Books: The True Elysian Fields

Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (Edinburgh, 1881), ch. XI., Books and Gardens, pp. 246, 248-9:

Most men seek solitude from wounded vanity, from disappointed ambition, from a miscarriage in the passions; but some others from native instinct, as a duckling seeks water. I have taken to my solitude, such as it is, from an indolent turn of mind, and this solitude I sweeten by an imaginative sympathy which re-creates the past for me,—the past of the world, as well as the past which belongs to me as an individual,—and which makes me independent of the passing moment. . . .

In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the Pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre,—the stage is time, the play is the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hiss, or cry "Bravo," when the great actors come on the shaking stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession,—all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world; what bleating of flocks; what green pastoral rest; what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah's camels. O men and women so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all! Books are the true Elysian fields, where the spirits of the dead converse; and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan's pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library, but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.

Passions And Feelings

Thomas Hope, Anastasius; or, Memoirs of a Greek (2nd edt. in three volumes, London, 1820), vol. III., pp. 103-4:

Alas! what am I to believe? Do not philosophers maintain that the passions are the only road to knowledge, to power, and to virtue? that the inert being who never has felt their influence on his own mind knows not how to guide the will of others, sees man as a machine whose movements baffle his skill, constantly miscalculates the views and conduct of his fellow creatures, and, only attempting to move men like blocks by physical force, must find a resistance which mocks his inadequate impulse. Without the passion of love would women encounter the pangs which preserve our species? without that of ambition would man endure the toil of maintaining public order, through means of a complicated polity? Is it not the passion of avarice alone that brings in contact, for universal benefit, the industry and the produce of the most distant countries? and what but the passion for fame makes man risk health, fortune, nay life itself, for the advantages, perhaps the amusement, of generations yet unborn? Like the heat of the sun, that of the passions may strengthen a few poisons, but alone it brings forth all the sweets and healthful plants of the creation.

H— shook his head. «It is feeling,» said he, «which, like the sun's genial warmth, ripens each fairest fruit. Passions, like a scorching blaze, only burn them to ashes. Would you behold the effects of the former; look at my young friend here. Calm, healthful and blooming, he is the bee that sucks the flowers of every clime, some day to add their honey to the stores of his grateful countrymen. Would you know the consequence of the latter; look in the brook beside you.»

I advanced my head over the glassy pool: but from its deep bosom up rose to meet my searching eye, a countenance so pale and ghastly—a cheek so wan and so feverish—that I started back with horror. I felt the reproof, bowed assent, and said no more.

World's Vanity

Francis Quarles (1592 – 1644), The Vanity of the World:

        False world, thou ly'st: thou canst not lend
                The least delight:
        Thy favors cannot gain a friend,
                They are so slight:
        Thy morning pleasures make an end
                To please at night:
        Poor are the wants that thou supply'st,
        And yet thou vaunt'st, and yet thou vy'st
        With heaven: fond earth, thou boasts; false world, thou ly'st.

        Thy babbling tongue tells golden tales        
                Of endless treasure;
        Thy bounty offers easy sales
                Of lasting pleasure; 
        Thou ask'st the conscience what she ails,
                And swear'st to ease her;    
        There's none can want where thou supply'st;
        There's none can give where thou deny'st.
        Alas! fond world, thou boasts; false world, thou ly'st.

        What well-advisèd ear regards
                What earth can say?
        Thy words are gold, but thy regards
                Are painted clay:
        Thy cunning can but pack the cards,
                Thou canst not play:
        Thy game at weakest, still thou vy'st;
        If seen, and then revy'd, deny'st:
        Thou art not what thou seem'st; false world, thou ly'st.

        Thy tinsel bosom seems a mint
                Of new-coined treasure;
        A paradise, that has no stint,
                No change, no measure;
        A painted cask, but nothing in 't,
                Nor wealth, nor pleasure:
        Vain earth! that falsely thus comply'st
        With man; vain man! that thou rely'st
        On earth; vain man, thou dot'st; vain earth, thou ly'st.

        What mean dull souls, in this high measure,
                To haberdash
        In earth's base wares, whose greatest treasure
                Is dross and trash?
        The height of whose enchanting pleasure
                Is but a flash?
        Are these the goods that thou supply'st
        Us mortals with? Are these the high'st?
        Can these bring cordial peace? false world, thou ly'st.

Accident As Maker

Isaac Disræli, Curiosities of Literature, Poets, Philosophers, and Artists, made by Accident:

Father Malebranche having completed his studies in philosophy and theology without any other intention than devoting himself to some religious order, little expected the celebrity his works acquired for him. Loitering in an idle hour in the shop of a bookseller, and turning over a parcel of books, L'Homme de Descartes fell into his hands. Having dipt into parts, he read with such delight that the palpitations of his heart compelled him to lay the volume down. It was this circumstance that produced those profound contemplations which made him the Plato of his age.

