Philosophy

Baroness Staël Holstein, i.e., Madame de Staël, Germany (London, 1813), tr. in three vols., vol. III., pt. three, ch. I., Of Philosophy, p. 1:

The world has been pleased, for some time past, to throw great discredit upon the very name of philosophy. The case is common with all those terms, the signification of which is capable of much extension: they become alternately the objects of benediction or blame among mankind, according to their use in fortunate or unhappy periods: but, in spite of the casual injustice or panegyric of individuals and of nations, philosophy, liberty, religion, never change their value. Man has spoken evil things of the sun, of love, and of life: he has suffered, he has felt himself consumed, by these lights of nature; but would he therefore extinguish them?

Reverence And The Disenchantment Of The World

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I., (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 1., The Natural History of Morals, pp. 141-43:

. . . there are few persons who are not conscious that no character can attain a supreme degree of excellence in which a reverential spirit is wanting. Of all the forms of moral goodness it is that to which the epithet beautiful may be most emphatically applied. . . . It [viz. reverence] is fostered in that stage of political life when loyalty or reverence for the sovereign is the dominating passion, when an aristocracy, branching forth from the throne, spreads habits of deference and subordination through every village, when a revolutionary, a democratic, and a sceptical spirit are alike unknown. Every great change, either of belief or of circumstances, brings with it a change of emotions. The self-assertion of liberty, the levelling of democracy, the dissecting-knife of criticism, the economical revolutions that reduce the relations of classes to simple contracts, the agglomeration of population, and the facilities of locomotion that sever so many ancient ties, are all incompatible with the type of virtue which existed before the power of tradition was broken, and when the chastity of faith was yet unstained. Benevolence, uprightness, enterprise, intellectual honesty, a love of freedom, and a hatred of superstition are growing around us, but we look in vain for that most beautiful character of the past, so distrustful of self, and so trustful of others, so simple, so modest, and so devout, which even when, Ixion-like, it bestowed its affections upon a cloud, made its very illusions the source of some of the purest virtues of our nature. In a few minds, the contemplation of the sublime order of nature produces a reverential feeling, but to the great majority of mankind it is an incontestable though mournful fact, that the discovery of controlling and unchanging law deprives phenomena of their moral significance, and nearly all the social and political spheres in which reverence was fostered have passed away. Its most beautiful displays are not in nations like the Americans or the modern French, who have thrown themselves most fully into the tendencies of the age, but rather in secluded regions like Styria or the Tyrol. Its artistic expression is found in no work of modern genius, but in the mediæval cathedral, which, mellowed but not impaired by time, still gazes on us in its deathless beauty through the centuries of the past. A superstitious age, like every other phase of human history, has its distinctive virtues, which must necessarily decline before a new stage of progress can be attained.

Below is seen my copy of Lecky's valuable book. 

Of Learning And Books

Samuel Johnson, The Idler, Obstructions of Learning, No. 94. Saturday, 2 February 1760:

It is common to find young men ardent and diligent in the pursuit of knowledge, but the progress of life very often produces laxity and indifference; and not only those who are at liberty to chuse their business and amusements, but those likewise whose professions engaged them inbliterary enquiries pass the latter part of their time without improvement, and spend the day rather in any other entertainment than that which they might find among their books.

This abatement of the vigour of curiosity is sometimes imputed to the insufficiency of learning. Men are supposed to remit their labours, because they find their labours to have been vain; and to search no longer after truth and wisdom, because they at last despair of finding them.

. . . Of learning, as of virtue, it may be affirmed, that it is at once honoured and neglected. Whoever forsakes it will for ever look after it with longing, lament the loss which he does not endeavour to repair, and desire the good which he wants resolution to seize and keep. The idler never applauds his own idleness, nor does any man repent of the diligence of his youth.

. . . It is the great excellence of learning that it borrows very little from time or place; it is not confined to season or to climate, to cities or to the country, but may be cultivated and enjoyed where no other pleasure can be obtained.

. . . That those who profess to advance learning sometimes obstruct it, cannot be denied; the continual multiplication of books not only distracts choice but disappoints enquiry. To him that has moderately stored his mind with images, few writers afford any novelty; or what little they have to add to the common stock of learning is so buried in the mass of general notions, that, like silver mingled with the oar of lead, it is too little to pay for the labour of separation; and he that has often been deceived by the promise of a title, at last grows weary of examining, and is tempted to consider all as equally fallacious.

There are indeed some repetitions always lawful, because they never deceive. He that writes the history of past times, undertakes only to decorate known facts by new beauties of method or of style, or at most to illustrate them by his own reflections. The author of a system, whether moral or physical, is obliged to nothing beyond care of selection and regularity of disposition. But there are others who claim the name of authors merely to disgrace it, and fill the world with volumes only to bury letters in their own rubbish. The traveller who tells, in a pompous folio, that he saw the Pantheon at Rome, and the Medicean Venus at Florence; the natural historian who, describing the productions of a narrow island, recounts all that it has in common with every other part of the world; the collector of antiquities, that accounts every thing a curiosity which the ruins of Herculaneum happen to emit, though an instrument already shewn in a thousand repositories, or a cup common to the ancients, the moderns, and all mankind, may be justly censured as the persecutors of students, and the thieves of that time which never can be restored.

