queen," said all the fairies; "we will try to understand."
"It is called by rather a long word," said the Queen, "its name is 'character'; that is what the mortals build, and the stones they use are more precious than our stones. I will tell you the names of some of them. First there is Truth, clear and bright like the diamonds; that must be the foundation; no good character can be made without Truth." ”

“ Your peasant manners can't efface the mark Of light you drew across the Land of Dark. In you the extremes of character are wed, To serve the quick and villify the dead. Hero and clown! O, man of many sides, The Muse of Truth adores you and derides, And sheds, impartial, the revealing ray Upon your head of gold and feet of clay. ”

“ Nay, but thou wrongest us: thou wrong'st our youth,
Who dost our happiness compassionate.
And yet! and yet! O royal Calvary!
Whence divine sorrow triumphed through years past:
Could ages bow before mere memory?
Those passion-flowers must blossom, to the last.
Purple they bloom, the splendour of a King:
Crimson they bleed, the sacrament of Death:
About our thrones and pleasaunces they cling,
Where guilty eyes read, what each blossom saith. ”

“ Each human fibre seemed to reveal to them some new truth. They were like jewelers before a casket full of gems, and what they studied, weighed, examined, was a human corpse. And when those eyes, living, terrible, accusing, were removed, leaving behind them two empty orbits, the Professor suddenly spoke with marvelous eloquence, flowing and picturesque, as if he were speaking of works of art. ”

“ It is a great truth, if we make the saying good, that from the same wood are formed the statues of idols and the rafters of the gallows, kings' thrones and cobblers’ stalls; and another strange thing is, that from the same rags is made the paper on which the wisdom of sages is recorded, and the crown which is placed on the head of a fool,—a thing that would puzzle the cleverest astrologer in the world. ”

“ Of flow'rs, these crush before one blossom swings.
But here and there the wisdom of a School
Unknown to these hath often written down
"Fame" in white ink the future hath turned brown;
When every beauty, heaped with ridicule,
In their ignoble prose, proved their renown,
Making each famous—as an ass or fool. ”

“ A soul, whose passport, signed in Calvary's blood,
Prevailed. Around the golden threshold's verge
I saw the dazzling of celestial wings,
Thronging to welcome it. The towering form
Of an archangel bore it company
Up to God's throne. Soft on my ear their tones,
Serenely wafted by ambrosial gales,
Fell like rich music. ”

“ All that romance of the imagination which touches with a golden glamour the recovered treasures of pagan antiquity he loved as intensely as if it were not alien and hostile, as the many thought, to that glow of spiritual piety, that zeal of martyrdom, that white, consuming splendor which for the mystical imagination surrounds the holy cross. ”

“ There are minds whose exuberant fancy leads them off from the paths of science into the regions of fable and romance; there they build their airy castles, and lighting them up with the brilliancy of their imaginations, they revel on with fairy queens or goblins bold. There is a reality in store for the youth of such a mind. ”

“ The heroes and heroines of pagan mythology and pagan history, the veritable actors in ancient times of the world’s great drama,—or the more unreal characters of fairy land, of the weird sisterhood, and of the wizard fraternity,—these all stand before us instinct with life. ”

“ Nay, it is as if the clay should be in such a heat and passion with the potter as to tell him that he has no hands, or that he works as awkwardly as if he had none. "Shall the clay pretend to be wiser than the potter and therefore to advise him, or mightier than the potter and therefore to control him?" ”

“ We point to the fact—which is true enough—that the most famous beauties of antiquity were plain women—plain, that is, according to the conventional standards.
We also maintain—again with perfect truth—that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination. ”

“ On the contrary, the structures of greatness and antiquity should be marked by a character of awful sublimity, suited to the dignity of the subject; indenting on the mind a reverential and permanent impression, and giving, at once, a corresponding and unequivocal grandeur to the picture. ”

“ A small number of scriptural and legendary stories lend themselves quite particularly to the development of such beautiful accessory, which soon becomes the paramount interest, and vests the whole with a totally new character: a romantic, childish charm, the charm of the improbable taken for granted, of the freedom to invent whatever one would like to see but cannot, the charm of the fairy story. ”

“ With weary feet to the new Calvary,
Where we behold, as one who in a glass
Sees his own face, self-slain Humanity,
And in the dumb reproach of that sad gaze
Learn what an awful phantom the red hand of man can raise. ”

“ Each narration, each portrait, each detail of action, might be detached and serve as a good example for schoolboys, along with the masterpieces of the ancient tribune. So strong is this tendency that, on the approach of the final moment, in the agony of death, alone and without witnesses, the character finds the means to plead his own frenzy and die eloquently. ”

“ The steeds of darkness, and the robber King,
My labouring spirit bids me dare to sing;
The car, whose sickening blight the pale stars fled,
And subterranean Juno's gloomy bed.
Hence, ye profane! all earth-born thoughts are gone,
And Phœbus reigns within my breast, alone. ”

