Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/socialprogressinOObatt o e » SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND SINCE THE UNION.” v %xmty M \t$t, gwMm. UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. ADDRESS % DELIVERED IN THE DINING HALL OF TRINITY COLLEGE. AT THE opening Meeting rxf the Twenty: -fifth Seeai txu t ON THURSDAY EVENING, NOVEMBER 28, 1878, §£ % 1 xm)rmi f T. S. FRANK BATTERSBY, B. A., SENIOR MODERATOR AND GOLD MEDALLIST IN HISTORY, POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND LAW. DUBLIN: E. PONSONBY, 1 1 6, G R A F T O N-S T R E E T. 1879. DUBLIN : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, BY PONSONBY AND MURPHY. O’NEILL LIBRARY / BOSTON COLLEGE / UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. ♦ Extracts from the Minutes of the Society. The opening Meeting of the twenty-fifth Session was held on Thursday evening, November 28th, 1878, in the Dining Hall of Trinity College. The chair was taken at eight o’clock by the Right Hon. Baron Dowse. Among those who accepted the Society’s invitations were : — The Right Hon. the Lord Mayor ; Master Lane ; the Right Hon. the Attorney- General ; Judge Harrison; Judge Battersby ; P. J. Smyth, M. P. ; A. M. Porter, G. C. ; C. H. Hemphill, G. C. ; Hon. F. R. de Montmorenci; Serjeant Sherlock, M. P. ; Serjeant Robinson ; Sir Robert Kane ; Sir Robert Stewart, Mus. D. ; General Westropp ; Colonel Hillier ; Lieut. -Colonel B. Smith; Mr. Porter, G. C. ; William Ryan, G. C. ; Mr. Carton, G. C. ; Sir Ralph Cusack ; Rev. T. Stack, S.F.T.C. ; Rev. J. H. Jellett, S.F.T.C. ; John Kells Ingram, LL.D., F. T.C. ; Professor Dowden, LL. D. ; Rev. J. P. Mahaify, F. T. C. ; Dr. Traill, F. T. C. ; G. F. Fitzgerald, F. T. C. ; Dr. Shaw, F. T. C. : Arthur Palmer, F. T. C. ; Professor Brady; Professor Faloon; The Professor of Political Economy, T. C. D. ; The Mac Dermott, G. C., D. L. ; Mr. Richardson, G. C. ; J. J. Twigg, G. C. ; Theobald A. Purcell, G. C. ; Mr. Pilkington, G. C. ; Sir George B. Owens, M. I). ; Mir Aulad Ali ; Mr. Seeds, G. C. ; Dean Dickinson; Rev. B. Gibson: Rev. Dr. Woods; Rev. Canon Jellett; Edward Blackburne, D. L. : Rev. Ph. Bender; Dr. Tuffnell ; Rev. Dr. Benson; Rev. Dr. Monahan; Dr. Carte, J. P. ; Edward Fox, J. P. ; Dr. N. Hancock ; R. Gamble, G. C. ; Dr. Stokes ; Dr. F. Battersby ; Dr. Smyly ; Dr. Duncan ; Dr. Tweedy ; Dr. Chapman ; Dr. M‘Clintock ; Surgeon-Major Nash ; Surgeon Croly; Dr. Kidd; Professor W. Moore; Dr. Thomley Stoker : Dr. Ormsby ; Dr. Kirkpatrick; Dr. Sigerson; John Murray, LL. 1). : Professor Galloway ; Professor Hull ; Dr. Kaye ; Dr. Kennedy ; Dr. Foot; Dr. Finny; Dr. Maunsell; Dr. Moore; Rev. A. S. Harvey: Dr. E. H. Bennett ; Rev. Maxwell Close ; J. A. Scott ; W. Fitz- patrick, J. P. ; G. Y. Patton, LL. D. ; William Findlater ; C. U. Townshend; Dr. Wyse ; T. Hewson; Alderman Harris; Major Leech : Major Lewis ; Abraham Stoker (Ex-Pres.) ; Francis Prendergast : Rev. B. Weldon; R. Eames ; J. H. Owen; C. J. Ferguson, J.P. : Rev. Canon Smith; John Findlater, J. P. ; Adam S. Findlater; A. Kinahan ; the Recorder of Derry ; Dr. Swanzy ; Edward Leahy ; S. Gerrard ; J. A. Jones, President R. H. A. ; Graves Searight ; C. H. Keene ; Surgeon-Major Chesnaye ; W. A. Cosgrave ; Rev. Dr. Molloy (Vice-Pres. Cath. University) ; Mr. Boyd ; J. C. Meredith, LL. D. ; J. C. M‘Farlane, J. P. ; Rev. A. Lawson ; J. N. Gerrard ; W. Kisbey ; R. Macalister, LL. B. ; Thomas A. Mooney ; Abraham IV PREFACE. Stoker ; the Auditor College Historical Society ; the Auditor College Theological Society; Arthur Patton (Ex-Pres.); Auditor Law Stu- dents’ Debating Society; Auditor University Shakspere Society ; D. Malins ; R. Courtenay ; John Falconer ; Brougham Leech, Professor of International Law, T.C.D. ; J. C. Bloomfield; J. H. Maxwell; R. R. H. Durham ; AY. M‘Cay, F. T. C. ; Rev. D. M‘Kee ; J. Rawson Carroll ; T. AY. Deane ; Bindon Stoney. The President, Mr. T. S. Frank Battersby (Sen. Mod.), B.A., delivered the Inaugural Address, after which it was moved by P. J. Smyth, Esq., M. P., and seconded by C. H. Hemphill, Esq., Q.C. : — “ That the best thanks of the Society are due to the President for his Address, and that it be printed at the expense of the Society.” The Eesolution having been put to the Meeting, was carried unanimously. It was then moved by Professor Gr. Armstrong (Ex- President), and seconded by A. M. Porter, Esq., Q.C.: — “ That the Philosophical Society is worthy of the support of the Students of this University.” The Eesolution was carried unanimously. The Chair- man then awarded the Society’s prizes as follows : — The President’s Gold Medal, A. R. Eager, B. A. The Society’s Silver Medal, . AYilliam AA 7 ilkins (Univ. Stu- dent), B.A. Certificates, . . . J. AY. Joynt (Univ. Student), B.A. ; T. S. F. Battersby, B.A., President. ©ratxrrg. The Society’s Silver Medal, . J. AY. Joynt, B.A., U. S. First Certificate, . . . G. D. Burtchaell, LL. B. Second Certificate, . . A. S. Findlater (Ex-Sec.), B.A. The marked thanks of the Society was awarded to Messrs. A. E. Eager, C. E. Osborne, B. C. Windle, H. W. Harris, and T. S. F. Battersby. The Eight Hon. the Attorney Greneral having been called to the second Chair, a vote of thanks to Baron Dowse, and the distinguished visitors who honoured the Meeting with their presence — was proposed by J. Eoss (Sch.), B.A., Auditor of the College Historical Society, seconded by Dr. K. Franks (Ex. Sec.), and was carried unanimously. Baron Dowse having replied, the Meeting adjourned. ADDRESS. — — *> — SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND SINCE THE UNION. "TV/TY first duty this evening- is, most sincerely ^ and heartily, to thank the Members of the Philosophical Society for the honour they have con- ferred upon me by electing me as their President. When I look back upon the distinguished roll of those who have already occupied the Chair, I feel how unworthy I am to fill the position they held ; and I can only hope to show my apprecia- tion of the trust committed to me by endeavour- ing fully to sustain the prestige of the Society, knowing, as I do, that my present position is due rather to my past services on behalf of it than to any personal merit. I have also the agreeable task of congra- tulating the outgoing President, Mr. John Ross, on the very prosperous condition of the Society during his year of office. I may safely affirm that our progress during the past session has been B 2 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND unequalled in the modern history of any College Society. At the last opening meeting no fewer than one hundred gentlemen were proposed for Membership. Later on, our numbers were im- mensely strengthened by the amalgamation with us of the University Reading Rooms Society ; and by the addition of their fine apartments to our own, we can now boast of by far the largest suite of rooms in College. This was a measure of great importance not alone to the two inter- ested Societies, but to all those who see in it the first step in the general amalgamation of all our College Societies on the plan of that system which, under the title of the Union, has been found to work with such immense success in the sister Uni- versities of Oxford and Cambridge. The attendance at our meetings is unexampled in our annals, as many as one hundred being entered as present when topics of more than ordi- nary interest were under discussion. And here I must, on behalf of the Society, return thanks to the many honorary members and strangers who took part in our meetings, and thereby contri- buted to raise the tone of both papers and dis- cussions, and trust we shall see them still more frequently during the current session, and in in- creasing numbers. The essays have been marked by variety in the choice of subject, carefulness in style and compo- sition, and originality in the methods of treat- SINCE THE UNION. 3 ment. We have broken away from the shackles of Poetry and Biography which so long held us in thrall, and, without absolutely casting them from us, have rendered them subservient to more Philosophic subjects — Science, Ethics, Meta- physics, History, Literature, and Antiquities equally occupying our attention. The speaking was above the average, both in quantity and qua- lity — the younger members especially showing more confidence, and being less fearful than for- merly of trusting themselves upon the untried waters. The Board have manifested their continued interest by providing better accommodation for the purposes of debate — a kindness which is fully appreciated. Lastly, the thanks of the Society are due to Professors George Armstrong and Edward Dowden, who kindly acted as Examiners for the ^Esthetic Medal, as well as to Professor Mahaffy and Dr. Tarleton, who undertook the arduous task of examining the essays which competed for the Society’s medal in Composition. I cannot conclude this review of last year’s history without alluding to an event which has caused the deepest regret among students of every grade in the University, and especially among our own ranks — the death of Dr. Long- field. He always manifested the most friendly feelings towards the Society, and his kindly in- 4 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND fluence was exerted, but a short time before his decease, to procure for us additional comforts in the rooms. We feel that by his death the Col- lege has lost a brilliant scholar, and ourselves a valued friend. The subject which I have selected for my ad- dress this evening is the consideration of the Social Progress made by Ireland since the com- mencement of this century. It was my choice for various reasons, but chiefly because I conceive that an address upon an occasion like this should not alone be philosophic in character, but in addi- tion, be of such a nature as to enlist the sympa- thies and attention of a large audience, and elicit a free and vigorous discussion from the speakers who will be called upon to address you. The birth and growth of a community — its gra- dual evolution from the rudest germ to the most perfect condition of strength — must always form a spectacle of the greatest interest not alone to the historian, but also to the politician and philoso- pher. It must necessarily occupy the attention of those who have at heart the amelioration of the human race, and who seek for the golden age not in the dim and misty past, but in that brightening future to which we are pursuing a slow but steady course. There are but few, indeed, who possess the necessary insight into the constitution and development of society, owing to the difficulty of obtaining a full and comprehen- SINCE THE UNION. 5 sive acquaintance with social history — the growth of ideas, the change of feelings, sentiments, and general surroundings, and the various disturbing influences and antagonistic tendencies which agi- tate the mass. I am then fully conscious that the task I have set myself to-night is an over-ambi- tious one, and I can only hope that in detecting my errors you will not overlook the difficulty of avoiding them. Probably in the case of no European nation are there so many obstacles to be encountered during an investigation of its social progress as in that of Ireland. The constituent parts of the commu- nity are so varied in character, and the biases so numerous and strong, that it becomes a problem of considerable difficulty to decide in what stage of development we are at present, and in what direction we are tending. I shall be content to bring before your notice in a connected, but necessarily incomplete and superficial manner, what appear to me the most salient points to be considered in an endeavour “ to see ourselves,” not, indeed, “as others see us,” which is too generally in a false and obscured light, but as we really are. The task, however, is by no means an easy one. Isolated as she has been, and to a certain extent still is, from the rest of Europe, the development of Ireland was neither rapid nor constant. She lagged behind the age, and but picked up the crumbs that fell from the table of 6 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND her more prosperous sisters. Yet it has been usual among her critics to judge her from the same standard. In the words of Mr. Morley, “ the geographical proximity of Ireland has misled politicians into the habit of explaining all that happens there by the usual reference to the ge- neral ideas, passions, and common movements of the rest of civilised Europe. The truth is, that Irish evolution has moved in an independent course.” This is strictly true of the period preceding the Union, though there were surely not wanting signs of progress ; and if we compare her condi- tion at the commencement of this century with her present position among the nations of West- ern Europe, we shall see in her rapid and steady increase of prosperity sufficient to warrant us in anticipating for her a great and useful future. Ireland, at the time of the Union, was in a state as dangerous as it was critical. Just recovering from the shock of a rebellion, hideous and revolt- ing by the atrocities of all concerned in it, whether Catholics or Protestants, crushed to the dust by the horrible cruelties perpetrated during its re- pression, she was handed over to the tender mer- cies of a people who were, at that period, as little capable of governing her as they were of regard- ing the people with other feelings than those of loathing and contempt. While affecting to abhor and despise the country, they rendered their tri- umph the more galling to her inhabitants by the SINCE THE UNION. 7 humiliating knowledge that their liberties had been sold by the men to whom her dearest interests were confided. Is it then to be wondered that, since the day on which her freedom was bartered in exchange for titles and honours, Ireland has nourished the seeds of discontent ? Is it a mat- ter for amazement that among her children — Dowered with the scorn of scorn, the hate of hate — there linger yet some sparks of the fire that was kindled into flame by injustice and wrong ? It is not my intention to make any further refe- rence to this topic. On the contrary, it appears to me to be too much the custom when treating of Ireland to view it, from a Theological or Ethnolo- gical standpoint, as the battle-field of races or reli- gions ; though if we desire to obtain a true and just conception of the people it is necessary to explore much further. Since, however, Social Progress necessitates and includes political progress, I am compelled, however unwillingly, to glance at the sentiments held at the present day by the great majority of Irishmen. In order fully to compre- hend the ardent desire of the Irish people for Home Government, it is necessary not alone to notice their social surroundings, impressionable nature, and the circumstances of the Union, but also to consider the tenacity with which they trea- sure up the memory of “ the days of old,” when Ire- land possessed a short but glorious independence ; 8 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND or, looking still further back, when she was known as Holy Isle of the West. To these fond traditions is added some distorted information as to the in- dependence achieved by the Irish Parliament and the Volunteers — the miserable state of the poorer orders being sedulously kept out of sight — and the peasant forms the not unnatural conclusion that a dissolution of the Union would bring great- ness and independence to Ireland. It must be admitted that a few honest, intelli- gent, and educated men profess the same belief, urged on by the existence of some radical faults in the present administration of Irish affairs ; but that they have any true faith in the principle I must doubt, and, however seemingly presump- tuous, remind them in the words of Professor Gold- win Smith, that “ Institutions however imperfect maybe better than those that went before, and may pave the way for something better to follow” — For forms of government let fools contest ; Whate’er is best administered is best ; and that our Social Progress, resulting from better government since the Union, has been very great, will, I think, be evident during the course of this essay. If England, at the time of the Union, showed an utter disregard for the feelings of Ireland, she has since then perceived her mistake, and amended the error of her ways. Be her faults of administra- SINCE THE UNION. 9 tion what they may, it is impossible not to see, on looking back over the long series of enactments dealing with Ireland, that she has had its interests at heart ; and that, even if unequal to the full task imposed upon her, she can point to a list of griev- ances redressed, and important measures passed, challenging comparison with a similar progress made by any other European country in the same period. If there were but the one measure of Ca- tholic emancipation to refer to, that alone should entitle the English administration to Irish grati- tude, since in our own Parliament we were unable to obtain that boon, though long and untiringly advocated by the genius, talents, and energy of Grattan. But we can also single out the regulation of the Elective Franchise — the abuses of which had been only equalled by the anti-reform system in England. The Irish Church Reforms, again, of 1833, were of so bold a character as even to satisfy O’Connell himself. We have, again, the establishment of Primary Education ; and with pride be it said that, while with narrow minds and selfish hearts English Churchmen and Dis- senters joined in opposing any system of national education, Ireland, on the contrary, received with open arms the means of educating her children, and enabling them to compete with the English artizan and labourer on more than equal terms. IO SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND And, as if the more effectually to repudiate Lord Lyndhurst’s sentiment that the Irish were “aliens in blood, in language, and religion,” did not Protestant England, Mammon-serving England, yet all the more generous England, cast aside her prejudices, and, however contrary to her feelings and conscience, contribute of her golden store to endow a seminary for the educa- tion of the clergy of a religion from which she shrunk, and which would scarcely claim indul- gence from her? Does not Maynooth College owe almost its existence to grants from the English government ? If further proof were required to convince the sceptical that England has endeavoured to the best of her ability to remove the disastrous effects of previous misgovernment, we have only to look at our free commerce, the liberal pro- vision for the poor, the overthrow of Protes- tant ascendancy and an Established Church, the various Land Acts, the Queen’s Colleges, and, for the preservation of peace at home, our con- stabulary and police systems, admittedly the two- finest bodies of the kind in Europe. Within this very year Irish legislation has been marked by one of the most important measures ever introduced into this country. The unani- mous approval bestowed upon the Intermediate Education Bill evidenced a full appreciation of SINCE THE UNION. I I the kindly intentions of the government, and was, it is to be hoped, an earnest of a better under- standing between the two countries. The main agent in the progress of mankind, according to M. Comte, is their intellectual de- velopment. In this respect Ireland can compare very favourably with England. Previously to the present century popular education scarcely existed in this country. Religion was a great stumbling-block. Indeed to profess Catholicism was sufficient to debar a man from either keeping a school or having his children educated in his own faith, and even the technical knowledge gained in a profession was inaccessible, since all the professions were closed to him. The love of learning, however, which has been the charac- teristic of Irishmen since the dawn of civilization, could not be suppressed ; and, despite coercive measures and intolerant oppression, the light of learning lingered on amid the highways and hedge-schools — the oppressed and half naked peasant exchanging his hard earnings for the rudiments of Latin and Greek. But a better time was at hand ; the Union took place, and the disabilities were removed. If popular education was not at once granted, neither was it in exist- ence on the other side of the Channel, although there things were better prepared for its re- ception — misgovernment had not deprived the people of the means of employment ; agriculture 12 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND was not ruined nor commerce destroyed : such, however, was the condition of this country. It was, therefore, first necessary to enable the people to support themselves, and not when they asked for a spade to throw them a primer. But when other and more crying evils had been re- medied, the National System of Education was introduced, and met most thoroughly the wants of the people. The best possible proof of their anxiety for learning is the remarkable fact that while the population of Ireland as compared with that of England is but as 5 to 27, the number of children receiving primary education in Ireland is over 1,000,000, while those in England number little over 2,000,000. These statistics speak for themselves. “ The National Education in Ire- land,” says Mr. Froude, “is, at this moment, the best that exists in any part of the empire.” Notwithstanding this fact, the results are not altogether satisfactory. The landscape is not all sunshine. The seeds of learning have been sown broadcast, the people have become more intelli- gent, but it is doubtful if they are more happy or more loyal. On the contrary, what was formerly the result of sentiment is now the effect of reason. They have been taught to read, and the so-called National Papers supply them with a cheap litera- ture calculated neither to reconcile them to cir- cumstances nor encourage amongst them the qualities most needed — independence, persever- SINCE THE UNION. 13 ance, and thrift. Considering that over forty years have elapsed since the introduction of the educa- tional system, it has not done much to make them appreciate better houses and cleaner living. The national failing of Ireland has been, and still is, the love of indolence, the absence of manly vigour and honourable toil ; and the education most wanted is one which shall teach them the nobility of work, rouse them out of the apathy into which they have fallen, incite them to energy, give them aspirations for something higher than their present self-satisfied idleness, and, if possible, instil into them some soul, some ideal, “ which,” as says Carlyle, “ all human beings do require to have, were it only to keep the body unputrified,” for “in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.” One great and lasting good has been accom- plished by the National School system ; it has brought together children of different religious persuasions, and thus paved the way for tole- rance and liberal sentiments. It is to be hoped that the ill-judged efforts now being made in some quarters to introduce Denominational Edu- cation will meet the failure they deserve ; for, to quote again from Mr. Froude, “the world has suffered enough from sectarian bigotry, and no wise statesman, if he can help it, will again coun- tenance the splitting of a nation into hostile camps about matters of which one knows as H SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND much as another, and all know next to no- thing.” Government, at the Union, took as little inte- rest in secondary as in primary education. But of late there has been a growing discontent with the existing system of middle-class schools, which was felt to be inadequate to our increasing wants. Mr. Gladstone, misunderstanding the evil, and, instead of effecting reform upwards, attempted to deal with that which should have been left to the last ; and his University scheme, like all prema- ture remedies, resulted in failure. During the four years that have elapsed since that measure was thrown out, time has been given for the excitement to abate, and for the more thorough ventilation of the grievance. It became apparent that the rejection of the remedy was owing to the violence of its nature and its misapplication. It is much to be regretted that a measure such as the Intermediate Act did not make its appear- ance earlier, for the disease which it attempts to cure has become serious in its proportions. The exodus of the upper and middle class youth to England for the purposes of education is a matter requiring grave consideration. It may exercise a most important influence on the state of Irish society, either for good or evil. Knowing that one of the greatest wants of Ireland is a resident SINCE THE UNION. 15 upper class who shall understand the duties con- nected with their position, and set an example of energy, industry, and morality to the masses, I cannot look upon it as altogether beneficial that the majority of those who can afford a first-class education for their sons prefer sending them to English rather than Irish schools, although, for the purposes of sound information, the latter are at least equal to the former, in which, moreover, they are almost certain to be taught — if indeed the subject ever comes under their notice — to view Ireland in an unfavourable light, and to look upon England as the refuge from the weari- ness of a provincial life. It cannot indeed be expected that an English school should give instruction in Irish history and social interests — subjects neglected even in Irish schools — since it supplies but a superficial knowledge of English history, and the study of Society has not yet become an item in the educa- tional programme. Yet this latter I consider to be one of the most important and necessary to the people of every country, and especially of one such as Ireland, where the influence of the aristocracy is naturally great. But granting what I have said, we may fairly ask — are the principles inculcated in English schools calcu- lated to make the young Irishman content to live in his native land, to settle there, and use his in- fluence to render it greater or happier? On the I 6 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND contrary, the reverse has been the result. From an English school the vast majority go to an English University and thence to an English profession. We therefore lose their talents, their industry, and the social advantages which would accrue from their residence either amongst their tenantry or their professional associates. Against these disadvantages may be balanced the removal of prejudice on either side, the dissi- pation of erroneous views respecting the two countries, and the extra polish which an English school is supposed to confer ; which, however, are but trivial when compared with the claim for a patriotic home education : and although trained at an English school, which I shall always regard with feelings of love and admiration, I protest against the system as an obstacle to our Social Progress. If change has been required in our schools, it has not been altogether unneeded in our Univer- sity, though, indeed, of all public institutions she can perhaps lay best claim to Progress since the Union. As a great factor in society, she has done her duty well, and risen through her liberal views to the first place among educational establish- ments. It is true that her gates were thrown open to all creeds by the Irish Parliament, and that her highest prizes were only offered to uni versal competition after a narrow escape from compulsion ; yet it is more generous to ascribe SINCE THE UNION. 