The following lines are also quite worth-while to be quoted, taken from: Frederic Harrison, The Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces (London: MacMillan and Co., 1886), ch. 1, How to Read, pp. 10-11:

But of this enormous mass of literature how much deserves to be chosen out, to be preferred to all the great books of the world, to be set apart for those precious hours which are all that the most of us can give to solid reading! The vast proportion of books are books that we shall never be able to read. A serious percentage of books are not worth reading at all. The really vital books for us we also know to be a very trifling portion of the whole. And yet we act as if every book were as good as any other, as if it were merely a question of order which we take up first, as if any book were good enough for us, and as if all were alike honourable, precious, and satisfying. Alas! books cannot be more than the men who write them; and as a fair proportion of the human race now write books, with motives and objects as various as human activity, books, as books, are entitled à priori, until their value is proved, to the same attention and respect as houses, steam-engines, pictures, fiddles, bonnets, and other products of human industry. In the shelves of those libraries which are our pride, libraries public or private, circulating or very stationary, are to be found those great books of the world rari nantes in gurgite vasto,1 those books which are truly “the precious life-blood of a master spirit.” But the very familiarity which their mighty fame has bred in us makes us indifferent; we grow weary of what every one is supposed to have read; and we take down something which looks a little eccentric, some worthless book on the mere ground that we never heard of it before.

Thus the difficulties of literature are in their way as great as those of the world, the obstacles to finding the right friends are as great, the peril is as great of being lost in a Babel of voices and an ever-changing mass of beings. Books are not wiser than men, the true books are not easier to find than the true men, the bad books or the vulgar books are not less obtrusive and not less ubiquitous than the bad or vulgar men are everywhere; the art of right reading is as long and difficult to learn as the art of right living. Those who are on good terms with the first author they meet, run as much risk as men who, surrender their time to the first passer in the street; for to be open to every book is for the most part to gain as little as possible from any. A man aimlessly wandering about in a crowded city is of all men the most lonely; so he who takes up only the books that he “comes across” is pretty certain to meet but few that are worth knowing.

 1. Virgil, Æneid, I., 118.

The Affections Of The Soul

Plutarch, Moralia, Animine an corporis affectiones sint peiores = Whether the Affections of the Soul are Worse than Those of the Body = ΠΟΤΕΡΟΝ ΤΑ ΤΗΣ ΨΥΧΗΣ Η ΤΑ ΤΟΥ ΣΩΜΑΤΟΣ ΠΑΘΗ ΧΕΙΡΟΝΑ​, 501C-E, tr. W. C. Helmbold (Loeb edition, vol. VI):

It is true that one who is sick in body gives in at once and goes to bed and remains quiet while he is being cured, and if, perchance, when the fever comes upon him, he tosses a bit and tumbles his body about, one of those who sit by him will say to him gently,

Lie still, poor wretch, and move not from your bed,​

[Euripides, Orestes, 258]

and so checks and restrains him; but those who suffer from diseases of the soul are then most active, then least at rest. For impulses are the beginning of action, and the soul's abnormal states are violent impulses. That is the reason why they do not allow the soul to be at rest, but just at the time when man most needs repose and silence and relaxation, then his fits of temper, of contentiousness, of love, or grief, drag him into the open air and strip him bare, and he is forced both to do many lawless things and to give tongue to many things unsuited to the occasion.

As, therefore, the storm that prevents a sailor from putting into port is more dangerous than that which does not allow him to sail, so those storms of the soul are more serious which do not allow a man to compose or to calm his disturbed reason; but pilotless and without ballast, in confusion and aimless wandering, rushing headlong in oblique and reeling courses, he suffers a terrible shipwreck, as it were, and ruins his life. Consequently for this reason also it is worse to be sick in soul than in body; for men afflicted in body only suffer, but those afflicted in soul both suffer and do ill.

Καὶ γὰρ ὁ μὲν τῷ σώματι νοσῶν εὐθὺς ἐνδοὺς καὶ καθεὶς ἑαυτὸν εἰς τὸ κλινίδιον ἡσυχίαν ἄγει θεραπευόμενος, ἂν δέ που μικρὸν ἐξᾴξῃ​ καὶ διασκιρτήσῃ τὸ σῶμα φλεγμονῆς προσπεσούσης, εἰπών τις τῶν παρακαθημένων πράως,

μέν’, ὦ ταλαίπωρ’, ἀτρέμα σοῖς ἐν δεμνίοις,

ἐπέστησε καὶ κατέσχεν. οἱ δ’ ἐν τοῖς ψυχικοῖς πάθεσιν ὄντες τότε μάλιστα πράττουσι, τόθ’ ἥκισθ’ ἡσυχάζουσιν· αἱ γὰρ ὁρμαὶ τῶν πράξεων ἀρχή,​ τὰ δὲ πάθη σφοδρότητες ὁρμῶνδιὸ τὴν ψυχὴν ἠρεμεῖν οὐκ ἐῶσιν, ἀλλ’ ὅτε μάλιστα δεῖται μονῆς καὶ σιωπῆς καὶ ὑποστολῆς ὁ ἄνθρωπος, τότ’ αὐτὸν εἰς ὕπαιθρον ἕλκουσι, τότ’ ἀποκαλύπτουσιν οἱ θυμοί, αἱ φιλονεικίαι, οἱ ἔρωτες, αἱ λῦπαι, πολλὰ καὶ δρᾶν ἄνομα καὶ λαλεῖν ἀνάρμοστα τοῖς καιροῖς ἀναγκαζόμενον.