Cowley became a poet by accident. In his mother's apartment he found, when very young, Spenser's Fairy Queen; and, by a continual study of poetry, he became so enchanted by the Muse, that he grew irrecoverably a poet.

Sir Joshua Reynolds had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's Treatise. . . .

Corneille loved; he made verses for his mistress, became a poet, composed Mélite and afterwards his other celebrated works. The discreet Corneille had else remained a lawyer. . . .

Ignatius Loyola was a Spanish gentleman, who was dangerously wounded at the siege of Pampeluna. Having heated his imagination by reading the Lives of the Saints during his illness, instead of a romance, he conceived a strong ambition to be the founder of a religious order; whence originated the celebrated society of the Jesuits. . . .

La Fontaine, at the age of twenty-two, had not taken any profession, or devoted himself to any pursuit. Having accidentally heard some verses of Malherbe, he felt a sudden impulse, which directed his future life. He immediately bought a Malherbe, and was so exquisitely delighted with this poet that, after passing the nights in treasuring his verses in his memory, he would run in the day-time to the woods, where, concealing himself, he would recite his verses to the surrounding dryads. . . .

The Quintessential In Romanticism

Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York, 1902), vol. II., The Romantic School in Germany, IV., p. 68:

The great question of the relation of poetry to life, despair over the deep, bitter discord between them, the unwearied struggle to bring about a reconciliation—this is what lies at the foundation of the whole of German literature from the Sturm und Drang period to the death of Romanticism.

The Awful Risk Of The Modern Man

Carl Jung, The Practice of Pschotherapy, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Bollingen Series XX., 1954), pt. 2, II., Psychology of the Transference, 8: Purification, para. 491, p. 279:

The story of Faust shows how unnatural our condition is: it required the intervention of the devil—in anticipation of Steinach—to transform the ageing alchemist into a young gallant and make him forget himself for the sake of the all-too-youthful feelings he had just discovered! That is precisely the risk modern man runs: he may wake up one day to find that he has missed half his life.

Vanity

Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes 1749 (his own imitation of Juvenal's tenth satire, from which I quoted in the previous post):

        . . . New Sorrow rises as the Day returns, . . .
        Year chases Year, Decay pursues Decay, . . .

Old Age

Decimus Junius Juvenalis, Satires, 4.10, tr. G. G. Ramsay:

Give me length of days, give me many years. O Jupiter! Such is your one and only prayer, in days of strength or of sickness; yet how great, how unceasing, are the miseries of old age! Look first at the mis-shapen and ungainly face, so unlike its former self: see the unsightly hide that serves for skin; see the pendulous cheeks and the wrinkles like those which a matron baboon carves upon her aged jaws in the shaded glades of Thabraca. The young men differ in various ways: this man is handsomer than that, and he than another; one is stronger than another: but old men all look alike. Their voices are as shaky as their limbs, their heads without hair, their noses drivelling as in childhood. Their bread, poor wretches, has to be munched by toothless gums; so offensive do they become to their wives, their children, and themselves, that even the legacy-hunter, Cossus, turns from them in disgust. Their sluggish palate takes joy in wine or food no longer, and all pleasures of the flesh have been long ago forgotten. . . . [some lines omitted]

Another translation by Lewis Evans (1881), whose version is copiously annotated:

"Grant length of life, great Jove, and many years!" This is your only prayer in health and sickness. But with what unremitting and grievous ills is old age crowded! First of all, its face is hideous, loathsome, and altered from its former self; instead of skin a hideous hide and flaccid cheeks; and see! such wrinkles, as, where Tabraca extends her shady dells, the antiquated ape scratches on her wizened jowl! There are many points of difference in the young: this youth is handsomer than that; and he again than a third: one is far sturdier than another. Old mens faces are all alike—limbs tottering and voice feeble, a smooth bald pate, and the second childhood of a driveling nose; the poor wretch must mumble his bread with toothless gums; so loathsome to his wife, his children, and even to himself, that he would excite the disgust even of the legacy-hunter Cossus! His palate is grown dull; his relish for his food and wine no more the same; the joys of love are long ago forgotten; and in spite of all efforts to reinvigorate them, all manly energies are hopelessly extinct. Has this depraved and hoary lechery aught else to hope? Do we not look with just suspicion on the lust that covets the sin but lacks the power?

