The fact is this — he's just as far
As folks in Borrioboola Gha.
As folks in Borrioboola Gha.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v17 - Mai to Mom
The men, who knew what they had to expect,-
for this sort of intelligence is soon communicated through a
ship,- were assembled in knots, looking very grave, but at the
same time not wanting in confidence. They knew that they could
>
## p. 9745 (#153) ###########################################
FREDERICK MARRYÁT
9745
C
»
trust to the captain, as far as skill or courage could avail them;
and sailors are too sanguine to despair, even at the last moment.
As for myself, I felt such admiration for the captain, after what
I had witnessed that morning, that whenever the idea came over
me that in all probability I should be lost in a few hours, I could
not help acknowledging how much more serious it was that such
a man should be lost to his country. I do not intend to say that
it consoled me; but it certainly made me still more regret the
chances with which we were threatened.
Before twelve o'clock the rocky point which we so much
dreaded was in sight, broad on the lee bow; and if the low sandy
coast appeared terrible, how much more did this, even at a dis-
tance! the black masses of rock covered with foam, which each
minute dashed up in the air higher than our lower mast-heads.
The captain eyed it for some minutes in silence, as if in calcula-
tion.
"Mr. Falcon,” said he at last, "we must put the mainsail on
her. ”
«She never can bear it, sir. ”
“She must bear it,” was the reply. “Send the men aft to the
mainsheet. See that careful men attend the buntlines. ”
The mainsail was set; and the effect of it upon the ship was
tremendous. She careened over so that her lee channels were
under the water; and when pressed by a sea, the lee side of the
quarter-deck and gangway were afloat. She now reminded me
of a goaded and fiery horse, mad with the stimulus applied;
not rising as before, but forcing herself through whole seas, and
dividing the waves, which poured in one continual torrent from
the forecastle down upon the decks below. Four men
secured to the wheel; the sailors were obliged to cling, to pre-
vent being washed away; the ropes were thrown in confusion to
leeward; the shot rolled out of the lockers, and every eye was
fixed aloft, watching the masts, which were expected every mo-
ment to go over the side. A heavy sea struck us on the broad-
side, and it was some moments before the ship appeared to
recover herself; she reeled, trembled, and stopped her way, as if
it had stupefied her. The first lieutenant looked at the captain,
as if to say, “This will not do. ” "It is our only chance,"
answered the captain to the appeal. That the ship went faster
through the water and held a better wind, was certain; but
just before we arrived at the point, the gale increased in force.
were
(
XVII-610
## p. 9746 (#154) ###########################################
9746
FREDERICK MARRYAT
»
>
"If anything starts, we are lost, sir,” observed the first lieutenant
again.
“I am perfectly aware of it,” replied the captain in a calm
tone; « but as I said before, and you must now be aware, it is
our only chance. The consequence of any carelessness or neglect
in the fitting and securing of the rigging will be felt now; and
this danger, if we escape it, ought to remind us how much we
have to answer for if we neglect our duty. The lives of a whole
ship's company may be sacrificed by the neglect or incompetence
of an officer when in harbor. I will pay you the compliment,
Falcon, to say that I feel convinced that the masts of the ship
are as secure as knowledge and attention can make them. ”
The first lieutenant thanked the captain for his good opinion,
and hoped it would not be the last compliment which he paid
him.
"I hope not too; but a few minutes will decide the point. ”
The ship was now within two cables' lengths of the rocky
point; some few of the men I observed to clasp their hands, but
most of them were silently taking off their jackets and kicking
off their shoes, that they might not lose a chance of escape pro-
vided the ship struck.
« 'Twill be touch and go indeed, Falcon,” observed the captain
(for I had clung to the belaying pins, close to them, for the last
half-hour that the mainsail had been set). “Come aft; you and
I must take the helin. We shall want nerve there, and only
there, now. ”
The captain and first lieutenant went aft and took the fore.
spokes of the wheel; and O'Brien, at a sign made by the cap-
tain, laid hold of the spokes behind them. An old quartermaster
kept his station at the fourth. The roaring of the seas on the
rocks, with the howling of the winds, was dreadful; but the sight
was more dreadful than the noise. For a few moments I shut
my eyes, but anxiety forced me to open them again. As near
as I could judge, we were not twenty yards from the rocks at
the time that the ship passed abreast of them. We were in the
midst of the foam, which boiled around us; and as the ship was
driven nearer to them, and careened with the wave, I thought
that our main yard-arm would have touched the rock; and at
this moment a gust of wind came on which laid the ship on her
beam-ends and checked her progress through the water, while
the accumulated noise was deafening. A few moments more the
## p. 9747 (#155) ###########################################
FREDERICK MARRYAT
9747
ship dragged on; another wave dashed over her and spent itself
upon the rocks, while the spray was dashed back from them and
returned upon the decks. The main rock was within ten yards
of her counter, when another gust of wind laid us on our beam-
ends; the foresail and mainsail split and were blown clean out
of the bolt-ropes — the ship righted, trembling fore and aft.
looked astern; the rocks were to windward on our quarter, and
we were safe. I thought at the time that the ship, relieved of
her courses, and again lifting over the waves, was not a bad
similitude of the relief felt by us all at that moment; and like
her we trembled as we panted with the sudden reaction, and felt
the removal of the intense anxiety which oppressed our breasts.
The captain resigned the helm, and walked aft to look at the
point, which was now broad on the weather quarter. In a min-
ute or two he desired Mr. Falcon to get new sails up and bend
them, and then went below to his cabin. I am sure it was to
thank God for our deliverance; I did most fervently, not only
then, but when I went to my hammock at night. We w
comparatively safe - in a few hours completely so, for, strange
to say, immediately after we had weathered the rocks the gale
abated; and before morning we had a reef out of the topsails.
re now
MRS. EASY HAS HER OWN WAY
From Mr. Midshipman Easy)
T
I"
((
WAS the fourth day after Mrs. Easy's confinement that Mr.
Easy, who was sitting by her bedside in an easy-chair, com-
menced as follows: "I have been thinking, my dear Mrs.
Easy, about the name I shall give this child. ”
Name, Mr. Easy? why, what name should you give it but
your own ?
Not so, my dear,” replied Mr. Easy: "they call all names
proper names, but I think that mine is not. It is the very worst
name in the calendar. ”
Why, what's the matter with it, Mr. Easy ? »
“The matter affects me as well as the boy. Nicodemus is a
long name to write at full length, and Nick is vulgar. Besides,
as there will be two Nicks, they will naturally call my boy Young
Nick, and of course I shall be styled Old Nick, which will be
diabolical. »
## p. 9748 (#156) ###########################################
9748
FREDERICK MARRYAT
>
>>
I will ap-
« Well, Mr. Easy, at all events then let me choose the name. ”
“That you shall, my dear; and it was with this view that I
have mentioned the subject so early. ”
“I think, Mr. Easy, I will call the boy after my poor father:
his name shall be Robert. »
“Very well, my dear: if you wish it, it shall be Robert. You
shall have your own way. But I think, my dear, upon a little
consideration, you will acknowledge that there is a decided
objection. ”
"An objection, Mr. Easy ? ”
“Yes, my dear: Robert máy be very well, but you must
reflect upon the consequences; he is certain to be called Bob. ”
"Well, my dear, and suppose they do call him Bob? »
"I cannot bear even the supposition, my dear. You forget
the county in which you are residing, the downs covered with
sheep. ”
“Why, Mr. Easy, what can sheep have to do with a Christian
name ? »
“There it is: women never look to consequences. My dear,
they have a great deal to do with the name of Bob.
peal to any farmer in the country if ninety-nine shepherds' dogs
out of one hundred are not called Bob. Now observe: your child
is out of doors somewhere in the fields or plantations; you
want and you call him. Instead of your child, what do you find ?
Why, a dozen curs, at least, who come running up to you,
all answering to the name of Bob, and wagging their stumps
of tails. You see, Mrs. Easy, it is a dilemma not to be got
over. You level your only son to the brute creation by giving
him a Christian name which, from its peculiar brevity, has been
monopolized by all the dogs in the county. Any other name
you please, my dear; but in this one instance you must allow me
to lay my positive veto. ”
“Well, then, let me see- but I'll think of it, Mr. Easy: my
head aches very much just now. ”
"I will think for you, my dear. What do you say to John ? "
“Oh no, Mr. Easy,- such a common name! ”
"A proof of its popularity, my dear. It is Scriptural — we
have the Apostle and the Baptist, we have a dozen popes who
were all Johns. It is royal — we have plenty of kings who
were Johns — and moreover, it is short, and sounds honest and
manly. "
(C
## p. 9749 (#157) ###########################################
FREDERICK MARRYAT
9749
(
C
»
I am
>>
(
"Yes, very true, my dear; but they will call him Jack. ”
“Well, we have had several celebrated characters who were
Jacks. There was — let me see - Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack
- — -
of the Bean-Stalk — and Jack — Jack —
- »
"Jack Sprat. "
"And Jack Cade, Mrs. Easy, the great rebel — and Three-
fingered Jack, Mrs. Easy, the celebrated negro — and above all,
Jack Falstaff, ma'am, Jack Falstaff — honest Jack Falstaff — witty
Jack Falstaff -->>
"I thought, Mr. Easy, that I was to be permitted to choose
the name. ”
“Well, so you shall, my dear; I give it up to you.
Do just
as you please; but depend upon it that John is the right name.
Is it not, now, my dear ? »
"It's the way you always treat me, Mr. Easy: you say that
you give it up, and that I shall have my own way, but I never
do have it.
sure that the child will be christened John.
"Nay, my dear, it shall be just what you please. Now I
recollect it, there were several Greek emperors who were Johns;
but decide for yourself, my dear. ”
"No, no,” replied Mrs. Easy, who was ill, and unable to con-
tend any longer, “I give it up, Mr. Easy. I know how it will
be, as it always is: you give me my own way as people give
pieces of gold to children; it's their own money, but they must
not spend it. Pray call him John. ”
« There, my dear, did not I tell you you would be of my
opinion upon reflection? I knew you would. I have given you
your own way, and you tell me to call him John; so now we're
both of the same mind, and that point is settled. ”
"I should like to go to sleep, Mr. Easy: I feel far from
well. ”
"You shall always do just as you like, my dear," replied
the husband, and have your own way in everything. It is the
greatest pleasure I have when I yield to your wishes. I will
walk in the garden. Good-by, my dear. ”
Mrs. Easy made no reply, and the philosopher quitted the
room. As may easily be imagined, on the following day the boy
was christened John.
