Short Studies on Great Subjects

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And let no one fear that, if such happy time were come, it would result
in a tame and weary sameness; that the beautiful variety of individual
form would be lost, drilled away in regimental uniformity. Even if it
were so, it need not be any the worse for us; we are not told to
develope our individualities, we are told to bear fruit. The poor
vagabond, with all his individualities about him, if by luck he falls
into the hands of the recruiting sergeant, finds himself, a year later,
with his red coat and his twelve months' training, not a little the
better for the loss of them. But such schooling as we have been speaking
of will drill out only such individualities as are of the unworthy kind,
and will throw the strength of the nature into the development of the
healthiest features in it. Far more, as things now are, we see men
sinking into sameness--an inorganic, unwholesome sameness, in which the
higher nature is subdued, and the _man_ is sacrificed to the profession.
The circumstances of his life are his world; and he sinks under them, he
does not conquer them. If he has to choose between the two, God's
uniform is better than the world's. The first gives him freedom; the
second takes it from him. Only here, as in everything, we must
understand the nature of the element in which we work; understand it;
understand the laws of it. Throw off the lower laws; the selfish,
debasing influences of the profession; obey the higher; follow love,
truthfulness, manliness; follow these first, and make the profession
serve them; and that is freedom; there is none else possible for man.

Das Gesetz soll nur uns Freiheit geben;

and whatever individuality is lost in the process, we may feel assured
that the devil has too much to do with, to make us care to be rid of it.

But how to arrive at this? so easy as it is to suggest on paper, so easy
to foretell in words. Raise the level of public opinion, we might say;
insist on a higher standard; in the economist's language, increase the
demand for goodness, and the supply will follow; or, at any rate, men
will do their best. Until we require more of one another, more will not
be provided. But this is but to restate the problem in other words. How
are we to touch the heart; how to awaken the desire? We believe that the
good man, the great man, whatever he be, prince or peasant, is really
lovely; that really and truly, if we can only see him, he more than
anything will move us; and at least, we have a right to demand that the
artificial hindrances which prevent our lifting him above the crowd,
shall be swept away. He in his beautiful life is a thousand times more
God's witness than any preacher in a pulpit, and his light must not be
concealed any more. As we said, what lies in the way of our sacred
recognition of great men is more than anything else the Protestant
doctrine of good works. We do not forget what it meant when the world
first heard of it. It was a cry from the very sanctuary of the soul,
flinging off and execrating the accursed theory of merits, the sickening
parade of redundant saintly virtues, which the Roman Church had
converted into stock, and dispensed for the benefit of the believers.
This is not the place to pour out our nausea on so poor, yet so
detestable a farce. But it seems with all human matters, that as soon as
spiritual truths are petrified into doctrines, it is another name for
their death. They die, corrupt, and breed a pestilence. The doctrine of
good works was hurled away by an instinct of generous feeling, and this
feeling itself has again become dead, and a fresh disease has followed
upon it. Nobody (or, at least, nobody good for anything) will lay a
claim to merit for this or that good action which he may have done.
Exactly in proportion as a man is really good, will be the eagerness
with which he will refuse all credit for it; he will cry out, with all
his soul, 'Not unto us--not unto us.'

And yet, practically, we all know and feel that between man and man
there is an infinite moral difference; one is good, one is bad, another
hovers between the two; the whole of our conduct to each other is
necessarily governed by a recognition of this fact, just as it is in the
analogous question of the will. Ultimately, we are nothing of ourselves;
we know that we are but what God has given us grace to be--we did not
make ourselves--we do not keep ourselves here--we are but what in the
eternal order of Providence we were designed to be--exactly that and
nothing else; and yet we treat each other as responsible; we cannot
help it. The most rigid Calvinist cannot eliminate his instincts; his
loves and hatreds seem rather to deepen in intensity of colouring as,
logically, his creed should lead him to conquer them as foolish. It is
useless, it is impossible, to bring down these celestial mysteries upon
our earth, to try to see our way by them, or determine our feelings by
them; men are good, men are bad, relatively to us and to our
understandings if you will, but still really, and so they must be
treated.