 A third one in verse by William Gifford's hand:

        "Life! length of life!" For this, with earnest cries,
        Or sick or well, we supplicate the skies.
        Pernicious prayer! for mark what ills attend,
        Still, on the old, as to the grave they bend:
        A ghastly visage, to themselves unknown,
        For a smooth skin, a hide with scurf o'ergrown,
        And such a cheek, as many a grandam ape,
        In Tabraca's thick woods, is seen to scrape.
        Strength, beauty, and a thousand charms beside,
        With sweet distinction, youth from youth divide;
        While age presents one universal face:
        A faltering voice, a weak and trembling pace,
        An ever-dropping nose, a forehead bare, 
        And toothless gums to mumble o'er its fare.
        Poor wretch, behold him, tottering to his fall,
        So loathsome to himself, wife, children, all,  
        That those who hoped the legacy to share,
        And flattered long—disgusted, disappear.
        The sluggish palate dulled, the feast no more  
        Excites the same sensations as of yore;    
        Taste, feeling, all, a universal blot,
        And e'en the rites of love remembered not:
        Or if—through the long night he feebly strives
        To raise a flame where not a spark survives;
        While Venus marks the effort with distrust,    
        And hates the gray decrepitude of lust.

There is another beautiful translation in verse by Charles Badham (London, 1814). The Latin text:

        ‘Da spatium vitae, multos da, Iuppiter, annos’: 
        hoc recto vultu, solum hoc, et pallidus optas,
        sed quam continuis et quantis longa senectus                190
        plena malis! deformem et taetrum ante omnia vultum
        dissimilemque sui, deformem pro cute pellem
        pendentisque genas et talis aspice rugas
        quales, umbriferos ubi pandit Thabraca saltus,
        in vetula scalpit iam mater simia bucca.                        195
        plurima sunt iuvenum discrimina; pulchrior ille
        hoc atque ille alio, multum hic robustior illo:
        una senum facies, cum voce trementia membra
        etiam leve caput madidique infantia nasi,
        frangendus misero gingiva panis inermi;                       200
        usque adeo gravis uxori natisque sibique,
        ut captatori moveat fastidia Cosso,
        non eadem vini atque cibi torpente palato
        gaudia, nam coitus iam longa oblivio, vel si
        coneris, iacet exiguus cum ramice nervus                      205
        et quamvis tota palpetur nocte, iacebit.
        anne aliquid sperare potest haec inguinis aegri
        canities? quid quod merito suspecta libido est
        quae venerem adfectat sine viribus?

A more literal tranlsation of the last lines of the satire is that of Paul Murgatroyd's (2017):

        Again, intercourse has by now long been forgotten, or,

        should you try, your little penis with its varicocele lies there

        and, despite being stroked all night long, will lie there.

        Can this sickly, white-haired phallus really hope for

        anything? What about the fact that lust which strives after sex

        without strength is quite rightly suspect?

No-one Is Left Unscathed

Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature, Sketches of Criticism:

Socrates, considered as the wisest and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and the pedant Athenæus as illiterate; the latter points out as a Socratic folly our philosopher disserting on the nature of justice before his judges, who were so many thieves. The malignant buffoonery of Aristophanes treats him much worse; but he, as Jortin says, was a great wit, but a great rascal.

Plato—who has been called, by Clement of Alexandria, the Moses of Athens; the philosopher of the Christians, by Arnobius; and the god of philosophers, by Cicero—Athenæus accuses of envy; Theopompus of lying; Suidas of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence; and Aristophanes, of impiety.

Aristotle, whose industry composed more than four hundred volumes, has not been less spared by the critics; Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, and Plutarch, have forgotten nothing that can tend to show his ignorance, his ambition, and his vanity.

It has been said, that Plato was so envious of the celebrity of Democritus, that he proposed burning all his works; but that Amydis and Clinias prevented it, by remonstrating that there were copies of them everywhere; and Aristotle was agitated by the same passion against all the philosophers his predecessors.

Virgil is destitute of invention, if we are to give credit to Pliny, Carbilius, and Seneca. Caligula has absolutely denied him even mediocrity; Herennus has marked his faults; and Perilius Faustinus has furnished a thick volume with his plagiarisms. Even the author of his apology has confessed, that he has stolen from Homer his greatest beauties; from Apollonius Rhodius, many of his pathetic passages; from Nicander, hints for his Georgies; and this does not terminate the catalogue.

Horace censures the coarse humour of Plautus; and Horace, in his turn, has been blamed for the free use he made of the Greek minor poets.

The majority of the critics regard Pliny's Natural History only as a heap of fables; and Pliny cannot bear with Diodorus and Vopiscus; and in one comprehensive criticism, treats all the historians as narrators of fables. [. . .]

