Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings, by George Eliot.

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The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete,

by George Eliot.

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Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings,

by George Eliot.

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The reviews are set in the order they were written, following the order the essays and articles were originally read, as ordered in various collections they were read from; the first few therefore being, Three Months In Weimar, and from collections - Impressions Of Theophrastus Such, and Essays of George Eliot Complete.

The latter title is as misleading as titles of various complete collections of works of George Eliot - most aren't complete, and nor is the collection of essays.

Here is an effort to put all the reviews - mine - together.

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Contents

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THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

Impressions of Theophrastus Such

The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.

Other Essays.

Poems

................................................................................................

THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

by George Eliot.

Frasers Magazine for Town and Country,

51: 306 (1855:June)

................................................................................................

Impressions of Theophrastus Such,

Contents

I. Looking Inward.

II. Looking Backward.

III. How We Encourage Research.

IV. A Man Surprised at his Originality.

V. A too Deferential Man.

VI. Only Temper.

VII. A Political Molecule.

VIII. The Watch-Dog of Knowledge.

IX. A Half-Breed.

X. Debasing the Moral Currency.

XI. The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb.

XII. “So Young!”

XIII. How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials, and Believe in Them.

XIV. The too Ready Writer.

XV. Diseases of Small Authorship.

XVI. Moral Swindlers.

XVII. Shadows of the Coming Race.

XVIII. The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!

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The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.

CONTENTS.

Preface,

“George Eliot’s” Analysis of Motives,

I.—Carlyle’s Life of Sterling,

II.—Woman in France,

III.—Evangelical Teaching,

IV.—German Wit,

V.—Natural History of German Life,

VI.—Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,

VII.—Worldliness and Other-Worldliness,

VIII.—The Influence of Rationalism,

IX.—The Grammar of Ornament,

X.—Felix Holt’s Address to Workingmen,

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Other Essays.

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Contents as in various collections

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Contents from The Complete Works of George Eliot,

e-artnow, 2020

Contact: info@e-artnow.org EAN: 4064066398552

Carlyle’s Life of Sterling

Woman in France: Madame de Sablé

Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming

German Wit: Henry Heine

The Natural History of German Life

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young

The Influence of Rationalism The Grammar of Ornament

Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt

George Forster

Margaret Fuller

How to Avoid Disappointment

The Wisdom of the Child

A Little Fable with a Great Moral

Hints on Snubbing

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric

Leaves from a Note-Book

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Contents (from the Complete Works of George Eliot,

identical contents from four separate collections

including two publications from JA,

one from ATOZ Classics, and one other.)

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.

How to Avoid Disappointment.

The Wisdom of the Child.

A Little Fable with a Great Moral.

Hints on Snubbing.

Carlyle’s Life of Sterling.

Margaret Fuller.

Woman in France: Madame de Sablé.

Three Months in Weimar.

Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming.

German Wit: Henry Heine.

The Natural History of German Life.

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.

George Forster.

Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young.

The Influence of Rationalism.

The Grammar of Ornament.

Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt.

Leaves from a Note-Book.

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Contents from

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF GEORGE ELIOT

Delphi

THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM

IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH

CARLYLE’S LIFE OF STERLING

WOMAN IN FRANCE: MADAME DE SABLÉ

EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING

GERMAN WIT: HENRY HEINE WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS: THE POET YOUNG

THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT

ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT

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Our order of reviews, followed (after

THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

Impressions of Theophrastus Such

The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.)

For Other Essays.

................................................................................................

Other Essays.

................................................................................................

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.

How to Avoid Disappointment.

The Wisdom of the Child.

A Little Fable with a Great Moral.

Hints on Snubbing.

Margaret Fuller.

George Forster.

Leaves from a Note-Book

................................................................................................

George Forster

Margaret Fuller

How to Avoid Disappointment

The Wisdom of the Child

A Little Fable with a Great Moral

Hints on Snubbing

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric

Leaves from a Note-Book

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On reading - fortunately - From the Note-Book of an Eccentric first, it would seem that other essays are a part of this, and this ought to gave been the title of this collection. So we shall read, and write review, in this order, beginning with that one.

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Reviews.

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THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

by George Eliot.

Frasers Magazine for Town and Country,

51: 306 (1855:June)

................................................................................................

A very charming description of Weimar from travels of George Eliot, but impossible to find as a publication except in a collection of her works. It's not even included amongst what's published as a complete collection of her essays, for some reason.

One tends to trust a name, and Delphi is such a name, but then one realises the trust was misplaced. Not only at least one work of George Eliot is missing from this supposedly complete collection of her works, but even in such a small essay as THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR, several paragraphs are missing. Here quotes below are from two separate sources for this piece, namely, this work,

The Complete Works of George Eliot:

Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays

& Biography by George Eliot.

Kindle Edition, 6581 pages

Published by e-artnow,

July 2nd 2020,

ASIN:- B08C8NLXQB

apart from Delphi.

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To begin with, one is startled as one reads the opening.

"IT was between three and four o’clock on a fine morning in August that, after a ten hours’ journey from Frankfort, I awoke at the Weimar station. No tipsiness can be more dead to all appeals than that, which comes from fitful draughts of sleep on a railway journey by night. To the disgust of your wakeful companions, you are totally insensible to the existence of your umbrella, and to the fact that your carpet bag is stowed under your seat, or that you have borrowed books and tucked them behind the cushion. ‘What’s the odds, so long as one can sleep?’ is your formule de la vie, and it is not until you have begun to shiver on the platform, in the early morning air that you become alive to property and its duties, i.e., to the necessity of keeping a fast grip upon it. Such was my condition when I reached the station at Weimar. ... "

If one has read George Eliot's works, one doesn't expect the touch of humour that seems more of a Jerome K Jerome than her! But the picture is familiar in the arriving at unearthly hours at a train station in Germany. And further, too.

"The ride to the town thoroughly roused me, all the more because the glimpses I caught from the carriage window were in startling contrast with my preconceptions. The lines of houses looked rough and straggling, and were often interrupted by trees peeping out from the gardens behind. At last we stopped before the, Erbprinz, an inn of long standing in the heart of the town, and were ushered along heavy-looking in-and-out corridors, such as are found only in German inns, into rooms which overlooked a garden just like one you may see at the back of a farm-house in many an English village."

" ... A loud rumbling of vehicles may indeed be heard now and then; but the rumbling is loud not because the vehicles are many, but because the springs are few. ... "

" ... Our ideas were considerably modified when, in the evening, we found our way to the Belvedere chaussee, a splendid avenue of chesnut trees, two miles in length, reaching from the town to the summer residence of Belvedere; when we saw the Schloss, and discovered the labyrinthine beauties of the park; indeed, every day opened to us fresh charms in this quiet little valley and its environs. ... "

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Authors of her era didn't begin to use paragraph break when changing topics, and simply ran on until the page was exhausted, didn't they!

