Short Studies on Great Subjects

J >> James Anthony Froude >> Short Studies on Great Subjects

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Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there are silent witnesses
which cannot lie, that tell the same touching story. Whoever loiters
among the ruins of a monastery will see, commonly leading out of the
cloisters, rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and
wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof
from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept
up) a perpetual ooze; for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through
which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light. Such as
they are, a well-kept dog would object to accept a night's lodging in
them; and if they had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic
tongues would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger perhaps
supposes that they were the very dungeons of which he has heard such
terrible things. He asks his guide, and his guide tells him they were
the monks' dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping
roof above them, was the self-chosen home of those poor men. Through
winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer sunshine,
generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at
last lay down and died.

It is all gone now--gone as if it had never been; and it was as foolish
as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would have been mischievous, to
revive a devotional interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have
produced but one more unreality in an age already too full of such. No
one supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived; that any
man, however earnest in his religion, would have gone looking for earth
floors and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he could get
anything better. Either we are wiser, or more humane, or more
self-indulgent; at any rate we are something which divides us from
mediaeval Christianity by an impassable gulf which this age or this epoch
will not see bridged over. Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists,
however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected, and were
endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in our educational system; a
very serious blank indeed, and one which, somehow, we must contrive to
get filled if the education of character is ever to be more than a name
with us. To try and teach people how to live without giving them
examples in which our rules are illustrated, is like teaching them to
draw by the rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without
designs in which to study the effects; or to write verse by the laws of
rhyme and metre, without song or poem in which rhyme and metre are
exhibited. It is a principle which we have forgotten, and it is one
which the old Catholics did not forget. We do not mean that they set out
with saying to themselves, 'We must have examples, we must have
ideals;' very likely they never thought about it at all; love for their
holy men, and a thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and
love unconsciously working gave them the best for which they could have
wished. The boy at school at the monastery, the young monk disciplining
himself as yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had
devoted himself, the old one halting on toward the close of his
pilgrimage,--all of them had before their eyes, in the legend of the
patron saint, a personal realisation of all they were trying after;
leading them on, beckoning to them, and pointing, as they stumbled among
their difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had left, as he
had trod that hard path before them. It was as if the Church was for
ever saying to them:--'You have doubts and fears, and trials and
temptations, outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and feel the
burden of your sin. Here was one who, like you, _in this very spot_,
under the same sky, treading the same soil, among the same hills and
woods and rocks and rivers, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned
like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did penance, and
washed out his sins; he fought the fight, he vanquished the Evil One, he
triumphed, and now he reigns a saint with Christ in heaven. The same
ground which yields you your food, once supplied him; he breathed, and
lived, and felt, and died _here_; and now, from his throne in the sky,
he is still looking lovingly down on his children, making intercession
for you that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by he may
himself offer you at God's throne as his own.' It is impossible to
measure the influence which a personal reality of this kind must have
exercised on the mind, thus daily and hourly impressed upon it through a
life; there is nothing vague any more, no abstract excellences to strain
after; all is distinct, personal, palpable. It is no dream. The saint's
bones are under the altar; nay, perhaps, his very form and features
undissolved. Under some late abbot the coffin may have been opened and
the body seen without mark or taint of decay. Such things have been, and
the emaciation of a saint will account for it without a miracle. Daily
some incident of his story is read aloud, or spoken of, or preached
upon. In quaint beautiful forms it lives in light in the long chapel
windows; and in the summer matins his figure, lighted up in splendour,
gleams down on the congregation as they pray, or streams in mysterious
tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft celestial glory,
and shining as he shines in heaven. Alas, alas! where is it all gone?

We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide question, what
possibly may have been the meaning of so large a portion of the human
race, and so many centuries of Christianity, having been surrendered and
seemingly sacrificed to the working out this dreary asceticism. If right
once, then it is right now; if now worthless, then it could never have
been more than worthless; and the energies which spent themselves on it
were like corn sown upon the rock, or substance given for that which is
not bread. We supposed ourselves challenged recently for our facts. Here
is an enormous fact which there is no evading. It is not to be slurred
over with indolent generalities, with unmeaning talk of superstition, of
the twilight of the understanding, of barbarism, and of nursery
credulity; it is matter for the philosophy of history, if the philosophy
has yet been born which can deal with it; one of the solid, experienced
facts in the story of mankind which must be accepted and considered with
that respectful deference which all facts claim of their several
sciences, and which will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing
it to have a meaning) except to reverence, to sympathy, to love. We must
remember that the men who wrote these stories, and who practised these
austerities, were the same men who composed our liturgies, who built our
churches and our cathedrals--and the gothic cathedral is, perhaps, on
the whole, the most magnificent creation which the mind of man has as
yet thrown out of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy of
history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being certain
progressive organising laws in which the fretful lives of each of us are
gathered into and subordinated in some larger unity, through which age
is linked to age, as we move forward, with an horizon expanding and
advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of any human phenomenon is
a criterion of its importance, and definite forms of thought working
through long historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast
laws--imply a distinct step in human progress. Something previously
unrealised is being lived out, and rooted into the heart of mankind.

