The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper

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Now, this tale of the '_Prior of Marrick_' would, but for the present
premature abortion, have seen daylight in the form of an
auto-biography--the catastrophe, of course, being added by some
brother-monk, who winds up all with his moral: and to get at this
auto-biographical sketch--a thing of fragments and wild soliloquies,
incidentally laying bare the heart's disease, and the poisonous
breathings of idolatrous influence--I could easily, and after the true
novelist fashion, fabricate a scheme, somewhat as follows: Let me go
gayly to the Moors by rail, coach, or cart, say for a sportsman's
pastime, a truant vicar's week, or an audit-clerk's holiday: I drop upon
the ruined abbey, now indeed with scarcely a vestige of its former
beauty remaining, but still used as a burial-place; being a bit of an
antiquary, I rout up the sexton, (sexton, cobbler, and general
huckster,) resolved to lionize the old desecrated precinct: I find the
sexton a character, a humourist; he, cobbler-like, looks inquisitively
at my caoutchouc shooting-shoes, and hints that he too is an artist in
the water-proof line; then follows question as how, and rejoinder as
thus. Our sexton has got a name among his neighbours for his capital
double-leather brogues, warranted to carry you dry-shod through a river;
and, warmed by my brandy-flask and _bonhomie_, considering me moreover
little likely to set up a rival shop, cunningly communicates his secret:
he puts parchment between the leathers--Parchment, my good man? where
can you get your parchment hereabouts? I spoke innocently, for I thought
only of ticketing some grouse for my friends southward: but the question
staggered my sexton so sensibly, that I came to the uncharitable
conclusion--he had stolen it. And then follows confession: how, among
the rubbish in a vault, he had found a small oak chest--broke it
open--no coins, no trinkets, "no nothing,"--except parchment; a lot of
leaves tidily written, and--warranted to keep out the wet. A few
shillings and a tankard make the treasure mine, I promising as extra to
send a huge bundle of ancient indentures in place of the precious
manuscript. Thus, in the way of Mackenzie's '_Man of Feeling_,' we
become fragmentary where we fear to be tedious; and so, in a good
historic epoch, among the wars of the Roses, surrounded by friars and
nuns, outlaws and border-riders, chivalrous knights and sturdy bowyers,
consign I to the oblivescent firm of Capulet and Co. my happily
destroyed '_Prior of Marrick_.'

* * * * *

A crank boat needs ballast; and of happy fortune is it for a disposition
towards natural levity, when educational gravity has helped to steady
it. Upon the vivacious, let the reflective supervene: to the gay, suffer
in its season the addition of the serious. Amongst other wholesome
topics of meditation--for wholesome it is to the healthy spirit,
although of some little danger to the presumptuous and inflated--the
study of the sure word of Prophecy has more than once excited the
writing propensity of your author's mind. On most matters it has been my
fate, rather from habits of incurable revery than from any want of
opportunities, to think more than to read; and therefore it is, with
very due diffidence, that as far as others and their judgments are
concerned, I can ever hope to claim originality or novelty. To my own
conscience, however, these things are reversed; for contemplation has
produced that as new to my own mind, which may be old to others deeper
read, and has thought those ideas original, which are only so to its own
fancy. Very little, then, must such as I reasonably hope to add on
Prophetical Interpretation; the Universal Wisdom of two millenaries
cannot be expected to gain any thing from the passing thought of a
hodiernal unit: if any fancies in my brain are really new, and hitherto
unbroached upon the subject, it can scarcely be doubted but that they
are false; so very little reliance do principles of catholicity allow to
be placed upon "private interpretations."

With thus much of apology to those alike who will find, and those who
will not find, any thing of novelty in my notions, I still do not
withhold them. By here a little and there a little, is the general mind
instructed: it would be better for the world if every mighty tome really
contributed its grain.

