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We hold in our hand a volume printed on thin yellow-brown paper,
almost exactly the same size and thickness as a monthly number of the
CornliiU Magazine. Though equal in bulk, its weight is hardly one-half
that of the magazine ; and so thin is the paper, that the foreign book,
although printed only on one side of the sheet, contains about seventy pages
more than the English one. The writing runs from top to bottom of the
page, as is shown by the dividing lines between the columns. Neither the
arrow-headed inscriptions of Ninevite marbles, nor the hieroglyphics of
Egyptian papyri, present such an intricate puzzling appearance to the un
initiated eye as do these complicated characters j and yet they are more
familiar to our English vision than any other oriental writing ; indeed, we
may venture to say, than any other foreign language whatever. For there
can hardly be man, woman, or child in the British isles, certainly there can
be none among the four millions of London, who have not frequently gazed
at this strange character where it stares them in the face in every
grocer s window upon the sides of tea chests. Owing to its extreme dis
similarity to all other forms of writing, possibly the majority of these
gazers never imagine that what they see is intelligible written language,
but take it to be grotesque ornamentation, congruous to the willow-pattern
piate style of beauty.' Yet these queer-looking pages, with their endlessly
diversified combinations of crosses and squares, straight lines and
flourishes, curves and dots, picture forth to the instructed eye the
thoughts and feelings of a heart that ceased to beat thousands of years
ago, and a brain long since decomposed to join the dust of a land ten
thousand miles away, and that with no less precision than the columns of
the morning s Times, still damp from the press, reflect the ideas which
passed through the editor’s mind last night. If thought be but a mode
of matter in motion, our brain has been just now agitated by vibrations
first set in movement about two thousand three hundred years ago within
the skull of a black-haired, yellow-skinned Mongolian, who pondered the
mysteries of existence while he cultivated his rice-field, somewhere not far
from where the impetuous Hoang-ho turns its turbid rush from a southerly
direction eastward. It is curious to review the strange and various media,
along which the vibrations must have passed from his brain to ours. In
his age pen, ink, and paper were yet unknown. Either he himself, or
more probably his disciples after him, painfully scratched with a knife’«
point rude figures on the smooth surface of slips of split bamboo, to
record the memories of thoughts they would not willingly let die. As the
�LEIH-TSZE.
45
centuries rolled on, woven silk was substituted for the wood, and a brush
of hair took the place of the graving-tool. Later still this costly material
yielded to coarse paper made from the inner bark of trees, ends of hemp,
©r old fishing nets, and by and bye of the fibre of the very bamboo plant
which had afforded the earliest writing-tablets. Centuries before Guthenberg, Faust, and Caxton, this book of tea-chest symbols was once more
graven on wood, but now cut in relief on a block of pear-tree wood, from
which copies were printed off with ink made of lamp-black and gum.
Multiplied by the press, the book held a more secure tenure of existence,
though in a country where book-tvorms and white ants rapidly devour
neglected libraries, new editions must have been frequently issued to pre
serve the work for posterity. Originally the outcome of a human mind,
thinking and teaching amid poverty and obscurity, its author could hardly
have expected it to be remembered beyond the third or fourth generation,
yet here it is, after more than two millenniums, a standard book among
millions of reading men in Eastern Asia ; and at present it is putting in
motion the brain- cells of a red-haired stranger on the banks of the Thames,
and perhaps, by means of these pages, may awaken some interesting and
not altogether valueless trains of thought in the minds of English readers.
The catalogue of the imperial library of China, commenced by the eru
dite Lew Heang, and completed by his son Lew Hin about the commence
ment of the Christian era, enumerated and described upwards of eleven
thousand sections by more than six hundred authors. Three thousand
*
of these contained the classics and their commentators. The remainder
were classified under the heads of philosophy, poetry, the military art,
mathematical science, and medicine. Of this respectable amount of lite
rature by far the larger portion perished ages ago; the imperial library
itself, with nearly its whole contents, being reduced to ashes during an
insurrection in the generation succeeding the completion of the catalogue.
But this library of the two Lew was only a collection of the scattered and
charred fragments of a much larger antecedent literature ; a restoration by
means of new copies of half-legible tablets disinterred from their hidingplaces in gardens, or dug out of old walls, in dilapidated houses. Midway
between Leih-tsze’s time and the labours of the Lew family, occurred the
infamous attempt of that Chinese Vandal, Shih Hwang Te, the first Em
peror of China, to annihilate all literature, with slight exceptions, that
existed in his dominions, that is, throughout what was to him and his
people the whole civilized world. Leih-tsze lived in the feudal age of
China, when the area drained by the Yellow River, was divided into a
hundred petty kingdoms, dukedoms, and baronies, nominally owning
allegiance to one Suzerain, but practically independent. Two centuries
after his death, a Chinese Alexander the Great issued from the extreme
* The meaning of peen, translated “ section,” is uncertain. Originally a slip of
bamboo, it came to mean a chapter of a book, or a book. Probably it stands for sec
tion, or chapter, in the catalogue above referred to, as the authors hardly could have
written eighteen or nineteen works apiece.
�46
LEIH-TSZE.
west of that Eastern orbis terrarum, and welded all these states into one
great despotic empire. Inflated by an insane pride which could not brook
comparison with the mythic glories of the semi-fabulous hero-kings of an
tiquity, and irritated by the conservatism of the literati, who were to him
what the French Legitimists were to Napoleon the First, he resolved to com
mit to the flames every memorial of the past, in order that the history of hu
manity might begin with his reign. The attempt failed. Literature was too
widely spread, and the love of literature too deeply ingrained in the hearts
of the people, for the efforts of a tyrant to exterminate it, even though the
monster went to the length of burying alive four hundred and sixty learned
men who resisted his decrees. But only those books which possessed the
largest amount of inherent vitality could sustain so severe an assault.
Among these was this work of Leih-tsze. This suggests to us a remark of
some importance. Shih Hwang Te’s very objectionable form of biblio
mania was happily as exceptional in Chinese history as Khalif Omar’s
consignment of the library of the Ptolemies to heat the bath fires of Alex
andria was in Western history. But apart from any special and extraordi
nary attacks upon literature, every generation saw multitudes of books
perish in China, either through neglect, or in the catastrophes of fire, war,
or civil commotion. That this particular book should have survived from
the fourth century b.c. to the age of printing, of itself marks it out as
worthy of attention. The preface of the earliest extant commentator,
Chang Sham, who edited Leih-tsze in the fourth century a.d., gives an
interesting glimpse at the process of natural selection which was always
going on, preserving a few favoured volumes from the oblivion into which
numbers of other works continually lapsed. Chang Sham tells us, “I
have heard my father say that his father married a Miss Wong, one of
three sisters. Mr. Wong belonged to an old literary family which had a
passion for book-collecting, and had become possessed of a vast library.
The other Misses Wong also married scholars, and the three young men
vied with each other in transcribing rare books. When there ensued a
time of confusion in the reign of the Emperor Wai (a.d. 310), he and one
of his brothers-in-law fled southward, each one putting as many books as
he could into his baggage-waggons. The road, however, was long, and
frequent attacks of robbers diminished their load greatly; so he said to
the other, ‘We cannot save all the books, let us select the rarer ones to
preserve them from extinction.’ Among those which he himself chose for
preservation were the writings of Leih-tsze.”
The continued existence of an author through two thousand years o
literary vicissitudes, the earlier millennium of which was especially fatal to
literature, may not, perhaps, prove its superior fitness to survive, accord
ing to our estimate of fitness. But it indicates that the book was con
genial to the tastes, and interested the minds, of its preservers. We have
met with the complaint on the part of English readers of Chinese transla
tions, that “ they contain nothing new.” It would be strange, indeed, if
Chinese poetry, philosophy, or religion, should contain any ideas abso
�LEIH-TSZE.
47
lutely new to those who have inherited the wealth of Sanscrit and
Semitic, of Greek and Roman literatures, with all their offspring of later
date. The value of a work like this is not in the novelty of its contents,
but in the light it throws upon the development of the human mind
among a people entirely uninfluenced by our Western progress. We
should find great light would be thrown upon many interesting but difficult
questions in psychology if we could discriminate always between original
and imitative thought. Much which seems to us the purely spontaneous
operation of our minds is, no doubt, unconscious reproduction of what
has been first put into them from outside. If, however, we could enter
into communication with the inhabitants, supposing there to be such, of
Venus, Jupiter, and other planets, and upon comparison of the respective
conditions and developments of mind in each we should find that the
same dominant ideas and principles had manifested and established them
selves in other planets as in our own, our conviction that these ideas and
principles are not the artificial product of restless, baseless speculation,
but the natural and necessary effect of the interaction between mind and
the universe in which it works, would be greatly strengthened. The
mutual comparison which is impossible for us with those star-dwelling
neighbours of ours, we can obtain upon the surface of our own globe,
whenever impassable mountain-ranges, and vast breadths of stormy ocean,
have isolated any portion of mankind for a time sufficiently long to
permit the independent evolution of thought, and its being recorded in
literature. Whenever the time comes that science marks out our globe
into distinct areas of independent mental evolution, China will occupy a
prominent place, making one great division by itself, and affording in its
ancient, vast, unbroken stream of literature the richest materials for
comparison with the rest of the world. In this article we aim at nothing
more than to give the reader a glimpse into the thoughts of an ancient
thinker, some might say, dreamer rather, belonging to a long obsolete
school of Chinese philosophy.
Conclusive proof of the mental isolation, and, therefore, independence
of those old Chinese thinkers is derived from the extant literature itself.
This does not militate against the theory that the black-haired race,
which has almost obliterated the traces of earlier peoples in Eastern Asia,
originally immigrated into the country, probably in successive waves
separated by hundreds of years, from some part of Western Asia, taking
its long pilgrimage across the sterile plateau of Thibet, and following the
course of the Yellow River, until it founded its first permanent settlements
on its banks about seven hundred miles from the sea. These immigrants
may have brought with them the rudiments of writing, as they doubtless did
bring many oral traditions, and habits of thought already formed, or in
formation, before they bade a long farewell to the streams of humanity
which tended south and west. Something, therefore, we must allow them
as their original stock of mental furniture when they came into the land,
at an unknown distant date, two, three, or more thousands of years
�48
LEIH-TSZE.
That which was strongest and most durable of this primitive floating
stock of thought was crystallised in their most ancient books, called the
Classics. We can see in these earliest national records that already, when
they were first inscribed on the bamboo tablets, all memory of derivation
from the West had died out of the minds of the people ; and if a portion of
their contents came into China from beyond the Western mountains, the
earliest scribes had not the faintest sense of the fact. All Chinese litera
ture after this, for about a thousand years, is beyond suspicion purely
Chinese. Take our author for example ; the whole known world to him
extended only about three hundred miles east and west, and about half
that distance north and south. All beyond this region was wrapt in
Cimmerian darkness. On every hand a fringe of savage tribes surrounded
the very limited area of civilisation, through which not the faintest
rumour of what existed to the north and south had penetrated, while the
ocean to the east was but dimly known by vague report, and the great
mountain region to the west was the chosen abode of genii, deified men,
and celestial spirits. Confucius, Laou-tsze, Leih-tsze, Yang-Choo, and
all other leaders of thought in China for some centuries were either
original thinkers, or were indebted to their own national literature only,
not a trace of outside influence being discernible in their writings.
Leih-tsze is for us the name of a book rather than of a man. Unlike
the great national hero Confucius, whose disciples Boswellized before
Boswell, Leih-tsze’s personality has left so faint an impression on his
literary remains, that he has been taken by some Chinese critics for an
imaginary personage. This incredulity we may comfortably waive aside
on the high authority of the imperial catalogue of the reigning dynasty,
which discusses the question temperately and fairly, and decides that
there are no good grounds for doubting that there did live a man by name
Leih Yu-kow, [or, as literature quotes him, Leih-tsze, the philosopher
Leih, whose teachings were compiled into a book by his disciples, in the
form in which we now have it, barring some errors and interpolations
which have crept into the text. Beyond the bare fact of his existence in
the kingdom of Ch’ing, nearly central among the feudal states, about four
hundred years before the Christian era, we have only the most meagre in
formation about him. Though a light of the age, a pupil of distinguished
rabbis, and himself the revered master of a band of attached disciples, he
was neglected by Government, and lived in obscurity and poverty. Once,
indeed, he came into contact with the ruling powers, as the following
anecdote shows :—“ So poor was Leih-tsze, that he bore the traces of
hunger in his emaciated frame. A travelling scholar drew the attention
of the Prince of Ch’ing to this, saying, ‘ In your territory one of the
leading teachers of the age lives in extreme poverty; is it because you,
0 prince, do not love learned men ? ’ The prince immediately sent an
officer to carry relief to Leih-tsze. Leih-tsze came out to receive the
messenger, and with a double obeisance declined the gift. When he
went inside again, his wife taunted him with the reproach, ‘ I was told
b.c.
�LEIH-TSZE.
49
that a philosopher’s wife and children were sure to be well off. Here we
are all starving, and when the ruler sends us relief, you refuse it. This, no
cToubt, is an instance of the fate you are always preaching ! ’ (Leih-tsze
taught necessity and pooh-poohed free will. So his angry spouse seemed
to have him on the hip.) But he quietly rejoined, ‘ The prince only sent
his help in consequence of another man’s report; he has no personal
knowledge of me. Another day he will be listening to some one else’s
report, and finding me a criminal, that is why I declined the gift.’ ” These
philosophers were a proud, at least self-respecting, set, counting it shame
to be pensioners on royal bounty, unless royalty respectfully received
their admonitions. The narrative intimates that, in this case, Leih-tsze’s
independence of spirit saved his life during a revolution which succeeded.
We have a peep at the man inside the philosopher’s cloak in this next
incident. “ Leih-tsze started for Tsai, went half-way, and returned. A
friend asked, ‘ Why have you come back ? ’ ‘I was afraid,’ he replied.
‘What made you afraid ? ’ ‘On the road I stopped to get a meal at the
sign of “ The Ten Syrups,” and they presented me with a grand dinner.’
‘ What was there in this to frighten you ? ’ ‘ Truly it made me very un
comfortable. I thought that if my personal appearance won me such
reverence from a poor innkeeper, how much more would it make an
impression upon a monarch of ten thousand chariots, who would surely
employ me in Government, and ascribe merit to me. On this account I
was afraid.’ ‘Excellent,’ replied his mentor, ‘ I see you know how to
conduct yourself. You will come to honour.’ ” The popularity from
which the philosopher shrank, nevertheless, found him out and besieged
him in the form of a numerous band of disciples, who showed their
respect by taking off their shoes before entering his door. This, again,
we are told, is an illustration of destiny. Leih-tsze was to be famous,
and he became so, even against his will.
Though a few passing allusions give us all that we can glean of the
personal individuality of Leih-tsze, this book, supplemented by other con
temporary records, affords a very vivid picture of the state of society in
which he moved. We are apt to think that times so far anterior to our
own must still have retained lingering traces of primeval arcadian sim
plicity of thought and manners. But we are introduced by these pages
to a highly artificial state of civilization, which felt itself removed by
immense spaces of time from the youth of the world. Kings and nobles
feasted in their halls, rode out in four-horse chariots to the chase or the
battle; minstrels, jugglers, mechanicians crowded to their courts for
employment and reward. Ladies sighed in the harems, or plotted with
eunuchs to secure the advancement of their own children in place of the
legitimate heir. Travelling statesmen and philosophers wandered from
court to court with the latest recipe for establishing universal peace, and
bringing mankind under one sway. Below them all was the great mass
of the people engaged in trade, handicrafts, and the cultivation of the
soil, but liable to be called upon for military service, and frequently
�50
LEIH-TSZE.
suffering the calamities of war. In this highly complex condition of
society there were a few men who, instead of taking existence as they
found it, laboured to discover its secret, or to amend its conditions.
Some of these, by the fame of their learning or their wisdom, attracted
disciples around them, and thus established informal schools, where the
instruction was chiefly oral and by example, and in which keen debate
upon the principles of philosophy and ethics was frequent. Among such
self-constituted teachers Leih-tsze held a distinguished place, and to the
admiration of his disciples we owe this record of his doctrines from which
we will now present some specimens.
Mr. G. H. Lewes, after reviewing the history of philosophy from
Thales to Kant and Hegel, considers that he has abundantly proved the
barrenness of all metaphysics and the impossibility of ontology. These
conclusions we do not venture to dispute. His numerous examples from
Ancient Greece and Modern Europe might be paralleled by a third depart
ment in which the metaphysics of China should be exhibited, and India,
of course, would add a crowded fourth. This agreement in prosecuting
inquiries so inevitably barren seems to indicate an innate tendency in the
human mind to ask these questions, unanswerable though they be.
Granted that it is utterly impossible for man ever to extricate himself
from the great stream of phenomena of which he is himself part, and to
survey from the lofty altitude of absolute perception the realities of being,
which here he knows only in its relations, will he ever learn to be con-.
tented in his necessary ignorance ? A few thousands of generations more
may perhaps evolve a human race which shall be incapable of curiosity
about these profoundest speculations ; and the man of the future, having
thoroughly acquiesced in the hereditary conviction that truth is but the
order of ideas corresponding to the order of phenomena, may have ceased
even to scorn metaphysics as equivalent to inquiring about lunar politics,
because the very memory that once such contemplations possessed
irresistible fascination for the human mind shall have been long lost. If
so, the future will be very unlike the past and the present, and for our
selves we acknowledge that the vista of human progress thus opening out
before us does not seem attractive. Leih-tsze, however, lived in a meta
physical age, and in the very foreground of his philosophy we find
abstruse speculations upon the nature of being in itself. A bare transla
tion into English without explanatory notes would hardly be intelligible,
but we may select a few sentences to show the style. “That which
brings forth all things is not born; that which changes things is itself
changeless.
Spontaneously it lives, changes, takes form and colour,
knows, is strong, decays and dies. Yet if you say that it lives and
changes, has shape and hue, possesses knowledge and strength, is subject
to decay and death, you err.” Again : “ There are living things and a
cause of life; there is form, and a cause of form; there is sound
and a cause of sound; there is colour and a cause of colour;
there is flavour and a cause of flavour. That which life produces
�LEIH-TSZE.
51
is death, but the cause of life never comes to an end.
That which
form produces is substance, but the cause of form is immaterial.
That which sound produces is hearing, but the cause of sound is ever
inaudible. That which colour produces is beauty, but the cause of
colour is ever invisible. All these are functions of the Absolute.
*
It can
be male and female, yielding and rigid, short and long, square and
round, living and dead, hot and cold, sweet and bitter, stinking and
fragrant. It is without knowledge and without power, and it is omnis
cient and omnipotent.” All this seems the childish babbling of a
philosophy which has not grown up to manhood, and entered into
possession of a polysyllabic terminology for its ideas ; yet its meaning is
equivalent to Herbert Spencer’s fundamental proposition “ the origin of
all things is inscrutable.” It recognises the existence of that “ some
thing ” which is above, and behind, and in, all phenomena; which no
acuteness of observation can reach, no profundity of meditation can
fathom, but which we know is there. In this direction the latest
researches of modern science and the crude reflections of our Chinese
philosopher both come to a dead stop at exactly the same point.
How crude and fanciful the metaphysical speculations of Leih-tsze
were is apparent in the following imaginary dialogue :—“ King T‘ang asked
Hea-Kih, ‘Was there originally a time when nothing material existed?’
Hea-Kih replied, ‘ If originally there was nothing, whence have existing
things come from ? Will it be reasonable if some day posterity should
ask whether anything existed at this time ? ’ The King continued, ‘ Then is
there really no succession of events ? ’ Hea-Kih said, ‘ The succession of
things is infinite. Beginnings may be endings, and endings may be
beginnings. Who can discriminate them ? But as to that which exists
beyond all phenomena, and before all events, I am ignorant.’ ‘Then is the
universe without limit ?’ asked the monarch. ‘I know not,’ Hea-Kih
replied ; but when pressed for an answer, added : ‘ The non-existent is
infinite. Existence is finite. How do I know this ? It is involved in the
idea of the infinite. The infinite cannot have a greater infinite to bound it.
But as to what limits the finite, I confess my ignorance.’ T‘ang asked,
‘ What is the nature of being beyond the limits of our world ? ’ ‘ Just
like it is in the middle kingdom,’ was the answer. ‘ How know you that ?’
‘ Because,’ he replied, ‘ I have travelled east and west to the limits of civi
lisation, and everywhere I found things the same. At the extreme points
of my wanderings I inquired of the people, and they assured me that
they knew of nothing different beyond them. Thus I conclude that the
whole universe is alike.’ ”
If disposed to smile at the superficiality of these reasonings, yet one
must remember that whether we sound a bottomless ocean with a deepsea line or a pole, the result is the same ; in each case we fail to reach
* We must make apology to the sinologue for the audacity of this translation of
moo wei by the Absolute. Yet does it not approach nearer to the idea of the Chinese
than any other English expression ?
�52
LEIH-TSZE.
the bottom. Our Chinese used the longest line he had, and could do no
more, nor can we.
