The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper

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* * * * *

It is scandalously reported of some folks that they are not musical, a
calumny that has been whispered of myself: and, though against my own
convictions, (who will confess he "has not music in his soul?") I partly
acquiesce; that is to say--for, of such a charge, self-defence claims to
explain a little--although I _am_ charmed with all manner of music,
still for choice I prefer a German chorus to an Italian solo, and an
English glee to a French jig. Accordingly the operatic world have every
reason to despise my taste: especially if I add that Welsh songs, and
Scotch and Irish national melodies--[where are our English
gone?]--rejoice my heart beyond Mozart and Rossini. And now this next
little notion is scarcely of substance sufficient to assume the garb of
authorship: it is little more than a passing whim, but I choose for the
very notion's sake to make it better known. Except in a very few
instances--as Haydn's '_Seasons_,' e.g.--Oratorios, from some
conventional idea of Lent, we may suppose, seem obligated to concern
matters sacred. Of course, every body is aware of the prayerful meaning
of the name; but we know also that a madrigal has long ago put off its
monkish robe of a hymn to the Virgin, and worn the more laic habit of a
love song. Now, it is a fact, that very many good men who delight in
Handel's melody, and of course cannot object to psalms and anthems,
entertain conscientious objections to hearing the Bible set to music in
a concert-room; and sure may we all be, that, unless the whole thing be
regarded as a religious service, (in a mixed gay company who think of
sound more than sense, not very easy,) the warbling of sacred phrases,
and variations on the summoning trumpet, and imitated angelic praise,
and the unfelt expressions of musical repentance, and unfearing
despondency of guilt in recitative, are any thing but congenial to a
mind properly attuned. I hope I am neither prudish, nor squeamish, nor
splenetic, but speak only what many feel, and few care to express. Now,
the cure in future for all this would be very simple: Why not have some
lay oratorios? Protestants have appropriated the madrigal, and listen,
delighted with its melody, without the needless offence of seeming to
countenance idolatry; why should they not have solemn music, new or
ancient as may be adapted, administering to their patriotism, or their
tragic interests, or historic recollections, without grating against
their feelings of religious veneration?--To be specific, let me suggest
a subject, and show, for the benefit of any Pindar of this day, its
musical capabilities: we are, or ought to be as Englishmen, all stirred
at the name of

ALFRED;

and he would minister as well to the harmonies of an oratorio as Abel,
or Jephtha, Moses, or St. Paul--nay, as the Messiah, or the last dread
Judgment. Remember, our Alfred was a proficient himself, and spied the
Danish forces in the character of a harper. What scope were here for
gentle airs, and stirring Saxon songs! He harangues his patriot band,
and a manly Phillips would personify with admirable taste the truly
royal bard: he leaves Athel-switha his wife, and a fair flock of
children in sanctuary, while he rushes to the battle-field: the
churchmen might receive their queenly charge with music: the Danes riot
in their unguarded camp with drinking-snatches, and old-country-staves:
a storm might occur, with elemental crash: the succeeding silence of
nature, and distant coming on of the patriot troops at midnight; their
war-songs and marches nearer and nearer; the invaders surprised in their
camp and in their cups; the hurlyburly of the fight--a hail-stone chorus
of arrows, a clash of thousand swords, trumpets, drums, and clattering
horse-hoofs; a silent interval, to introduce a single combat between
Alfred and Hubba the Dane, with Homeric challenges, tenor and bass; the
routed foe, in clamorous and discordant staccato; the conquerors
pressing on in steady overwhelming concord; how are the mighty
fallen--and praise to the God of battles!

Most briefly, then, thus: there is religion enough to keep it solemn,
without being so experimental as to intrude upon personal prejudice. The
notion is too slight, and too slenderly worked out, even for admission
here, if I were not still, my shrewd and mindful reader, sedulously
endeavouring to get rid of all my brain-oppressing fancies: and this,
happening to come uppermost as I write, finds itself caught, to my
comfort. It is commended, if worth any thing, to the musical proficient:
for I might as well think of adding a note to the gamut as of trying to
compose an oratorio.