Should we proceed with this list to our own country, and to our own times, it might be curiously augmented, and show the world what men the Critics are! but, perhaps, enough has been said to soothe irritated genius, and to shame fastidious criticism. . . .

The Coming Of The Baroque & The «Too Much» To Italy, Nature, Rome, The Garden, & The Aristocrats

Jacques Élie Faure, History of Art, vol. III., Renaissance Art, tr. Walter Pach (Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1923), ch. II., Rome and the School, sect. iv., pp. 143-147:

The spectacle that we now witness is the contrary of the cue presented by the decadence of Greece, during which sources of life could be opened up here and there in new countries because the original organism, having developed more slowly and more universally, broke up with less rapidity; but in Italy there was no arresting the descent. The School, step by step, becomes a mere factory. Its principal founder at Bologna, Annibale Carracci, was still, if not a great painter, at least a man of noble will, of grave mind, and of conscience. He adapted intelligently the inventions of others, and ornamented the great melancholy palaces of the Italian princes who had now lost their independence. In his hollow but severely arranged pictures, the pagan divinities bend under his wealth of rhetoric. With Domenichino, the drama becomes completely external, the gestures break up and disperse the overstrained composition, and the mimicry turns into grimacing, though sometimes in a bare arm or in a bit of sky there vibrates the ethereal soul of Venice. The genuine grace of Albani is so sugary and sophisticated that one has difficulty in doing it justice. The bombast of Guido Reni and of Guercino is well-nigh intolerable. What with false sentiment, icy and waxen color, the organization of the picture prescribed by recipe and conventional drawing, the discord that reigns in the art factory of fallen Italy becomes more and more accentuated and develops that gesticulating character which, in the seventeenth century, will culminate in the disjointed and indefatigable grandiloquence of Bernini.

With the contortions of his statues, with the battles and the romantic landscapes of Salvator Rosa, with the dregs of painting that we reach with the prestidigitation of Luca Giordano, the easy and questionable life of Naples invaded Italy and merged its troubled waters with the exhausted currents of the north. It contributed, at least, as much as was necessary to the Jesuit propaganda to mislead the tragic and passionate soul of Italy toward that baroque style in which passion turned to intrigue and tragedy to melodrama. We cannot deny that the style was lacking in abundance and in brilliancy. It had too much. Something of a Hindu exuberance puffed up the buildings and the pictures, and gave to the statues their convulsive appearance. But, within, there was none of the burning sap of India. Instead, there is a heavy look of vanity that inflates the forms with a desire to look well, to please, and to astonish. Under the dominion of bigoted and corrupt political organizations, the great Italian cities, from the sixteenth century onward, pay homage to their own wealth in extravagant churches, amiable and gilded, and in palaces ornamented, like the churches, with profuse decoration. Excepting Venice, where the atmosphere saves everything, this passion for building, for decorating, and for dazzling gave to certain of the cities, to Genoa, to Bologna, and especially to Rome, a character of obstinate power which approaches a kind of beauty; Genoa, however, is insolent, and Bologna pretentious. Rome, with her ruins overgrown with verdure, her red palaces whose reflection turns the fountains to blood, her enormous volumes of water—Rome haunts our memory with a monotonous heaviness. Through twenty centuries she has remained what she was, the place where nature, more than anywhere else in the world, has consented, with unwearying indifference, to take on the form of the will. Besides, in the eighteenth century, she, like Venice, has a moment of semi-awakening and lifts her stone shell to permit the entrance among her ruins of beautiful and princely villas surrounded by parks rich in sentiment. We cannot be sure as to the explanation of this, but it doubtless lies in the philosophic revolt that was taking place everywhere. Piranesi constructs his great staircases and dreams his terrible prisons; it is the last, deep sigh of Michael Angelo, a fantastic gleam in the shadow, the tragic spirit of Italy stifling under the crumbling walls and hidden behind the cellar bars, the violent and mysterious bound of her great heart which cannot be stilled. Rome is strange. Ugly when one comes to analyze it, the city preserves in its ensemble an artificial splendor which is garbed in living splendor by the people and the gardens.

In Italy, in England, and in France, as in the Orient, the garden is the only artistic expression that belongs to the aristocracies. It adapts itself to the most imperious needs of those beings who have been robbed of self-possession through idleness and wealth. It throws around them the solitude which they cannot seek within themselves. It is made to surround them with murmurs, with coolness and shade, the possession of which, amid the freedom of the earth, is the recompense of the poor. Even when it is amassed, shaped, and broken in, nature is never ugly. The trees remain the trees; the water remains the water; the flowers remain the flowers; and whatever artist arranges them, space and light retain the power of softening the contrasts, of organizing the values, and of orchestrating the colors.