Leih-tsze’s philosophy of life was fatalism, yet fatalism of a peculiar
shade. He belonged to the school originated by the famous contemporary
of Confucius, Laou-tsze, the watchword of which was taou, “ the path/’
Confucius, too, believed in “ the path,” but his path was the path of duty,
the way of righteousness, following the higher instincts of our moral nature.
“ What Heaven has conferred is called the 'nature; an accordance
with this nature is called the path; the regulation of this path is called
instruction." It is much more difficult to grasp Laou-tsze’s and Leih-tsze’s
meaning when they speak of “ the path ” ; but this difference between
the rival schools is clear. Confucius fixed his mind exclusively on the
ethical side of human nature, while his opponents included in their idea
of “ the path ” not only the totality of human nature, but the totality of
the universe. One student of Taouism explains taou as the “ultimate
ideal unity of the universe.” [It is simpler to take “ the path” for what we
express by “ the course of nature,” only extending nature beyond physical
things to embrace gods and men, mind and matter, heaven and earth, and
all theii’ contents in one universal stream of being, all pervaded by one
uniting principle it is true, but that principle inscrutable to us, and
inseparable from the stream of existence itself. This infinite march of
events moves on of itself in its own irresistible current; it is folly to
struggle against it, wisdom to resign ourselves to be borne along by the
stream whithersoever it tends. “ The Emperor Shun asked Ching : ‘ Can
I attain to the possession of ‘1 the path ” ? ’ ” (Tuott here stands for the inner
secret of being, the reality behind appearances, and perhaps might be
rendered by “ the truth.”) “ Ching replies to him : ‘ Your body is not your
own, how can you acquire and possess taou ? ’ Shun said, ‘ If my body
is not my own, whose is it ? ’
‘ It is a form entrustedto you by Heaven
and Earth,’ was the answer.
‘ Life is not yours. It is a harmony
entrusted to you by Heaven and Earth. Your nature is not yours, it is
a concord entrusted to you by Heaven and Earth. Your children and
grandchildren are not yours. They are new forms entrusted to you by
Heaven and Earth. When you move, you do not know whither you are
going; when you are at rest, you know not what you are grasping. The
very food you eat is made by Heaven and Earth to nourish you, you
know not how. Why should you talk of attaining to the possession of
anything ? ’ ”
In the sixth chapter we have an amusing discussion between fate and
free-will personified. What we call free-will is represented by Mr. Effort,
who challenged Mr. Fate thus : “ How can you compare your merits with
mine ? ” Fate retorted : “ What are these merits of yours which you wish
to compare with me ? ” Effort replied : “ Long life and early death,
failure and success, honour and obscurity, riches and poverty, all depend
upon me.” Fate said : “ Pang-tso .was not wiser than the sages Yau
and Shun, yet he lived to be eight hundred years old. Ngan Uen’s
�LEIH-TSZE.
53
talents were not mediocre, yet he died at thirty-two. Confucius virtue
was not inferior to that of the princes of his day, yet he wandered about
in poverty. The tyrant Chow’s morality was not better than that of the
three sages, yet he enjoyed the royal seat. If these things are your work,
Mr. Effort, why do you confer long life, riches, and honours upon the bad,
and accumulate misfortune on the good ?
Effort replied : ‘ Accoiding
to what you say, I have no merits at all. But that things happen so con
trary is your arrangement, not mine.” Fate answered : “ Since you say
Fate does these things, why talk about their being arranged so ? Crooked
and straight are all the same to me. All things are what they are of
themselves. How can I know anything about it ? ”
The sentimentalism of Xerxes weeping at his grand review would
have met with small sympathy from a Taouist, as the following anecdote,
told by Leih-tsze, shows
“ The King of Tsai, returning from a journey,
came in sight of his capital from the northern hills and burst into tears,
saying, ‘ Beautiful, beautiful, is my royal city ! So stately and spacious,
yet I must leave it and die ! If I were to live for ever, I should never
wish to quit this place and go elsewhere.’ His courtiers wept with him,
saying, ‘ Our food and clothing, our chariots and horses, are poor com
pared with yours. Yet we, too, are unwilling to die, how much more
reason have you to dislike the prospect 1 ’ One among them, however, only
sniiW. The king, observing this, ceased to weep, and demanded of him
why he alone smiled when all the others sympathised with their master’s
grief? The philosopher replied: ‘If virtuous rulers never left their
thrones, T’ae Kung and Hwan Kung would be always reigning. If valiant
Tn An never died, Chong Kung and Ling Kung would constantly occupy
the royal seat. If these monarchs had not vacated the throne, you, my
prince, would to-day be clad in mats and tilling the ground. You owe
your occupancy of the throne to the mutations of life and death.
This same doctrine of fatalism rudely jostles against an Englishman’s
conceptions of providence in our next illustration. Listen to this.
“ Mr. Tien made a great feast in his hall, and sat down among a
thousand guests to the banquet. While the waiters were bringing in fish
and wild geese, Mr. Tien heaved a sigh and said, How generous is
Heaven to man I For our use the corn grows ; for us the waters yield fish,
and birds fly in the air.’ The guests re-echoed these sentiments; until
a boy of twelve years old stepped forth and said, ‘ Not so, my lord. All
things in heaven and earth live by the same right as ourselves. The
large prey upon the small; the strong and intelligent eat the stupid and
weak. It is not that they are made for each other. Man takes what is
eatable and eats it. Why should you think that Heaven produced things
for man’s sake ? Mosquitoes bite man’s skin, and tigers devour his flesh.
Did Heaven produce men for the mosquitoes and tigers ? ’ ”
Fate rules all ; or, since there can be no such conscious intelligence
in fate as the word “ rules ” suggests, all things are by fate. But this
conviction does not interfere with human activity, A considerable part of
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LEIH-TSZE.
Leih-tsze’s teaching is devoted to illustrate the power of mind over
matter. Laying hold of such facts as the immense superiority in feats of
skill, driving four-in-hand, swimming, rowing, archery, and music, and
handicrafts, which is attained by unremitting practice, concentrated atten
tion, utter fearlessness, and freedom from self-consciousness, our author
seems to push them to the extreme of believing that man may possibly
attain, by a still higher degree of abstraction, to an omnipotent command
over material forces. Many of his tales, which have the appearance of
extravagant credulity, may perhaps be intended to convey an allegorical
meaning. We read of men who could ride upon the wind, walk through
fire, over water, and even through solid rocks as through empty space.
These marvellous stories, perhaps, only clothe in fables the philosopher’s
conviction of the power of wisdom and virtue to render the soul independ
ent of the shocks and changes of external circumstances. These mystical
utterances, however, lack the clue needed for their interpretation, and we
are never sure whether Leih-tsze is credulous himself, or playing upon human
credulity, or veiling some subtle meaning under his marvellous narratives.
A few of these tales occupy a border-land between fact and fiction. Here
is one which embodies a notion common enough among ourselves, that
there is a wonderful power in faith, apart altogether from the reality of
what is believed. “ Tsze Wa was a favourite with the Prince of Tsun.
Those whom he patronised were ennobled ; those whom he spoke against
were degraded. Two guests of his on a journey passed the night at a
farm-house. The old farmer, by name Yau Hoi, overheard them con
versing about the power of life and death, riches and poverty, possessed
by Tsze Wa. The farmer, who was grievously poor, drank in all their
words, and on the morrow went into the city and found his way to Tsze
Wa’s door. Tsze Wa’s disciples were all men of good birth, used to dress
in silk and ride in carriages, to walk with a stately step, and look about
them with a lofty air. When they saw Yau Hoi, a weak old man with a
dirty face and untidy clothes, come into the school, they despised him,
and amused themselves by making game of him and pushing him about.
Yau Hoi exhibited no sign of anger. Presently Tsze Wa led them up to
the top of a lofty tower, and cried out, ‘ I’ll give a hundred pieces of silver
to any one who will throw himself down.’ All of them eagerly responded,
and Yau Hoi thinking they were sincere, determined to be first, and threw
himself over. He clave the air like a bird, and alighted upon the ground
without a broken bone. Tsze Wa thought he had escaped by chance. So
he again pointed to a deep pool in the river and said, 1 Down there is a
precious pearl: dive and you will get it.’ Yau Hoi again complied;
dived into the flood, and when he came up, he had really got a pearl.
The spectators then began to suspect something extraordinary ; and Tsze
Wa ordered that food and clothing should be prepared to present to him.
Suddenly a great fire was discovered in Tsze Wa’s treasury. Tsze Wa
exclaimed, ‘ If any one dare venture in, he shall have whatever treasure
he rescues as his reward.’ Yau Hoi entered calmly, and came out again
�LEIH-TSZE.
55
unsoiled and unhurt. Then every one thought he possessed a magic
charm. They crowded round to do him reverence, apologising for their
former rudeness, and begging for his secret. Yau Hoi said, ‘ I have no
secret. I myself do not know how it was done ; but I will try to recount
it to you. Last night Tsze Wa’s guests lodged at my house, and I over
heard them praising Tsze Wa’s power of life and death, riches and poverty,
nnd I perfectly believed it. When I came here, I took all your words to
be true, and only feared lest I should not perfectly trust them and act
them out. I was unconscious of my bodily frame, and knew no fear.
Now that I know you have deceived me, I tremble, and wonder at what I
have gone through. I consider myself lucky that I was not burnt or
drowned. Now I shake with fear, and I shall never dare to approach fire
or water again.’ From this time forward, if Tsze Wa’s pupils met a
beggar or a horse-dealer on the road, they did not dare to be rude to him,
but stopped and bowed.” This represents the power of faith as inherent
in itself. There is another view of faith which regards its efficacy as not
in itself, but in its appeal to a higher Power. Leih-tsze was no theist,
and he was so careless of the national objects of worship that they are
hardly alluded to in his pages. Yet he gives us a story which will convey
to many minds a meaning far beyond his own. “A stupid countryman,
ninety years of age, had his dwelling on the northern slope of a lofty
mountain-range, two hundred miles long and ten thousand cubits high.
One day he was struck with the thought that a road to the south was emi
nently desirable, so he called his family together and proposed to level
the precipices, and make a road through to the southern waters. His
wife remonstrated, hinting that the old man’s strength would not suffice to
demolish a hillock, let alone those great mountains. But the old man
was not daunted, and leading on his son and grandson, the three of them
began to pick and dig, and to carry away the stones and earth in baskets,
and an old widow sent her child of seven years old to help them. Winter
and summer they toiled away, and after a whole year seemed to be where
they began. A shrewd old grey-beard mocked their slow progress ; but
the stupid countryman replied with a sigh, ‘ Your heart is not so intelli
gent as that of this widow’s feeble child. Although I am old, and shall
die, I have a son, and he has a son; these will have children and grand
children. My posterity will go on multiplying without end, and the
mountain will not grow bigger. 'What is to prevent our levelling it ?/
The old man had nothing to say, but the spirit which presides over
snakes heard what was said, and fearing that the work would not stop,
reported the matter to God.
God was affected by their sincerity, and
commanded two genii to remove the mountains, shifting one to the east,
and another to the south, so as to open a pass to the river Han.”
In that last reference to God, Leih-tsze does but for a moment borrow
the language of the ancient creed which he usually lost sight of in his
speculations. On the subject of immortality he seems to have speculated
much, and at times to have indulged some faint hope of existence beyond
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LEItl-TSZE.
the range of present vision. “ Once on a journey he sat down with a
group of his disciples to take a meal by the road-side. One of the
company saw a skull, bleached with age, half hidden by the grass; he
pulled the long grass aside and pointed to it. Leih-tsze said to his disciple
Pak-fung, ‘ Only he and I know, and are independent of life and death.’ ”
But his utterances on this are indistinct, and rather point to an absorption
into an infinite substance than continued conscious individuality. “ The
living, according to nature, must end. The pure spirit-essence is
Heaven’s part, the bodily framework is Earth’s part. When the spirit
essence leaves the form, both return to their true state. From birth to
death man has four great changes, childhood, youth, old age, and death.
In childhood his physical nature is simple, and his will is not divided,
which is the perfection of harmony. External things cannot injure him,
and his virtue is complete. In manhood his passions change like the
wind and overflow like a flood. His desires and anxieties arise in abund
ance. External things fight against him, therefore his virtue declines.
In old age his desires and anxieties become feeble, and his body is near
its rest. External things do not occupy the first place. Although it does
not reach the completeness of childhood, it is superior to middle age. In
death he attains to rest, and returns to its extreme limit.” The Taouist
philosophers are never tired of aiming a blow at Confucianism, and thus
the great sage is made to figure sometimes in ridiculous situations. In
the next extracts there is probably a covert attack on the melancholy
which overshadowed the life of Confucius, and wrapt his end in gloom.
“ Confucius roaming about the Tai mountain, saw Wing K’ai Ki walking
in the fields, dressed in a deer-hide, with a bit of rope for his girdle,
striking his guitar and singing. He asked him, ‘ Sir, what makes you so
joyful ? ’ K’ai Ki replied, ‘ I have many reasons for joy. Of all things
Heaven has made, human beings are most noble, and I have been made a
human being; that is one reason for joy. Men are more honourable
than women, and I was made a man ; this is a second cause for joy.
Some men are born and die before they are out of the nurse’s arms, but I
have gone along for ninety years ; that is a third cause for joy. Scholars
are always poor, and death is the end of man. Why should I regret
being as others and coming to my end ? ’ Confucius exclaimed, ‘ Capital 1
you know how to be magnanimous.’ ” Another of these refreshingly
contented spirits meets us in the following :—“ LamLu, when a hundred
years old, was gleaning in his patrimonial fields, clad only in a sheep
skin, and he sang as he went along. Confucius saw him from a distance,
and said to his disciples, ‘ That old man is worth speaking to, go and
question him.’ Tsze Kung requested leave to go. Encountering him on
a hillock, he looked him m the face, sighed, and said, ‘ Sir, have you not
yet any regrets that you go on singing as you glean ? ’ Lam Lil neither
stopped walking nor singing. Tsze Kung kept on asking, until he looked
up, and replied, ‘ What should I regret ? ’ Tsze Kung said, ‘ In youth you
failed in diligence, in manhood you did not struggle with the times,
�57
LEIH-TSZE.
now you are old you have neither wife nor child; death’s appointed
day is near; what occasions for joy can you have that you should
sing as you glean ? ’ Lam Lu smiled and said, ‘ All men share in
my causes for joy; but they, on the contrary, take them for sorrows ;
because when I was young I did not work hard, and in my manhood
I did not struggle with the times, therefore I have attained to this green
old age. Now I am old, because I have neither wife nor child, and
death’s appointed day is near, therefore I rejoice like this.’ Tsze Kung
replied, ‘ It is natural to man to love long life and to dislike death;
how is it that you take death to be a cause for joy ? ’ Lam Lil said,
‘ Death and life are but a going forth and a returning, therefore when I
die here, how do I know that I shall not live there ? And how do I know
that planning and craving for life is not a mistake ? Also, how know I
that for me to die now is not better than all my previous life ? ’ Tsze
Kung heard, but did not understand what he meant; so he went back and
told the Master. The Master said, ‘ I knew he was worth speaking to,
and so it has proved. But though he has got hold of the thing, he has
not got to the bottom of it.’ ”
Live without care, die without fear; such was our author’s philosophy
of life. When we compare his ethical teaching with that of his great
predecessor Laou-tsze, five or six generations before, we are struck with
the marked degeneracy of his moral tone. In his Taou Teh King, the
founder of the Taouist sect, despite his sphinx-like style, impresses us
with a sense of his profound moral earnestness. Though Laou-tsze dis
sented altogether from the Confucian system, nevertheless we see in him
an eager yearning for perfection, a pensive sadness in the contemplation
of human follies and crimes, a positive inculcation of personal virtue,
which draw out our hearts towards “ the old philosopher.” Confucius
was the stern practical reformer like Calvin, whom we rather admire than
love ; while Laou-tsze possesses the attractive power of the mystic Tauler.
It would be utterly unjust to attribute to the founder of Taouism the
moral aberrations of his successors, even though we can detect in his
teachings the germ of the subsequent evil development. For if we can
detect it, he could not, and we cannot doubt that his devotion to virtue
was as sincere as his conception of it was beautiful. If called upon to
express the guiding principle of his moral teachings by one word, we
shall not be exalting it above its intrinsic merits by choosing that noblest
of words, self-abnegation. Not that he in the dim light of heathenism
could see all that that word now implies to us in the clear light of our
Christianity. The passive side of self-abnegation was more evident to
him than the active. But amid the confused noises of a distracted world,
the shock of battles, the intrigues of courts, the restless contentions for
honour and advancement of the officials and scholars, the fierce pursuit of
wealth by the merchants and artizans, Laou-tsze distinctly heard a still
small voice, summoning him, and through him mankind, to the calm serenity
of a life freed from selfish desires, devoid of covetousness, envy, and ambiVOL. XXX.—NO. 175.
4.
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LEIH-TSZE.
tion, strong in acknowledged weakness, and victorious over pride and
violence by the might of meekness and humility. To him the type of
perfect goodness was water; “ water which is good to benefit all things,
while it does not strive, but runs to the place which all men disdain.”
The defects of his conception are manifest to us, though while yet untested
by experience he may well have failed to perceive them. He disliked
political reformers, because in them self-exaltation mingled with their
desire to reform the world. He disliked preachers of morality, because
their labours were an indication of, in a sense, the result of, the loss of
morality. He disliked an artificial state of society, because it abounded
in temptations to pride, covetousness, and deceit. This antagonism to
effort, led him into the extreme of depreciating even effort for self-improve
ment. He appeared to entertain a vague hope that if men would only let
themselves alone, strive for nothing, not even for goodness, the great Taou,
that ineffable, inexplicable something, too mysterious to have even a name,
would itself flow through the channels of the human heart, and bear the
life along in the right direction. With all this exaggeration of his favourite
precept “ do nothing,” his own personal attachment to virtue was sincere
and supreme ; and doubtless, while he continued to influence his own
philosophy, this loyalty to virtue endured among his followers.
Leih-tsze lived near two centuries later, and in his teachings the
earnest moral purpose of Taouism has given place to a licentious indifferentism. Here and there, indeed, we come across some lingering echoes
of the traditional admiration for meekness and humility, but for the most
part the philosopher is so lost in contemplation of the mystery of existence
that he has not a spare thought left for these particular phenomena, virtue
and vice. He is much more interested in the question whether man may
not, by the power of abstract contemplation, penetrate into the secret of
existence, and gain a superhuman control over natural forces. He still
holds theoretically that the riches, power, and fame of the world are all
delusive appearances, and that to be free from appetites, and passions,
and self-assertion, is “the path;” but he -has ceased to entertain the
slightest hope that out of this doctrine will ever come a moral renovation
of the world. Indeed, he suspects now that the distinctions of virtue and
vice are themselves but delusive imaginations, as much as the pomps and
vanities of life which his leader eschewed. One can hardly read the
following specimens of his teaching without a shudder of disgust:—
“ Tsze Ch‘an * became Prime Minister of Ch'ing, and had sole authority
in the Government. Within three years he brought the whole kingdom
into a state of order. The good gladly submitted to his sway, and the
bad obeyed his laws from fear. But his own brothers, Ch‘iu and Muk,
were addicted to vicious pleasures ; Ch‘iu loved wine, and Muk loved
women. A thousand jars of wine stood in Ch‘iu’s cellar, and heaps of
grain in his barns. When one passed his door at the distance of a
hundred paces, the smell of distillation filled the nostrils. In his drink
* A disciple of Confucius, and one of his personal attendants.
�LEIH-TSZE.
59
ing bouts Ch'iu forgot politics and morals, riches and poverty, friends
and relatives, care of life and fear of death. Although the house were on
fire, or swords clashing in his very face, he would know nothing about it.
In Muk’s harem were scores of concubines, selected for their youth and
beauty; and at times he would shut himself in the inner apartments for
three months together, not at home to his nearest relative or dearest
friend. His emissaries haunted the whole country-side in search for
lovely maidens, whom gold might tempt to enter his harem. Tsze Ch‘an
grieved over his brothers’ ill-conduct night and day, and at last secretly
consulted Tang Sik about it. ‘ I have heard,’ said he, ‘ that a man
must first of all regulate himself, next his family, and then the kingdom,
proceeding from the near to the distant. Now I have brought the
kingdom under government, but my own family is disorderly; this is
contrary to “ the path.” Tell me, I pray you, how I may save my brothers.’
Tang Sik replied, ‘ I have been wondering at it for a long time, but was
afraid to speak about it. Why, sir, do you not find some opportunity of
instructing them in the importance of following one’s (moral) nature, and
according with (Heaven’s) decree, and also of alluring them by setting
before them the high esteem which attends upon the practice of propriety
and righteousness ? ’
“ Tsze Ch'an took Tang Sik’s advice, and went to visit his brothers;
and began his instructions by saying, ‘ Man’s superiority to the brutes con
sists in intelligence and forethought. Intelligence and forethought produce
the rules of propriety and righteousness. Propriety and righteousness
lead to fame and office. If you act upon the incentives of your passions,
and abandon yourselves to wine and lust, you imperil your own lives.