"First among all its attractions is the Park, which would be remarkably beautiful even among English parks, and it has one advantage over all these—namely, that it is without a fence. It runs up to the houses, and far out into the corn-fields and meadows, as if it had a “sweet will” of its own, like a river or a lake, and had not been planned and planted by human will. Through it flows the Ilm, not a clear stream, it must be confessed, but, like all water, as Novalis says, “an eye to the landscape.” Before we came to Weimar we had had dreams of boating on the Ilm, and we were not a little amused at the difference between this vision of our own and the reality. A few water-fowl are the only navigators of the river, and even they seem to confine themselves to one spot, as if they were there purely in the interest of the picturesque. The real extent of the park is small, but the walks are so ingeniously arranged, and the trees are so luxuriant and various, that it takes weeks to learn the turnings and windings by heart, so as no longer to have the sense of novelty. In the warm weather our great delight was the walk which follows the course of the Ilm, and is overarched by tall trees with patches of dark moss on their trunks, in rich contrast with the transparent green of the delicate leaves, through which the golden sunlight played, and chequered the walk before us. On one side of this walk the rocky ground rises to the height of twenty feet or more, and is clothed with mosses and rock-plants. On the other side there are, every now and then, openings, breaks in the continuity of shade, which show you a piece of meadow-land, with fine groups of trees; and at every such opening a seat is placed under the rock, where you may sit and chat away the sunny hours, or listen to those delicate sounds which one might fancy came from tiny bells worn on the garment of Silence to make us aware of her invisible presence. ... Sometimes we took our shady walk in the Stern, the oldest part of the park plantations, on the opposite side of the river, lingering on our way to watch the crystal brook which hurries on, like a foolish young maiden, to wed itself with the muddy Ilm. ... How little real knowledge of Goethe must the mind have that could wish to see him represented as a naked Apollo, with a Psyche at his knee! The execution is as feeble as the sentiment is false; the Apollo-Goethe is a caricature, and the Psyche is simply vulgar. The statue was executed under Bettina’s encouragement, in the hope that it would be bought by the King of Prussia; but a breach having taken place between her and her royal friend, a purchaser was sought in the Grand Duke of Weimar, who, after transporting it at enormous expense from Italy, wisely shut it up where it is seen only by the curious."

And the paragraph is quoted just about over a half.

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Another surprise is the description of beauty, not what a reader expects from George Eliot after reading several of her works.

" ... Exquisitely beautiful were the graceful forms of the plane-trees, thrown in golden relief on a background of dark pines. Here we used to turn and turn again in the autumn afternoons, at first bright and warm, then sombre with low-lying purple clouds, and chill with winds that sent the leaves raining from the branches. The eye here welcomes, as a contrast, the white façade of a building looking like a small Greek temple, placed on the edge of a cliff, and you at once conclude it to be a bit of pure ornament, a device to set off the landscape; but you presently see a porter seated near the door of the basement story, beguiling the ennui of his sinecure by a book and a pipe, and you learn with surprise that this is another retreat for ducal dignity to unbend and philosophize in. Singularly ill-adapted to such a purpose it seems to beings not ducal. On the other side of the Ilm the park is bordered by the road leading to the little village of Ober Weimar, another sunny walk, which has the special attraction of taking one by Goethe’s Gartenhaus, his first residence at Weimar. Inside, this Gartenhaus is a homely sort of cottage, such as many an English nobleman’s gardener lives in; no furniture is left in it, and the family wish to sell it. Outside, its aspect became to us like that of a dear friend, whose irregular features and rusty clothes have a peculiar charm. It stands, with its bit of garden and orchard, on a pleasant slope, fronting the west; before it the park stretches one of its meadowy openings to the trees which fringe the Ilm, and between this meadow and the garden hedge lies the said road to Ober Weimar. A grove of weeping birches sometimes tempted us to turn out of this road up to the fields at the top of the slope, on which not only the Gartenhaus, but several other modest villas are placed. From this little height one sees to advantage the plantations of the park in their autumnal coloring; the town, with its steep-roofed church, and castle clock-tower, painted a gay green; the bushy line of the Belvedere chaussée, and Belvedere itself peeping on an eminence from its nest of trees. Here, too, was the place for seeing a lovely sunset, such a sunset as September sometimes gives us, when the western horizon is like a rippled sea of gold, sending over the whole hemisphere golden vapors, which, as they near the east, are subdued to a deep rose-color."

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"A more interesting place to visitors is the library, which occupies a large building not far from the Schloss. The principal Saal, surrounded by a broad gallery, is ornamented with some very excellent busts and some very bad portraits. Of the busts, the most remarkable is that of Glück, by Houdon—a striking specimen of the real in art. The sculptor has given every scar made by the small-pox; he has left the nose as pug and insignificant, and the mouth as common, as Nature made them; but then he has done what, doubtless, Nature also did—he has spread over those coarsely cut features the irradiation of genius. A specimen of the opposite style in art is Trippel’s bust of Goethe as the young Apollo, also fine in its way. It was taken when Goethe was in Italy; and in the “Italiänische Reise,” mentioning the progress of the bust, he says that he sees little likeness to himself, but is not discontented that he should go forth to the world as such a good-looking fellow—hübscher Bursch. ... "

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Funny how associations differ.

" ... Markt, a cheerful square, made smart by a new Rath-haus. Twice a week it is crowded with stalls and country people; and it is the very pretty custom for the band to play in the balcony of the Rath-haus about twenty minutes every market-day to delight the ears of the peasantry. A head-dress worn by many of the old women, and here and there by a young one, is, I think, peculiar to Thuringia. ... Two houses in the Markt are pointed out as those from which Tetzel published his indulgences and Luther thundered against them; but it is difficult to one’s imagination to conjure up scenes of theological controversy in Weimar, where, from princes down to pastry-cooks, rationalism is taken as a matter of course."

And now, post WWII, Weimar is associated with the very short and fragile Weimar republic period.

"Passing along the Schiller-strasse, a broad, pleasant street, one is thrilled by the inscription, Hier wohnte Schiller, over the door of a small house with casts in its bow-window. Mount up to the second story and you will see Schiller’s study very nearly as it was when he worked in it. It is a cheerful room with three windows, two towards the street and one looking on a little garden which divides his house from the neighboring one. The writing-table, which he notes as an important purchase in one of his letters to Körner, and in one of the drawers of which he used to keep rotten apples for the sake of their scent, stands near the last-named window, so that its light would fall on his left hand. ... The bedstead on which Schiller died has been removed into the study, from the small bedroom behind, which is now empty. A little table is placed close to the head of the bed, with his drinking-glass upon it, and on the wall above the bedstead there is a beautiful sketch of him lying dead. He used to occupy the whole of the second floor. It contains, besides the study and bedroom, an antechamber, now furnished with casts and prints on sale, in order to remunerate the custodiers of the house, and a salon tricked out, since his death, with a symbolical cornice, statues, and a carpet worked by the ladies of Weimar."

"Goethe’s house is much more important looking, but, to English eyes, far from being the palatial residence which might be expected, from the descriptions of German writers. The entrance hall is indeed rather imposing, with its statues in niches, and its broad staircase, but the rest of the house is not proportionately spacious and elegant. The only part of the house open to the public — and this only on a Friday — is the principal suite of rooms which contain his collection of casts, pictures, cameos, &c. This collection is utterly insignificant, except as having belonged to him, and one turns away from bad pictures and familiar casts, to linger over the manuscript of the wonderful Romische Elegien, written by himself in the Italian character. It is to be regretted that a large sum offered for this house by the German Diet, was refused by the Goethe family in the hope, it is said, of obtaining a still larger sum from that mythical English Croesus always ready to turn fabulous sums into dead capital, who haunts the imagination of continental people. One of the most fitting tributes a nation can pay to its great dead, is to make their habitation, like their works, a public possession, a shrine where affectionate reverence may be more vividly reminded that the being who has bequeathed to us immortal thoughts or immortal deeds, had to endure the daily struggle with the petty details, perhaps with the sordid cares, of this working-day world; and it is a sad pity that Goethe’s study, bedroom, and library, so fitted to call up that kind of sympathy, because they are preserved just as he left them, should be shut out from all but the specially privileged. We were happy enough to be amongst these — to look through the mist of rising tears at the dull study with its two small windows, and without a single object chosen for the sake of luxury or beauty; at the dark little bedroom with the bed on which he died, and the arm-chair where he took his morning coffee as he read; at the library with its common deal shelves, and books containing his own paper marks. In the presence of this hardy simplicity, the contrast suggests itself of the study at Abbotsford, with its elegant gothic fittings, its delicious easy chair, and its oratory of painted glass."