17 the concession to a feeling of justice than to a dread of future interference. But it is on account of her educational system that she merits the proud title of Premier University. Whilst her English sisters have, not altogether undeservedly, been charged by Mr. Herbert Spencer with “ re- tarding a culture better in matter and manner, both by occupying the field and by partially in- capacitating those who pass through them for seeing what a better culture is,” the University of Dublin has carried out the dictum of Dr. Magee, that education should not be so much the impart- ing of instruction as the sharpening the intellect so as to enable it to cut anything. Without altogether throwing off the gradually decaying prejudice in favour of Classics, she yet shows an almost equal regard for the many other branches of learning the importance of which is now fully appreciated ; since she alone of British Universities permits a student to take out his degree with Honors in such subjects as Ethics and Logics ; Experimental Science ; Natural Science ; History and Political Science and Modern Literature. If a suggestion were not out of place, it would be that she should ar- range the progression and order of study in the subjects according to M. Comte’s classification, and make compulsory a study of Sociology as a fitting conclusion to the Course. It is also to be deplored that the University of Dublin should c i8 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND be among the last to popularise the study of Gaelic, by the founding of a Chair of the Keltic languages, and should have so completely neg- lected the science of ^Esthetics, which attracted to Oxford the genius of John Ruskin, and which, if a Professorship were established here, would easily obtain the services of men competent to make it the most popular of all studies. No doubt there are difficulties to be overcome, which may account for the procrastination, but some vigorous steps are urgently needed to wipe away the stigma attaching to a country so devoid of a current literature as Ireland now is ; and if our National University fails to take the initiative and give some encouragement — some outlet — to the talent that undoubtedly exists, the result must be that such Irish genius as still remains here will cross the Channel to find in England a recom- pense and a home. The uniformity of our Social Progress has been broken in the one subject of literary effort. Though, at the commencement of the century, a native literature can scarcely be said to have existed, yet a wonderful activity therein soon sprang up — too suddenly indeed to be anything but ephemeral. Between the years 1810 and 1840, no fewer than twenty magazines and periodicals were established, the very names of which have, with but few exceptions, been now quite forgotten. Yet, at the time, their popularity was immense, the “ Irish Penny Journal” in par- SINCE THE UNION. 19 ticular having at one period a circulation of 50,000 copies. But alas for these butterflies of a day, they are all gone ; and the one periodical which, towering above the rest, worked for itself a place among the giants of the sister kingdom — the “Dublin University Magazine” — withering from neglect, has been transplanted to a foreign soil, and lost its local habitation and even its name. Would that some Jeffrey, Smith or Murray might here arise to rouse our energies and stimu- late our efforts to the formation of a national press and a periodic literature. In the words of an unfulfilled wish of forty years since, “ Let us hope that the time is fast passing away in which we could be satisfied with the second-hand litera- ture of any other market — that the period is arrived when we shall resume the duty and the right of thinking for ourselves, and spurn the idea of contributing to the support of publications at a distance, whilst we suffer those at our own door to linger in neglect.” I lay particular stress upon the need of a periodical literature in Ireland, being convinced of its importance as an element of Social Progress, both by the creation of a public opinion by which to mould the character and con- dition of the nation, and by giving the intellect as well as the purse an interest in the soil. Let us not be disheartened by past failure, but buckle ourselves up to renewed exertion. We do not lack talent. Already the title of silent sister is 20 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND admitted to be inapplicable to our University ; nor are the Queen’s Colleges and Catholic Uni- versity wanting in men of genius. In history, philosophy, science, and literature, Ireland is well represented, as is testified by the possession of such men as Lloyd, Ingram, Haughton, Sigerson, Lecky, Mahaffy, Cliffe Leslie, Graves, and Craik, besides a host of others. In poetry and polite literature many of the best known names are those of Irishmen, three of the ablest and most distinguished — one, alas ! no more — being, I am proud to say, Ex-Presidents of this Society. I refer to the names of George and Edmund Arm- strong and Edward Dowden ; while another, Dr. John Todhunter, was also a distinguished mem- ber. Of the host of archaeologists who supplied the voluminous information on our antiquities, history and folklore, but few remain ; the most notable being Miss Stokes, Dean Reeves, Marcus Keane, Fergusson, and the veteran Henry O’Neill. The race of story-tellers and Irish novelists has ap- parently disappeared ; yet give but a stimulus to genius, and we shall find another Lever and another Carleton. Ireland yet awaits a “ mighty magician,” endowed like Sir Walter Scott with generous, and, in the purest sense of the word, National sympathies, who will grasp the pictu- resque traditions of the country, and with respect and skill, in no sectarian or class spirit, embody SINCE THE UNION. 2 I them in a literature of native and. imperial effi- cacy. Scott has nationalized his country, and I am not without hope that in the future an Irish genius of similar patriotic essence will perform a like task for Ireland. But surely the few names cited above are in themselves evidence that it is not for lack of ability that we are without a National Press. The materials are at hand, the workers are many, and it requires but a master to set the machinery in motion. I then appeal to the patriotism of all who are here to-night, to the Press, to our learned Societies, and above all to our Universities, to wipe away this disgrace to our country, to give encouragement to our writers, and to form a national taste for a national litera- ture. And lastly, I appeal to the Irish public, without whose aid every such effort must fail, and has failed, to show a public spirit by their appre- ciation of native effort, nor by their apathy drive from the country, as heretofore, their greatest in- tellects, and bring on us the everlasting reproach that, to damn a book, it is sufficient to print it at an Irish press. In no country in the civilized world, I venture to say, is there such a total want of true patriotic feeling as in Ireland. We are always ready to fight over a political sentiment or a religious idea, but when a social and practical question arises which requires an appeal to the purse, or the exercise of a little self-denial, our patriotism 2 2 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND becomes short-sighted to a remarkable degree, and passes by on the other side. At the time of the Union, the claims of the National Press were fully recognised. Take up the works of any Irish author of that period, and it is more than probable that the publisher was in Dublin — perchance an author himself, as for in- stance the late Mr. Kennedy, of no mean cele- brity. How, then, is the exodus of Irish authors to be accounted for ? It is not the want of a reading public, since works issuing from the Scotch Press receive as much patronage as any others, and there is no reason why Irish works should not do likewise. It is not from the ab- sence of reliable printing offices, for the Univer- sity, and many other Presses in this city, can turn out a volume equal in print and appearance to any published by a Scotch or English house. The cause must rather be sought in the Provin- cial spirit to which I have already referred, and which causes Irishmen, notwithstanding all their home affection, to look down on their native land, and induces even such a man as Mr. A. M. Sullivan to publish such a work as his “ New Ireland” in London. A view of Irish Social Progress would be imper- fect without some notice, however slight, of its theological history and sentiments. At the time of the Union, the principal grievances of the Ca- tholics had been removed. O’Connell obtained SINCE THE UNION. Emancipation ; Mr. Gladstone levelled the Irish Protestant Church. Government has, therefore, to the best of its ability, removed all obstacles to equality and harmony between each creed ; the rest must be left to the people themselves. In France, Germany, and Europe generally, different beliefs co-exist without producing theological or sectarian bigotry. At present it would be rash to make a similar boast of Ireland, though, as compared with the rancorous feelings of religious hatred at the Union, charitable feelings and good sense have made great advances. At that period, owing to causes already mentioned, theological hate ran so high that, said Burke, four or five years previously, Protestants could be counted in thousands who had never talked to a Roman Ca- tholic in their whole lives, and kept apart as if they were not alone separate nations but separate species. We will not further dwell upon that painful period, and barely refer to it for the pur- pose of showing the change that has since taken place in our creed relations, and that we have no reason to despair of further improvement in the future. Human nature changes but slowly, and the dregs of superstition cannot easily be re- moved ; but indeed if an illustration were re- quired of the necessity, in these days of progress, of the study of Sociology, it could not better be given than by pointing to the fact of a body of intelligent men, professing liberal sentiments and 24 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELALD Christian charity, celebrating- with all the parade and pomp of circumstance, to the annoyance of their fellow-countrymen, the memory of a reli- gious battle, won a couple of centuries ago by foreigners over their own nation, and which had scarcely as much to do with religious liberty as the battle of Liitzen ; and, stranger still, we hear them calling on the members of the religion which was that day defeated to join in the cele- bration of their defeat, in that it secured religious liberty — almost as ludicrous a request as if the French Catholics had called upon the Huguenots to join in their “ ungenerous and indecent rejoic- ings” over the battle of Jarnac. To these a study of science would be improving, as demon- strating that a great social revolution, such as that referred to, could never be caused by one man ; that there were antecedent modifications in the society to which he belonged, and of which he formed a unit ; and that it was itself the re- sultant of innumerable forces working in the past, each one of which contributed equally to the event — nay more, that had their hero not seen the light, nor their favourite river burst its springs, the social change was inevitable — the end would have been the same. But here, although following Mr. Herbert Spencer in the main, I do not altogether agree with his total rejection of the Great-Man theory. For, while admitting the incorrectness of Mr. SINCE THE UNION. 25 Froude’s canon that “ universal history is at bot- tom the history of the great men who have worked here,” and granting that, as in the case under observation, the great man generally “ depends upon the antecedents furnished by the society he is born in,” I fail to see that this is universally true, and believe that Mr. Spencer, although maintaining it, has admitted both the possibility and the existence of exceptions. He concedes the possibility of exception when he says that “ unless individuality be very decided, the social surroundings will prove too strong for him,” thereby granting the contingency of an indivi- duality and originality not to be accounted for by social surroundings and antecedents, and which strongly marked individuality may impress its own characteristics on its surroundings. But in addi- tion to making this large concession, Mr. Spencer has even supplied us with a refutation of his state- ment, that “ the real explanation of social changes must be sought for in that aggregate of condi- tions out of which both he (7. e. the great man) and they have arisen” ; for, speaking of the wars of the French Consulate he thus concludes: — “ All this slaughter, all this suffering, all this devasta- tion was gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot over all men.” This is perfectly true, but it is nevertheless in direct contradiction to his dogmatic theory ; for if Na- poleon was only a “ product of his antecedents,” 26 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND it follows that those antecedents, and not he, are answerable for all the terror, cruelty, and blood- shed which have so justly excited Mr. Spencer’s wrath and indignation against him. William III., however, was no Napoleon, and those who see in him the liberator and emancipator merely acknow- ledge their ignorance both of the course which the evolution of society was then taking, and of the charitable precepts of their own religion. It is deeply to be regretted that the one blot of religious dissension should stain the social relations of the Northern Province, which in nearly every other respect puts the rest of Ireland to shame. “ The prosperity enjoyed by that portion of Ireland testi- fies to the capabilities to work out her own rege- neration when freed from the disturbing causes which have so long impeded her progress in civilization and improvement. We find there a population hardy, wealthy, and employed ; capital fast flowing into the district ; new sources of em- ployment daily developing themselves, and a peo- ple well disposed alike to the government and institutions of this country.” It is a most hopeful sign, that in Belfast they are beginning to appre- ciate religious toleration, and that there exists among one powerful trade, at least, a league of brotherhood between the two creeds of which it is composed — a league which has extracted all that was good and pure from the principles of the United Irishmen, and which we may hope is an SINCE THE UNION. 27 augury that the time is approaching when Ireland shall hold up her head as a united nation, and the past become a dream. Then may her Various tints unite, And form in Heaven’s sight One arch of Peace. It is unnecessary to dwell on the present and ad- vancing prosperity of Ireland — it is well known. It may, however, bring our progress into a clearer light to contrast it with our condition before the Union, when, according to a high authority, “the industry of the traders was restricted, their com- merce and even their production fettered, and their prosperity checked, for the benefit of the merchants of Manchester and Bristol.” Sir Ers- kine May alludes to these commercial restric tions in the following words : — “ To satisfy the jealous instincts of English traders, her commerce had been crippled with intolerable prohibitions and restraints. The export of her produce and manufactures to England was nearly interdicted, all direct trade with foreign countries and British possessions prohibited. Every device of protec- tive and prohibitory duties had been resorted to for ensuring a monopoly to English commerce and manufactures. Ireland was impoverished that English traders should be enriched.” It would doubtless be interesting to contrast with these extracts a statement of Ireland’s present 28 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND commercial prosperity ; but, in addition to the fact, that all are familiar with the subject, the merest outline would occupy more space than is at my disposal. I will therefore sum up the proofs which have been adduced in the course of this address in support of the view that Ireland has made enor- mous Social Progress since the Union, and con- clude by venturing some remarks on her probable future. Examining her politically, we have seen that true independence was not achieved by the masses until after the Union ; that the splendid provisions for Education could scarcely have existed but for the Union ; that previous to it, Religion may be said to have consisted in “hating each other for the love of God;” that Literature was confined to one class and creed, and was necessarily ephemeral ; and lastly, that her commercial prosperity depended upon the peace and security which have since been secured to her. And now comes the question — Has the end and aim of all government been secured — the greatest happiness of the greatest number? If increase of liberty, knowledge, wealth, and com- fort could bestow happiness, the Irish peasant is on the road to it. Yet in the process his nature appears to be varying — The old order changeth, yielding place to new. SINCE THE UNION. 29 There is apparent, and let us hope real, content throughout the country, but at the same time it is characteristic of the Irish peasant to undergo the severest suffering without complaint, and he is now passing through a transition state which sorely tries him. He liketh not change ; he is essentially conservative; his “household gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted out without blood.” He is losing that light-hearted gaiety for which he was formerly noted, and is sobering down to the stern realities of life. The airy fancies of the past, the elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves no longer serve to charm or strike with awe. Casting aside fancy he embraces work ; he has found a new mistress, and knowing her value, will never rest till he has raised his position and made himself respected among men. In this social regeneration of the labouring classes — and here I refer more particularly to the agricultural labourers — a great and noble oppor- tunity is being given to the employers — the landed gentry — to aid with their sympathy and assistance the improvement of the circumstances of their poorer countrymen. Not alone do the enlight- ened feelings of humanity urge them on — their own interests are concerned. In most instances they look upon labourers as mere serfs — idlers requiring the eye of the master continually on 30 SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND them, rather than honest, intelligent men. The tendency of such a mode of treatment is obvious. If you wish a man to defraud you, the best way to go about it is to show that you continually suspect his intention of doing so. On the other hand, the surest way of making him honest is to trust him. This truth has been well exemplified in our history. While suspicion was the ruling idea of government, so long was Ireland disturbed. Then the second experiment was tried, and ten or twelve thousand peasantry were enrolled as the Irish constabulary. Confidence and good treat- ment so metamorphosed them that now “ there is not,” as even Mr. Froude admits, “ in the whole empire a force more loyal, more trustworthy, or more efficient.” In the case of the agricultural labourers a similar treatment is certain to meet with similar results. At present it is but too true that we look almost in vain among the working classes for the just pride which will choose to give good work for good wages ; and this state of things will con- tinue to exist until employers learn to treat labourers as men, and not merely animals, and give them, as well as themselves, an interest in the returns. It is time, in this boasted age of Progress, that the effete barriers of class should be thrown down, and man help his fellow-man, no matter what his rank and station. If there shall always SINCE THE UNION. 31 be poor, there shall not ever be paupers ; but they shall exist as long as men may amass colossal fortunes — the ruin of themselves, the envy of mankind. This is no philanthropist’s dream; it is a reality, a necessity staring us in the face, would we but see it. “ A high class with- out duties to do is like a tree planted on a pre- cipice from the roots of which all the earth has been crumbling.” But duties do exist; there is a practical evil and a practical remedy. There is little sympathy between the classes ; nor have they learned the great truth of the community of interest. How little do the landed gentry con- tribute towards the advancement of the masses socially and morally ! Self-aggrandisement occu- pies their ambition — pleasure is preferable to patriotism ; and thus — Cramped, cringing in their social self-built cell, they close their eyes and ears to all the world around them. It is but the noise of waters on the* distant beach ! It cannot help nor harm them ! Yet let them beware ; the demon of democracy, servant to the spirit of Progress, is at hand. It may be appeased in time. Let them look around them into the world and understand the signs ; throw off the spirit of exclusiveness ; encourage Progress, not retard it ; create society, which now does not exist save in the petty factions of our SOCIAL PROGRESS IN IRELAND cities; and shed the miserable shell of selfish pride which hides the rottenness within. If those who waste their talents and energy over a political idea, in which they Keep the word of promise to our ear, And break it to our hope, would exert themselves to obtain the ameliora- tion of the lower classes, to inculcate industry and virtue, and persuade all Irishmen to unity, they would perform a service which Ireland could never repay but by a niche in the shrine of her memory. Where are our true patriots now, to Lift us o’er the petty love of life, The quest for pleasure and the greed for gold, and make our nation’s manhood ? What is Social Progress but the gradual advance towards the perfection of humanity ? and how shall we attain Jo that perfection until we have rid ourselves of all that is selfish, base, and mean in human- nature — of all that delays the coming of that One far off divine event To which the whole creation moves ? Let Ireland pursue her course : I fear not for her future. She has her thousands who have not bowed the knee to Baal; who are true to the- SINCE THE UNION. 33 religion of Progress and of Truth. But if it were not so — if man should never see a brighter dawn nor feel a purer air — Yea, if no morning shall behold Man, other than were they now cold, And other deeds than past deeds done, Nor any near or far-off sun Salute him risen and sunlike-souled, Free, boundless, fearless, perfect, one, Let man’s world die like worlds of old, And here in heaven’s sight only be The sole sun on the worldless sea. D The Philosophical Society intend, for the future, to publish, along with the President’s Address, such Essays of the pre- ceding Session as may be recommended by the Examiners. Those in the present number are as follows : — “ Liberalism and Literature.” Me. A. C. Hilliee. “ Poetry.” — (Awarded the Society’s Silver Medal). Me. W. Wilkins, B.A. (University Student). “ Pantheism.” — (Awarded the President’s Gold Medal). Me. A. It. Eagae, B.A. 4 4 Latest Criticism on the Irish Bound Towers.” — (Certificate). Me. T. S. Eeank Batteksby, B.A., Hon. Sec. LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. In an attempt like the present to estimate the effects of liberal- ism, or more properly of a liberal tendency of mind on litera- ture, it is inevitable that some mention should be made of the corresponding conservative tendency. Having premised this, it may be as well to remark that, though the words liberal- ism and conservatism have a wider meaning than is usually attached to them, they may, without doing violence to the reality of things, be made use of in the more popular sense, as having special reference to political thought ; and it is in such a sense they are made use of here. Now literature is merely a reflection of life : an embodiment of its experi- ences, and a registry of its actions and passions. Conse- quently, anything which so largely modifies daily existence as political influences must make the most lasting impres- sions on literature. Of course it is open to those who uphold the theory of art for art’s sake to deny this, and to ask in a triumphant manner what, for example, the poetry of Words- worth has in common with politics. The answer is obvious. In so far as poetry deals only with nature, and with that in a purely objective manner, it has indeed no more than an aesthetic influence, and no more than an aesthetic import- ance; but Wordsworth’s poetry has a directly liberal, it might be added directly democratic, tendency; for scarcely any other writer has in the same way helped us to enter into the lives of our fellows, and particularly those of the middle and lower classes of society. It has been affirmed by a contemporary writer that it is to the conservative tendency of thought literature owes its D 2 36 LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. origin and its durability. Relying on the justice of my cause to make atonement for shortcomings, it is my purpose to take up the gauntlet which he has thus thrown down, and to prove that so far from his statement of the matter being a fair one, the very opposite to any such statement is the case ; that, it is to liberalism literature is indebted mainly, if not entirely, for its vitality and its strength. But whilst distinctly insisting on this, no attempt is made in the following pages to deny that the influences of conservatism on literature are, of themselves, valuable and important. It is good to feel a reverence for established institutions, so long as we are in no danger of being rendered blind by the dust which sometimes accumu- lates on them. We have, since the close of the seventeenth century, gained inestimable privileges — the right of governing ourselves, and the right of criticising the authority of other persons ; and since that time we have grown more rapidly towards the full height of our intellectual stature than hitherto we have ever done. Yet in spite of these things it is with a curious mixture of affection and veneration that we are accustomed to regard days of total ignorance and partial servitude. We regret the easy fetters of the house of bond- age, and mourn after the flesh-pots of Egypt. And in times like the present of social repulsion and contract, we can scarcely fail to appreciate the imaginative aspects of a time when the yeoman was bound to his lord and the soldier to his chief, at least as much by the ties of affection as by the fear of punishment or the prospect of reward. The principle of caste was less stringent then than it has become since, for it was in less peril of being infringed. There were no middle classes, and the chasm between the peasant and the noble was impassible, and therefore there could be no class war- fare. There is a very fine thing said on this subject in “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater” : — “Two centuries back, when a military chieftain addressed his soldiers as ‘ my children/ he did so because he was an irresponsible despot, exercising uncontrolled powers of life and death. From the LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. 