Listen to a brother’s words, and if you repent in the morning, before
night you shall receive a government appointment.’ Ch‘iu and Muk
replied, ‘ Long ago we attained to knowledge, and made our choice; do
you suppose we waited for you to come and teach us before we could un
derstand ? Life is not easy to get, but death comes of itself. Who
would think of wasting a life so hard to get, by spending it in watching for
a death which comes so easily ? And as to caring for proprieties and
righteousness, in order that we may brag over others, and doing violence
to our own natures, in order to win an empty name, in our view this
would be worse than death itself. All we wish is to exhaust the joys of
life, and seize the pleasure of the present moment. Our only grief is that
our physical capacity for pleasure is so small, we have no leisure to sorrow
over loss of reputation or danger to life. If you are so puffed up by your
political success, as to think of leading our minds astray by the seductions
of glory and official salary, we think it mean of you and pitiable. Now
we will tell you the difference. External government, however clever, is
not certain of success, and inflicts suffering upon people. Internal go
vernment never leads to disorder, and men joyfully conform to nature.
Your external government barely gets a temporary success in one small
kingdom, and after all does not accord with the hearts of the people. Our
4—2
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LEIH-TSZE.
internal government may be applied to the whole world, and then kings
and statesmen will have no more to do. We have long been wishing to
teach you our doctrine, and do you on the contrary bring your doctrine to
teach us ! ’ Tsze Ch'an was dumfoundered, and departed without a word.
Next day he reported the interview to Tang Sik. Tang Sik said, ‘ You,
sir, have been living with perfect sages, and you did not know it. Who
will say that you are wise ? The good order of the kingdom is an
accidental circumstance, not to be imputed as merit to you.’ ”
This licentious creed was the deliberate choice of Taouism ; though of
course Taouists used to the full our grand human liberty of inconsistency,
and by no means carried out their principle either to its full logical or
practical consequences. Still it remains a fact, that for a space, if only a
brief space, philosophy in China rejected morality, and exalted licentious
ness to the dignity of a religion. As a natural result Taouism rapidly de
generated, and at the same time lost its hold upon the people. If in their
lifetime Laou-tsze held his banner of spontaneity bravely aloft, and Confu
cius waged a desperate but hardly equal strife under the standard of rigid
self-discipline, the two teachers were in their hearts fighting on the same
side, to reclaim a lost world to truth and virtue. But while the Confucianists remained staunch to this double object of pursuit, truth and
virtue, the Taouists thought they perceived an inconsistency between
them, and chose truth rather than virtue. The complete victory of Con
fucianism along the whole line is a fact worthy of our consideration.
Confucius was the prophet of conscience, not only grasping tenaciously
the truth of the moral supremacy of conscience, but believing most
devoutly in its divine origin, and his own divine mission to defend its
rights, and also that there could not be salvation for humanity except in
obedience to its behests. In his lifetime he fought an Ishpaaelitish con
flict, a guerilla warfare for his sacred faith. Every man’s hand seemed
against him, apd it was as much as he could do to live with his principles,
though the life of a wanderer from one city to another, from one kingdom
to another people. After his death his disciples fought for his truth like
soldiers combating desperately over the corpse of their dead leader, and
still for generations the battle seemed to hang in the balance. But at last
the victory was achieved, and it was final and glorious. Conscience
proved its own supremacy, by putting these doctrines of natural licence to
disgraceful rout. Now, and for these thousand years and more, that be
wildering attempt of Leih-tsze’s to confuse the distinctions between right
and wrong has seemed as strange and unnatural to the Chinese mind as
it seems to our own. The sect continued, but as a small minority of the
nation, a minority given over to idolatry, superstitious arts, magic,
alchemy, the philosopher’s stone, and the elixir of life. But the name of
Taou has never lost its potency in China, and for centuries it has been
united with Confucianism and Buddhism as a member of the trinity of
philosophies. At the parting of the ways, whei’e the doctrine of nature
and spontaneous life diverged from the doctrine of virtue and stern self
�LEIH-TSZE.
61
discipline, the nation bade farewell to the dreamy mysticism of Laou-tsze,
to follow the banner of Confuciu's and conscience. Yet a memory of the
sweetness and serenity of those earlier musings lingered long in the
national mind, preserving the ancient doctors of Taou from oblivion and
their writings from contempt. They appealed to our nature on one side,
and they had glimpses of one side of truth also, and although we rejoice
in the clear victory of the teacher of righteousness and benevolence, as a
notable instance of the survival of the fittest in the mutual struggle for
life of the philosophies, we acknowledge that the far-off echoes of ancient
Taou sound a note, an under-tone of which can be detected in many
quarters, even in our modern Christian England.
There is a vein of humour in Leih-tsze which enlivens with a genial
light some of his shrewd observations of human nature ; and though he
fails to smite at vice with the trenchant blade of moral faith, he manifests
a visionary longing for a happier state in which vice is not. With a few
extracts illustrative of these traits, we will close this notice of him.
‘ ‘ In the state of Ki there was a man who was anxious lest heaven and
earth should fall to pieces and he have no place to lodge his body in. He
could neither eat nor sleep from anxiety. And there was another who
was anxious about his distress and went to enlighten him. ‘ The heaven
gathers air,’ he said, ‘ and there is no place which is not full of air: sun,
moon, and stars are only collected air which contains light; even if they
could fall they would do no harm.’ His pupil said, ‘ Suppose the earth
should break, what then ? ’ ‘ The Earth,’ replied his mentor, ‘ is an ac
cumulation of clods, packed close together on all sides. You may go
about the whole day treading and trampling on the earth without any fear
of its breaking.’ His hearer rejoiced like a released prisoner, and the
teacher rejoiced in sympathy with him. But Chang Lo heard it and said
with a smile : ‘ Rainbows and clouds, wind and rain, sky and mountains,
seas and rivers, metals and stones, fire and wood, are all but forms of
matter in combination. Who says they will not be destroyed ? A little
thing like man in the midst of the vast universe may think it
indestructible, and to trouble ourselves about such a remote contingency
is needless. But heaven and earth will inevitably be destroyed, and if
you encountered that time, how could you help being anxious ? ’ Leih-tsze
heard and smiled, saying : ‘ It is equally erroneous to say that the universe
will be destroyed, and to say that it will not be destroyed. We are
unable to determine it either way. Life does not know death, and death
does not know life. Why should I trouble my mind about the permanency
of the universe ? ’ ”
“ Yang Choo was travelling through Sung, and came to an inn. The
inn-keeper had two wives, one of whom was pretty and the other was
ugly. He esteemed the ugly one and slighted the pretty one. Yang Choo
asked the reason. The inn-keeper replied : ‘ That pretty one thinks herself
pretty, but I do not perceive her beauty. The ugly one thinks herself
ugly, but I do not perceive her lack of comeliness.’ Yang Choo said to
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LEIH-TSZE.
his disciples : ‘ Remember this; if you act virtuously without attributing
the merit of it to yourself, where will you go without being loved ? ’ ”
“ When the great Yu was regulating the waters, one day he lost his
way, and wandered into a country on the northern shore of the North
Sea, he knew not how many times ten thousand miles from China. In *
that land was neither wind nor rain, frost nor dew, nor did he meet with
any kinds of animal or vegetable life. On all sides the ground was per
fectly smooth, only gently rising in elevation in the centre. A vase-shaped
mountain rose in the middle of that country, with a circular orifice on
the summit, from which a fountain issued, called the spiritual fountain.
Its fragrance was sweeter than rose-gardens or cinnamon groves, and its
taste was more exquisite than that of the finest wine. From one source it
divided into four channels and flowed down the mountain, meandering
through the whole land and watering every corner of it. The climate was
serene, perfectly free from malaria. The people who lived there were of a
gentle disposition and in harmony with their external circumstances. No
strife nor violence marred their peace. Their hearts were tender and their
frames were soft. They were innocent of pride and envy. Old and
young dwelt together, and they had neither prince nor official among
them. Men and women wandered about in company, and they employed
no match-makers, sent no marriage presents. They dwelt on the banks of
the stream, and needed not to plough and sow. The climate was so
genial that they did not weave nor wear clothes. They lived to be a
hundred years old; premature death and disease being unknown among
them. The population was always increasing, till it was innumerable ;
and enjoyed perpetual felicity, ignorant of decay, old age, grief and
hardship. Delighting in music, the voices joining harmoniously in song,,
ceased not throughout the day. If hungry or weary they drank of the
spiritual fountain and their strength and spirits were restored to their
normal condition. Too deep a draught intoxicated, and then they slept
for a week without waking. When they bathed in the spiritual fountain
their skin became glossy and the fragrance exhaled for a week. When
King Muh of Chau entered that kingdom he tarried there for three years
without a thought of home. On his return to his royal palace he was
plunged in profound melancholy, refused food and wine, and all the
delights of his harem, and several months passed before he recovered.”
“ A man in the East, while on a journey, was reduced by starvation,
and lay dying by the road-side. A celebrated highwayman passed that
way, and, pitying him, dismounted, and put a bottle to his lips. After
three sucks the dying man revived, and opened his eyes. Seeing his
deliverer bending over him, he inquired his name, and being told, ex
claimed, ‘ Are not you the famous robber ? What induced you to give
me drink ? I am an honest man, and cannot receive food from you.’
Thereupon he beat the ground with his arms and tried to vomit, gasped
and gurgled in his throat, fell back, and expired. But if the man was a
robber, his drink had not committed theft. How strangely men confuse
�LEIH-TSZE.
63
**
things.
This is a satire upon certain well-known anecdotes of Confucian
worthies, whose unbending scrupulousness appeared ridiculous to our
Taouist believer in non-resistance to the universal life-stream of nature.
“ A neighbour of Yang Choo lost a sheep, and calling upon the
villagers to go in search of it, he asked the assistance of Yang Choo’s
servant also. Yang Choo inquired why so many persons were needed to
seek for a single sheep. His neighbour said, ‘ Because the roads and by
paths are many.’ When they returned, he asked if the sheep had been
found. ‘ No, it is lost,’ they answered. ‘ How lost ? ’ he demanded.
‘ The bypaths branch out into other bypaths, and we could not pos
sibly tell which way it had gone, so we returned.’ A shade of sadness
fell upon Yang Choo’s countenance ; for a long time he did not speak,
and he did not smile again that day. His disciples marvelled, and
requested an explanation. 1 The sheep was not a valuable animal, and it
did not belong to you; why should it cloud over your happiness like
this ? ’ Yang Choo returned no answer. Discussing it among them
selves, one of them said, ‘ The great path divides into many by
paths, and many sheep are lost therein.. How is it that you sit in the
master’s school, and have not yet learned to interpret the master’s
meaning ? ’ ”
“ Yang Choo’s younger brother went out for a walk in a suit of
white silk, but rain coming on, he borrowed a black cloak to return in.
When he reached the door, his dog came out and barked at him. The
young man was provoked, and raised his hand to strike the dog. Yang
Choo said, ‘ Do not beat him; you are no better yourself. Suppose
your dog went out white, and came back black, would it not startle
you ? ’ ”
“ One new year’s day, the people of Ham Tan presented a number of
pigeons to their lord. He was very pleased, and liberally rewarded them.
A guest of his inquired the reason. ‘ This is new year’s day,’ he said,
‘ and I shall set them all at liberty to fly back to the woods, and
so express the good-will of my heart to all living things.’ His guest
replied, ‘ The people are aware of your intention to release the birds, and
therefore they entrap and catch them, and many are killed in their
attempts. If you wish to keep them alive, the better way would be to
prohibit catching them.’ ”
“A man who had lost his axe, suspected his neighbour’s son. He
watched him, and said to himself, ‘ He is the thief; he has the gait of a
thief, the face of a thief, the voice of a thief; everything in his appearance
and behaviour says as plainly as possible that he has stolen the axe.’
But happening one day to find the axe in his own garden, when he next
met his neighbour’s son, there was nothing whatever in his looks or
behaviour which could lead one to suspect him to be a thief.”
“ Confucius, on a journey, saw two children disputing, and asked the
reason. One of the lads said, ‘1 say that the rising sun is near us, and
at noon it is far off.’ The other said, ‘ No, the sun is far off at dawn, but
�64
LEIH-TSZE.
near at mid-day.’ The first said, 1 Why, when the sun rises it is as large
as a chariot-wheel, but in the middle of the day it is no larger than
a plate ; is it not small when at a distance, and large when it is near ? ’
The other said, ‘ When the sun first rises, its rays are mild and genial;
but at noon it is blazing hot. Surely it is hotter when near, and cooler
when afar.
Confucius could not decide the point. The two children
smiled and said, ‘ Who will say that you know much ? ’ ”
The English reader may be disposed to think that in this respect there
is not much to choose between Confucius and Leih-tsze and all the rest
of China s boasted sages. They lived before the Baconian philosophy;
and a clever boy from one of our primary schools could instruct them in
the exact sciences. But unless, in the progress of human evolution,
man develops into a being very different from what he always has been,
the subject-matter of Taouistic speculation will continue to possess
intensest interest and unrivalled practical importance for mankind. Our
meditations upon the whence and the whither may fail to lead to those
definite and clear conclusions which science craves, but they exert a
momentous influence upon the formation of a practical rule of life. One
does not need to go far in modern literature in order to detect an order of
thought which is strictly parallel to that naturalistic philosophy of which
Leih-tsze is a representative. Those old Chinese thinkers were but
following a tendency in human nature, which exists in us still; and
it can do us no harm to learn whither it led them, and what it ended in.
Happily we have a sure confidence that, as nobler instincts and loftier
aspirations prevailed in the far East, leaving this indolent epicurean
philosophy to lose itself in the ignominious quagmire of absurd and
degrading superstition, so the philosophy of conscience and duty, of effort
and conflict, will prevail, and must prevail in the long run, however for a
time men may seem to lose heart and long for the land of the lotos
eaters.
F. S. T.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Leih-tsze
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Storrs-Turner, Frederick
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: [44]-64 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Article signed F.S.T. The Reverend Frederick Storrs-Turner was a British clergyman and campaigner against the opium trade. From the Cornhill Magazine 30 (July 1874). Full name of author, magazine title and issue number from Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900.
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[Smith, Elder & Co.]
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[1874]
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G5346
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China
Opium
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Leih-tsze), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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English
China
Conway Tracts
Leih-Tsze
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599
JFiw-JdM flje
Ortass of Jobe.
Familiarity with the classical gods of Greece and Rome is considered a
matter-of-course accomplishment in polite education. To show ignorance
on that point, would render a person liable to be placed in the Kimmerian
circle of outer barbarians. But how few are there who have even so
much as a faint notion of the Germanic Pantheon, in which the creed of
that race was once embodied, from which Englishmen have in the main
sprung! “ Bay after day, as the weeks run round,” says the author of
Words and Places, the Rev. Isaac Taylor—“we have obtruded upon our
notice the names of the deities who were worshipped by our pagan fore
fathers. This heathenism is indeed so deeply ingrained into our speech that
we are accustomed daily to pronounce the names of Tiu, Woden, Thunor,
Frea, and Saetere. These names are so familiar to us that we are apt to
forget how little is really known of the mythology of those heathen times.”
Sun- and star-worship was, according to Roman testimony, among the
earliest forms of creed of the Germanic tribes. The dies Solis, and the
dies Luna, had therefore no difficulty in being translated into a Sun-day
and Moon- or Mon-day. In Tuesday we have the name of the Germanic
god of war, Tyr, Tiu, or Ziu—in some Teutonic dialects also called Era
or Erich, the root of which word is no doubt the same as in the Hellenic
Ares. Hence Tuesday, in High German Pinstag, is in some Alemannic
and Bavarian districts called Zistig, Erschtag, or Erichstag. Wodan, the
All-father, furnishes the name for Wednesday. Thursday is derived from
the God of Thunder. Friday represents the day of the Germanic Venus.
In Saturday, the derivation of which was formerly traced to Saturnus, a
god Saetere is probably hidden—that name being, to all appearance, an
aZius for Loki, or Lokko, the evil-doing god, of whose malicious mind the
Edda gives so graphic an account in the song called “ The Banquet of
Oegir” [Oegisdrekka e^a Lokasennai)—a Titanic satire upon the dwellers
in Asgard.
If we look over the topography of all countries in which the Germanic
race dwells, or through which it has passed in the course of its migrations,
what deep imprints do we find of its ancient creed in the very appellations
of dwelling-places ! The God of War ; the All-father who rules the winds
and the clouds; the God of Thunder; the Goddess of Love ; the deity
who represents insidious mischief and destruction—they are all to be met
with, not only in Germany, Scandinavia, and other Continental lands, but
on English soil, too, where Tewesley, Tewin, and Dewerstone; Wanborough, Wednesbury, Woodnesborough, Wansdike, and Woden Hill;
�600
FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
Thundersfield, Thurscross, and Thurso; Frathorpe, Fraisthorpe, and
Freasley ; Satterleigh, and Satterthwaite, in all probability bear -witness to
a decayed cultus. Even so Balderby and Balderton ; Easterford, Easterleake, and Eastermear ; Hellifield, Hellathyrne, and Helagh, are no doubt
referable to the worship of Balder, the god of light and peace; of Eostre,
or Ostara, the goddess of Spring; of Hel, the mistress of the underworld.
And again, when in this country we meet with places called Asgardby and
Aysgarth, we have no difficulty in referring them to Asgard, the Germanic
Olympus.
Still, with all these traces of a pagan religion—which had its grandeur
and even some traits of charm—strewn thickly around us, how many are
there who think it worth while to read the thoughts of their own ancestors
in the mythic system so amply elaborated by them ? Among a large class
of people of highly cultivated mind, where are the readers of the powerful
text-book of heathen Germanic religion ? where the students of that folk
lore in which precious fragments of ancient creed are embedded, even as
glittering shells, of brilliant hue, are concealed beneath the incrustated
slime of the sea ?
Yet, on the mere plea of poetical enjoyment, an extended knowledge
of these subjects might be urged. Assuredly—as Mannhardt puts it, who
with Simrock, Kuhn, Schwarz, and others, has ably and laboriously
continued the immortal labours of Grimm, and of the many Norse scholars
—there is not, in the Germanic world of Gods, the perfect harmony and
plastic repose of the Olympian ideals of Greece. But their forms and
figures tower in lofty greatness through the immensity of space; and if
they are not so well rounded off as the deities of the later Greek epoch—
if they are somewhat apt to float, before the mind’s eye, like fantasticallyshaped storm-clouds, or like bright-coloured visions of dawn and sunset,
they are, on the other hand, less liable to be taken for mere idols of ivory,
brass, and stone.
Can it be said, however, that there is a lack of poetical conception in
the figure of Wodan, or Odin, the hoary god of the clouds, who, clad in
a flowing mantle, careers through the sky on a milk-white horse, from
whose nostrils fire issues ? Is there a want of artistic delineation in
Freia, who changes darkness into light wherever she appears—the
goddess with the streaming golden locks, and the siren voice, who hovers
in her snow-white robe between heaven and earth, making flowers sprout
along her path, and planting irresistible longings in the hearts of men ?
Do we not see in bold and well-marked outlines the figure of the redbearded, steel-handed Thor, who rolls along the sky in his goat-drawn car,
and who smites the mountain giants with his magic hammer ? Are these
dwellers in the Germanic Olympus mere spectres, without distinct con
tour ? And if their strength often verges upon wildness ; if their charms
are sometimes allied to cruel sorcery—are they not, even in their uncouth
passions, the representatives of a primitive race, in which the pulse throbs
with youthful freshness ?
�FEEIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
601
Again, what a throng of minor deities—surpassing in poetic conception
even Hellenic fancy—have been evolved by the Teutonic mind out of all
the forces of nature! Look at the crowd of fairies, and wood-women,
and elfin, and nixes, and dwarfs, and cobolds, that dance in the moon
light, and whisk through the rustling leaves, or dwell enchanted in trees,
or hide in glittering mountain-caves, or waft enthralling songs from
beneath the water, or bustle day and night through the dwellings of man!
The Greeks had all, or nearly all, this—for the elements of mythology
are the same in all Aryan lands : but there is a greater depth in the
corresponding Teutonic tales : they coil themselves round the heart like
invisible threads ; they seem so familiar and homely, and yet lead the
imagination into a strange dreamland.
Then, what a dramatic development Germanic mythology has ! The
Hellenic gods sit in ambrosian quiet in their lofty abodes ; they are
eternal gods, inaccessible to the corroding power of Time. True, there
are some faint indications of a final change when Jupiter himself is to
make place for a juster ruler. But, in the main, the deities of classic
antiquity live on in an unbroken, immortal life ; they are, as it has been
aptly said, like so many statues ranged along a stately edifice, each statue
perfect in itself—no idea of action, of tragic complication, arising out of
the whole.