Ὥσπερ οὖν ἐπισφαλέστερος χειμὸν τοῦ πλεῖν οὐκ ἐῶντος ὁ κωλύων καθορμίσασθαι, οὕτως οἱ κατὰ ψυχὴν χειμῶνες βαρύτεροι στείλασθαι τὸν ἄνθρωπον οὐκ ἐῶντες οὐδ’ ἐπιστῆσαι τεταραγμένον τὸν λογισμόν· ἀλλ’ ἀκυβέρνητος καὶ ἀνερμάτιστος ἐν ταραχῇ καὶ πλάνῃ δρόμοις λεχρίοις​ καὶ παραφόροις διατραχηλιζόμενος εἴς τι ναυάγιον φοβερὸν ἐξέπεσε καὶ συνέτριψε τὸν ἑαυτοῦ βίον. ὥστε καὶ ταύτῃ χεῖρον νοσεῖν ταῖς ψυχαῖς ἢ τοῖς σώμασιν· τοῖς μὲν γὰρ πάσχειν μόνον τοῖς δὲ καὶ πάσχειν καὶ ποιεῖν κακῶς συμβέβηκε.

Expectations Frustrated

Samuel Johnson, The Idler, No. 58. Saturday, 26 May 1759, Expectations of Pleasure Frustrated:

It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. He that has pictured a prospect upon his fancy, will receive little pleasure from his eyes; he that has anticipated the conversation of a wit, will wonder to what prejudice he owes his reputation. Yet it is necessary to hope, tho' hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.

Indulging The Present

Samuel Johnson, The Idler, No. 59. Saturday, 2 June 1759, Books Fall Into Neglect:

In the common enjoyments of life, we cannot very liberally indulge the present hour, but by anticipating part of the pleasure which might have relieved the tediousness of another day; and any uncommon exertion of strength, or perseverance in labour, is succeeded by a long interval of languor and weariness. Whatever advantage we snatch beyond the certain portion allotted us by nature, is like money spent before it is due, which at the time of regular payment will be missed and regretted.

. . . many have lost the final reward of their labours, because they were too hasty to enjoy it. . . . that which is to be loved long must be loved with reason rather than with passion.

Passions' Importance

Denis Diderot, Diderot's Early Philosophical Works, trans. & edt. Margaret Jourdain (Chicago & London: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1916), Philosophic Thoughts, pp. 27-28:

People are for ever declaiming against the passions; they attribute to them all the pains that man endures, and forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures. It is an ingredient in man's constitution which cannot sufficiently be blessed and banned. It is considered as an affront to reason if one ventures to say a word in favour of its rivals; yet it is passions alone, and strong passions that can elevate the soul to great things. Without them, there is no sublime, either in morality or in achievement; the fine arts return to puerility, and virtue becomes a pettifogging thing. [I]

Deadened passions degrade men of extraordinary quality. Constraint annihilates the grandeur and energy of nature. Look at that tree; it is to the luxury of its branches that you owe the coolness and breadth of its shade, which you may enjoy until winter despoils it of its leafy honours. There is no more excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music when superstition has wrought upon the human temperament the effect of old age. [III]

Genius And Melancholy

Noel L. Brann, Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 107, The Debate Over The Origin Of Genius During The Italian Renaissance, (Brill, 2002), ch. I., The Seeding of a Theory of Melancholy Genius, C. The Humanist Perspective, pp. 59-60:

“This extremely bitter fatigue of studies, and exceedingly burdensome meditation (pensiero) of the mind,” Alberti [Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)] complained in his Delle comodità, “always contributes to us something more of self-torment than of rejoicing.” If, on one hand, scholars manage to elicit a certain pleasure from their arduous studies, Alberti pessimistically mused, on the other hand they generally find a way to stifle that pleasure “by their reflections and very great labors.” On this account, Alberti admonished, one who adopts a life of letters is prone to suffer an excruciating “anxiety of studies” (ansietà degli studii), the result being that “he cannot sleep, eat, or rest, takes no pleasure or repose in anything, and, endeavoring to understand all things, constantly remains in a state of bitter thought.” As for those things he has already learned, he is able to retain them only with great effort, with great skill, “and with great anxiety and reflection.”

What strikes the reader from this diagnosis of the “scholar's disease” by Alberti is that its symptoms belong to one who, being dis-contented with the pedestrian concerns of everyday life, seeks but fails to find solace in contemplative detachment from those concerns. Moreover, further passages from his treatise inform us, one so inclined to the scholarly life, being dissatisfied with the finite nature of the worldly concerns from which he is attempting to escape, strives to surmount them through an inner drive to the infinite. At bottom, as Alberti further spelled out his diagnosis, the cause of the painful tribulations arising out of intense intellectual inquiry is that “the studious man is never able to find a method of imposing a limit on his desire for learning. Nor is it ever permitted to him to rest his mind until that time when he has wiped away his ignorance of all the most hidden things.” As a result, Alberti warned, a man of letters “has very little or no quiet in either his mind or body, always remains melancholy and solitary (sta sempre malinconico & solitano), and displays bitter weariness, extreme vigilance, curious thoughts, very lofty occupations, and ardent cares.” Such a man, accordingly, “is never able to find pleasure or delight, and throughout his life fails to savor so much as a moment of rest from his labors and vexations. Much as the contemporary mystics prescribed an “infinite cure” for what they diagnosed as an “infinite disease,” so does the same prescription logically apply to the scholarly melancholy characterized by Alberti as “infinite anxiety, infinite strivings, infinite discomfort, infinite harmful injuries, infinite travails, and infinite calamities.”