The prophecies of Holy Writ appear to me to have one great peculiarity,
distinguishing them from all other prophecies, if any, real or
pretended; and that peculiarity I deferentially conceive to be this:
that, whereas all human prophecies profess to have but one fulfilment,
the divine have avowedly many true fulfilments. The former may indeed
light upon some one coincidence, and may exult in the accident as a
proof of truth; the latter bounds as it were (like George Herbert's
sabbaths) from one to another, and another, through some forty
centuries, equally fulfilled in each case, but still looking forward
with hope to some grander catastrophe: it is not that they are loosely
suited, like the Delphic oracles, to whatever may turn up, but that
they, by a felicitous adaptation, sit closely into each era which the
Architect of Ages has arranged. Pythonic divination may be likened to a
loose bag, which would hold and involve with equal ease almost any
circumstance; biblical prophecy to an exact mould, into which alone,
though not all similar in perfection, its own true casts will fit: or
again, in another view of the matter, accept this similitude: let the
All-seeing Eye be the centre of many concentric circles, beholding
equally in perspective the circumference of each, and for accordance
with human periods of time measuring off segments by converging radii:
separately marked on each segment of the wheel within wheel, in the way
of actual fulfilment, as well as type and antitype, will appear its
satisfied word of prophecy, shining onward yet as it becomes more and
more final, until time is melted in eternity. Thus, it is perhaps not
impossible that every interpretation of wise and pious men may alike be
right, and hold together; for different minds travel on the different
peripheries. So our Lord (to take a familiar instance) speaks of his
second advent in terms equally applicable to the destruction of one
city, of the accumulated hosts at Armageddon, and of this material
earth: Antiochus and Antichrist occur prospectively within the same pair
of radii at differing distances; and, in like manner and varying
degrees, may, for aught we can tell, such incarnations of the evil
principle as papal Rome, or revolutionary Europe, or infidel
Cosmopolitism; or, again, such heads of parties, such indexes of the
general mind, as a Caesar, an Attila, a Cromwell, a Napoleon, a--whoever
be the next. So also of hours, days, years, eras; all may and do coeexist
in harmonious and mutual relations. Good men, those who combine prayer
with study, need not fear necessary difference of result, from holding
different views; the grand error is too loosely generalizing; a little
circle suits our finite ken; we cannot, as yet, mentally span the
universe. These crude and cursory remarks may serve to introduce a
likely-looking idea to which my thoughts have given entertainment, and
which, with others of a similar sort, were once to have come forth in an
essay-form, headed

THE SEVEN CHURCHES;

moreover, for aught that has come across my reading, to be additionally
styled '_A New Interpretation, for these Latter Days_.' Without desiring
to do other than quite confirm the literal view, as having related
primarily to those local churches of old times, geographically in Asia
Minor; without attempting to dispute that they may have an individual
reference to varieties of personal character, and probably of different
Christian sects; I imagine that we may discover, in the Apocalyptic
prospect of these seven churches, an historical view of Christianity,
from the earliest ages to the last: beginning as it did, purely, warmly,
and laboriously, with the apostolic emblematic Ephesus, and to end with
the "shall He find faith on earth" of lukewarm Laodicea: thus Smyrna
would symbolize the state of the church under Diocletian, the
"tribulation ten days:" Pergamus, perhaps the Byzantine age, "where
Satan's seat is" the Balaam and Balak of empire and priesthood;
Thyatira, the avowed commencement of the Papacy, "Jezebel," &c.; Sardis,
the dreary void of the dark ages, the "ready to die;" Philadelphia, the
rise of Protestantism, "an open door, a little strength;" and Laodicea,
(the riches of civilization choking the plant of Christianity,) its
decline, and, but for the Founder's second coming, its fall; if, indeed,
this were possible.

The elucidation of these several hints might show some striking
confirmations of the notion; which, as every thing else in this book,
would humbly claim your indulgence, reader, for my sketches must be
rapid, and their descriptions brief. Concurrently, however, with this,
(which I know not whether any prophetic scholiasts have mentioned or
not,) there may be deduced a still further interpretation, equally, as
far as I am concerned, underived from the lucubrations of others. This
other interpretation involves a typical view of the general
characteristics of Christendom's seven true churches, as they are to be
found standing at the coming of their Lord; the Asiatic seven may be
assimilated, in their religious peculiarities, with the national
Protestant churches of modern Europe: what order should be preserved in
this assimilation, unless indeed it be that of eldership, it might be
difficult to decide; but, excluding those communities which idol-worship
has unchurched, and leaving out of view such anomalies as America
presents, having no national religion, we shall find seven true churches
now existing, between which and the Asiatics many curious parallels
might be run: the seven are, those of England, Scotland, Holland,
Prussia, perhaps Switzerland, Sweden, and Germany. Without professing to
be quite confident as to the list, the idea remains the same: it is but
a light hint on a weighty subject, demanding more investigation than my
slender powers can at present compass. It is merely thrown out as
undigested matter; a crude notion let it rest: if ever I aspire to the
dignity and dogmatism of a theological teacher, it must be after more
and deeper inquiry of the Newtons, Faber, Frere, Croly, Keith, and other
learned interpreters, than it is possible or proper to make in a hurry:
volumes have been, and volumes might be again, written for and against
any prophecy unfulfilled; it is dangerous to teach speculations; for, if
found false, they tend to bring holy truths into disrepute. Let me then
put upon the shelf, as a humble layman should, my hitherto
unaccomplished prophetical treatise; and receive its mention for little
more than my true revelation of another phase of authorship.