How different is the Germanic view of the Universe! There, all is
action, struggle: and the world of gods itself is from the very beginning
destined to a catastrophe.. So long as the Aesir last, they are regarded as
the girders and pillars of the Universe. But at the end of time, the world
is to be consumed in a mighty conflagration ; the heavens and the earth
stand in a lurid blaze; Asgard and Walhalla, the abodes of gods and
heroes, are doomed to destruction; the Universe breaks down in a
gigantic crash :—
The sun darkens ;
Earth in Ocean sinks ;
From Heaven fall
The bright stars.
Fire’s breath assails
The all-nourishing Tree ;
' Towering flames play
Against Heaven itself.
That cataclysm shall be preceded by—
An axe-age, a sword-age ;
Shields shall be cloven—
A wind-age, a wolf-age,
Ere the world sinks !
Only after this terrible convulsion shall have ended, will there be
introduced a new and peaceful reign, with eternal bliss. Then the white
god of peace, whose death Loki had encompassed, will triumphantly
29—5
�602
FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
return. In the Voluspa, the prophetess foresees the coming of that
golden age—
She sees arise,
A second time,
Earth from Ocean,
Beauteously green ...
Unsown shall
The fields bring forth,
All evil be amended ;
Balder shall come,
Hoder and Balder,
The heavenly gods!
A mythic system of such poetic sublimity is as much worth being
studied as that of classic antiquity, or as the Hindoo Pantheon, where we
meet with the germs of the pagan religion of all Aryans. I have pro
posed to myself, in this present essay, to treat especially of Freia, who, in
Norse mythology, appears already divided into two distinct figures,
namely: Frigg, the consort of Odin; and Freyja, the goddess of love:
whilst among the Germans, properly speaking, Freia combines the
characters of Juno and of Venus—the motherly and the erotic element.
It may be prefaced here that, in the Norse system, a duodecimal series
of gods and goddesses is clearly discernible, to whom the figure of the
fiendish Loki is to be added. Germany, so rich in tales which contain the
ancient deities under a strange disguise, has in all probability had the same
duodecimal system of polytheism. Laborious researches strongly tend to
establish that hypothesis as a fact. .1 will not enter here more deeply into
this point to show the scientific mode of procedure, but will only quote a
passage from Max Muller’s work, which bears upon it. “ It might seem
strange, indeed,” he wrote, i£ that so great a scholar as Grimm should
have spent so much of his precious time in collecting his Mahrchen, if
those Mdlivchen had only been intended for the amusement of children.
When we see a Lyell or Owen pick up pretty shells and stones, we may
be sure that, however much little girls may admire these pretty things,
this was not the object which these wise collectors had in view. Like the
blue, and green, and rosy sands which children play with in the Isle of
Wight, those tales of the people, which Grimm was the first to discover
and collect, are the detritus of many an ancient stratum of thought and
language, buried deep in the past. They have a scientific interest.”
Out of a mass of such popular tales and traditions, the fair form of the
German Venus may be reconstructed with a great degree of certainty.
There is good ground for believing that the deities whom we afterwards
find in Asgard, gradually arose out of an elementary worship—that, like other
pagan gods, they are simply the result of a successive anthropomorphic
condensation of ideas connected with the worship of the forces of Nature,
and with cosmogonic speculations. That historical elements entered into
the formation of their divine images, I readily acknowledge. In fact, it
seems to me most probable that there is a mixed origin of all mythic
�FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OE LOVE.
603
figures. At any rate, the worship of the forces of Nature appears to be
the prevailing element in their composition ; and thus the first glimpse we
obtain of Freia, or Freia-Holda, shows her under the shape of a storm
goddess—that is, as the female counterpart of Wodan, the ruler of the
cloudy region, who was originally conceived as the storm himself—as the
dtma, or Great Breath, which pervades the universe.
Now, it speaks much for an early culture of the heart among the
Germanic race, that the vague idea of a storm-goddess should have so
swiftly become refined, as it actually did, into the form of Freia-Holda,
whose very name indicates friendliness, love, and benevolent grace. The
process of shaping and polishing the images of the other divinities of the
cloudy sky was a longer one. For a considerable time they seem to have
retained their floating and somewhat less circumscribed character. Even
when they had assumed that form which, under a more developed reign of
art, would have rendered them fit for sculptured representation, popular
fancy exhibited a marked inclination towards dissolving them, ever and
anon, into their aboriginal chaotic substance. Not so with Freia. Round
her, also, the most variegated myths clustered. Moreover, the various
attributes conferred upon her, were apt to give rise to a number of special
figures, ranging—extraordinary to say—from the typification of charms to
that of hideous witchcraft, from beauty to that of its very contrast.
Nevertheless, there is, as with the Greek deities, a clear, unmarred, central
picture, which shows Freia-Holda under an aspect of well-marked, noble
beauty. The mind of the people who revered her, fondly dwelt upon the
portraiture of her attractions and virtues, always adding new traits, and
elaborating it with fresh touches. Hence the mythic circle which
surrounds the worship of Freia, is in every respect one of the richest in
German folk-lore.
Lapse of time and local tradition have certainly given us a multiform
variety of Freia-Holda images. The Gods of Homer and Hesiod were not
exactly those of ¿Eschylus and Euripides. In the same way, the Germanic
Pantheon was not at all times fitted with the identical forms. The tribal
differences among the German race also went far to give a different
colouring to the original character of a deity. But even as we have a welldefined idea of the character and attributes of Jupiter, of Juno, of Mars,
of Venus, quite irrespective of the special myths, which vary considerably
according to time and locality, so also do we possess an average image
of Wodan, of Thunar, but most particularly of Freia.
Whilst other deities are heard in the tempest that bends the rustling
tree-tops of primeval forests, or hurriedly pass along the vault of Fleaven :
the Goddess of Love gladdens more visibly the glance of men, as she
glides slowly over flowery meadows, amidst a rosy sheen.
She is represented as being of entrancing beauty, with long-flowing,
thick, golden hair of great heaviness. Her body is snow-white; she is
©lad in a white garment, which spreads a rosy effulgence. On her
forehead hangs a single tangled lock of hair. She is covered, over her
�604
FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OE LOVE.
white robe, with a light veil, from head to foot. Round her neck she
wears a chain of shining jewels, from which a light streams forth, as of the
dawn of morn. Rose-bushes and willow-trees are her favourite resorts :
willow-trees overhanging crystal lakes. Her voice, full of melodious song,
enthralls men. Rs heavenly strains transport the listener to spheres of
unknown bliss ; he is drawn along, in rapture, in spite of his will. Whereever she walks, flowers sprout up on her path, and the merry sound of
golden bells is heard tinkling. A radiance of ethereal worlds follows
her footsteps. In the depth of night, the wanderer who has lost his way,
guides his walk after her beneficent apparition. The fields over which she
passes, are blessed with fruit.
About Twelfth-night time—that is, at the winter solstice—when the
German tribes were accustomed to celebrate one of their sun-worship rites,
Freia-Holda visits the households, looking after the industry of the maidens
at the spinning-wheel. She is the goddess of amorousness, but also of
housewifely accomplishments. She has a virgin-like appearance; in her
qualities, however, the two womanly elements are blended.
Her
residence is beyond the azure skies, in a sunny region behind the clouds ;
limpid waters divide her reign from the outer world. There she dwells
in a garden, where fragrant flowers and luscious fruits grow, and the song
of birds never ceases.
On the meadows, and amidst the foliage of that garden, the souls
of the Unborn—whose protectress Freia is—are playing their innocent,
unconscious games, gathering food from the chalices of flowers, until the
heavenly messenger comes who calls them into human birth. In that
garden, there is also the Fountain of Rejuvenescence—the Jungbrunnen
or Quickborn, where the sources of life are incessantly renovated, and
decrepit age once more changes into blooming youth.
Such, with a few strokes, is the image of the Goddess whose worship
was most deeply rooted among our forefathers—so much so, that it was
found impossible to overthrow her reign except by a substitution which
preserved the substance of her attributes.
Indeed, the German Mariolatry of the middle ages is to a large degree
traceable to these previous heathen customs. There are a number of
highly coloured hymns to the Virgin, the imagery of which is almost
literally taken from similar Freia songs, fragmentary pieces of which latter
have come down to us in children’s rhymes. Many of these hymns would
be perfectly unintelligible if we did not know the poetical surroundings of the
pagan goddess. Freia, the Queen of the Heavens, the sorrowing mother
of Balder, that god of peace who met with his death through the traitor
Loki, was transfused into the Mater dolorosa, the ‘ ‘ Mother of God ” of
the Roman Church; but in this transfusion she retained much of her
original character. However, in order to create a division-line, a notion
was fostered that Freia’s day, Friday—originally the favourite marriageday—was an unlucky day ; a superstition which prevails to this moment
arqong large numbers of uneducated people. Nevertheless, there are some
�FEEIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
605
Woks and corners where, even now, Friday is regarded as the proper
wedding-day—clearly a remnant of the old religion.
It was “ das ewig Weiblichef the worship of which the Germanic race
tenaciously clung to, though under strange forms of superstition. Out of
this frame of mind grew up the chivalric view about womankind, which in
Germany had its lyric representation in the poetry of the minnesinger.
The fervour with which that view was held, often assumed the shapeof an abstract principle, leading to the most ardent evolutions of thought
and sentiment, quite irrespective of individual passion and amatory
reality. It would be an error to suppose that aristocratic chivalry had
created this whole world of woman-worship. It was a trait characteristic
of the Germanic races as such—even at a time when they were only
just emerging into historical light. The early Roman authors mention
the veneration in which womankind was held by our forefathers. The
ancient Germans ascribed to woman a kind of sacred and prophetic
character.—(Tacitus, Germ., cap. viii.) And, no doubt, the institution
of monogamy, which was but occasionally broken through by the aris
tocratic chieftains ; the influence exercised not only by the priestesses
and prophetesses, such as Aurinia and Veleda, but by the German women
in general : an influence of persuasion, of wise counsel, and of heroic,
patriotic conduct, not an influence obtained by equality of political rights
■—all this points to the fact of an early development of more tender
sentiments, of which the Freia cultus was the religious outcome.
The name of the goddess appears in different forms, as Freia, Friia,
Frea, Frigga, Frikka, Frikk. It is traceable to a root meaning “to
love.” In Gothic, frijon means “ to love; ” hence the German
“Freund,” friend; hence, perhaps, also “freien,” to woo, and Frau.
In Low German, the verb “friggen ” is still extant, in the sense of “ to
love.” Thus Freia is a loving, befriending divinity; and through the
fertilising character,' naturally connected with these qualities, as well as
through the sunny effulgence which envelops her attractive picture, she
easily merges into the form of Ceres. There are indications, at least, that
she may have been revered also as a goddess of agriculture, and that
healing powers were attributed to her. Her sister was Voila (Fulness),
of whom we get a glimpse in the famous incantation song of Merseburg
*
—a divinity evidently typifying the abundance of Nature.
I have endeavoured, out of a confusing wealth of legends, to draw
the form of Freia in clear colours, choosing that type which the goddess
must have assumed at a certain period in the early life of the German
nation, when vague conceptions about the struggle of elementary forces
had been fused into more plastic expression, whilst the process of decay
and deterioration had not yet set in, which afterwards reduced the figure
of Freia-Holda to that of a mere sorceress, nay, even hag. But how,
* It begins with the words :— •
Phol ende Uodan
Vuoron zi holza,
�606
FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
it will be asked, was the goddess of love and domestic virtue wrought from
the crude idea of a divinity of the clouds who flits along the horizon ?
As the wife of the storm-god Wodan, she is, in the early form of the
tale, chased by him, even as the cloud is by the wind. Minor cloud
goddesses, or cloud-women, environ her; in some myths they are con
ceived as horses or swans.
They are the swift-running, fast-sailing
clouds, of sombrer or of more silvery hue. The flight of the goddess from
before her consort, and the representation of her companions as mares,
remind us of the Hindoo myth, in which a similar female deity flies before
the Ruler of the skies in the shape of a mare.
Soon the tale assumes a more poetic form; It is now no longer the
Ruler of the skies who chases his stormy spouse ; but, by an inversion not
unfrequent in the process of mythological formation, it is henceforth she
who wanders, wailing and in tears, over hill and dale in search of her
long-lost lover. The lamenting wind and the rain, which were connected
with the notion of a tempest-deity, are here converted into the plaints and
the weeping of the longing goddess. The howling storm softens into
loving grief, and the somewhat dark and dim deity which represented the
first, necessarily undergoes a corresponding transfiguration.
The same is the case with her cloudy retinue. The white and silvery
specks on the welkin come to the foreground; from swans, under which
form they were at first conceived, they change into swan-virgins. Nor do
they career or sail along the sky any more. They now act as the
embellishing suite of the loving goddess, who, after having scarcely met
with her eagerly-sought friend, loses him once more, and has, Isis-like, to
start on a new heart-rending peregrination. It would appear that the
ever-repeated change of the junction and the separation of the productive
and receptive faculties in nature is here shadowed forth under the guise
of loving satisfaction and grief. In this gradual alteration of imagery,
the successive humanization of the character of the myth is clearly
discernible.
Later on—I will here remark in passing—when the period of mythic
decay arrives, the early form and'character of the swan-virgins is entirely
lost. Of the swan, nothing then remains but the foot, which is tacked on
to the body of an elf, or even a gnome. The tales in which swan’s feet
occur, are very valuable for the attentive inquirer. The imprint of these
birds' feet serves as a trace leading back to the sanctuary of the Teutonic
Aphrodite, and thus helps to reconstruct our knowledge of the once wide
spread cultus.
To look upon the sky as a “ sea of ether,” as a“ heavenly ocean”—
samudra in Sanskrit—is an ancient Vedic notion. Freia, who resides
beyond the azure sky, at the bottom of a crystal well, is, however, in
more than one sense a water-goddess, for she belonged originally to that
circle of Vana-deities who in Norse tradition are said to have been
engaged in a long and fierce struggle with the Asa-gods, until peace was
concluded between the rival and hostile dynasties of gods, when Freia, with
�FBEIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
607
some others, was received into Asgard. Whether this tale refers to two
different cosmogonic systems held by different races in pre-historic times,
or whether it marks a religious struggle among separate Germanic tribes,
it is impossible now to decide. But the original character of Freia-Holda
as a water-goddess of the Vana-circle is still apparent in the fairy tale,
current to this day among the German peasantry, about 11 Frau Hoile,”
who is represented as walking up a hill with a golden, bottomless pail, a
kind of Danaides tub, from which water incessantly flows.
In another tale, Frau Hoile is said, when it snows, to have spread and
shaken her white mantle. It is the white robe which the Germanic god
dess once wore. Again, when white, shimmering cloudlets—called to this
day “lambs” (Lämmer) in German—make their appearance, Hoile is
said to drive her flock.
The former character of the protectress of
agriculture appears in this form of the legend.
The sunny attributes of the original water-goddess linger in another
legend, which says that when there has been rain during the whole week,
it is expected to cease on Friday—Freia’s day—when Frau Hoile has to
dry her veil, which she spreads for that purpose over rose-bushes and
willows, the trees anciently sacred to that northern Venus. In the same
way, the conception of Freia as a solar deity lingers in a Low German
children’s rhyme, which, though slightly deteriorated, describes with
wonderful fidelity the heavenly abode of the goddess in all its typical
particulars. In that rhyme, the water-carrying goddess, who walks up
the hill with the golden bucket, is called “ the little sun,”—
Wo dat sönneken den berg herop geit.
In German children’s rhymes, tales, plays, and dances, the last shreds
and fragments of the old heathen system of religion are wonderfully pre
served. The rhymes constitute a sort of poetised mythology for the use
of the nursery. They are the traditionary oral catechism of a creed which
is no longer understood. The Freia worship ; the adoration of the Nomes,
the weird Sisters of Fate ; the belief in a coming downfall of Asgard;—
all these pagan notions have left their vestiges in childish ditties. The
quaint Cockchafer ditties, to which I have yet to allude, are among the
most important in this respect. It is often difficult to sort out the mere
dross which has crept in by the misapprehension of words, leading to new
associations of ideas, in which the original meaning of the myth disap
pears. Yet these infantile songs, often apparently devoid of sense, are a
rich mine, from which ancient forms of religious thought may be dug out.
One of these rhymes runs thus :
Mutter Gottes thut Wasser tragen
Mit goldenen Kannen
Aus dem goldenen Brünnei.
Da liegen Viel' drinne.
Sie legt sie auf die Kissen,
Und thät sie schön wiegen
Auf der goldenen Stiegen.
�608
FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
The “ golden buckets ” of Freia are, in this ditty, already carried by
the “ Mother of God.” The mother of Balder, of the transfixed deity
■who has died, but who will hereafter introduce a millennium of peace, is,
under Roman Catholic influence, changed into Mutter Gottes. But her
heathen paraphernalia still cling to her. She still resides in the golden,
or sunlit, well. She is still the water-goddess; and “the many that are
lying ” in her celestial abode, behind the azure waves of the ethereal
ocean, are still the Unborn who dwell in Freia’s fragrant domain.
If we follow that train of ideas, in which Freia was regarded as a
representative of warmth, of light, of fire, we find it fabled that the
souls of the Unborn, when awaiting their human embodiment, are carried
earthwards in flashes of lightning. The soul, in other words, was con
sidered a heavenly ray or flash. In connection with this idea is the
sanctification of many things and beings who, on account of their colour
being that of lightning,—namely, red,—are received into the special
service of the Goddess of the Unborn. The red-billed and red-legged
stork and the red-winged lady-bird must here specially be mentioned.
They were once nearly worshipped. A halo of inviolability still protects
in Germany the stork. The lady-bird also continues to be held, by
children at least, in some sort of friendly reverence.
The lady-bird was supposed to aid in carrying, on its red wings, the
souls of children to their terrestrial destination. The very name “ lady
bird” points to the former goddess: the “Lady” originally was the
Germanic Queen of the Heavens, for whom the Virgin Mary was afterwards
substituted. In a Low-German dialect, the lady-bird is called Mai-Katt
(May-cat), which name points to the time of the year that was sacred to
Freia, and to the cat, a team of whom drew the car of the goddess.
*
Other names are : Sonnenkalb, Sonnenkdfer, Sonnenhithnchen, SonnemcendKafer, bringing us back to Freia’s sunny domain. The lady-bird is also
called Marien-Kafer, from the Virgin Mary; or lastly, Herrgotts-Kdfer,
the Lord (Herrgott') being, in this case, substituted for the Lady, a trans
position frequently observable in mythology, the male and female forms of
the ruling spirit of the Universe (“ Woden ” and “ Frau Gaude ”) often
taking each other’s place.
There is a Suabian song, in which the lady-bird {Herrgotts-Moggela') is
called upon to fly into heaven, there to fetch, on a golden basin, a golden
baby. In other tales, children are supposed to come from a “hollow
tree ”—aus holdem Baum, or aus dem Ilollenbaum. This strange notion
of the origin of mankind from the vegetable reign, which appears in
* There is a children’s rhyme in the Austrian dialect, representing the cat as going
to Hollabrunn,—that is, the well of Holda—where she finds a baby “in the sun.”
The Freia-Holda worship, in its bearings upon a Neptunic and a solar cultus, is in
this verse given in a few quaint words :—
Hop, hop, Heserlmann!
Unsa Katz hat Stieferln an,
Rennt damit nach Hollabrunn,
Findt a Kindla in da Sunn!
�FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OE LOVE.
609
Wrious German doggrels, is to be met with also among the ancient Greeks,
aS the saying shows : “ ou yap airo bpvoQ tart iraXaityarov ovS’ airo irkrpriQ.” In
the “ hollow ” tree we have, however, unquestionably Holda’s, or Hoile’s,
¡tree, on whose branches the unborn sat.
We shall afterwards see how a similar deterioration of terms led to the
idea of Holda as a witch who was charming in the face, but hollow in the
back, similar to an excavated stem with gnarly bark. In Hessian trials of
witches, long after the middle ages, we read of “ FrawHolt ” under such a
description ; the name of Holda, Hoile, or Holt, having, by a double
assimilation of sounds, given rise to the comparison of the sorceress with
a hollow tree—holt or holz signifying wood or tree. The corruption of
words is, indeed, one of the most frequent sources of new mythical
formations.
Even as the lady-bird, so the stork also was in the service of Freia.
His red colours, too, made him the representative of lightning, of electricity,
of the principle of vivification. He helped in carrying the souls of the
unborn earthwards. His mythic name, therefore, was “Adebar” or
“ Odebar ”—carrier of children, bringer of souls. Even now, he has that
name in various German dialects ; but its meaning is obliterated or
obscured in the popular memory.
As the typification of the spark of heaven, the stork was connected
with sun-worship. Hence, he was doubly sacred to our forefathers,
and is still partly so to our village folk, who frequently place a wheel for
him on house-tops and chimneys, that he may the more commodiously
build his nest on them. In solar worship, the wheel particularlyrepresents
the orb of the sun. It is used as such in the solstice-fires (SonnenwendFeuer), which German peasants light to this day amidst great jubilation.
When the peasant boys of Upper Bavaria and the Tyrol roll their
tarred wheels, which are set on fire, in the dark night down the mountains,
making them describe most wonderful gyrations, they sing songs in honour
of their loves. There are set rhymes to that effect, which have been
handed down through generations, and in which, according to the occasion,
the name of the particular sweetheart has only to be inserted. The solar
8>nd the Aphroditean cultus of Freia were blended in early mythology;
the traces of this connection are yet visible in such boorish merryBiakings !