Regarding the very same topos of the Life of Letters (or genius) and melancholy, but in another context, another geography, and some three centuries later, vide the following title: Anne C. Vila, Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

 

Beauty In Repose

All the following excerpts from Winckelmann's Storia delle Arti el Disegno Presso gli Antichi are given in translation (and in Italian) in: Alexander Walker, Beauty: Illustrated by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Women (London, 1852), ch. xviii., The Greek Ideal of Beauty, pp. 315-21:

“Taken in either sense [of action or of passion], expression changes the features of the face, and the disposition of the body, and consequently the forms which constitute beauty; and the greater the change, the greater the loss of beauty. Therefore, the state of tranquillity and repose was considered as a fundamental point in the art. Tranquillity is the state proper to beauty.

“The handsomest men are generally the most mild and the best disposed.

“Besides, tranquillity and repose, both in men and animals, is the state which allows us best to examine and represent their nature and qualities; as we can see the bottom of the sea or rivers only when the waves are tranquil and the stream runs smoothly.

“Therefore the Grecian artists, wishing to depict, in their representations of their deities, the perfection of human beauty, strove to produce, in their countenances and actions, a certain placidity without the slightest change or perturbation, which, according to their philosophy, was at variance with the nature and character of the gods. The figures produced in this state of repose expressed a perfect equilibrium of feeling.

“But as complete tranquillity and repose cannot exist in figures in action, and even the gods are represented in human form, and subject to human affections, we must not always expect to find in them the most sublime idea of beauty. This is then compensated for by expression. The ancient artists, however, never lost sight of it: it was always their principal object, to which expression was in some sort made subservient.

“Beauty without expression would be insignificant, and expression without beauty would be unpleasing; but from their influence over each other, from combining together their apparently discordant qualities, results an eloquent, persuasive, and interesting beauty.”

Some of these remarks are true and beautiful; but the great object of the Greeks in suppressing the convulsions of impassioned expression, was the bestowal of grace, the highest quality in all representation. . . . the Greeks suppressed impassioned expression only to bestow the highest degree of grace. Those, therefore, who complain of this, show themselves ignorant of the best object of their art. . . .

“Repose and tranquillity may be regarded as the effect of that composed manner which the Grecians studied to show in their actions and gestures. Amongst them, a hurried gait was regarded as contrary to the idea of decent deportment, and partaking somewhat of expressive boldness. . . . Whilst on the other hand, slow and regulated motions of the body were proofs amongst the ancients of a great mind.

“The highest idea of tranquillity and composure is found expressed in the representations of the divinities; so that from the father of the gods to the inferior deities, their figures appear free from the influence of any affection. The greatest of the poets thus describes Jupiter as making all Olympus tremble by merely moving his eyebrow or shaking his locks. . . . All the figures of Jupiter are not however made in the same style. . . .

“In representing the figures of heroes, the ancient artist exercised equal care and judgment; and expressed only those human affections which are suitable for a wise man, who represses the violence of his passions, and scarcely allows a spark of the internal flame to be seen, so as to leave to those who are desirous of it, the trouble of finding out what remains concealed. . . . 

“Niobe and her daughters, against whom Diana shot her fatal arrows, are represented as seized with terror and horror, in that state of indescribable anguish, when the sight of instant and inevitable death deprives the mind of the power of thought. Of this state of stupor and insensibility, the fable gives us an idea in the metamorphosis of Niobe into a stone; and hence Æschylus introduces her in his tragedy as stunned and speechless. In such a moment, when all thought and feeling cease, in a state bordering upon insensibility, the appearance is not altered, nor any feature of the face disturbed, and the mighty artist could here depict the most sublime beauty, and has indeed done so. Niobe and her daughters are, and ever will be, the most perfect models of beauty.”

The Ancient Course

Karl Jaspers quoting from an acnient Egyption papyrus, in his: Man in the Modern Age, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), Introduction, p. 24:

‘Robbers abound. . . . No one ploughs the land. People are saying: “We do not know what will happen from day to day.” . . . Dirt prevails everywhere, and no longer does any one wear clean raiment. . . . The country is spinning round and round like a potter’s wheel. . . . Slave-women are wearing necklaces of gold and lapis lazuli. . . . No more do we hear any one laugh. . . Great men and small agree in saying: “Would that I had never been born.” . . . Well-to-do persons are set to turn millstones. . . . Ladies have to demean themselves to the tasks of serving-women. . . . People are so famished that they snatch what falls from the mouths of swine. . . . The offices where records are kept have been broken into and plundered . . . and the documents of the scribes have been destroyed. . . . Moreover, certain foolish persons have bereft the country of the monarchy; . . . the officials have been driven hither and thither; . . . no public office stands open where it should, and the masses are like timid sheep without a shepherd. . . . Artists have ceased to ply their art. . . . The few slay the many. . . . One who yesterday was indigent is now wealthy, and the sometime rich overwhelm him with adulation. . . . Impudence is rife. . . . Oh that man could cease to be, that women should no longer conceive and give birth. Then, at length, the world would find peace.’