There is no more mischievous falsehood than to persist in railing at
man's nature, as if it were all vile together, as if the best and the
worst which comes of it were in God's sight equally without worth. These
denunciations tend too fatally to realise themselves. Tell a man that no
good which he can do is of any value, and depend upon it he will take
you at your word--most especially will the wealthy, comfortable,
luxurious man, just the man who has most means to do good, and whom of
all things it is most necessary to stimulate to it. Surely we should not
be afraid. The instincts which God has placed in our hearts are too
mighty for us to be able to extinguish them with doctrinal sophistry. We
love the good man, we praise him, we admire him--we cannot help it; and
surely it is mere cowardice to shrink from recognising it
openly--thankfully, divinely recognising it. If true at all, there is no
truth in heaven or earth of deeper practical importance to us; and
Protestantism must have lapsed from its once generous spirit, if it
persists in imposing a dogma of its own upon our hearts, the touch of
which is fatal as the touch of a torpedo to any high or noble endeavours
after excellence.

'Drive out nature with a fork, she ever comes running back;' and while
we leave out of consideration the reality, we are filling the chasm with
inventions of our own. The only novels which are popular among us are
those which picture the successful battles of modern men and women with
modern life, which are imperfect shadows of those real battles which
every reader has seen in some form or other, or has longed to see in his
own small sphere. It shows where the craving lies if we had but the
courage to meet it; why need we fall back on imagination to create what
God has created ready for us? In every department of human life, in the
more and the less, there is always one man who is the best, and one
type of man which is the best, living and working his silent way to
heaven in the very middle of us. Let us find this type then--let us see
what it is which makes such men the best, and raise up their
excellencies into an acknowledged and open standard, of which they
themselves shall be the living witnesses. Is there a landlord who is
spending his money, not on pineries and hothouses, but on schools, and
washhouses, and drains, who is less intent on the magnificence of his
own grand house, than in providing cottages for his people where decency
is possible; then let us not pass him by with a torpid wonder or a
vanishing emotion of pleasure--rather let us seize him and raise him up
upon a pinnacle, that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps,
their hearts may prick them; and the world shall learn from what one man
has done what they have a right to require that others shall do.

So it might be through the thousand channels of life. It should not be
so difficult; the machinery is ready, both to find your men and to use
them. In theory, at least, every parish has its pastor, and the state of
every soul is or ought to be known. We know not what turn things may
take, or what silent changes are rushing on below us. Even while the
present organisation remains--but, alas! no--it is no use to urge a
Church bound hand and foot in State shackles to stretch its limbs in any
wholesome activity. If the teachers of the people really were the wisest
and best and noblest men among us, this and a thousand other blessed
things would follow from it; till then let us be content to work and
pray, and lay our hand to the wheel wherever we can find a spoke to
grasp. _Corruptio optimi est pessima_; the national Church as it ought
to be is the soul and conscience of the body politic, but a man whose
body has the direction of his conscience we do not commonly consider in
the most hopeful moral condition.

FOOTNOTES:

[AA] Written 1850.

REYNARD THE FOX.[AB]

Lord Macaulay, in his Essay on Machiavelli, propounds a singular theory.
Declining the various solutions which have been offered to explain how a
man supposed to be so great could have lent his genius to the doctrine
of 'the Prince,' he has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or
may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's character, but
which, as an exposition of a universal ethical theory, is as
questionable as what it is brought forward to explain. We will not show
Lord Macaulay the disrespect of supposing that he has attempted an
elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that he may have been
exercising his genius with a paradox, but the subject is not of the sort
in which we can patiently permit such exercises. It is hard work with
all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see the road with all
plainness as it lies out before us; and clever men must be good enough
to find something else to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our
eyes with sophistry.