* * * * *

The authorial mind is infinitely versatile: books and book-making are
indeed its special privilege, forte, and distinguishing peculiarity; but
still its thoughts and regards are ever cast towards originality of
idea, though unwritten and unprinted, in all the multitudinous
departments of science and of art. Thus, mechanical invention, chemical
discovery, music as above, painting as elsewhere, sculpture as below,
give it exercise continually. The authorial mind never is at rest, but
always to be seen mounted and careering on one hobby-horse or other out
of its untiring stud. If the coin of some rude Parthian, or the
fragments of some old Ephesian frieze, serve not as a scope for its
present ingenuities, it will break out in a new method of grafting
raspberries on a rosebush, in the comfortable cut of a pilot-coat, or
the safest machinery for a steamer. _Ne sutor ultra crepidam_ is a rule
of moderation it repudiates; incessant energy provokes unabated
meddling, and its intuitive qualities of penetration, adaptation, and
concentration, are only hindered by the accidents of life from carrying
any one thing out to the point at least of respectable attainment. Look
at Michael Angelo; poet, painter, sculptor, architect, and author: and
if indeed we are not told of Milton having modeled, or Horace having
built up other monuments than his own imperishable fame, still nothing
but manual habit and the world's encouragement were wanting to perfect,
in the concrete, the conceptions of those plastic minds. Who will deny
that Hogarth was a novelist and play-wright, if not indeed a
heart-rending tragedian? Who will refuse to those nameless monastic
architects who planned and fashioned the fretted towers of Gloucester,
the stern solidity of Durham, the fairy steeple of Strasburg, or the
delicate pinnacles of Milan, the praise due to them of being genuine
poets of the immortal Epic? Phidas and Praxiteles, Canova and
Thorswaldsen, are in this view real authors, as undoubtedly as Homer or
Dante, Sallust or Racine; and to rise highest in this argument, the
heavens and the earth are but mighty scrolls of an Omniscient Author,
fairly written in a universal tongue of grandeur and beauty, of skill,
poetry, philosophy, and love.

But let me not seem to prove too much, and so leap over my horse instead
of vaulting into the saddle: though authorship may claim thus
extensively every master-mind, from the Adorable Former of all things
down to the humblest potter at his wheel fashioning the difficult
ellipse; still, in human parlance, must we limit it to common
acceptations, and think of little more than scribe, in the name of
author. Nevertheless, let such seeds of thought as here are carelessly
flung out, nurtured in the good soil of charity, and not unkindly forced
into foolish accusations of my own conceit, whereas their meaning is
general, (as if forsooth selfishly dibbled in with vain particularity,
and not liberally broadcast that he may run that reads,)--let such crude
considerations excuse my own weak and uninjurious invasion of the
provinces of other men. The wisdom for social purposes of infinitesimal
division of labour, may be proved good by working well; but its lowering
influences on the individual mind cannot be doubted: that an intelligent
man should for a life-time be doomed to watch a valve, or twist
pin-heads, or wind cotton, or lacquer coffin-nails, cannot be improving;
and while I grant great evil in my desultory excesses, still I may make
some use of that argument in the converse, and plead that it is good to
exercise the mind on all things. Thus, in my assumed metier of
authorship, let notions be extenuated that popularly concern it little,
and yield admittance to any thought that may lead to that Athenian
desideratum, "some new thing."

While the echoes of the name of Alfred still linger on the mind, and our
patriotism looks back with gratitude on his thousand virtues unsullied
by a fault, (at least that History, seldom so indulgent, has
recorded,)--while we reflect that in him were combined the wise king,
the victorious general, the enlightened scholar, the humble Christian,
the learned author, the excellent father, the admirable MAN in
all public and private relations, in domestic alike with social duties,
I cannot help wishing that forgetful England had raised some
architectural trophy, as a worthy testimonial of Alfred the noble and
the good. Whether Oxford, his pet child--or Westminster Hall, as mindful
of the code he gave us--or Greenwich, as the evening resting-place of
those sons of thunder whom the genius of Alfred first raised up to man
our wooden walls--should be the site of some great national memorial,
might admit of question; but there can be none that something of the
kind has been owing now near upon a thousand years, and that it will
well become us to claim boastingly for England so true, so glorious a
hero. With a view to expedite this object, and strictly to bear upon the
topic in author-fashion, it has come into my thought how much we want a

LIFE OF ALFRED:

my little reading knows of none, beyond what dictionaries have gathered
from popular history and vague tradition, rather than manuscripts of old
time, and Asser, the original biographer. Of this last work, written
originally in Saxon, and since translated into Latin, I submit that a
popular English version is imperatively called for; a translation from a
translation being never advisable, (compare Smollett's Anglo-Gallified
dilution of '_Don Quixote_,') the primary source should be again
consulted; and seeing that profound ignorance of the ancient Saxon
coupled with, as now, total indifference about its acquisition, place me
in the list of incapables, I leave the good suggestion to be used by
pundits of the Camden or Roxburghe or other book-learned society. If it
may have been already done by some neglected scribe, bring it to the
light, and let us see the bright example set to all future ages by that
early Crichton; if never yet accomplished, my zeal is over-paid should
the hint be ever acted on; and if, which is still possible, an English
version of the life of Alfred should be positively rife and common among
the reading public, your humble ignoramus has nothing for it but to pray
pardon of its author for not having known him, and to walk softly with
the world for writing so much before he reads.