 

Vanity Of Worldly Conversations

Miguel de Unamuno, The Private World: Selections from the Diario Íntimo And Selected Letters 1890-1936, tr. Anthony Kerrigan and others (Princeton University Press, 1984), Notebook 1, pp. 13-14:

For years now what has most of my talk added up to? No more than gossip. I have spent my days judging others and accusing almost everyone else of foolishness. I was at the center of my universe—and thus, my fear of death. I came to believe that the world would come to an end at my death.

Often I have observed that the sad thing about all worldly conversations is that they are not dialogues at all, but intermingled monologues. Those who talk remain strangers to one another, each one following his own line of thought. No one listens with benevolent attention. Each one is impatient to speak his piece, which always seems more important than anyone else’s. Almost never is there any mingling of feelings, any unity of intent, any communion of spirit, in what is said. The frequency of interruption in any worldly conversation is worth noting as a symptom of a very painful disease.

Unamuno The Spaniard, Wordsworth The Englishman, And Valéry The Frenchman

Salvador de Madariaga, Introduction: Unamuno Re-read, in: Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (Princeton University Press, 1972), tr. Anthony Kerrigan, pp. xli-xlv:

The earnestness, the intensity, and the oneness of his predominant passion are the main cause of the strength of Unamuno’s philosophic work. They remain his main asset, yet become also the principal cause of his weakness as a creative artist. Great art can only flourish in the temperate zone of the passions, on the return journey from the torrid. Unamuno, as a creator, has none of the failings of those artists who have never felt deeply. But he does show the limitations of those artists who cannot cool down. And the most striking of them is that at bottom he is seldom able to put himself in a purely æsthetical mood. In this, as in many other features, Unamuno curiously resembles Wordsworth—and was, by the way, one of the few Spaniards to read and appreciate him. Like him, Unamuno is an essentially purposeful and utilitarian mind. Of the two qualities which the work of art requires for its inception—earnestness and detachment—both Unamuno and Wordsworth possess the first; both are deficient in the second. Their interest in their respective leading thought—survival in the first, virtue in the second—is too direct, too pressing, to allow them the “distance” necessary for artistic work. Both are urged to work by a lofty utilitarianism—the search for God through the individual soul in Unamuno; the search for God through the social soul in Wordsworth—so that their thoughts and sensations are polarized, and their spirit loses that impartial transparence to nature’s lights without which no great art is possible. Once suggested, this parallel is too rich in sidelights to be lightly dropped. This single-mindedness which distinguishes them explains that both should have consciously or unconsciously chosen a life of semi-seclusion, for Unamuno lived in Salamanca very much as Wordsworth lived in the Lake District—

                                     in a still retreat

Sheltered, but not to social duties lost,

hence in both a certain proclivity toward plowing a solitary furrow and becoming self-centered. There are no doubt important differences. The Englishman’s sense of nature is both keener and more concrete; while the Spaniard’s knowledge of human nature is not barred by the subtle inhibitions and innate limitations which tend to blind its more unpleasant aspects to the eye of the Englishman. There is more courage and passion in the Spaniard; more harmony and good will in the Englishman; the one is more like fire, the other like light. For Wordsworth, a poem is above all an essay, a means for conveying a lesson in forcible and easily remembered terms to those who are in need of improvement. For Unamuno, a poem or a novel (and he holds that a novel is but a poem) is the outpouring of a man’s passion, the overflow of the heart which cannot help itself and lets go. And it may be that the essential difference between the two is to be found in this difference between their respective purposes: Unamuno’s purpose is more intimately personal and individual; Wordsworth’s is more social and objective. Thus both miss the temperate zone, where emotion takes shape into the molds of art; but while Wordsworth is driven by his ideal of social service this side of it, into the cold light of both moral and intellectual self-control, Unamuno remains beyond, where the molten metal is too near the fire of passion, and cannot cool down into shape.

Unamuno is therefore not unlike Wordsworth in the insufficiency of his sense of form. We have just seen the essential cause of this insufficiency to lie in the non-æsthetical attitude of his mind, and we have tried to show one of the roots of such an attitude in the very loftiness and earnestness of his purpose. Yet, there are others, for living nature is many-rooted as it is many-branched. It cannot be doubted that a certain refractoriness to form is a typical feature of the Basque character. The sense of form is closely in sympathy with the feminine element in human nature, and the Basque race is strongly masculine. The pre-dominance of the masculine element—strength without grace—is as typical of Unamuno as it is of Wordsworth. The literary gifts which might for the sake of synthesis be symbolized in a smile are absent in both. There is as little humor in the one as in the other. Humor, however, sometimes occurs in Unamuno, but only in his ill-humored moments, and then with a curious bite of its own which adds an unconscious element to its comic effect. Grace only visits them in moments of inspiration, and then it is of a noble character, enhanced as it is by the ever-present gift of strength. And as for the sense for rhythm and music, both Unamuno and Wordsworth seem to be limited to the most vigorous and masculine gaits. This feature is particularly pronounced in Unamuno, for while Wordsworth is painstaking, all-observant, and too good a “teacher” to underestimate the importance of pleasure in man’s progress, Unamuno knows no compromise. His aim is not to please but to strike, and he deliberately seeks the naked, the forceful, even the brutal word for truth. There is in him, however, a cause of formlessness from which Wordsworth is free—namely, an eagerness for sincerity and veracity which brushes aside all preparation, ordering or planning of ideas as suspect of “dishing up” intellectual trickery, and juggling with spontaneous truths.