So late down as the sixteenth century, the Roman Church thought it
advisable to take the heathen myth of Freia’s well, within which the
unborn are playing, and of Adebar the bringer of children, under its own
protection. So-called Kindlein's-Brunnen, to which women proceeded, in
ftrder to drink the consecrated water, were erected, or changed into holy
places of the Catholic Church, in many towns and villages of Germany.
Bishop John, of Saalhausen, had a chapel built, in 1512, over one of
these old places of Freia worship. Numbers of women congregated there,
doing reverence to the “ holy and chaste virgin at the Fountain of Life ”
{Qu&ckbrunneri). The weather-vane of the chapel was a stork, who carried
�610
FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
a child in his bill—even as is still to be seen in the toys of German
children, who are much given to the notion that a fresh arrival of a brother
or sister is due to the obliging stork.
The cockchafer, too, seems to have been a hallowed insect of yore. It
is called Mai-Käfer in German, from the period of the year when it gene
rally comes first out of the ground ; and that period, as said before, was
the sacred time of the Goddess of Love. German children have a custom
of placing that beetle on their left hand, to which they generally attach it
by a thread, and then they sing a verse the meaning of which has long
puzzled investigators. Mannhardt has collected quite a variety of such
verses, all taken direct from the lips of German boys, in order to prove
that they refer to that final catastrophe when the gods and their giant
antagonists are warring with each other, and the Asa-world collapses in a
fearful tumult and universal conflagration. All the rhymes collected until
now make it extremely probable that they refer to the danger which
envelops, and finally destroys, Holda’s reign. Still, Mannhardt was not
able to give any verse in which her name is distinctly traceable.
Now, in the same way, it had formerly been rendered very probable
that all the Holda myths were Freia myths ; Holda being simply one of
the appellatives of the Goddess, which had branched out into a well-nigh
identical form. For a while, the hypothesis of the original identity of the
two forms seemed unsubstantiated. At last, however, in a Latin manu
script preserved at Madrid, the name of the deity was discovered in the
form “ Friga-Holda,” when the substantial unity of the two mythic
figures was placed beyond doubt.
Even so, I believe I can supply the missing link in regard to the
curious Cockchafer Songs, which are of such high mythological interest.
I distinctly remember a ditty sung by children, in which the cockchafer is
bidden to fly to his father (presumably Wodan, the consort of FreiaHolda),who is said to be “ at war,” and to his mother who is “in Holler
land,” where a conflagration has broken out, which consumes Holler
land :—
Maikäfer, flieg’!
Dein Vater ist im Krieg!
Deine Mutter ist im Hollerland—
Hollerland ist abgebrannt!
Iuchhe1
The latter joyful exclamation may be supposed to be the Christian
“ Io triumphe," the utterance of joy over the destruction of the heathen
Asa-world. I need scarcely remind the reader that the song which is sung
in Germany about the cockchafer, is also sung in some parts of this
country about the lady-bird. (“ Lady-bird, lady-bird, hie thy way home !
Thy house is on fire I Thy children all roam ! ” Or : “ Lady-bird, lady
bird, fly away home ! Your house is on fire ! Your children will burn! ”
See, for instance, Jamieson’s Northern Antiquities.')
In the folk-lore still current in Germany, the name of “ Freia ” is only
�FREÏA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
611
preserved yet among the people of the Ukermark and the Altmark. Other
wise, we meet with it in some Suabian, Franconian, Alemannic, and Lower
Saxon designations of villages, and different places, where her worship
once flourished. Thus there are several Frickenhausen, situated near
lakes—quite in keeping with the myth which makes the Goddess haunt
the water, even as Aphrodite rose from the waves of the sea. In other
parts of Germany the goddess is called Holda ; Frau Gode, Gauden, or
Gaue (that is, Woden’s wife, the “W” being changed into “G”—even
as war, in old-German werra, becomes, in French, guerre'); or Frau
Hera, or Harke ; Mother Rose ; Perchta, or Bertha. All these seemingly
distinct fairy figures arose from the personification of Freia’s attributes
and appellatives.
There is a multiform mass of legends, of a mixed heathen and Chris
tian character, in which the image of Freia is recognisable under the
oddest masks. As “Mother Rose” she has been received into the
legendary circle of the Roman Church. But why, many will wonder,
should the Virgin pass under the name of Mother Rose ? I forego
entering into the etymological explanation, which traces that name to a
cognomen of Freia, and will only mention an old pagan sorcery song,
clearly referable to that goddess, which says :—•
Kam eine Jungfer aus Engelland;
Eine Rose trug sie in ihrer Hand.
This “Engelland” is not, as some misunderstand it, England, but
the land of the white elfs, the fairyland of Freia. The “ Jungfer,” or
Virgin, who reigns over it, became the Virgin Mary; and the favourite
flower of the German goddess of love was converted into a symbol of the
Madonna.
As Mother Rose, Freia appears in a Christianised garb. But under
the names of Holda, Gode, Hera, and Perchta, she preserves, in the
tales, her heathen character as a fay—in a good or an evil sense. Most
astonishing are the transformations she undergoes under these various
appellations. Even as the storm-god Wodan, who led the departed
heroes into Walhalla, became changed, after the introduction of Chris
tianity, into a wild huntsman who careers along the sky with his ghostly
retinue, so Freia-Holda also becomes a wild huntress, who hurries round
at night with the unfortunate souls. Through this same association with
hobgoblin devilry, she is converted into a Mother Haule, or Ilaule-mutter,
a howling utterer of mournful wails about the dead. By way of direct
contrast, the once white-robed goddess with the snow-white body changes,
as Hera, into a white dove, a typification of loving innocence. At a first
glance, such quid pro quo's and metamorphoses into the very opposite
would appear incredible; but he who has studied the effect of misapprehended words and sounds upon the untutored mind of man will not be
astonished at these changeling substitutions.
The way in which the souls of the unborn were supposed to be called
from Freia s garden, is to this day represented in various children’s games
�612
FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
in Germany, by words and expressive mimicry.
In the Perchta, or
Bertha myths, that linger in some secluded valleys, the crowd of the
unborn still appear as a suite of elfs, called Heimchen, who follow the
goddess. The Perchta legends are of a somewhat wild—occasionally
Bacchantic and Korybantic—-character, in which the gloomy element is,
however, not wanting. The goddess, who once typified the purest beauty,
assumes in them rather motley and multiform shapes : there are beautiful
Perchtas as well as “ wild- Perchteln,” the latter with a satyr-like appear
ance, running about with dishevelled hair. The Bacchantic and Korybantic
character of the goddess appears even from a passage in Luther’s writings.
He calls her, not Perchta, but with her softer name, “Frau Hulda,”
makes a Dame Nature of her, who rebels against her God, and describes
her as “ donning her old rag-tag livery, the straw-harness, and singing
and dancing whilst fiddling on the violin ” (liengt um sick iren alten trewdelmarkt, den stroharnss, Jiebt an und scharret daher mit irer geigen). The
straw-harness may be supposed to symbolize the former character of the
Teutonic Cythere as a Ceres, a goddess of productiveness and fertility in
every sense.
Representations of the Perchta myth have until lately been going on,
at stated times of the year, among the peasantry of Southern Germany;
and are, no doubt, still in vogue here and there. Near Salzburg, a
“Perchtel” is represented, in such masquerades, with a sky-blue dress,
wearing a crown of tinkling bells, and singing in highly jubilant manner.
The goddess, or fairy, here shows something of a vulgivaga character; a
trait cropping up already in the Eddie Hyndlu-Song.
The decay of the Freia myth may be said to have begun when her
powers of entrancing men made her to be looked upon as a dangerous
sorceress, as the incarnation of witchcraft. Still, before the goddess
simply became a hag—an ole Moder Tarsclie, that is, Old Mother Sorceress
—popular fancy wove some charming legends about her magic qualities.
On the banks of the river Main, there are Hulli-steine, Holda’s stones, or
hollow stones, on which a fairy form sits at night, bewailing the loss of
her betrothed one who has left her. There she sits, sunk in sorrow,
shedding tears over the rock until it is worn down and becomes hollowed
out. In another Franconian tale, the bewitching fay sits on a rock in the
moon-light, when the bloom of the vine fills the mountains and the valleys
with sweet ffagrancy; she is clad in a white, shining garment, pouring
forth heart-enthralling songs. The children, in those parts of the country,
are warned not to listen to the seductive voice, but ardently to pray their
pater-noster, lest they should have to remain with “ Holli ” in the wood
until the Day of Judgment. From this legend, Heine took the subject
of his Lorelei song, transplanting it from the Main to the Rhine. Holda
appears, in this Franconian version, with faintly-indicated surroundings
of a Bacchic nature ; and her abode is described as “in the wood,
whither many pagan deities were relegated after Christianity had obtained
the upper-hand.
�FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
613
Some myths of later growth convert Freia into a “Venus ” who has
lost all the attributes of domestic virtue, connected with the earlier image
of the goddess ; nay, into a sort of grim Lakshmi, half Venus, half infernal
deity, who sits in a mountain cave, where there is much groaning of souls
suffering damnation. Other legends, though painting her as a she-devil,
do not depict the “ Venusinne ’’-grotto as a place of torment, but rather
as one of magic attractiveness, from which even the repentant sinner, who
has been allowed to leave it for a pilgrimage to Rome, cannot break loose
for ever.
This view of the abode of Venus we get in the famed
Tannhäuser legend, about which we possess various ancient poems, dating
from the fifteenth century.
The identity of the German Venus legends with the Freia-Holda
cycle is proveable from various facts. There is a “Venus-Berg” in
Suabia, situated close to a “ Hollenhof.” In a Swiss version of the
Tannhäuser song, Frau Venus is called “Frau Frene,” a name evoking
the memory of Frea or Freia. The IIorseel-Berg, near Eisenach, an old
place of Freia worship, was especially pointed out as containing the under
ground abode of Venus. And in the same way as Wodan’s wife, when
she left the mountain at midnight, as a wild huntress, with her army of
souls, was preceded by a grey-bearded man, the trusty Eckhart, who with
a white staff warned off all people not to obstruct the path of the goddess ;
so also Venus, when she leaves the mountain, is preceded by the trusty
Eckhart. The identity is therefore fully established.
To complete the picture of strange transformations, I ought to speak
of Freia-Bertha becoming the Ahn-frau and the ueisse Frau of German
princely families and royal castles. The presiding female deity of the
Asa-dynasty is changed into the ancestress of kings who, with the pride of
rulers by right divine, trace their pedigree to celestial origin. In the same
way, the white-robed goddess, who once exercised a powerful influence, is
metamorphosed into a spectral “ woman in white,” whose appearance
foretells the coming of great events, or is even a harbinger 'of royal death.
I will not treat here of the curious chapter of Berthas, ancestresses- of
kings, who were represented as swan-footed, flat-footed, large-footed, or
club-footed, a characteristic which brings us back to the bevy of swan
damsels who surrounded Freia. I will only, in conclusion, speak of the
strange transfiguration of Holda into a Hel, of a goddess of Love into
a goddess of Death, whose name afterwards furnished the designation for
the infernal region, or hell.
And here it is first to be observed that Hel, the Germanic mistress of
the under-world, originally was a mother of life, like Holda, as well as a
mother of death. Her natne, which comes from lielen or hehlen—in
Latin celare—indicates that she is a deity who works in darkness and
secrecy. Hence, she represents, in the beginning, the forces of nature
that are active beneath the hiding soil. Consequently, she is not, properly
speaking, destructive ; she rather aids in nature’s rejuvenation. She
typifies the idea of life emerging from death, and of death being only a
�614
FREIA-HOLDA, THE TEUTONIC GODDESS OF LOVE.
transformation of life. In the Edda, Hel is half dark or livid, half of the
hue of the human skin (bld half en half me# horundur lit); similar to the
Hindoo Bhavani or Maha Kali, the mother of nature and life, the goddess
who creates and destroys, the representative of love and of death, whose
face alternately is radiant with beauty, like that of Aphrodite, or expressive
of hideous terrors. In her beneficent quality, Bhavani carries a lotos
flower in her hand, even as Freia the rose ; and the waters of the Ganges
murmur her praise, as crystal lakes may have done that of the Germanic
deity. In her destroying and avenging character, the Hindoo goddess is
Kali the bloodthirsty, who rides a hellish horse. So Holda is converted
into a fiendish Hel.
Thus the images of life and death, of creation and destruction, of
beauty and of horrors, touch each other in a mysterious twilight. It is
an idea which may be followed through many religious systems ; for is
not Apollo also, the sunny'god, a typification of the pernicious power as
well as of ideal beauty ? and does not his very name bear the trace of the
destructive force ascribed to him ? The deep meaning contained in these
contradictory combinations attaches also to the mythological fancies of our
ruder forefathers ; and though it may sometimes be difficult to grasp the
sense that is enclosed in the veiling legends, they have, irrespective of
the philosophical significance which they struggle to express, a poetical
merit of their own, often exhibiting a bold and many-coloured imagery,
and a power of fashioning forms, such as we are wont to admire in the
products of classic antiquity.
KARL BLIND.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Freia-Holda, the Teutonic goddess of love
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Blind, Karl [author]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 599-614 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the Cornhill Magazine 25 (May 1872). Attribution from Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
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[Smith, Elder & Co.]
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[1872]
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G5349
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Mythology
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Conway Tracts
Freia-Holda
Germany
Goddesses
Mythology
Paganism
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66
Sbije JLeal Jjmpn' ®énmâ.
Some time has gone by since M. Michel Lévy issued, under the auspices
of M. Taine, a posthumous work which threw unusual light on the career
and peculiar temperament of one of the most remarkable personalities of
this century. In France, wearied by intestine and foreign warfare, the
sickened mind of the intellectual public has, for three long years, given
unmistakeable tokens of transient sterility ; the living appear momentarily
incapable of healthy productions. Authors themselves are full of the
national cares, political fever swamps that moral repose which is needed
for meditation, and readers are fain to be content with the literary treasures
of the past, whence a recent influx of posthumous works, of more or less
interest, in the shape of private correspondences. The Parisians have
had before them letters of Lamartine, letters of Sainte Beuve, and of
others, all of which afforded a valuable insight into the real character of
their writers. None, however, deserved more study than those of the late
Prosper Mérimée, and critics of both countries have paid a deserving
homage to these confidences of a complex genius. The Revue des Deux
Mondes and the Quarterly Review have in turns given exhaustive treatments
of the subject. Nor should we venture on re-opening a field of speculation
that has called forth such universal notice, but that, in our own opinion,
there is further room for interesting remarks, mainly owing to the scope
within which the reviewers of the Lettres à une Inconnue have seen fit to
remain. Far from us be the presumptuous thought of analysing better
what others have analysed so ably ; our meaning is that the work has
been considered rather in regard to its intrinsic merits as a literary pro
duction than used as it ought to be, namely, as a key to a curious psycho
logical study. Some have deprecated the laxity of morals the writer be
trays in more than one instance ; others have taken seriatim divers remarks
on men and things, apparently forgetting that many hidden thoughts that
have crossed the minds of most men are consigned to intimate correspon
dence—thoughts the author would have been loth to affirm in public ; and,
to the best of our knowledge, none have allotted to Mérimée the place to
which he has a right. Our purpose would be to repair this omission.
f The readers of Mérimée’s critics may still ask in vain : “ Who was he ?
A vulgar sceptic, or a typical incarnation of a time ; a man of genius, or a
distinguished lettré ? What was his influence on his contemporaries, and
how will posterity estimate him ? And how is it that Mérimée attained
celebrity of a peculiar kind which far surpasses that of geniuses superior
�THE REAL PROSPER MÉRIMÉE.
67
to his ? ” Perhaps the following observations may be useful towards a
satisfactory answer.
It was not without reason that the author of the Life of Jesus recently
described Prosper Mérimée as the Petronius of his epoch. He was not
merely an eminent man of letters of the ordinary calibre, a novelist, a
savant ; he was something more, a type of the modern race of Frenchmen,
a man whose adamantine nature was the receptacle of all doubts and dis
beliefs. Together with these two illustrious sceptics, Sainte Beuve and
Stendhal, he made up a trio which might well have passed for the treble
incarnation of haughty and resigned despair. Sainte Beuve possessed a
store of amiability which daubed his scepticism with a pleasant glaze of
varnish. Stendhal was, like all those who have scrutinised the vices of
human nature with a magnifying glass, of a dark and desponding mood,
corrected by considerable tenderness of heart ; but he, Prosper Mérimée,
stood an image of perfection in character, a strong, invulnerable sceptic,
whose acquired toughness was proof alike against love and hatred—a
human Mephistopheles, not of the capacity of Goethe’s, but rather like
the evil spirit such as he has been personified by a famous singer—
polished, refined, elegant ; stabbing with daggers of the finest steel and
richest work, darting a murderous epigram in the choicest language,
working the same havoc as the bitter spirit of German creation, but
killing, tearing, and wounding with the exquisite politeness of a perfect
gentleman. Having so far guarded himself against the invasion of
banality and shown the teeth to most men, he tried hishand at everything,
attained perfection in most things, threw them up in disgust after becom
ing their master, and one day awoke one of the most forlorn of human
creatures. And still Prosper Mérimée was not born what he was here
after. Such sentiments as he possessed and prided on do not issue from
the cradle. A man gifted with the choicest faculties, as Mérimée, must
have the embryo of high qualities of heart ; and if his judge will take the
trouble to follow the incidents of the first years of his life, he will soon find
singular instances in support of this. More than any other, a youthful
creature owning to an unusual degree the faculty of observation should be
attended to by his educators, for, if we judge by the present instance, the
slightest lesson wrongly given and erroneously understood will turn a
precocious child into a dire path of thought. M. Taine tells us, in his
interesting preface, that when he'was nine years old Mérimée was scolded
by his parents for some trifling breach of manners, and dismissed from the
drawing-room in an agony of shame. "While still in tears at the door, he
heard his friends laughing and saying : “ Poor child ! he thinks we are
very angry.” Even at that tender age he was revolted at the idea of
being made a fool of and deceived, and henceforth he pledged himself to
repress his sensibility, to be constantly on guard against enthusiasm, and
effusion, and to speak and write as if in the presence of a harsh and bitter
hearer.
To this petty occurrence, which would have left but little impression
�68
THE REAL PROSPER MÉRIMÉE.
on other children, may, on Mérimée’s own admission, be traced the
origin of the programme he set to himself to fight his way through
life. lienee he studied a part, and applied his rich gifts of intellect
to a manufacture of an artificial self. He curbed his passions, tastes,
and desires under a strong hand ; he had a sensitive heart ; he repressed
his sensitiveness so that it did not seem to exist ; later on the arti
ficial process got the better of him, and it was really suppressed alto
gether. His disposition naturally tended to affection ; this he concealed
in the same way—not that he was yet irreclaimable, but, to quote
„ Taine’s happy metaphor, certain race-horses are so well bred by their
masters that when they are in hand they dare not indulge in the
slightest gambol. So that he entered the lists clad in an inward cuirass
which the contact of society was to harden more and more, and bent
on regarding the world much as one contemplates a forest full of mur
derous robbers. He looked about him, and bitterly disposed as he was
he applied himself more to the observation of what is contemptible in
human nature than to an appreciation of its nobler sides. His remarks
justified preconceived ideas, and from the first, as he said himself, quoting
Hamlet, man pleased him not, nor woman neither. Let us say, however,
that his contempt for his fellow creatures came not from a personal and
disparaging comparison with himself, for his letters to the unknown lady
in whom he confided show that the shortcomings he despised in others
he equally derided in himself. One of his subjects of ironical commentary
was that throughout his life he was credited for qualities not his own, while
he was blamed for defects which he had not. With such thoughts there
was nothing surprising that he should adopt as a first fundamental maxim
the paradox that speech is given to man to conceal his yearnings, and, as
a second principle, Talleyrand’s recommendation to guard oneself against
generous movements because they are usually the best.
A natural consequence of this moral perversion was that he affected, in
the process of writing, theories of a totally different cast from those of others.
First of all he examined with a critical eye the manner then predominant
among the finest writers France has produced in this age. The Romantique
renovation was in full efflorescence ; Mérimée set at work over dishes of the
same taste. A story is told of an original who stopped to look at one of the
hottest street fights of the Revolution of July 1830; a National guard
was obstinately firing on the Royal Suisses without the slightest effect,
and the stranger was looking on in apparent disgust. Presently he walked
up to the unsuccessful marksman, took the rifle from his hands, and
volunteered to show how the work should be done ; he fired and one of
the Suisses fell dead. As he attempted to return the rifle to its owner,
and as the other urged him to keep the weapon he could use so well,
the stranger gravely replied : “No, thank you ; I am a royalist ; it isn’t
my opinion.” Likewise Prosper Mérimée joined the Romantiques ; he
wrote Spanish sword and cloak comedies, which he gave as translations
from the text of an unknown genius, thereby mystifying the public and
�THE REAL PROSPER MÉRIMÉE.
