Short Studies on Great Subjects

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But, as if this palpable initiation into the unseen were still
insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on which we are treading
sometimes shakes under us, and we feel as Humboldt describes himself to
have felt at the first shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of
mysterious wildness are let fall in our way, coming suddenly on us like
spectres, and vanishing without explanation or hint of their purpose.
What are those Phoeacian ships meant for, which required neither sail
nor oar, but of their own selves read the hearts of those they carried,
and bore them wherever they would go?--or the wild end of the ship which
carried Ulysses home?--or that terrible piece of second sight in the
Hall at Ithaca, for which the seer was brought from Pylos?--or those
islands, one of which is for ever wasting while another is born into
being to complete the number?--or those mystical sheep and oxen, which
knew neither age nor death, nor ever had offspring born to them, and
whose flesh upon the spits began to crawl and bellow?--or Helen singing
round the horse inside the Trojan walls, when every Grecian chief's
heart fainted in him as he thought he heard the voice of his own dear
wife far away beyond the sea?

In the far gates of the Loestrygones, 'where such a narrow rim of
night divided day from day, that a man who needed not sleep might earn a
double hire, and the cry of the shepherd at evening driving home his
flock was heard by the shepherd going out in the morning to pasture,' we
have, perhaps, some tale of a Phoenician mariner, who had wandered
into the North Seas, and seen 'the Norway sun set into sunrise.' But
what shall we say to that Syrian isle, 'where disease is not, nor
hunger, nor thirst, and where, when men grow old, Apollo comes with
Artemis, and slays them with his silver bow?' There is nothing in the
Iliad like any of these stories.

Yet, when all is said, it matters little who wrote the poems. Each is
so magnificent, that to have written both could scarcely have increased
the greatness of the man who had written one; and if there were two
Homers, the earth is richer by one more divine-gifted man than we had
known. After all, it is perhaps more easy to believe that the
differences which we seem to see arise from Homer's own choice of the
material which best suited two works so different, than that nature was
so largely prodigal as to have created in one age and in one people two
such men; for whether one or two, the authors of the Iliad and the
Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind.

FOOTNOTES:

[X] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1851.

[Y] Mackay's _Progress of the Intellect_.

THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS.

1850.

If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors had been
completed, it would have contained the histories of 25,000 saints. So
many the Catholic Church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals--as men
who had not only done her honour by the eminence of their sanctity, but
who had received while on earth an openly divine recognition of it in
gifts of supernatural power. And this vast number is but a selection;
the editors chose only out of the mass before them what was most
noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of
national interest. It is no more than a fraction of that singular
mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is
still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the
modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the
entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish
between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word.
Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say
little in this place. The 'Lives' have no form or beauty to give them
attraction in themselves; and for their human interest the broad
atmosphere of the world suited ill with these delicate plants, which had
grown up under the shadow of the convent wall; they were exotics, not
from another climate, but from another age; the breath of scorn fell on
them, and having no root in the hearts and beliefs of men any more, but
only in the sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank.
And yet, in their place as historical phenomena, the legends of the
saints are as remarkable as any of the Pagan mythologies; to the full as
remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length and firmness of hold
they once possessed on the convictions of mankind is to pass for
anything in the estimate--and to ourselves they have a near and peculiar
interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the Catholic faith.

Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from ridicule; their
extravagancies, even the most grotesque of them, can be now seen to have
their root in an idea, often a deep one, representing features of
natural history or of metaphysical speculation, and we do not laugh at
them any more. In their origin, they were the consecration of the
first-fruits of knowledge; the expression of a real reverential belief.
Then time did its work on them; knowledge grew, and they could not grow;
they became monstrous and mischievous, and were driven out by
Christianity with scorn and indignation. But it is with human
institutions as it is with men themselves; we are tender with the dead
when their power to hurt us has passed away; and as Paganism can never
more be dangerous, we have been able to command a calmer attitude
towards it, and to detect under its most repulsive features sufficient
latent elements of genuine thought to satisfy us that even in their
darkest aberrations men are never wholly given over to falsehood and
absurdity. When philosophy has done for mediaeval mythology what it has
done for Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find there also at least as
deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life, and we shall find a
moral element which the Pagans never had. The lives of the saints are
always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful; yet, as Goethe
observed, if without beauty, they are always good.