37 moment when legal rights have been won for the poorest classes, inevitable respect on the part of the higher classes extinguishes for ever the affectionate style which belongs naturally to the state of pupilage or infantine bondage.” It is however the peculiar merit of a conservative tendency that it is the source of such a wealth of imaginative material. It gives the temperament necessary for forming conceptions of society as it was in the middle ages, and of that yet more complicated society which existed between them and the French Revolution. It keeps fresh in our recollections pictures of life and manners, which would otherwise have dropped from the memories of men to whom they were of no personal importance, and on whom they had left no personal impression ; for too often it is our habit to regard the past as a grotesque improbability. And therefore it is to the honour of conservatism that it enables us to transform knights and ladies into thoughtful and passionate men and women, diffe- rently dressed from ourselves, perhaps, but nevertheless com- manding a variety of facial expression, startling to modern ideas of mediaeval society ; for in the course of time person- alities fade into each other, until all men wear the same scowl, and all women grow into a pale-faced damsel with blue eyes and yellow hair down her shoulders. In what manner conservatism influences literature may be perceived if we turn to Sir Walter Scott’s novels. In that great gallery, from Waverley to Woodstock, we may behold in every work at all worthy of its author’s genius the vene- ration in which he held the remains of a beloved past ; and reviewing them collectively, we may wonder at the incom- parable manner in which he has reproduced the spirit of so many former eras. The scenes which he paints for us leave an impression on the mind which hardly anything afterwards is able to efface : Saladin and his troop scouring across the shifting sands on the horses of the desert ; the carnp of Cceur de Lion, where the banner of England droops around its staff ; the crowd of courtiers, buffoons and girls, that blocks 33 LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. the roa.i to Kenilworth ; the worn-out and extravagant forms of dissipation of the Court of James I., the meretricious glitter of the harem of Charles II. ; the gloomy conventicles where the Puritans assembled in the time of trouble ; and the yet more gloomy fastnesses whither they fled in the day of danger. There is no writer who has at all the same gift of describing things as they actually might have been. Yet it must be acknowledged that the powers of Scott, wonderful as they are, have been chiefly exerted over the objective world. That is to say they are imaginative rather than either intellectual or emotional. And more than this, Scott’s is the imagina- tion of a realist, as different in kind from that of Blake or Shelley, as it is different from that of Shakspere. When he pleases, no writer can be more graphically descriptive or more vividly picturesque than Scott ; but he deals most effec- tively with the outside world, and in his genius, never as with the great poets, are the sensual and the spiritual grafted on to the growth, and molten into the substance of one another. The body politic would be by no means fancifully illus- trated by a figure such as that ascribed by the Romans to their deity, Janus. One of its faces might be made to re- semble that of Sir Walter Scott, and the other that of Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the retrospect of the former of these would lie the past with its immense resources of imaginative material, whilst the latter would have in contemplation an ideal which, so long as it remained to be realized, would re- main to give fresh energy and purpose to daily life. It will be admitted that due weight has already been given to the fact, that a sympathetic study of the past is induced by the conservative tendency of thought. But, before proceeding, one word remains to be added on this subject ; and it is this: The past is made poetic, not because it has gone by, but because the features and aspects belonging to it have changed. Therefore it is to change the effect of liberalism that the peculiar obligation which literature is under to the conservative influence is itself due. A liberal, on the other LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. 39 hand, is never altogether likely, or even liable, to neglect the imaginative colouring of the time which lies behind us, be- cause every induction he makes as to how he should act, and what he may hope for in the future, has been grounded on the experience which has been won by mankind in the past. However the axiom which I desire to establish is the follow- ing: — To the existence of literature liberalism is essential, and mainly so because it presupposes the introduction of new ideas. It is indeed difficult to represent this in terms which are sufficiently strong. Nothing is so necessary to art as an influence capable of from time to time originating an impulse in the worlds of thought and imagination — an influence in the same way capable of descending from time to time to trouble their waters. And there is another light in which the matter may be viewed. The evolution of our emotions, from a primitive to a complex and modified state, is regulated by the added condition of fresh phases of thought. Indeed there exists an elemental relationship between intellect and emotion. That which we know we feel also, and the surplus of feeling which we are unable to render into thought is un- serviceable for literary purposes. Thus, new forms of thought always bring with them an impulse for the world of passion. Ideas, by a not unpardonable metaphor, may be termed the atmosphere of literature, and whenever a fresh current of them is not to be had, then literature commences to decline. Consequently, whatever insures constant originality, or to put it in other words, a constant infusion of fresh thought, is of the utmost importance to all descriptions of writing ; and this is what the liberal tendency is able to do. It yet remains to be pointed out that what has been propounded in theory is borne out by facts. But it will not be hard to show that the great eras of literary activity have been invariably consequent on revolutions or slightly in anticipation of them. Now, in claiming as a revolutionary movement the Reformation, it must be clearly understood that I am not writing on the sub- ject from any religious or sectarian point of view. However, 40 LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. it may justly be objected that at starting I promised to con- fine myself to the discussion of political influences on litera- ture, and of these only. In answer to this possible objection I shall make but two remarks. In the first place, great re- ligious movements have had at all times a direct influence on politics. The Church and the State indeed are the eyes of a nation, and when one of them is affected, it is rarely long before the other is drawn into sympathy with it. But in this instance the appearance of modern democracy and the Reformation were contemporaneous. At first they had scarcely anything in common, but they grew up side by side, and finally united at the time of the English Rebellion, just as the speculative movement in the eighteenth century finally united with modern republicanism at the time of the French Revolution. Now, although no person could rank Chaucer amongst the disciples of Wycliffe, he was in one way indi- rectly affected by the influences of the Wyclifflte party, as I shall presently show. In spite of that interminable homily to which the man of religion treats his companions in the “ Canterbury Tales,” we may take it for granted that Chaucer’s instincts were not directly religious, nor, for the matter of that, directly political, but purely artistic. Therefore we are justified in supposing that Chaucer’s peculiarly receptive na- ture took from the Reformation what was suitable for his art. And he probably learned from that memorable move- ment, that although the raptures of the mystics had a value of their own, it made a discount from otherwise salutary effects, if the net result of them was to be a metrical para- phrase of the Scriptures, or a metaphysical poem on the soul. He learned the value of having practical and positive views of life. At the same time the bright and sunny character of his genius took no colouring from the sombre views of life held by the first Reformers. But whatever we think of Chaucer, it is undeniable that Langlande and Wycliffe were influenced — the former by the current of ideas which had be- gun to set in the direction of the Reformation, and the latter LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. 41 by the Reformation itself. Why then, it may be asked, was Chaucer the greatest of the pre-Elizabethan writers, abso- lutely less under the influences of this great movement than his contemporaries ? About this period, let us recollect, a great political revolution was taking place. During the reign of Richard II. the fabric of feudalism became unsteady. But in the preceding reign its strength had been noiselessly but swiftly sapped by forces which worked at its base on this side and on that. Now of this period of transition Chaucer is the poet. In his poetry we can trace the influences of feudalism becoming weaker and weaker, until at last they vanish entirely. His last verses are altogether modern in spirit, and nothing can be more modern than the characte- ristic manner in which Chaucer has insisted again and again that it is “only noble to be good.” However the fall of chivalry and feudalism bore other fruit than Chaucer in other places than England ; for these received their death-blow from Cervantes, who embodied in his own person the radi- calism of the middle ages ; and out of the new forces then disturbing Europe was created the destructive genius of Rabelais. Passing from the middle ages, we find the Reformation arriving at its crisis during the Marian and Elizabethan per- secutions. During the middle ages men had been too much under the influence of mysticism to produce anything very great ; and it was from such an influence they were set free by the fresh currents of thought introduced by the Reforma- tion. It is, of course, true that Dante lived in the middle ages ; but, nevertheless, even a translation of his great work will show that in it the mystical part may be dropped out of the reader’s mind with more advantage than even in the “ Faery Queen.” In the latter work, at any rate, we have pre- sented to us a noble system of ethics, and not merely a pedantic and far-fetched allegory. The reaction against mysticism, however, was by no means altogether beneficial ; and it is the fault of the Elizabethan poets, particularly of the 42 LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. dramatists, that they display in their writings a positive want of spirituality. They found enough to occupy them in human action and passion, and, in the meanwhile, they allowed the future to take care of itself. This tendency to care only about the world of the senses, combined with im- mense powers of enjoyment in life, and an almost complete absence of melancholy and introspection, were the principle features of the Elizabethan time. However there seems to have been one poet of this period who was indeed fully pos- sessed with the idea that the world around him was a revela- tion of something beyond itself. In Italy the gorgeous era of the Renaissance had completely freed men and women from the danger of an over-wrought habit of spiritual ab- straction ; but in England it is Spenser who represents the period of transition between the ages of mysticism and the drama — a period which in England certainly did not take place much before the early Elizabethan time. For this reason Spenser is the hardest of the Elizabethans to bring under a theory. Perhaps scarcely even Keats took more enjoyment in the sensuous and material aspects of nature than Spenser ; but yet there is a spiritual and ethical ten- dency in Spenser’s poetry which is absent in the poetry of Keats. Moreover, no writer of his time — it may be no writer of any time — was so conservative in his sympathies as Spenser, and yet in none did the spirit of the Reformation lie more deep. The Puritans, in whatever other respects they might differ, were united in despising precedent and authority, and yet more united in contemning all descriptions of human pomp. And Spenser, although at one time and another he may have pilloried the extreme Puritan party as “ Sans Joy” and the “ Blatant Beast,” was nevertheless a Puritan, so that it is an anomaly that he, of all others, should have endea- voured to revive the literature of chivalry. But his poetry,, whilst making as it does so strong an appeal to the senses, is poetry in which abstract ideas are conspicuous. It is his delight to write of knights and ladies, and to feast his imagi- LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. 43 nation on the material magnificence of the middle ages ; he even goes so far as to seek archaic forms of expression, yet in his “ Faery Queen” we find the thought of his age em- bodied under the disguise of an elaborate allegory. Shak- spere may be regarded as summing up in his own person all the other dramatists, except Marlowe and his following. On a superficial inspection, Shakspere appears to have been in the highest degree conservative. The heroes and heroines of his plays are kings and queens, princes and princesses; but, since Chaucer, no poet had ever been at such pains to represent individuals as such. It is Hamlet we feel interested in, not the Prince of Denmark ; Cordelia, not the Queen of France. And few writers have taught, in the same way as Shakspere, the lesson of personal responsibility. Shelley’s ideal of political greatness was that a man should be able to govern himself ; and this is the lesson which the plays of Shakspere teach. One sometimes hears it said that Corio- lanus is a protest against democracy ; but as Miss Bronte points out in one of the chapters of “ Shirley,” the teaching of the play is, if not the opposite, at least very different. This is little to say of Shakspere, but it is sufficient to upset the very wide theory, supported on a very narrow basis, which asserts that Shakspere was a conservative, and that his con- servatism is to be found in his plays. The truth seems to be that Shakspere hated the mob as sincerely as he loved the people. We have the right to assert no more than this, for no more than this are we able to prove. From the Reformation the genius of Christopher Marlowe took no shape, for it was moulded, although in a necessarily indirect manner, by the speculative tendencies of his mind. But in Marlowe, as in his follower, Chapman, there seems at first sight to have been a strong conservative tendency. His heroes regard the world as a theatre for their own actions, and the universe as a contrivance for the gratification of their passions, or even of their fancies — a scheme in which might is right, and of which force, physical and intellectual, is the 44 LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. god. They are willing to sacrifice everything and all per- sons to the imperious lust for wealth, or power, or fame, or name. Each of them is an incarnate desire, at the same time divine and infernal. Indeed it would be scarcely hard to conceive a hero or a heroine of Marlowe possessed by “a hunger and thirst after righteousness” : Tamburlaine con- demning the virgins of Damascus, or lashing from his royal car the Asiatic kings ; Faustus wielding to his will the Ger- man clowns and courtiers ; Barabas poisoning a convent of nuns ; they are all embodiments of the same ideal : all re- markable for the same concentration and energy of character, and the same delight in making others feel their power. Nothing comes nearer to an apotheosis of avarice of some description than Marlowe’s plays ; but, at the same time, the desire of superiority over others strikes the key-note of each one of them. The fact, however, is that the conservatism of such men as Marlowe and Chapman consists in no worship of kings or emperors as such, but in their admiration of force, and their worship of the “ men who can.” Tamburlaine is only a Scythian shepherd, and Bussy d’Ambois a thread- bare soldier of fortune. Strange as it may appear to say so, it was beneficial to letters that the Reformers had such an aversion to literary pursuits, and looked upon them with so much distrust ; because when poetry was delivered out of the hands of scholastics who versified metaphysics and theology, instead of becoming a controversial weapon, it had the good fortune to fall into the hands of a set of literary men. It was fortunate also that religious differences rendered the repre- sentation of the Miracle Plays, in the presence of mixed audiences, unwise, and in some cases impossible ; for to this circumstance we are, in a great measure, indebted for the English drama. These instances are sufficient to show that even sectarian differences have a far wider influence on pure literature than any one w r ould at first sight be led to* suppose. The waters were troubled, and we have seen to what results. In the reign of Charles I. the new ways of looking at facts, LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. 45 so powerfully influential during the reigns of his predeces- sors, became familiar. There was a period of intellectual stagnation, and, as a result of this, literature began to decline. From the decay of the imagination which then began were generated the stupid conceits and far-fetched allegories of the latter dramatists and the royalist poets. The Great Rebel- lion at least brought one good result to the writers most in sympathy with its movement. It entirely alienated them from the detestable literary taste of the age. It was scarcely probable that men doing battle for their lives and their liber- ties would find leisure to elaborate bad verses, recording the cruelty of a mistress, who was no doubt encouraged in her unkindness by the imbecility of the author. Out of patience with these, Milton brought forth his prose pamphlets. If Shakspere is a typical Englishman, so also is Milton ; and Milton represents a phase of the English character which finds no expression in Shakspere. That inherent spirit of independence so deeply rooted in the nature of the English people never was displayed so nobly, and in such an unmis- takeable manner, as it was displayed in the person of Milton ; and I hope that I shall not be accused of nationalism, that most objectionable of all weaknesses, if I mention as pecu- liarly English one other great virtue which in Milton was pre-eminent ; I mean that power of a self-renunciation, not achieved and completed by one effort, but persistently exer- cised from day to day. It was this which enabled Milton to turn away from poetry for twenty years, during which time he devoted himself to the cause of the English people ; and thus we only possess the poetry of Milton’s youth and the poetry of his old age ; and it is the misfortune of our litera- ture that his later poetry was written when the enemies of the popular cause were in power. Therefore, whatever Milton wrote during this period is marked but vaguely by the traces of any political influence. However the true meaning of the “ Samson Agonistes” is made tolerably clear, although at the same time the key-note of the poem is given by the last line. 46 LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. Worn out in the struggle, Milton resolved to keep clear of political warfare for what remained to him of life. The Great Rebellion was followed by no important literary movement, for two reasons : firstly, on account of the Puri- tan’s aversion to poetry ; and secondly, because the influence which the mighty struggle should have exercised was coun- teracted and rendered neutral by the Restoration. This was of course notorious in Milton’s case ; but indeed there could be no literature from the Republican party of a political character, for the very sufficient reason that all such literature was suppressed. However it would be a mistake to suppose that the great thoughts which found expression in Milton’s prose pamphlets died a natural death. On the contrary, to them we owe much of the literature of the latter part of the seventeenth century, and in particular Locke’s Treatise on Civil Government : a work which is the basis of all legiti- mate government, whether nominally republican or nominally monarchical. To talk, as some persons do, of the Puritans having exercised a blighting influence on the great age of Elizabethan poetry is an absurdity, for the Puritans were only in power during a period of poetic decline ; and when they extinguished the English drama by closing the theatres, that drama was no longer worth being preserved. On the other hand their language was so saturated with the style of the English Bible, that though such works as the “ Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the “ Areopagitica,” they helped to lay the foundations of a better and purer taste than had been known before. The eighteenth century, whilst not sufficiently radical to bring forth any great literary work, had in it an undercurrent of radicalism, which fashioned the lengthy chain of effects destined to conclude with the French Revolution. In short, being no longer persecuted for their opinions, men began to disrespect the traditions which had induced them to submit to persecution for so long ; and turning their backs on the past, they set to work drawing out thumb-nail sketches to LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. 47 govern the world in the future. What the writers of the last century wanted was to bring the whole of life, and therefore the entire intellectual and moral outcome of man, under the command of a few rational ideas. At the same time there was no room in the eighteenth century for great aspirations. The men and women of the age called themselves matter-of- fact, mistaking facts for objects they could see and touch, and forgetting in their positivism that feelings, especially feelings towards other men and classes, are also realities. In fact, all that could be seen on the surface of the last century was a toryism of the worst description. Dr. Johnson is its representative — a man of distinctly marked out notions. He knew blue from red, but he had a confused idea of violet, and none whatever of lavender or rose. . He would reply to the arguments of an idealist by telling him to run his head against the door, and if that was not a conclusive answer so much the worse for the idealist. Before the French Revolution the assertion by man of his individuality had been hardly known. At first men were held together by the feudal system. A band of followers was an individual having as its motive principle the suzerain, and so forth, until finally the state was an individual, and that individual an emperor or some great king. But with the French Revolution there came a tendency to look on men and women as beings possessed of passions, interests, and rights, and not as classes possessed of none of these things. One of the most important results of this was personal po- etry: the word personal is here used in preference to the word subjective, the latter epithet not being sufficiently strong to express what is meant. During the latter part of the last century this great idea of man, superior to his circum- stances and his social surroundings, was embodied in the poetry of Robert Burns. Yet the true exponent of this new literary motive was emphatically Shelley ; since none of the other writers of this century or the last were ca- pable of fully grasping an idea so essentially spiritual. 48 LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. By way of parenthesis, it must be owned that this state- ment demands a qualification in favour of William Blake. There are, in fact, amongst the “ Songs of Experience,” two or three short poems which in sentiment so recall passages in “ Queen Mab,” and the “ Revolt of Islam,” that it is hard to believe they were written and published when Shelley was in his cradle. It is a misfortune that we are so liable to regard Shelley as a dreamer, and as nothing more. Visionary and idealist he may have been, yet it was by virtue of clinging to an idea that he came closer to the reality than Wordsworth and Coleridge, or Byron. He was at least able to separate the notion of liberty from its accidents, and to see the injustice of judging the revolutionary movement by the insanity or even the crimi- nality of its leaders and apostles. To cite the crimes of one Church and another would not be considered a fair indictment against Christianity ; yet this was precisely the line of argument which Wordsworth and Coleridge took up with regard to the French Revolution. However, placed so far in point of time from the first shock of the Revolution, it is not for us to condemn a man of Wordsworth’s finely organized nature, for feeling revolted by the scenes enacted in France under the Reign of Terror. But yet it is the law of nature that things apparently chaotic work out a perfect harmony of their own in their own time. And the French Revolution sent a necessary pulsation from one end of Europe to the other : a force of passion and of thought. The Revolution no doubt lost by its violence. Wordsworth outlived its influence; and had Shelley lived ten years longer, he would have been brought to acknowledge positively, what in reality he never denied, that democratic tendencies expand and only ought to expand with the widening culture of the people. However, Shelley is distinctly the great poet of his time from the personal element in his writing ; and therefore he is a lyric poet. Indeed, the poetry of the whole century, even when not lyrical in form, has been for the most part LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. 49 produced under a lyrical impulse. And this individualism, which I have insisted on as a result of the French Revolu- tion, seems rather to have increased in force since that time. Walt Whitman endeavours to make manifest that a demo- cracy, governed by the laws which govern human nature, gives the freest possible play for the development of indivi- dual thought and character — the problem of humanity. He sings of men “ en masse ” it is true, but also “ he is the bard of personality,” he will “ effuse egotism, and show it under- lying all.” Another expression of individualism is found in the present revolutionary tendencies of style. It is one of the nicest refinements of modern criticism to be able to take a doubtful passage in Mediaeval or Elizabethan poetry, and to say of it unhesitatingly, that is Chaucer's or Shakspere's, because no follower could write in exactly the same manner. But a modern writer’s style is something peculiar to himself and organic. Let us take four examples to prove that this is is so : and let them be Walt Whitman, Swinburne, Carlyle, and Robert Browning. As regards Swinburne, the style is the man, and too often the whole man. There is here and there in Swinburne an echo of Shelley ; but where Shelley's style is as subtle and as various as beauty, his, even when near its best, is often boisterous and blatant, wanting weight to be sublime, and condensation to be splendid. His com- mand of epithet rather than of expression is here and there magnificent. But then his music is the same thing over again in various keys, and always illustrating the same old weary theme of passion which has worn itself out, and takes refuge in sensuality. At the same time, the one impression which is left on the reader after laying down The Songs before Sunrise , or better still, the first series of the Poems and Ballads y is an impression of the writer’s genius — a genius which is the result of a strong and distinctly framed person- ality. In Byron the effect of the French Revolution may be recognised in that spirit of defiance which was the greatest E 50 LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. thing about him. In Milton we see an embodiment of inde- pendence, and in the same manner we behold in Byron defiance incarnate. Shelley hated conventionalities, but also he despised them supremely; indeed he never hated any- thing which he did not despise. But Byron enjoyed rebellion with that delight in it which is so often felt by a strong nature. That great democratic sentiment for the poetry of daily existence, and the pains and pleasures of common people, has no more perfect exemplification than the poetry of William Wordsworth. No poet ever cared in reality more about the people ; and his feelings were with them always wherever his theories might be. Indeed, it is noticeable that in politics, as in art, Wordsworth’s theories were usually at variance with his practice. It is remarkable that after Wordsworth’s desertion from the liberal cause his poetry fell off. The French Revolution had supplied to Wordsworth’s poetry a motive of passion, and especially of enthusiasm. Mrs. Browning has used as a synonym for genius a phrase which has in a wonderful way escaped being abused, like most great phrases of a similar kind : it is to her that we owe the expression “ individual heat.” Now it is the want of this which makes Wordsworth’s later poetry weak in its “ ensem- ble.” Shelley and Wordsworth were no doubt the highest poetical powers of the century, and Wordsworth had more reflection, if Shelley had more genius. Yet it is undeniable that after the Excursion was written, Wordsworth’s powers collapsed almost inexplicably. After the great liberal move- ment of 1832, which was more practically beneficial than the first French Revolution, Wordsworth’s mantle appears to have fallen on Tennyson, who is rather relatively than positively a conservative, as may be seen by comparing his ideal of a republic, in Lockslcy Hall or the celebrated passage towards the end of The Princess , with Matthew Arnold’s Sonnets To a Republican Friend , 1848, for both poets mean the same thing. George Eliot, also, is the successor LIBERALISM AND LITERATURE. 