Setting Unamuno next to Wordsworth has shown them both as typical spirits of their respective nations. A similar effect would be obtained by comparing Unamuno with Valéry, for both might well stand as, again, typical spirits of their respective nations. Valéry was above all an intellect, a shape-giving, feminine spirit. Unamuno was a nothing-less-than-whole-man, a seed-providing, masculine spirit, with all that non-intellectual, vital sap which goes into a work, even into a work of “mere” thought, all the life-element without which, for Unamuno, a work would be worthless, all that which would be brushed aside by Valéry as mere dross, a muddying of the pure waters of the intellect; while the perfection of form, consciously sought and painfully attained by the Frenchman—a perfection, by the way, utterly beyond the powers of Unamuno unless he struck it by chance—would have been for the Spaniard mere vanity and waste. Finish for the Frenchman, finicking for the Spaniard.

Passionate versus dispassionate; a man living from his roots up, giving forth his “works” as a chestnut tree its “candles,” versus a goldsmith patiently chiseling his jewels; Unamuno versus Valéry symbolizes the secular tension between the spirit of Spain and the spirit of France, between fullness and perfection, substance and shape, power and care, hunger and fear, a beginning and an end.

Tieck and Romanticism

Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Essays on German Literature (London, 1892), ch. xiii., Literary Aspects of the Romantic School, pp. 341-43:

We fondly believe that in an enlightened age like ours, when science mercilessly penetrates to the causes of every cherished mystery, the range of the terrible is gradually reduced to a mere vanishing quantity; but no amount of scientific reasoning can conquer the tremor which a timid person feels in a dark hall or in an empty church at midnight. The small territory of clear daylight fact which we have conquered for ourselves is on all sides surrounded by a far vaster realm of mystery, and whenever the gates are opened to this realm, our reason refuses to do our bidding, and we are on the verge of insanity. It is on the boundary between these two realms of reason and mystery that Tieck has laid the scene of his fairy-tales; he is perpetually setting the gates ajar, and while we dwell on situations which on the surface appear only grotesque and comical, we involuntarily shudder. He knows exactly where to touch us to find our reason weak and our sense of mystery the more active. Vulgar ghost-stories he seldom deals with, but frequently with those situations in which some undeniably real but unexplained psychological element overmasters the will and urges it on to deeds for which the individual is hardly himself responsible. According to Tieck, the ghost of insanity is lurking in us all, and the moment we become conscious of its presence, we are all already half-way under its sway. . . .

Tieck was excessively fond of moonlight, and literally flooded his tales with its soft, dim splendor; therefore moonlight is now romantic. He never allows a hero to make a declaration of love without a near or distant accompani ment of a bugle (Schalmei or Waldhorn); accordingly, the bugle is called a romantic instrument. He showed a great preference for the Middle Ages, and revived the interest in mediæval history and literature; therefore the Middle Ages are to-day regarded as the most romantic period of history, and their literature is par excellence the romantic literature, and so on in infinitum.

Thoughts and Reflections of Halifax, I

George Savile, Marquis of Hlifax (1633 – 1695), Moral Thoughts and Reflections, in: A Character of King Charles the Second (London: 1750):

Of the World

To underftand the World, and to like it, are two things not easily to be reconciled. [p. 118]

It is the Fools and the Knaves that make the Wheels of the World turn. They are the World; those few who have Sense or Honesty sneak up and down single, but never go in Herds. [118]

A Man that steps aside from the World, and hath leisure to observe it without Interest or Design, thinks all Mankind as mad as they think him, for not agreeing with them in their Mistakes. [118]

Of Ambition

Men make it such a Point of Honour to be fit for Business, that they forget to examine whether Business is fit for a Man of Sense. [119]

There is Reason to think the most celebrated Philosophers would have been Bunglers at Business; but the Reason is because they despised it. [119]

Of Cunning and Knavery

In this Age, when it is said of a Man, He knows how to live, it may be imply'd he is not very honest. [122]

Of Folly and Fools

A Fool is naturally recommended to our Kindness by setting us off by the Comparison. Men are grateful to Fools for giving them the Pleasure of contemning them. [127]

Most Men make little other use of their Speech than to give evidence against their own Understanding. [130]

A Fool hath no Dialogue within himself, the first Thought carrieth him without the Reply of a second. [131]

Till Follies become ruinous, the World is better with than it would be without them. [132]

Of Apologies

To a Man who hath a mind to find a Fault, an Excuse generally giveth farther hold. [136]