69
proving that it was in his power to affect the tone and style of the new
school as successfully as the best, although “ it was not his opinion.
He
tried the trick once more with the same felicitous result in La Guzla. And
then he gave up romanticism, and took to writing according to his own
ideas, after contemptuously observing that such masterpieces as he had
achieved only demanded the knowledge of a word or two of a foreign
language, a sketch-book of a foreign country, and a tolerable style. Nothing
could be more withering for himself and others.
Prosper Mérimée seems throughout his existence to have been filled
with that restlessness which according to Mr. Forster affected Charles
Dickens, although his studious care was to conceal any sign of such a
disposition, and to appear a man of marble. He did certainly devote
enormous study to French literature, and especially to contemporaneous
productions, but marvellously keen at detecting the strings which set the
machine in motion, ever intent on scanning the details, he ignored
their real beauty of ensemble, lost sight of the pregnant sides of a work,
and soon wearied of the best. It had been the same with Art; a painter
of no little ability, he had become convinced of the sterility of the brush,
because the purely mechanical side of art had no secret for him. It was
the same reason which induced him to sift the delicacies of six languages,
and ransack their literature : occasionally he brought forth a gem and set
it in French, adding the perfection of his style to some pregnant novelette
of Ivan Tourguenef’s; but eventually he wearied of polyglotism too, and
deeming nothing among the living worthy of notice, he turned his eyes to
the past, and turned the final leaf of his literary existence, that of a man
who could never apply his talent to the services of a definite idea, who
had every natural element to be happy and illustrious, and who failed in
being the one and but just attained the other. Mérimée henceforward
wasted priceless faculties in artistic attempts which could only be entitled
to the place of curiosities of literature. He doted on imparting life to
things of the past; he liked to transfer himself, like Théophile Gautier,
into the midst of dead civilisations, constructing an admirable story on
the sight of an inscription, a ruin, using his acuteness of observation in
the framing of types to people the archaic visions he indulged in. He
even went so far as to observe his surroundings merely with the purpose
of guessing by means of induction the gait and ideas of their pre
decessors. In this ungrateful labour he has shown well enough what he
was capable of doing if he had applied himself to the serious analysis of
contemporary characters. Without possessing the intensity of observation
of a Balzac, his intellectual condition might have entitled him to a place
but just below this great master. And it is strange and painful to follow
him as he sedulously narrows his own scope in art.
All the reasons we have adduced above fatally drove him into the
rankest egotism which was ever the bane of a writer. His historical
works no one, not excluding himself probably, took a very great in
terest in; they are cold and stately—comparable for the matter, if the
�70
THE REAL PROSPER MÉRIMÉE.
metaphor be permitted to us, to water contained in the finest Bohemian
glass. As to his essays in fiction it is vastly different. When he has
deigned to remain in his own time, and to pick out his personages and
action from modern society, his productions have always been admirable
both in matter and form. His process was much like Stendhal’s. As he
wrote for the select (if indeed he ever wrote for the edification of any one)
he disdained the imbroglio of commonplace sentiments, the banalities of
ordinary conversation ; he obviously aimed at concentration and abridg
ment, at probing the acts of man by certain telling features of human
nature, and, in fact, at leaving much for the reader to guess by suppressing
what vulgarities are wearisome to the “ profound few.” This kind of
work offers equal dangers and advantages ; it excludes two thirds of the
general readers who may be wanting in the quick sagacity requisite for
the propel comprehension of the author’s process, although in the main
they may be qualified to appreciate the essence of his work ; further, it
circumscribes the repute of a writer in a narrow circle, and, moreover, such
style always tends to fall into obscurity and enigma. On the other hand,
the omission of a great many strictly useless details preserves a work
from the caprices of fashion and change of customs, and Carmen and
Colomba, free as they are from descriptions of transient and superficial
interest, and consisting solely of the condensed description of passions
and impulses that are eternal, will be eternally useful, just as Shakspeare and Milton are. These masterpieces are but few in num her, a,nd
they serve rather to show what their conceiver might have done than
what he has done.
We have now done with Mérimée until we find the new and charac
teristic Lettres à une Inconnue. Their literary merits are of secondary
consideration ; suffice it to say, in departing from the subject once for
all, that their form, wit, and ingeniosity are paramount. As to the In
connue, there is no need to inquire after her. What is thoroughly engros
sing is the perusal between the lines of the desolate story of unhappiness
the great sceptic relates. There are expressions for every disgust, words
eloquent in their brevity expressive of deceptions, weariness, ennui ; bitter
estimations of men, impeachments of what he calls human imbecility ;
contemptuous allusions to his best friends, and topping all a clear disbelief
in goodness, and-those noble commonplaces, honour, love, chivalry, ab
negation. It is worthy of special note that Mérimée is withal open to
superstition, several instances of this being manifested in different,
letters ; so strong is the yearning of every one towards a faith, whatever
it may be. We have found but one good note* in the two volumes of this
The passage we allude to has been quoted by the Quarterly Review as very
cynical. The opinion we hold being somewhat different, the passage should be given:
“ I went to a ball given by some young men of my acquaintance to which all the
figurantes of the Opera were invited. These women are mostly stupid ; but I have
remarked how superior they are in moral delicacy to the men of their class. There
is only a single vice which separates them from other women—poverty.” The Quar
terly goes on to remark that a man must be far gone in cynicism to hazard such a
�THE REAL PROSPER MÉRIMÉE.
71
correspondence ; as to the harsh ones, they abound; on Frenchmen espe
cially his satire never tarries : “ The greatest nation in the world is made
up of a set of scapegraces, inconsistent, anti-artistic, illogical, bigoted,
and not even possessing the religion that comes from the heart.” He
WM a senator of the Empire, not out of any particular liking for a
dynasty or a principle, but because, as he said, “ tyrants had over Re
publicans the advantage of washing their hands; ” in his official capacity
he was once called upon to make a speech in the Senate, and as it was his
first public address he felt rather timorous. “I gained courage,” he
writes to the Inconnue, “ when I bethought myself that I was speaking to
two hundred fools.” On another occasion he relates to the same person
how, answering a toast to European Literature at a dinner of the Literary
Association, presided over by Lord Palmerston, he gravely spoke nonsense in
English for a quarter of an hour, which seemed to be highly appreciated
by the so-called learned men who listened. Further on he writes: “ You
Cannot imagine my disgust for our present society ; it seems as if it tried,
by its stupid combinations, to augment the mass of annoyances and troubles
which are necessary to the order of the world.” Speaking of Englishmen,
he says that individually they are stupid, but as a whole admirable.
Few things, in fact, find grace in his eyes. On marriage, he says that
nothing is more repulsive : “ The Turks, who bargain for a wife as for a
fat sheep, are more honest than we Europeans who daub over this vile
transaction with a varnish of hypocrisy but too transparent.” It may be seen
at this stage how the scepticism of the first days has begot a cynic. He
might have sought happiness in union with a lovely and amiable woman
(for he was a great favourite with the sex); but he discarded marriage and
women by principle. Much of this insensibility is revealed in the following
lines : “ The other day I went out boating on the Seine. There was a
quantity of small sailing-boats filled with all kinds of people about the
river. Another large one was freighted by a number of women (of those
of the bad tone). All these boats had gone to the shore, and from the
largest emerged a man about forty years old, who had a drum, and who
drummed away for his own amusement. While I was admiring this
lubber’s musical dispositions, a woman of about twenty-three comes up to
Mm, calls him a monster, says that she followed him from Paris, and that
it would fare ill with him unless he admitted her to his party. All this
was going on ashore, our own boat being twenty yards away. The man
with the drum was drumming away while the woman was remonstrating,
and he at last told her with much coolness that he would have nothing of
th® kind. Upon this, she ran to the boat furthest from the shore and
jumped into the water, thereby splashing us abominably. Although she
paradox, and. that the “ Unknown ” must have been singularly destitute in feminine
dignity and self-respect could she have endured to be told that she was only separated
from such a class of women by poverty. We hope the “ Unknown ” did endure it
and approve of it, for, unless the Quarterly has entirely misunderstood Mérimée’s
pseaning, no worse construction could be put on a very sensible remark.
�72
THE REAL PROSPER MÉRIMÉE.
had extinguished my cigar, indignation did not prevent me, nor my
friends, from saving her before she had swallowed a glassful. The hand
some object of her despair hadn’t stirred, and he muttered between his
teeth, ‘ Why take her out if she wanted to drown herself ? ’ . . . The
question to which this incident gives rise in my mind is, why are the most
indifferent men the most beloved ? That is what I should like you to tell
me, if you can.”
Such was his opinion on feminine love. Believing as he did that a
man - is no longer cherished from the moment he shows any affection for
the woman he distinguishes from others, Mérimée probably deemed that
the best way of avoiding misery and pain was not to love at all. Perhaps
the unknown might have replied to his query that she used precisely the
means alluded to to win her illustrious correspondent’s heart ; but in any
case it may be affirmed that she did not succeed.
II.
It is within the present writer’s recollection to have met Prosper
Mérimée at one of those Parisian cafés which form the resort of the pith
of the literary world. The place was generally well attended by famous
men, but it was never more crowded than when Mérimée happened to be
there. His brilliancy of conversation, the effective manner in which he
poured out the overflowing of his wit, made of him one of the most desir
able men of Paris. On this occasion a young sculptor of talent was
holding forth on artistic theories, and he came to speak of glory with the
fervency of an adept. “ La gloire !” said Mérimée, with a caustic smile.
“ Do you then believe in glory, young man ? ”
This exclamation remained in our memory as the dejected profession
of faith of a wasted life. Such, indeed, was Prosper Mérimée’s ; and it
can be safely affirmed that this unfortunate result was provoked by
counteraction against nature, and the valuable information afforded by
his correspondence goes to support this view. Throughout the emptiness
of his life prevails. To sum up, he sifted languages, literatures, and cha
racters ; he studied his species in all parts of the globe ; and, as a just
retribution for spurning all subjects of study after devoting his attention
to each, instead of drawing consequences from the synthesis of things, he
sickened, and looked about him for something to love or to like. Failing
in his endeavours, he led the brilliant and sterile life of a delicate
désœuvré, and listlessly wandered through the drama of life, obviously with
out object, and certainly without desire. What was the use for him to
apply his energy to some great work ; to labour for a definite enterprise ?
He was a sceptic, and much of a cynic too ; his soul was. as well closed to
narrow egotism as to a noble faith in the perfectibility of human attempts.
Vanity he had none ; he cared not a whit for glory. If he achieved a few
masterpieces it was for his amusement, not for others—he despised
others too much for that ; and in his sometimes heroic contempt, the
�THE REAL PROSPER MÉRIMÉE.
73
trace he would leave of his passage in this world troubled him but
slightly. 'As most men who look upon the details of life too critically, he
had lost sight of the good features of human nature only to give para
mount importance to its vices. He commenced life on the defensive :
suspicion bred bitterness ; bitterness bred scepticism, scepticism bred the
cynic. It is clear that such negative sentiments were not primarily in his
heart, and that they derived their origin from mistaken notions. It is also
clear that this singular man’s heart never thrilled with love, and that a
fatal distrust, on which we have commented, deprived him of a solace
which might have made of him a far different individual from the polite,
caustic, stoically desponding Mérimée, whom Renan gives as a type of a
period. The “ Unknown” was merely the recipient of those confidences
which every mind has an irrepressible tendency to unfold ; but that alone
is no proof of amorous affection. Proud as he was, Mérimée doubtless
selected her as the fittest person to preserve his secrets ; and perhaps
another deception might be added to the others, could he know that
even this trust has been betrayed. Howbeit, the Inconnue was no more
than a confidante. She might perchance have been more had she liked ;
and her own letters to Mérimée would show if she is responsible for
preventing a very distinguished man from seeing clearly through his mis
takes, and reconciling himself with his fellow-creatures.
This, however, is merely speculation, and one should only reason by
facts on such delicate ground. What facts we have lead us to point to
Mérimée as the most unhappy of men. In the tumult of court life, amidst
the uproar of the gayest society, he was more forlorn than in the solitude
of a desert. His heart was dry to the core ; the eventualities of daily
existence were to him as the phases of a nightmare, in which he was
forced into playing a part although convinced of its vanity. He must,
indeed, have longed to cast off the clay as well as his official gear. His
death was in unison with the mournfulness of his life : it occurred shortly
after the overthrow of the Second Empire. France was going to pieces ;
no one thought of a single individual in this whirling tempest, and
Mérimée’s demise was not more noticed than a simple soldier’s. He
expired in the arms of two faithful English friends. Two hours before
breathing his last he wrote the note which closes the second volume of
his correspondence. He was borne silently to the grave, momentarily
forgotten.
No doubt he would have approved of this oblivion and
indifference.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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Title
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The real Prosper Merimee
Creator
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Barrere, Camille Eugene Pierre
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 66-73 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Publisher
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[Smith, Elder & Co.]
Date
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[{1874]
Identifier
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G5348
Subject
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Literature
France
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The real Prosper Merimee), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
French Literature-19th Century
Prosper Merimee
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gbbenx Snrmg.
Had someone stood under the crystal dome of the first great Exhibition,
and foretold that in a quarter of a century after that inauguration of the
millennium of common sense, England would incur the denunciations of
the Hebrew prophets on a land of wizards and necromancers, and of
those who “ seek after familiar spirits,” how merrily should we have
laughed the absurd prediction to scorn ! Not much more attention
should we have paid to it even had we known that just three years before
(in 1848) Miss Kate Fox, of Hydesville, State of New York, at the mature
age of nine, had received monitions from the spirit world in the form of a
hail-storm of raps on the walls and floors of her abode. It seemed,
indeed, scarcely more likely that the juvenile “ medium” should open a
new dispensation for Europe and America, than that her contemporary little
visionaries (or naughty little impostors, as the case may be) of La Salette
should send half France on pious pilgrimage to the spot where they saw,
or did not see, the Virgin. The lesson that great events may spring from
small causes, and that the foolish things of the world not seldom confound
the wise, is, however, by no means a new one for mankind, and we have
now very plainly to reckon with Spiritualism as one of the prominent
facts of the age. We will not take upon ourselves to guess how many
disciples it may boast in America before these sheets pass to the press ;
a few millions, more or less, seem to count for little in the statements of its
triumphant advocates ; but here, in England, there are evidences enough
of its flourishing condition. In nearly every company may be met at least
one lady or gentleman who looks grave and uncomfortable when the
subject is treated with levity ; confesses to a conviction that there is
“ something in it; ” and challenges disproof of miracles which she or he
has actually beheld, heard, and handled. Not seldom are to be seen
persons in a later stage of faith, easily recognisable by wild and vision
seeking eyes, and hands and feet in perpetual nervous agitation, who
take no interest in other conversation, but eagerly pour out narratives,
arguments, and appeals concerning Spiritualism whenever they can make
an opportunity introducing the subject. Even the pulpit is no longer free
from spiritualistic interpretations of religious mysteries ; and the periodical
press, which long confined itself to such attacks and refutations as those
by Lord Amberley, in the Fortnightly Review, by an anonymous writer in
the New Quarterly Magazine, and by a well-known physiologist in the
Quarterly Review (October, 1871), has now opened its columns to two
very remarkable papers in its defence, by Dr. Alfred Wallace (Fortnightly
�MODERN SORCERY.
37
Review, May and June, 1874). This double essay, indeed, by the dis
tinguished traveller and fellow-originator with Dr. Darwin of the
“Doctrine of Natural Selection,” may be justly said to mark an epoch in
the progress of the movement, and we can scarcely do wrong in taking it
as the first serious challenge to us from competent authority, to give to
the marvels of Spiritualism a fair and full investigation.
To many readers, indeed, we believe it has not unsuccessfully so ap
pealed ; causing them to hesitate as to whether they were justified in
holding back any longer from enquiry, even while the process remains
to them eminently distasteful. In view of such a dilemma it may be
not inopportune to discuss briefly, not the Evidences of Spiritualism, but
the preliminary question—Whether we are intellectually or morally bound
to examine and weigh those evidences ? Spiritualists, to do them justice,
very candidly warn us that the task is no trivial one to be performed in a
hurry. They scoff indignantly at the notion that five unsuccessful
séances (in one of which Di Vernon appeared as an historical character,
and, in another, Socrates with a straight nose and a disinclination to
speak Greek) were sufficient to warrant Lord Amberley in pronouncing
Spiritualism an imposition ; and they bid us admire men who, like Dr.
Sexton, are prepared to spend fifteen years in inquiry before the
“ needful evidence ” to convince them is vouchsafed/' To sift and
collate the mass of evidence already produced ; to cross-examine the
witnesses, and weigh the value of their individual testimony ; finally,
to institute the requisite actual experiments at séances innumerable,
would be to exceed the labours of Hercules, and repeat the weariness
of the Tichborne trial. It is not too much to insist that excellent
reason should be shown for the devotion of so much time and toil to such
an end ; nor need we be alarmed at the adoption by Spiritualists of the
tone of high moral indignation against indolent non-inquirers, natural to
all persons who think they are advocating some important discovery.
Few amongst us who have reached middle life regret that we did not
obey the solicitations of early friends to devote the years of our prime to
investigations of the “ discoveries ” of St. John Long, Spurzheim, and
Reichenbach,—to testing the therapeutic agencies of tar-water, “ tracttors,” and brandy and salt ; or nicely studying the successive solutions
triumphantly propounded of the problem of human flight and of perpetual
motion. We have borne with tolerable equanimity to be called hasty
and prejudiced in these matters ; and we may now endure the taunt of
Spiritualists that we display indifference to truths possibly indefinitely
valuable to the human race. Some limits there must needs be to the
duty of inquiring into everything proposed to us as a subject of inves
tigation ; and those limits we may perhaps in the present case find in the
nature of the subject, the methods of the investigation to be pursued,
and the results which follow in the contingency of such inquiries proving
successful.
Quarterly Review, May 1874, p, 651.
�38
MODERN SORCERY.
The propensity which ethnologists attribute, especially to Touranian
races, to seek after intercourse with inferior grades of spiritual existence, or
(to give it the old name) the passion for Sorcery, is one which seems to
flourish like the olive, the Phoenix of trees. Cut down, or burnt down,
in one land or age, it springs up and branches forth afresh in the next;
and while the main tendency of human thought seems constantly towards
a stricter monotheism, a counter eddy of the current for ever fills and
re-fills the invisible world with legions of imps, ghosts, and lying spirits,
meaner and more puerile than human nature in its basest condition.
Fifty years ago such delusions seemed to have ebbed out, and the few
writers who dealt with them, spoke of them as things of the past; and
assured us that, save in some Tartar tent in the East, or Gipsy one in
the West, magic and incantations would be heard no more. The future
historian of the England of to-day may truly relate that such incantations
were more common in London in 1874 than they were in Palestine when
the witch of Endor deluded Saul; or in Byzantium, when Santabaren
restored his long lost son to the arms of the Emperor Basil the Mace
*
donian.
What is the origin of this widespread and seemingly ineradicable
propensity ? Of course the answer which first suggests itself is, that it
is the result of a most natural and blameless curiosity to learn the
mysteries of that life into which we ourselves expect to pass through
the gates of the tomb, and wherein it is our hope that the beloved
ones who have left us have already entered. That in some cases this
is the real spring of the desire, we will not question. But it is certain
that the passion for Sorcery has far other springs beside, and that those
who addict themselves to it most completely have neither ardent long
ings for immortality on their own account, nor common reverence for
the dead. The special characteristic of the propensity, and of the
practices to which it gives rise, is the absence of all the more delicate
sentiments or spiritual aspirations of true human love, or true religion;
and the presence, in their stead, of a brutal familiarity and irreverence
as regards the dead, and of a gross materialism touching the experiences
of communion, divine or human.
In this respect superstitious Sacerdotalism and Sorcery have in all ages
borne some strong features of resemblance, even while mutually denouncing
one another. Each of them disregards really spiritual gifts as needful
to qualify Priest or Medium for intercourse with the unseen world; and
relies upon rites and incantations, rather than upon such liftings-up of
the human soul in longing and prayer, as should draw (if anything
might draw) the Divine aid from heaven and human love back from
the grave. The Sacerdotalist forgets the truth that, not by the help of
* This latter marvel is vouched for by Leo Grammaticus in vita Basilii Imp., § 20.
It was obviously accomplished by phantasmagoria and a magic lanthorn. See, for a
most valuable explanation of a multitude of such wonders,Eusebe Salverte’s Sciences
Occultes.
�MODERN SORCERY.
39
ecclesiastical machinery, but by spiritual worship, must the Father of
Spirits be approached ; and the Spiritualist forgets that not by his
machinery of raps and alphabets, but indeed “spiritually,” must “ spiritual
things” (such as immortality), be discerned. It was well said of late
by a profound thinker, that “if our belief in a future life could be
verified by the senses, Heaven would cease to be a part of our religion, and
become a branch of our geography.” “ Spiritualism ” is indeed a singular
misnomer, or, rather, it is a case of lucus a non lucendo, for there is no
“ spirituality ” in the system at all. It is materialism, pure and simple,
applied to a spiritual truth.