According to this conception of human nature, the basenesses and the
excellencies of mankind are no more than accidents of circumstance, the
results of national feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and
treachery, and lying, and such other 'natural defences of the weak
against the strong,' are in themselves neither good nor bad, except as
thinking makes them so. They are the virtues of a weak people, and they
will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable; they are to the
full as compatible with the highest graces and most lofty features of
the heart and intellect as any of those opposite so called heroisms
which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolise the name.
Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for
victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open
bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's
meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding,
he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the
characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, the free and
noble nature of the Moor is wrecked through a single infirmity, by a
fiend in the human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago's
keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable as Othello's
daring appears to us, and Othello himself little better than a fool and
a savage. It is but a change of scene, of climate, of the animal
qualities of the frame, and evil has become good, and good has become
evil. Now, our displeasure with Lord Macaulay is, not that he has
advanced a novel and mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in
the finely tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric at Athens; and
so long as such a phenomenon as a cultivated rogue remains possible
among mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any number of
philosophical disguises. Seldom or never, however, has it appeared with
so little attempt at disguise. It has been left for questionable poets
and novelists to idealise the rascal genus; philosophers have escaped
into the ambiguities of general propositions, and we do not remember
elsewhere to have met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying
two whole organic characters, with their vices and virtues in full life
and bloom, side by side, asking himself which is best, and answering
gravely that it is a matter of taste.

Lord Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors; he has shrunk from
no conclusion, and has looked directly into the very heart of the
matter; he has struck, as we believe, the very lowest stone of our
ethical convictions, and declared that the foundation quakes under it.

For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right, and wrong is wrong?
People in general accept it on authority; but authority itself must
repose on some ulterior basis; and what is that? Are we to say that in
morals there is a system of primary axioms, out of which we develope our
conclusions, and apply them, as they are needed, to life? It does not
appear so. The analogy of morals is rather with art than with geometry.
The grace of heaven gives us good men, and gives us beautiful creations;
and we, perceiving by the instincts within ourselves that celestial
presence in the objects on which we gaze, find out for ourselves the
laws which make them what they are, not by comparing them with any
antecedent theory, but by careful analysis of our own impressions, by
asking ourselves what it is which we admire in them, and by calling that
good, and calling that beautiful.

So, then, if admiration be the first fact--if the sense of it be the
ultimate ground on which the after temple of morality, as a system,
upraises itself--if we can be challenged here on our own ground, and
fail to make it good, what we call the life of the soul becomes a dream
of a feeble enthusiast, and we moralists a mark for the sceptic's finger
to point at with scorn.

Bold and ably-urged arguments against our own convictions, if they do
not confuse us, will usually send us back over our ground to re-examine
the strength of our positions: and if we are honest with ourselves, we
shall very often find points of some uncertainty left unguarded, of
which the show of the strength of our enemy will oblige us to see better
to the defence. It was not without some shame, and much uneasiness,
that, while we were ourselves engaged in this process, full of
indignation with Lord Macaulay, we heard a clear voice ringing in our
ear, 'Who art thou that judgest another?' and warning us of the presence
in our own heart of a sympathy, which we could not 'deny,' with the
sadly questionable hero of the German epic, 'Reynard the Fox.' With our
vulpine friend, we were on the edge of the very same abyss, if, indeed,
we were not rolling in the depth of it. By what sophistry could we
justify ourselves, if not by the very same which we had just been so
eagerly condemning? And our conscience whispered to us that we had been
swift to detect a fault in another, because it was the very fault to
which, in our own heart of hearts, we had a latent leaning.