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With the exception of boards and personal description, thus sounds familiar.

"We were very much amused at the privacy with which people keep their shops at Weimar. Some of them have no kind of enseigne — not so much as their names written up; and there is so much nonchalance towards customers, that one might suppose every shopkeeper was a salaried functionary employed by government. The distribution of commodities, too, is carried on according to a peculiar Weimarian logic: we bought our lemons at a seiler’s, or ropemaker’s, and should not have felt ourselves very unreasonable if we had asked for shoes at a stationer’s. As to competition, I should think a clever tradesman or artificer is almost as free from it at Weimar as Aesculapius or Vulcan in the days of old Olympus. Here is an illustration. Our landladv’s husband was called the ‘susser Rabenhorst,’ by way of distinguishing him from a brother of his who was the reverse of sweet. This Rabenhorst, who was not sweet, but who nevertheless dealt in sweets, for he was a confectioner, was so utter a rogue that any transaction with him was avoided almost as much as if he had been the Evil One himself, yet so clever a rogue that he always managed to keep on the windy side of the law. Nevertheless, he had so many dainties in the confectionery line — so viel Sussigkeiten und Leckerbissen — that people bent on giving a fine entertainment were at last constrained to say, ‘After all, I must go to Rabenhorst;’ and so he got abundant custom, in spite of general detestation."

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And her description of Germans, and of difference between the two societies is accurate, too.

"At the beginning of August, when we arrived in Weimar, almost everyone was away —‘at the Baths,’ of course — except the tradespeople. As birds nidify in the spring, so Germans wash themselves in the summer; their waschungstrieb acts strongly only at a particular time of the year; during all the rest, apparently, a decanter and a sugar-basin or pie-dish, are an ample toilette service for them: We were quite contented, however, that it was not yet the Weimar season, fashionably speaking, since it was the very best time for enjoying something far better than Weimar gaieties — the lovely park and environs. It was pleasant, too, to see the good bovine bourgeoisie enjoying life in their quiet fashion. Unlike our English people, they take pleasure into their calculations, and seem regularly to set aside part of their time for recreation. It is understood that something is to be done in life besides business and housewifery: the women take their children and their knitting to the Erholung, or walk with their husbands to Belvedere, or in some other direction, where a cup of coffee is to be had. The Erholung, by the way, is a pretty garden, with shady walks, abundant seats, an orchestra, a ball-room, and a place for refreshments. The higher classes are subscribers and visitors here as well as the bourgeoisie; but there are several resorts of a similar kind frequented by the latter exclusively. The reader of Goethe will remember his little poem, Die Lustigen von Weimar, which still indicates the round of amusements in this simple capital: the walk to Belvedere or Tiefurt, the excursion to Jena, or some other trip, not made expensive by distance; the round game at cards; the dance; the theatre; and so many other enjoyments to be had by a people not bound to give dinner parties and ‘keep up a position.’

"It is charming to see how real an amusement the theatre is to the Weimar people. The greater number of places are occupied by subscribers, and there is no fuss about toilet or escort. The ladies come alone, and slip quietly into their places without need of “protection”—a proof of civilization perhaps more than equivalent to our preeminence in patent locks and carriage springs; and after the performance is over you may see the same ladies following their servants, with lanterns, through streets innocent of gas, in which an oil-lamp, suspended from a rope slung across from house to house, occasionally reveals to you the shafts of a cart or omnibus, conveniently placed for you to run upon them.

"A yearly autumn festival at Weimar is the Vogelschiessen, or Bird-shooting; but the reader must not let his imagination wander at this word into fields and brakes. The bird here concerned is of wood, and the shooters, instead of wandering over breezy down and common, are shut up, day after day, in a room clouded with tobacco-smoke, that they may take their turn at shooting with the rifle from the window of a closet about the size of a sentinel’s box. However, this is a mighty enjoyment to the Thuringian yeomanry, and an occasion of profit to our friend Punch, and other itinerant performers; for while the Vogelschiessen lasts, a sort of fair is held in the field where the marksmen assemble.

"Among the quieter every-day pleasures of the Weimarians, perhaps the most delightful is the stroll on a bright afternoon or evening to the Duke’s summer residence of Belvedere, about two miles from Weimar. As I have said, a glorious avenue of chestnut-trees leads all the way from the town to the entrance of the grounds, which are open to all the world as much as to the Duke himself. Close to the palace and its subsidiary buildings there is an inn, for the accommodation of the good people who come to take dinner or any other meal here, by way of holiday-making. A sort of pavilion stands on a spot commanding a lovely view of Weimar and its valley, and here the Weimarians constantly come on summer and autumn evenings to smoke a cigar or drink a cup of coffee. In one wing of the little palace, which is made smart by wooden cupolas, with gilt pinnacles, there is a saloon, which I recommend to the imitation of tasteful people in their country-houses. It has no decoration but that of natural foliage: ivy is trained at regular intervals up the pure white walls, and all round the edge of the ceiling, so as to form pilasters and a cornice; ivy again, trained on trellis-work, forms a blind to the window, which looks towards the entrance-court; and beautiful ferns, arranged in tall baskets, are placed here and there against the walls. The furniture is of light cane-work. Another pretty thing here is the Natur-Theater—a theatre constructed with living trees, trimmed into walls and side scenes. We pleased ourselves for a little while with thinking that this was one of the places where Goethe acted in his own dramas, but we afterwards learned that it was not made until his acting days were over. The inexhaustible charm of Belvedere, however, is the grounds, which are laid out with a taste worthy of a first-rate landscape-gardener. The tall and graceful limes, plane-trees, and weeping birches, the little basins of water here and there, with fountains playing in the middle of them, and with a fringe of broad-leaved plants, or other tasteful bordering round them, the gradual descent towards the river, and the hill clothed with firs and pines on the opposite side, forming a fine dark background for the various and light foliage of the trees that ornament the gardens—all this we went again and again to enjoy, from the time when everything was of a vivid green until the Virginian creepers which festooned the silver stems of the birches were bright scarlet, and the touch of autumn had turned all the green to gold. One of the spots to linger in is at a semicircular seat against an artificial rock, on which are placed large glass globes of different colors. It is wonderful to see with what minute perfection the scenery around is painted in these globes. Each is like a pre-Raphaelite picture, with every little detail of gravelly walk, mossy bank, and delicately leaved, interlacing boughs presented in accurate miniature."