(
»
## p. 9750 (#158) ###########################################
9750
MARTIAL
(MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIALIS)
(50 ? -102 ? A. D. )
BY CASKIE HARRISON
M
ARTIAL (Marcus Valerius Martialis), the world's epigrammatist,
was, like Seneca and Quintilian, a Spanish Latin. Born at
Bilbilis about A. D. 40, he probably came to Rome in 63;
but we first individualize him about 79. He lived in Rome for nearly
thirty-five years, publishing epigrams, book after book and edition
after edition, doing hack-work in his own line for those who had the
money to buy but not the wit to produce, and plagiarized by those
who lacked both the wit and the money; reading his last good thing
to his own circle, from which he could
not always exclude poachers on his pre-
serves, and lending a courteous or a politic
patience to the long-winded recitations of
new aspirants; patronized in various more
or less substantial ways by the Emperor
and sundry men of wealth, influence, and
position, on whom he pulled all the strings
of fulsome flattery and importunate appeal;
adjusting himself to the privileges and ex-
pectancies of Rome's miscellaneous “upper
ten” in private and public resorts: solacing
his better nature with the contact and es-
MARTIAL
teem of the best authors of the day. Bored
with the “fuss and feathers” of town life,
and yearning for the lost or imagined happiness of his native place,
he would from time to time fly to his Nomentane cottage or make
trips into the provinces, only to be disenchanted by rustic monotony
and depressed by the lack of urban occupations and diversions. His
works, and his life as there sketched, expose the times and their
representative men at their best and at their worst. This delineation
gives to his writings an importance even greater than that due to
his general pre-eminence as the one poet of his age, or to the special
supremacy of his epigrams as such. His rating as a poet has indeed
been questioned, and his restriction of the epigram deplored; but no
## p. 9751 (#159) ###########################################
MARTIAL
9751
one can question his portraiture of the Roman Empire at the turn of
its troubled tide.
Returning to Spain early in Trajan's reign, he died there about
102; and his death is noted with sincere feeling by the younger
Pliny, whose recognition must to a certain degree offset our repug-
nance to some of Martial's acknowledged characteristics. Martial was
a man of many personal attractions: he was essentially sympathetic
and true, loving nature and children; his manners were genial, and
his education was finished; his acute observation was matched by his
versatile wit; in an age of artifice, his style was as natural as his
disposition was fair and generous. All these qualities are detected
in his works, although his time demanded the general repression or
the prudent display of such qualities by one whose livelihood must
depend on patronage,-an inevitable professionalism that perhaps
fully explains, not only his obsequiousness, but also his obscenity.
Martial was a predestined gentleman and scholar, forced by his pro-
fession into a trimmer and a dependent: a man of stronger character
might have refused to live such a life even at the cost of his vocation
and its aptitudes; but Martial was a man of his own world.
Whether Martial was married, and how many times, it is hard to
determine: he is his only witness, and his testimony is too indirect
to be unquestionable; at any rate, he seems to have had no children.
His pecuniary condition is equally doubtful: he credits himself with
possessions adequate to comfort only as a basis for protestations
of discomfort; but we know how time and circumstances alter one's
standards of worldly contentment. Even when Martial speaks in the
first person, we cannot be sure it is not the “professional,” instead of
the individual, first person,- the vicarious and anonymous first per-
son of the myriad public whose hints he worked up into effective
mottoes, valentines, and lampoons, and for whose holiday gifts he
devised appropriate companion pieces of verse.
Martial's poems — fifteen books, containing about sixteen hundred
numbers in several measures - are epigrams of different kinds. The
Liber Spectaculorum' (The Show Book) merely depicts the marvels
of the “greatest shows on earth,” while eulogizing the generosity of
the emperors who provided them. The Xenia' (“friendly gifts”)
and Apophoreta (“things to take away with you”) are couplets to
label or convoy presents, whose enumeration includes an ventory
of Flavian dietetics, costume, furniture, and bric-à-brac. The other
twelve books are epigrams of the standard type; a kind illustrated
indeed by the Greeks, but developed and fixed by the Romans from
Catullus down, Martial being the perpetual exemplar of its possibilities.
Besides some lapses of taste, whereby the fatal facility of over-
smartness sometimes leads to contaminating tender or lofty sentiments
## p. 9752 (#160) ###########################################
9752
MARTIAL
by untimely pleasantry, Martial is justly condemned by the modern
world for the two blemishes which have been already specified. How
far he really felt his obsequiousness and his obscenity to be compro-
mises of his dignity, and how far his life was cleaner than his page,
we cannot tell: he was a client of Domitian's day, but he had enjoyed
the countenance of Pliny. In justice to Martial's memory, it must be
said that only about one-fifth of his epigrams are really offensive.
The reign of Domitian was a reaction within a reaction, char-
acterized by the power and the impotence of wealth and its cheap
imitations. It was an age of fads and nostrums: sincere, as the
galvanizing of dead philosophies; affected, as the vicarious intellect-
ualism or the vicarious athleticism of hired thinkers and hired glad-
iators. It was an age of forgotten fundamentals, with no enthusiasm
except for practical advantage, with public spirit aped only in mutual
admiration. Its art and literature had no creativeness and no respon-
sibility; form and copy being ideals, and point demanding the highest
season for its pungency, while the stage and the arena were scenes
of filth or brutality. Its religion was either agnostic paganism or
various novel sentimentalities. Its social functions were chiefly het-
erogeneous gatherings of a flotsam and jetsam assemblage of parve-
nus, where acquaintance was accidental and multitudinous isolation
was the rule. The incongruities of the day afforded matchless targets
for our poet's wit, many of them unfortunately not suited to modern
light. Yet other ages of the world have indisputably exhibited in
their own forms one or another of the features familiarized to us
by Martial.
Martial divides with Juvenal the right to represent this period;
but the division is not equal. The serious purpose of the satirist,
even more than the purely impersonal attitude of the historian, leads
him to emphasize unduly circumstances of perhaps great momentary
importance, but of no ultimate or typical pertinence. On the other
hand, the satirist and the historian are apt to neglect or overlook
many aspects of contemporary life because these seem insignificant
as regards any particular aim or tendency; whereas trifles are often
the best exhibits of the actual offhand life, as distinguished from the
professed principles and practice of the time. Hence Martial's epi-
grams have been well called by Merivale “the quintessence of the
Flavian epoch. ” The epigrammatist has no mission to fulfill; and the
form as well as the volume of his works enables him to touch every
aspect of life into the boldest relief. Especially interesting is the
modernness of these touches; and it would startle a stranger to see
how slight an adaptation or perversion of an epigram or a line or a
word produces anticipatory echoes of present-day experiences, in their
extremest or most peculiar features.
## p. 9753 (#161) ###########################################
MARTIAL
9753
Generally speaking, the Romans were humorous after the dry
kind, while the Greeks were witty; but Greek comedy and epigram
are as humorous as those of any nation, and Martial vindicates the
Roman capacity for triumphant wit - a wit that shows all the colors
of all the nationalities. The wit of America, of France, of Ireland,
cross and blend with each other in Martial's epigrams; and even trav-
esties like the American mockery of Hebrew or negro idiosyncra-
sies find illustration. Puns, parodies, paradoxes, refrains, antitheses,
alliterations, echoes and surprises of all sorts are there, with some
curious antetypes of modern slang, of present provincial or proverb-
ial usages, and even of some points of recent comic songs. In the
versions here appended, literalness has been sacrificed to spirit; the
characteristic features of the original have been preserved in a mod-
ern countenance and expression. In the small space at command,
preference has been given to our poet's wit rather than his other
qualities, as being the special characteristic of himself and of the
epigram; though the omission of other specimens is a sacrifice of his
dues.
The only notable edition of Martial is Friedländer's with Ger-
man notes, the school manuals being inadequate and unsympathetic.
There is no great translation, the French renderings in prose and
verse being the best complete reproduction; there are admirable ver-
sions of individual epigrams in all the modern languages. Sellar's
monographs in the Encyclopædia Britannica) and his "Selections
from Martial' give perhaps the best brief estimate of the poet in
our tongue.
Carnie
Harrism.
THE UNKINDEST CUT
L
AST night as we boozed at our wine,
After having three bottles apiece,
You recall that I asked you to dine,
And you've come, you absurdest of geese!
I was maudlin, you should have been mellow,
All thought of the morrow away:
Well, he's but a sorry good fellow
Whose mind's not a blank the next day!
## p. 9754 (#162) ###########################################
9754
MARTIAL
EVOLUTION
A
SURGEON once - a sexton now twin personages:
Identical professions, only different stages!
VALE OF TEARS
LONE she never weeps her father's death;
When friends are by, her tears time every breath.
Who weeps for credit, never grief hath known;
He truly weeps alone, who weeps alone!
A
SIC VOS NON VOBIS
I
F THAT the gods should grant these brothers twain
Such shares of life as Leda's Spartans led,
A noble strife affection would constrain,
For each would long to die in brother's stead;
And he would say who first reached death's confine,
"Live, brother, thine own days, and then live mine! ”
SILENCE IS GOLDEN
OU'RE pretty, I know it; and young, that is true;
And wealthy — there's none but confesses that too:
But you trumpet your praises with so loud a tongue
That you cease to be wealthy or pretty or young!
You
SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR
YES
,
ES, New and I both here reside:
Our stoops you see are side by side;
And people think I'm puffed with pride,
And envy me serenely blessed,
With such a man for host and guest.
The fact is this — he's just as far
As folks in Borrioboola Gha.
What! booze with him ? or see his face,
Or hear his voice? In all the place
There's none so far, there's none so near!
We'll never meet if both stay here!
To keep from knowing New at all,
Just lodge with him across the hall!
## p. 9755 (#163) ###########################################
MARTIAL
9755
THE LEAST OF EVILS
HILE some with kisses Julia smothers,
Reluctant hand she gives to others:
Give me thy merest finger-tips,
Or anything - but not thy lips!
W
THOU REASON’ST WELL
TER
He atheist swears there is no God
And no eternal bliss:
For him to own no world above
Doth make a heaven of this.
NEVER IS, BUT ALWAYS TO BE
<<
Yºu
(
always say
to-morrow, ” “to-morrow” you will live;
But that “to-morrow," prithee, say when will it arrive ?
How far is't off ? Where is it now? Where shall I go to
find it?
In Afric's jungles lies it hid? Do polar icebergs bind it?
It's ever coming, never here; its years beat Nestor's hollow!
This wondrous thing, to call it mine, I'll give my every dollar!
Why, man, to-day's too late to live — the wise is who begun
To live his life with yesterday, e'en with its rising sun!
LEARNING BY DOING
A
s MITHRADATES used to drink the deadly serpent's venom,
That thus all noxious things might have for him no mis-
chief in 'em,-
So Skinner feeds but once a day with scanty preparation,
To teach his folks to smile unfed nor suffer from starvation.
TERTIUM QUID
W**
HEN poets, croaking hoarse with cold,
To spout their verses seek,
They show at once they cannot hold
Their tongues, yet cannot speak.
## p. 9756 (#164) ###########################################
9756
MARTIAL
SIMILIA SIMILIBUS
I
WONDER not that this sweetheart of thine
Abstains from wine;
I only wonder that her father's daughter
Can stick to water.
CANNIBALISM
W
ITHOUT roast pig he never takes his seat:
Always a boor- a boar — companions meet!
"
YO
EQUALS ADDED TO EQUALS
ask why I refuse to wed a woman famed for riches:
Because I will not take the veil and give my wife the breeches.
The dame, my friend, unto her spouse must be subservient quite:
No other way can man and wife maintain their equal right.
THE COOK WELL DONE
THY call me a bloodthirsty, gluttonous sinner
For pounding my chef when my peace he subverts?
If I can't thrash my cook when he gets a poor dinner,
Pray how shall the scamp ever get his deserts ?
W"
A DIVERTING SCRAPE
M
Y SHAVER, barber eke and boy,-
One such as emperors employ
Their hirsute foliage to destroy,–
I lent a friend as per request
To make his features look their best.