Was it so indeed, then? Was Reineke no better than Iago? Was the sole
difference between them, that the _vates sacer_ who had sung the
exploits of Reineke loved the wicked rascal, and entangled us in loving
him? It was a question to be asked. And yet we had faith enough in the
straight-forwardness of our own sympathies to feel sure that it must
admit of some sort of answer. And, indeed, we rapidly found an answer
satisfactory enough to give us time to breathe, in remembering that
Reineke, with all his roguery, has no malice in him. It is not in his
nature to hate; he could not do it if he tried. The characteristic of
Iago is that deep motiveless malignity which rejoices in evil as its
proper element--which loves evil as good men love virtue. In
calculations on the character of the Moor, Iago despises Othello's
unsuspicious trustingness as imbecility, while he hates him as a man
because his nature is the perpetual opposite and perpetual reproach of
his own. Now, Reineke would not have hurt a creature, not even
Scharfenebbe, the crow's wife, when she came to peck his eyes out, if he
had not been hungry; and that [Greek: gastros ananke], that craving of
the stomach, makes a difference quite infinite. It is true that, like
Iago, Reineke rejoices in the exercise of his intellect: the sense of
his power and the scientific employment of his time are a real delight
to him; but then, as we said, he does not love evil for its own sake; he
is only somewhat indifferent to it. If the other animals venture to take
liberties with him, he will repay them in their own coin, and get his
quiet laugh at them at the same time; but the object generally for which
he lives is the natural one of getting his bread for himself and his
family; and, as the great moralist says, 'It is better to be bad for
something than for nothing.' Badness generally is undesirable; but
badness in its essence, which may be called heroic badness, is
gratuitous.

But this first thought served merely to give us a momentary relief from
our alarm, and we determined we would sift the matter to the bottom, and
no more expose ourselves to be taken at such disadvantage. We went again
to the poem, with our eyes open, and our moral sense as keenly awake as
a genuine wish to understand our feelings could make it. We determined
that we would really know what we did feel and what we did not. We would
not be lightly scared away from our friend, but neither would we any
more allow our judgment to be talked down by that fluent tongue of his;
he should have justice from us, he and his biographer, as far as it lay
with us to discern justice and to render it.

And really on this deliberate perusal it did seem little less than
impossible that we could find any conceivable attribute illustrated in
Reineke's proceedings which we could dare to enter in our catalogue of
virtues, and not blush to read it there. What sin is there in the
Decalogue in which he has not steeped himself to the lips? To the lips,
shall we say? nay, over head and ears--rolling and rollicking in sin.
Murder, and theft, and adultery; sacrilege, perjury, lying--his very
life is made of them. On he goes to the end, heaping crime on crime, and
lie on lie, and at last, when it seems that justice, which has been so
long vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron grasp, there
is a solemn appeal to heaven, a challenge, a battle ordeal, in which, by
means we may not venture even to whisper, the villain prospers, and
comes out glorious, victorious, amidst the applause of a gazing world.
To crown it all, the poet tells us that under the disguise of the animal
name and form the world of man is represented, and the true course of
it; and the idea of the book is, that we who read it may learn therein
to discern between good and evil, and choose the first and avoid the
last. It seemed beyond the power of sophistry to whitewash Reineke, and
the interest which still continued to cling to him seemed too nearly to
resemble the unwisdom of the multitude, with whom success is the one
virtue, and failure the only crime.

It appeared, too, that although the animal disguises were too
transparent to endure a moment's reflection, yet that they were so
gracefully worn that such moment's reflection was not to be come at
without an effort. Our imagination following the costume, did
imperceptibly betray our judgment; we admired the human intellect, the
ever ready prompt sagacity and presence of mind. We delighted in the
satire on the foolishnesses and greedinesses of our own
fellow-creatures; but in our regard for the hero we forgot his humanity
wherever it was his interest that we should forget it, and while we
admired him as a man we judged him only as a fox. We doubt whether it
would have been possible, if he had been described as an open
acknowledged biped in coat and trousers, to have retained our regard for
him. Something or other in us, either real rightmindedness, or humbug,
or hypocrisy, would have obliged us to mix more censure with our liking
than most of us do in the case as it stands. It may be that the dress of
the fox throws us off our guard, and lets out a secret or two which we
commonly conceal even from ourselves. When we have to pass an opinion
upon bad people, who at the same time are clever and attractive, we say
rather what we think that we ought to feel than what we feel in reality;
while with Reineke, being but an animal, we forget to make ourselves up,
and for once our genuine tastes show themselves freely. Some degree of
truth there undoubtedly is in this. But making all allowance for
it--making all and over allowance for the trick which is passed upon our
senses, there still remained a feeling unresolved. The poem was not
solely the apotheosis of a rascal in whom we were betrayed into taking
an interest; and it was not a satire merely on the world, and on the men
whom the world delight to honour. There was still something which really
deserved to be liked in Reineke, and what it was we had as yet failed to
discover.