The Pleasure Of Danger And Struggle

Jean-Marie Guyau, A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, tr. Gertrude Kapteyn (London, 1898), 2nd bk., ch. I., sect. II., pp. 120-22:

Primitive humanity lived in the midst of danger, hence there must still exist in many people a natural predisposition to face it. Danger was, so to speak, the sport of primitive men, as sport is to-day, for many people, a kind of sham danger. This taste for peril, faced for its own sake, is to be met with even among animals. We find on this subject a curious tale of a traveller in Cambodia.

As soon as a troup of monkeys notice a crocodile with its body sunk in the water, its mouth wide open, so as to seize anything which may pass within reach, they seem to plan together, approach little by little, and begin their sport, being by turns actors and spectators. One of the most agile, or of the most imprudent, passes from branch to branch, to within a respectful distance of the crocodile, suspends himself by a paw, and with the dexterity of his race advances, goes back, now striking its adversary with its paw, now merely pretending to hit him. Some of the others, amused by this game, want to be of the party; but, the other branches being too high, they form a chain by holding one another hanging by their paws. They balance themselves in that way, while he who is nearest the amphibious animal torments it as much as possible. Sometimes the dreadful jaw shuts itself, but without catching the audacious monkey. There are screams of joy and merry antics; but sometimes also a paw is caught in the vice, and the leaping monkey is drawn down under water with the quickness of lightning. The whole troup then disperses moaning and howling, which, however, does not prevent them beginning again the same sport several days, perhaps even several hours, later. [Mouhot, «Voyage dans le Royaume de Siam et de Cambodge.»]

The pleasure of danger is derived chiefly from the pleasure of victory. One likes to conquer, no matter whom, even an animal. We like to prove to ourselves our superiority. . . . Moreover, even after having lost the hope of conquest, one obstinately goes on struggling. Whosoever may be the adversary, every fight degenerates into a desperate duel. . . .

This need of danger and of victory, which carries away the soldier and the huntsman, is found also in the traveller, the colonist, the engineer. . . . The invincible attraction of the sea lies, to a great extent, in the constant danger which it presents. It tempts in succession each generation which is born on its shores, and if the English nation has acquired an intensity of life and force of expansion so great that it has spread itself over the whole world, we may say that this is due to its education by the sea—that is to say, to its education by danger.

Let us note that the pleasure of contest alters its form without disappearing, be it in the struggle with an animated being (war or chase), or in the struggle with visible obstacles (sea, mountain), or in the struggle with invisible things (illness to be cured, difficulties of all sorts to be conquered). The struggle always partakes of the same character—that of a passionate duel. In truth, the doctor who starts for Senegal has decided upon a kind of duel with the yellow fever. The struggle passes from the domain of things physical to the intellectual domain, without losing anything of its ardour or of its fascination. The struggle may also pass into the special domain of morals. There is an inward struggle between the will and the passions, as captivating as any other, and in which the victory brings an infinite joy, as was well understood by Corneille.

In short, man needs to feel himself great, in order now and again to have full consciousness of the sublimity of his will. This consciousness he gets in struggle—struggle with himself, with his passions, or with material and intellectual obstacles. 

Man And Mountains

Walther Kirchner, Mind, Mountain, and History, I. The Classical Spirit, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Oct., 1950), pp. 412-3:

For the Jews, as for Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Indians, and many other peoples, the early relations of man and nature must be traced against a religious background, and mountains must be considered within this general setting. They are the seats of the Gods. The Cedar Mountain of the Assyrians, the Caucasus of the Persians, the peaks of the Himalayas on India's northern border, from the heights of which, as the Rig Veda tells, the Gods look down—they all are understood as steps or ladders to what is immeasurable, unknown, and high above. Few would ever have thought of trying to grasp with mortal hands what might be dwelling on top of the mountains, close to heaven. Respect for the «holy» and fear of hidden terrors would forbid such an arrogant attempt. Not without cause were the mountains created arduous to approach, inaccessible on their flanks, and surrounded by clouds and storms. It was to separate man from the eternally holy which dwelt in solitude and serenity; and only he whose sincere longing to be close to God and whose own purity would be an armor against the dangers from above could dare set his foot on the heights. 

Essentially, each separate religion had «its own group of sacred mountains.» Even the Jews, who evolved a transcendental, monotheistic religion including a God whose image could not be conceived by man, have viewed mountains with special regard, lifting their eyes «unto the hills whence cometh my help.» Only Moses could undertake to ascend Horeb of Sinai, could dare stand face to face with his God and in storm and thunder receive a law from above for the impious crowd below. Likewise Mount Hor, Mount Nebo, the mountain from which Jesus preached his sermon, Mount Calvary and others bear witness to the fact that in an age when religious expression is paramount in man's life, he has to find a place in his mind for mountains—a place in harmony with his fundamental attitude. 