By test of testy looking-glass
He mowed and raked the hairy grass,
Forgetful how the long hours pass;
He left my friend a perfect skin,
But grew a beard on his own chin!
## p. 9757 (#165) ###########################################
MARTIAL
9757
DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND
Youp
ou'd marry Crichton, Miss Jemima:
Smart for you!
But somehow he won't come to time. Ah!
He's smart too!
THE COBBLER'S LAST
PK
.
REDESTINED for patching and soling,
For fragrance of grease, wax, and thread,
You find yourself squire by cajoling,
When with pigs you should hobnob instead;
And midst your lord's vertu you're rolling,
With liquor and love in your head!
How foolish to send me to college,
To soak up unpractical views!
How slow is the progress of knowledge
By the march of your three-dollar shoes!
BUT LITTLE HERE BELOW
H"
is grave must be shallow,— the earth on him light, -
Or else you will smother the poor little mite.
E PLURIBUS UNUS
Hen hundreds to your parlors rush,
You wonder I evade the crush?
Well, frankly, sir, I'm not imbued
With love of social solitude.
W"
FINE FRENZY
L
ONG and Short will furnish verse
To market any fake :
Do poets any longer dream,
Or are they wide-awake?
## p. 9758 (#166) ###########################################
9758
MARTIAL
LIVE WITHOUT DINING
NY
Z
ow, if you have an axe to grind, or if you inean to spout,
If your invite is to a spread, then you must count me out:
I do not like that dark-brown flask, I dread the thought of
gout,
I'm restless at the gorgeous gorge that ostentation dares.
My friend must offer me pot-luck on wash-days unawares;
I like my feed when his menu with my own larder squares.
THE TWO THINGS NEEDFUL
Hº
OW grand your gorgeous mansion shows
Through various trees in stately rows!
Yet two defects its splendors spite:
No charmed recess for tedious night -
No cheerful spot where friends may dine-
Well, your non-residence is fine!
## p. 9759 (#167) ###########################################
9759
JAMES MARTINEAU
(1805-)
wo names overtop all others in the history of English Unita-
rian thought and leadership,- Joseph Priestley and James
Martineau. Priestley died in 1804, and Martineau was born
the following year, April 21st, coming of a Huguenot family which
had been long settled in England. From his father he inherited the
gentleness and refinement of his nature, from his mother that intel-
lectual strength in which his celebrated sister Harriet so fully shared.
His education began at the Grammar School” in Norwich, where
his father was a manufacturer and wine
merchant; and was continued at Bristol with
Dr. Lant Carpenter, then a prominent Uni-
tarian minister, but now best known as the
father of the scientist W. B. Carpenter and
Mary the philanthropist. The next step
was to the workshop, with a view to mak-
ing himself a civil engineer. This phase
of his experience enriched his mind with
the materials for many a brilliant metaphor
in his writings, wonderful to his readers
until they know his early history. But his
heart was not in his ork; and at length
his father yielded to his solicitations, and JAMES MARTINEAU
assuring him that he was courting pov-
erty,” sent him to Manchester New College, which was then at
York,-a lineal descendant of that Warrenton Academy in which
Priestley taught and Malthus was educated, but already, in 1824, a
Unitarian theological school. Here Martineau was graduated in 1827,
and soon after became junior pastor of a church in Dublin, nominally
Presbyterian like most of the early Unitarian churches in England
and Ireland. Already distinguished as a preacher of great eloquence
and fervor, upon the death of his senior he refused to take that sen-
ior's place because it entailed the regium donum: a gift of the Crown
to Protestant ministers, which he thought discriminated unfairly
against Roman Catholics. His next charge was in Liverpool, whither
he went in 1832, and in 1836 published his first book, Rationale of
Religious Enquiry,' which was strikingly in advance of the current
## p. 9760 (#168) ###########################################
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JAMES MARTINEAU
)
Unitarian thinking. In 1839 he made himself a great reputation in
the famous Liverpool Controversy); accepting, with the Unitarians
Thom and Giles, the challenge of thirteen clergymen of the Estab-
lished Church to a public debate. Martineau's contribution was the
most brilliant and effective ever made to Unitarian controversial writ-
ing. This success may have done something to set the habit of his
life; for it is certain that it has ever since been stoutly controver-
sial,— his numerous essays and reviews, and even his most import-
ant books, being cast for the inost part in a controversial mold, while
his sermons frequently take on a controversial character without any
of the personalities which the other things involve.
In 1840 he was made professor of mental and moral philosophy in
Manchester New College; which, following its peripatetic habit, in
1841 returned from York to Manchester, went to London in 1847, and
to Oxford in 1889. Martineau was connected with it as professor,
and for many years as its head, until 1885. In the mean time he
had removed from Liverpool to London, in 1857, after ten years of
journeying there to his lectures and back to his pastoral work. The
substance of his college work is embodied in his ‘Types of Ethical
Theory) (1885), A Study of Religion (1888), and The Seat of
Authority in Religion (1890).
The critical radicalism of the last of these volumes did much to
alienate the sympathies of those whose religious conservatism had
attracted them to the two others, and to the general working of his
mind as opposed to the materialistic tendencies which were domi-
nant and aggressive in the third quarter of the century. But as a
critic of the New Testament and Christian origins there was nothing
in "The Seat of Authority to astonish or surprise any one acquainted
with the course of his development. In this respect he had been
consistently radical from first to last. Some of the most radical posi-
tions in the book will be found, germinal if not developed, in his
reviews and studies of a much earlier date. The result of his criti-
cisms was, for himself, a conception of Jesus and his work in history
which, ethically and spiritually, transcended any that he found in
the traditional presentation, but was strictly within the limits of a
humanitarian view.
If Martineau's theological and philosophical position was conserva-
tive as compared with his criticism, it was so only from the accident
of a temporary swaying of the pendulum of thought towards materi-
alism a tendency which has already reached its term, and which no
English writer has done so much to counteract as he. But an intui-
tive philosophy, anti-materialistic, anti-necessarian, anti-utilitarian, was
not a conservative but a radical philosophy from 1840 until 1860; and
this was the philosophy of Martineau in those years of earnest thought
## p. 9761 (#169) ###########################################
JAMES MARTINEAU
9761
(
and active change. He had begun as an ardent disciple of Locke
and Hartley and Priestley: serving out his captivity with them
more patiently because of the idealization of their doctrine by the
younger Mill, who as early as 1841 noticed in a syllabus of Marti-
neau's lectures that he was falling away from his allegiance to the
empirical school, and begged to have the lectures printed lest he
should be studying them in another state of existence” were their
publication long delayed. In a little while Martineau found himself
bound “to concede to the self-conscious mind itself, both as knowing
and willing, an autonomous function distinct from each and all of
the phenomena known, and changes willed, - a self-identity as unlike
a
as possible to any growing aggregate of miscellaneous and dissimilar
experiences. This involved a surrender of determinism and a revis-
ion of the doctrine of causation. In 1848–9 he spent fifteen months in
Germany, studying with Trendelenburg, and was soon brought into
the same plight with reference to the cognitive and æsthetic side of
life that had already befallen him in regard to the moral. He had
become a metaphysician, — the possible as real for him as the actual,
noumena as real as phenomena, mind central to the universe, and God
a righteous will.
It would be difficult to find a more brilliant series of writings —
culminating in the elaborate treatises of 1885, 1887, 1890 — than those
in which Martineau defended his new-found philosophic faith. He
had many foemen worthy of his pen. In the persons of Mansel and
Spencer he opposed himself to Agnosticism before Huxley had named
the terrible child, and while it was provisionally called Nescience.
Against Tyndall and others as the prophets of Materialism, he put
forth his utmost strength. In the great battle with Determinism and
Utilitarianism he met all those who came up against him with a dia-
lectic supple and keen as a Damascus sword. On these several fields
he was a recognized captain of the host, and obtained the admiration
and the gratitude of many who could not abide his Unitarian faith.
His scientific knowledge was so large that it enabled him to cope
with noble confidence with scientists venturing across his lines. He
has lived to see many of the bolder of them retreating from positions
too rashly taken up; but that his own are final is not to be supposed.
One may greatly admire him, and yet conceive that he has been far
more apt in finding what is weakest in the philosophical and reli-
gious implications of a transitional science, than in appropriating
those scientific elements which make for a more satisfactory solution
of the universal mystery than any yet obtained.
But if Martineau had not been master in philosophy and ethics,
he would still have been one of the most distinguished preachers of
his sect and time. His most helpful books have been his volumes
XVII-611
## p. 9762 (#170) ###########################################
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JAMES MARTINEAU
of sermons, especially the two volumes (1843-7) Endeavors after a
Christian Life. The published sermons of his later life are too much
overcrowded by the fear that the materialists be upon us. They
have not the joyous march and song of the 'Endeavors. ' A pene-
trating spirituality is the dominant note of all his works; a passion
for ideal truth and purity. The beauty of holiness shines from every
page as from the preacher's face. His style, though marvelously
brilliant, has undoubtedly been a deduction from his influence. It is
so rich with metaphor that it dazzles the reader more than it illumi-
nates the theme. Moreover, we are arrested by the beauty of the
expression as by a painted window that conceals what is beyond.
Nevertheless, for those straining after an ideal perfection, his sermons
are as music to their feet. He has won the unbounded love and
reverence of his own household of faith; and in his ninety-third year
(1897) is, with Gladstone, one of the most impressive figures on the
century's narrowing verge. All the great universities of Great Brit-
ain, America, and Continental Europe long since accorded him their
highest honors.
THE TRANSIENT AND THE REAL IN LIFE
From Hours of Thought on Sacred Things )
Job xii. 22: "He discovereth deep things out of darkness; and bringeth
out to light the shadow of Death. ”
1
T is the oldest, as it is the newest, reproach of the cynic against
the devout, that they construe the universe by themselves;
attribute it to a will like their own; tracing in it imaginary
vestiges of a moral plan, and expecting from it the fulfillment of
their brilliant but arbitrary dreams. Instead of humbly sitting at
the feet of Nature, copying her order into the mind, and shap-
ing all desire and belief into the form of her usages and laws,
they turn out their own inward life into the spaces of the world,
and impose their longings and admirations on the courses and
issues of Time. With childish self-exaggeration, it is said, we
fancy creation governed like a great human life,- peopled with
motives, preferences, and affections parallel to ours,- its light
and heat, its winds and tides, its seasons and its skies, adminis-
tered by choice of good or ill, transparent with the flush of an
infinite love, or suffused with the shadow of an infinite displeas-
We set at the helm of things a glorified humanity; and
that is our God. We think away from society the cries of wrong
ure.
## p. 9763 (#171) ###########################################
JAMES MARTINEAU
9763
and the elements of sin, leaving only what is calm and holy; and
that is our Kingdom of Heaven. We picture to ourselves youth
that never wastes, thought that never tires, and friendship with-
out the last adieu; and that is our immortality. Religion, we
are assured, is thus born of misery: it is the soul's protest against
disappointment and refusal to accept it, the pity which our nature
takes upon its own infirmities, and is secured only on the pathos
of the human heart.
Be it so. Are you sure that the security is not good ? Are
we so made as to learn everything from the external world,
and nothing out of ourselves? Grant the allegation.