* * * * *

And many like attempts have been hazarded by me in the mode theological;
though, from some cause or other, they have mostly fallen abortive. Were
mention here made of the more completed efforts of your author's mind,
in this walk of literature, or of others, it might too evidently lay
bare the mystery of my mask; a piece of secret information intended not
as yet to be bestowed. But this book--purporting to be the medley of my
mind, the _bona fide_ emptying of its multifarious fancies--must of
necessity, if honest, pourtray all the wanings and waxings of an
ever-changing lunar disposition: so, haply you shall turn from a play to
a sermon, from a novel to a moral treatise, from a satire or an epigram
to a religious essay. Such and so inconsistent is authorial man. Here
then, in somewhat of order, should have followed lengthily various other
writings of serious import, half-fashioned, and from conflicting reasons
left--perhaps for ever--half-finished. But considering the crude and
apparently careless nature of this present book, and taking into account
the solemn and responsible manner in which such high topics ought
invariably to be treated, I have struck out, without remorse or mercy,
all except a mere mention of the subjects alluded to. The contiguity of
lighter matter demands this sacrifice; not that I am one of those who
deem a cheerful face and a prayerful heart incongruous: there is danger
in a man, however religious, when his brow lowers, and his cheek is
stern; so did Cromwell murder Charles; so did Mary (though bigoted,
sincere,) consign Cranmer to the flames and Jane to the scaffold:
innocence and mirth are near of kin, and the tear of penitence is no
stranger to the laughter-loving eye. But I ramble as usual. Let it
suffice to say, that in accordance with common prejudices, I suffer my
mind to be shorn of its consecrated rays; for albeit my moral censor has
spared the prophetical ideas, and one or two other serious sobrieties,
on the ground that, although they are mere hints, they are at all events
hints of good, still more experimental and more hazardous pieces of
biblical criticism have been not unwisely immolated. The full cause of
this will appear in the mere title of the first of these half-attempted
essays, viz:

THE WISDOM OF REVISION;

whereof my predication shall be simply and strictly _nil_.

The next piece of serious study, as yet little more than a root in my
mind, was to have fructified in the form of

HOMELY EXPOSITIONS,

or domestic readings in Scripture for daily use in family worship, with
an easy, sensible, useful sort of commentary; a book calculated
expressly for the understandings, wants, vices, temptations, and
peculiarities of household servants, and quite opposed to the usual
plans of injuriously raising doubts to lay them, of insisting upon
obsolete Judaisms, of strict theological controversy, of enlarging to
satiety on the meaning of passages too obvious to require explanation,
and ingeniously slurring over those which really need it; indeed, of
pursuing the courses generally adopted by the mass of commentators.

A further notion extended to

LAY SERMONS,

whereof are many written: their principal peculiarities consist in being
each of a quarter-hour length, as little as possible regarding Jews and
their didactic histories, and, as much as might be, crowding ideas, and
images, and out-of-the-way knowledge of all sorts, into the good service
of illustrating Gospel truths.

Another religious essay has been relinquished, although to a great
degree effected, from the apprehension that it may suggest matter
fanciful or false: also, in part, from the material being perhaps of too
slender a character to insist upon. Its name stood thus,

SCRIPTURAL PHYSICS;

being an attempt to vindicate the wisdom of Holy Writ in matters of
natural science; for example, cosmogony, geology, the probable centre of
the earth, the vitality and circulation of the blood, hints of magnetism
and electricity, a solar system, a plurality of worlds, the earth's
shape, inclined axis, situation in space, and connection with other
spheres, the separate existence of disembodied life, the laws of optics,
much of recondite natural history:--all these can be easily proved to be
alluded to in detached, or ingeniously compared, passages of the Hebrew
Scriptures. It is very likely, however, that Huntington has anticipated
some of this, although I have never met with his writings; and a great
deal more of it is mentioned in notes and sermons which many have read
or heard. Until, therefore, I become surer of neither invading the
provinces of others, nor of detracting from their wisdom, let those
ill-written fancies still lie dormant in my desk.