But this is an accessory--an episode; I plead for a statue to King
Alfred: and--(now for another episode; is there _no_ cure for these
desperate parentheses?)--_apropos_ of statues, let me, in the simple
untaught light of nature, suggest a word or two with regard to some
recent under-takings. Notwithstanding classical precedents, whereof more
presently, it does seem ridiculous to common sense, to set a man like a
scavenger-bird at Calcutta, or a stork at Athens, or a sonorous Muezzin,
or a sun-dried Simeon Stylites, on the top of a column a hundred feet
high: sculpture imitates life, and who would not shudder at such an
unguarded elevation? sculpture imitates life, and who can recognise a
countenance so much among the clouds? Again for the precedents: I
presume that Pompey's pillar, (which, indeed, perhaps never had any
thing on its summit except some Egyptian emblem, as the cap and throne
of higher and lower Egypt, or a key of the Nile as likely as any thing,)
is the most notable, if not the first, of solitary columns: now,
Pompey, or, as some prefer, Diocletian, and others Alexander Severus,
had that fine pillar ferried over from the quarries of Lycian Xanthus;
at least, this is a good idea, seeing that near that place still lie
three or four other columns of like gigantic dimensions, unfinished, and
believed to have been intended to support the triglyph of some new
temple. Pompey's idea was to fix the pillar up as a sea-mark, for either
entering the harbour of Alexandria, or to denote shallows, anchorage, or
the like; but apart from this actual utility, and apart also from its
acknowledged ornament as a sentinel on that flat strand, I take it to be
an architectural absurdity to erect a regular-made column with little or
nothing to support: an obelisk now, or a naval trophy, or a tower
decorated with shields, or a huge stele or cippus, or a globe, or a
pyramid, or a Waltham-cross sort of edifice, (of course all these
supporting nothing on their apices,) in fact, _any thing but_ a
Corinthian or Tuscan, or other regular pillar, seems to be permissable;
but for base, shaft, and capital to have nothing to do but lift a
telescopic man from earth's maternal surface, does look not a little
unreasonable; and therefore as much out of taste, as for the marble arch
at Buckingham Palace to spend its energies in supporting a flag-staff.

The magnificent column of Trajan is exempted from this hasty bit of
criticism, (as also of course is its modern counterpart, Napoleon's,)
because it is, both from decoration and proportions, out of the
recognised orders of architecture; it partakes rather of the character
of a triumphal tower, than of one among many pillars separated chiefly
from the rest; the man is a superlative accessory, a climax to his
positive exploits; he does not stand a-top, as if dropt from a balloon,
but like a gallant climber treading on his conquests: and, as to
Phocas's column at Rome, I shall only say, that it illustrates my
meaning, except in so far as an immense base to the super-imposed
statuere deems it from the jockey imputation of carrying too light a
weight. Now, with respect to the Nelson memorial, your meddlesome scribe
had an unexhibited notion of his own. Mehemet Ali is understood to have
given certain two obelisks respectively to the French and English
nations: the Parisians appropriated theirs, and have set it up,
thorn-like, in their midst, perhaps as an emblem of what African
conquest has been in the heartside of France; but we English, less
imaginative, and therefore less antiquarian, have permitted our _petit
cadeau_ to lie among its ruins of Luxor or Karnac, unclaimed and
unconsidered.

Nelson of the Nile might have had this consecrated to his honour: and
if, as is probable, it be of insufficient elevation, I should have
proposed a high flight of steps and a base, screened all round by
shallow Egyptian entrances, with an Etruscan sarcophagus just within the
principal one, (Egypt and Etruria were cousins germane,) and an
alto-relievo of Nelson dying, but victorious, recumbent on the lid: the
globe and wings, emblems alike of Nelson's rapidity, his universal fame,
and his now-emaciated spirit, might be sculptured over each entrance; a
sphinx, or a Prudhoe lion, being allusive to England as well as Egypt,
should sit guardiant at each corner of the steps; and the three
remaining doorways would be represented closed, and carved externally
with some allegorical personations of Nelson's career, of the Nile,
Copenhagen, and Trafalgar. This, then, had it been strictly in my
metier, (a happy metier mine of literary leisure,) should have been my
limned outline for the Nelson testimonial: the real interesting antique
needle, rising from the midst of its solid Egyptian architecture, and
pointing to the skies; not a steeple, however, but merely the obelisk
raised upon a heavy base, only hollowed far enough to admit of an
interior alto-relievo.