Let our
diviner visions be the native instinct, the home inspiration, of
our thought and love: are they therefore false because we think
them ? illusory, because beautiful relatively to us? Am I to be-
lieve the register of my senses, and to contradict the divinations
of conscience and the trusts of pure affection? Is it a sign of
highest reason to deny God until I see him, and blind myself to
the life eternal till I am born into its surprise ? Nothing more
arbitrary, nothing narrower, can well be conceived, than to lay
down the rule that our lowest endowment - the perceptive pow-
ers which introduce us to material things - has the monopoly
of knowledge; and that the surmises of the moral sense have
nothing true, and the vaticinations of devoted love only a light
that leads astray. The wiser position surely is, that the mind
is a balanced organ of truth all round,- that each faculty sees
aright on its own side of things, and can measure what the
others miss: the hand, the palpable; the eye, the visible; the
imagination, the beautiful; the spirit, the spiritual; and the will,
the good. How else indeed could God and Heaven, if really
there, enter our field of knowledge, but by standing thus in rela-
tion to some apprehensive gift in us, and emerging as the very
condition of its exercise and the attendant shadow of its move-
ments ?
And in truth, if we are not strangely self-ignorant, we must
be conscious of two natures blended in us, each carrying a sep-
arate order of beliefs and trusts, which may assert themselves
with the least possible notice of the other. There is the nature
which lies open to the play of the finite world, gathers its expe-
rience, measures everything by its standard, adapts itself to its
rules, and discharges as fictitious whatever its appearances fail
to show. And underlying this, in strata far below, there is the
## p. 9764 (#172) ###########################################
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JAMES MARTINEAU
nature which stands related to things infinite, and heaves and
stirs beneath their solemn pressure, and is so engaged with them
as hardly to feel above it the sway and ripple of the transi-
tory tides. Living by the one, we find our place in nature; by
the other, we lose ourselves in God. By the first, we have our
science, our skill, our prudence; by the second, our philosophy,
our poetry, our reverence for duty. The one computes its way
by foresight; the other is self-luminous for insight. In short,
the one puts us into communication with the order of appear-
ances; the other with eternal realities. It is a shallow mind
which can see to the bottom of its own beliefs, and is conscious
of nothing but what it can measure in evidence and state in
words; which feels in its own guilt no depth it cannot fathom,
and in another's holiness no beauty it can only pine to seize;
which reads on the face of things - on the glory of the earth
and sky, on human joy and grief, on birth and death, in pity
and heroic sacrifice, in the eyes of a trusting child and the com-
posure of a saintly countenance no meanings that cannot be
printed; and which is never drawn, alone and in silence, into
prayer exceeding speech. Things infinite and divine lie too near
to our own centre, and mingle in too close communion, to be
looked at as if they were there instead of here: they are given
not so much for definition as for trust; are less the objects we
think of than the very tone and color of our thought, the ten-
sion of our love, the unappeasable thirst of grief and reverence.
Till we surrender ourselves not less freely to the implicit faiths
folded up in the interior reason, conscience, and affection, than to
the explicit beliefs which embody in words the laws of the out-
ward world, we shall be but one-eyed children of Nature, and
utterly blind prophets of God.
No doubt these two sides of our humanity, supplying the
temporal and the spiritual estimates of things, are at ceaseless
variance; they reckon by incommensurable standards, and the
answers can never be the same. The natural world, with the
part of us that belongs to it, is so framed as to make nothing
of importance to us except the rules by which it goes, and to
bid us ask no questions about its origin; since we have equally
to fall in with its ways, be they fatal or be they divine. But to
our reason in its noblest exercise, it makes a difference simply
infinite, whether the universe it scans is in the hands of dead
necessity or of the living God. This, which our science ignores,
## p. 9765 (#173) ###########################################
JAMES MARTINEAU
9765
no
is precisely the problem which our intellect is made to ponder.
Again, our social system of rights and obligations is constructed
on the assumption that with the springs of action we have no
concern: they fulfill all conditions, if we ask nothing and give
nothing beyond the conduct happiest in its results. But the nat-
ural conscience flies straight to the inner springs of action as
its sole interest and object; it is there simply as an organ for
interpreting them, and finding in them the very soul of right-
eousness: that which the outward observer shuns is the inward
spirit's holy place. And once more, Nature, as the mere mother
of us all, takes small account in this thronged and historic world of
the single human life; repeating it so often as to render it cheap;
short as it is, often cutting its brief thread; and making each
one look so like the other that you would say it could not matter
who should go. But will our private love, which surely has the
nearer insight, accept this estimate ? Do we, when its treasure
has fallen from our arms, say of the term of human years, “It
has been enough ” ? — that the possibilities are spent; that the
cycle of the soul is complete; and that with larger time and
renovated opportunity, it could learn and love and serve
more? Ah no! to deep and reverent affection there is an aspect
under which death must ever appear unnatural; and its cloud,
after lingering awhile till the perishable elements are hid, grows
transparent as we gaze, and half shows, half veils, a glorious
image in the depth beyond. Tell me not that affection is blind,
and magnifies its object in the dark. Affection blind! I say there
is nothing else that can see; that can find its way through the
windings of the soul it loves, and know how its graces lie. The
cynic thinks that all the fair look of our humanity is on the out-
side, inasmuch as each mind will put on its best dress for com-
pany; and if there he detects some littleness and weakness, which
perhaps his own cold eye brings to the surface, there can be
only what is worse within. Dupe that he is of his own wit! he
has not found out that all the evil spirits of human nature flock
to him; that his presence brings them to the surface from their
recesses in every heart, and drives the blessed angels to hide
themselves away: for who would own a reverence, who tell a
tender grief, before that hard ungenial gaze? Wherever he moves,
he empties the space around him of its purest elements: with his
low thought he roofs it from the heavenly light and the sweet
air; and then complains of the world as a close-breathed and
## p. 9766 (#174) ###########################################
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JAMES MARTINEAU
stifling place. It is not the critic, but the lover, who can know
the real contents and scale of a human life; and that interior
estimate, as it is the truer, is always the higher: the closest look
becomes the gentlest too; and domestic faith, struck by bereave-
ment, easily transfigures the daily familiar into an image con-
genial with a brighter world.
Our faculties and affections are graduated then to objects
greater, better, fairer, and more enduring, than the order of
nature gives us here. They demand a scale and depth of being
which outwardly they do not meet, yet inwardly they are the
organ for apprehending. Hence a certain glorious sorrow must
ever mingle with our life: all our actual is transcended by our
possible; our visionary faculty is an overmatch for our experi-
ence; like the caged bird, we break ourselves against the bars
of the finite, with a wing that quivers for the infinite. To stifle
this struggle, to give up the higher aspiration, and be content
with making our small lodgings snug, is to cut off the summit
of our nature, and live upon the flat of a mutilated humanity.
To let the struggle be, however it may sadden us, to trust the
pressure of the soul towards diviner objects and more holy life,
and measure by it the invisible ends to which we tend,- this
is true faith; the unfading crown of an ideal and progressive
nature. It is indeed, and ever must be, notwithstanding the
light that circles it, a crown of thorns; and the brow that wears
it can
never wholly cease to bleed. A nature which reaches
forth to the perfect from a station in the imperfect must always
have a pathetic tinge in its experience. Think not to escape it
by any change of scene, though from the noisy streets to the
eternal City of God. There is but One for whom there is no
interval between what he thinks and what he is; in whom there.
fore is “light, and no darkness at all. ” For us, vain is the
dream of a shadowless world, with no interruption of brilliancy,
no remission of joy. Were our heaven never overcast, yet we
meet the brightest morning only in escape from recent night;
and the atmosphere of our souls, never passing from ebb and
flow of love into a motionless constancy, must always break the
white eternal beams into a colored and a tearful glory. Whence
is that tincture of sanctity which Christ has given to sorrow, and
which makes his form at once the divinest and most pathetic in
the world ? It is that he has wakened by his touch the illimit-
able aspirations of our bounded nature, and flung at once into
## p. 9767 (#175) ###########################################
JAMES MARTINEAU
9767
our thought and affection a holy beauty, a divine Sonship, into
which we can only slowly grow. And this is a condition which
can never cease to be. Among the true children of the Highest,
who would wish to be free from it? Let the glorious burden
lie! How can we be angry at a sorrow which is the birth-pang
of a diviner life?
From this strife, of infinite capacity with finite conditions,
spring all the ideal elements which mingle with the matter of
our being. Nor is it our conscience only that betrays the secret
of this double life. Our very memory too, though it seems but
to photograph the actual, proves to have the artist's true select-
ing power, and knows how to let the transient fall away, and
leave the imperishable undimmed and clear. As time removes
us from each immediate experience, some freshening dew, some
wave of regeneration, brightens all the colors and washes off the
dust; so that often we discover the essence only when the acci-
dents are gone, and the present must die from us ere it can
truly live. The work of yesterday, with its place and hour, has
but a dull look when we recall it. But the scene of our childish
years,—the homestead, it may be, with its quaint garden and
its orchard grass; the bridge across the brook from which we
dropped the pebbles and watched the circling waves; the school-
house in the field, whose bell broke up the game and quickened
every lingerer's feet; the yew-tree path where we crossed the
church-yard, with arm round the neck of a companion now be-
neath the sod, - how soft the light, how tender the shadows, in
which that picture lies! how musical across the silence are the
tones it Aings! The glare, the heat, the noise, the care, are
gone; and the sunshine sleeps, and the waters ripple, and the
lawns are green, as if it were in Paradise. But in these minor
religions of life, it is the personal images of companions loved
and lost that chiefly keep their watch with us, and sweeten and
solemnize the hours. The very child that misses the mother's
appreciating love is introduced, by his first tears, to that thirst
of the heart which is the early movement of piety, ere yet it has
got its wings. And I have known the youth who through long
years of harsh temptation, and then short years of wasting decline,
has, from like memory, never lost the sense as of a guardian angel
near, and lived in the enthusiasm, and died into the embrace,
of the everlasting holiness. In the heat and struggle of mid-life,
it is a severe but often a purifying retreat to be lifted into the
## p. 9768 (#176) ###########################################
9768
JAMES MARTINEAU
lonely observatory of memory, above the fretful illusions of the
moment, and in presence once more of the beauty and the sanc-
tity of life. The voiceless counsels that look through the vision-
ary eyes of our departed steal into us behind our will, and sweep
the clouds away, and direct us on a wiser path than we should
know to choose. If age ever gains any higher wisdom, it is
chiefly that it sits in a longer gallery of the dead, and sees
the noble and saintly faces in further perspective and more vari-
ous throng. The dim abstracted look that often settles on the
features of the old, - what means it ? Is it a
mere fading of
the life ? an absence, begun already, from the drama of humanity ?
a deafness to the cry of its woes and the music of its affections ?
Not always so: the seeming forgetfulness may be but brightened
memory; and if the mists lie on the outward present, and make
it as a gathering night, the more brilliant is the lamp within
that illuminates the figures of the past, and shows again, by their
flitting shadows, the plot in which they moved and fell.