No one who entertains natural reverence and awe for the dead
can contemplate the practices of spiritualists in their séances without
pain and indignation, and only the example of unfeeling mediums and
excited friends can have prompted many tender natures to sanction or
endure them. In the midnight silence and stillness of our chambers,
or in some calm evening solitude of hills and woods, it might be pos
sible to bear the overwhelming emotions of awe ; the rush of unspeak
able tenderness, which must come upon us with the genuine convic
tion that the one who was “ soul of our soul ” has actually returned from
the grave, and is near us once more, conveying to us (as his presence even
in silence would surely do) the ineffable sense of love triumphant over
death ; and ready to receive from us the passionate assurances of neverforgotten regret and affection. Such a meeting of the spirits of the dead
and the living would be among all life’s solemn and affecting incidents the
most profound and touching ; the one which would move us to the very
foundations of our being, and leave us evermore other men than we had been.
Nay, we may further conceive that, bending over the dying, and speak
ing to them of the world into which they are about to enter, and where it
is at least not impossible they may meet our long lost friend or parent,
we might with faltering lips charge them to bear for us to the dead the
message of unchanged fidelity. Such as these are forms of communion
with the departed which involve no shock to our reverence, no sin against
the holiness of buried affection. But what shall we say for the travesty
and mockery thereof which goes on at every spiritualistic séance, amid
the circumstances with which we are all too well acquainted; and as
an alternate evening diversion to music, cards, or tea ? In a drawing
room with gas raised or extinguished a score of times to suit the require
ments of the medium, amid a circle of pleasantly excited ladies and gentle
men dabbling with alphabets, and slates, and planchettes, and ready'to
catch up every straw of “ evidence ” to be published or gossiped about on
the morrow ; in such a scene as this, and with the aid of a psychagogue,
who can scarcely pronounce three common-place sentences without betray
ing his ignorance or his vulgarity, we are told that wives ask to com
*
* Charles Sumner has just been brought back from the grave, and proves to have
very quickly acquired that disregard of adverbs which is common among the weaker
�40
MODERN SORCERY.
municate with their dead husbands ; parents are made to “feel” a lost
child in their arms; and sons listen to words professedly spoken to
them by their mother’s souls. We do not need to be told that the com
munications thus made are utterly unworthy of the majesty of death, and
are patently calculated rather to convince and entertain the audience by
verifiable allusions to names and places, than to convey what—if it were
truly the departed soul which had returned—would inevitably be the heartwrung utterances of supreme love. Strange is it indeed that persons not
otherwise devoid of tender and reverent feeling, when caught by the passion
for this sorcery, permit themselves and the company they may happen to
join ; to find the entertainment of an evening in practice so revolting.
Shall we give to it the name which it deserves, and say that the act of
evoking the dead in such a manner, and for such a purpose, is seta ileye ?
We have spoken of the objects and method of spiritualistic inquiry.
Its results even more emphatically exonerate any man of sound and re
verent mind from engaging in the task of its investigation. Dr. Wallace
asks us to “ look rather at the results produced by the evidence, than
to the evidence itself,” and we are thankful to accept his challenge.
Never, we venture to say, may the principle of judging a tree by its fruits
be more fairly applied. The grand and obvious result of Spiritualism is
to afford us one more (real or fictitious) revelation of the state of de
parted souls, added to those which we possessed before. Let us consider
it a little carefully, and observe what it really reveals.
The pictures of a future world which men have drawn in different
lands and ages, all possess at least one claim to our interest. They afford
us not indeed the faintest outlines of that Undiscovered Country beyond
the bourne of death, but they reveal with unimpeachable, because un
intentional sincerity, the innermost desires and fears of living men. On
that “cloud” which receives every departing soul out of our sight, the
magic-lantern of fancy casts its bright or gloomy imagery, and we need
but watch the phantasms as they pass to know the hidden slides of the
brain which produced them. The luscious gardens and Houris anticipated
by the Moslem; the eternal repose of Nirvana sighed for by the Budd
hist; the alternate warfare and wassail of Walhalla, for which the Norse
man longed as the climax of glory and felicity, convey to us at a glance
a livelier conception of the sensuality, the indolence, and the fierceness,
of the respective races than could be acquired by elaborate studies of
their manners and morality. In a similar way other characteristics are
revealed by the terrors of Future Punishment,—which the lively Greek
imagined to himself as the endless hopeless labours of an Ixion or a
Sisyphus ; the dignified Egyptian, as degradation to a bestial form; and
the grim-souled Teuton of the Dark Ages, as eternal torture in a fiery
brethren, in America—and also, perhaps, among American mediums. He is repotted
to have said, “ Oh, my friends, that you would ponder well that sacred injunction from
spirit life, * Lay up treasures in Heaven. Yhu need not be told how to do this, you
must act unselfish.'1'
�41
MODERN SORCERY.
cave. Whatever has constituted man’s highest pleasure on earth, that
he has hoped to find again in heaven, and whatever he has most dreaded,
that he has imagined as forming the retribution of guilt hereafter. From
this point of view the Christian idea of a serene empyrean, wherein saints
and archangels for ever cast their crowns before the great White Throne,
and worship the thrice Holy One who sitteth thereon—affords singular
evidence of the spiritual altitude to which those souls had attained to
whom 'such an Apocalypse opened the supremest vision of beatitude.
The attitude of Adoration—of sublime ecstatic rapture in the presence
of perfect Holiness and Goodness, is assuredly the loftiest of which we
have any conception, and to desire to enjoy and prolong it for ever can
only genuinely pertain to a soul in which the love of Divine goodness is
already the ruling passion. Wider thought and calmer reflection may
teach that not alone on such mountain peaks of emotion, but on the plains
of sacred service, should the faithful son of God desire to spend his
immortality. But the modern American poet who has taken on himself
to sneer at the notion of angels “ loafing about the Throne,” has given
curious evidence of his incompetence to understand what sublime passion
it was which inspired that wondrous vision of Patmos.
Accepting then the Heaven and Hell of each creed as a natural test
of the characteristic sentiments of its disciples, we turn somewhat in
quisitively to discover what sort of a future existence the new faith of
Spiritualism proposes to give us. Of course it affords every facility for
such an inquiry ; for, while other religions teach primarily concerning God,
and secondly, and with much more reserve, about the life after death ;
Spiritualism teaches first, and at great length, about the future life, and
frankly confesses that it has no light to throw on the problems of
theology. What then, we ask, has Spiritualism told us respecting the
state of the dead, or rather (as a sceptic mustinwardly pose the question)__
What do its narratives betray concerning the ideals of existence which
Spiritualists have created out of the depth of their own consciousness ? Do
they prove an advance upon those of earlier creeds; or, on the contrary, do
they mark a singular and deplorable retrogression towards the material
istic, the carnal, and the vulgar ? Of course such an enquiry would be
met at the outset by a Spiritualist with the vehement assertion that it was
not he who devised what the spirits say of themselves, but the spirits
who have lifted the veil of their own existence, for whose ignoble details
he is in no way responsible. As, however, every Pagan and Buddhist
Mahometan and Parsee would say as much on his own behalf, and main
tain that Elysium and Nirvana, Paradise and Gorotman, had each been
revealed by such “mediums” as Orpheus and Buddha, Mahomet and
Zoroaster, we must be content to pass by this argument and treat the
phase of immortality discovered (or invented) by Mr. Hume and his friends
as no less significant of the moral ideals of Spiritualists and the general
level of their aspirations.
Let it be granted cordially that there is nothing in the spiritualistic
3—5
�42
MODERN SORCERY.
Hades akin to the “ Hell of the Red Hot Iron,” the “ Hell of the Little
Child,” the “ Hell of the Burning Bonnet,” and the “ Hell of the
Boiling Kettle ” set forth with such ghastly circumstantiality in these
latter days in Dr. Furness’ Books for the Young, and in older times by
numberless Calvinistic and Catholic divines. Theodore Parker went,
indeed, so far as to say that “ there was, at all events, one good service
which the Spiritualists had done, they had, knocked the bottom out of Hell.”
Considering that the peculiarity of that terrible Pit has been generally
understood to be that it is “bottomless,” the achievement would seem
rather difficult; but in any case we may candidly agree that on this side
no exception need be taken against the spiritualist doctrine, save that
perchance it fails to afford indication of any sense of how profound must
be the mental anguish through which it is possible for a soul, stained
with vice and cruelty, to recover its purity and peace.
Spiritualist
remorse seems almost as colourless as spiritualist beatitude is vulgar
and inane.
On the other hand, when we ask to be informed (beyond the testimony
of sweet smiles and assurances of felicity), of the nature of the happiness
of virtuous departed souls, we are confronted with narratives much more
nearly realizing our notion of humiliating penance and helplessness than of
glory and freedom ; of Purgatory rather than of Paradise. The dead, it
seems, according to Spiritualism, have not (even after vast intervals of time)
advanced one step nearer to the knowledge of those diviner truths for
which the soul of man hungers, than they possessed while on earth. The
Hope of Immortality is bound up, in religious minds, with the faith that
though no actual vision can ever be vouchsafed of the all-pervading Spirit,
yet that some sense beyond any which earthly life affords, of the presence
and love of the Father will come to the soul when it has gone “ home to
God,” and that Doubt will surely be left behind among the cerements of
the grave. But Spiritualists cheerfully tell us such hopes are quite as
delusive as those of the material crowns and harps of the New Jerusalem.
“ Nothing,” says Dr. Wallace, “ is more common than for religious people
at seances to ask questions about God and Christ. In reply they never
get more than opinions, or more frequently the statement that they, the
spirits, have no more actual knowledge than they had on earth ” (p. 805.)
There are indeed, Dr. Wallace assures us, Catholic and Protestant,
Mahommedan and Hindoo spirits, proving that the “mind with its
myriad beliefs is not suddenly changed at death,” nor, seemingly, for ages
afterwards. Thus from our estimate of the Spiritualist state of future
felicity, we are called on to make, at starting, the enormous deduction of
everything resembling religious progress. The Spiritualist is perfectly
content with an ideal Heaven wherein he will remain in just as much doubt
or error as he happens to have entertained upon earth.
Further, as regards his personal and social affections, Does he at least
image to himself that he will be nearer and more able to protect and
bless his dear ones after death ? Or that he will pass freely hither
�MODERN SORCERY.
43
and thither, doing service like a guardian angel to mankind, strengthening
the weak, comforting the mourner, and awakening the conscience of the
wicked? There is (so far as we have followed the literature of Spiritualism)
no warrant for such a picture of bénéficient activity. Good spirits, as well
as bad—the souls of Plato and Fénélon, as well as those of the silliest
and wickedest “twaddler” (as Dr. Wallace honestly describes many
spirits Zmôàiiés of séances)—have seemingly spent all the centuries since
their demise humbly waiting to be called up by some, woman, or child
precisely, as if they were lackeys ready to answer the downstairs’ bell.
In many cases we are led to infer that the dead have been striving for
years and ages to make themselves known, and now for the last quarter
of a century have very clumsily and imperfectly succeeded in doing so.
Let us conceive for' a moment a grand and loving soul—a Shakespeare,
or Jeremy Taylor, or Shelley, who once spoke to mankind in free and
noble speech, a man among men, fumbling about the legs of tables,
scratching like a dog at a door, and eagerly flying to obtain the services
of an interpreter like Miss Fox, Mr. Hume, or Mrs.Guppy,—and we have
surely invented a punishment and humiliation exceeding those of any
purgatory hitherto invented. If Virtue itself has nothing better to hope
for hereafter than such a destiny, we may well wish that the grave should
prove indeed, after all, the last home of “ earth’s mighty nation.”
Where Oblivion’s pall shall darkly fall
On the dreamless sleep of annihilation.
In conclusion, Is it too much now to ask that we may be exonerated,
once for all, from the charge of unreasonable prejudice, if we refuse to
undertake the laborious inquiry into the marvels of Spiritualism which its
advocates challenge,— an inquiry pursued by methods bordering upon the
sacrilegious, and terminating, either in the exposure of a miserable delu
sion, or else in the stultification and abortion of man’s immortal Hope ?
�
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Modern sorcery
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Cobbe, Frances Power [1832-1907.]
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An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: [36]-43 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From the Cornhill Magazine 30 (July, 1874). Attribution of author, the magazine title, and date from Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. The top of the first page has been cut out, no text is missing.
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Spiritualism
Witchcraft
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Conway Tracts
Spiritualism
Witchcraft
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65
lUIIab.
Why is it so with me, false Love,
Why is it so with me ?
Mine enemies might thus have dealt;
I fear’d it not of thee.
Thou wast the thought of all my thoughts,
Nor other hope had I:
My life was laid upon thy love;
Then how could’st let me die ?
The flower is loyal to the bud,
The greenwood to the spring,
The soldier to his banner bright,
The noble to his king :
The bee is constant to the hive,
The ringdove to the tree,
The martin to the cottage-eaves;
Thou only not to me.
Yet if again, false Love, thy feet
To tread the pathway burn
That once they trod so well and oft,
Return, false Love, return;
And stand beside thy maiden’s bier,
And thou wilt surely see,
That I have been as true to love
As thou wert false to me.
F. T. Palgrave.
4—5
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Ballad
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Palgrave, Francis Turner
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 1 page (p.65) ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From the Cornhill Magazine 30 (July, 1874). Attribution from Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900.
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[Smith, Elder & Co.]
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[1874]
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G5347
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Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Ballad), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
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24
Ijfofre of fjre
Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving on the
outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day’s journey from
Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travel to Basle by
night. He courts the heat of the sun and the uninteresting monotony of
French plains,—then- sluggish streams and never-ending poplar-trees,—•
for the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach to the great
Alps which await him at the close of day. It is about Mulhausen that
he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into
rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams ; the green Swiss
thistle grows by river-side and cowshed ; pines begin to tuft the slopes of
gently rising hills ; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first
Hesper, then the troop of lesser fights ; and he feels,—yes, indeed, there
is now no mistake,—the well-known, well-loved, magical fresh air that
never fails to blow from snowy mountains and meadows watered by
perennial streams. The last hour is one of exquisite enjoyment, and when
he reaches Basle, he scarcely sleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine
beneath the balconies, and knowing that the moon is shining on its
waters, through the town, beneath the bridges, between pasture lands
and copses, up the still mountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where
the water springs. There is nothing in all experience of travelling like
this. We may greet the Mediterranean at Marseilles with enthusiasm;
on entering Rome by the Porta del Popolo, we may reflect with pride
that we have reached the goal of our pilgrimage, and are at last among
world-shaking memories. But neither Rome nor the Riviera wins our
hearts like Switzerland. We do not lie awake in London thinking of'
them; we do not long so intensely, as the year comes round, to
revisit them. Our affection is less a passion than that which we cherish
for Switzerland.
Why, then, is this ? What, after all, is the love of the Alps, and
when and where did it begin ? It is easier to ask these questions than to
answer them. The classic nations hated mountains. Greek and Roman
poets talk of them with disgust and dread. Nothing could have been more
depressing to a courtier of Augustus than residence at Aosta, even though
he found his theatres and triumphal arches there. "Wheiever classical
feeling has predominated, this has been the case. Cellini’s Memoir®,
written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well express the aversion which
a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitable wildernesses of Switzerland.
Dryden, in his dedication to The Indian Emperor,-says, “ High objects,
it is true, attract the sight; but it looks up with pain on craggy rocks and
�THE LOVE OE THE ALPS.
25
barren mountains, and continues not intent on any object which is wanting
in shades and green to entertain it.”
Addison and Gray had no better epithets than “rugged,” “horrid,”
and the like for Alpine landscape. The classic spirit was adverse to
ffittthnsiasm for mere nature. Humanity was too prominent, and city life
absorbed all interests,—not to speak of what perhaps is the weightiest
reason—that solitude, indifferent accommodation, and imperfect means of
travelling, rendered mountainous countries peculiarly disagreeable. It is
impossible to enjoy art or nature while suffering from fatigue and cold,
dreading the attacks of robbers, and wondering whether you will find food
and shelter at the end of your day’s journey. Nor was it different in the
Middle Ages. Then individuals had either no leisure from war or strife
with the elements, or else they devoted themselves to the salvation of
their souls. But when the ideas of the Middle Ages had decayed, when
improved arts of life had freed men from servile subjection to daily needs,
when the bondage of religious tyranny had been thrown off and political
liberty allowed the full development of tastes and instincts, when moreover
the classical traditions had lost their power, and courts and coteries became
too narrow for the activity of man; then suddenly it was discovered that
Nature in herself possessed transcendent charms. It may seem absurd
to class them all together ; yet there is no doubt that the French
devolution, the criticism of the Bible, Pantheistic forms of worship,
landscape-painting, Alpine travelling, and the poetry of Nature, are all
signs of the same movement—of a new Renaissance. Limitations of'
every sort have been shaken off during the last century, all forms have
been destroyed, all questions asked. The classical spirit loved to arrange,
model,, preserve traditions, obey laws. We are intolerant of everything
that is not simple, unbiassed by prescription, liberal as the wind, and
natural as the mountain crags. We go to feed this spirit of freedom
among the Alps. What the virgin forests of America are to the Americans
the Alps are to us. What there is in these huge blocks and walls of
granite crowned with ice that fascinates us it is hard to analyze. Why,
Seeing that we find them so attractive, they should have repelled our
ancestors of the fourth generation and all the world before them, is another
mystery. We cannot explain what rapport there is between our human
souls and these inequalities in the surface of the earth which we call
Alps. Tennyson speaks of—•
Some vague emotion of delight
In gazing up an Alpine height,—
and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physical science
has created for natural objects has something to do with it. Curiosity and
the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns, no cultivated
tracts of Europe, however beautiful, form such a contrast to our London
life as Switzerland. Then there is the health and joy that comes from
exercise in open air; the senses freshened by good sleep ; the blood
quickened by a lighter and rarer atmosphere. Our modes of life, the
�26
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
breaking down of class privileges, the extension of education, which con
tribute to make the individual greater and society less, render the solitude
of mountains refreshing. Facilities of travelling and improved accom
modation leave us free to enjoy the natural beauty which we seek. Our
minds, too, are prepared to sympathize with the inanimate world ; we
have learned to look on the universe as a whole, and ourselves as a part
of it, related by close ties of friendship to all its other members. Shelley’s,
Wordsworth’s, Goethe’s poetry has taught us this ; we are all more or
less Pantheists, worshippers of “ God in Nature,” convinced of the omni
presence of the informing mind.
Thus, when we admire the Alps we are after all but children of the
century. We follow its inspiration blindly ; and, while we think ourselves
spontaneous in our ecstasy, perform the part for which we have been
trained from childhood by the atmosphere in which we live. It is this
very unconsciousness and universality of the impulse we obey which
makes it hard to analyze. Contemporary history is difficult to write ; to
dp.fiup. the spirit of the age in which we live is still more difficult ; to
account for “impressions which owe all their force to their identity with
themselves ” is most difficult of all. We must be content to feel, and not
to analyze.
Rousseau has the credit of having invented the love of Nature.
Perhaps he first expressed, in literature, the pleasures of open life among the
mountains, of walking tours, of the “ école buissonnière,'” away from courts,
and schools, and cities, which it is the fashion now to love. His bourgeois
birth and tastes, his peculiar religious and social views, his intense self
engrossment, all favoured the development of Nature-worship. But
Rousseau was not alone, nor yet creative in this instance. He was but
one of the earliest to seize and express a new idea of growing humanity.
For those who seem to be the most original in their inauguration of
periods are only such as have been favourably placed by birth and educa
tion to imbibe the floating creeds of the whole race. They resemble the
first cases of an epidemic which become the centres of infection and pro
pagate disease. At the time of Rousseau’s greatness the French people
were initiative. In politics, in literature, in fashions, and in philosophy
they had for some time led the taste of Europe. But the sentiment which
first received a clear and powerful expression in the works of Rousseau
soon declared itself in the arts and literature of other nations. Goethe,
Wordsworth, and the earlier landscape-painters, proved that Germany
and England were not far behind the French. In England this love
of Nature for its own sake is indigenous, and has at all times been
peculiarly characteristic of our genius. Therefore it is not surprising that
our life, and literature, and art have been foremost in developing the sen
timent of which we are speaking. Our poets, painters, and prose writers
gave the tone to European thought in this respect. Our travellers in
search of the adventurous and picturesque, our Alpine Club, have made of
Switzerland an English playground.
�THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
27
The greatest period in our history was but a foreshadowing of this.