Explaining is generally half confessing. [136]

There is hardly any Man so strict as not to vary a little from Truth when he is to make an Excuse. [138]

Of Vanity

Men often mistake themselves, but they never forget themselves. [141]

It sheweth the Narrowness of our Nature, that a Man that intendeth any one thing extreamly, hath not Thought enough left for any thing else. [142]

Our Pride maketh us over-value our Stock of Thought, so as to trade much beyond what it is able to make good. [142]

Many aspire to learn what they can never comprehend, as others pretend to teach what they themselves do not know. [143]

The Vanity of teaching often tempteth a Man to forget he is a Blockhead. [143]

Selfe Learning

Great Reading without applying it is like Corn heaped that is not stirred, it groweth musty. [147]

The Reading of most Men, is like a Wardrobe of old Cloaths that are seldom used. [148]

Of Friendship

In the Commerce of the World, Men struggle little less with their Friends, than they do with their Enemies. [151]

A Purity No Longer Attainable

Jean Paul Richter, Autobiography, lecture III., The Lord's Supper, in: Levan; or, The Doctrine of Education (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891), pp. 62-63:

On this evening there came, too, a mild, light, clear heaven of peace over my soul, an unutterable never-returning blessedness in feeling myself quite clean, purified and freed from sin; in having made with God and man a joyful far-reaching peace, and still, from these evening hours of mild and warm soul-rest, I looked onward to the heavenly enthusiasm and rapture at the altar next morning.

O blessed time! when one has stripped off the unclean past, and stands pure and white, free and fresh in the present, and thus steps forth courageously into the future. But to whom but children can this time return? In the happy time of childhood this complete peace of soul is more easy to gain, because the circle of sacrifices which it demands is smaller and the sacrifices themselves less important, while the complicated and widened circumstances of later years, either through deficiencies or delay in complete resignation, admit the heavenly rainbow of peace only incomplete and not rounded to a perfect circle, as in the time of youth. In the twelfth year enthusiasm can render one perfectly pure, but not so in age. The youth, too, and the maiden with all their fiery impulses have less to overcome in their circle, and have an easier and shorter way to the highest moral purity, than that which the man or woman have to traverse with their colder and more selfish strivings, through the wilderness of troubles, cares, and toils. The true man is, at some period in his earliest time, a diamond of the first water, crystal clear, and without colour, then he becomes one of second quality and glitters with many colours, until at last he darkens into a coloured stone. 

Cloudy Skies and Poor Humans

Jean Paul Richter, Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or: The Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs, tr. Alexander Ewing (London: George Bell & Sons, 1897), bk. iv., ch. xvi., pp. 454-457:

It was Saturday, and cloudy. Damp weather affects the walls of our brains as it does the walls of our rooms; the paperings of both imbibe the moisture, and get curled up into clouds, until the next dry day smooths both out again. Under a blue sky, I long for eagles’ pinions; under a cloudy one, I only want a goose’s wing to write with. In the former case we are eager to be off and out, into the wide world; in the latter, all we want is to sit comfortably down in our arm-chair. In short, clouds, when they drop, make us domestic, citizenish, and hungry, while blue skies make us thirsty, and citizens of the world. . . .

Away from home we are bold and daring: we resolve, and undertake; at home, we pause and hesitate, and delay.

. . . in man there nestles an accursed tendency towards still-sitting ease and comfort; like a big dog he lets himself be poked and pinched a thousand times before he takes the trouble to get up, rather than growl. Once fairly on his legs, however, he is not in a hurry to lie down again. The first heroic deed (like the first earned dollar, according to Rousseau) costs more than the next thousand. The prospect of the long, difficult, tedious and risky financial and surgical operation of a stage death stung our Siebenkæs on the domestic bolster. . . .

Poor, fevered human creatures that we are! driven back and repulsed asunder by our own lackings, and those of others, yet continually drawn together again by never-ceasing longings, in whom one hope of finding love falls away to dust after another, whose wishes come to nothing but memories. Our feeble hearts are at all events glowing and right full of love in that hour when we come back and meet again; and in that other hour when we part, disconsolate,—as every star seems milder, larger, and lovelier when it is rising, than when it is overhead. But to souls which always love, and are never angry, these two twilights (when the morning star of meeting, and the evening star of parting shine) are too sad to bear for to them they seem like nights.

Bewailing One's Books' Destiny

Antoine Silvestre de Sacy, in: Charles Nodier, The Bibliomaniac, tr. Mabel Osgood Wright (New York: J. O. Wright & Co., 1894), preface, pp. 22-23:

O my beloved books, some day you will also be exhibited in an auction-room, when you will pass into other hands, owners perhaps less worthy of you than your present master. Yet these books that I have selected, one by one, are truly mine, collected by the sweat of my brow; and I love them so, that it seems to me they have become a part of my very soul by such a long and precious intercourse.