It is through such natural experiences — the treasured sanctities
of every true life — that God “discovereth to us deep things out
of darkness, and turneth into light the shadow of death. ” They
constitute the lesser religions of the soul; and say what you will,
they come and go with the greater, and put forth leaf and blos-
som from the same root. We are so constituted throughout-in
memory, in affection, in conscience, in intellect — that we cannot
rest in the literal aspect of things as they materially come to
No sooner are they in our possession, than we turn them
into some crucible of thought, which saves their essence and pre-
cipitates their dross; and their pure idea emerges as our lasting
treasure, to be remembered, loved, willed, and believed.
for this sort of intelligence is soon communicated through a
ship,- were assembled in knots, looking very grave, but at the
same time not wanting in confidence. They knew that they could
>
## p. 9745 (#153) ###########################################
FREDERICK MARRYÁT
9745
C
»
trust to the captain, as far as skill or courage could avail them;
and sailors are too sanguine to despair, even at the last moment.
As for myself, I felt such admiration for the captain, after what
I had witnessed that morning, that whenever the idea came over
me that in all probability I should be lost in a few hours, I could
not help acknowledging how much more serious it was that such
a man should be lost to his country. I do not intend to say that
it consoled me; but it certainly made me still more regret the
chances with which we were threatened.
Before twelve o'clock the rocky point which we so much
dreaded was in sight, broad on the lee bow; and if the low sandy
coast appeared terrible, how much more did this, even at a dis-
tance! the black masses of rock covered with foam, which each
minute dashed up in the air higher than our lower mast-heads.
The captain eyed it for some minutes in silence, as if in calcula-
tion.
"Mr. Falcon,” said he at last, "we must put the mainsail on
her. ”
«She never can bear it, sir. ”
“She must bear it,” was the reply. “Send the men aft to the
mainsheet. See that careful men attend the buntlines. ”
The mainsail was set; and the effect of it upon the ship was
tremendous. She careened over so that her lee channels were
under the water; and when pressed by a sea, the lee side of the
quarter-deck and gangway were afloat. She now reminded me
of a goaded and fiery horse, mad with the stimulus applied;
not rising as before, but forcing herself through whole seas, and
dividing the waves, which poured in one continual torrent from
the forecastle down upon the decks below. Four men
secured to the wheel; the sailors were obliged to cling, to pre-
vent being washed away; the ropes were thrown in confusion to
leeward; the shot rolled out of the lockers, and every eye was
fixed aloft, watching the masts, which were expected every mo-
ment to go over the side. A heavy sea struck us on the broad-
side, and it was some moments before the ship appeared to
recover herself; she reeled, trembled, and stopped her way, as if
it had stupefied her. The first lieutenant looked at the captain,
as if to say, “This will not do. ” "It is our only chance,"
answered the captain to the appeal. That the ship went faster
through the water and held a better wind, was certain; but
just before we arrived at the point, the gale increased in force.
were
(
XVII-610
## p. 9746 (#154) ###########################################
9746
FREDERICK MARRYAT
»
>
"If anything starts, we are lost, sir,” observed the first lieutenant
again.
“I am perfectly aware of it,” replied the captain in a calm
tone; « but as I said before, and you must now be aware, it is
our only chance. The consequence of any carelessness or neglect
in the fitting and securing of the rigging will be felt now; and
this danger, if we escape it, ought to remind us how much we
have to answer for if we neglect our duty. The lives of a whole
ship's company may be sacrificed by the neglect or incompetence
of an officer when in harbor. I will pay you the compliment,
Falcon, to say that I feel convinced that the masts of the ship
are as secure as knowledge and attention can make them. ”
The first lieutenant thanked the captain for his good opinion,
and hoped it would not be the last compliment which he paid
him.
"I hope not too; but a few minutes will decide the point. ”
The ship was now within two cables' lengths of the rocky
point; some few of the men I observed to clasp their hands, but
most of them were silently taking off their jackets and kicking
off their shoes, that they might not lose a chance of escape pro-
vided the ship struck.
« 'Twill be touch and go indeed, Falcon,” observed the captain
(for I had clung to the belaying pins, close to them, for the last
half-hour that the mainsail had been set). “Come aft; you and
I must take the helin. We shall want nerve there, and only
there, now. ”
The captain and first lieutenant went aft and took the fore.
spokes of the wheel; and O'Brien, at a sign made by the cap-
tain, laid hold of the spokes behind them. An old quartermaster
kept his station at the fourth. The roaring of the seas on the
rocks, with the howling of the winds, was dreadful; but the sight
was more dreadful than the noise. For a few moments I shut
my eyes, but anxiety forced me to open them again. As near
as I could judge, we were not twenty yards from the rocks at
the time that the ship passed abreast of them. We were in the
midst of the foam, which boiled around us; and as the ship was
driven nearer to them, and careened with the wave, I thought
that our main yard-arm would have touched the rock; and at
this moment a gust of wind came on which laid the ship on her
beam-ends and checked her progress through the water, while
the accumulated noise was deafening. A few moments more the
## p. 9747 (#155) ###########################################
FREDERICK MARRYAT
9747
ship dragged on; another wave dashed over her and spent itself
upon the rocks, while the spray was dashed back from them and
returned upon the decks. The main rock was within ten yards
of her counter, when another gust of wind laid us on our beam-
ends; the foresail and mainsail split and were blown clean out
of the bolt-ropes — the ship righted, trembling fore and aft.
looked astern; the rocks were to windward on our quarter, and
we were safe. I thought at the time that the ship, relieved of
her courses, and again lifting over the waves, was not a bad
similitude of the relief felt by us all at that moment; and like
her we trembled as we panted with the sudden reaction, and felt
the removal of the intense anxiety which oppressed our breasts.
The captain resigned the helm, and walked aft to look at the
point, which was now broad on the weather quarter. In a min-
ute or two he desired Mr. Falcon to get new sails up and bend
them, and then went below to his cabin. I am sure it was to
thank God for our deliverance; I did most fervently, not only
then, but when I went to my hammock at night. We w
comparatively safe - in a few hours completely so, for, strange
to say, immediately after we had weathered the rocks the gale
abated; and before morning we had a reef out of the topsails.
re now
MRS. EASY HAS HER OWN WAY
From Mr. Midshipman Easy)
T
I"
((
WAS the fourth day after Mrs. Easy's confinement that Mr.
Easy, who was sitting by her bedside in an easy-chair, com-
menced as follows: "I have been thinking, my dear Mrs.
Easy, about the name I shall give this child. ”
Name, Mr. Easy? why, what name should you give it but
your own ?
Not so, my dear,” replied Mr. Easy: "they call all names
proper names, but I think that mine is not. It is the very worst
name in the calendar. ”
Why, what's the matter with it, Mr. Easy ? »
“The matter affects me as well as the boy. Nicodemus is a
long name to write at full length, and Nick is vulgar. Besides,
as there will be two Nicks, they will naturally call my boy Young
Nick, and of course I shall be styled Old Nick, which will be
diabolical. »
## p. 9748 (#156) ###########################################
9748
FREDERICK MARRYAT
>
>>
I will ap-
« Well, Mr. Easy, at all events then let me choose the name. ”
“That you shall, my dear; and it was with this view that I
have mentioned the subject so early. ”
“I think, Mr. Easy, I will call the boy after my poor father:
his name shall be Robert. »
“Very well, my dear: if you wish it, it shall be Robert. You
shall have your own way. But I think, my dear, upon a little
consideration, you will acknowledge that there is a decided
objection. ”
"An objection, Mr. Easy ? ”
“Yes, my dear: Robert máy be very well, but you must
reflect upon the consequences; he is certain to be called Bob. ”
"Well, my dear, and suppose they do call him Bob? »
"I cannot bear even the supposition, my dear. You forget
the county in which you are residing, the downs covered with
sheep. ”
“Why, Mr. Easy, what can sheep have to do with a Christian
name ? »
“There it is: women never look to consequences. My dear,
they have a great deal to do with the name of Bob.
peal to any farmer in the country if ninety-nine shepherds' dogs
out of one hundred are not called Bob. Now observe: your child
is out of doors somewhere in the fields or plantations; you
want and you call him. Instead of your child, what do you find ?
Why, a dozen curs, at least, who come running up to you,
all answering to the name of Bob, and wagging their stumps
of tails. You see, Mrs. Easy, it is a dilemma not to be got
over. You level your only son to the brute creation by giving
him a Christian name which, from its peculiar brevity, has been
monopolized by all the dogs in the county. Any other name
you please, my dear; but in this one instance you must allow me
to lay my positive veto. ”
“Well, then, let me see- but I'll think of it, Mr. Easy: my
head aches very much just now. ”
"I will think for you, my dear. What do you say to John ? "
“Oh no, Mr. Easy,- such a common name! ”
"A proof of its popularity, my dear. It is Scriptural — we
have the Apostle and the Baptist, we have a dozen popes who
were all Johns. It is royal — we have plenty of kings who
were Johns — and moreover, it is short, and sounds honest and
manly. "
(C
## p. 9749 (#157) ###########################################
FREDERICK MARRYAT
9749
(
C
»
I am
>>
(
"Yes, very true, my dear; but they will call him Jack. ”
“Well, we have had several celebrated characters who were
Jacks. There was — let me see - Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack
- — -
of the Bean-Stalk — and Jack — Jack —
- »
"Jack Sprat. "
"And Jack Cade, Mrs. Easy, the great rebel — and Three-
fingered Jack, Mrs. Easy, the celebrated negro — and above all,
Jack Falstaff, ma'am, Jack Falstaff — honest Jack Falstaff — witty
Jack Falstaff -->>
"I thought, Mr. Easy, that I was to be permitted to choose
the name. ”
“Well, so you shall, my dear; I give it up to you.
Do just
as you please; but depend upon it that John is the right name.
Is it not, now, my dear ? »
"It's the way you always treat me, Mr. Easy: you say that
you give it up, and that I shall have my own way, but I never
do have it.
sure that the child will be christened John.
"Nay, my dear, it shall be just what you please. Now I
recollect it, there were several Greek emperors who were Johns;
but decide for yourself, my dear. ”
"No, no,” replied Mrs. Easy, who was ill, and unable to con-
tend any longer, “I give it up, Mr. Easy. I know how it will
be, as it always is: you give me my own way as people give
pieces of gold to children; it's their own money, but they must
not spend it. Pray call him John. ”
« There, my dear, did not I tell you you would be of my
opinion upon reflection? I knew you would. I have given you
your own way, and you tell me to call him John; so now we're
both of the same mind, and that point is settled. ”
"I should like to go to sleep, Mr. Easy: I feel far from
well. ”
"You shall always do just as you like, my dear," replied
the husband, and have your own way in everything. It is the
greatest pleasure I have when I yield to your wishes. I will
walk in the garden. Good-by, my dear. ”
Mrs. Easy made no reply, and the philosopher quitted the
room. As may easily be imagined, on the following day the boy
was christened John.