It is probable that the exhibition of designs, which an _alibi_
prevented me from seeing, included several obelisks; but the
peculiarities I should have insisted on, would have been first to make
good use of the real thing, the rarely carved old Egypt's porphyry; and,
next, to have had our hero's likeness within reasonable distance of the
eye.

But to return from this other desperate digression: Alfred, the great
and wise, deserves his Saxon cross; or let him lie enshrined in a grove
of florid Gothic pinnacles, a fretted roof on clustered columns
reverently keeping off the rain; or, best of all, let him stand majestic
in his own-time costume, colossal bronze on a cube of granite, and so
put to shame the elegancies of a Windsor uniform, and the absurdity of
sticking heroes, as at St. George's, Bloomsbury, and elsewhere, on the
summit of a steeple. So, friend, let all this tirade serve to introduce
a most unlikely and chaotic treatise on

NATIONAL MEMORIALS.

Politics are a sore temptation to any writer, and of dalliance with a
Delilah so seductive it is futile to declare that I am innocent. My
principles positively are known to myself; which is a measure of
self-knowledge, in these any-thing-arian days, of that cabinet
coin-climax the "8th degree of rarity;" and that those choice
principles may not be concealed from so kind an eye as yours, friend
reader, hear me profess myself honestly--if you approve, or
shamelessly--if you _will_ so think it--"a rabid Tory!" At least, by
such a nomenclature sundry veracious journals, daily leaders of the
public opinion, would call me, were such a groundling as I prominent
enough to attract their indignation; and, from all that can be gathered
from their condemnatory clauses against others like minded, I have no
little reason to be proud of the title. For, on collation of such
clauses with their causes, I find, and therefore take (under correction
always) the rabid Tory to be--a temperate lover of order, whom his
mother has taught to "fear God," his father to "honour the king," and
his pastor to "meddle not with them who are given to change." A rabid
Tory, in matters of national expenditure, remembers to have heard an old
unexploded proverb, "There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth, and
there is that withholdeth what is due, but it tendeth to poverty;" and
he is by no means sure that a certain mismanaged nation is not
immolating her prosperity to what actuaries would call economical
principles. A rabid Tory is bigoted enough to entertain a ridiculous
fear of that generation abstraction, Catholic Rome, whom further he is
sufficiently vulgar-minded to consider as a lady of easy virtue arrayed
in the colours of a cardinal: he thinks one Luther to be somewhat more
than a renegade monk; and is childish enough to venerate, when a man,
the same Liturgy which his grandmother had taught him when a boy. For
other matters, the higher born, the better bred, the more classically
educated, and the more extensively possessed of moneys and lands our
honest-spoken Tory may be, ten to one the more is he afflicted with this
rabbies: and his mad propensities become positively criminal, when, as a
magistrate or a captain of dragoons, he thinks himself bound in
honourable duty to quell the enthusiasm of some disinterested patriots,
whose innocent wishes rise no higher than to subvert the existing order
of things, to secure for themselves a reasonable share of parks,
palaces, and pocket-money, and (as the very justifiable means for so
happy an end) manfully to sacrifice in the temple of Freedom the rogues
who would object to being robbed, and the tyrants who would be bloody
enough to fight for life and liberty.