" ... We set out on one of the brightest and hottest mornings that August ever bestowed, and it required some resolution to trudge along the shadeless chaussée, which formed the first two or three miles of our way. One compensating pleasure was the sight of the beautiful mountain-ash-trees in full berry, which, alternately with cherry-trees, border the road for a considerable distance. At last we rested from our broiling walk on the borders of a glorious pine-wood, so extensive that the trees in the distance form a complete wall with their trunks, and so give one a twilight very welcome on a summer’s noon. ... Presently we passed out of the pine-wood into one of limes, beeches, and other trees of transparent and light foliage, and from this again we emerged into the open space of the Ettersburg Park in front of the Schloss, which is finely placed on an eminence commanding a magnificent view of the far-reaching woods. ... The Schloss, which is a favorite residence of the Grand Duke, is a house of very moderate size, and no pretension of any kind. Its stuccoed walls, and doors long unacquainted with fresh paint, would look distressingly shabby to the owner of a villa at Richmond or Twickenham; but much beauty is procured here at slight expense, by the tasteful disposition of creepers on the balustrades, and pretty vases full of plants ranged along the steps, or suspended in the little piazza beneath them. ... "

Another time I will tell what we saw of these recreations, rural and theatrical; of lovely walks along chaussees bordered by plum-trees laden with purple fruit, or by the mountain ash, lifting its bunches of coral against the sky, to country seats where no gate or padlock obstructs your entrance, and no gardener haunts you, expectant of a fee, and to happy-looking villages —"

"Each with its little patch of fields

"And little lot of hills;

"of excursions to the classic

"Jena and the romantic

"Ilmenau; and, for a variety,

"of Weimar fairs and target-shooting,

"and Wagner operas

"presided over by Liszt."

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September 17, 2021 - September 17, 2021.

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Impressions of Theophrastus Such,

by George Eliot.

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This author, familiar for decades - her Silas Marner was read when one was in mid to late teens, and it was so obviously different, with a quality bordering on spiritual; later, her Mill On The Floss was Frank about admission and depiction of caste system of England, which was startling (most in West pretend, following Macaulay policy of equating everything bad with India and denying or falsifying everything good about her, so much so they don't realise it - not so different from what MS Clinton observed about Pakistan as she dealt with it while part of Obama administration); and then one read more, recently, when time was as much available, as were her works due to internet.

But reading the earlier essays, especially bit of this as one reads through, and the last one more than any other, is not just starting, it's shocking, leaving one aghast - this woman is so racist, it is Nazi in all but name.

She couldn't be unique in this, of course - this is probably true of most of West.

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Glad one didn't continue reading this in April!

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In the midst of reading a collection of works of George Eliot, if one has a "massive heart attack" that one doesn't know of until informed by medical authorities, and subsequently resumes the reading after return home post surgical procedure, one can be forgiven for being exasperated with George Eliot, by the time - after one finishes Daniel Deronda - one is brave enough to get through Felix Holt The Radical. Next, one opens Impressions of Theophrastus Such, and is too exhausted to see it, and gives up bitterly, not liking one bit the defeat against the very German style writing - where one has to read, reread, and repeat, before it faintly dawns what the long sentence says.

In German writing, so the joke goes amongst English speaking readers of German, there are frequently sentences two pages long, with a single word changing the whole meaning after one turns the page, due to a split verb. George Eliot, of course, is easier than that. She wrote in English.

But half a year later, having read a collection of works of Jane Austen, to one's great amazement - one has been familiar with her major works for half a century, but didn't know the rest! Or anything at all about her, either. - one returns to thus, and is quite amazed.

Who knew!

Who knew George Eliot could be other than ponderous, plodding through long sentences of ethical discussions about moral dilemma, and good heavens, so humorous! Who knew!

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Contents

I. Looking Inward.

II. Looking Backward.

III. How We Encourage Research.

IV. A Man Surprised at his Originality.

V. A too Deferential Man.

VI. Only Temper.

VII. A Political Molecule.

VIII. The Watch-Dog of Knowledge.

IX. A Half-Breed.

X. Debasing the Moral Currency.

XI. The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb.

XII. “So Young!”

XIII. How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials, and Believe in Them.

XIV. The too Ready Writer.

XV. Diseases of Small Authorship.

XVI. Moral Swindlers.

XVII. Shadows of the Coming Race.

XVIII. The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!

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Reviews

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I. Looking Inward.

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George Eliot opens with something familiar - friends, acquaintances, relatives, tend to assume they know you, everything about yourself, better than you do yourself; and if you contradict or differ, you are liable to be accused of prevarication.

Was this written and published before her identity was known to public? " I am a bachelor" she writes, not used for women until much later.

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"It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meet with: can I give any true account of my own? I am a bachelor, without domestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been an attentive companion to myself, flattering my nature agreeably on plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me, and in general remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the careless inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held, express their desire to convert me to my favourite ideas, forget whether I have ever been to the East, and are capable of being three several times astonished at my never having told them before of my accident in the Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since notably diminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought to know myself better than these indifferent outsiders can know me; nay, better even than my intimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inward experience which have chiefly shaped my life.

"Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even the acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as they would be if I were a dead philosopher, are probably aware of certain points in me which may not be included in my most active suspicion. We sing an exquisite passage out of tune and innocently repeat it for the greater pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what his foreign accent is in the ears of a native? And how can a man be conscious of that dull perception which causes him to mistake altogether what will make him agreeable to a particular woman, and to persevere eagerly in a behaviour which she is privately recording against him? I have had some confidences from my female friends as to their opinion of other men whom I have observed trying to make themselves amiable, and it has occurred to me that though I can hardly be so blundering as Lippus and the rest of those mistaken candidates for favour whom I have seen ruining their chance by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must still come under the common fatality of mankind and share the liability to be absurd without knowing that I am absurd. ... "

True! And then she brings a smile with

"It is in the nature of foolish reasoning to seem good to the foolish reasoner."

Whether she knows, much less intends, or otherwise. Latter, one suspects.

"Hence with all possible study of myself, with all possible effort to escape from the pitiable illusion which makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at Folly's likeness, in total unconsciousness that it resembles themselves, I am obliged to recognise that while there are secrets in me unguessed by others, these others have certain items of knowledge about the extent of my powers and the figure I make with them, which in turn are secrets unguessed by me. When I was a lad I danced a hornpipe with arduous scrupulosity, and while suffering pangs of pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiority as a dancing pupil, imagining for myself a high place in the estimation of beholders; but I can now picture the amusement they had in the incongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of hornpipe am I dancing now?"

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" ... No man can know his brother simply as a spectator. ... And thus while I carry in myself the key to other men's experience, it is only by observing others that I can so far correct my self-ignorance as to arrive at the certainty that I am liable to commit myself unawares and to manifest some incompetency which I know no more of than the blind man knows of his image in the glass."

" ... In all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness which may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence by the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us and have had a mingled influence over our lives; by the fellow-feeling which should restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an act of accusation against others, who have no chance of vindicating themselves; and most of all by that reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonising struggles with temptation, in unbroken silence. ... Yet half our impressions of his character come not from what he means to convey, but from what he unconsciously enables us to discern."

" ... I am not indeed writing an autobiography, or pretending to give an unreserved description of myself, but only offering some slight confessions in an apologetic light, to indicate that if in my absence you dealt as freely with my unconscious weaknesses as I have dealt with the unconscious weaknesses of others, I should not feel myself warranted by common-sense in regarding your freedom of observation as an exceptional case of evil-speaking; or as malignant interpretation of a character which really offers no handle to just objection; or even as an unfair use for your amusement of disadvantages which, since they are mine, should be regarded with more than ordinary tenderness. ... "

And again, it brings a smile - how true! One feels - when she says -

" ... It is true, that I would rather not hear either your well-founded ridicule or your judicious strictures. Though not averse to finding fault with myself, and conscious of deserving lashes, I like to keep the scourge in my own discriminating hand. I never felt myself sufficiently meritorious to like being hated as a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desire that all my acquaintances should give me their candid opinion of me. I really do not want to learn from my enemies: I prefer having none to learn from. Instead of being glad when men use me despitefully, I wish they would behave better and find a more amiable occupation for their intervals of business. In brief, after a close intimacy with myself for a longer period than I choose to mention, I find within me a permanent longing for approbation, sympathy, and love."