A fifth tractate on things theological, still in the egg state, was to
have been indued with the rather startling appellation of

AN APOLOGY FOR HEATHENISM;

especially as contrasted with practical atheism, which, truth to tell,
is the contradictory sort of religion most universally professed among
the moderns: working out the idea, that any-how it is better to have
many objects of veneration than none, and that, although idol-worship is
a dreadful sin, still it is not so utterly hopeless as actual
ungodliness. That, among the heathens, temporal judgment ever vindicated
the true Divinity; whereas the consummation of the more modern
unworshiping world will be an eternal one: so, by the difference in
punishments comparing that of their criminalities. Showing also that,
however corrupted afterwards by impure rites and fatuous iniquities,
heathenism was, in its most ancient form, little more than the
hieroglyphic dress of truth: this exemplified by Moses and the brazen
serpent, by interpretations of Grecian mythology, shown, after the
manner of perhaps too ingenious Lord Bacon, to be consistent with
philosophy and religion; by the way, in which Egyptian priests satisfied
so good and shrewd, though credulous, a mind as that of Herodotus; by
Hesiod's '_Theogony_;' by the practical testimony of the whole educated
world in earliest times to the deep meaning involved in idolatrous
rites; by the mysteries of Eleusis in particular; by the characters of
all most enlightened heathens--as Cicero, Socrates, and
Plato--(half-convinced of the Godhead's unity, and still afraid to
disavow His plurality,) contrasted with those of the school of Pyrrho,
and Lucretius, and the later Epicureans. The possibility of early
allusions to the Trinity, as "Let us make man," _etc._, having led to
the idea of more than one God; and if so, in some sort, its veniality.

All the above might be applied with some force, and, if so, with no
little value, to modern false semblances of religion, and non-religion;
to Roman Catholicism, with its images, its services in an unknown
tongue, its symbols, its adoption of heathen festivals, its actual
placing of many Gods in the throne of One; to Mammonism, as practically
a religion as if the golden calf of Babylon were standard at Cornhill;
to Voluptatism--if I may fabricate a name for pleasure-hunters,
following still, with Corybantic fury, the orgic revels of Osiris or
Astarte: in brief, to all the shades of human heresy, on this side or on
that of the golden mean, the worship of one true God, as revealed to us
in His three mysterious characters.

But, query? Has not all this, and the very title, for any thing I know,
been done already by another, by a wiser? and, if so, by whom?--Speak,
some friend: it is the misfortune of mere thinkers (and this present
amygdaloid mass, this breccia book, exemplifies it well) to stumble
frequently upon fancies too good not to have been long ago appropriated
by others like-minded. A read, or heard, hint may be the unerring clue,
and we vainly imagine some old labyrinth to be our new discovery:
education renders up the master-key, and we come to regard ancient
treasuries as wealth of our own amassing, from which we deem it our
right to filch as recklessly as he from the mint of Croesus, who so
filled his pockets--ay, his mouth--that we read he [Greek: hebebusto].
Who, in this age of literature, can be fully condemned, or heartily
acquitted of plagiarism? An age--and none so little in advance or in
arrear of it as I--of easy writing and discursive reading, of ideas
unpatented, and books that have outlived copy-right. But this has
detained us long enough: for the present, my brain is quit of its
heathenish exculpations: let us pass on; many regiments are yet to be
reviewed; their uniforms [_Hibernice_] are various, but their flag is
one.

A last serious subject--(they grow tedious)--is a fair field for
ingenious explanation and Oriental poetry,

THE SIMILES OF SCRIPTURE:

(of course "similes" is an English word: the author of a recent '_Essay
on Magna Charta_' has been _learned_ enough to write it "similae," for
which original piece of Latinity let him be congratulated; I safely
follow Johnson, who would have roared like a lion at "similia;" and,
though Shakspeare does write it "similies," it may stoutly be contended
that this is of mixed metal, and that Matthew Prior's "similes" is the
purer sample: all the above being a praiseworthy parenthesis.)