A rabid Tory--you see it is a pet name of mine--feels no little contempt
for a squeezable character; and he is well assured, from history as well
as on his own conviction, that the noble army of martyrs lived and died
upon his principles: whereas the retrograde regiment of cowards, whom
the wisdom of providing for personal safety has in battle induced to run
away, _relictis non bene parmulis_--the clamorous cohort of bullies,
whom the necessities of impending castigation have sensibly induced to
eat their words--the volunteer company of light-heeled swindlers, whom
nature instructs that they must live, and honesty has neglected to
inform how--every one, in short, whose grand maxim (_quocunque modo
rem_) is temporizing expediency, and with whom the cogent argument "you
shall" has more force than the silly conscience-whisper of "you
ought,"--contributes to swell the band which the professor of Toryism,
the abstracted follower of principles and not of men, has the honour of
beholding in the angle of his diagram, inscribed "contradictory." Not
that your true Tory believes so ill of _all_ his adversaries; there are
some few geese among the cranes; an Abdiel here and there, who has long
felt irksome in the host, but for false shame is there still; sundry
men, having ambitious or illuminated wives, and too amiable, or too
prudent, to attempt a breach of peace at home; some thronging the
opposite benches, because their fathers and grandfathers topographically
occupied those same seats--a decent reason, supposing similarity of
places and names, to insure similarity of principles and practice; and
some--I dislike them not for honesty--confessing and upholding the
republican extremes, upon a belief that all short of these are but an
unsatisfactory part of a great and glorious experiment. Now, the rabid
Tory prefers an open foe to a false friend; but your go-between, your
midway sneak, your shuttlecock, your perjured miser who will swear to
any thing for an extra per centage--all these are his detestation: and
although he will readily acknowledge some good and some wise in the
adversary's ranks, still he recognises that tri-coloured banner as the
one under which all naturally fight, who are poor in both worlds--with
neither money nor religion. Thus much of my reasonable rabies.

One may hate principles without hating men; and for this sentiment we
have the Highest Example. Things are either right or wrong; if right,
do; if wrong, forbear: nothing can be absolutely indifferent, and to do
a little actual evil in order to compass great hypothetical good, is
false morality, and, therefore bad government. Why should not honesty
and plain-dealing be as inviolable publicly as privately? Why be guilty
of such mean self-stultification as to say one thing and do another? It
is criminal in rulers to give a helping hand to the evil which they deem
unavoidable; let them, in preference, cease to rule, and imitate the
noble threat of that king for half a century whose conscience bade him
abdicate rather than do wrong.

But to come abruptly on a title-page: often-times, in reading
deleterious leading articles in wrong-sided newspapers, have I longed to
set before the world of faction

A MANUAL OF GOOD POLITICS,

which indeed has already been half-done, if decently begun be
synonymous. With this view has my author's mind heretofore thought over
many scriptural texts, characters, doctrines, and usages; yet, let me
freely confess the upshot of those efforts to be little satisfactory:
for I fear much, that though there be grounds enough to go upon for one
who is already fixed in right political principle, [orthodoxy being, as
is common among arguers, _my_ doxy,] there may not be sufficient so to
reason from as to convince the thousands, ready and willing to gainsay
them: and Locke's utter annihilation of poor ridiculous well-intentioned
Filmer, makes one wary, of taking up and defending a position so little
tenable, as, for instance, Adam's primary grant for the foundation of
absolute monarchy, or of attempting to nullify natural freedom by the
dubious succession of patriarchal power. At the same time, (competency
for so great a task being conceded--no small supposition, by the way,)
much remains to be done in this field of discourse; as, the fearful
example made of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, for conduct very analogous
with numberless instances of modern Liberalism; the rights of rulers, as
well as of the governed; of kings, as well as people; the connexion
subsisting now, as through all former ages, between church and
state--well indeed and deeply argued out already by such great minds as
Coleridge and Gladstone, but perhaps, for general usefulness, requiring
a more brief and popular discourse; the question of passive obedience;
the true though unfashionable doctrine of man's general depravity
invalidating the consignment of power to the masses; and so forth. There
are, however, if Scripture is to be held a constitutional guide, some
examples to a certain extent contrary to the argument: as, elective
monarchy in the case of Saul; non-legitimate succession in families even
where election is omitted, as in the case of Solomon; and, honestly to
say it, many other difficulties of a like nature. In fact, upon the
whole, this distinction might be drawn; that although the Bible at large
favours what we may, for shortness' sake, term Conservative politics,
still it would not be easy to deduce from its page as code of rules, so
necessarily of a social, temporary, and accidental nature: The principle
is given, but little of the practice; the seed of true and undefiled
religion produces among other good fruit what we will call Conservatism,
but we must be very microscopic to detect that fruit in the seed: of
this admission let my _Liberal_ adversary make--as indeed he will--the
most; but let him remember that truth has always been most economically
distributed. It is a material too costly to be broadcast before swine;
and in slender evidence lurks more of moral test, than in stout
arguments and open miracles. At any rate, as unfitted for the task, I
leave it. For any thing mine un-book-learned ignorance can tell, the
very title may be as old as Christianity itself; it is a good name, and
a fair field.