Lucien Prévost-Paradol, the French essayist, wrote of him: This Christian, whom some would like to call austere, if the word austerity could cover so much forbearance and perfect gentleness, became a sort of epicure in all that concerned his reading. [Ibid., p. 21]

The Art of Printing Turned Into A Clog

Frederic Harrison, The Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces (London: MacMillan and Co., 1886), ch. 1, How to Read, pp. 17-19:

For the art of printing has not been a gift wholly unmixed with evils; it must be used wisely if it is to be a boon to man at all; it entails on us heavy responsibilities, resolution to use it with judgment and self-control, and the will to resist its temptations and its perils. Indeed, we may easily so act that we may make it a clog on the progress of the human mind, a real curse and not a boon. The power of flying at will through space would probably extinguish civilisation and society, for it would release us from the wholesome bondage of place and rest. The power of hearing every word that had ever been uttered on this planet would annihilate thought, as the power of knowing all recorded facts by the process of turning a handle would annihilate true science. Our human faculties and our mental forces are not enlarged simply by multiplying our materials of knowledge and our facilities for communication. Telephones, microphones, pantoscopes, steam-presses, and ubiquity-engines in general may, after all, leave the poor human brain panting and throbbing under the strain of its appliances, no bigger and no stronger than the brains of the men who heard Moses speak, and saw Aristotle and Archimedes pondering over a few worn rolls of crabbed manuscript. Until some new Gutemberg or Watt can invent a machine for magnifying the human mind, every fresh apparatus for multiplying its work is a fresh strain on the mind, a new realm for it to order and to rule.

And so, I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organise our knowledge, to systematise our reading, to save, out of the relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest—this is a necessity, unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up is, in the infinity of knowledge, to know nothing. To read the first book we come across, in the wilderness of books, is to learn nothing. To turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent to all that is good.

When Knowledge is Harmful

Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books (في مدح الكتب), James E. Montgomery (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pt. 4, The Slavific Book, 4.2: The Form of the Introduction, B. The Treatise on Legal Verdicts, #14, pp. 206-7:

Though knowledge be the life of the reasoning intellect, as the reasoning intellect is the life of the spirit and the spirit is the life of the body, the determining characteristic of knowledge is the determining characteristic of water and the other nutrients: when they exceed the extent to which they are required, they become harmful. Drinks are only palatable and food is only wholesome one bit at a time. Knowledge works like this and proceeds as they do. It is part of men’s souls to feel ennui over what they find too lengthy and too copious. We should not be among those who assist this or be among those who fail to understand the nature of the human constitution, for even the strongest is weak and even the most energetic grows weary. Though their states be disparate, they are all susceptible to and overcome by weakness.

Death and Civilisation

Hubert Lauvergne, De l'Agonie et de la Mort dans toutes les Classes de la Société sous le Rapport humanitaire, physiologique et religieux, (Paris: 1842, Librairie de J.-B. Baillièrech), tome i., ch. ii., pp. 131-2:

As we move away from the great centres of civilisation, as we approach the plains and the mountains, the character of death takes on more and more the calm aspect of the sky on a beautiful evening twilight. The Arab who dies in his tent asks to see the East once more, and this wish, which is an extraordinary thing, is very often the last which great and pure intelligences make when they feel seized by the hand of time. How different is such an end from that suffered by a citizen of Rome or Paris, in the midst of symbolic ceremonies which make him miss life longingly and the thousand joys with which it adorns itself in the eyes of a powerful and rich human! In general, death is brought about in a manner that is all simpler and more natural the freer one is from the innumerable ties of civilisation.

À mesure qu'on s'éloigne des grands foyers de civilisation, qu'on se rap proche des plaines et des montagnes, le caractère de la mort prend de plus en plus l'aspect calme du ciel par un beau crépuscule du soir. En général la mort s'accomplit d'une maière d'autant plus simple et naturelle qu'on est plus libre des innombrables liens de la civilisation. L'Arabe qui meurt sous sa tente demande à voir encore une fois l'orient, et ce vœu, chose extraordinaire, est bien souvent le dernier que font les grandes et pures intelligences quand elles se sentent saisies par la main du temps. Quelle différence d'une telle fin à celle que subit un citoyen de Rome ou de Paris, au milieu des cérémonies symboliques qui lui font regretter la vie et les mille joies dont elle se pare aux yeux de l'homme puissant et riche! En général, la mort s'accomplit d'une manière d'autant plus simple et naturelle qu'on est plus libre des innombrables liens de la civilisation.

A Faithful Friend

J. G. Zimmermann, Solitude, (London: 1802, 3rd edt.), vol. II., ch. III., The Disadvantages of Solitude, pp. 129-130:

The delight which the heart experiences in pouring forth the fulness of its feelings, with honest confidence, into the bosom of a faithful friend, is permanent and unbounded. The pleasures which spring from the acquisition of fame, whether resulting from the generous voice of an approving public, or extorted from the reluctant tongues of envious rivals and contemporaries, will bear no comparison with those which thrill through the exulting bosom of him who can justly exclaim, “To the heart of this unhappy man I have given returning hopes, and made him look forward with confidence to the enjoyment of peace; to his wounded spirit I have imparted the balm of comfort and tranquillity; and from the bleeding bosom of my friend have driven despair!” . . .

It is justly and beautifully said by one of the apocryphal writers, that, A faithful friend is the medicine of life. A variety of occasions happen, when to pour forth the heart to one whom we love and trust, is the chief comfort, perhaps the only relief we can enjoy. Miserable is he who, shut up within the narrow inclosure of selfish interest, has no person to whom he can at all times, with full confidence, expand his soul.