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Seriously, who ever knew, or expected, even suspected, George Eliot was a humorist?

" ... I am spoken of to inquiring beholders as "the author of a book you have probably not seen." (The work was a humorous romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is much tasted in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes are rendered with all the serious eloquence characteristic of the Red races.) ... "

And just in case the reader didn't get it, she drops subtlety -

" ... This sort of distinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, can hardly counteract an indistinctness in my articulation, which the best-intentioned loudness will not remedy. Then, in some quarters my awkward feet are against me, the length of my upper lip, and an inveterate way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chin projecting. One can become only too well aware of such things by looking in the glass, or in that other mirror held up to nature in the frank opinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by excursion train; and no doubt they account for the half-suppressed smile which I have observed on some fair faces when I have first been presented before them. This direct perceptive judgment is not to be argued against. But I am tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned are apparently taken to warrant unfavourable inferences concerning my mental quickness. ... "

Wonder if this was where P. G. Wodehouse found inspiration?

" ... With all the increasing uncertainty which modern progress has thrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of the haunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of ideas. ... "

And after that has threatened the reader with serious pain due to laughter, she returns with the Oh, so true, don't we know it! -

" ... Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a clever observation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they were anonymous pictures. I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of finding that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found remarkable and even brilliant. ... "

And then comes the unexpected googly, a frank and unconcealed reference to the caste system of England in particular and West in general, which intelligentsia of England was not unlikely to make, until Macaulay policy of lies against India was so deeply rooted as to hide truth in plain sight -

" ... It is to be borne in mind that I am not rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high connections such as give to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through a titled line; just as "the Austrian lip" confers a grandeur of historical associations on a kind of feature which might make us reject an advertising footman. ... "

And back to a flash of humour, like a feint at a punch in the solar plexus -

" ... I have now and then done harm to a good cause by speaking for it in public, and have discovered too late that my attitude on the occasion would more suitably have been that of negative beneficence. ..."

Before the return to Serious Thought -

" ... Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should be known to hold it? ..."

Before a bitter draught that most of us are only too familiar with -

" ... And as to the force of my arguments, that is a secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the ex pede Herculem principle, and from awkward feet infer awkward fallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an enlightened artisan remark, "Here's a rum cut!"—and doubtless he reasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely puts on an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills her glance in sign of predetermined neutrality: both have their reasons for judging the quality of my speech beforehand."

And she continues the one-two-three style, feint, punch, serious -

"This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who has also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, has naturally a depressing if not embittering tendency; and in early life I began to seek for some consoling point of view, some warrantable method of softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism which might supply the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I dwelt much on the idea of compensation; trying to believe that I was all the wiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place in the true spiritual scale, and even that a day might come when some visible triumph would place me in the French heaven of having the laughers on my side. But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort of self-cajolery. Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several of my friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised a little beyond their merit? Is the ugly unready man in the corner, outside the current of conversation, really likely to have a fairer view of things than the agreeable talker, whose success strikes the unsuccessful as a repulsive example of forwardness and conceit? And as to compensation in future years, would the fact that I myself got it reconcile me to an order of things in which I could see a multitude with as bad a share as mine, who, instead of getting their corresponding compensation, were getting beyond the reach of it in old age? What could be more contemptible than the mood of mind which makes a man measure the justice of divine or human law by the agreeableness of his own shadow and the ample satisfaction of his own desires?"

- before proceeding with the ethical and moral discussion one has come to expect from George Eliot.

But not before another punch.

"I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be encouraging me in the persuasion that my discontent was the chief evil in the world, and my benefit the soul of good in that evil. ... In my conscience I saw that the bias of personal discontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias of self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose-coloured glass or the indigo, we are equally far from the hues which the healthy human eye beholds in heaven above and earth below. I began to dread ways of consoling which were really a flattering of native illusions, a feeding-up into monstrosity of an inward growth already disproportionate; to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankind which is a transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims; to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper. The standing-ground worth striving after seemed to be some Delectable Mountain, whence I could see things in proportions as little as possible determined by that self-partiality which certainly plays a necessary part in our bodily sustenance, but has a starving effect on the mind."

" ... I have long looked with suspicion on all views which are recommended as peculiarly consolatory to wounded vanity or other personal disappointment. The consolations of egoism are simply a change of attitude or a resort to a new kind of diet which soothes and fattens it. Fed in this way it is apt to become a monstrous spiritual pride, or a chuckling satisfaction that the final balance will not be against us but against those who now eclipse us. Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name, if not in the text, at least in a laudatory note: whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents. But an attention fixed on the main theme or various matter of the book would deliver us from that slavish subjection to our own self-importance. And I had the mighty volume of the world before me. ... "

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April 01, 2021 -

September 18, 2021 - September 18, 2021.

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II. Looking Backward.

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George Eliot is nostalgic about her father, and begins by hiding the personal by questioning idealisation of antiquity. She was still hiding her own identity, and not merely in anonymity.

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"Most of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that our father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it is held no impiety, rather, a graceful mark of instruction, for a man to wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which also he knows nothing except through the easy process of an imperfect imagination and a flattering fancy.

"But the period thus looked back on with a purely admiring regret, as perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; the desirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most likely they are the fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the Aeolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with our redundance. ... it would be really something original in polished verse if one of our young writers declared he would gladly be turned eighty-five that he might have known the joy and pride of being an Englishman when there were fewer reforms and plenty of highwaymen, fewer discoveries and more faces pitted with the small-pox, when laws were made to keep up the price of corn, and the troublesome Irish were more miserable. Three-quarters of a century ago is not a distance that lends much enchantment to the view. We are familiar with the average men of that period, and are still consciously encumbered with its bad contrivances and mistaken acts. ... their times are not much flattered, not much glorified by the yearnings of that modern sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing—not themselves but—all their neighbours. ... To be quite fair towards the ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed to each of them, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed loudest with servile, pompous, and trivial prose."

" ... One wonders whether the remarkable originators who first had the notion of digging wells, or of churning for butter, and who were certainly very useful to their own time as well as ours, were left quite free from invidious comparison with predecessors who let the water and the milk alone, or whether some rhetorical nomad, as he stretched himself on the grass with a good appetite for contemporary butter, became loud on the virtue of ancestors who were uncorrupted by the produce of the cow; nay, whether in a high flight of imaginative self-sacrifice (after swallowing the butter) he even wished himself earlier born and already eaten for the sustenance of a generation more naove than his own."

And here comes a clue to the title.

"I have often had the fool's hectic of wishing about the unalterable, but with me that useless exercise has turned chiefly on the conception of a different self, and not, as it usually does in literature, on the advantage of having been born in a different age, and more especially in one where life is imagined to have been altogether majestic and graceful. With my present abilities, external proportions, and generally small provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground for confidence that I should have had a preferable career in such an epoch of society? An age in which every department has its awkward-squad seems in my mind's eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by the Strymon under Philip and Alexander without throwing any new light on method or organising the sum of human knowledge; on the other hand, I might have objected to Aristotle as too much of a systematiser, and have preferred the freedom of a little self-contradiction as offering more chances of truth. I gather, too, from the undeniable testimony of his disciple Theophrastus that there were bores, ill-bred persons, and detractors even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the English, and not yet made endurable by being classic; and altogether, with my present fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for possessing Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity."