Looking down from Mount Nebo, found in today's Jordan. (Photos mine, taken in 2022)

Constant Sense Of Novelty

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1841, Otober 9:

Life.  Is identity tedious? Not if we can see to the life. That always stupefies us with sweet astonishment. A million times since the rose have the words “I thank you” been spoken. Yet are they just as graceful and musical in my ear when spoken with living emotion as if now first coined.

Philosophers And Taking Dicision

Friedrich Schiller, The Philosophers, tr. Edgar A. Bowring:

PUPIL.

 I am rejoiced, worthy sirs, to find you in pleno assembled;

   For I have come down below, seeking the one needful thing.

 ARISTOTLE.

 Quick to the point, my good friend! For the Jena Gazette comes

    to hand here,

  Even in hell,—so we know all that is passing above.

 PUPIL.

 So much the better! So give me (I will not depart hence without it)

  Some good principle now,—one that will always avail!

 FIRST PHILOSOPHER.

 Cogito, ergo sum. I have thought, and therefore existence!

  If the first be but true, then is the second one sure.

 PUPIL.

 As I think, I exist. 'Tis good! But who always is thinking?

  Oft I've existed e'en when I have been thinking of naught.

 SECOND PHILOSOPHER.

 Since there are things that exist, a thing of all things there must

    needs be;

  In the thing of all things dabble we, just as we are.

 THIRD PHILOSOPHER.

 Just the reverse, say I. Besides myself there is nothing;

  Everything else that there is is but a bubble to me.

 FOURTH PHILOSOPHER.

 Two kinds of things I allow to exist,—the world and the spirit;

  Naught of others I know; even these signify one.

 FIFTH PHILOSOPHER.

 I know naught of the thing, and know still less of the spirit;

  Both but appear unto me; yet no appearance they are.

 SIXTH PHILOSOPHER.

 I am I, and settle myself,—and if I then settle

  Nothing to be, well and good—there's a nonentity formed.

 SEVENTH PHILOSOPHER.

 There is conception at least! A thing conceived there is, therefore;

  And a conceiver as well,—which, with conception, make three.

 PUPIL.

 All this nonsense, good sirs, won't answer my purpose a tittle:

  I a real principle need,—one by which something is fixed.

 EIGHTH PHILOSOPHER.

 Nothing is now to be found in the theoretical province;

  Practical principles hold, such as: thou canst, for thou shouldst.

 PUPIL.

 If I but thought so! When people know no more sensible answer,

  Into the conscience at once plunge they with desperate haste.

 DAVID HUME.

 Don't converse with those fellows! That Kant has turned them all crazy;

  Speak to me, for in hell I am the same that I was.

 LAW POINT.

 I have made use of my nose for years together to smell with;

  Have I a right to my nose that can be legally proved?

 PUFFENDORF.

 Truly a delicate point! Yet the first possession appeareth

  In thy favor to tell; therefore make use of it still!

 SCRUPLE OF CONSCIENCE.

 Willingly serve I my friends; but, alas, I do it with pleasure;

  Therefore I often am vexed that no true virtue I have.

 DECISION.

 As there is no other means, thou hadst better begin to despise them;

  And with aversion, then, do that which thy duty commands.

Between Being On One's Own And Being With Others

Joseph-Marie baron de Gérando, Self-Education; or, The Means and Art of Moral Progress, (Boston, 1833), ch. III., Solitude and Society, pp. 302-305:

«Every time that I have been among men, I have returned more imperfect,» says a sage, who was too severe, perhaps, towards society and towards himself. He was a hermit. When a man goes from solitude into the world, he runs the danger of being drawn into too severe judgments upon the world and himself. We cannot find realized in society the images we have arbitrarily formed in a contemplation wholly ideal; we cannot apply rigorously the absolute rules which we had drawn up in the regions of abstraction. Thrown into the midst of society, we are struck by the contrast; we encounter a thousand obstacles, which we have not experienced or suspected in our solitary life. The dissipation of mind, alone, is a great trouble; having no longer our customary aids, we become disconcerted. It was easy to speculate on perfection in a state of tranquillity, and far from danger. We perhaps believed ourselves to have attained it, until we were put to the proof, till reality came, and the labor commenced; now we find fault with the world, from not remarking that we have doubtless carried into the world an imperfect and feeble virtue. Do not let us accuse other men of our own faults; but reflect, that we, perhaps, might have carried with us and preserved dispositions by which we might have escaped peril and gathered advantages.