Nature never half does her work. She goes over it, and over it, to make
assurance sure, and makes good her ground with wearying repetition. A
single section of a short paper is but a small space to enter on so vast
an enterprise; nevertheless, a few very general words shall be ventured
as a suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may possibly
have meant.

First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the world,
whatever form the spirit of the world assumes, the ideals of
Christianity will of course be their opposite; as one verges into one
extreme, the other will verge into the contrary. In those rough times
the law was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart
which guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded; and
monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would be the
destruction and abnegation of the animal nature. The war hero in the
battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis of the
fleshly man--the saint in the desert of the spiritual.

But this interpretation is slight, imperfect, and if true at all only
partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not contradictories; they
are the complements in the perfect character; and in the middle ages, as
in all ages of genuine earnestness, they interfused and penetrated each
other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors; and those grand
old figures which sleep cross-legged in the cathedral aisles were
something higher than only one more form of the beast of prey.
Monasticism represented something more positive than a protest against
the world. We believe it to have been the realisation of the infinite
loveliness and beauty of personal purity.

In the earlier civilisation, the Greeks, however genuine their reverence
for the gods, do not seem to have supposed any part of their duty to the
gods to consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as was
their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as beauty of form, with
all their loftiness and their nobleness, with their ready love of moral
excellence when manifested, as fortitude, or devotion to liberty and to
home, they had little or no idea of what we mean by morality. With a few
rare exceptions, pollution, too detestable to be even named among
ourselves, was of familiar and daily occurrence among their greatest
men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman; and was not
supposed to be incompatible, and was not, in fact, incompatible with any
of those especial excellences which we so admire in the Greek character.

Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of the republic), there was
a sufficiently austere morality. A public officer of state, whose
business was to enquire into the private lives of the citizens, and to
punish offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only
once on this planet. There was never a nation before, and there has been
none since, with sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality
was not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself. It was
obedience to law, practised and valued, loved for what resulted from it,
for the strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved for
itself. The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and it
submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as the energy of the
old spirit endured. But as soon as that energy grew slack--when the
religion was no longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in,
and there was no more danger to face, and the world was at their feet,
all was swept away as before a whirlwind; there was no loveliness in
virtue to make it desired, and the Rome of the Caesars presents, in its
later ages, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the coarsest animal
desire, with means unlimited to gratify it. In Latin literature, as
little as in the Greek, is there any sense of the beauty of purity.
Moral essays on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the wise
man whose passions and whose appetites are trained into obedience to
reason. But this is no more than the philosophy of the old Roman life,
which got itself expressed in words when men were tired of the reality.
It involves no sense of sin. If sin could be indulged without weakening
self-command, or without hurting other people, Roman philosophy would
have nothing to say against it.

The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy. Without speculating on
the _why_, they felt that indulgence of animal passion did, in fact,
pollute them, and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.
Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces of the universe,
giving the spirit to God, but declaring matter to be eternally and
incurably evil; and looking forward to the time when the spirit should
be emancipated from the body, as the beginning of, or as the return to,
its proper existence, a man like Plotinus took no especial care what
became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of flesh. If the body sinned,
sin was its element; it could not do other than sin; purity of conduct
could not make the body clean, and no amount of bodily indulgence could
shed a taint upon the spirit--a very comfortable doctrine, and one
which, under various disguises, has appeared a good many times on the
earth. But Christianity, shaking all this off, would present the body to
God as a pure and holy sacrifice, as so much of the material world
conquered from the appetites and lusts, and from the devil whose abode
they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and scourgings, the
penances and night-watchings; it was this which sent St. Anthony to the
tombs and set Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh,
and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much as one corrupt
thought.