51 of Wordsworth in her feeling for the middle and lower classes, whilst Miss Bronte, on the other hand, is descended in part from Byron, and in part from Shelley, by reason of her asser- tion of personality as a great force, victorious over the accidents of birth, fortune, and circumstance, and over all the conventionalities of society. All this never was displayed more powerfully than in Jane Eyre. To the social problems working themselves out around us literature has at all times owed a debt. I have no space to speak of the manner in which Charles Kingsley and Charles Dickens have treated the great social questions of the age, but I cannot conclude without a word on the way in which Mrs. Browning has viewed these subjects. She has been the first to insist on the necessity of education, and even culture, in the higher sense of the word, for the people, if even we would confer on them physical benefits which are to last. Romney Leigh made no effort to move the masses with spiritual forces, and for that reason his work failed. Mrs. Browning shows that hand in hand with material improve- ment mental progress must advance, or neither proceeds to a certain goal ; and that, important as the former undoubt- edly is, no democracy can be either possible or expedient without the latter. ARTHUR CECIL HILLIER. January , 27, 1878. THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY (Non-dram atic.) Mr. Ruskin attributes to the circumstance of his having been brought up in London an intense love of the external face of Nature, that he does not think a country-bred child would have had. I, too, born and brought up in a fortress, regard the dewy, rustic lonelinesses with enthusiasm not com- mon in those who have grown among winding, bowery lanes, and copses full of bluebell and lily of the valley. For me, too, in the greyest desolation of Winter, nothing can so effectually banish troubles, restore health, and reconcile with the mingled good and evil of life, as the loud, hoarse dash of a brown mountain torrent, hurrying from its native peak over shingle and boulder, on its pure, glad way to the sea. But those who live on its banks remain for the most part unconscious of its grand lonely music, and swift, vigorous, perennial beauty. So much for readers of poetry. A similar influence acts on writers of it. Nature — merely as Nature — affects with almost morbid intensity those who have passed their child- hood in the arid, unlovely city. Charles Lamb, to whom theatres, and gossip, and jests, and a thousand whim-whams, as he says, had become necessary, speaks with much tender- ness of the green crankles that here and there preserved their verdure in the stony heart of the city, like the flowers che- rished by our metropolitan poor in their dingy garret win- dows. He was, he tells us, “ in love with this green earth, the face of town and country, the sweet security of streets, the unspeakable rural solitudes .” Thomas Hood also, a weakly THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. 53 London child, tells us of “the walk that costs a meal,” and finally, it is Keats, the Cockney poet, as he was contemp- tuously styled, who is our great Apostle of that passionate love of Nature and rusticity, induced by sophisticated indoor life during the period of early youth. In the old ballads we have the “ wan water,” “ green sea,” “ green wood,” etc., and such simple matters are dismissed thus briefly. The poet does not care to say anything more about them. But Keats — “ Paths there were many, Winding through palmy fern and rushes fenny, And ivy banks, all leading pleasantly To a wide lawn : whence one could only see Stems thronging all around between the swell Of tuft and slanting branches. Who could tell The freshness of the space of heaven above, Edged round with dark tree-tops, thro’ which a dove Would often beat its wings ; and often, too, A little cloud would move across the blue ? ” — Endymion. The London poet, you see, revels in Nature, counting nothing of her’s unworthy of delighted notice and loving record. That the ancients had a particle of our modern feeling for landscape has been disputed, and, I think, on good grounds ; but I speak under correction of the learned President. It is certain, however, that the landscape Chaucer loved so well was a beautifully kept garden in May time, or an open, park- like forest. Jungles or mountains Dan Chaucer could not behold “ siccis oculis.” Shakspere’s appreciation of moun- tain scenery has also been questioned, though a sort of case can be made out for it. But the sea Shakspere could only regard as an object of terror, or a field for hardy, romantic, dangerous adventure. The same idea is involved in the forests of the Faery Queene . Tennyson’s notices of the Aurora Borealis (. Locksley Hall , Talking Oak , etc.) were pre- ceded by one allusion only — so far as I know — in English 54 THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. poetry, and that in Burns {Tam o ’ Shan ter)* The Lau- reate’s repeated allusions ( Maud , The Miller's Daughter) to the beautiful phenomenon of “ Summer Lightning,” — as it is called in the South of England — were only anticipated by one passage in Shelley ( Adonais ), and one in Shakspere (< Cymbeline, Act V., Sc. 5). Things that our ancestor did not value, we count very precious, and hasten to embalm them in poetry. Our “ heart leaps up when we behold a rainbow in the sky”; but the emotion was not expressed until for thousands of people dust, and smoke, and houses packed together, had obliterated rainbows entirely. As civilization advances, the picturesque figure of the knight, the man-at-arms, the friar, the page, the chatelaine, with their special dresses contrasting strongly with each other, disappear ; and in outward aspect all people become pretty much alike. The tournament, the foray, and that great cave of Adullam, the good greenwood, are abolished. The ballad proper vanishes from current literature, and instead of its objective way of looking at things, we get a subjective way of regarding men and Nature. Hence the drama and the novel, — dealing primarily with character and with incident as developing and exhibiting character; — hence also the colouring which, in modern poetry, scenery receives from the mind ; and hence, too, that inner significance which all things have for poets of sentiment and reflection like Words- worth and Longfellow. Connected partly with this, and partly resulting from the tameness of city life, is an intense appreciation and wonderful rendering of every motion and aspect of the sea. “Man marks the earth with ruin ; his control Stops with the shore .’ 9 There is no “ stifling savour of the crowd ” along the beach, but it is ever fresh and invigorating. The yearning after * I have to acknowledge with thanks another allusion in Byron’s Mazeppa (nth stanza), pointed out by a lady friend. THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. 55 Nature finds expression firstly in authors of city birth such as Keats cr Proctor, then the keen delight it affords is com- municated far and wide among a vast body of readers, until poets who live by the sea (as Tennyson) learn to love it better, just as poets who live in the country, like Wordsworth and Capern, acquire a deeper joy in verdure and rusticity from contrasting the quiet loveliness of open fields and rust- ling woods with the close, feverish din of the town. “ The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef.” — Enoch Arden. “ Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar, Now to the scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.” Maud. “ He stood on Plymouth Hoe Till a pillar of spray rose far away, And shot up its stately head ; Reared, and fell over, and reared again. 4 ’Tis the rock, the rock,’ he said.” — (Miss Ingelow’s Winstanley .) How deeply the authors of the foregoing lines must have studied the ocean before so accurately interpreting it to us. The sea has taken possession of the very souls of some of our poets. With Swinburne it is a passion even greater than mountains were for Wordsworth. For Swinburne the ocean is the “ world without stain,” the “ great, sweet, mother and lover of men.” Fie exults in the untameable might of ocean, “ older than all the gods.” Bare, and stormy, and sick with sun and wind may be the shore, but he finds in it, when his misery is deepest, a satisfaction and solace. This religion — for it is nothing less — intensifies in his works from Atalanta to Erechtheus, and has lately been formally embodied in his Ex-voto , the confession of faith of a perfect sea-lover. To Longfellow the ocean is almost as much, but in a lower way. He reads from it parables of human and poetic life. 56 THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. The Building of the Ship> Driftwood , and Birds of Passage are examples of this. He is best when considering, not the rearing breaker, but the Lighthouse — ‘ ‘ The startled waves leap over it, the storm Smites it with all the scourges of the rain, And steadily against its solid form Press the great shoulders of the hurricane.” Then follows the moral — “ A new Prometheus, chained on a rock, Still grasping in his hand the fire of Jove, It does not hear the cry or heed the shock But hails the mariner with words of love.” This is tolerably well ; but let us turn back to the London poet : — “Forth, with the rain in our hair, And the salt sweet foam in our lips, In the teeth of the hard glad weather, In the blown wet face of the sea.” — A Song in time of Order . Has not city life done for poetry inestimable things ? Dense populations, besides piercing sequestered valleys with railways, and inundating them with tourists (much to Wordsworth’s disgust), have the effect of sweeping away all relics of antiquity that do not serve a useful purpose. Ruins, however picturesque, are being pulled down to build stables. Irreverence is pained by the way dear and hallowed things are canvassed. Ideality is outraged by coarse ap- praising in pounds, shillings, and pence, of things too sacred to have properly any absolute market value. We look back to times when this was not done, and fancy makes there a sort of golden age— an ideal time of chival- rous valour and devotion, with which our mercenary days contrast pitifully. This admiring regret of antiquity makes age become a sufficient title to veneration. Thus Milton, Spenser, and Scott, imbued thoroughly with love of ancient THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. 57 times, sought there adequate forms of the heroic splendour and grandeur with which their imaginations were filled. In Keats’ poetical nature, too, a romantic passion for glori- fied recollections of by-gone days was no unimportant ele- ment. Literature will always feel this influence, and authors dissatisfied with existing conditions of affairs will appeal to the past for a higher and purer standard of excellence. The present decade gives us William Morris’ Jason and his Sagas; Tennyson, Idylls of the King; Swinburne’s Greek Tragedies, and Rossetti’s Mediaeval Ballads. Spread of population, and facilities of travel, have done away with El Dorado and Brobdignag from literature, just as macadamized roads and rural police have abolished the fairies. Ghosts, and Friar Rush, and the whole tribe of goblins, benevolent or otherwise, “troop to the infernal jail” from the glare of gaslight. Folklore is confined to books for children, and stories of magical adventures charm no longer. How dull Thalaba seems to the reader. In Endy - mion how unsatisfactory are the disconnected marvellous occurrences. The mere wonderful has no small share in rendering the Bridal of Triermain the least known of Scott’s poems, and the Holy Grail the weakest of the Idylls of the King . Another consequence of town life in literature is a loss of such a sympathy with the brute creation as breathes in Burns’ Twa Dogs . “ He was a gash and faithfu’ tyke As ever lap a sheugh or dyke. His honest, sonsie, baws’nt face Aye gat him friends in ilka place. His breast was white, his touzie back Weel clad wi’ coat o’ glossy black ; His gaweie tail wi’ upward curl Hung o’er his hurdies wi’ a swirl.” These lines, written by a countryman, make us in love with Fonest Luath. Who could set his face against the canine 58 THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. species after this ? But since Burns we have not had any poet at all intimate with lower animals. The doctrine of the Ancient Mariner does not come home to us. The poem has a strained effect. I believe Coleridge felt the want of sympathy in modern times between man and beast, and sought to correct it in himself and others by such efforts as the Mariner , and the Lines to a Young Ass. Wordsworth suggested that the Albatross should be a tutelary spirit of the South Seas, but Coleridge was impelled to represent the killing of the mere seabird as enough to disturb the conscience of the ancient mariner. Perhaps his feeling was that no modern mariner would be disconcerted by the slaugh- ter of a whole hecatomb of albatrosses. The literature of this century has no horseman so enthu- siastic as the Dauphin in Henry V. Sometimes, when our poets imitate the old ballads, we get a horse like black Auster or the “dark-grey charger” of Mamilius in Macaulay’s Lays, but they are not like Shakspere’s horses — mere beau- tiful animals, and on that account interesting, though in- troduced accidentally and in some sort under a cloud of unfavourable circumstances. In Richard II. Bolingbroke rode on Roan Barbary. “ Rode he on Barbary ? Tell me, gentle friend, How went he under him ” ? “ So proudly as if he disdain’d the ground.” Hotspur’s roan, “a crop ear , is it not?” kindles up his master at once to break away from the pretty endearments of Lady Percy. How different is Wildfire in Silas Marner ! She is merely a valuable piece of property to be ruined by Dunstati Cass. Scott’s portraits of dogs would seem to form an exception to what I am showing ; but Scott, as I have said before, went back to a previous age and identified him- self with it, and is not to be regarded as an exponent of the present time. The words “ beast,” “ brute,” “ dog,” &c., applied to men are now opprobrious in the extreme. Does not this show that we have lost all sense of excellence in the lower THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. 59 creatures ? Machinery has superseded them, and they merely drudge out for us the existence of inferior machines. Their names are not transferred to men except to connote something base, as obstinacy, stupidity, or ferocity. But in Shakspere (I. Henry IV. Act III., Sc. 3, 1 . 140), when Falstafif calls the hostess “a beast,” she exhibits no indignation until she can learn what particular beast he means. The feeling is that all depends on that. Let us examine Tennyson’s feelings in respect to the lower animals. We find in him such lines as “ Reel back into the brute, and all be lost.” “Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die.” In his aspirations he despises the creatures inferior to- man. He peoples the world before human occupation of it with scaly dragons, tearing each other in the slime (. In Mem.), and the “monstrous newt” that was of old the lord and master of earth (Maud). Merlin’s sculptures begin with beasts slaying men, and the improvement of men slaying beasts follows (Holy Grail). This is Tennyson’s view, and probably the true one, of early savage times ; but how many poets have loved to contemplate rude ages, and filled them with noble Centaurs, and jolly Satyrs, and joyous Fauns ! Tennyson reaches the nadir of disapprobation in calling men “wolves” (Enid), or swine (Palace of Art). He cannot get below that. Even a fiend becomes more horrible by approaching to a brute. “ With colt-like whinny, and with hoggish whine, They burst my prayer.” — St. Simeon Sty lit es. How different is the tone of Milton’s Comus ! There, bad men are said to become like brutes, by losing the express image of God charactered in the human face ; but the brute creation is not insulted by the supposition, that a sufficient amount of depravity is all that is necessary to turn a man into> a beast. 60 THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. In all Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle of stories, no warhorse but Geraint’s receives the least notice, and he is sketched only to add tenderness to Enid’s deep happiness of reconcili- ation, or to her misery when Geraint falls, ‘‘And the great charger stood, grieved like a man” Longfellow is a citizen of a younger country than Tenny- son’s. In America the population is spare, and if we except a few seats of manufactures, agriculture is the universal in- dustry. Even in the cities the residents are not, for the most part, city-born, but consist in a great degree of immigrants from the country, or from agricultural districts in Europe. The very head-quarters of “ Yankee notions” are in close communication with the farms and plantations which support them. In addition to this, the restless, roving disposition of the sharp-witted city-Americans prevents the development of that antiquated modernism — the intensely un rural, civi- lised, sophisticated, feeling of which London is the centre, and with which London leavens the empire. For centuries of smoke and dust, and a thousand Lord Mayors’ shows, crush, as it were with a huge weight of precedent, our wild sympathy with field creatures. We must remember that we have a capital — the metropolis of our world — which must be a law to us, rebuking our childish giddinesses. But in America at one’s back are always the prairies. So, though Longfellow’s youth in “ the beautiful town” he speaks of— with the sea in front and “ Deering’s Woods” behind — was not so very different to the physical eye from Tennyson’s boyhood in the fen-country, yet the influences at work upon the two cotemporaries appear to the mind’s eye very different indeed. The American had no vast all-assimilat- ing London within a day’s journey : nor had the English boy any savages, red or white, to see strut in the crowds of Broad- way dissipating in a week’s debauch a whole hunting season’s spoil of the forest. Young Longfellow would have stared as much at a neat English village as young Tennyson would have done at an ox team on a plank road. THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. 6 I Hence, we find in Longfelllow, as we might expect, that sympathy with all animals which his metropolitan environ- ment has denied to Tennyson. The return of the cattle at evening to Grand-Pr6 in the beginning of Evangeline, and many other passages in that poem, remind us of Thomson, and almost indeed of that warm-hearted ploughman who grieved over the little field-mouse unhoused by his plough, and who indited the famous salutation to the Auld Mare Maggie. Take such lines as “A foamy brook with many a bound Followed us like aplayful hound." There is no such simile in Tennyson. On the same page of the Golden Legend , I read — “ We heard a short and a heavy tramp, And our horses snorted in the damp Night air of the ?neadows green and wide ! ” What a piece of friendship for the horses that is. It brings them home to us at once, as they went along, spreading their nostrils and snuffing up the meadow mist. Again, how loving is the picture of Ser Federigo's Falcon ! “ Motionless the drowsy bird Dreamed of the chase, and in his slumber heard The sudden scythe-like sweep of wings that dare The headlong plunge thro’ eddying gulfs of air. Then, starting broad awake upon his perch, Tinkled his bells like mass-bells in a church, And, looking at his master, seemed to say, ‘ Ser Federigo, shall we hunt to day ? ’ ” The essence of the whole poems — Hiawatha , the Birds of Killingworth , and Ser Federigo' s Falcon , is love of the lower creation. For a contrast, let us go to Swinburne again : — “ As one who, hidden in deep sedge and reeds, Smells the rare scent made where a panther feeds ; And tracking ever slot-wise the warm smell, Is snapped upon by the sweet mouth, and bleeds, His head far down the hot sweet throat of her.” 62 THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. City life, you see, in poetry cuts both ways. How unwhole- some the city poet’s cruel delight in the fierce dangerous panther ! Coleridge and Tennyson (whatever else they may be) are thoroughly men of their time, comprehending its tendencies, dealing with its problems, looking into its future, leavened throughout with its spirit. Wordsworth and Shelley were not so. They were enthusiasts whom the spirit of the age could not touch, and their feeling with lower creatures is quite outside what I have been discussing. It is as far re- moved from Keats, or Burns, or Longfellow, as it is from Tennyson. They poured their own soul, not only into brutes, but into the inanimate universe. The ass, in Peter Bell , the little dog “ Music,” or the traveller’s dog in Fidelity , are very different animals from those of Burns. They have gentle offices to do, and gracious lessons to teach us, and that is all. Take in the Revolt of Islam the eagle struggling with the serpent, or the “ Tartarian Steed” that bears away Laon and Cythna, they are ideal creatures — they embody ideas of the poets. They are beautiful denizens of Shelley’s ideal world, and not a real eagle or a real horse. Shakspere’s dogs are free from anthropomorphisms. The song of birds being a marketable article of human luxury, though not of human use, a friendship with song- birds is, in general, quite beside the question of sympathy with the whole animal creation. It is for this reason that I have not discussed Keats’ Nightingale , or Coleridge’s, or Ten- nyson’s Blackbird , and many passages relating to birds in the Idylls of the King . We should not have had two such poems as Childe Harold , or In Memoriam , but for the influence of cities on society. The grave, decorous, unimpassioned exterior that everyone must wear leads to the burial in the heart of the deepest feelings and of things that are dear as life to us. “ I draw a veil across my face Before I come back to the place ; THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. 63 And dull obscurity of these. I hide my face and no man sees. I learn to smile a lighter smile, And change, and look whate’er they please. It is but for a little while.” From time 1 6 time this inner life breaks forth in song, which is its only adequate vent; either poured forth in a con- tinuous body of verse like Shelley’s longer poems and Byron’s tales, or taking the form of disconnected fugitive pieces. Recent examples of this tendency are the religious poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, and the amatory poetry of Coventry Patmore, Mr. Swinburne, and others. Not unnaturally, this amatory poetry of highly civilised life is continually misin- terpreted by provincial people to mean simply what Hamlet calls “ country matters.” The direct influence of metropolitan life, however, w r ould not permit this subjective tendency to overpass a certain limit, for city life is civilized, not lawless ; and is self- restrained rather than violently self-asserting. It is emi- nently fitted to give a keen sense of what is low, mean, absurd, and burlesque. That this influence is, on the whole, adverse to true poetry I cannot believe. Never did two men enjoy more a smutty jest than Chaucer and Shakspere ; never had any man a higher conception than these two of whatsoever is true, pure, lovely, and of good report. A sense of the ridiculous may stop many heroics — I hope it will continue to do so ; but I hold that we love a good poem none the less because we have laughed, for once in a way, at a good parody of it. Ridicule is the touchstone of heroics; and if Rosalind’s passion will not bear the clown’s burlesque, it were best she hanged herself in her own garters. The London life of Shakspere, far from checking his loftier flights, has bequeathed to us Hamlet . And into Havilet the ludicrous is admitted with exquisite artistic effect. Unfortu- nately, the nature of Milton, and his unhappy times, made London degenerate for him into a palace of Circe on the one hand, and a monster Methody meeting on the other. 64 THE influence of city life on poetry. The result is glaringly apparent more than once in Paradise Lost ; the poet did not know when he was becoming ridi- culous. The same is true of Wordsworth. How much of this divine poet’s work is the tamest and most commonplace rubbish ! In another way the want of city-culture clings like a leprosy on the finest work of Byron and Shelley. For city life makes the poet first of all a man of the world, who will love himself too well to take the trouble of hating or abusing either God or his neighbour. It will, perhaps, be objected that, if Byron and Shelley had been sane and sound, they would not have been poets at all ; but that moral health is not incompatible with the poetic faculty is evidenced by the great masters, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakspere, from whose bright company Shelley and Byron, Titanic archangels as they are, have fallen into outer darkness. Occasionally indeed, in this night of darkness and disease, a breeze of special circumstances dispels the mists, and we see no longer the stagey figures of Cain, Lara, or Childe Harold, but Byron, the fever having left him, doing such flawless work as the Prisoner of Chillon, Mazeppa, and the story of Haidee . So too Shelley, on the death of his friend, forgets for a moment to play the raving, hysterical visionary. No suspicion of simu- lation, no infection of mania, taints the immortal poem which begins — “ I weep for Adonais, he is dead, O weep for Adonais !” So that it was quite possible for Byron and Shelley to be healthy and yet great poets. Shelley defines poetry as 44 the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds.” It is possible for a mourner to be happy ; but happiness is not possible to misanthropy or delirium. Good sense, calmness, mental freedom and health, were wanting to Byron and Shelley, but are found more than elsewhere in cities — the w'orld of concrete fact and practical reality. Swinburne is a poet as commanding in his genius, and as violent in his pas- THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. 65 sions and opinions, as were Byron and Shelley. But he lives in London, and so his poetry preserves a respectability of self-possession often wanting in his great predecessors. “ Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “ Let us take a walk down Fleet- street.” For in a city walk is rest and refreshment, and strengthening for body and mind. On the one hand, in dis- regard of action , is Shelley’s Scylla of nightmare, and horror, and disbelief. On the other, whirls in disregard of thought, the athlete’s Charybdis of a football match. In the midst is Fleet-street, the way of salvation. I have said so much concerning the poetry that city dwellers find in the country, that I crave your indulgence while I remark, however briefly, the mines of poetry that are to be found in the city itself. Little fragments of the golden ore turn up here and there : Tennyson’s “ golden cross that shines over city andriver” ; Swinburne at Siena ; Wordsworth in his chamber at Cam- bridge ; Matthew Arnold at Oxford, “that sweet city with her dreaming spires”; Rossetti in the museum galleries, or perchance in Jenny’s boudoir ; Browning at the Parisian Morgue ; Hugo looking down at night from a Parisian roof upon the lighted streaming crossways of what is still the world’s capital; Goethe wandering with Faust through the endi- manches promenaders of the public festival; Clough’s revolted Oxonian, to whose democratic fervour ‘‘Even the whole great wicked, artificial, civilised fabric, All its unfinished houses, lots for sale, and railway outworks, Seems reaccepted, resumed to primal nature and beauty.’ ’ But these are fragments — the morning stars that herald the uprising sun. Only one singer of our century has grasped the total poetry of man’s life, city and country, indoors and outdoors. You know whom I mean, for there is but one name in the nineteenth century to rank in any way beyond Goethe and Hugo, and our far-reaching poet-king, Tennyson. I mean Walt Whitman, “ of mighty Manhattan, the son.” F 66 THE INFLUENCE OF CITY LIFE ON POETRY. Dweller in Mannahatta, his city, he is “ a lover of populous pavements” ; at the same time he thinks “ he could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained”; and he “ could come every afternoon of his life to look at the farmer’s girl, boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking short cake.” But, true to the principles I have laid down, he is enamoured of growing out-doors. “ I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and the sea, half held by the night. Press close, bare-bosomed night ! magnetic, nourishing night ! Night of south winds, night of the few large stars ! Still, queenly night ! mad, naked, summer night. Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breathed earth ! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees, Of departed sunset, of the mountains misty-topt, Of the vitreous light of the full moon, just tinged with blue ; Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river, Of the limpid grey of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake ; Far-sweeping large-armed earth, rich apple-blossomed earth, Smile, for your lover comes. Prodigal, you have given me love ! Therefore I to you give love ! O unspeakable, passionate love.” THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. “Ava PX 0V Kai CLTtXevTaLOV to IIai/.” It is fashionable, in Encyclopaedias and other such embodi- ments of condensed wisdom for the masses, to ascribe the rise, development, and spread, of Pantheistic philosophy to a subjective motive. Man, we are told, will not be satis- fied to remain in ignorance of that which is unknowable ; his too proud intellect will not rest in any philosophy that does not satisfy all the problems of nature, and resolve all the contradictions between those sets of phenomena which he calls his Soul, and the World, and the idea which he calls God; and, as a matter of course, he always tries to reach these solutions by the shortest way. Hence when, in the course of the wanderings of human thought, some philoso- pher hit upon the idea that all things in existence might be comprehended under one great head, other men were struck by the simplicity of the system; and because “one order of things is neater than two” or three, of course it was soon believed that there was only one order of things, and Panthe- ism spread and flourished, merely because of the combined pride and laziness of the intellect of man. Without speaking too strongly, I think I may say that the above is a fair sample of the profound philosophical expla- nations of Pantheism given in Popular Encyclopaedias, works on Theology, and Dictionaries of Sects. And the learned expositors generally take good care to avoid putting their philosophy in uncongenial company. In one page of a Theological work by an eminent living divine, a small part of which deals with Pantheism, I have found the statements F 2 68 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. that Thales among the Greeks, the Manichaeans among early heretics, and the Buddhists among Asiatics, professed the doctrine in question. It is scarcely necessary to say that Thales was not a Pantheist — not because he opposed the doctrine, but because he never troubled himself about it ; that Manichaeism and Pantheism are radically opposed in their first principles; and that the central doctrine of Buddh- ism more nearly resembles Nihilism. Having enlightened his readers with these and other facts, the Right Reverend Author most successfully disproves Pantheism, by proving a number of statements which no Pantheist is bound to deny. The psychology, the history, and the controversy, are ad- mirable companions ; none of them can accuse its fellow of being more inaccurate than itself. For my own part, I may say that I have come to the con- clusion that the cause of Pantheistic philosophy is more ob- jective than subjective, and that man’s pride of intellect has not been a more powerful agent in producing it than a feeling of individual littleness, of worthlessness when in isolation from the World and his fellows. It is quite true that it has never arisen in any country until philosophy has turned from the contemplation of nature to the study of the human mind ; but this is not because it is the mere fruit of unhealthy brooding, but because the study of mind brings with it a new element to the study of nature. The World we must study bit by bit, ever shaping the results of our science into fragmentary unities ; but a man’s mind is presented to him as a whole with every individual mental phenomenon, and he finds himself obliged to study each fact in its relation to the whole, from the very beginning. Hence the begin- ning of mental science must be the beginning of synthetic philosophy, and Pantheism is generally an early fruit of the synthetic study of Nature and the Soul. Before this period, in the early era of observation , dualism generally reigned triumphantly. And there seemed a good deal to support it, for the Pythagoreans only formularised THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 69 what everybody saw, when they said nature was formed of opposites. In their own favourite numbers they found one and many, odd and even ; in external nature, bounded and unbounded, light and darkness ; in the races of animals and man, male and female, body and mind ; in the body of man, health and sickness, life and death ; in his soul, good and evil. And so far as mere observation goes, they were quite right ; production by means of the two sexes is the type, and its analogy holds in all nature. It was not possible yet to see that the duality was only on the surface, for the sur- face was all men knew. But the result of the first attempt at mental study must have shown the utter worthlessness of such halving of the realm of nature. From the very moment when a thought became an object of study, the philosopher must have seen that its mere existence laughed at all ultimate dualism of the Mind and the World. For what is a thought but the joint product of this very Mind and its radical opposite, the World, the practical unity of what men believed to be fundamentally two ? So far from having nothing in common, mind and matter have in common the only thing we know about them — the objects of our knowledge. What right have we to assert their transcendental duality, when we only found that on their natural duality ? and that, practically, is natural unity. And, on close inspection, the other opposites also vanished, as far as philosophy was concerned, in some unity ; it became certain that, if there be two principles in nature, they are not opposing, but co-operating. The old type — production by sexes — might still remain ; but it became quite evident that the two sexes were ultimately alike in their chief charac- teristics, differing only in function , and that by uniting to the same end. In the latter fact is their practical unity, while their transcendental unity might be traced in the fact that the man, par excellence — the logos , or reasoning soul — was neither male nor female. Thus the strongest form of dual- ism, which implies opposition of the fundamental principles 70 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. of nature, received its death-blow at the hands of the first man who ever studied a thought as a thought. The transition to the next stage is slight, but important. It has been shown that a closer study of life and nature revealed the fact that all apparently fundamental opposites possess a practical unity in their product, and a possible transcendental unity when beyond the limitations of know- ledge ; but otherwise their duality remains unshaken. For us, they are still two. Life and Death are foes to one ano- ther ; the world is still under the alternate rule of light and darkness, joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, good and evil. But men soon saw that in all these cases of opposition there was a close analogy between the members of the different pairs, so that, instead of stating that nature contained all these opposites, they might classify all under two heads. Light and joy, and pleasure and good, might be classed to- gether, and balanced against darkness and sorrow, and pain and evil, as so many different forms of one duality. And when this was once clearly seen, further progress was very easy, for the study of any one pair of opposites could not but throw considerable light on the nature of all the rest. Now the smallest amount of accurate thought as to the real nature of most of these opposites could not but reveal the fact that the difference between them was not one of oppo- sition proper, but rather of limitation , and that the least difference in circumstances would change the same thing from one side of the equation of nature to the other. Nothing in existence could be pointed out as the exclusive domain of either principle; the same plant was now a poison, a servant of the kingdom of death, and now a useful medicine, a messenger from the Lord of life. This being so, any theory as to their being in any way given to earth by two opposing principles could not possibly be believed ; and the second stage of development of Pantheism is reached by the disco- very of the fact that all the oppositions of nature are the results of limitation of one principle. THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 71 Perhaps the greatest bar to the reception of this belief was found in the popular conception of morality. Here, at least, it was thought, we find duality ; — man’s life is a great contest between two powers, good and evil, each operating on the same point of his nature. His will is always in a state of tremor between two motives, honest and dishonest, holy and unholy, moral and immoral ; and these two, so far from being in any way modifications of the same principle, must (for the bare safety of virtue and accuracy of thought) be viewed as radically opposed. This view I believe to be based on a fundamental error, a radical misconception of the relation of morality to the mind of man. For my own part, I have no hesitation in saying that the moral law (whether it be inborn or developed by association or inherit- ance) is essentially single, not double, in its nature, and that there is no point in man’s complex nature at which forces of good and evil meet in direct antagonism. For man’s physical nature there is one law, there is one for his mental, there is one for his moral ; his moral law, from its very nature, claims to be supreme in his whole life, and if he sins, it is not because an immoral law vanquishes the moral one, but because the moral law has been too weak to check the motives applied by the laws of mind and body; so that in morality, as in all else, we find only a limitation of one principle, not an opposition of two. A man may lie because it is convenient, and in this case the motive is the physical or mental one of convenience; — he may abstain from lying because he believes it right to speak the truth, even though it be inconvenient : what happens in the latter case is, that the moral law rules the mental or physical, not that it conquers an immoral one. A law in the members may war against a law in the mind ; but there are not two laws in the mind warring against each other. The second stage of Pantheism is completed by the proof that the moral nature of man is as essentially single as all the rest of nature, and we can thus see that in no department of 72 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. Creation is there evidence of the existence of two fundamental and opposing principles — except, indeed, we choose to re- gard limitation, or negation, which are only other names for any manifestation that we can understand, as a separate prin- ciple from existence, and to urge, with the Atomists, that nothingness is just as real as being. The meaning of this limitation is the great problem of the Universe — unsolved, and probably insoluble ; and many are the answers given to it by those who have succeeded in freeing themselves from the chains of dualism, but to find this one dark gate between them and knowledge of the One. With some, as with the cobbler-philosopher, Bohme, this internal self-differentia- tion appears as the condition of existence of the One him- self; with others it appears in more apparently inimical forms. The “ stubbornness of matter,” by which it, of its own in- herent nature, resisted the action of the Creator, represents this side, negation or limitation, in Mill ; while we have a poetic personification of it in the Mephistopheles of Goethe — the spirit that is a “ part of the part that was at first the whole,” that ever says “No,” that does not so much pro- duce evil as check the good. I can see no foe of light, and I see no proof that there is one ; but the knowledge that dark- ness is nothing real will not make me understand it a bit the better, and the Pantheist has only got one step beyond the Dualist, for the problem of limitation has taken the place of the problem of opposition. Now, whatever be the origin of limitation, it is perfectly plain that it is not the same as opposition ; that it is not an enemy to the creative principle, but rather its everlasting companion — the eternal bride through whom the father Na- ture begets his children, created things. And it is no less certain that these things are one , not merely in their origin, but in themselves. This is, perhaps, a point of more im- portance than the abstract question’ as to the unity or duality of their origin ; it does not merely assert that there was when one principle was supreme ; it says that now but one life can THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 73 be discerned in nature. I shall state a few of the grounds on which we make this statement. In the first place, there is no special reason, a priori , why the laws of nature should be uniform, or why such of them as we call mathematical laws should be universal. But we find on examination that they are uniform and universal, and in this fact is one expression of the unity of nature. Whether space be (as Kant says) only a form of our own intuition, or not, is in this connexion really unimportant ; however we answer it, the unity of space is a form of the unity of nature. For, to begin with, Kant himself admits that the differences of perception in space and time must correspond to differences in the objects. Must not the same be the case with the uni- formities ? And, in the second place, the real importance of the uniformity of these mathematical laws lies in their con- stant relation to dynamical uniformities in nature : — however the relations between squares and their roots may be subjec- tive, the law that the force of gravity decreases as the square of the distance belongs to nature, and its universalism, is a proof of the unity of nature — as far, at any rate, as its opera- tion extends. Secondly, the absolute unity of the universe is shown by the fact — worthy of more consideration than it generally re- ceives — that there is no absolute unit in existence except the universe. This is not the mere enunciation of a truism, for it is quite conceivable that the universe should consist of any number of absolutely independent units ; and, as a matter of history, at least one philosophical scheme was based on the supposition that the universe consisted of an immense number of units totally independent — monads, between which any union was impossible, each being an individual complete in itself. But I think a competent acquaintance with the facts of existence — a rational consideration of either the world or our own minds — must show us that the same unity of organisation which we can trace in ourselves is 74 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. spread through the whole universe, and can be bounded by no narrow limits. The monad, or living atom, must be a perfect individual ; or some assemblages of atoms must be individuals; or the universe, and the universe alone, must be a perfect unity. But the individuality of monads is an abso- lute impossibility. No monad exists except as it feels, or acts, or knows, or is felt, or acted on, or known ; in other words, except as it can blend into life with other monads, forming with them unions of existence ; but as complete exclusiveness and independence is a characteristic of the supposed monad, the monad-unit is an impossible absurdity, that never has been and never shall be. And the absolute individuality of any of the combinations of nature — physical or mental — is equally impossible. To state an obvious reason why this is so, no combination is enduring. All bide their little time, and gradually pass away, blending their compo- nent atoms into new combinations ; all are but waves in the sea of being ; the sea endures, and the drops of which the waves are formed last, but the waves themselves pass ever into new shapes and motions. No physical combination can have more enduring and absolute individuality than has the long ripple that beats on the strand day after day, or the river that flows week after week in the same course, or the breath of the winds of heaven, that blows and is gone. And, besides this negative proof, it may be positively shown that all physical nature is one. Every object exerts some in- fluence on every other one ; the sounds of our voices here to-night are making the earth itself vibrate, and affecting the balance of the solar system. Nature is so strongly one, that the annihilation of a single atom, if such a thing were possible, would actually set every other atom in existence into motion, would be felt in the sun, and would act on the Pleiades. When Hegel says that the force of gravity is “ the red strand in the philosophy of nature,” he means that all nature is one, and that the universality of the force of gravity THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 75 proves that no physical unit is a monad, or entirely self- dependent. If it be true that there is in nature no absolute physical in- dividual, it is equally true that there is no absolute mental or spiritual one. Our minds are not definite unities, which wax not and wane not, and blend not with the minds of others. If it be true that our bodies are fed by meat and drink, and absorb the substance of animals and plants into their own, it is equally true that our minds are fed and grow, and are ever adding the substance of fresh ideas to their own. No man’s individuality is perfect. With respect to our bodies, “ sumus quod edimus;” with respect to our minds, “ sumus quod co- gitamus.” And just as physical nature is bound together by gravity, so is mental nature clasped into one unity by what we may call the gravity of spirits — that attraction of soul for soul, which seems rather to accept family, nationality, fellow- ship in religion, as a means than as a cause for developing itself. No man can hold the perfect independence and in- dividuality of his mind, and yet believe in the existence of domestic affection, social instinct, the love of man or the love of God. I shall not urge, as a further proof of the non-isolation of minds, those other bonds of union which have been always obscurely believed in, though seldom acknowledged, and which, under the names of mesmerism, clairvoyance, &c., have been often believed in as revelations, oftener denounced as impostures. I shall not dwell upon them, not because I do not believe in the possibility of such direct mental com- munion myself, and not because I do not trust my own ex- perience of it ; but simply on the same ground that would urge me to suppress the evidence of my sight if I lived among a race of men of whom most were blind from their birth. In the latter case, those of us who were fortunate enough to have the use of our eyes would probably be denounced as lunatics or humbugs if we laid claim to vision. The same might be said now if I were to press as evidence of a com- 76 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. munion of mind with mind the seemingly half-supernatural evidence of dreams and rapports. But there is, happily, plenty of evidence without this, for the truth of the state- ment that no human mind is an entirely independent unity ; and I need not point to the witness of mesmerism while I can call on sympathy, affection, society, and religion, to prove it. The Universe is then an absolute unit, and there is no absolute unit in existence except the Universe. In other words, there is but one life in all nature ; one force, under- going many changes. We have just seen that there is a common life in all matter, and in all minds ; and if anyone doubts that there is a common life to both mind and matter, it is quite in his power to test it by trying how the wear and tear of his body affect his mind, and vice versa. There is very little use in arguing, as Descartes did, that mind and body can have nothing in common, in view of the fact that they actually have everything in common, and that in every face flushed with joy, or thin and sharp with grief, we have a living illustration of the fact. In human thought and vitality we have the unity of the force of matter, which is one, with the force of mind, which is one ; and then we know, and all science confirms us in the belief, that there is but one force and life in nature. In this — in the recognition of nature as all the manifesta- tion of one life — consists Pantheism proper ; and it is only the recognition of this fact that will serve as a clue when threading the mysterious labyrinths built by the upholders of Pantheistic and mystical theology. The characteristics by which the doctrine is more generally known are, in reality, the accidents of different systems, many of which may have been almost universally associated with Pantheism, while some have only appeared in single bodies of thinkers, or only in individual philosophers ; and I think it will be found, on examination, that the definitions generally given will be found to be either really imperfect, or to resolve themselves THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 77 into consequences of my definition as given above — the re- cognition of nature as the manifestation on one life, on one principle. Take, for example, the popular conception of Pantheism — “the belief that nature is God, or a part of God.” The two parts of this definition really represent what have frequently been called the two sorts of Pantheism, but what may more properly be said to be the combinations of Pantheism, which is a purely scientific principle, with two theistic prin- ciples — Theism and Atheism. ( En passant , I may just defend myself from a possible charge. It may be thought strange to assert that Pantheism is not a theistic but a scientific prin- ciple, and the derivation of the name may be flung in my teeth, but it is nevertheless true that what I have said is the case. The explanation is simple. Pantheism is a name applied to two different theistic systems. On examination it is found that these agree in a philosophical or scientific principle, and in nothing else. Pantheism must then be this principle — itself scientific, though manifested in the- °logy). The belief that God is nature and nature God may be termed Pantheistic Atheism. Theologically, it accepts nature as self-existent, and denies the existence of any being, Cre- ator or Preserver, beyond and above it. Philosophically, it recognises the unity of this nature, and uses the name God as denoting the impersonal unity of these forces ; not merely, as is vulgarly supposed, their totality, but, distinctly, their unity. Speaking critically, this doctrine is really poetical and philosophical Atheism, whatever it may be called ; and the unity of the forces of nature is only the unity of the forces of nature, whether we call it God or not. I do not mean to discuss the theological bearing of this question at all, but simply to show that though this doctrine is rightly called Pantheism, it is so by virtue of its philosophical and scientific, not its theological character. A Pantheist may be a Theist or an Atheist — a Christian or a Mohammedan — a Deist or a Buddhist : his theology is a statement of his views as regards 78 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. God ; his Pantheism is his doctrine of the principle of the Universe, and is consistent with any views in theology — or, rather, is capable of being joined with any theological opinions that do not involve the reception of a dualistic principle of existence. The belief that nature is a part of God, or, as I prefer to express it, in order that the statement may not seem what it is not, profane, that the existence of all nature is of the existence of God, I may call Pantheistic Theism, since it is the necessary result of the reception of the belief in a Deity and the doctrine of scientific Pantheism, as explained above. If there be a God in any connexion with the world, the world must have sprung from Him wholly or in part ; He must have given its life, or a part of its life. But if God be the source of any part of the World’s existence, and the principle of its life (as Theism teaches He is), and if the life and existence of the world have but one source and but one principle (as Pantheism teaches it has), then the man who admits that there is a God, and that the world is from one source and on one principle, must admit that that source and principle are God — that He has given the force of His own force, and that the life is emphatically His life, all coming from Him and upholden by Him. So, too, matter must be from Him, whether eternally or not, since otherwise there would be two principles, the very dualism from which we escaped. Whether this life, flowing from the Deity, and this matter, whose existence came from Him and is supported by Him, may be said to be a part of His existence or not, is a question on which I do not choose to enter ; there is quite enough to discuss in things without wasting time over words, and I must say that I consider the statement that existence is totally of God, and yet is not His existence, a piece of vain subtlety worthy only of one of the least enlightened of the schoolmen. Practically, the former statement contains all that is required by Pantheistic Theism ; and, theoretically, all the life of nature must be considered the life of God, unless it THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 79 can be shown that there is life in nature which is not of God, but of something else ; — a theory with which I am not con- cerned, as all I undertook to show was that the view in ques- tion was a necessary consequence of the philosophical recog- nition of unity of principle, when applied to Theism. The difficulties, moral and otherwise, urged against Pan- theism, are generally either based on misconceptions of its nature, on the special doctrines of particular Pantheistic sects, or on the ordinary difficulties which equally affect every explanation of the principle of the Universe. It is said, for instance, that it destroys moral responsibility. Now I am not going to deny that a great many Pantheists have deduced this doctrine from it — almost as many, I dare say, as have drawn heresies from Christianity — but I think it scarcely fair to charge a doctrine with immorality merely because some immoral men have found a shelter under it through miscon- struing it. As far as moral responsibility lies between man and man, it is based on society, not on philosophy ; as far as it lies between man and God, it presents no special difficulty to Pantheism, since the problems of the existence of Evil and the nature of Free-will are just as difficult to re- concile with any other theory of the connexion of the All- good with the World. It is further said that Pantheism renders personal immortality impossible, for that the final destiny of all men must, under it, be absorption in the Deity. I think this simply absurd, for surely if personal existence for a while be compatible with Pantheism, that personal exist- ence may last for ever. In short, there is no objection that may be urged against Pantheism which may not be urged with equal force against Theism ; and there is no Theistic creed with which Pantheism may not combine, except the Zoroastran or Manichaean, and the rest of the dualistic school ; and