The social inclination has something in it eminently moral; it puts in motion many precious faculties; it opens the soul, and makes it expand with many honorable sentiments. How solemn, touching, and noble is the impression which we receive of the dignity of human nature when we find ourselves in the midst of an assembly of men of different conditions, with whom we have no point of contact and no collision of interests. It is the same kind of impression, more extended but less vivid, that we receive in the midst of our own family. We are strengthened by the great alliance; and generous sentiments take the ascendency rapidly and surely. Such an impression is often received when we mingle with the crowd, on those days set apart to sacred rest. The impression is deepened, if this assembly is in the midst of the simple scenes of nature; if its attention is directed towards some grave and majestic work of art; if it is gathered round the statue of a great man; or if it fills a solemn temple: in short, if some moral or religious thought comes over all, the soul is penetrated with emotions of a strong and elevated character.1 This is the natural influence which we should constantly receive from social intercourse, if it were not adulterated by the hostile dispositions, which spring out of our rivalries, and our secret desire of invading and subduing others. But the hostilities of which we are the object do not so much interfere with it, as those of which we are the authors. The wounds that the first cause us, are envenomed by ourselves; we seem to take delight in inflaming them; we allow the envy that we might despise, to irritate us; the criticism that might enlighten, to wound us; and we are mortified even by indifference. Our self-love, especially, wages with the self-love of others a silent and concealed but continual and implacable war. We complain of being carried away by the influence of example: but we give it the power that it exercises over us. On examination, we shall find that the examples so easily followed, meet a secret propensity within, and that we have a secret interest in following the tracks of others: this happens, especially, in regard to those whom we would flatter; for there is no adulation more delicate.

We complain of the extreme corruption of the world, of the discouragement and sadness that it makes us feel; but we should guard against declamation, and appreciate things according to their just value. At our entrance into the world, we generally presume too much upon the goodness of other men, and so require too much; afterwards we fall into the opposite exaggeration, through the effect of the surprise which our mistake has made us experience. If we are sincere, we shall acknowledge that the vices with which we especially reproach the world, are those by which our vanity, our repose, or our pretensions have suffered: and that our judgment has a little the character of revenge. We are disconcerted with ourselves, and wreak this discontent upon others: we look at them through the medium of a chagrin, which springs from being ill at ease. We have hardly studied to discover and to note what society may contain of hidden virtues, of pure and just sentiments. Besides, how great is the weakness of our reason, if morality loses its authority in our eyes, because it loses its credit in the world! Is worldly success necessary, as its sanction or its proof? Does morality become an illusion, because some frivolous men misconceive it? If so, let us go upon the theatre of the world, as generous defenders of this miscon- cenceived cause, instead of flying, and yielding to pusillanimous fears.

1. These are certainly some fine lines; nonetheless, it is quite striking to me how such sentiments seem fully unattainable, at least in my case. I cannot recall once in my life when I experienced any similar sentiments. 

Human Nature And The Stoics

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I., (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire:

In truth, the Stoics, who taught that all virtue was conformity to nature, were, in this respect, eminently false to their own principle. Human nature, as revealed to us by reason, is a composite thing, a constitution of many parts differing in kind and dignity, a hierarchy in which many powers are intended to co-exist, but in different positions of ascendancy or subordination. To make the higher part of our nature our whole nature, is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this mutilation has never been attempted without producing grave evils. As philanthropists, the Stoics, through their passion for unity, were led to the extirpation of those emotions which nature intended as the chief springs of benevolence. As speculative philosophers, they were entangled by the same desire in a long train of pitiable paradoxes. Their famous doctrines that all virtues are equal, or, more correctly, are the same, that all vices are equal, that nothing is an evil which does not affect our will, and that pain and bereavement are, in consequence, no ills, though partially explained away and frequently disregarded by the Roman Stoics, were yet sufficiently prominent to give their teaching something of an unnatural and affected appearance. Prizing only a single object, and developing only a single side of their nature, their minds became narrow and their views contracted.

Athens, The Germans, Wincklemann, & Becoming Greeks

Frederick Beiser, Hegel, (Routledge, 2005), ch. II., Early Ideals, The Highest Good, p. 38:

The young Hegel and the romantics had a very idealistic conception of ancient Greek life. Their paradigm for unity of life was that of fifth-century Athens. They had their own theory about the ancient Greek: that he lived in harmony with himself, with others and with nature. We scarcely need to bother about the historical accuracy of such a fanciful theory: it is a myth whose value entirely lies in what it tells us about the Germans rather than the ancient Greeks. The romantic conception of Greek life came from several sources: from Rousseau, Wieland, Herder and Schiller. But its ultimate source was that Homer of German myth, ‘the divine’ J.J. Winckelmann. It was Winckelmann who taught the Germans that Greek culture was an aesthetic whole. Winckelmann’s constant refrain that Greek life was ‘natural’ stemmed from his political conviction that the Greeks were a free people who could express their humanity. The political message behind Winckelmann’s classicism was never lost on a public weary of absolutism: we could all become Greeks if we were only free.