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" ... Except on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe, unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have inherited their diseases of mind and body, and by consequence scorn my own scorn, which is equally an inheritance of mixed ideas and feelings concocted for me in the boiling caldron of this universally contemptible life, and so on—scorning to infinity. ... "

That much seems obvious, although few realise that explicitly. But then she goes against it, and is twisted into a pretzel.

" ... This may represent some actual states of mind, for it is a narrow prejudice of mathematicians to suppose that ways of thinking are to be driven out of the field by being reduced to an absurdity. The Absurd is taken as an excellent juicy thistle by many constitutions."

Did she realise it was she, who had been showing the absurdity of the then prevalent nostalgia for antiquity?

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"Besides, there are other reasons why I am contented that my father was a country parson, born much about the same time as Scott and Wordsworth; notwithstanding certain qualms I have felt at the fact that the property on which I am living was saved out of tithe before the period of commutation, and without the provisional transfiguration into a modus. It has sometimes occurred to me when I have been taking a slice of excellent ham that, from a too tenable point of view, I was breakfasting on a small squealing black pig which, more than half a century ago, was the unwilling representative of spiritual advantages not otherwise acknowledged by the grudging farmer or dairyman who parted with him. ... Notwithstanding such drawbacks I am rather fond of the mental furniture I got by having a father who was well acquainted with all ranks of his neighbours, and am thankful that he was not one of those aristocratic clergymen who could not have sat down to a meal with any family in the parish except my lord's—still more that he was not an earl or a marquis. A chief misfortune of high birth is that it usually shuts a man out from the large sympathetic knowledge of human experience which comes from contact with various classes on their own level, and in my father's time that entail of social ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now. To look always from overhead at the crowd of one's fellow-men must be in many ways incapacitating, even with the best will and intelligence. The serious blunders it must lead to in the effort to manage them for their good, one may see clearly by the mistaken ways people take of flattering and enticing those whose associations are unlike their own. Hence I have always thought that the most fortunate Britons are those whose experience has given them a practical share in many aspects of the national lot, who have lived long among the mixed commonalty, roughing it with them under difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them, and getting acquainted with their notions and motives not by inference from traditional types in literature or from philosophical theories, but from daily fellowship and observation. Of course such experience is apt to get antiquated, and my father might find himself much at a loss amongst a mixed rural population of the present day; but he knew very well what could be wisely expected from the miners, the weavers, the field-labourers, and farmers of his own time—yes, and from the aristocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them and had been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. "A clergyman, lad," he used to say to me, "should feel in himself a bit of every class;" and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his inclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him beloved by his parishioners. They grumbled at their obligations towards him; but what then? It was natural to grumble at any demand for payment, tithe included, but also natural for a rector to desire his tithe and look well after the levying. A Christian pastor who did not mind about his money was not an ideal prevalent among the rural minds of fat central England, and might have seemed to introduce a dangerous laxity of supposition about Christian laymen who happened to be creditors. My father was none the less beloved because he was understood to be of a saving disposition, and how could he save without getting his tithe? ... I profited by his popularity, and for months after my mother's death, when I was a little fellow of nine, I was taken care of first at one homestead and then at another; a variety which I enjoyed much more than my stay at the Hall, where there was a tutor. ... In my earliest remembrance of him his hair was already grey, for I was his youngest as well as his only surviving child; and it seemed to me that advanced age was appropriate to a father, as indeed in all respects I considered him a parent so much to my honour, that the mention of my relationship to him was likely to secure me regard among those to whom I was otherwise a stranger—my father's stories from his life including so many names of distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to his acquaintanceship. ... "

" ... To my father's mind the noisy teachers of revolutionary doctrine were, to speak mildly, a variable mixture of the fool and the scoundrel; the welfare of the nation lay in a strong Government which could maintain order; and I was accustomed to hear him utter the word "Government" in a tone that charged it with awe, and made it part of my effective religion, in contrast with the word "rebel," which seemed to carry the stamp of evil in its syllables, and, lit by the fact that Satan was the first rebel, made an argument dispensing with more detailed inquiry. I gathered that our national troubles in the first two decades of this century were not at all due to the mistakes of our administrators; and that England, with its fine Church and Constitution, would have been exceedingly well off if every British subject had been thankful for what was provided, and had minded his own business—if, for example, numerous Catholics of that period had been aware how very modest they ought to be considering they were Irish. ... "

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September 18, 2021 - September 18, 2021.

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III. How We Encourage Research.

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George Eliot begins with a falsehood rooted in fraud spread by church, without looking at it, due to her own upbringing as a clergyman's daughter, which goes over and rooted deeper into her consciousness, than if she were born of ancestry sufficiently away from church, and brought up with grounding more into thought.

"The serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other deities whose disposition has been too hastily inferred from that of the men who have invoked them, can hardly be well pleased with much of the worship paid to her even in this milder age, when the stake and the rack have ceased to form part of her ritual. Some cruelties still pass for service done in her honour: no thumb-screw is used, no iron boot, no scorching of flesh; but plenty of controversial bruising, laceration, and even lifelong maiming. Less than formerly; but so long as this sort of truth-worship has the sanction of a public that can often understand nothing in a controversy except personal sarcasm or slanderous ridicule, it is likely to continue. The sufferings of its victims are often as little regarded as those of the sacrificial pig offered in old time, with what we now regard as a sad miscalculation of effects."

She's not looking at the fraud perpetrated by church, when the horror of inquisition, which in reality was a quest of complete domination and power - not only over lands and kingdoms, but over very souls of people - in order to establish the lies and fraud at roots of teachings of Rome, was covered with a false label of name of Truth.

So George Eliot uses a false equating of Truth with inquisition, instead of questioning church, and its frauds of its whole history and teachings, which would strike at very roots of her being.

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Whether all that was preamble to the real point, the story of her friend Herman, is a moot point.

"One such victim is my old acquaintance Merman. Twenty years ago Merman was a young man of promise, a conveyancer with a practice which had certainly budded, but, like Aaron's rod, seemed not destined to proceed further in that marvellous activity. Meanwhile he occupied himself in miscellaneous periodical writing and in a multifarious study of moral and physical science. What chiefly attracted him in all subjects were the vexed questions which have the advantage of not admitting the decisive proof or disproof that renders many ingenious arguments superannuated. ... "

But it would seem she based the character of Dr Lydgate, of her Middlemarch, partly on this friend.

" ... Such flexibility was naturally much helped by his amiable feeling towards woman, whose nervous system, he was convinced, would not bear the continuous strain of difficult topics; and also by his willingness to contribute a song whenever the same desultory charmer proposed music. Indeed his tastes were domestic enough to beguile him into marriage when his resources were still very moderate and partly uncertain."

Next part might, unlike Lydgate's quest, be satirical, in the specific names.

""What is the matter, Proteus?"

""A great matter, Julia. That fellow Grampus, whose book is cried up as a revelation, is all wrong about the Magicodumbras and the Zuzumotzis, and I have got hold of the right clue.""

And then the wife is Rosamond, but Merman much more assertive than Lydgate was.

""Oh no, dear, don't go too far into things. Lie down again. You have been dreaming. What are the Madicojumbras and Zuzitotzums? I never heard you talk of them before. What use can it be troubling yourself about such things?"