with these it cannot blend, since it is the ex- pression of a philosophical theory radically opposed to them. I have tried to show on what grounds we were justified in rejecting the dualistic theory and accepting the monistic — to 8o THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. prove that the logical consequence of uniting this with Theism or Christianity was Pantheism ; and to show that the objections generally urged against the last-named doctrine were either invidious or common to all Theism : it only remains to trace the actual manner in which Pantheism has developed itself in the history of philosophy, producing many theories of very different appearance, according to the doctrines with which it was combined. It is generally supposed that Asia is the natural home of Pantheistic philosophy, and that the doctrine, as it exists in Europe, was derived from Asia. I am not at all sure that the latter statement is really true : I am rather inclined to believe the two developments different and independent; and, at any rate, if we are indebted to Asia for Pantheistic philo- sophy, it came among us as a child and is now a man in our midst. In Asia it exists in a crude form — more poetical and theological than philosophical ; or, when it does become philosophical, it will generally be found that the philosophy has soared so far away from earth as to leave all we know anything about quite unconsidered, in its desire to account for what we know nothing of. The two Pantheistic systems of Asia are Brahmanism and Buddhism. The former of these starts from the idea of an absolute personal God whose existence is infinite, and who, like the Isis at Sais, is all that is, and has been, and ever shall be. But it may be truly said that this being is an infinite whose in- finity is very little use to him ; for he cannot act, or he would pass beyond his infinite nature ; and he cannot create, or he would produce more than his infinite nature ; both of which results are impossible. The monarch of all lives in eternal loneliness, in eternal sleep; in state more sombre than that of the Eastern kings whose face no man may see and live. But Brahma is infinite, and has infinite attributes, infinite love among the rest. How can he love when there is not, and cannot be, aught beside himself? He cannot make anything beyond himself ; but in his lonely aeonial sleep he calls up a THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 8l dream, to soothe his solitude, to delight his heart, to win his love. This dream of Brahma — which is nothing, and can be nothing, and yet is all that is, except the dreamer — is our world and all that is in it; the being of the life of nature, of the host of heaven, of our own selves, is but the pale reflection of the being of Brahma, the dream of the High God in his eternal sleep. Truly a very beautiful poem, albeit one that must have grown up among men who had long forgotten the joys of nature; but no true Pantheism. The fundamental position of Pantheism — the unity of principle in nature — seems indeed to be established ; but it is quite evident that if the world be but a delusion, a self-mystification of the divine being, his self-unity may be consistent with any rule in nature — monism, or dualism, or utter anarchy. There is in Brahmanism no philosophical value whatever ; it is a fairy- tale — a very glorious one, but a fairy-tale for all that. Buddhism, on the other hand, is only deep Pessimism con- densed into a system- It has an Infinite, which it calls God ; but that Infinite, it is important to remember, is unlike the Infinite of all other systems — it is infinite nothingness — the annihilation towards which all things are tending. This annihilation is the god and heaven of Buddhism, for the Buddhist believes that existence is in itself an evil, and to- wards annihilation all his hopes are bent. He sees in a state of life approaching towards idiocy on earth an earnest of this coming Nirvana; and his highest ideal of holiness is that leaving love, joy, grief, parents, friends, country, all that men hold dear, he should (as one of the hymns of Go- tohama expresses it) “walk alone like the rhinoceros.” This system, though frequently supposed to be Pantheistic, is not so at all, in my opinion : it leaves the nature of life unex- plained, except that it denounces it as an intolerable burden; and its hope for the future is annihilation . Nirvana is often said to be equivalent to “absorption into the Infinite/’ but we must remember that the Infinite of Buddhism is infinite non-existence. G 82 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. We may perhaps hope for better results from European philosophy. In Asia, we have found the philosophy a spuri- ous Pantheism, of no real philosophical value — impossible to be disproved, indeed, because not only removed beyond all ex- perience, but even deprived of all contact with it. In ancient Greece, however, and in modern Europe, we may expect to find the system developed in a more philosophical manner, and tending more to establish real truth. The Right Reverend author of whom I spoke at the begin- ning of this essay mentions Thales among the supporters of Pantheism. I may here again repeat, as introductory to the study of Greek Pantheism, that the doctrine in question has no relation to the views of Thales or any of the Ionic or Physi- cist school to which he belongs. They were not at all con- cerned with the question of the unity of the universe ; all they tried to show was that the materials of which it is composed might all be varying forms of one material. Now it is quite evident that this might be shown most clearly, and yet we would not be a bit nearer Pantheism ; this 7rpo)Trj vXrj might contain opposing forces, or be. liable to opposing in- fluences, or be itself but one side of the equation of nature. The Ionic philosophy did not even ask itself the questions to which Pantheism is intended as an answer. The Pythagoreans came a little closer to the Pantheistic idea, in their introduction of the idea of law and order, but as their law did not imply unity, they were still very far indeed from the doctrine. They were in reality dualists, and tried to carry their twofold divisions into all parts of nature. But they, at any rate, established the fact that law holds in all nature, and that it is bound together by, at any rate, the principle of order. After Pythagoreanism came Eleaticism, which was all more or less Pantheistic. The first of this school, Xenophanes of Elea, first saw that all nature lived with one life ; and we are told how he stood on the seashore, with the clear air stretch- ing out in unclouded blue above him, and the wide sea spread THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 83 before him to the horizon, and felt that the sea and air and all without and within him were throbbing with one life ; and how he looked up to the circling vault of heaven, and said, “ God is the One and All.” His successors, Parmenides and Zeno, seem to have rather injured than improved his stand- point, for they made their One so perfect in its unity as to exclude the world around them, and so their last state was worse than their first, as hopeless dualism. Their mistake was, in fact, much the same as that of the Brahmans, in that the immature completeness of their unity shut out all the pheno- menal life of nature ; and the only points in which Parmenides and Zeno seem to have been much superior to the Asiatic philosophers is, that their unity was in, not beyond, nature ; and that they did not condemn all being, but only phenome- nal being, to be deemed illusion. It is a rather remarkable fact, and a very important one, that the culmination of early Greek Pantheism was reached in a philosopher whose ruling idea was not Unity, but Change — the “Dark” Heraclitus. We have seen above that the One of Eleaticism failed as an explanation of nature, on account of its want of elasticity, its real exclusiveness, while claiming to be all-inclusive. Heraclitus saw quite plainly that any philosophy which began by refusing to consider the pheno- menal at all must fail as an explanation of anything. If a doctrine cannot offer any explanation of the world which it has seen, it is scarcely likely to be able to explain the world it has not seen. He saw that a philosophy of nature must begin with the nature around us — a rather hard task, as it is there comparatively easy to have one’s errors detected ; while in a philosophy of the unknown and absolute any doctrine may bide its day, since no one can try experiments to test it. Heraclitus saw that the first fact of nature was life and motion, and that life and motion meant change — becoming. Nothing remained as it was for two successive moments, it was ever parting with old, acquiring new, parts. The river changed even while the bather was in it; and as to the bather, G 2 8 4 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. was his body even the same from hour to hour ? Nature was to him a whole — a complete unity; but a living unity — so com- plete, that it included the phenomenal as easily as the real world, if a world there be more real than the phenomenal — so much unity, as to be the only real unity in existence. The system of Heraclitus forms in many ways an important epoch. In the first, place, he first of all philosophers, deve- loped a Pantheistic doctrine from observation of objective nature ; and as a natural consequence, his was the first Pantheism into which the facts of nature could at all be fitted. Secondly, his doctrine, while presenting a single principle as ground for the variety in nature, presents a principle so constituted as to contain in itself a sufficient reason of this variety — unlike the Asiatics and the Eleatics, to whom variety was a paradox and a puzzle. In this he may be compared to Bohme, whose theosophy made an eternal inner self-diremption a necessary part of the nature of the Divine Being ; and to Schelling, whose Impersonal Intuition posits object and subject equally. As a natural consequence, he was not obliged to regard existing phenomena as disa- greeable obtrusions, to be explained away in order that his philosophy might have fair play : phenomenal nature came as truly under him as the most ideal of worlds. In the third place, in him Greek scientific Pantheism reached its climax, just as mystical Pantheism was at its height in Xeno- phanes. From this, we find a continual retrogression of the Pantheistic principle; sometimes, as in Anaxagoras, in favour of direct formal dualism ; sometimes, as in the Sophists, in favour of a more Positivistic turn of thought — a disposition to tangle all the threads of pure philosophical discourse, and to carry philosophy no further than the organa of the arts and sciences, With Socrates Greek Philosophy passes away from the question of the origin of nature, and occupies itself instead with the mind of man and the nature of virtue and vice. Of course this is quite off the road on which Pantheism lies, and THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 85 it is hence not surprising that it almost disappears from Greek thought after Heraclitus, until the rise of Neo-Platonism. In the interval we indeed find a few weak traces of its influence among the Socratics, and Aristotle steered close enough to it in part of his system. In fact, Aristotle might possibly have been a Pantheist if he had not thought it necessary to believe that the Supreme Being must be pure actuality, and the ori- ginal matter of the world pure potentiality; — a separation which fixed him as a dualist for ever. Side by side with these systems of philosophic Pantheism existed another order of systems which seem to have taught similar doctrines, though as religion, not philosophy. The ruling idea of the Mysteries of ancient Greece seems to have been the deification of nature under various aspects. In joy and in sorrow, in triumph and humiliation, the same nature appeared under different names and in different forms. Deme ter is nature who serves man — the giver of grain for his food ; the mother-earth who sorrows for half the year for the death of her green plant-children, and joys for half the year when they are alive and with her. And if Demeter — with whom the Mysteries identified Hestia, the goddess of domestic fire — be the servant of man, Dionysus, the wine of the world, is the great vital force of nature, more powerful than man. The popu- lar account of him as a mere wine-god is quite absurd in face of those mysterious “ sorrows of Dionysus” which formed the beginning of Tragedy ; and such of his adventures as remain to us seem to show that he represented the strength, and beauty, and power, and vigour of nature in plant, and beast, and man. Pan is the correlative of Dionysus ; if the latter triumphs, the former mourns; — Pan is the representative of the firm conviction that the beauty and good of nature are tainted with pain and evil ; that man’s aims and desires are higher than some mysterious check will ever suffer his achieve- ments to be ; — the goat’s legs will not perform the will of the human heart ; the goat’s horns mar the beauty of the human face. These three are the chief gods of the Mysteries, and I 86 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. think it evident that they are all representations of the same nature from different points of view. The spread of Christianity produced a new development of Pantheistic philosophy which would be somewhat surprising to us, if it were not easy to see that a Pantheistic idea under- lies all Christianity. To begin with the fundamental idea of the Jewish religion, — the absolute supremacy of the Lord God, and the derivation of all things seen and unseen from Him, a view continued in the religion of Christianity — is so exceed- ingly provocative of Pantheism, that the philosophy of almost all Jews, from the days of the Kabbala till now, has taken that form. Secondly, the most influential of apostolic writers — S. Paul — had an especial leaning in that direction, as is evi- dent from the language he continually employs. God, he says, “ is over all, and through all, and in you all.” And again, “ in Him we live and move and are ( kcll €o-/xe v)” The figures he uses, the arguments he employs, are continually marked with the impress of this opinion that God is not out- side His universe, but in it; and that it all lives with a life so single that the whole of it is affected by anything that happens any part of it. Thirdly, the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, — those in which it differs from Judaism — would tend to strengthen, rather than to weaken the Pantheistic tendency, inasmuch as they are founded on the supposition of a close union of the Creator and His creation, and of all the parts of the universe with one another, and include in their opera- tion all nature — body as well as spirit. In fine, one of the strongest reasons why we should expect a Pantheistic growth from Christianity is because it distinctly asserts that matter is as holy as spirit, and as capable of entering into union with the Deity. If there had been a shadow of dualism in Chris- tianity, I have no doubt but that matter would have been the domain assigned to the Evil One — a doctrine which could never accompany a belief in the Incarnation. We are not, therefore, surprised to find that the tendency to Pantheism soon developed itself in those many philoso- THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 87 phies, which were the children of primitive Christianity, and which we call by the general name of Gnosticism. The rul- ing characteristics of these are generally threefold — a central Pantheistic idea, a smattering of Christian doctrine, and a surprising amount of additional matter. This last is often most beautiful — religious and poetical in thought; but oftener the most utter rubbish human brain ever devised. It is with the first point we are now concerned, however — the Pan- theism of Gnosticism. The Gnostic theogonies generally included an immense number of aeons, or emanations of the one Supreme God, in whose “fulness” they dwelt, and of whom they were. This Supreme Being was generally re- garded as diffusive in his nature, having his life interpene- trating all the worlds (as well as filling the aeons), of which a strong proof is the mystic name Abraxas , assigned to him in some of the systems. This word is composed of the letters which signify the number 365 in Greek — the number of the worlds or universes of which he was the God, and whose being was derived from his being. Sometimes, however, the Gnostic systems are not Pantheistic ; and, in all cases, their Pantheism is modified by the interposition of the “ aeons,” or emanative spirits of God — God is in nature, but not directly, He is in the aeons, and the aeons are in nature. So much for the Pantheistic systems that arose out of and outside Christianity. Within the Church there was not so much a Pantheistic system as a Pantheistic habit of thought, which manifested itself more in side-directions than in any direct utterance. It was at the bottom of the opposition to the Manichaeans within, and the Neo-Platonists without, the Church. Neo-Platonism, although vehemently opposed to those Christian doctrines which seem to tend towards Pantheism, is, strange to say, itself belonging to the same school. It belongs, however, to what may be called transcendental, as opposed to natural, Pantheism ; being more like Brahman- 88 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. ism than any Greek Pantheistic school. This pretended revival of the philosophy of Plato originated in the desire to oppose some consistent system of pagan philosophy to the Christian, which was now spreading rapidly in every direc- tion. Its supporters believed in the existence of a Deity who transfused himself into nature by the intervention of a “ Trinity,” and who was Reason itself wherever it appeared. Communion between Him and man in general was impos- sible : but by attaining to a state in which all the things of earth were forgot, and all distinction of subject and object lost, man could swoon into union with the Deity. It is scarcely necessary to point out that this is utterly false Pan- thism; it seems as if the Deity inhered in creation ; but He really only dwells in part of it, and makes thereby the gulf between mind and body, reason and sense, deeper than it is in mos tordinary Theism. The monism of Neo-Platonism is itself utterly dualistic. When Neo-Platonism was dead, and Christianity had be- come the established religion of the civilized world, we hear nothing of Pantheism for several centuries. Indeed, I am not aware of any Christian Pantheist of importance, with the exception of John Scotus Erigera, before the rise of the Mystics in the twelfth century. We need not stop now to examine into the views of these remarkable preachers and writers, since it is certain that their position was more devotional than philosophic, and that their Pantheism was mainly a protest against the formalism of their generation, and went no further than was necessary for that purpose. Nor did a philosophical school of any importance spring from them ; their work was religious, and the philosophy underlying it did not seem to survive it long. It seems to be a characteristic of the doctrine we are dis- cussing to keep itself quietly in the back-ground at all times, except when some other important movement is abroad on the earth ; and then, when men’s minds are warm, and they feel their mental and religious emotions at their highest, we THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 89 see among the combatants the banner of Pantheism, which does not love to flaunt in time of peace. So we hear nothing further of them until the stirring days of the sixteenth cen- tury; and then Bruno and Vanini and their companions arise in Italy, and Jacob Bohme in Germany, almost if not quite simultaneously. The Italians were ardent lovers of the ancient philosophies, and their Pantheism was more or less a repro- duction of that of the Greeks ; the German was an unlearned shoemaker, and his philosophy was his own in every respect. The Italian Pantheists were unfortunate. Bruno died at the stake, in the year 1600, for the seemingly harmless, if strange, opinion that the world was an animal ; and twenty years after Vanini also gave his body to the flames. The German Bohme was not called on to lay down his life for his opi- nions, or to suffer any worse persecution than being abused by a magistrate and preached at by a parson. And no doubt the worthy clergyman thought his doctrines very strange, if (what is most unlikely) he understood them at all. I daresay the statement that “ all things are in Yes and No” filled him with horror, which was not diminished when he learned that “the No is the counterstroke of the Yes.” And yet all the cobbler-philosopher meant is not so very dreadful. “In Yes and No are all things” — they all spring from one principle and its negation ; and “ the No is the counterstroke of the Yes,” for the negation is not any second principle, but the condition of limitation necessary for the manifestation of the One. The Yes and No, says Bohme, are in God Himself, who can only have any exist- ence in so far as he can make an internal severance of his own nature, and divide his oneness into two. Now this is a very remarkable achievement of Bohme’ s, for he has passed the rock on which Aristotle split, and has shown us the manner in which the potentiality and actuality can exist together in the First Cause. The inherence of God in nature Bohme develops by means of a Trinity — like the Gnostics, the Neo-Platonists, Fichte, and Hegel — in fact, 90 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. like all Pantheists who have acknowledged the necessity of internal differentiation in the Deity. But the efforts of all these philosophers fade into insignifi- cance when we come to Baruch Spinosa ; — the Jewish Pan- theist who alone ever produced a Pantheistic system professing to be demonstrably proved. Into the details of his life I need not enter, and the limits of this Paper forbid my giving more than a very hasty sketch of his philosophy. Perhaps no man has ever been so worshipped and hated, blessed and cursed, merely for his opinions. Some do not scruple to call him an atheist, while others echo the name given him by one of his admirers, “ a man intoxicated with God.” For my own part, I think the latter the better description ; but I shall leave it to you to judge for yourselves, merely premising that my account of his doctrines cannot but convey a very meagre idea of them to you. According to Spinosa, there is but one being existent, and that being is God, who is absolutely infinite, and hence must include all that is. But of things that are, we know two kinds — matter and spirit — and as these cannot be anything outside God, they must be two of his attributes, of which he has an infinite number. The fragments of these attributes, or accidents, are called modi , and are all finite things — man as well as everything else ; and to every modus of matter corresponds one of spirit — the ‘'idea” of a thing, the “soul” of a man. Into the details of the system, as regards man, we need not go ; I am only discussing Spinosa’ s views to-night as far as they are Pantheistic, and affect the relation of God to nature. Nature, says Spinosa, is nothing besides God, but God is something besides nature. He has an infinite number of accidents, of which nature only represents two, and of which we can only understand two. This view has been called atheistic, but I must say I cannot see that it is. Spinosa, it is true, denied that the Deity was personal ; but he gave his reason, and said that it was because he was greater than all personality, which word only applied to finite THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. 91 beings. I do not know that he would have refused to call him the living God ; and I do know that he spoke of the love of God as the first of virtues, and that, if a man did not persuade himself that Spinosa’s Pantheism implied atheism, he would never suspect it from his practical teaching or religious advice. There is a strange piece of dualism lurking in Spinosa’s stronghold, and I suspect that this fact prevented his doctrine from ruling the succeeding age of philosophy. It is notice- able that matter and spirit are almost essentially two in Spinosanism, their only union being in the infinite gulf of Deity. And on this dualism succeeding philosophy seized, and magnified it into systems, so that Spinosa became to modern philosophy what Heraclitus was to ancient — the first and last of the distinctively pure Pantheistic school. I suppose philosophy never was further from even the germ of Pantheism than it was in Leibnitz’s Monadology, in which every particle of matter, living or dead, is a living soul, self- inclusive, and only linked to anything else by a “ Pre-estab- lished Harmony” of their actions. There was no revival of Pantheism until after the rise of Kant ; but when his great work had filled men’s minds with the creative power of the human intellect — which binds objects with its laws instead of being bound by theirs — this mind-adoration soon produced the philosophy of Fichte, in which the Ego or soul produces from itself both subject and object, being incited, however, to action, by some kind of non-Ego which never comes into consciousness. For my own part, I would consider a non-Ego thus outside the pale of all possible knowledge — a hopeless bar to unity; but Fichte succeeded in developing from it a kind of Pantheism, the drift of which is that the one great Ego or mind produces from itself all the phenomenal Egos and non-Egos, subjects and objects ; that in fact, every individual mind is a subject- god, and every thing known an object-god. On the same track followed Schelling ; but he was not in any way hasty about forming his views, so he took up successively the views 92 THE HISTORY OF PANTHEISM. of Fichte, Spinosa, the Neo-Platonists, and Bohme, and at last came to the conclusion that all knowledge was the act of one great intellectual intuition intuiting itself. Hegel’s Pantheism is much more peculiar and much more interesting. Having made up his mind to examine the philo- sophy of nature accurately, and trace it to some one principle, he found that none of the attempts yet made had succeeded, simply because (he said) the philosophers had started wrong. In every act of knowledge what was presented was an Idea , which implied a subject knowing and an object known, both being equally necessary. Former philosophers had taken, some the subject, others the object, as the basis; and both attempts had failed. Now Hegel saw that it was impossible that either of these could produce the other, since they were co-ordinate and equally necessary ; and he believed that both were produced by the idea. It is not, he said, a subject and object that produce an idea, but the idea that produces the subject and object. The Idea is then the basis of existence ; and produces the subject and its circumstances, and the object and its circumstances. But the ideas differ only in these products, and there must therefore be one Absolute Idea which unfolds itself in all these ways — which is, in fact, the perpetual Creator. This Idea is God, who must then be pure being, since he is not limited into any subject and object ; he must also be, for the very same reason, pure nothing ; as a thing is a thing only as it is severed from other things. This identity of being and nothing constitutes, according to Hegel, the incomprehensibility of God. I have only just given the germ of the system of Pantheism of the Idea, in order to show you in what it resembles, and in what it differs from, the Pantheism we had been dealing with before it — they resemble one another, in that both attempt to trace all the universe to one principle ; but they differ, in that one is objective, and starts from the unity observed in nature ; the other is idealistic, and starts from a unity manufactured out- side nature. THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. In dealing with the question of the Irish Round Towers, we may divide the various theories respecting the period of their erection into two classes, the Pagan and the Christian. Under the first heading come two sub-divisions — that which assigns to them a Cuthite origin, and that which attributes them to the Kelts. Were we to enter into this minor dispute we should find time wanting to discuss the more immediate object of this Essay. We may however safely pass it over, I think, by taking it for granted that a Keltic origin cannot be assigned to them, since, so far as we are acquainted with the Kelts, they were ignorant of the art of building in stone, previous to the introduction of Christianity, and even despised such erections — all structures built by them previous to the 12th century being of wood, wattles, or earthwork, such as their houses, monasteries and raths. In order to understand the arguments of Keane and O’Brien — the chief advocates of the Pagan original — I will quote a few words from the former on the historical bearings of the question. He commences by stating a broad fact, sustained by abundant evidence and admitted even by those who refuse his conclusions, viz.: — “that antecedent to the Keltic invasion (of Ireland), which took place many centu- ries before our era, Ireland was inhabited by a highly civi- lized race, of building celebrity ; and a careful investigation of the ancient classic and oriental histories and traditions will clearly prove the identity of this primitive race with the Cuthites of antiquity — the descendants of Ham — about whom Faber, in his ‘Origin of Pagan Idolatry’ has so fully written.” 