(
»
## p. 9750 (#158) ###########################################
9750
MARTIAL
(MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIALIS)
(50 ? -102 ? A. D. )
BY CASKIE HARRISON
M
ARTIAL (Marcus Valerius Martialis), the world's epigrammatist,
was, like Seneca and Quintilian, a Spanish Latin. Born at
Bilbilis about A. D. 40, he probably came to Rome in 63;
but we first individualize him about 79. He lived in Rome for nearly
thirty-five years, publishing epigrams, book after book and edition
after edition, doing hack-work in his own line for those who had the
money to buy but not the wit to produce, and plagiarized by those
who lacked both the wit and the money; reading his last good thing
to his own circle, from which he could
not always exclude poachers on his pre-
serves, and lending a courteous or a politic
patience to the long-winded recitations of
new aspirants; patronized in various more
or less substantial ways by the Emperor
and sundry men of wealth, influence, and
position, on whom he pulled all the strings
of fulsome flattery and importunate appeal;
adjusting himself to the privileges and ex-
pectancies of Rome's miscellaneous “upper
ten” in private and public resorts: solacing
his better nature with the contact and es-
MARTIAL
teem of the best authors of the day. Bored
with the “fuss and feathers” of town life,
and yearning for the lost or imagined happiness of his native place,
he would from time to time fly to his Nomentane cottage or make
trips into the provinces, only to be disenchanted by rustic monotony
and depressed by the lack of urban occupations and diversions. His
works, and his life as there sketched, expose the times and their
representative men at their best and at their worst. This delineation
gives to his writings an importance even greater than that due to
his general pre-eminence as the one poet of his age, or to the special
supremacy of his epigrams as such. His rating as a poet has indeed
been questioned, and his restriction of the epigram deplored; but no
## p. 9751 (#159) ###########################################
MARTIAL
9751
one can question his portraiture of the Roman Empire at the turn of
its troubled tide.
Returning to Spain early in Trajan's reign, he died there about
102; and his death is noted with sincere feeling by the younger
Pliny, whose recognition must to a certain degree offset our repug-
nance to some of Martial's acknowledged characteristics. Martial was
a man of many personal attractions: he was essentially sympathetic
and true, loving nature and children; his manners were genial, and
his education was finished; his acute observation was matched by his
versatile wit; in an age of artifice, his style was as natural as his
disposition was fair and generous. All these qualities are detected
in his works, although his time demanded the general repression or
the prudent display of such qualities by one whose livelihood must
depend on patronage,-an inevitable professionalism that perhaps
fully explains, not only his obsequiousness, but also his obscenity.
Martial was a predestined gentleman and scholar, forced by his pro-
fession into a trimmer and a dependent: a man of stronger character
might have refused to live such a life even at the cost of his vocation
and its aptitudes; but Martial was a man of his own world.
Whether Martial was married, and how many times, it is hard to
determine: he is his only witness, and his testimony is too indirect
to be unquestionable; at any rate, he seems to have had no children.
His pecuniary condition is equally doubtful: he credits himself with
possessions adequate to comfort only as a basis for protestations
of discomfort; but we know how time and circumstances alter one's
standards of worldly contentment. Even when Martial speaks in the
first person, we cannot be sure it is not the “professional,” instead of
the individual, first person,- the vicarious and anonymous first per-
son of the myriad public whose hints he worked up into effective
mottoes, valentines, and lampoons, and for whose holiday gifts he
devised appropriate companion pieces of verse.
Martial's poems — fifteen books, containing about sixteen hundred
numbers in several measures - are epigrams of different kinds. The
Liber Spectaculorum' (The Show Book) merely depicts the marvels
of the “greatest shows on earth,” while eulogizing the generosity of
the emperors who provided them. The Xenia' (“friendly gifts”)
and Apophoreta (“things to take away with you”) are couplets to
label or convoy presents, whose enumeration includes an ventory
of Flavian dietetics, costume, furniture, and bric-à-brac. The other
twelve books are epigrams of the standard type; a kind illustrated
indeed by the Greeks, but developed and fixed by the Romans from
Catullus down, Martial being the perpetual exemplar of its possibilities.
Besides some lapses of taste, whereby the fatal facility of over-
smartness sometimes leads to contaminating tender or lofty sentiments
## p. 9752 (#160) ###########################################
9752
MARTIAL
by untimely pleasantry, Martial is justly condemned by the modern
world for the two blemishes which have been already specified. How
far he really felt his obsequiousness and his obscenity to be compro-
mises of his dignity, and how far his life was cleaner than his page,
we cannot tell: he was a client of Domitian's day, but he had enjoyed
the countenance of Pliny. In justice to Martial's memory, it must be
said that only about one-fifth of his epigrams are really offensive.
The reign of Domitian was a reaction within a reaction, char-
acterized by the power and the impotence of wealth and its cheap
imitations. It was an age of fads and nostrums: sincere, as the
galvanizing of dead philosophies; affected, as the vicarious intellect-
ualism or the vicarious athleticism of hired thinkers and hired glad-
iators. It was an age of forgotten fundamentals, with no enthusiasm
except for practical advantage, with public spirit aped only in mutual
admiration. Its art and literature had no creativeness and no respon-
sibility; form and copy being ideals, and point demanding the highest
season for its pungency, while the stage and the arena were scenes
of filth or brutality. Its religion was either agnostic paganism or
various novel sentimentalities. Its social functions were chiefly het-
erogeneous gatherings of a flotsam and jetsam assemblage of parve-
nus, where acquaintance was accidental and multitudinous isolation
was the rule. The incongruities of the day afforded matchless targets
for our poet's wit, many of them unfortunately not suited to modern
light. Yet other ages of the world have indisputably exhibited in
their own forms one or another of the features familiarized to us
by Martial.
Martial divides with Juvenal the right to represent this period;
but the division is not equal. The serious purpose of the satirist,
even more than the purely impersonal attitude of the historian, leads
him to emphasize unduly circumstances of perhaps great momentary
importance, but of no ultimate or typical pertinence. On the other
hand, the satirist and the historian are apt to neglect or overlook
many aspects of contemporary life because these seem insignificant
as regards any particular aim or tendency; whereas trifles are often
the best exhibits of the actual offhand life, as distinguished from the
professed principles and practice of the time. Hence Martial's epi-
grams have been well called by Merivale “the quintessence of the
Flavian epoch. ” The epigrammatist has no mission to fulfill; and the
form as well as the volume of his works enables him to touch every
aspect of life into the boldest relief. Especially interesting is the
modernness of these touches; and it would startle a stranger to see
how slight an adaptation or perversion of an epigram or a line or a
word produces anticipatory echoes of present-day experiences, in their
extremest or most peculiar features.
## p. 9753 (#161) ###########################################
MARTIAL
9753
Generally speaking, the Romans were humorous after the dry
kind, while the Greeks were witty; but Greek comedy and epigram
are as humorous as those of any nation, and Martial vindicates the
Roman capacity for triumphant wit - a wit that shows all the colors
of all the nationalities. The wit of America, of France, of Ireland,
cross and blend with each other in Martial's epigrams; and even trav-
esties like the American mockery of Hebrew or negro idiosyncra-
sies find illustration. Puns, parodies, paradoxes, refrains, antitheses,
alliterations, echoes and surprises of all sorts are there, with some
curious antetypes of modern slang, of present provincial or proverb-
ial usages, and even of some points of recent comic songs. In the
versions here appended, literalness has been sacrificed to spirit; the
characteristic features of the original have been preserved in a mod-
ern countenance and expression. In the small space at command,
preference has been given to our poet's wit rather than his other
qualities, as being the special characteristic of himself and of the
epigram; though the omission of other specimens is a sacrifice of his
dues.
The only notable edition of Martial is Friedländer's with Ger-
man notes, the school manuals being inadequate and unsympathetic.
There is no great translation, the French renderings in prose and
verse being the best complete reproduction; there are admirable ver-
sions of individual epigrams in all the modern languages. Sellar's
monographs in the Encyclopædia Britannica) and his "Selections
from Martial' give perhaps the best brief estimate of the poet in
our tongue.
Carnie
Harrism.
THE UNKINDEST CUT
L
AST night as we boozed at our wine,
After having three bottles apiece,
You recall that I asked you to dine,
And you've come, you absurdest of geese!
I was maudlin, you should have been mellow,
All thought of the morrow away:
Well, he's but a sorry good fellow
Whose mind's not a blank the next day!
## p. 9754 (#162) ###########################################
9754
MARTIAL
EVOLUTION
A
SURGEON once - a sexton now twin personages:
Identical professions, only different stages!
VALE OF TEARS
LONE she never weeps her father's death;
When friends are by, her tears time every breath.
Who weeps for credit, never grief hath known;
He truly weeps alone, who weeps alone!
A
SIC VOS NON VOBIS
I
F THAT the gods should grant these brothers twain
Such shares of life as Leda's Spartans led,
A noble strife affection would constrain,
For each would long to die in brother's stead;
And he would say who first reached death's confine,
"Live, brother, thine own days, and then live mine! ”
SILENCE IS GOLDEN
OU'RE pretty, I know it; and young, that is true;
And wealthy — there's none but confesses that too:
But you trumpet your praises with so loud a tongue
That you cease to be wealthy or pretty or young!
You
SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR
YES
,
ES, New and I both here reside:
Our stoops you see are side by side;
And people think I'm puffed with pride,
And envy me serenely blessed,
With such a man for host and guest.
The fact is this — he's just as far
As folks in Borrioboola Gha.
What! booze with him ? or see his face,
Or hear his voice? In all the place
There's none so far, there's none so near!
We'll never meet if both stay here!
To keep from knowing New at all,
Just lodge with him across the hall!
## p. 9755 (#163) ###########################################
MARTIAL
9755
THE LEAST OF EVILS
HILE some with kisses Julia smothers,
Reluctant hand she gives to others:
Give me thy merest finger-tips,
Or anything - but not thy lips!
W
THOU REASON’ST WELL
TER
He atheist swears there is no God
And no eternal bliss:
For him to own no world above
Doth make a heaven of this.
NEVER IS, BUT ALWAYS TO BE
<<
Yºu
(
always say
to-morrow, ” “to-morrow” you will live;
But that “to-morrow," prithee, say when will it arrive ?
How far is't off ? Where is it now? Where shall I go to
find it?
In Afric's jungles lies it hid? Do polar icebergs bind it?
It's ever coming, never here; its years beat Nestor's hollow!
This wondrous thing, to call it mine, I'll give my every dollar!
Why, man, to-day's too late to live — the wise is who begun
To live his life with yesterday, e'en with its rising sun!
LEARNING BY DOING
A
s MITHRADATES used to drink the deadly serpent's venom,
That thus all noxious things might have for him no mis-
chief in 'em,-
So Skinner feeds but once a day with scanty preparation,
To teach his folks to smile unfed nor suffer from starvation.
TERTIUM QUID
W**
HEN poets, croaking hoarse with cold,
To spout their verses seek,
They show at once they cannot hold
Their tongues, yet cannot speak.
## p. 9756 (#164) ###########################################
9756
MARTIAL
SIMILIA SIMILIBUS
I
WONDER not that this sweetheart of thine
Abstains from wine;
I only wonder that her father's daughter
Can stick to water.
CANNIBALISM
W
ITHOUT roast pig he never takes his seat:
Always a boor- a boar — companions meet!
"
YO
EQUALS ADDED TO EQUALS
ask why I refuse to wed a woman famed for riches:
Because I will not take the veil and give my wife the breeches.
The dame, my friend, unto her spouse must be subservient quite:
No other way can man and wife maintain their equal right.
THE COOK WELL DONE
THY call me a bloodthirsty, gluttonous sinner
For pounding my chef when my peace he subverts?
If I can't thrash my cook when he gets a poor dinner,
Pray how shall the scamp ever get his deserts ?