And they may have been absurd and extravagant. When the feeling is
stronger than the judgment, men are very apt to be extravagant. If, in
the recoil from Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint thus
purified had contracted supernatural virtue and could work miracles,
they had not sufficiently attended to the facts, and so far are not
unexceptionable witnesses to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and
in virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage--we are lifted forward a
mighty step which we can never again retrace. Personal purity is not the
whole for which we have to care: it is but one feature in the ideal
character of man. The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly
all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us poor, mean, and
emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is with science; generations of
men have given themselves exclusively to single branches, which, when
mastered, form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in life,
so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years to make good a single
step. Weary and tedious enough it seems when we cease to speak in large
language, and remember the numbers of individual souls who have been at
work at the process; but who knows whereabouts we are in the duration
of the race? Is humanity crawling out of the cradle, or tottering into
the grave? Is it in nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood? Who
knows? It is enough for us to be sure of our steps when we have taken
them, and thankfully to accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it
is impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to any character
which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth we require, not greatness only,
but goodness; and not that goodness only which begins and ends in
conduct correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure
feeling for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and
susceptible as woman's modesty.

So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are
right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil which
hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.
If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they
look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of modern
Christianity, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance
which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion--and, loud in
their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point
their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the
scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those
millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad
success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross along their journey
through life, they set it by, pass it over, dismiss it out of history,
with some poor commonplace simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will not do.
Mankind have not been so long on this planet altogether, that we can
allow so large a chasm to be scooped out of their spiritual existence.

We intended to leave our readers with something lighter than all this in
the shape of literary criticism, and a few specimens of the biographical
style: in both of these we must now, however, be necessarily brief.
Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals,
should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never
read a late life when he can command an early one; for the genius in
them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like river-water, is most
pure nearest to the fountain. We are lucky in possessing several
specimens of the mode of their growth in late and early lives of the
same saints, and the process in all is similar. Out of the unnumbered
lives of St. Bride, three are left; out of the sixty-six of St. Patrick,
there are eight; the first of each belonging to the sixth century, the
latest to the thirteenth. The earliest in each instance are in verse;
they belong to a time when there was no one to write such things, and
were popular in form and popular in their origin. The flow is easy, the
style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is
substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and we
exchange the exuberance of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic
record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. The
marvellous in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the
after-miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of poets'
metaphors for literal truth. There is often real, genial, human beauty
in the old verse. The first two stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's
Hymn are of high merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a
translation:--

Bride the queen, she loved not the world;
She floated on the waves of the world
As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.

Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps
In the far land of her captivity,
Mourning for her child at home.

What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor
human soul in this earthly pilgrimage!

The poetical 'Life of St. Patrick,' too, is full of fine, wild, natural
imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and
there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and
leaving a gigantic footprint on a rock from which he sprang back into
heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature
of the spot; as it is first told, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and
it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy; but in the
later prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren
prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again,
when Patrick is described, as the after-apostle, raising the dead Celts
to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force, and we have a
long weary list of literal deaths and literal raisings. So in many ways
the freshness and individuality was lost with time. The larger saints
swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits; chasms were
supplied by an ever ready fancy; and, like the stock of good works laid
up for general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready when any
defect was to be supplied. So it was that, after the first impulse, the
progressive life of a saint rolled on like a snowball down a mountain
side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend,
appropriate or inappropriate--sometimes real jewels of genuine old
tradition, sometimes the debris of the old creeds and legends of
heathenism; and on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and
was dashed in pieces on the Reformation.

One more illustration shall serve as evidence of what the really
greatest, most vigorous, minds in the twelfth century could accept as
possible or probable, which they could relate (on what evidence we do
not know) as really ascertained facts. We remember something of St.
Anselm: both as a statesman and as a theologian, he was unquestionably
among the ablest men of his time alive in Europe. Here is a story which
Anselm tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran. The saint, with thirty of
his companions, was preaching within the frontiers of a lawless Pagan
prince; and, disregarding all orders to be quiet or to leave the
country, continued to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the
ears of the prince himself. Things took their natural course.
Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers was sent, and the
saint and his little band were decapitated. The scene of the execution
was a wood, and the heads and trunks were left lying there for the
wolves and the wild birds.

But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the Church in
the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by Divine Providence
to preserve the bodies of these saints from profanation. The trunk
of Kieran rose from the ground, and selecting first his own head,
and carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and
afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of his
companions, giving each body its own head, he dug graves for them
and buried them, and last of all buried himself.

It is even so. So it stands written in a life claiming Anselm's
authorship; and there is no reason why the authorship should not be his.
Out of the heart come the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the
intellect or the understanding. Men are not good or bad, noble or
base--thank God for it!--as they judge well or ill of the probabilities
of nature, but as they love God and hate the devil. And yet the story is
instructive. We have heard grave good men--men of intellect and
influence--with all the advantages of modern science, learning,
experience; men who would regard Anselm with sad and serious pity; yet
tell us stories, as having fallen within their own experience, of the
marvels of mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is
ridiculous) as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.