""That is the way, Julia—that is the way wives alienate their husbands, and make any hearth pleasanter to him than his own!"

""What do you mean, Proteus?"

""Why, if a woman will not try to understand her husband's ideas, or at least to believe that they are of more value than she can understand—if she is to join anybody who happens to be against him, and suppose he is a fool because others contradict him—there is an end of our happiness. That is all I have to say.""

And wife changes from Rosamond - who remained assertive (in a passive-aggressive way) about anyone not in accord with her being not merely incorrect, not merely wrong, but was deliberately out to make her miserable - to a supposedly ideal wife.

""Oh no, Proteus, dear. I do believe what you say is right That is my only guide. I am sure I never have any opinions in any other way: I mean about subjects. Of course there are many little things that would tease you, that you like me to judge of for myself. I know I said once that I did not want you to sing 'Oh ruddier than the cherry,' because it was not in your voice. But I cannot remember ever differing from you about subjects. I never in my life thought any one cleverer than you."

"Julia Merman was really a "nice little woman," not one of the stately Dians sometimes spoken of in those terms. Her black silhouette had a very infantine aspect, but she had discernment and wisdom enough to act on the strong hint of that memorable conversation, never again giving her husband the slightest ground for suspecting that she thought treasonably of his ideas in relation to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, or in the least relaxed her faith in his infallibility because Europe was not also convinced of it. It was well for her that she did not increase her troubles in this way; but to do her justice, what she was chiefly anxious about was to avoid increasing her husband's troubles."

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Eliot returns to satire, or at least humour - which was missing from the second piece, Looking Backward.

"But the hour of publication came; and to half-a-dozen persons, described as the learned world of two hemispheres, it became known that Grampus was attacked. This might have been a small matter; for who or what on earth that is good for anything is not assailed by ignorance, stupidity, or malice—and sometimes even by just objection? But on examination it appeared that the attack might possibly be held damaging, unless the ignorance of the author were well exposed and his pretended facts shown to be chimeras of that remarkably hideous kind begotten by imperfect learning on the more feminine element of original incapacity. ... But in point of fact Grampus knew nothing of the book until his friend Lord Narwhal sent him an American newspaper containing a spirited article by the well-known Professor Sperm N. Whale which was rather equivocal in its bearing, the passages quoted from Merman being of rather a telling sort, and the paragraphs which seemed to blow defiance being unaccountably feeble, coming from so distinguished a Cetacean. Then, by another post, arrived letters from Butzkopf and Dugong, both men whose signatures were familiar to the Teutonic world in the Selten-erscheinende Monat-schrift or Hayrick for the insertion of Split Hairs, asking their Master whether he meant to take up the combat, because, in the contrary case, both were ready.

"Thus America and Germany were roused, though England was still drowsy, and it seemed time now for Grampus to find Merman's book under the heap and cut it open. For his own part he was perfectly at ease about his system; but this is a world in which the truth requires defence, and specious falsehood must be met with exposure. Grampus having once looked through the book, no longer wanted any urging to write the most crushing of replies. This, and nothing less than this, was due from him to the cause of sound inquiry; and the punishment would cost him little pains. In three weeks from that time the palpitating Merman saw his book announced in the programme of the leading Review. No need for Grampus to put his signature. Who else had his vast yet microscopic knowledge, who else his power of epithet? This article in which Merman was pilloried and as good as mutilated—for he was shown to have neither ear nor nose for the subtleties of philological and archaeological study—was much read and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system of Grampus, or any precise conception of the danger attending lax views of the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams with which the victim was lacerated, and the soaring fountains of acrid mud which were shot upward and poured over the fresh wounds, were found amusing in recital. ... "

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The names might be satire, spoof or humour, but the battle described is all too real.

"Perhaps that popular comparison of the Walrus had truth enough to bite and blister on thorough application, even if exultant ignorance had not applauded it. But it is well known that the walrus, though not in the least a malignant animal, if allowed to display its remarkably plain person and blundering performances at ease in any element it chooses, becomes desperately savage and musters alarming auxiliaries when attacked or hurt. In this characteristic, at least, Merman resembled the walrus. And now he concentrated himself with a vengeance. That his counter-theory was fundamentally the right one he had a genuine conviction, whatever collateral mistakes he might have committed; and his bread would not cease to be bitter to him until he had convinced his contemporaries that Grampus had used his minute learning as a dust-cloud to hide sophistical evasions—that, in fact, minute learning was an obstacle to clear-sighted judgment, more especially with regard to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, and that the best preparation in this matter was a wide survey of history and a diversified observation of men. Still, Merman was resolved to muster all the learning within his reach, and he wandered day and night through many wildernesses of German print, he tried compendious methods of learning oriental tongues, and, so to speak, getting at the marrow of languages independently of the bones, for the chance of finding details to corroborate his own views, or possibly even to detect Grampus in some oversight or textual tampering. All other work was neglected: rare clients were sent away and amazed editors found this maniac indifferent to his chance of getting book-parcels from them. It was many months before Merman had satisfied himself that he was strong enough to face round upon his adversary. But at last he had prepared sixty condensed pages of eager argument which seemed to him worthy to rank with the best models of controversial writing. He had acknowledged his mistakes, but had restated his theory so as to show that it was left intact in spite of them; and he had even found cases in which Ziphius, Microps, Scrag Whale the explorer, and other Cetaceans of unanswerable authority, were decidedly at issue with Grampus. ... In fine, Merman wound up his rejoinder by sincerely thanking the eminent adversary without whose fierce assault he might not have undertaken a revision in the course of which he had met with unexpected and striking confirmations of his own fundamental views. Evidently Merman's anger was at white heat."

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"The rejoinder being complete, all that remained was to find a suitable medium for its publication. This was not so easy. Distinguished mediums would not lend themselves to contradictions of Grampus, or if they would, Merman's article was too long and too abstruse, while he would not consent to leave anything out of an article which had no superfluities; for all this happened years ago when the world was at a different stage. At last, however, he got his rejoinder printed, and not on hard terms, since the medium, in every sense modest, did not ask him to pay for its insertion.

"But if Merman expected to call out Grampus again, he was mistaken. Everybody felt it too absurd that Merman should undertake to correct Grampus in matters of erudition, and an eminent man has something else to do than to refute a petty objector twice over. What was essential had been done: the public had been enabled to form a true judgment of Merman's incapacity, the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis were but subsidiary elements in Grampus's system, and Merman might now be dealt with by younger members of the master's school. But he had at least the satisfaction of finding that he had raised a discussion which would not be let die. The followers of Grampus took it up with an ardour and industry of research worthy of their exemplar. Butzkopf made it the subject of an elaborate Einleitung to his important work, Die Bedeutung des Aegyptischen Labyrinthes; and Dugong, in a remarkable address which he delivered to a learned society in Central Europe, introduced Merman's theory with so much power of sarcasm that it became a theme of more or less derisive allusion to men of many tongues. Merman with his Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis was on the way to become a proverb, being used illustratively by many able journalists who took those names of questionable things to be Merman's own invention, "than which," said one of the graver guides, "we can recall few more melancholy examples of speculative aberration." Naturally the subject passed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised programmes. ... "

" ... And all the while Merman was perfectly sure that his very opponents who had knowledge enough to be capable judges were aware that his book, whatever errors of statement they might detect in it, had served as a sort of divining rod, pointing out hidden sources of historical interpretation; nay, his jealous examination discerned in a new work by Grampus himself a certain shifting of ground which—so poor Merman declared—was the sign of an intention gradually to appropriate the views of the man he had attempted to brand as an ignorant impostor."