94 THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. On turning to Mr. Faber’s work, we find three volumes of closely reasoned matter, put together with intense applica- tion and filled with deep learning and research. Starting from the common origin of all nations, he follows the course of each division, the rise of the Cuthic or Scuthic empire, occupying a large portion of one volume, in which he traces its descent with unerring accuracy from its founder Nimrod — the reputed builder of Babel— through varying change of name, down to the Phoenicians and those colo- nies which, under the names of Pelasgi, Bolgs, or Belgae, gradually forced their way into Greece, Germany, Italy, Western Gaul, South-Eastern Britain, and Spain. His argu- ments are convincing, and his references to Ireland should be carefully considered, since it was no part of his plan to prove the Cuthite invasion of Ireland, and his references to it are merely incidental. He remarks that “ from Spain the Pelasgic shepherds migrated into Ireland, according to the concurrent traditions of both these countries ; which, after making due allowance for certain embellishments, may safely, I think, in the main be believed. To this I am the more inclined from the testimony of the accurate Tacitus, who gives it — that the Iberi had passed over from Spain and had colonized the Western shores of Britain.’’ Colonel Vallancey has aided in the proof by quotations from many Spanish writers relative to traditions of early migrations to Ireland. Aeschylus, Strabo, and Dionysius, are also quoted to prove the peopling of Spain, from Egypt and Phoenicia, by way of Nubia and North Africa. Before leaving this part of the argument, I would — notwithstanding the already numerous derivations of the word Scots — draw attention to a fact, not perhaps of much value, but never yet noticed — the apparent affinity of the words Cuthi, Scuthi or Scythians, and Scuti or Scots, the early name for the inhabitants of Ireland. The next step is to see what internal evidence there is of such a people having been in Ireland ; and here we have THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. 95 only to refer to Lord Dunraven’s elaborate work, edited by Miss Stokes, to find an abundance of Cyclopean remains, of unknown antiquity, and agreeing in their style of architec- ture with those to be found studding the line marked out by Mr. Faber, and leading us back to the East. I need only refer to such colossal remains as Dun Aengus, Dubh Cahir, and Staigue Fort, the builders of which, accord- ing to the tradition detailed by Miss Stokes, “ were a hunted and persecuted race, whose fate would seem to have been mournful and strange. Coming to Ireland through Britain they seem to have been long beaten hither and thither^ till, flying still westward, they were protected by Ailill and Moene, who are said to have lived and reigned in Con- naught about the first century of the Christian era.” They vanish like a dream, but have left behind them these hoary fortresses, the wild and wasted ruins of which still sur- vive the storms and tempests of that bleak and barren region. We must then not only take it for granted, but we are compelled to admit, that previous to the Kelts there existed in Ireland a people who raised the Cyclopean stone build- ings that remain in the most wonderful preservation to the present day. We have only to look at the photographs and engravings in Miss Stokes’s volumes to see that this people were not rude savages, but that they had at any rate a certain amount of architectural ability. These buildings, as before described, are not rude piles of unhewn stones. In the more perfect specimens the stones appear to show marks of the chisel, and are laid in courses, with almost the regularity of a modern building. To this same building race, who have obtained the name of Cyclopeans, are attri- buted by some such earthworks as Newgrange, now referred to as the same class of buildings as the Pyramids, and akin to the earth barrows of which Silbury Hill is the most re- markable. That this people touched the coast of Cornwall is evident from the Cyclopean remains of a vast fort protect- 9 6 THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. in g the promontory on which the Logan rock is situated, and minutely described in all works dealing with Cornish antiquities. Thus far we have facts to guide us. Written record there is none. But in the traditions of the Irish peasantry, whose tenacious minds treasure up the memory of past days, in their tales and fairy mythology, we find a remarkable fact which has been noticed by the late Mr. Kennedy in his “ Fireside Legends,” namely, the frequent reference to an early invasion of Ireland from Africa and Greece, by a people deeply skilled in the mysteries of magic, and apparently civilized. The intimate acquaint- ance shown by the uneducated people with the nomen- clature and geography of the East renders credible their belief that Ireland was peopled thence. Sir William Wilde, in his Belfast address, at the British Association, stated his conviction that the Firbolgs (the name given to the latter invaders) were members of an Eastern nation subdued by the Greeks and reduced to slavery, who had become eman- cipated, and made their way through South Europe to Ire- land. Briant states, on the authority of Herodotus, that the Cyclopeans were in Greece, and were particularly famous for architecture, some of their workmanship being equal to the Pyramids of Egypt. There is then a strong presumption of the arrival in Ireland, at an age long anterior to Christianity, of a people remarkable for their skill in building, which they carried with them from the East in the general westerly movement of the nation of that period, corresponding with the time of the expulsion from Egypt of the shepherd Kings who belonged to the Scuthic race. Let us now try, if possible, to connect this race with the Irish Round Towers. In the first place, then, it had been remarked by many travellers in India and the East, that there existed scattered throughout those countries remains of Round Towers, the origin of which had been forgotten by the present inhabi- tants. At first they were supposed to have been built in THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. 97 imitation of the tower of Babel, but more careful investiga- tion proved them to have been erected either by the adorers of the Sun or by the Phallic worshippers who were widely spread through the East during the Cuthite dominion, and paid adoration to the God of Nature. They built towers and raised obelisks and pillars which were worshipped as emblems of the creative power and origin of strength in “ An odorous, dim, enchanted land, With the dusk stone god for only warden. ” We can find many striking references to this symbol in the old Testament, one of the most remarkable of which I may give as an example ; it is to be found along with several others in Deut. xxii. “ Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful and hast forgotten the God that formed thee.” Mr. Harcourt, an authority on the East, says “ At Moha- balipoor (the city of Baal Peor), or Hercules Belus, the towers are pyramidical : one very old temple stands on the brink of the sea, and midst the dash of the spray a tall pillar is conspicuous. This is worshipped as the lord Belus or Baal, whose emblems are the crescent and all obelisks or pillars, whatever be their shape.” Many of these pillars still exist in the East ; indeed the well-known form of the obelisk, now used as a monument without, any symbolic meaning being attached to it, and for this reason utterly meaningless, may, and is maintained by Mr. Faber to, owe its origin to this ancient Pagan Idolatry. Now if we find pillar-rocks and stones in Ireland exactly corresponding to those in the East, not laid claim to by the Christian religion, and to which are attached legends attri- buting their origin to the East ; and if, moreover, we find a mysterious sanctity placed to their credit, such as these Eastern pillar-stones are held in, then there can be no reason for refusing to assign to them the origin claimed. But such pillar-stones are to be found in Ireland, and H 9 8 THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. are attributed by the Keltic population to an early race who invaded Ireland from Africa and Spain, and brought these sacred emblems with them. Such for instance is the famous Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, now under the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey, and long the stone on which the Scottish Kings of Scotland and Ireland were crowned. Such again is the pillar-stone on Tara Hill; the similar one at Innis-Murray on the Clog-an-ealy at Falcaragh, in addition to many more not so well known. I might now proceed to produce some of the tales about these pillar- stones and compare them with similar fables in the East, but this would occupy too much time, and I hope I have already sufficiently established the strong probabilities on these points : — 1. That previous to our era Ireland was colonized from the East. 2. That this colony brought thence its religion and skill. 3. That its members were capable of performing, and actually accomplished the task of building Cyclopian struc- tures, the marvellous ruins of which exist at the present day. There is one more point to which I have not alluded, and it is incontrovertible, namely, that Round Towers similar to those in Ireland, and even showing the same varieties in structure, were erected ages ago by the early Arian race, at the same period and with the same object as the pillar-stones ; which are indisputably analogous to those in Ireland. Indeed the very names of these latter apparently bear testimony to their origin, since they were called in Irish “ Muidhr,” or the Sun Ray. The Eastern type was also worshipped as the “ Ray of the Sun,” he being the origin of life. The question as to the origin of the Round Towers is scarcely capable of being decided positively — it is in fact a question of probabilities. Having therefore suggested the probability of the Irish Round Towers having been built THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. 99 by the race who erected the pillar-stones, I pass for a time to another side of the argument. I now purpose setting before you and briefly criticising the arguments adopted by Dr. Petrie and his school, more especially his latest disciples, Lord Dunraven and Miss Stokes, who support the Christian origin. Although at first convinced of the truth of Dr. Petrie’s reasoning, a careful consideration threw considerable doubt into its validity, and I am now rather inclined to believe in the truth of Dr. Lanigan’s statement that “ it can scarcely be doubted that the original models according to which they (the Round Towers) were constructed belong to the times of Paganism, and that the singular style of architecture which we observe in them was brought from the East.” Dr. Petrie very fully answers the arguments of those who supported the idea of a Danish origin for the Round Towers, as well as his enthusiastic antagonists on the Pagan side, who tried to show, often with a dishonesty which injured their own cause, that the pre-Christian date of the Round Towers could be proved from ancient documents —passages from which they generally invented or mis- quoted. Indeed so much heat has been generated on either side, whenever the Round Towers formed the subject of discussion, that it might be supposed impossible to con- sider the subject in a dispassionate or Philosophic spirit. The mistake appears to have been that each believed the question capable of positive proof, instead of leaving it as one of probabilities which, as I have already said, I believe to be the only possible method of investigation. And first as to the Keltic title for the Round Tower, Dr. Petrie and his school maintain that it was commonly called Cloig-theach, “a steeple” or “ belfry.” Mr. Keane, on the contrary, derives the word from Clogh, a stone, and insists that it means simply a “stone building” — a distin- guishing name given to these remnants of their predeces- H 2 IOO THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. sors’ skill by the Kelts, who had no stone buildings of their own. A third meaning given to it is that of Father Smiddy, who declares that the universal popular name of the Round Tower in all Irish-speaking parts of Ireland is not cloig- theach nor clog-theach, but cuilctheach, the reed-house or reed-shaped structure. To this last view I shall hereafter refer ; but the conclusion I wish to draw from these various renderings is simply that we cannot derive an argument on any side from the word, and may therefore omit it from the discussion. To the reasoning of O’Brien, Vallancey, and others to prove that the early Irish used these towers for the purposes of fire worship, Druidical astronomical observation, etc., Dr. Petrie remarks that “ Irish History says nothing about the worship of fire in towers,” and this he has satisfactorily proved. But though he denies that such was the case, he fully admits, what I have only asked you to take as a strong probability, that Ireland was colonized by the Chaldic or Cuthite worshippers of fire, whose rites can still be seen in the Beltane fires on St. John’s eve, and many more relics of heathen practises still observed by our peasantry. Dr. Petrie, having demolished the historical “ facts ” of his opponents, next proceeds to prove that the architecture of the Irish churches, usually called Anglo-Norman, is not in reality so, but has a date much anterior to the Norman conquest. This he establishes by a comparison of their respective features, and by references to the annalists giving either the supposed dates of their building or their restora- tion. He then points out that almost without exception the Round Towers are in close proximity to, and in one or two cases in connexion with, a church or churches ; for frequently we find the group of seven churches, peculiar to Ireland in the West, with its attendant tower. Here, however, the learned Doctor makes several admis- sions which appear to tell somewhat against himself. First of all, he says: — “ Much of the Irish ecclesiastical THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. IOI ornamental architecture is of a date anterior to the Norman conquest, and probably even of the Danish irruptions of Ireland,” and he proceeds to say that the remains of the most ancient Irish churches “ have an antiquity of charac- ter rarely to be seen in any of the Christian edifices now remaining in any country of Europe ” and even admits that the early Irish churches are Cyclopean or Pelasgic in their structure ; but accounts for this by the supposition that they were copied by the early Christians from the fortresses of the Firbolgs and Tuatha de Danaans. (It would be cruel to suggest that the architects imitated the Cyclopean structure of the Round Towers, and wished to have their models at hand.) Of the doorway of one of these churches, that of St. Fechin at Fore in the county Westmeath, he relates that “the late eminent antiquarian traveller, Mr. Edward Dodwell, declared to me it was as perfect Cyclopean in its character as any specimen he had seen in Greece. ,, After this startling admission from Dr. Petrie, we shall not be astonished to find Mr. Keane endeavouring, not without some success, to prove that even these “temples” used by the early Christians were of Pagan origin. But the next admission is the most compromising of all. Dr. Petrie feels the very strong likelihood of Goban Saor having built the churches and Round Towers assigned to him. This far-famed mythical architect, whose name is known where lives the Keltic tongue, the Doctor places at the year 620 a.d., without authority, and though quoting from the ancient MS., the Dinnsenchus, which calls him one of the “ goodly dark race.” Then the Doctor admits (p. 304) that he “ might have been one of the Tuatha de Danaan who were distinguished from their conquerors, the Scottish race, by their dark complexion — the latter being fair — as well as by their mental characteristics.” The question of the Goban Saor is too long to enter into. It appears to be more probably the name of a building race 102 THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. than the name of a hero ; but Dr. Petrie’s argument, so far from backing up his theory, seems rather to tell against it. The candid Doctor again, as if purposely showing what can be said against himself, admits (p. 44) Tor Conaing, Tor Breogan, and the towers of Maghturath in Sligo and Mayo, to be of the Cyclopean class of building, earlier than and dis- tinct from all other Christian structures. He is unable to find many references to the building of towers, but gives several quotations which would compel us to admit the Christian origin of at least some of these towers, did he not of his own accord make this remarkable admission: — “ Though the annalists intended to record to restoration of the roof only, the word yopb&t), which they employ, properly signifies to finish or complete.” So that instead of having the building of these towers proved, we are at liberty to choose between their erection and mere restoration ! When, therefore, we next find Dr. Petrie giving a number of references to accounts of steeples and cloightheachs hav- ing been burned at different periods, along with the missals, books, etc., kept therein, we hardly feel ourselves justified in agreeing with his conclusion that these steeples (which he assumes to have been Round Towers) were built for the pur- pose of holding these utensils and protecting them ; and we feel inclined to doubt whether Dr. Petrie had not himself misgivings as to the truth of his own theory, that with but few exceptions the greater number were built at the com- mencement of the 9th century, by the monks, to preserve their valuables from the Danes, who at that period paid their first unwelcome visits to Ireland. Miss Stokes, in opposition to Dr. Petrie, who proves the “ erection” of one in the 6th century (p. 382), admits none earlier than the 9th century, and brings the building of the latest down to the 12th cen- tury. But the fact of their having been used as strongholds, or having been called such, only proves that in those days, when the knowledge of architecture was at its lowest in this country, THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. 103 the monks turned these monuments of the past into their own service, roofing and restoring such as were dilapidated, and probably now and then essaying to revive the art of building them. It however appears to me that they never attained any great success in these endeavours. And this I think capable of proof. It may not be generally known that until the very end of the 9th century the churches of Scotland and Ireland were one. From the time of St. Columba’s mission (a.d. 563) until a.d. 888, it is not too much to say that all the Scottish missionaries were Irish, their monasteries were founded by Irishmen, and the supreme abbots of Iona were regularly chosen from the tribe Cinel Conail of Ulster. Not alone was Scotland christianized by Irishmen, but history states that the wandering Scots, enthusiasts even to the 12th and 13th centuries, who made themselves formidable on the Continent, from Calais to the Rhine, were Irish Kelts. Be- tween Scotland and Ireland the most intimate intercourse existed, bound together as the two countries were by the ties of religion and race. Their literature and arts were common, and regular interchange of commodities took place. But Scotland, like Ireland, was open to the savage incursions of the Danes. Its monasteries were pillaged, burnt, and razed to the ground. Nine times is Iona said to have been plun- dered within a short period, and the only recorded means the clergy had of saving their valuables was that of burying them in the ground. But surely, it will be remarked, they had their Round Towers. Did not the Irish ecclesiastics, who erected hundreds in Ire- land to withstand the Danes, extend a helping hand to their Caledonian brethren, and instruct them in the art of self-de- fence and protection ? Alas, no ! They left them to perish unaided, and the only spots in all Scotland in which we hear of Round Towers are two — Abernethy and Brechin — within miles of which the Danes never ventured. This weighty answer to his reasoning does not appear to 104 THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. have struck Dr. Petrie — nor indeed his opponents for the matter of that — yet we cannot believe him ignorant of the fact that the Irish churchmen, to whom he attributes the con- ception and construction of these wonders of western archi- tecture, kept passing over to Scotland in a continuous stream for three long centuries, and were the great educators of the people — not alone in religion, but in such of the arts and sciences as were then known. I cannot but think that, were they the builders of the Round Towers, we should have found more than two in the whole of Scotland, and found them moreover on the west coast, which was studded with ecclesi- astical buildings, ever open to the visits of the Danes, and not in the Eastern Midlands, where the Danes never were. Nor does it appear to be an argument of any force to point out their proximity to churches and the like. It would have been most natural for the early church builders — granting to Dr. Petrie that the churches do date from the Danish inva- sions — to have placed their churches near edifices which, from their strength and peculiar structure, offered great ad- vantages for the protection of themselves and their sacred chattels against attack. No one has yet explained the meaning of the groups of seven churches in connexion with which we invariably find a Round Tower. Some have supposed them figurative of the seven churches of Asia, which is both improbable — for the same reason as my last argument, that we meet them no- where else — and is unsupported by evidence. Others, among whom I may mention Skene and Dean Reeves of Armagh, consider them peculiar to the early tribe system of the Irish Kelts. These however are but suppositions — precedents and authorities I can find none. I happened lately to come across an odd passage from a work little known — the late Sir William Betham’s Gcel and Cimbri , in which I may observe there is no reference to Round Towers. It is an extract from Jalkut’s commentaries on Jeremiah : — “ ‘Though all other houses of idolatry were in Jerusalem, yet Moloch was with- THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. IO5 out the gates in a private place. He was an image of brass ; he had seven chapels, and they set it on fire within, for it was hollow. * These seven chapels resemble the seven gates with which the Persians honoured the Sun, and mystically represent the seven planets of which the Sun was Moloch or king.” Now, knowing as we do that the worship of Moloch (Baal) or the Sun was extensively practised in Ireland, and that some of its rites still exist, I maintain that there is as much proba- bility that the Round Towers and groups of seven churches were part of this worship, and have lasted to our time, as that they were symbols of the seven churches of Asia, or a part of the Keltic tribe system. On this obscure point additional evidence may be gleaned from Miss Stokes’ essay. Discussing the meaning of cloigh- teach, she says that in the LeabharBreac mention is made of a cloighteach built of silver by Castroe, king of the Medes and Persians. This demonstrates the bare possibility of the brazen Moloch amid his seven chapels being a cloighteach. As to the meaning of this word, cloighteach, on which she builds one of the few arguments not derived from Dr. Petrie, Miss Stokes further on admits it to have been used “ by early Irish writers synonymously with that of a keep, and did not convey the meaning we now associate with church-belfry.” Only twenty-three cloighteachs (whatever they were) are re- ferred to in the Irish Annals, yet, whenever the uses of these buildings are incidentally alluded to, they are invariably spoken of as monastic keeps. Indeed a mere glance at any Round Tower would be sufficient to show the truth of Miss Stokes’ remark that “ viewed as simple belfries and no more, they would appear as poor conceptions and failures in design,” and wanting in Mr. Ruskin’s chief attribute of a noble build- ing — its special fitness for its own purposes. So the defenders of the Christian origin have been com- pelled, in spite of the name, to fall back from the ground of belfry supporters, and take up the position that “ bells small io6 THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. as those left to us still” — such as the hand-bells to be seen any day in the Royal Irish Academy — “ were deposited in them, and they were thence called bell-towers.” Miss Stokes is here, however, apparently inconsistent, for she adds “that the primary object for which they were built was subservient to the accommodation of bells seems a theory which is wholly untenable.” Thus we are utterly at a loss to know the exact purpose for which they would have us believe them erected: — First we are told they were belfries, then this is admitted to be impossible ; next, they are but the receptacles for bells, but this is also admitted untenable. The last theory is that they were strongholds to which the monks fled with their books, bells, et omnia res sacra from the marauding Danes. That they were thus made use of at times is indisputable, but that they were built for the purpose appears improbable, since from their isolated position and scanty accommodation they do not give us the idea of a hastily conceived means of defence by a semi-civilized people, nor did the numerous attacks of the Danes allow of the long periods which would be required to build them. A strong argument of Miss Stokes is a map placed at the end of Lord Dunraven’s work, which shows that the majority of groups of Round Towers are placed in the very districts attacked by the Northmen. From this she argues that they were placed there in anticipation of attack. Perhaps they were; but may we not, with equal plausibility, refer them a couple of thousand years back to withstand, if you will, the attacks of the Danaan or any other of the numerous invaders that swarmed into Ireland ages back? For it will be remarked by this map that the clusters of towers are placed along rivers and valleys stretching from the coast inland, which at all times must have offered the same advantages to invaders. Moreover, we find them in places far inland, which the Danes never thought of attacking, for theirs was an empire of the sea, not of the land. Miss Stokes fairly admits that “ doubt may linger in some THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. 