Mutato nomine, de te
Fabula narratur.

We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and turn away and
straightway forget what manner of men we are. The superstition of
science scoffs at the superstition of faith.

FOOTNOTES:

[Z] Written in 1850.

REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

1850.

From St. Anselm to Mr. Emerson, from the 'Acta Sanctorum' to the
'Representative Men;' so far in seven centuries we have travelled. The
races of the old Ideals have become extinct like the Preadamite
Saurians; and here are our new pattern specimens on which we are to
look, and take comfort and encouragement to ourselves.

The philosopher, the mystic, the poet, the sceptic, the man of the
world, the writer; these are the present moral categories, the _summa
genera_ of human greatness as Mr. Emerson arranges them. From every
point of view an exceptionable catalogue. They are all thinkers, to
begin with, except one: and thought is but a poor business compared to
action. Saints did not earn canonisation by the number of their folios;
and if the necessities of the times are now driving our best men out of
action into philosophy and verse-making, so much the worse for them and
so much the worse for the world. The one pattern actor, 'the man of the
world,' is Napoleon Bonaparte, not in the least a person, as we are most
of us at present feeling, whose example the world desires to see
followed. Mr. Emerson would have done better if he had kept to his own
side of the Atlantic. He is paying his own countrymen but a poor
compliment by coming exclusively to Europe for his heroes; and he would
be doing us in Europe more real good by a great deal if he would tell us
something of the backwoodsmen in Kentucky and Ohio. However, to let that
pass; it is not our business here to quarrel either with him or his
book; and the book stands at the head of our article rather because it
presents a very noticeable deficiency of which its writer is either
unaware or careless.

These six predicables, as the logician would call them, what are they?
Are they _ultimate genera_ refusing to be classified farther? or is
there any other larger type of greatness under which they fall? In the
naturalist's catalogue, poet, sceptic, and the rest will all be
classified as men--man being an intelligible entity. Has Mr. Emerson any
similar clear idea of great man or good man? If so, where is he? what is
he? It is desirable that we should know. Men will not get to heaven
because they lie under one or other of these predicables. What is that
supreme type of character which is in itself good or great, unqualified
with any farther _differentia_? Is there any such? and if there be,
where is the representative of this? It may be said that the generic man
exists nowhere in an ideal unity--that if considered at all, he must be
abstracted from the various sorts of men, black and white, tame or
savage. So if we would know what a great man or a good man means, we
must look to some specific line in which he is good, and abstract our
general idea. And that is very well, provided we know what we are about;
provided we understand, in our abstracting, how to get the essential
idea distinctly out before ourselves, without entangling ourselves in
the accidents. Human excellence, after all the teaching of the last
eighteen hundred years, ought to be something palpable by this time. It
is the one thing which we are all taught to seek and to aim at forming
in ourselves; and if representative men are good for anything at all, it
can only be, not as they represent merely curious combinations of
phenomena, but as they illustrate us in a completely realised form, what
we are, every single one of us, equally interested in understanding. It
is not the 'great man' as 'man of the world' that we care for, but the
'man of the world' as a 'great man'--which is a very different thing.
Having to live in this world, how to live greatly here is the question
for us; not, how, being great, we can cast our greatness in a worldly
mould. There may be endless successful 'men of the world' who are mean
or little enough all the while; and the Emersonian attitude will confuse
success with greatness, or turn our ethics into a chaos of absurdity. So
it is with everything which man undertakes and works in. Life has grown
complicated; and for one employment in old times there are a hundred
now. But it is not _they_ which are anything, but _we_. We are the end,
they are but the means, the material--like the clay, or the marble, or
the bronze in which the sculptor carves his statue. The _form_ is
everything; and what is the form? From nursery to pulpit every teacher
rings on the one note--be good, be noble, be men. What is goodness then?
and what is nobleness? and where are the examples? We do not say that
there are none. God forbid! That is not what we are meaning at all. If
the earth had ceased to bear men pleasant in God's sight, it would have
passed away like the cities in the plain. But who are they? which are
they? how are we to know them? They are our leaders in this life
campaign of ours. If we could see them, we would follow them, and save
ourselves many and many a fall, and many an enemy whom we could have
avoided, if we had known of him. It cannot be that the thing is so
simple, when names of highest reputation are wrangled over, and such
poor counterfeits are mobbed with applauding followers. In art and
science we can detect the charlatan, but in life we do not recognise him
so readily--we do not recognise the charlatan, and we do not recognise
the true man. Rajah Brooke is alternately a hero or a pirate; and fifty
of the best men among us are likely to have fifty opinions on the merits
of Elizabeth or Cromwell.

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