“ Fantastic garbs, beggaring all fancy of a Teniers or a Callot, succeed each other, like monster devouring monster in a Dream. The whole too in brief authentic strokes, and touched not seldom with that breath of genius which makes even old raiment live. ”

“ Beyond cavil his fame was secure, and he enjoyed it as that which he had honestly earned, with a genuine and ever fresh delight, openly avowed by the charming frankness of his nature. He dearly loved to be esteemed and cherished by his fellow men, and what he valued most, his waning years brought him in ever increasing abundance. ”

“ Again, some character in real history had become so famous, so proverbial, as Nero for instance, that they were introduced instead of the moral quality, for which they were so noted;—and in this manner the stage was moving on to the absolute production of heroic and comic real characters, when the restoration of literature, followed by the ever-blessed Reformation, let in upon the kingdom not only new knowledge, but new motive. ”

“ The glamour of an entirely new experience had crept over the cruel, scheming man of many crimes as he sat there waiting for the twilight to fall, the glamour which hangs around the days of early childhood and innocence, and seems to whisper of things holy and beautiful. ”

“ What a noble thing is the soul, in its strengths and in its weaknesses! Who would be less weak than Calantha? Who can be so strong? The expression of this transcendent scene almost bears us in imagination to Calvary and the Cross ”

“ A handful of such heroes, out of the mass of dead generations, seem set like burning gems along the vista of human story,—the magical carbuncles of the old legend, reared aloft to shed a glow over the whole scene and time in which they lived. ”

“ Such are the confessions which Death, the great master, forces even from the bosoms of kings, which have been wrapt in the splendour of gold and the softness of ermine, and have looked to the simple spectator so noble and so serene. ”

“ And it may be well to premise, seeing that nowadays in story-telling the realms of imagination have often a two-fold meaning, literal as well as metaphorical, that, though the embroidery of this tale may be fanciful, the ground upon which it is worked is of the substance called fact. For the once secret chronicles of these two hundred kingdoms, principalities, palatinates, bishoprics, duchies, landgravates and what not form very pretty reading to the student of humanity; and the dull atmosphere of much pettiness and fatuous pomp is lighted up in welcome fashion by occasional stars of romance. ”

“ Such opulence of nature's tapestries,
That I reflected how the humblest may
Inherit all those lavish treasuries
Beside which human art is children's play,
And kings' possessions merest travesties. ”

“ But he became enamoured in his youth with the adventurous quest for the discovery of Nature's stupendous secrets, and under the spell of the Cabala, and under the influence of eager expectations entertained in his day by men of rank and learning, that fresh light was about to dawn upon the ancient mysteries of the world, he took the false path of magic as the way to the conquest of the great secret. ”

“ The rest of us will be quicker to comprehend how subtly this volume takes its peculiar place in its author's record of struggling dreams, how, beneath, a surface covered with political finery and sentimental bric-à-brac, the quest goes on, stubbornly and often stupidly, in a forgotten world made suddenly animate and as real as our own. ”

“ By that time all the followers of secret arts crowded about the King’s palace. Priests, monks, astrologers, star-gazers, magicians, sorcerers, witches, wizards, necromancers, bird conjurers, mice conjurers, snake conjurers, predictors by measuring with the span, predictors by casting beans or blue pebbles, predictors by gazing at cups of water, and all kinds of enchanters, male and female, old and young, were there, practicing their arts, but none could understand the secret, or devise a remedy. ”

“ The grim and threatening skeletons, the ghosts of those whom Carignano had betrayed, the tormented look of the flying king, the malediction in the heavens, the solitude of the earth and the sea, display a concentrated power of imagination rare in art. ”

“ Each succeeding generation finds that glamour, or brings it; and each generation, as it passes, deems that its successor has either found or brought less of it. But the glamour is there all the while. ”

“ It must be owned that in the old legends there is a something which lifts them out of the domain of superstition, and even to a denizen of the modern world an hour may come when the old enchanting glamour makes itself felt, quickening the phantasies of the past into actual living realities. ”

“ And feeling their own unworthiness and impurity, as well as that of their people, they uttered their spiritual desires, and their aspirations and disappointments and indignations and humiliations, in strains that make their great writings sound like one long, impassioned, rhythmic wail through the bars of a dungeon. Gloomy, wrathful, and intense, their utterances are grand and pathetic and sublime; but the beautiful plays through them, and gilds their highest points as the white crests do the billows of a black, tempestuous sea. ”

“ We go from person to person, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey, although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression has effaced the other. Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its every limb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturally reared on one foundation, whose parts are all subordinated to a great unity, the “Divina Commedia,” as an organic, artistic whole, is inferior to the “Iliad” and “Paradise Lost,” and to the Grecian and Shakespearean tragedies. ”

“ So poets were to restrict themselves to ‘short swallow-flights of song,’ fables, hymns to various deities and sacred places, elegies, epigrams, the one thing needful being that every line should be a model of polished brilliance, and that each poem should be a mine of learned allusion. Of this literary faith and practice the great champion and exponent was Callimachus. ”