W"
A DIVERTING SCRAPE
M
Y SHAVER, barber eke and boy,-
One such as emperors employ
Their hirsute foliage to destroy,–
I lent a friend as per request
To make his features look their best.
By test of testy looking-glass
He mowed and raked the hairy grass,
Forgetful how the long hours pass;
He left my friend a perfect skin,
But grew a beard on his own chin!
## p. 9757 (#165) ###########################################
MARTIAL
9757
DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND
Youp
ou'd marry Crichton, Miss Jemima:
Smart for you!
But somehow he won't come to time. Ah!
He's smart too!
THE COBBLER'S LAST
PK
.
REDESTINED for patching and soling,
For fragrance of grease, wax, and thread,
You find yourself squire by cajoling,
When with pigs you should hobnob instead;
And midst your lord's vertu you're rolling,
With liquor and love in your head!
How foolish to send me to college,
To soak up unpractical views!
How slow is the progress of knowledge
By the march of your three-dollar shoes!
BUT LITTLE HERE BELOW
H"
is grave must be shallow,— the earth on him light, -
Or else you will smother the poor little mite.
E PLURIBUS UNUS
Hen hundreds to your parlors rush,
You wonder I evade the crush?
Well, frankly, sir, I'm not imbued
With love of social solitude.
W"
FINE FRENZY
L
ONG and Short will furnish verse
To market any fake :
Do poets any longer dream,
Or are they wide-awake?
## p. 9758 (#166) ###########################################
9758
MARTIAL
LIVE WITHOUT DINING
NY
Z
ow, if you have an axe to grind, or if you inean to spout,
If your invite is to a spread, then you must count me out:
I do not like that dark-brown flask, I dread the thought of
gout,
I'm restless at the gorgeous gorge that ostentation dares.
My friend must offer me pot-luck on wash-days unawares;
I like my feed when his menu with my own larder squares.
THE TWO THINGS NEEDFUL
Hº
OW grand your gorgeous mansion shows
Through various trees in stately rows!
Yet two defects its splendors spite:
No charmed recess for tedious night -
No cheerful spot where friends may dine-
Well, your non-residence is fine!
## p. 9759 (#167) ###########################################
9759
JAMES MARTINEAU
(1805-)
wo names overtop all others in the history of English Unita-
rian thought and leadership,- Joseph Priestley and James
Martineau. Priestley died in 1804, and Martineau was born
the following year, April 21st, coming of a Huguenot family which
had been long settled in England. From his father he inherited the
gentleness and refinement of his nature, from his mother that intel-
lectual strength in which his celebrated sister Harriet so fully shared.
His education began at the Grammar School” in Norwich, where
his father was a manufacturer and wine
merchant; and was continued at Bristol with
Dr. Lant Carpenter, then a prominent Uni-
tarian minister, but now best known as the
father of the scientist W. B. Carpenter and
Mary the philanthropist. The next step
was to the workshop, with a view to mak-
ing himself a civil engineer. This phase
of his experience enriched his mind with
the materials for many a brilliant metaphor
in his writings, wonderful to his readers
until they know his early history. But his
heart was not in his ork; and at length
his father yielded to his solicitations, and JAMES MARTINEAU
assuring him that he was courting pov-
erty,” sent him to Manchester New College, which was then at
York,-a lineal descendant of that Warrenton Academy in which
Priestley taught and Malthus was educated, but already, in 1824, a
Unitarian theological school. Here Martineau was graduated in 1827,
and soon after became junior pastor of a church in Dublin, nominally
Presbyterian like most of the early Unitarian churches in England
and Ireland. Already distinguished as a preacher of great eloquence
and fervor, upon the death of his senior he refused to take that sen-
ior's place because it entailed the regium donum: a gift of the Crown
to Protestant ministers, which he thought discriminated unfairly
against Roman Catholics. His next charge was in Liverpool, whither
he went in 1832, and in 1836 published his first book, Rationale of
Religious Enquiry,' which was strikingly in advance of the current
## p. 9760 (#168) ###########################################
9760
JAMES MARTINEAU
)
Unitarian thinking. In 1839 he made himself a great reputation in
the famous Liverpool Controversy); accepting, with the Unitarians
Thom and Giles, the challenge of thirteen clergymen of the Estab-
lished Church to a public debate. Martineau's contribution was the
most brilliant and effective ever made to Unitarian controversial writ-
ing. This success may have done something to set the habit of his
life; for it is certain that it has ever since been stoutly controver-
sial,— his numerous essays and reviews, and even his most import-
ant books, being cast for the inost part in a controversial mold, while
his sermons frequently take on a controversial character without any
of the personalities which the other things involve.
In 1840 he was made professor of mental and moral philosophy in
Manchester New College; which, following its peripatetic habit, in
1841 returned from York to Manchester, went to London in 1847, and
to Oxford in 1889. Martineau was connected with it as professor,
and for many years as its head, until 1885. In the mean time he
had removed from Liverpool to London, in 1857, after ten years of
journeying there to his lectures and back to his pastoral work. The
substance of his college work is embodied in his ‘Types of Ethical
Theory) (1885), A Study of Religion (1888), and The Seat of
Authority in Religion (1890).
The critical radicalism of the last of these volumes did much to
alienate the sympathies of those whose religious conservatism had
attracted them to the two others, and to the general working of his
mind as opposed to the materialistic tendencies which were domi-
nant and aggressive in the third quarter of the century. But as a
critic of the New Testament and Christian origins there was nothing
in "The Seat of Authority to astonish or surprise any one acquainted
with the course of his development. In this respect he had been
consistently radical from first to last. Some of the most radical posi-
tions in the book will be found, germinal if not developed, in his
reviews and studies of a much earlier date. The result of his criti-
cisms was, for himself, a conception of Jesus and his work in history
which, ethically and spiritually, transcended any that he found in
the traditional presentation, but was strictly within the limits of a
humanitarian view.
If Martineau's theological and philosophical position was conserva-
tive as compared with his criticism, it was so only from the accident
of a temporary swaying of the pendulum of thought towards materi-
alism a tendency which has already reached its term, and which no
English writer has done so much to counteract as he. But an intui-
tive philosophy, anti-materialistic, anti-necessarian, anti-utilitarian, was
not a conservative but a radical philosophy from 1840 until 1860; and
this was the philosophy of Martineau in those years of earnest thought
## p. 9761 (#169) ###########################################
JAMES MARTINEAU
9761
(
and active change. He had begun as an ardent disciple of Locke
and Hartley and Priestley: serving out his captivity with them
more patiently because of the idealization of their doctrine by the
younger Mill, who as early as 1841 noticed in a syllabus of Marti-
neau's lectures that he was falling away from his allegiance to the
empirical school, and begged to have the lectures printed lest he
should be studying them in another state of existence” were their
publication long delayed. In a little while Martineau found himself
bound “to concede to the self-conscious mind itself, both as knowing
and willing, an autonomous function distinct from each and all of
the phenomena known, and changes willed, - a self-identity as unlike
a
as possible to any growing aggregate of miscellaneous and dissimilar
experiences. This involved a surrender of determinism and a revis-
ion of the doctrine of causation. In 1848–9 he spent fifteen months in
Germany, studying with Trendelenburg, and was soon brought into
the same plight with reference to the cognitive and æsthetic side of
life that had already befallen him in regard to the moral. He had
become a metaphysician, — the possible as real for him as the actual,
noumena as real as phenomena, mind central to the universe, and God
a righteous will.
It would be difficult to find a more brilliant series of writings —
culminating in the elaborate treatises of 1885, 1887, 1890 — than those
in which Martineau defended his new-found philosophic faith. He
had many foemen worthy of his pen. In the persons of Mansel and
Spencer he opposed himself to Agnosticism before Huxley had named
the terrible child, and while it was provisionally called Nescience.
Against Tyndall and others as the prophets of Materialism, he put
forth his utmost strength. In the great battle with Determinism and
Utilitarianism he met all those who came up against him with a dia-
lectic supple and keen as a Damascus sword. On these several fields
he was a recognized captain of the host, and obtained the admiration
and the gratitude of many who could not abide his Unitarian faith.
His scientific knowledge was so large that it enabled him to cope
with noble confidence with scientists venturing across his lines. He
has lived to see many of the bolder of them retreating from positions
too rashly taken up; but that his own are final is not to be supposed.
One may greatly admire him, and yet conceive that he has been far
more apt in finding what is weakest in the philosophical and reli-
gious implications of a transitional science, than in appropriating
those scientific elements which make for a more satisfactory solution
of the universal mystery than any yet obtained.
But if Martineau had not been master in philosophy and ethics,
he would still have been one of the most distinguished preachers of
his sect and time. His most helpful books have been his volumes
XVII-611
## p. 9762 (#170) ###########################################
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JAMES MARTINEAU
of sermons, especially the two volumes (1843-7) Endeavors after a
Christian Life. The published sermons of his later life are too much
overcrowded by the fear that the materialists be upon us. They
have not the joyous march and song of the 'Endeavors. ' A pene-
trating spirituality is the dominant note of all his works; a passion
for ideal truth and purity. The beauty of holiness shines from every
page as from the preacher's face. His style, though marvelously
brilliant, has undoubtedly been a deduction from his influence. It is
so rich with metaphor that it dazzles the reader more than it illumi-
nates the theme. Moreover, we are arrested by the beauty of the
expression as by a painted window that conceals what is beyond.
Nevertheless, for those straining after an ideal perfection, his sermons
are as music to their feet. He has won the unbounded love and
reverence of his own household of faith; and in his ninety-third year
(1897) is, with Gladstone, one of the most impressive figures on the
century's narrowing verge. All the great universities of Great Brit-
ain, America, and Continental Europe long since accorded him their
highest honors.
THE TRANSIENT AND THE REAL IN LIFE
From Hours of Thought on Sacred Things )
Job xii. 22: "He discovereth deep things out of darkness; and bringeth
out to light the shadow of Death. ”
1
T is the oldest, as it is the newest, reproach of the cynic against
the devout, that they construe the universe by themselves;
attribute it to a will like their own; tracing in it imaginary
vestiges of a moral plan, and expecting from it the fulfillment of
their brilliant but arbitrary dreams. Instead of humbly sitting at
the feet of Nature, copying her order into the mind, and shap-
ing all desire and belief into the form of her usages and laws,
they turn out their own inward life into the spaces of the world,
and impose their longings and admirations on the courses and
issues of Time. With childish self-exaggeration, it is said, we
fancy creation governed like a great human life,- peopled with
motives, preferences, and affections parallel to ours,- its light
and heat, its winds and tides, its seasons and its skies, adminis-
tered by choice of good or ill, transparent with the flush of an
infinite love, or suffused with the shadow of an infinite displeas-
We set at the helm of things a glorified humanity; and
that is our God. We think away from society the cries of wrong
ure.
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and the elements of sin, leaving only what is calm and holy; and
that is our Kingdom of Heaven. We picture to ourselves youth
that never wastes, thought that never tires, and friendship with-
out the last adieu; and that is our immortality. Religion, we
are assured, is thus born of misery: it is the soul's protest against
disappointment and refusal to accept it, the pity which our nature
takes upon its own infirmities, and is secured only on the pathos
of the human heart.
Be it so. Are you sure that the security is not good ? Are
we so made as to learn everything from the external world,
and nothing out of ourselves? Grant the allegation.