'Two are better than one,' and we resolved in our difficulty to try what
our friends might have to say about it. The appearance of the Wurtemburg
animals at the Exhibition came fortunately _apropos_ to our assistance:
a few years ago it was rare to find a person who had read the Fox Epic;
and still more, of course, to find one whose judgment would be worth
taking about it. But now the charming figures of Reineke himself, and
the Lion King, and Isegrim, and Bruin, and Bellyn, and Hintze, and
Grimbart, had set all the world asking who and what they were, and the
story began to get itself known. The old editions, which had long slept
unbound in reams upon the shelves, began to descend and clothe
themselves in green and crimson. Mr. Dickens sent a summary of it round
the households of England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and now,
at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see whether we are alone in
our liking--whether others share in this strange sympathy, or whether it
be some unique and monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves.

We set to work, therefore, with all earnestness, feeling our way first
with fear and delicacy, as conscious of our own delinquency, to gather
judgments which should be wiser than our own, and correct ourselves, if
it proved that we required correction, with whatever severity might be
necessary. The result of this labour of ours was not a little
surprising. We found that women invariably, with that clear moral
instinct of theirs, at once utterly reprobated and detested our poor
Reynard; detested the hero and detested the bard who sang of him with so
much sympathy; while men we found almost invariably feeling just as we
felt ourselves, only with this difference, that we saw no trace of
uneasiness in them about the matter. It was no little comfort to us,
moreover, to find that the exceptions were rather among the half-men,
the would-be extremely good, but whose goodness was of that dead and
passive kind which spoke to but a small elevation of thought or
activity; while just in proportion as a man was strong, and real, and
energetic, was his ability to see good in Reineke. It was really most
strange: one near friend of ours--a man who, as far as we knew (and we
knew him well), had never done a wrong thing--when we ventured to hint
something about roguery, replied, 'You see, he was such a clever rogue,
that he had a right.' Another, whom we pressed more closely with that
treacherous cannibal feast at Malepartus, on the body of poor Lampe,
said off-hand and with much impatience of such questioning, 'Such
fellows were made to be eaten.' What could we do? It had come to
this;--as in the exuberance of our pleasure with some dear child, no
ordinary epithet will sometimes reach to express the vehemence of our
affection, and borrowing language out of the opposites, we call him
little rogue or little villain, so here, reversing the terms of the
analogy, we bestow the fulness of our regard on Reineke because of that
transcendently successful roguery.

When we asked our friends how they came to feel as they did, they had
little to say. They were not persons who could be suspected of any
latent disposition towards evil-doing; and yet though it appeared as if
they were falling under the description of those unhappy ones who, if
they did not such things themselves, yet 'had pleasure in those who did
them,' they did not care to justify themselves. The fact was so: [Greek:
arche to hoti]: it was a fact--what could we want more? Some few
attempted feebly to maintain that the book was a satire. But this only
moved the difficulty a single step; for the fact of the sympathy
remained unimpaired, and if it was a satire we were ourselves the
objects of it. Others urged what we said above, that the story was only
of poor animals that, according to Descartes, not only had no souls, but
scarcely had even life in any original and sufficient sense, and
therefore we need not trouble ourselves. But one of two alternatives it
seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was fatal to the
proposed escape. Either there was a man hiding under the fox's skin; or
else, if real foxes have such brains as Reineke was furnished withal, no
honest doubt could be entertained that some sort of conscience was not
forgotten in the compounding of him, and he must be held answerable
according to his knowledge.

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