107 unreasoning minds (the only objectionable phrase in the whole work) regarding the connexion between the detached towers and the churches,” but she thinks they will hardly deny an ecclesiastical character to those which are “ attached to and evidently coeval with these buildings. ,, Nine of these are found in Ireland, two in the Orkneys. Of the history of their erection nothing is known or guessed at, with the ex- ception of the Antrim tower and one at St. Mich, de la Poles, Dublin, which I believe, on the authority of the Rev. Mr. Carroll, was destroyed in the year 1777. These Dr. Petrie observes certainly appear to be the latest, probably of the 1 2th century. It is impossible to deny, of course, that these towers are coeval with the attached buildings, but the accu- racy of Dr. Petrie’s judgment may be doubted as to the late date he assigns to them. But even were we to be convinced that these semi-de- tached towers are, with the contiguous buildings, of com- paratively recent date, we could no more argue that all the Round Towers belong to the same period, than that they were all built in the 19th century, because that very perfect specimen in Glasnevin was erected in 1849. An interesting attempt was made by Miss Stokes to ascer- tain the probable date of some of the Round Towers by the remnants of their iron doors. Professor Emerson Reynolds was consulted, but his calculations are not given — possibly because unfavourable — for he said “ it would take a very long time indeed to eat completely through an iron bar of mode- rate thickness,” and Miss Stokes admits it would last 900 years (p. 172). Therefore all but the few remains of iron doors referred to by her, having been eaten through, they must be older than 900 years, and consequently the towers to which they belong. Another evidence of the remote antiquity of the model is the fact that several of the towers, more particularly those of Monasterboice, Kilmacduach, Kilkenny, and Glendalough, are considerably out of the perpendicular, which can only io8 THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. be accounted for by the subsidence of the ground since the time of their erection. The discovery of human bones and skeletons beneath one or two of the Round Towers has been made the subject of much wrangling. In the year 1847 the Rev. James Graves found three skeletons under the base of the Round Tower at Kilkenny. Miss Stokes gives a cross section of the towers, founda- tions, and the bones. She does not however claim the discovery as conclusive, but remarks “that the skeletons were those of Christians is rendered probable by the posi- tion east and west.” The sole authority in support of this astounding statement is a quotation from an early MS. in which a dying chieftain recently converted to Christianity desires to be buried east and west. On the other hand, Dr. Petrie has endeavoured to falsify the discovery of human skeletons by some Cork antiquaries under the tower of Cloyne. They claimed the discovery as a proof of the Pagan origin of that tower, and Dr. Petrie admits it would be conclusive; yet Miss Stokes claims an exactly similar one as evidence of a Christian origin ! Touching this question, it is scarcely necessary to remark that the east and west have had their mysterious charm for ages before Christianity, and that sepulture in that posi- tion was almost universal. It is, therefore, scarcely possible to draw any conclusion from skeletons beneath towers merely from their position. It is strange to find Dr. Petrie deriving one of his argu- ments for the ecclesiastical turres from the well-known tale of Giraldus Cambrensis that, in the words of Moore, “ On Lough Neagh’s banks, as the fisherman strays, When the clear cold eve’s declining, He sees the Round Towers of other days, In the waves beneath him shining.” This picturesque vision is dissipated before the clear cold THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. IOg eye of science, and Dr. Petrie should have known, what any tyro in geology could have told him, that Lough Neagh was formed ages before the present races of man made their appearance on this globe, and therefore cannot contain beneath its waves such memorials of past times. Father Smiddy, to whose work I have already referred, gives a much more rational explanation of the illusion. He considers that the true name of the Tower is cuiltheach or reed-tower, that they were built after the model of a reed both because of the beauty and symmetry of that plant, and that it was the symbol of St. John the Baptist. That the reed-houses were Baptistries, and that the fishermen of Lough Neagh, gazing down through the still pure waters of the lake, mistook the stately reeds for their antitype, the Round Tower. All, however, that can be said for Father Smiddy’s theory, is that it is original and ingenious. The sole evidence he advances in support of it consists of quotations from various authors describing the continental Baptistries as being found nigh and built in proximity to churches. But none of the existing Baptistries on the Continent bear any resemblance to our Round Towers ; and when we investigate the few Round Towers to be seen out of Ireland, none of them are at present, or apparently ever have been, used as such. There are, according to Lord Dunraven, but twenty-two of these on the Continent, while there are one hundred and eighteen existing remains in Ireland. Those on the Conti- nent are in a line stretching from North Italy to Brittany by Pisa, Ravenna, Worms, Strasburg, and Epinal in Lorraine. In the category Miss Stokes places the towers to be found on the Main, but in which I cannot see any resemblance to our Round Towers. She says that the places I have named “mark the path by which the form found its way to Ireland after the year 800.” But here Miss Stokes is contradicted, first by her own references to foreign notices of those towers, showing that I IO THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. the purposes for which they were used were totally different from those she ascribes to the Irish cloighteachs, as when she quotes Eginhard to prove that the Round Towers of St. Gall were designed for watch-towers. Again we have Dr. Petrie’s authority for asserting that the form was known in Ireland previous to Christianity. Lastly, I would refer to a late publication by Westropp on the recent discovery of Round Towers in Brittany, in which he states that, according to the general traditions through- out the country, they were used as beacon-towers to attract the people to the churches after dark. Now though we cannot disbelieve such a statement, coming from so high an authority, it is most unlikely and improbable that these Round Towers in Brittany were built for the purpose of attracting the church-goers at night. The tradition rather suggests the dim remembrance of rites connected with fire having been once practised in those towers. And, remem- bering that Brittany was the last home of the early Pagan inhabitants of Gaul, and that their descendants have re- mained isolated and almost distinct from the rest of France to the present day, it is not to be wondered at that in so small a space more Round Towers exist than in all France or all Europe put together. In the course of this Essay I have endeavoured to place before you in a clear light the interesting problem of the Round Towers and their origin. I have stated the argu- ments for the Christian and Pagan theories, and given my reasons for believing that, as a question of probability, the original of the Round Towers was pre-Christian, and not with the Dane-harassed monks of the 9th, 10th, and nth centuries, and that though they may have been used as keeps, bell-towers, or even Baptistries, they were not erected for such purposes. That we can state with any degree of certainty for what purpose or at what period they were built may not perhaps be possible; but I think we can decide as to whether they THE IRISH ROUND TOWERS. I I I were Christian or Pagan : and whether we come to a definite conclusion or not, the subject is one of interest to every Irishman proud of the antiquities of his land ; it is closely knitted to many others, and has the wondrous charm of the past, in the study of which our minds cannot fail to be enlarged, and “ Thus shall Memory often in dreams sublime Catch a glimpse of the days that are over, Thus, sighing, look through the waves of time For the long-faded glories they cover.” APPENDIX I. UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. MDCCCLXXIX. POUISTDED 1B5S. T. S. FRANK BATTERSBY {Sen. Mod.), B.A. GEORGE YEATES DIXON {Jun. Mod.), B.A. f&tmmtx : ALEX. R. EAGAR {Sen. Mod.), B.A. ^xbxmm : C. E. OSBORNE. H. W. HARRIS, sch. (&mncx I : John Ross, sch., LL.B. {Ex-Pres.) J. Emerson Scott, B.A. ( Ex-Treas .) B. C. A. Windle {Ex-Lib.) R. R. Cherry. George Coffey. QxbXUXg The Treasurer, ex-officio. The Librarian, ex-officio . H. A Cosgrave, M.A. E. P. Culverwell, sch., B.A., Univ. student. W. H. Bell. Adam S. Findlater, B.A. {Ex-Sec.) W. Wilkins, sch., B.A., Univ. stud. Committee : W. K. Dalgleish, M.A. H. S. Butler, M.A. C. W. Welland. I APPENDIX. 114 Pxrox rmg The Right Rev. Charles Graves, D.D., Lord Bishop of Limerick. The Rt. Hon. Sir J oseph Napier, Bart. George F. Shaw, LL.D., T.C.D. The Rev. P. J.Mahaffy,M.A., F.T.C. (Pres. 1858-9.) Francis Tarleton, LL.D., F.T.C. Arthur Palmer, M.A., F.T.C. (Treas. 1861 and 1862-3.) Edward Dowden, LL.D., Professor of Oratory and English Literature (Pres. 1638-4.) F. Reay Greene, M.A., Professor of Natural History, Queen’s College, Cork. E. J. Swifte, B.A. (Sec. 1859-60.) The Rev. T. P. Pope, M.A., ex-sch. (Pres. 1859-60.) Thomas E. Little, M.D., ex-sch. (Treas. 1859-60.) W. H. S. Monck, M.A., ex-sch . J. Butler Yeates, B.A. The Rev. John Dowden, M.A. Maurice C. Hime, LL.D., ex-sch . Hon. David Robert Plunket, Q.C., M.P. Henry O’Hea, B.A. (Pres. 1865-6.) George F. Armstrong, M.A., Prof, of Modern Lit., Queen’s College, Cork (Pres. 1865, and 1867-8.) John Todhunter, M.D. ®xVxmtQ 1. J. Howard Pentland, A.I.B. 2. *G. A. Greene, B.A. (Ex-Sec.) 3. A. S. Findlater, B.A., M.C. (Ex- Sec.) 4. *A. St. G. Patton, B.A. (Ex- Pres.) 5. George N. Plunkett. 6. *Harold Littledale, B.A. (Ex- Pres.) 7. William Y. Kane, B.A. 8. *Rev. Samuel Sandys, B.A. 9. J. Emerson Scott, B.A. (Ex- Treas.) H Imhm : William R. Brownrigg, B.A., ex-sch . (Pres. 1854-5.) Rev. Henry R. Stewart, B.A. (Treas. 1854-5.) William Oldham, B.A. Francis S. Stoney, B.A. T. E. Webb, LL.D., Ex-F.T.C., Regius Professor of Civil Law. William Rea Larminie, B.A. Isaac Bryan, M.A. John Ribton Garstin, M.A. Rev. W. Hardman, LL.D. Rev. James Walsh, B.D., ex-sch. Henry J. Moses, M. A., LL.B. John Short, B.A. Rev. Hewitt R. Poole, M.A., F.T.C. Abraham Stoker, M.A. (Pres. 1870.) J. B Sandford, B.A. (Pres. 1869.) The Right Hon. Edward Gibson, M.A., M.P., Q.C. The Right Hon. Gerald Fitz Gibbon, M.A., Lord Justice of Appeal (Ex- Sec. 1857-8.) Professor Mir Aulad Ali. George M. W. Hill, B.A. (Ex- Treas.) Robert S. Ball, LL.D., Astronomer Royal (Pres. 1860-1.) Rev. John Baptist Crozier, M.A. Pres. 1874-5.) Rev. J. W. Stubbs, D.D., F.T.C. George Fitzgerald, M.A., F.T.C. $mbm : 10. L. Edward Steele, B.A. 11. * William H. Line, B.A. 12. *John Ross, sch. y LL.B. (Ex- Pres.) 13. H. B. L. Overend, B.A. 14. T. W. Lewis, B.A. 15. J. A. Jennings. 16. Rev. T. S. R. Lindsay, B.A. 17. Arthur Baker, B.A. 18. T. S. Frank Battersby, B.A. (President). 19. a W. F. Starkie, B.A. (Ex-Lib.) 20. William Cox Neville, B.A. * Obiit Dec., 1878. APPENDIX JI 5 21. E. C. M ‘Master. 22. G. W. Walker, sch. 23. Henry A. West. 24. E. J. Stokes, sch., B.A. 25. E. L. Pontifex. 26. Joseph Bewley, B.A. 27. J. J. Kingsbury. 28. C. J. DuBedat. 29. E. P. Culverwell, B.A., Univ. student , M.C. 30. S. P. Boyd. 31. *Rev. T. W. Clarendon, B.A. 32. W. F. Cosgrave. 33. *Alex. R. Eagar, B.A. [lion. Treas.) 34. F. Dwyer. 35. T. W. Rolleston, B.A. 36. C. E. Osborne [Hon. Lib.) 37. Bertram C. A. Windle [Ex- Lib.) 38. P. Daviez. 39. A. E. Jacob. 40. S. P. Johnston, sch. 41. H. W. Harris, sch. 42. C. A. Owen, B.A. 43. W. A. Carte. 44. D. D’Arcy. 45. J. W. Joynt, B.A., Univ. stud., M.C. 46. Frederic Searigbt. 47. George Searigbt. 48. R. C. I. Whitty. 49. J. H. Bernard. 50. G. Johnston. 51. G. D. Burtchaell, LL.B. 52. E. Robinson. 53. C. J. Graham. 54. J. Lindsay. 55. H. Glenn. 56. G. H. Andrews. 57. J. Chute. 58. W. G. Jefferson. 59. R. R. Cherry, M.C. 60. H. E. Austin. 61. W. H. Irvine. 62. C. H. Austin. 63. H. D. Brown. 64. A. S. Hartigan. 65. T. R. Smith. 66. W. Stephens. 67. J. H. Nunn, LL.B. 68. T. P. Ryan. 69. A. J. Cockle. 70. George Yeates Dixon, B.A. [Hon. Sec.) 71. C. I. Fry. 72. H. Palmer. 73. D. S Robertson. 74. H. E. Taaffe. 75. J. A. James. 76. George Coffey, M.C. 77. W. R. Joynt. 78. E. M. Griffin. 79. A. Duncan. 80. H. C. Waddell. 81. L. W. Gilliland. 82. J. Gilmore. 83. A. C. Hillier. 84. H, J. Daly. 85. Rev. F. H. Smyth, M.D. 86. H. D. Conner. 87. E. W. Harris. 88. G. Stokes. 89. N. Falkiner. 90. A. Geoghegan. 91. D. Tighe. 92. J. B. Richardson. 93. J. Johnson. 94. J. M. A. Weisse. 95. D. E. Burtchaell. 96. A. J. Boyd. 97. R. Manning. 9s. V. Manning. 99. R. T. Lewis. 100. G. A. C. May. 101. J. Howlin. 102. A. R. Thompson. 103. M. F. Day. 104. G. F. Reid. 105. L. T. Young. 106. J. B. Wright. 107. F. W. Mervyn. 108. R. M‘Larney. 109. S. L. Robinson. 110. C. F. D’Arcy. 111. a W. Wilkins, sch., B.A. , Univ. student, M.C. 112. C. Wilkins, sch. 113. H. P. Goodbody. 114. W. C. Lucas. 115. C. Roulston. 116. W. Beatty. 117. J. R. Holt, sch. 118. James Bernard. Obiit Jan., 1879. I 2 APPENDIX. I 16 119. B. E. Christie. 120. H. E. Blandford. 121. T. Tomlinson. 122. G. Wilkins, sch . 123. Y. H. A. Smith. 124. T. H. J. Orr. 125. W. Sheane. 126. H. S. Macintosh, sch. 127. It. Russell, sch. 128. W. H. Windle. 129. J. Gray. 130. J. F. N. Greene. 131. S. A. James. 132. F. J. Anderson. 133. W. J. McClelland. 134. W. J. Wilson. 135. A. M l Cully. 136. R. Ferguson. 137. W. P. Blood. 138. F. R. Beatty. 139. W. H. Bell, M.C. 140. S. Bernard. 141. E. Beveridge. 142. H. Brownrigg, 143. J. Byrne. 144. W. Coates, sch. 145. S. Constable. 146. J. Earl. 147. S. M. Eccles. 148. P. Egerton. 149. H. S. Gabbett. 150. Hugh Gabbett. 151. W. H. Gater, Mus. Bac. 152. C. Gaussen. 153. Rev. F. Hamilton. 154. G. C. Kingsbury. 155. W. Lawless. 156. W. H. Lowry. 157. W. Lucas. 158. E. McClelland. 159. H. C. J. Nixon. 160. J. E. Pirn. 161. A. Shaw. 162. J. Walsh. 163. H. C. West. 164. E. F. B. Wilson. 165. J. T. Carson. 166. W. F. Bailey. 167. A. Porter. 168. J. Martin. 169. J. J. Beare. 170. C. L. Nolan. 171. M. T. Duggan. 172. T. McClelland. 173. J. B. McDermott. 174. C. D. Seymour. 175. J. Barrington. 176. F. Molyneux. 177. F. Mouillot. 178. P. H. Grierson. 179. J. Bulphin. 180. C. B. Buicke. 181. A. Panter. 182. R. Longford. 183. L. E. Le Doux. 184. C. Hamilton. 185. G. Raymond. 186. G. R. Church. 187. II. Ferguson. 188. F. Blackburne. 189. W. R. Hackett. 190. S. M. Rhodes. 191. W. Fenton. 192. A. Fenton. 193. C. E. Cairns. 194. W. A. Middleton. 195. J. H. Reid. 196. D. Kirkpatrick. 197. H. E. S. Langley. 198. F. T. Bagwell. 199. W. F. Alrnent. 200. W. M. Hackett. 201. F. 0. Sutton. 202. E. G. Newell. 203. A. Lindsay. 204. C. H. Oldham. 205. A. N. Halpin. 206. R. Gamble. 207. G. H. Garrett, B.A., Vniv . student . 208. W. L. Hanna. 209. G. Clibborn, B.A. 210. G. H. Bailey. 211. W. Drury. 212. H. L. Ferguson. 213. H. C. Weir. 214. W. P. Magee. 215. J. D. O’Connor. 216. J. N. James. 217. S. J. Carolin. 218. J. Lecky. 219. T. Nelson Tickell. 220. W. Stockley. 221. J. P. Johnston. APPENDIX. I n 222. J. H. Longford. 223. L. Milne. 224. Maurice H. Collis. 225. Hugh Massy. 226. Ashleigh Sharp. 227. R. Y. Dixon. 228. R. Gi. Webster. 229. Gi. B. Power. 230. J. T. Darragh. 231. R. A. Kernan. 232. E. W. Digby, 233. R. F. Hayes, sch. 234. B. Daly. 235. W. H. Winter. 236. J. W. M‘Loughlin. 237. W. Ball. 238. J. Mallin. 239. Alex. Findlater. 240. S. Robinson. 241. R. Fleming. 242. J. M. A Lewis. 243. J. D. Mayne-Colles. 244. Eric Wright. 245. A. Andrews. 246. E. H. Nunns. 247. A. J. Boyd. 248. J. F. Beare. 249. W. Lindsay. emit lumbers : 250. Gi. Alexander. 251. H. J. D. Astley. 252. W. C. Barrett. 253. W. H. Bennett. 254. E. S. Bernard. 255. E. Briscoe. 256. H. S. Butler, M.A., M.L.C. 257. W. J. Butler. 258. H. A. Cosgrave, M.A. 259. Y. K. Dalgleish, M.A., M.L.C. 260. S. Davis. 261. John Dockrill, M.A. 262. *Rev. J. A. Donovan, B.A. 263. Gi. M. Eccles. 264. Gi. Fetberston H. 265. H. S. Gabbett, M.A. 266. H. Hall. 267. L. Jennings. 268. A. H. Leahy. 269. J. MacCrossan. 270. E. MacLougblin. 271. D. J. MacSbeaban. £72. Thomas M‘Gee. 273. Rev. J. E. Murphy, B.A. 274. Y. 0. B. Newell, M.A. 275. W. H. Neilson. 276. R. G. Paul. 277. R. J. Polden, B.A. [Ex. Sec.) 278. A. Reid. 279. J. W. Richards. 280. D. S. Robertson. 281. J. N. Seymour. 282. H. L. Stein, B.A. 283. J. E. L. Stein, B.A. 284. R. W. Stein, B.A. 285. A. L. Stephenson. 286. W. E. Stevenson, M.A. 287. F. T. Stonex. 288. Edward Warren. 289. James W. Warren. 290. C. W. Welland, M.L.C. 291. J. Mostyn. APPENDIX. 1 18 APPENDIX II. PROCEEDINGS OF SESSION 1877-8. Those Essays marked (*) were recommended to compete for the Society’s Medals. Thuesday, November 29th , 1877. Essay : — * “ The Supernatural in English Poetry. By C. E. Osboene. Speakees. G. A. Greene, B.A. [Ex-Sec.) A. B. Eagar, B.A. H. W. Harris, M.C. J. H. Weisse. A Palmer, F.T. C.D. [Hon. Mem.). Thuesday, December §th, 1877. Essay : — “ Critiques and Reviews.” By R. M‘Laeney. Speakees. A. R. Eagar, B. A., M.C. R. C. J. Whitty. C. E. Osborne. H. W. Harris. J. W. Joynt, B. A., sch. A. S. Findlater, B. A., ex- Sec. W. L. Gilliland. E. P. Culverwell, B. A., sch. Thuesday, December 13 th, 1877. Essay : — * “ The Influence of City Life on Poetry.” By W. Wilkins, sch. Speakees. J. E. Scott [Hon. Treas.) T. S. F. Battersby [Hon. Sec.), B.A. B. C. A. Windle [Hon. Lib.) C. E. Osborne. •T. W. Joynt, B. A., sch, G. Y. Dixon, B. A, E, J. Stokes, B. A., sch. G. A. Greene, B. A. J. H. Weisse. T. W. Rolleston. A. R, Eagar, B. A. APPENDIX. i*9 Thursday, December VAst, 1877. Essay : — * “ The Element of Love in the Greek Drama.” By . W. C. Bouchier, B. A., sch. Speakers. It. C. J. Whitty. ltev. Jeremiah Donovan. J. H. Pentland, B.A. W. H. Carnegie. A. C. Hillier. G. D. Bnrtchaell, LL. B. H. W. Harris. G. Y. Dixon, B.A. J. H. Weisse. Thursday, January 10 th, 1878. Essay : — * “ On the Origin of the Bound Towers.” By T. S. F. Battersby, B. A., Secretary . George Coffey. A. R. Eagar, B. A. H. W. Harris. G. D. Burtchaell, LL. B. B. C. W indie (Hon. Lib.) Speakers. J. H. Pentland, B.A. Professor Mir Aulad Ali, Hon. Mem. A. S. Findlater, B.A. Henry O’Neill, Esq. a Thursday, January 17 th, 1878. Essay : — * “ Liberalism and Literature.” By A. C. Hillier. Speakers. W. Wilkins, sch. T. W. Rolleston. C. E. Osborne. J. H. Weisse. G. A. Greene, B.A. Thursday, January 24 th, 1878. Essay : — “ Higher Education of Women, and its Influence on Young Men of the Day.” By J. H. Weisse. Speakers. H. W. Harris. R. M‘Larney. A. R. Eagar, B. A. G. Coffey. A. C. Hillier. Rev. Mr. Macdonald, M. A. G. A. Greene, B. A. Rev. J. Donovan, B. A. R. R. Cherry. J. Ross, President . Thursday, January 31s£, 1878. Essay : — “ King Arthur.” By G. D. Burtchaell, LL. B. B. C. A. Win die. E. J. Stokes, B. A., sch. J, E, Scott. Speakers. C. Wilkins, sch. T. S. F. Battersbv (Hon. Sec.), B.A. A. C. Hillier. Author of “ Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland.” 120 APPENDIX. Thursday, February 1th, 1878. Essay : — “ Dress — Ancient and Modern.” By G. Searight. J. H. Weisse. C. E. Osborne. G. Y. Dixon, B. A. R. C. I. Whitty. H. W. Harris. Speakers. G. D. Burtchaell, LL. B. A. S. Findlater, B. A. T. S. F. Battersby [Hon. Sec.), B. A. W. R. Joynt. W. F. Bailey. Thursday, February 14 th, 1878. Essay .*— * “ The Action of the Mind in Dreaming.” By R. R. Cherry. Speakers. S. Sandys, B. A. A. R. Eagar, B. A. B. C. A. Windle. J. H. Weisse. W. H. L. Bell. — Irvine. G. A. Greene, B. A, — Smith. Thursday, February 21 st, 1878. Essay : — “ Mortality of Mind.” By J. E. Scott, Treasurer . Speakers. T. S. F. Battersby [Hon. Sec.), B.A. A. R. Eagar, B. A. J. H. Weisse. W. H. Line, B. A. George Coffey. Professor Mir Aulad Ali {Hon. Mem.) S. P. Johnston. Thursday, February 28 th, 1878. Essay : — * “ Some Present Questions connected with Education.” By H. W. Harris. J. W. Joynt, B. A., sch. G. D. Burtchaell, LL. B. W. H. Line, B. A. Speakers. C. E. Osborne. S. Sandys, B. A. A. S. Findlater (Ex- Sec.), B. A. Thursday, March 1th, 1878. Essay : — “ The Political Education of the Working Classes.” By W. F. Starkie, B.A., Ex-Librarian. Speakers. T. S. F. Battersby (Hon. Sec.), B.A. J. E. Scott (H071. Treas .), B.A. A. R. Eagar, B.A. A. S. Findlater, B.A. G. A. Greene, B.A. J. H. Weisse. APPENDIX. I 2 I Thursday, March 14 th, 1878. Essay : — “ Russia at the Present Day.” By G. Y. Dixon, B.A. Speakers. A. C. Hillier. G. D. Burtchaell, LL.B. J. H. Weisse. A. R. Eagar, B.A. W. H. L. Bell. H. W. Harris. T. S. E. Battersby (Hon. Sec.), B.A. T. Robertson. Rev. J. Donovan. Professor Mir Aulad Ali. Thursday, March 21 st, 1878. Essay: — * “ The Teuton and the Kelt in Ireland.” By E. I. Stokes, sch ., B.A. Speakers. J. E. Scott {Hon. Treas .), B.A. W. H. Carnegie. T. Robertson. G. D. Burtchaell, LL.D. R. R. Cherry. J. H. Weisse. G. Coffey. C. F. D’Arcy. Thursday, May 9th , 1878. Essay : — * “ The Drama, Ancient and Modern, and its Effect on Culture.” By J. W. Joynt, sch., B.A. Speakers. H. W. Harris. J. E. Scott (Hon. Treas.), B.A. G. D. Burtchaell, LL.B. A. S. Findlater (Ex-Sec.) J. H. Weisse. Thursday, May 1 6th, 1878. Essay : — * “ Pantheism.” By A. R. Eagar, B.A. Speakers. E. I. Stokes, sch. G. Coffey. A. C. Hillier. A. S. Findlater (Ex-Sec.) J. E. Scott (Hon. Treas.), B.A. Thursday, May 2Zrd, 1878. Essay : — “ Public Opinion.” By G. A. Greene, B.A. (Ex-Sec.) Speakers. J. H. Weisse. C. E. Osborne. W. H. L. Bell. H. R, Eagar. A. S. Findlater (Ex-Sec.) J. W. Joynt, sch., B.A. A. C. Hillier. 122 APPENDIX. Thursday, May 30 th, 1878. Essay : — * “ The England of the Future.” By A. S. Findlater, B.A. Speakers. J. H. Weisse. W. H. L. Bell. J. E. Taaffe. G. D. Burtchaell, LL.B. J. W. Joynt, sch., B.A. H. W. Harris. A. R. Eagar, B.A. A. C. Hillier. Thursday, June 6th , 1878. Essay : — * “ Intermediate Education.” By F. H. Smyth, M.D. Speakers. H. W. Harris. J. H. Weisse. G. Jefferson. W. H. L. Bell. G. D. Burtchaell, LL.B. J. W. Joynt, sch ., B.A. A. S. Findlater, B.A. [Ex-Sec.) Wednesday, June 19 th, 1878. Essay : — “ The Chinese Opium Trade.” By H. D. Brown. Speakers. B. C. Windle [Hon, Lib.) J. H. Weisse. E. J. Stokes, sch. F. H. Smyth, M.D. G. D. Burtchaell, LL.B. Essay — By J. E. Taaeee. Speakers. A. R. Eagar, B.A. J. H. Weisse. G. Stokes. APPENDIX 123 APPENDIX III. LIST OF PRIZEMEN AND MEDALLISTS SINCE THE FOUNDATION OF THE SOCIETY (1854). COMPOSITION. Composition Medallists wear sky-blue ribbons. Year First Prize. Second Prize. Third Prize. 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 Henry A. Dixon. ( Arch. Hamilton. 1 ( Isaac Ashe. j Robert Ball, sch. Maurice Wilkinson. Edward Dowden. Edward Dowden. Benj. Purser, sch. Geo. F. Armstrong. John Todhunter. T. W. Snagg. Lucas King. Isaac Ashe. John Shortt. Geo. W. Hingston. Benj. Purser, sch. E. King. Edm. J. Armstrong. Henry O’Hea. 0. Handcock, sch . James S. Monck. M. Cullinan, sch . ( W. M. C. Stewart. 1 M. C. Cullinan, sch. B. Moffett, sch. * President’s Gold Medal. First Prize. Second Prize. 1866 John Todhunter. G. F. Armstrong. W. E. Ormsby. 1867 ( Geo. F. Armstrong, j W. E. Burroughs, ( Standish O’ Grady, \ Pres. | Treas. ( sch., ex- Sec. ( W. E. Burroughs, ( Standish O’ Grady, j ex- Treas. — I QUO ( sch ., ex -Sec. ( Herbert Wilson. First Silver Medal .t Second Silver Medal.t 1869 J. B. Sandford, Pres. J. F. V. Fitzgerald. W. Crooke, sch. t Henry E. W. Adair, 1870 W. T. King. H. Wilson, Pres. < Sec. , andK. Franks 1871 P. H. C. Herbert. C. W. Frizell. { (equal). William Wilde. 1872 Thomas Stoker, B.A. Henry S. Gabbett. Charles L. Matheson. 1873 H. S. Gabbett, B.A. E. J. Hardy, B.A. Arthur Patton. j R. J. Polden, B.A. 1874 G. A. Greene, Treas. Arthur Patton, Sec. J. A. Donovan, B.A. 1875 Arthur Patton, Pres. J. A. Donovan. ( (equal). W. Fitzgerald, B.A. 1876 W. F. Starkie, B.A., A. E. Eagar, B.A. W. H. Line, B.A. ex-Lib. 1877 A. H. Smith, B.A., Samuel Sandys. — sch. / J. W. Joynt, 1st Cer- 1878 A. R. Eagar, B.A., W. Wilkins, B.A., ) tificate. Treas. sch., Univ. stud. i T. S. F. Battersby, ' v (Pres.), B. A., 2nd do. Presented by the outgoing President. + In accordance with a resolution of the Society. 124 APPENDIX MEDALS IN ORATORY. Medallists in Oratory wear crimson ribbons. Year. Silver Medal. First Certificate. Second Certificate. 1860 ( C. E. Wright, sch. { John Shortt. — — 1862 Edw. Dowden, Pres. — — 1863 H. C. Kirkpatrick. — — 1864 G. F. Armstrong. . — — 1865 Henry O’Hea, Pres. W. A. Macdonald, sch. W. E. Burroughs. 1866 W. Green, sch., Pres. W. A. Macdonald, sch. S. O’ Grady. 1867 S. O’Grady, sch., ex - Sec. W. Burroughs, Treas. H. Shackle ton, Sec. 1868 William Crooke, sch. J. B. Sandfoid. J. Scott. 1869 J. B. Sandford, Pres. H. B. Adair. A. Stoker. 1870 H. B. Adair, Sec. C. M. Arundell. G. M. Hill, Treas. 1871 C. M. Arundell, Pres. C. L. Matheson. W. Wilde. 1872 Thomas Stoker. C. W. Frizell, Pres. J. B. Crozier, Treas. 1873 W. C. K. Wilde, B.A. J. Bobinson, B.A., Pres. J. B. Crozier, B.A., Pres. Arthur Patton. 1874 Arthur Patton. J. A. Donovan, B.A. 1875 C. G. Booth. J. A. Donovan, B.A. C. D. Moutray, G. A. Greene, Treas. (ext.) 1876 Harold Littledale. John Boss, sch., LL.B. G. N. Plunkett. 1877 John Boss, sch., LL.B. Alex. B. Eagar, B.A. J. Emerson Scott, B.A., Lib. G. D. Burtchaell, LL.B. (extra). 1878 J. W. Joynt, B.A., sch., Univ. stud. G. D. Burtchaell, LL.B. A. S. Findlater, A.B., ex-Sec. OCCASIONAL PRIZES EOR COMPOSITION. Year. Prizemen. Subject of Essay. By whom offered. 1858 1860 1860 1864 J. J. Brown. W. H. S. Monck. Bohert Young. 1. D. Colquhoum 2. None awarded. “ William III.” 1 “Mr. Mansel’s Philo- \ sophical Position, j “The Ends of the Uni - ( versitv Curriculum.” / 1 . “ The Influence of 1 Milton’s Blindness j on his Poetry.” ' 2. “Public Opinion.” J. W. Hardman, B.A. W. B. Brownrigg, B.A., sch., ex- Pres. { J. P. Mahaffy, B A. \ sch., ex- Pres. / 1. Bev. W. Ferrar, M.A., F.T.C.D. j 2. B. Ball, sch., Univ. \ stud., ex- Pres. APPENDIX. 125 MEDALS IN .ESTHETICS. Medallists in j. E sthetics wear white ribbons. Year. Prize. To whom awarded. By whom offered. 1869 Gold Medal. Herbert Wilson, Sec. ( Geo. F. Armstrong, ( ex- Pres. First Silver Medal. George Hill. ( Abraham Stoker, ex- ( Sec. Second Silver Medal. A. Barrington Orr. J. B. Sandford, Pres. 1 Geo. F. Armstrong, \ ex-Pres. 1870 Gold Medal. G. M. Hill, Treas. 1871 Gold Medal. C. M. Arundell, Pres. { Geo. F. Armstrong, ( ex-Pres. Silver Medal. J. J. Robinson. The Society. 1872 Gold Medal. K. M. Franks, sch. Geo. F. Armstrong, ex-Pres. 1873 Silver Medal. H. A. Cosgrave, B.A. The Society. 1874 Silver Medal. G. A. Greene, Treas. The Society. 1875 Silver Medal. R. J. Polden, B.A. The Society. 1876 Silver Medal. T. Clarendon, B.A. The Society. 1877 None awarded. — — 1878 Silver Medal. A. R. Eagar,B.A.,Tmw. The Society. Course f or Esthetic Medal , 1879 : — Liibke, “ Hist, of Art,” Yol. I. Lessing, “Lacoon.” Taine, “ Philosophic de l’Art.” Bellairs, “ The Fine Arts and their Uses.” Haweis, “Music and Morals.” ( Last Edition.) SILVER MEDAL IN POETRY. YearJ 1 To whom awarded. Subject. By whom offered. 1869 1 1 Alfred P. Graves, ) l sch. ) Orpheus and Eurydice. T. H. Tydd (ex-Pres.) APPENDIX IV. LIST OF OFFICERS SINCE THE FOUNDATION OF THE SOCIETY. 126 APPENDIX. ■ZLSl “’(TOM JO P-reoa QT# ‘ifygpog 9 q; 0 ; suioo^j jo ihhjS 9q^ no p9;n;i;siii 9opjo £ M o p 03 os O O a 00 a CD U t 3 0 0 * 0 m bQ q 1 ^ S £ •- ^ a 0 a 3 p g a p q H d P H p t 3 P 13 P d H H <1 p 5 « -e o P £ w o P W w ,§ . o o o o P % ^ £ £ oq m d d d d x o . nd P p P <3 £ .3 « M ^ -P r-H M H • c 3 w 3 a p M o 5H O P d ^3 +3 fe: 2 bo o l-H *fH P d ^ 1 I p Jt ’ 5 * . ^ CD o P P APPENDIX. 127 •sm ‘ (tom j° oq; £q ‘ijoioog 0q; 0 ; sraoo£ jo juujS oqj no p0jn;i;sui ooqjQ >> cc (-1 •<- 0 P rd -4-> r d 3 TS s 0! r— 1 © NJ 'a m >* 0 * & f-T © | -g © £ < W pq EH Hs’ t-H HH d d -+^ c3 to P PH 3 O r-^ 3 P d d 5h <1 ■p eg hH HH 'g >-a OD H *0 00 - CO CO co 00 00 00 GO OO OO co r- GO GO (£•) Prof, of Astronomy. (f) Prof. Eng. Lit. Queen’s Coll. Cork (1/ ) F.T.C.D. 128 APPENDIX M HH Q Jz; H Ph Ph <1 m EH ft o o o PH o eh o Pn Eh tji PQ <1 / 4 o b U o U ACME BOOKBINDING CO., INC. 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