And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves on the magnitude of
the Christian hagiology. The Bollandists were restricted on many sides.
They took only what was in Latin--while every country in Europe had its
own home growth in its own language--and thus many of the most
characteristic of the lives are not to be found at all in their
collection. And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed in
all cases late, and compiled out of the mass of various shorter lives
which had grown up in different localities out of popular tradition; so
that many of their longer productions have an elaborate literary
character, with an appearance of artifice, which, till we know how they
came into existence, might blind us to the vast width and variety of
the traditionary sources from which they are drawn. In the twelfth
century there were sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that
in a country where every parish had its own special saint and special
legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have contained (Mr. Gibbon says
_must_ have contained) at least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To
severe criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St. Patrick,
appears problematical. But at least there is the historical fact, about
which there can be no mistake, that the stories did grow up in some way
or other, that they were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read;
that these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over the earth,
wherever the Catholic faith was preached, stories like these, sprang out
of the heart of the people, and grew and shadowed over the entire
believing mind of the Catholic world. Wherever church was founded, or
soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of those who had died in
the faith; wherever the sweet bells of convent or of monastery were
heard in the evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and
remembrance of God, there dwelt the memory of some apostle who had laid
the first stone, there was the sepulchre of some martyr whose relics
reposed beneath the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for
his Master's sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent self-chosen
austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer and penance, on which the
angels of God were believed to have ascended and descended. It is not a
phenomenon of an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the
history of Christianity. From the time when the first preachers of the
faith passed out from their homes by that quiet Galilean lake, to go to
and fro over the earth, and did their mighty work, and at last
disappeared and were not any more seen, these sacred legends began to
grow. Those who had once known the Apostles, who had drawn from their
lips the blessed message of light and life, one and all would gather
together what fragments they could find of their stories. Rumours blew
in from all the winds. They had been seen here, had been seen there, in
the farthest corners of the earth, preaching, contending, suffering,
prevailing. Affection did not stay to scrutinise. When some member of a
family among ourselves is absent in some far place from which sure news
of him comes slowly and uncertainly; if he has been in the army, or on
some dangerous expedition, or at sea, or anywhere where real or
imaginary dangers stimulate anxiety; or when one is gone away from us
altogether--fallen perhaps in battle--and when the story of his end can
be collected but fitfully from strangers, who only knew his name, but
had heard him nobly spoken of; the faintest threads are caught at;
reports, the vagueness of which might be evident to indifference, are to
love strong grounds of confidence, and 'trifles light as air' establish
themselves as certainties. So, in those first Christian communities,
travellers came through from east and west; legions on the march, or
caravans of wandering merchants; and one had been in Rome, and seen
Peter disputing with Simon Magus; another in India, where he had heard
St. Thomas preaching to the Brahmins; a third brought with him, from the
wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as he said, from a thorn
tree, the seed of which St. Joseph had sown there, and which had grown
to its full size in a single night, making merchandise of the precious
relic out of the credulity of the believers. So the legends grew, and
were treasured up, and loved, and trusted; and alas! all which we have
been able to do with them is to call them lies, and to point a shallow
moral on the impostures and credulities of the early Catholics. An
Atheist could not wish us to say more. If we can really believe that the
Christian Church was made over in its very cradle to lies and to the
father of lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to say,
till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself with any faith which
after such an admission we may profess to entertain. For, as this spirit
began in the first age in which the Church began to have a history, so
it continued so long as the Church as an integral body retained its
vitality, and only died out in the degeneracy which preceded and which
brought on the Reformation. For fourteen hundred years these stories
held their place, and rang on from age to age, from century to century;
as the new faith widened its boundaries, and numbered ever more and more
great names of men and women who had fought and died for it, so long
their histories, living in the hearts of those for whom they laboured,
laid hold of them and filled them: and the devout imagination, possessed
with what was often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out
into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we try them by any
historical canon, we have to say that quite endless untruths grew in
this way to be believed among men; and not believed only, but held
sacred, passionately and devotedly; not filling the history books only,
not only serving to amuse and edify the refectory, or to furnish matter
for meditation in the cell, but claiming days for themselves of special
remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers, forming the
spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of millions of human souls.