Bibliomania For Its Own Sake

Isaac Disræli, his valuable Curiosities of Literature, The Bibliomania:

The Bibliomania, or the collecting an enormous heap of books without intelligent curiosity, has, since libraries have existed, infected weak minds, who imagine that they themselves acquire knowledge when they keep it on their shelves. Their motley libraries have been called the madhouses of the Human mind; and again, the tomb of books, when the possessor will not communicate them, and coffins them up in the cases of his library. It was facetiously observed, these collections are not without a Lock on the Human Understanding.

The Bibliomania never raged more violently than in our own times. It is fortunate that literature is in no ways injured by the follies of collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily protect the good.

Some collectors place all their fame on the view of a splendid library, where volumes, arrayed in all the pomp of lettering, silk linings, triple gold bands, and tinted leather, are locked up in wire cases, and secured from the vulgar hands of the mere reader, dazzling our eyes like eastern beauties peering through their jalousies!

La Bruyère has touched on this mania with humour:—«Of such a collector, as soon as I enter his house, I am ready to faint on the staircase, from a strong smell of Morocco leather. In vain he shows me fine editions, gold leaves, Etruscan bindings, and naming them one after another, as if he were showing a gallery of pictures! a gallery, by-the-bye, which he seldom traverses when alone, for he rarely reads; but me he offers to conduct through it! I thank him for his politeness, and as little as himself care to visit the tan-house, which he calls his library.»

Wise Negligence

Attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds, in: Frederick Hilles, The Literary Career Of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1936, ch. I., Education, p. 3:

If you take too much care of yourself, Nature will cease to take care of you.

Hegel And The Romantic Legacy, & The Question Of Polemics

Frederick Beiser, Hegel, (Routledge, 2005), ch. II., Early Ideals, The Romantic Legacy, pp. 35-36:

Although the importance of the romantic legacy seems obvious, it has lately become unpopular even to associate Hegel with romanticism. Walter Kaufmann, Shlomo Avineri and Georg Lukács, to name a few, have argued strenuously against any conflation of Hegel with the romantics, even in his early years. There is an important element of truth to this. Hegel came into his own only in his later Jena years (1804–7) when he reacted against some of the central ideas of the romantic circle. The preface to the Phenomenology is his Abschiedsbrief, his settling of accounts with the romantics. We can see some of these critical tendencies even in the early fragments, so it would be a mistake to see Hegel as a romantic pure and simple even in his Frankfurt years. 

Nevertheless, it is also a mistake to treat Hegel as a figure apart, as if we can understand him without the romantics, or as if he were fundamentally opposed to them. This would be anachronistic for the early Hegel; but it would also be inaccurate about the later Hegel, who never entirely freed himself from romantic influence. His distinguishing features are still within a common genus. What seems to be a difference in quality is very often only one of quantity or emphasis. It is indeed a very common mistake of Hegel scholarship to regard ideas as distinctly Hegelian that are in fact common to the whole romantic generation. Hegel’s absolute idealism, his organic conception of nature, his critique of liberalism, his communitarian ideals, his vitalized Spinozism, his concept of dialectic, his attempt to synthesize communitarianism and liberalism–all these ideas are sometimes seen as uniquely Hegelian; but they were part of the common romantic legacy. 

Hegel scholars have often been led astray by Hegel’s own polemics. They accept these polemics as infallible, as if what Hegel says about his differences with the romantics had to be true simply because Hegel knew himself best. But sometimes the polemics distance Hegel from the romantics only at the cost of obscuring or disguising his own affinity with them. When, for example, in the preface to the Phenomenology Hegel states that his own view is that the absolute is not only substance but also subject, Hegel scholars take this as a distinguishing feature of Hegel’s philosophy over Schelling’s and the romantics. But what Hegel claimed as his own project–the attempt to combine substance and subject, Spinoza and Fichte–was a common enterprise of the romantic generation.

The reason many scholars have separated Hegel from the romantic generation is that they have a very anachronistic conception of Frühromantik that virtually equates it with the later more reactionary tendencies of Spätromantik. Their conception of Hegel’s intellectual context rests upon a neglect of the early philosophical works of the romantics, the unpublished fragments of Schleiermacher, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Hölderlin, most of which have been accessible in critical editions only in the last fifty years. A careful study of these fragments is a fundamental desideratum of Hegel studies; it alone will allow us to locate him historically and to determine his individuality.