To return to Nature-worship was but to reassume the habits of the
Elizabethan age, altered indeed by all the changes of religion, politics,
society, and science, which the last three centuries have wrought, yet still
in its original love of free open life among the fields and woods, and on the
sea, the same. Now the French national genius is classical. It reverts
to the age of Louis XIV., and Rousseauism in their literature is as true
an innovation and parenthesis as Pope-and-Drydenism was in ours. Asin
the age of the Reformation, so in this, the German element of the modern
character predominates. During the two centuries from which we have
emerged, the Latin element had the upper hand. Our love of the Alps is
a Gothic, a Teutonic, instinct ; sympathetic with all that is vague, infinite,
and unsubordinate to rules, at war with all that is defined and systematic
in our genius. This we may perceive in individuals as well as in the broader
aspects of arts and literatures. The classically-minded man, the reader of
Latin poets, the lover of-brilliant conversation, the frequenter of clubs and
drawing-rooms, nice in his personal requirements, scrupulous in his choice
of words, averse to unnecessary physical exertion, preferring town to
country life, cannot deeply feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will
dislike German art, and, however much he may strive to be catholic in his
tastes, will find as he grows older, that his liking for Gothic architecture
and modern painting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing
admiration for Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect of
speculation all men are either Platonists, or Aristotelians, in respect of
taste, all men are either Greek or German.
At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands ; the
Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so much
about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our cultus,—a
strange reflection, proving how much greater man is than men ; the
common reason of the age in which we five than our own reasons, its
constituents and subjects.
Perhaps it is our modern tendency to “ individualism ” which makes
the Alps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point,—
no claims are made on human sympathies,—there is no need to toil in
yoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our own dreams,
and sound the depths of personality without the reproach of selfishness,
without a restless wish to join in action or money-making, or the pursuit
of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this absence of social
duties and advantages is of necessity barbarizing, even brutalizing. But
to men wearied with too much civilization, and deafened by the noise of
great cities, it is beyond measure refreshing. Then again among the
mountains history finds no place. The Alps have no past nor present nor
future. The human beings who live upon their sides are at odds with nature,
clinging on for bare existence to the soil, sheltering themselves beneath
protecting rocks from avalanches, damming up destructive streams, all but
annihilated every spring. Man who is all things in the plain is nothing
�28
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
here. His arts and sciences, and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty
works, and conquests and decays, demand our whole attention in Italy or
Egypt. But here the mountains, immemorially the same, which were,
which are, and which are to be, present a theatre on which the soul breathes
freely and feels herself alone. Around her on all sides is God and Nature,
who is here the face of God, and not the slave of man. The spirit of the
world hath here not yet grown old. She is as young as on the first day;
and the Alps are a symbol of the self-creating, self-sufficing, self-enjoying
universe which lives for its own ends. For why do the slopes gleam with
flowers, and the hillsides deck themselves with grass, and the inaccessible
ledges of black rock bear their tufts of crimson primroses, and flaunting
tiger-lilies ? Why, morning after morning, does the red dawn flush the
pinnacles of Monte Rosa above cloud and mist unheeded ? Why does
the torrent shout, the avalanche reply in thunder to the music of the sun,
the trees and rocks and meadows cry their “ Holy, Holy, Holy ? ” Surely
not for us. We are an accident here, and even the few men whose
eyes are fixed habitually upon these things are dead to them the peasants
do not even know the names of their own flowers, and sigh with envy
when you tell them of the plains of Lincolnshire or Russian steppes.
But indeed there is something awful in the Alpine elevation above
human things. We do not like Switzerland merely because we associate
its thought with recollections of holidays and health and joyfulness.
Some of the most solemn moments of life are spent high up above
among the mountains, on the barren tops of rocky passes, where the
soul has seemed to hear in solitude a low controlling voice. It is
almost, necessary for the development of our deepest affections that some
sad and sombre moments should be interchanged with hours of merri
ment and elasticity. It is this variety in the woof of daily life which
endears our home to us ; and, perhaps, none have fully loved the Alps
who have not spent some days of meditation, or it may be of sorrow,
among their solitudes. Splendid scenery, like music, has the power to
make “ of grief itself a fiery chariot for mounting above the sources of
grief,” to ennoble and refine our passions, and to teach us that our lives
are merely moments in the years of the eternal Being. There are many,
perhaps, who, within sight of some great scene among the Alps, upon the
height of the Stelvio, or the slopes of Murreu, or at night in the valley of
Cormayeur, have felt themselves raised above cares and doubts and miseries
by the mere recognition of unchangeable magnificence ; have found a deep
peace in the sense of their own nothingness. It is not granted to us every
day to stand upon these pinnacles of rest and faith above the world. But
having once stood there, how can we forget the station ? How can we
fail, amid the tumult of our common life, to feel at times the hush of that
far-off tranquillity ? When our life is most commonplace, when we are ill
or weary in London streets, we can remember the clouds upon the moun
tains we have seen, the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the scent of
countless flowers. A photograph of Bisson’s, the name of some well-
�THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
29
¡rnnwn valley, the picture of some Alpine plant, rouses the sacred hunger
in our souls, and stirs again the faith in beauty and in rest beyond our
selves which, no man can take from us. We owe a deep debt of gratitude
to everything which enables us to rise above depressing and enslaving
circumstances, which brings us nearer in some way or other to what is
eternal in the universe, and which makes us feel that, whether we live or
suffer or enjoy, life and gladness are still strong in the world. On
ihi« account, the proper attitude of the soul among the Alps is one of
reverential silence. It is almost impossible without a kind of impiety to
frame in words the feelings they inspire. Yet there are some sayings,
hallowed by long usage, which throng the mind through a whole summer s
day, and seem in harmony with its emotions—some portions of the Psalms
or lines of greatest poets, inai’ticulate hymns of Beethoven and Mendelssohn,
waifs and strays not always apposite, but linked by strong and subtle
chains of feeling with the grandeur of the mountains. This reverential
feeling for the Alps is connected with the Pantheistic form of our religious
sentiments to which we have before alluded. It is a trite remark, that
even devout men of the present generation prefer temples not made with
bands to churches, and worship God in the fields more contentedly than
in their pews. What Mr. Ruskin calls “ the instinctive sense of the divine
presence not formed into distinct belief ’ ’ lies at the root of our profound
veneration for the nobler aspects of mountain scenery. This instinctive sense
has been very variously expressed by Goethe in Faust’s celebrated Confes
sion of Faith, by Shelley in the stanzas of Adonais which begin, “He is made
one with nature,” and by Wordsworth in the lines on Tintern Abbey. It is
more or less strongly felt by all who have recognized the indubitable fact
that religious belief is undergoing a sure process of change from the
dogmatic distinctness of the past to some at present dimly descried creed
of the future. Such periods of transition are of necessity full of discomfort,
doubt, and anxiety, vague, variable, and unsatisfying. The men in whose
spirits the fermentation of the change is felt, who have abandoned their
old moorings, and have not yet reached the haven for which they are
steering, cannot but be indistinct and undecided in their faith. The
universe of which they form a part becomes important to them in its
infinite immensity ; the principles of beauty, goodness, order, and law, no
longer definitely connected in their minds with certain articles of faith, find
symbols in the outer world; they are glad to fly at certain moments from
mankind and its oppressive problems, for which religion no longer provides
a satisfactory solution, to Nature, where they vaguely localize the spirit that
broods over us controlling all our being. Connected with this transitional
condition of the modern mind is the double tendency to science and to
mysticism, to progress in knowledge of the world around us, and to
indistinct yearnings after something that has gone away from us or lies
in front of us. On the one side we see chemists and engineers conquering
&e brute powers of Nature, on the other jaded, anxious, irritable men
adrift upon an ocean of doubt and ennui. With regard to the former
�30
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
class there is no difficulty : they swim with the stream and are not
oppressed by any anxious yearnings : to them the Alps are a playground
for refreshment after toil—a field for the pursuit of physical experiment.
But the other class complain, “ Bo what we will, we suffer; it is now too
late to eat and drink and die obliviously ; the world has worn itself to old
age; a boundless hope has passed across the earth, and we must lift our
eyes to heaven.” The heaven to which they have to lift their eyes is very
shadowy, far off, and problematical. The temple of their worship is the
Alps; their oracles are voices of the winds and streams and avalanches ;
their Urim and Thummim are the gleams of light on ice or snow ; their
Shekinah is the sunrise and the sunset of the mountains.
Of the two tendencies here broadly indicated, the former is represented
by physical research—the science of our day; the latter by music and land
scape painting—the art of our day. There is a profound sympathy between
music and fine scenery: they both affect us in the same way, stirring
strong but undefined emotions, which express themselves in “ idle tears,”
or evoking thoughts “which lie,” as Wordsworth says, “ too deep fortears,”
beyond the reach of any words. How little we know what multitudes
of mingling reminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its
fancy with the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the senti
ments which music or which mountains stir. It is the very vagueness,
changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which cause
their charm ; they harmonize with the haziness of our beliefs and seem to
make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious that unre
strained indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery must destroy
habits of clear thinking, sentimentalize the mind, and render it more apt
to entertain embryonic ideas than to bring thoughts to definite perfection.
As illustrating the development of music in modem times, and the love
of Switzerland, it is not a little remarkable that the German style of music
has asserted an unquestionable ascendancy, that the greatest lovers of this
art prefer Beethoven’s symphonies to merely vocal music, and that harmony
is even more regarded than melody. That is to say, the vocal element of
music has been comparatively disregarded for the instrumental; and the art,
emancipated from its subordination to words, has become the most accurate
interpreter of all the vague and powerful emotions of yearning and reflec
tive and perturbed humanity. If some hours of thoughtfulness and
seclusion are necessary to the development of a true love for the Alps,
it is no less essential to a right understanding of their beauty that we
should pass some wet and gloomy days among the mountains. The
unclouded sunsets and sunrises which often follow one another in September
in the Alps have something terrible. They produce a satiety of splendour,
and oppress the mind with the sense of perpetuity. I remember spending
such a season in one of the Oberland valleys, high up above the pine-trees,
in a little chalet. Morning after morning I awoke to see the sunbeams
glittering on the Eiger and the Jungfrau ; noon after noon the snowfields
blazed beneath a steady fire; evening after evening they shone like beacons
�THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
31
in the red light of the setting sun. Then peak by peak they lost the glow;
the soul passed from them, and they stood pale and garish against the
darkened sky. The stars came out, the moon shone, but not a cloud
sailed over the untroubled heavens. Thus day after day for several weeks
there was no change, till I was seized with an overpowering horror of
unbroken calm. I left the valley for a time ; and when I returned to it in
wind and rain I found that the partial veiling of the mountain heights
restored the charm which I had lost and made me feel once more at home.
The landscape takes a graver tone beneath the mist that hides the higher
peaks, and comes drifting, creeping, feeling, through the pines »upon their
slopes—white, silent, blinding vapour wreaths around the sable spires.
Sometimes the cloud descends and blots out everything. Again it lifts a
little, showing cottages and distant Alps beneath its skirts. Then it sweeps
over the whole valley like a veil, just broken here and there, above a lonely
chalet, or a thread of distant dangling torrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath
the mist are more strange. The torrent seems to have a hoarser voice and
grinds the stones more passionately against its boulders. The cry of
shepherds through the fog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills.
The bleating of penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cow-bells, are
mysteriously distant in the dull dead air. Then again, how immeasurably
high above our heads appear the domes and peaks of snow revealed through
chasms in the drifting cloud; how desolate the glaciers and the avalanches
in gleams of light that struggle through the mist! There is a leaden glare
peculiar to clouds, which makes the snow and ice more lurid. Not far from
the house where I am writing, the avalanche that swept away the bridge
last winter is lying now, dripping away, dank and dirty, like a rotting
whale. I can see it from my window, green beech-boughs nodding over it,
forlorn larches bending their tattered branches by its side, splinters of
broken pine protruding from its muddy cayes, the boulders on its flank, and
the hoarse hungry torrent tossing up its tongues to lick the ragged edge of
snow. Close by the meadows, spangled with yellow flowers, and red and
blue, look even more brilliant than if the sun were shining on them.
Every cup and blade of grass is drinking. But the scene changes ; the
mist has turned into rain-clouds, and the steady rain drips down, incessant,
blotting out the view.
Then, too, what a joy it is if the clouds break towards evening with a
north wind, and a rainbow in the valley gives promise of a bright to-morrow.
We look up to the cliffs above our heads, and see that they have just been
.powdered with the snow that is a sign of better weather. Such rainy
days ought to be spent in places like Seelisberg and Miirreu, at the edge of
precipices, in front of mountains, or above a lake. The cloud-masses
crawl and tumble about the valleys like a brood of dragons ; now creeping
along the ledges of the rock with sinuous self-adjustment to its turns and
twists; now launching out into the deep, repelled by battling winds, or
driven onward in a coil of twisted and contorted serpent curls. In the
midst of summer these wet seasons often end in a heavy fall of snow.
�32
.THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
You wake some morning to see the meadows which last night were gay
with July flowers huddled up in snow a foot in depth. But fair weatherj
does not tarry long to reappear. You put on your thickest boots and
sally forth to find the great cups of the gentians full of snow, and to
watch the rising of the cloud-wreaths under the hot sun. Bad dreams
or sickly thoughts, dissipated by returning daylight or a friend’s face,
do not fly away more rapidly and pleasantly than those swift glory-coated
mists that lose themselves we know not where in the blue depths of
the sky.
In contrast with these rainy days nothing can be more perfect than
clear moonlight nights. There is a terrace upon the roof of the inn at
Cormayeur where one may spend hours in the silent watches when all the
world has gone to sleep beneath. The Mont Chétif and the Mont de la
Saxe form a gigantic portal not unworthy of the pile that lies beyond.
For Mont Blanc resembles a vast cathedral ; its countless spires are
scattered over a mass like that of the Duomo at Milan, rising into one
tower at the end. By night the glaciers glitter in the steady moon ;
domes, pinnacles, and buttresses stand clear of clouds. Needles of every
height and most fantastic shapes rise from the central ridge, some solitary
like sharp arrows shot against the sky, some clustering into sheaves. On
every horn of snow .and bank of grassy hill stars sparkle, rising, setting,
rolling round through the long silent night. Moonlight simplifies and
softens the landscape. Colours become scarcely distinguishable, and forms,
deprived of half their detail, gain in majesty and size. The mountains
seem greater far by night than day—higher heights and deepei' depths,
more snowy pyramids, more beetling crags, softer meadows, and darker
pines. The whole valley is hushed, but for the torrent and the chirping
grasshopper and the striking of the village clocks. The black tower and
the houses of Cormayeur in the foreground gleam beneath the moon until
she reaches the edge of the firmament, and then sinks quietly away, once
more to reappear among the pines, then finally to leave the valley dark
beneath the shadow of the mountain’s bulk. Meanwhile the heights of
snow still glitter in the steady light : they, too, will soon be dark, until
the dawn breaks, tingeing them with rose.
But it is not fair to dwell exclusively upon the mere sombre aspect of
Swiss beauty when there are so many lively scenes of which to speak.
The sunlight and the freshness and the flowers of Alpine meadows form
more than half the charm of Switzerland. The other day we walked to a
pasture called the Col de Checruit, high up the valley of Cormayeur, where
the spring was still in its first freshness. Gradually we climbed by dusty
roads, and through hot fields where the grass had just been mown, beneath
the fierce light of the morning sun. Not a breath of air was stirring, and
the heavy pines hung overhead upon their crags, as if to fence the gorge
from every wandering breeze. There is nothing more oppressive than
these scorching sides of narrow rifts, shut in by woods and precipices.
But suddenly the valley broadened, the pines and larches disappeared,
�THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
83
fond we found ourselves upon a wide green semicircle of the softest meadows.
Little rills of water went rushing through them, rippling over pebbles,
rustling under dockleaves, and eddying against their wooden barriers.
Far and wide 11 you scarce could see the grass for flowers,” while on every
side the tinkling of cow-bells, and the voices of shepherds calling to one
another from the Alps, or singing at then- work, were borne across the
fields. As we climbed we came into still fresher pastures where the snow
had scarcely melted. There the goats and cattle were collected, and the
shepherds sat among them, fondling the kids and calling them by name.
When they called, the creatures came, expecting salt and bread. It was
pretty to see them lying near their masters, playing and butting at them
with their horns, or bleating for the sweet rye-bread. The women knitted
st,oe,kings, laughing among themselves, and singing all the while. As soon
as we reached them they gathered round to talk. An old herdsman, who
was clearly the patriarch of this Arcadia, asked us many questions in a
slow deliberate voice. We told him who we were, and tried to interest
him in the cattle-plague, which he appeared to regard as an evil very
unreal and far away,—like the murrain upon Pharaoh’s herds which one
reads about in Exodus. But he was courteous and polite, doing the
honours of his pasture with simplicity and ease. He took us to his chalet
and gave us bowls of pure cold milk. It was a funny little wooden house,
clean and dark. The sky peeped through its tiles, and if shepherds were
not in the habit of sleeping soundly all night long they might count the
setting and rising stars without lifting their heads from the pillow. He
told us how far pleasanter they found the summer season than the long
cold winter which they have to spend in gloomy houses in Cormayeur.
This indeed is the true pastoral life which poets have described,—a happy
summer life among the flowers, well occupied with simple cares, and
harassed by “no enemy but winter and rough weather.”
Very much of the charm of Switzerland belongs to simple things, to
greetings from the herdsmen, the “ Gluten Morgen ” and “ Guten Abend,”
that are invariably given and taken upon mountain paths ; to the tame
creatures, with their large dark eyes, who raise their heads one moment
from the pasture while you pass; and to the plants that grow beneath
your feet. It is almost sacrilegious to speak of the great mountains in
this hasty way. Let us, before we finish, take one glance at the multitude
of Alpine flowers.
The latter end of May is the time when spring begins in the high Alps.
Wherever sunlight smiles away a patch of snow the brown turf soon becomes
green velvet, and the velvet stars itself with red and white and gold and
blue. You almost see the grass and lilies grow. First come pale crocuses
and lilac soldanellas. These break the last dissolving clods of snow, and
stand up on an island, with the cold wall they have thawed all round them.
It is the fate of these poor flowers to spring and flourish on the very skirts
of retreating winter ; they soon wither—the frilled chalice of the soldanella
shrivels up and the crocus fades away before the grass has grown; the
vol. xvi.—no. 91.
8.
�84
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS.
sun, which is bringing all the other plants to life, scorches their tender
petals. Often when summer has fairly come, you still may see their
pearly cups and lilac bells by the' side of avalanches, between the chill
snow and the fiery sun, blooming and fading hour by hour. They have,
as it were, but a Pisgah view of the promised land, of the spring which
they are foremost to proclaim. Next come the clumsy gentians and yellow
anemones, covered with soft down like fledgeling birds. These are among
the earliest and hardiest blossoms that embroider the high meadows with
a drift of blue and gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas
begin to tuft the dripping rocks, while frail white fleurs-de-lis, like flakes
of snow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled ranunculuses, join with
forget-me-nots and cranesbill in a never-ending dance upon the grassy
floor. Happy, too, is he who finds the likes of the valley clustering
about the chestnut boles upon the Colma, or in the beechwood by the stream
at Macugnaga, mixed with fragrant white narcissus, which the people of
the villages call “ Angiolini.” There, too, is Solomon’s seal, with waxen
bells and leaves expanded like the wings of hovering butterflies. But
these fists of flowers are tiresome and cold; it would be better to draw
the portrait of one which is particularly fascinating. I think that botanists
have called it saxífraga cotyledon; yet, in spite of its long name, it is a
simple and poetic flower. London pride is the commonest of all the
saxifrages ; but the one of which I speak is as different from London pride
as a Plantagenet upon his throne from that last Plantagenet who died
obscure and penniless some years ago. It is a great majestic flower, which
plumes the granite rocks of Monte Rosa in the spring. At other times of
the year you see a little tuft of fleshy leaves, set like a cushion on cold
ledges and dark places of dripping cliffs. You take it for a stone crop—
one of those weeds doomed to obscurity, and safe from being picked
because they are so uninviting—and you pass it by incuriously. But
about June it puts forth its power, and from the cushion of pale leaves
there springs a strong pink stem, which rises upward for a while, and then
comes down and breaks into a shower of snow-white blossoms. Far away
the splendour gleams, hanging, like a plume of ostrich-feathers, from the
roof of rock, waving to the wind, or stooping down to touch the water of
the mountain stream that dashes it with dew. The snow at evening,
glaring with a sunset flush, is not more rosy pure than this cascade of
pendent blossoms. It loves to be alone—inaccessible ledges, chasms
where winds combat, or moist caverns overarched near thundering falls,
are the places that it seeks. I will not compare it to a spirit of the
mountains or to a proud lovely soul, for such comparisons desecrate the
simplicity of nature, and no simile can add a glory to the flower. It
seems to have a conscious life of its own, so large and glorious it is, so
sensitive to every breath of air, so nobly placed upon its bending stem, so
gorgeous in its solitude. I first saw it years ago on the Simplon, feather
ing the drizzling crags above Isella. Then we found it near Baveno, in a
crack of sombre cliff beneath the mines. The other day we cut an armful
�
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Dublin Core
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Title
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The love of the alps
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 24-35 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From the Cornhill Magazine (Vol. 30, July 1874). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. Incomplete copy - text ends mid-sentence on p.34.
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[Smith, Elder & Co.]
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[1874]
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G5344
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[Unknown]
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Nature
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The love of the alps), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Alps
Conway Tracts
Travels