From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idolator, what a
strange sight must be that still mountain-peak on the wild west Irish
shore, where, for more than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved
chip of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long
ago there of the Irish apostle; and where, in the sharp crystals of the
trap rock, a path has been worn smooth by the bare feet and bleeding
knees of the pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their
painful way along it as they have done for a thousand years. Doubtless
the 'Lives of the Saints' are full of lies. Are there none in the Iliad?
or in the legends of AEneas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of
Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of the Cid or of
Siegfried true? We say nothing of the lies in these; but why? Oh, it
will be said, but they are fictions; they were never supposed to be
true. But they _were_ supposed to be true, to the full as true as the
'Legenda Aurea.' Oh, then, they are poetry; and besides, they have
nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, that is it; they have nothing to
do with Christianity. Religion has grown such a solemn business with us,
and we bring such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive to
be at all naturally admissible such a light companion as the
imagination. The distinction between secular and religious has been
extended even to the faculties; and we cannot tolerate in others the
fulness and freedom which we have lost or rejected for ourselves. Yet it
has been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found themselves off the
recognised ground of Romance and Paganism, and they failed to see the
same principles at work, though at work with new materials. In the
records of all human affairs, it cannot be too often insisted on that
two kinds of truth run for ever side by side, or rather, crossing in and
out with each other, form the warp and the woof of the coloured web
which we call history: the one, the literal and external truths
corresponding to the eternal and as yet undiscovered laws of fact; the
other, the truths of feeling and of thought, which embody themselves
either in distorted pictures of outward things, or in some entirely new
creation--sometimes moulding and shaping real history; sometimes taking
the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or popular legend; sometimes
appearing as recognised fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It
is useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and falsehood. We
are stating a fact, not a theory; and if it makes truth and falsehood
difficult to distinguish, that is nature's fault, not ours. Fiction is
only false, when it is false, not to fact, else how could it be fiction?
but when it is--to _law_. To try it by its correspondence to the real is
pedantry. Imagination creates as nature creates, by the force which is
in man, which refuses to be restrained; we cannot help it, and we are
only false when we make monsters, or when we pretend that our inventions
are facts, when we substitute truths of one kind for truths of another;
when we substitute,--and again we must say when we _intentionally_
substitute:--whenever persons, and whenever facts seize strongly on the
imagination (and of course when there is anything remarkable in them
they must and will do so), invention glides into the images which form
in our minds; so it must be, and so it ever has been, from the first
legends of a cosmogony to the written life of the great man who died
last year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot
relate facts as they are; they must first pass through ourselves, and we
are more or less than mortal if they gather nothing in the transit. The
great outlines alone lie around us as imperative and constraining; the
detail we each fill up variously, according to the turn of our
sympathies, the extent of our knowledge, or our general theories of
things: and therefore it may be said that the only literally true
history possible is the history which mind has left of itself in all the
changes through which it has passed.

Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superstitious as Surius, and
Suetonius was most laborious and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus
and Pliny. Suetonius gives us prodigies, where Surius has miracles, but
that is all the difference; each follows the form of the supernatural
which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes a life of
Lycurgus, with details of his childhood, and of the trials and
vicissitudes of his age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as
questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of England.

No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes. Sympathies and
antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, and indifference is
impossible. Love is blind, and so is every other passion. Love believes
eagerly what it desires; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it
dwells on what is beautiful; while dislike sees a tarnish on what is
brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do we believe that all this is
a disease of unenlightened times, and that in our strong sunlight only
truth can get received?--then let us contrast the portrait, for
instance, of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free Trade Hall at
Manchester,[Z] at the county meeting, and in the Oxford Common Room. It
is not so. Faithful and literal history is possible only to an impassive
spirit. Man will never write it, until perfect knowledge and perfect
faith in God shall enable him to see and endure every fact in its
reality; until perfect love shall kindle in him under its touch the one
just emotion which is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.

How far we are in these days from approximating to such a combination we
need not here insist. Criticism in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems
to have accomplished great intellectual triumphs; and in Germany and
France, and among ourselves, we have our new schools of the philosophy
of history: yet their real successes have hitherto only been
destructive. When philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project
its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a
theory: and what is a theory but an imperfect generalisation caught up
by a predisposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras but a
theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which he can mould to
illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory
be what it will? Intellect can destroy, but it cannot restore life; call
in the creative faculties--call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have
living figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which ever
lived before. The high faith in which Love and Intellect can alone
unite in their fulness, has not yet found utterance in modern
historians.

The greatest man who has as yet given himself to the recording of human
affairs is, beyond question, Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a
serene calmness of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling. He
took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may have been Republican,
but he has left no sign whether he was either: he appears to have sifted
facts with scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn, his
hatred, according only to individual merit: and his sentiments are
rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of his portraits,
than expressed in words by himself. Yet such a power of seeing into
things was only possible to him, because there was no party left with
which he could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in Rome
through which he could feel. The spirit of Rome, the spirit of life had
gone away to seek other forms, and the world of Tacitus was a heap of
decaying institutions; a stage where men and women, as they themselves
were individually base or noble, played over their little parts. Life
indeed was come into the world, was working in it, and silently shaping
the old dead corpse into fresh and beautiful being. Tacitus alludes to
it once only, in one brief scornful chapter; and the most poorly gifted
of those forlorn biographers whose unreasoning credulity was piling up
the legends of St. Mary and the Apostles, which now drive the
ecclesiastical historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and
faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among mankind, than the
keenest and gravest intellect which ever set itself to contemplate them.