Let our
diviner visions be the native instinct, the home inspiration, of
our thought and love: are they therefore false because we think
them ? illusory, because beautiful relatively to us? Am I to be-
lieve the register of my senses, and to contradict the divinations
of conscience and the trusts of pure affection? Is it a sign of
highest reason to deny God until I see him, and blind myself to
the life eternal till I am born into its surprise ? Nothing more
arbitrary, nothing narrower, can well be conceived, than to lay
down the rule that our lowest endowment - the perceptive pow-
ers which introduce us to material things - has the monopoly
of knowledge; and that the surmises of the moral sense have
nothing true, and the vaticinations of devoted love only a light
that leads astray. The wiser position surely is, that the mind
is a balanced organ of truth all round,- that each faculty sees
aright on its own side of things, and can measure what the
others miss: the hand, the palpable; the eye, the visible; the
imagination, the beautiful; the spirit, the spiritual; and the will,
the good. How else indeed could God and Heaven, if really
there, enter our field of knowledge, but by standing thus in rela-
tion to some apprehensive gift in us, and emerging as the very
condition of its exercise and the attendant shadow of its move-
ments ?
And in truth, if we are not strangely self-ignorant, we must
be conscious of two natures blended in us, each carrying a sep-
arate order of beliefs and trusts, which may assert themselves
with the least possible notice of the other. There is the nature
which lies open to the play of the finite world, gathers its expe-
rience, measures everything by its standard, adapts itself to its
rules, and discharges as fictitious whatever its appearances fail
to show. And underlying this, in strata far below, there is the
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nature which stands related to things infinite, and heaves and
stirs beneath their solemn pressure, and is so engaged with them
as hardly to feel above it the sway and ripple of the transi-
tory tides. Living by the one, we find our place in nature; by
the other, we lose ourselves in God. By the first, we have our
science, our skill, our prudence; by the second, our philosophy,
our poetry, our reverence for duty. The one computes its way
by foresight; the other is self-luminous for insight. In short,
the one puts us into communication with the order of appear-
ances; the other with eternal realities. It is a shallow mind
which can see to the bottom of its own beliefs, and is conscious
of nothing but what it can measure in evidence and state in
words; which feels in its own guilt no depth it cannot fathom,
and in another's holiness no beauty it can only pine to seize;
which reads on the face of things - on the glory of the earth
and sky, on human joy and grief, on birth and death, in pity
and heroic sacrifice, in the eyes of a trusting child and the com-
posure of a saintly countenance no meanings that cannot be
printed; and which is never drawn, alone and in silence, into
prayer exceeding speech. Things infinite and divine lie too near
to our own centre, and mingle in too close communion, to be
looked at as if they were there instead of here: they are given
not so much for definition as for trust; are less the objects we
think of than the very tone and color of our thought, the ten-
sion of our love, the unappeasable thirst of grief and reverence.
Till we surrender ourselves not less freely to the implicit faiths
folded up in the interior reason, conscience, and affection, than to
the explicit beliefs which embody in words the laws of the out-
ward world, we shall be but one-eyed children of Nature, and
utterly blind prophets of God.
No doubt these two sides of our humanity, supplying the
temporal and the spiritual estimates of things, are at ceaseless
variance; they reckon by incommensurable standards, and the
answers can never be the same. The natural world, with the
part of us that belongs to it, is so framed as to make nothing
of importance to us except the rules by which it goes, and to
bid us ask no questions about its origin; since we have equally
to fall in with its ways, be they fatal or be they divine. But to
our reason in its noblest exercise, it makes a difference simply
infinite, whether the universe it scans is in the hands of dead
necessity or of the living God. This, which our science ignores,
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no
is precisely the problem which our intellect is made to ponder.
Again, our social system of rights and obligations is constructed
on the assumption that with the springs of action we have no
concern: they fulfill all conditions, if we ask nothing and give
nothing beyond the conduct happiest in its results. But the nat-
ural conscience flies straight to the inner springs of action as
its sole interest and object; it is there simply as an organ for
interpreting them, and finding in them the very soul of right-
eousness: that which the outward observer shuns is the inward
spirit's holy place. And once more, Nature, as the mere mother
of us all, takes small account in this thronged and historic world of
the single human life; repeating it so often as to render it cheap;
short as it is, often cutting its brief thread; and making each
one look so like the other that you would say it could not matter
who should go. But will our private love, which surely has the
nearer insight, accept this estimate ? Do we, when its treasure
has fallen from our arms, say of the term of human years, “It
has been enough ” ? — that the possibilities are spent; that the
cycle of the soul is complete; and that with larger time and
renovated opportunity, it could learn and love and serve
more? Ah no! to deep and reverent affection there is an aspect
under which death must ever appear unnatural; and its cloud,
after lingering awhile till the perishable elements are hid, grows
transparent as we gaze, and half shows, half veils, a glorious
image in the depth beyond. Tell me not that affection is blind,
and magnifies its object in the dark. Affection blind! I say there
is nothing else that can see; that can find its way through the
windings of the soul it loves, and know how its graces lie. The
cynic thinks that all the fair look of our humanity is on the out-
side, inasmuch as each mind will put on its best dress for com-
pany; and if there he detects some littleness and weakness, which
perhaps his own cold eye brings to the surface, there can be
only what is worse within. Dupe that he is of his own wit! he
has not found out that all the evil spirits of human nature flock
to him; that his presence brings them to the surface from their
recesses in every heart, and drives the blessed angels to hide
themselves away: for who would own a reverence, who tell a
tender grief, before that hard ungenial gaze? Wherever he moves,
he empties the space around him of its purest elements: with his
low thought he roofs it from the heavenly light and the sweet
air; and then complains of the world as a close-breathed and
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stifling place. It is not the critic, but the lover, who can know
the real contents and scale of a human life; and that interior
estimate, as it is the truer, is always the higher: the closest look
becomes the gentlest too; and domestic faith, struck by bereave-
ment, easily transfigures the daily familiar into an image con-
genial with a brighter world.
Our faculties and affections are graduated then to objects
greater, better, fairer, and more enduring, than the order of
nature gives us here. They demand a scale and depth of being
which outwardly they do not meet, yet inwardly they are the
organ for apprehending. Hence a certain glorious sorrow must
ever mingle with our life: all our actual is transcended by our
possible; our visionary faculty is an overmatch for our experi-
ence; like the caged bird, we break ourselves against the bars
of the finite, with a wing that quivers for the infinite. To stifle
this struggle, to give up the higher aspiration, and be content
with making our small lodgings snug, is to cut off the summit
of our nature, and live upon the flat of a mutilated humanity.
To let the struggle be, however it may sadden us, to trust the
pressure of the soul towards diviner objects and more holy life,
and measure by it the invisible ends to which we tend,- this
is true faith; the unfading crown of an ideal and progressive
nature. It is indeed, and ever must be, notwithstanding the
light that circles it, a crown of thorns; and the brow that wears
it can
never wholly cease to bleed. A nature which reaches
forth to the perfect from a station in the imperfect must always
have a pathetic tinge in its experience. Think not to escape it
by any change of scene, though from the noisy streets to the
eternal City of God. There is but One for whom there is no
interval between what he thinks and what he is; in whom there.
fore is “light, and no darkness at all. ” For us, vain is the
dream of a shadowless world, with no interruption of brilliancy,
no remission of joy. Were our heaven never overcast, yet we
meet the brightest morning only in escape from recent night;
and the atmosphere of our souls, never passing from ebb and
flow of love into a motionless constancy, must always break the
white eternal beams into a colored and a tearful glory. Whence
is that tincture of sanctity which Christ has given to sorrow, and
which makes his form at once the divinest and most pathetic in
the world ? It is that he has wakened by his touch the illimit-
able aspirations of our bounded nature, and flung at once into
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our thought and affection a holy beauty, a divine Sonship, into
which we can only slowly grow. And this is a condition which
can never cease to be. Among the true children of the Highest,
who would wish to be free from it? Let the glorious burden
lie! How can we be angry at a sorrow which is the birth-pang
of a diviner life?
From this strife, of infinite capacity with finite conditions,
spring all the ideal elements which mingle with the matter of
our being. Nor is it our conscience only that betrays the secret
of this double life. Our very memory too, though it seems but
to photograph the actual, proves to have the artist's true select-
ing power, and knows how to let the transient fall away, and
leave the imperishable undimmed and clear. As time removes
us from each immediate experience, some freshening dew, some
wave of regeneration, brightens all the colors and washes off the
dust; so that often we discover the essence only when the acci-
dents are gone, and the present must die from us ere it can
truly live. The work of yesterday, with its place and hour, has
but a dull look when we recall it. But the scene of our childish
years,—the homestead, it may be, with its quaint garden and
its orchard grass; the bridge across the brook from which we
dropped the pebbles and watched the circling waves; the school-
house in the field, whose bell broke up the game and quickened
every lingerer's feet; the yew-tree path where we crossed the
church-yard, with arm round the neck of a companion now be-
neath the sod, - how soft the light, how tender the shadows, in
which that picture lies! how musical across the silence are the
tones it Aings! The glare, the heat, the noise, the care, are
gone; and the sunshine sleeps, and the waters ripple, and the
lawns are green, as if it were in Paradise. But in these minor
religions of life, it is the personal images of companions loved
and lost that chiefly keep their watch with us, and sweeten and
solemnize the hours. The very child that misses the mother's
appreciating love is introduced, by his first tears, to that thirst
of the heart which is the early movement of piety, ere yet it has
got its wings. And I have known the youth who through long
years of harsh temptation, and then short years of wasting decline,
has, from like memory, never lost the sense as of a guardian angel
near, and lived in the enthusiasm, and died into the embrace,
of the everlasting holiness. In the heat and struggle of mid-life,
it is a severe but often a purifying retreat to be lifted into the
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lonely observatory of memory, above the fretful illusions of the
moment, and in presence once more of the beauty and the sanc-
tity of life. The voiceless counsels that look through the vision-
ary eyes of our departed steal into us behind our will, and sweep
the clouds away, and direct us on a wiser path than we should
know to choose. If age ever gains any higher wisdom, it is
chiefly that it sits in a longer gallery of the dead, and sees
the noble and saintly faces in further perspective and more vari-
ous throng. The dim abstracted look that often settles on the
features of the old, - what means it ? Is it a
mere fading of
the life ? an absence, begun already, from the drama of humanity ?
a deafness to the cry of its woes and the music of its affections ?
Not always so: the seeming forgetfulness may be but brightened
memory; and if the mists lie on the outward present, and make
it as a gathering night, the more brilliant is the lamp within
that illuminates the figures of the past, and shows again, by their
flitting shadows, the plot in which they moved and fell.
It is through such natural experiences — the treasured sanctities
of every true life — that God “discovereth to us deep things out
of darkness, and turneth into light the shadow of death. ” They
constitute the lesser religions of the soul; and say what you will,
they come and go with the greater, and put forth leaf and blos-
som from the same root. We are so constituted throughout-in
memory, in affection, in conscience, in intellect — that we cannot
rest in the literal aspect of things as they materially come to
No sooner are they in our possession, than we turn them
into some crucible of thought, which saves their essence and pre-
cipitates their dross; and their pure idea emerges as our lasting
treasure, to be remembered, loved, willed, and believed.