The similes of Scripture, then, were to have been demonstrated apt and
happy: for there is indeed both majesty, and loveliness, and propriety,
and strict resemblance in them. "As a rolling thing before the
whirlwind,"--"as when a standard-bearer fainteth"--"as the rushing of
mighty waters,"--"as gleaning grapes when the vintage is done,"--"as a
dream,"--"as the morning dew,"--"as"--but the whole book is a garden of
similitudes; they are "like the sand upon the sea-shore for multitude."
It is, however, too true, that often-times the baldness of translation
deprives poetry, Eastern especially, of its fervour, its glow, its gush,
and blush of beauty: to quote Aristotle's example, it too frequently
converts the rosy-fingered Morn into the red-fisted; and so the poetry
of dawning-day, with its dew-dropped flowers, its healthy refreshment,
its "rosy-fingers" drawing aside the star-spangled curtain of night,
falls at once into the low notion of a foggy morning, and is suggestive
only of red-fisted Abigails struggling continuously with the deposits of
a London atmosphere. In like manner, (for all this has not been an
episode beside the purpose,) many a roughly rendered similitude of
Scripture might be advantageously vindicated; local diversities and
Orientalisms might be explained in such a treatise: for example, in the
'_Canticles_,' the "beloved among the sons," is compared with an
apple-tree among the trees of the wood: now, amongst us, an apple-tree
is stunted and unsightly, and always degenerates in a wood; whereas the
Eastern apple-tree, probably one of the citron class, (to be more
correct,) may be a magnificent monarch of the forest. "Camphire," to a
Western mind, is not suggestive of the sweetest perfume, and perhaps
the word may be amended into the marginal "cypress," or cedar, or some
other: as "a bottle in the smoke," loses its propriety for an image,
until shown to be a wine-skin. "Who is this that cometh out of the
wilderness, like pillars of smoke?"--probably intending the
swiftly-rushing columns of _sand_ flying on the wings of the whirlwind.
"Thine eyes are like the fish-pools in Heshbon," might well be softened
into fountains--tearful, calm, resplendent, and rejoicing; and in
showing the poetic fitness of comparing the bride to a landscape, it
might clearly be set out how emblematic of Jewish millennial prosperity
and of Christian universality, that bride was; while comparisons of a
like un-European imagery might be taken from other Eastern poets, who
will not scruple to compare that rare beauty, a straight Grecian nose,
with a tower, and admire above all things the Cleopatra-coloured hair
which they call purple, and we auburn. Very much might be done in this
vein of literature, but it must be by a man at once an Oriental scholar
and a natural poet: the idioms of ancient and modern times should be
more considered, and something of apologetic explanation offered to an
English ear for phrases such as "the mountains skipping like rams," "the
horse swallowing the ground with fierceness," and represented as being
afraid as a grasshopper. A thousand like instances could be displayed
with little searching; let the above be taken as they are meant, for
good, and as of zeal for showing the best of books to the best
advantage: but it will appear that this essay trenches on the former one
so slenderly hinted at, as '_The Wisdom of Revision_,' therefore has
been stated too much at length already. Let it then rest on the shelf
till a better season. For this time, good reader, I, following up the
object of self-relieving, thank you for your patience, and will turn to
other themes of a more sublunary aspect.

* * * * *

One of the most natural and indigenous productions of a true author's
mind, is, by common consent, an epic poem: verily, a wearisome,
unnecessary, unfashionable bit of writing. Nevertheless, let my candour
humbly acknowledge that, for the larger canticle of two mortal days, I
was brooding over, and diligently brewing up, a right happy, capital,
and noble-minded thesis, no other than

HOME.

Alas, for the epidemy to which, few can doubt, ideas are subject! Alas,
for the conflict of prolific geniuses, wherewith the world's quiet is
disturbed! not impossibly, this very book now in progress of inditing
will come to be classed as a "Patch-work," an "Olla Podrida," a "Book
without a name," or some other such like _rechauffee_ publication;
whereas I protest its idea to be exclusively mine own, and conceived
long before its seeming congeners saw the light in definite
advertisements--at least to my beholding. And similarly went it with my
poor epic: scarcely had a general plan suggested itself to my musings,
and divers particular morsels thereof assumed "their unpremeditative
lay;" scarcely had I jotted down a staid synopsis, and a goodly array of
metrical specimens; when some intrusive newspaper displayed to me in
black and white a good-natured notice of somebody else's '_Home, an
Epic_.' So, as in the case of '_Nero_,' and haply of other subjects, had
it come to pass, that my high-mettled racer had made another false
start; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have been
self-appropriated, was found to have, sticking on one corner of it, the
flag of another king; that the havoc of my brain, subsiding calmly into
the pendulum regularities of metre, was much ado about nothing; and all
those pretty fancies were the catalogued property of another. Such a
subject, too! intrinsically worthy of a niche in the temple of Fame,
besides Hope, Memory, and Imagination, _if_ only one could manage it
well enough to be named in the same breath with Campbell, Rogers, and
Akenside. Well, it was a mental mortification; for I am full of moral
land-marks, and would not (poetically speaking) for the world move
rooted termini into other people's grounds. Whether the field has been
well or ill preoccupied I wot not, having neither seen the poem nor
heard its maker's name: therefore shall my charity hope well of it, and
mourn over the unmerited oblivion which generally greets modern
poetry--yea, upon its very natal-day. Nevertheless, as an upright man
will never wish barefacedly to steal from others, so does he determine
at all times to claim independently his own: to be robbed, and not
resent it (I speak foolishly), is the next mean thing after pilfering
itself; and rash will be thy daring, O literary larcener! (can such
things be?) if thou art found unpermissively appropriating even such
sorry spoil as these poor seedlings of still possible volumes.