And now having in some degree cleared the ground of difficulties, let us
go back to the Lives of the Saints. If Bede tells us lies about St.
Cuthbert, we will disbelieve his stories; but we will not call Bede a
liar, even though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has
set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the clearest evidence.
We are driven to no such alternative; our canons of criticism are
different from Bede's, and so are our notions of probability. Bede would
expect _a priori_, and would therefore consider as sufficiently attested
by a consent of popular tradition, what the oaths of living witnesses
would fail to make credible to a modern English jury. We will call Bede
a liar only if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert as a picture
of a life which he considered admirable and excellent, as one after
which he was endeavouring to model his own, and which he held up as a
pattern of imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it admirable
at all, when he was making no effort at the austerities which he was
lauding. The histories of the saints are written as ideals of a
Christian life; they have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and
straightforward as they are,--if they are not this they are nothing. For
fourteen centuries the religious mind of the Catholic world threw them
out as its form of hero worship, as the heroic patterns of a form of
human life which each Christian within his own limits was endeavouring
to realise. The first martyrs and confessors were to those poor monks
what the first Dorian conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrtaeus, what
Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were wherever Homer was sung
or read; or in more modern times, what the Knights of the Round Table
were in the halls of the Norman castles. The Catholic mind was
expressing its conception of the highest human excellence; and the
result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As with the battle
heroes, too, the inspiration lies in the universal idea; the varieties
of character (with here and there an exception) are slight and
unimportant; the object being to create examples for universal human
imitation. Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spirit of
chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain, or Antony in the desert, are
equal models of patient austerity. The knights fight with giants,
enchanters, robbers, unknightly nobles, or furious wild beasts; the
Christians fight with the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight
leaves the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint in quest
of penance, and on the bare rocks or in desolate wildernesses subdues
the devil in his flesh with prayers and penances; and so alien is it all
to the whole thought and system of the modern Christian, that he either
rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures, or receives them
with disdainful wonder, as one more shameful form of superstition with
which human nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.

Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of monastic asceticism,
it seems necessary to insist that there really was such a thing; there
is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are
not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many
centuries lead the sort of life which saints are said to have led. We
have got a notion that the friars were a snug, comfortable set, after
all; and the life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern
university, where the old monks' language and affectation of
unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist with as large a mass of
bodily enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate. Very likely this
was the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen in the
fifteenth century. It was a symptom of a very rapid disorder which had
set in among them, and which promptly terminated in dissolution. But
long, long ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which, wisely or
foolishly, these old monks and hermits did make themselves a very hard
life of it; and the legend only exceeded the reality in being a very
slightly idealised portrait. We are not speaking of the miracles; that
is a wholly different question. When men knew little of the order of
nature, whatever came to pass without an obvious cause was at once set
down to influences beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were
witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad powers, of
course the especial servants of God would not be left without graces to
outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were many other reasons why
the saints should work miracles. They had done so under the old
dispensation, and there was no obvious reason why Christians should be
worse off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the modern
phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest
natural is the highest supernatural, nevertheless natural facts permit
us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of
commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a
disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief
thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working
miracles, but they worked miracles because they had become saints; and
the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they
had used to make themselves what they were: and as we said, in this part
of the business there is unquestionable basis of truth--scarcely even
exaggeration. We have documentary evidence, which has been filtered
through the sharp ordeal of party hatred, of the way in which some men
(and those, not mere ignorant fanatics, but men of vast mind and vast
influence in their days) conducted themselves, where _myth_ has no room
to enter. We know something of the hair-shirt of Thomas a Becket; and
there was another poor monk, whose asceticism imagination could not
easily outrun; he who, when the earth's mighty ones were banded together
to crush him under their armed heels, spoke but one little word, and it
fell among them like the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their
hands against each other, and the armies melted away; and the proudest
monarch of the earth lay at that monk's threshold three winter nights in
the scanty clothing of penance, suing miserably for forgiveness. Or
again, to take a fairer figure. There is a poem extant, the genuineness
of which, we believe, has not been challenged, composed by Columbkill,
commonly called St. Columba. He was a hermit in Arran, a rocky island in
the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was summoned, we do not
know how, but in a manner which appeared to him to be a Divine call, to
go away and be Bishop of Iona. The poem is a 'Farewell to Arran,' which
he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us see something of a hermit's life
there. 'Farewell,' he begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), 'a
long farewell to thee, Arran of my heart. Paradise is with thee; the
garden of God within the sound of thy bells. The angels love Arran. Each
day an angel comes there to join in its services.' And then he goes on
to describe his 'dear cell,' and the holy happy hours which he had spent
there, 'with the wind whistling through the loose stones, and the sea
spray hanging on his hair.' Arran is no better than a wild rock. It is
strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of the old
hermitages; and at their best they could have been but such places as
sheep would huddle under in a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet
which would pierce through the chinks of the walls.

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