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Return to Lydgate and Rosamond, but with an inverse of the result - in Middlemarch, it was Rosamond who triumphed, and Lydgate withered to an early death via fashionable practice treating rich.

" ... Merman's reputation as a sober thinker, a safe writer, a sound lawyer, was irretrievably injured: the distractions of controversy had caused him to neglect useful editorial connections, and indeed his dwindling care for miscellaneous subjects made his contributions too dull to be desirable. Even if he could now have given a new turn to his concentration, and applied his talents so as to be ready to show himself an exceptionally qualified lawyer, he would only have been like an architect in competition, too late with his superior plans; he would not have had an opportunity of showing his qualification. He was thrown out of the course. The small capital which had filled up deficiencies of income was almost exhausted, and Julia, in the effort to make supplies equal to wants, had to use much ingenuity in diminishing the wants. ... "

"Now and then, on rare occasions, when a sympathetic tjte-`-tjte has restored some of his old expansiveness, he will tell a companion in a railway carriage, or other place of meeting favourable to autobiographical confidences, what has been the course of things in his particular case, as an example of the justice to be expected of the world. The companion usually allows for the bitterness of a disappointed man, and is secretly disinclined to believe that Grampus was to blame."

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IV. A Man Surprised at his Originality.

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It's not an uncommon experience, with variations only in detail - but trust George Eliot to write it as a phenomenon.

"Among the many acute sayings of La Rochefoucauld, there is hardly one more acute than this: "La plus grande ambition n'en a pas la moindre apparence lorsqu'elle se rencontre dans une impossibiliti absolue d'arriver oy elle aspire." Some of us might do well to use this hint in our treatment of acquaintances and friends from whom we are expecting gratitude because we are so very kind in thinking of them, inviting them, and even listening to what they say—considering how insignificant they must feel themselves to be. We are often fallaciously confident in supposing that our friend's state of mind is appropriate to our moderate estimate of his importance: almost as if we imagined the humble mollusc (so useful as an illustration) to have a sense of his own exceeding softness and low place in the scale of being. Your mollusc, on the contrary, is inwardly objecting to every other grade of solid rather than to himself. Accustomed to observe what we think an unwarrantable conceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous pretensions and forwardness to play the lion's part, in obvious self-complacency and loud peremptoriness, we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims of a more exorbitant kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or an acquiescence in being put out of the question."

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" ... He was a man of fair position, deriving his income from a business in which he did nothing, at leisure to frequent clubs and at ease in giving dinners; well-looking, polite, and generally acceptable in society as a part of what we may call its bread-crumb—the neutral basis needful for the plums and spice. Why, then, did he speak of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his tone of assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you to suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him and showed an indisposition to repay? ... "

"For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given readily to imagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first getting these mystic hints from Lentulus, concluded that he held a number of entirely original poems, or at the very least a revolutionary treatise on poetics, in that melancholy manuscript state to which works excelling all that is ever printed are necessarily condemned; and I was long timid in speaking of the poets when he was present. ... But time wearing on, I perceived that the attitude of Lentulus towards the philosophers was essentially the same as his attitude towards the poets; nay, there was something so much more decided in his mode of closing his mouth after brief speech on the former, there was such an air of rapt consciousness in his private hints as to his conviction that all thinking hitherto had been an elaborate mistake, and as to his own power of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting superstructure, that I began to believe less in the poetical stores, and to infer that the line of Lentulus lay rather in the rational criticism of our beliefs and in systematic construction. In this case I did not figure to myself the existence of formidable manuscripts ready for the press; for great thinkers are known to carry their theories growing within their minds long before committing them to paper, and the ideas which made a new passion for them when their locks were jet or auburn, remain perilously unwritten, an inwardly developing condition of their successive selves, until the locks are grey or scanty. ... "

" ... It was therefore with renewed curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject—the universal erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began that process. And here I found him more copious than on the theme of poetry. He admitted that he did contemplate writing down his thoughts, but his difficulty was their abundance. Apparently he was like the woodcutter entering the thick forest and saying, "Where shall I begin?" The same obstacle appeared in a minor degree to cling about his verbal exposition, and accounted perhaps for his rather helter-skelter choice of remarks bearing on the number of unaddressed letters sent to the post-office; on what logic really is, as tending to support the buoyancy of human mediums and mahogany tables; on the probability of all miracles under all religions when explained by hidden laws, and my unreasonableness in supposing that their profuse occurrence at half a guinea an hour in recent times was anything more than a coincidence; on the haphazard way in which marriages are determined—showing the baselessness of social and moral schemes; and on his expectation that he should offend the scientific world when he told them what he thought of electricity as an agent."

" ... His wristbands and black gloves, his hat and nicely clipped hair, his laudable moderation in beard, and his evident discrimination in choosing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the prevalent estimate of him as a man untainted with heterodoxy, and likely to be so unencumbered with opinions that he would always be useful as an assenting and admiring listener. Men of science seeing him at their lectures doubtless flattered themselves that he came to learn from them; the philosophic ornaments of our time, expounding some of their luminous ideas in the social circle, took the meditative gaze of Lentulus for one of surprise not unmixed with a just reverence at such close reasoning towards so novel a conclusion; and those who are called men of the world considered him a good fellow who might be asked to vote for a friend of their own and would have no troublesome notions to make him unaccommodating. You perceive how very much they were all mistaken, except in qualifying him as a good fellow.

"This Lentulus certainly was, in the sense of being free from envy, hatred, and malice; and such freedom was all the more remarkable an indication of native benignity, because of his gaseous, illimitably expansive conceit. Yes, conceit; for that his enormous and contentedly ignorant confidence in his own rambling thoughts was usually clad in a decent silence, is no reason why it should be less strictly called by the name directly implying a complacent self-estimate unwarranted by performance. Nay, the total privacy in which he enjoyed his consciousness of inspiration was the very condition of its undisturbed placid nourishment and gigantic growth. Your audibly arrogant man exposes himself to tests: in attempting to make an impression on others he may possibly (not always) be made to feel his own lack of definiteness; and the demand for definiteness is to all of us a needful check on vague depreciation of what others do, and vague ecstatic trust in our own superior ability. But Lentulus was at once so unreceptive, and so little gifted with the power of displaying his miscellaneous deficiency of information, that there was really nothing to hinder his astonishment at the spontaneous crop of ideas which his mind secretly yielded. ... "

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"The respectable man had got into his illusory maze of discoveries by letting go that clue of conformity in his thinking which he had kept fast hold of in his tailoring and manners. He regarded heterodoxy as a power in itself, and took his inacquaintance with doctrines for a creative dissidence. ... His benevolent disposition was more effective for good than his silent presumption for harm. He might have been mischievous but for the lack of words: instead of being astonished at his inspirations in private, he might have clad his addled originalities, disjointed commonplaces, blind denials, and balloon-like conclusions, in that mighty sort of language which would have made a new Koran for a knot of followers. I mean no disrespect to the ancient Koran, but one would not desire the roc to lay more eggs and give us a whole wing-flapping brood to soar and make twilight.

"Peace be with Lentulus, for he has left us in peace. Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact—from calling on us to look through a heap of millet-seed in order to be sure that there is no pearl in it."

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V. A too Deferential Man.

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"A little unpremeditated insincerity must be indulged under the stress of social intercourse. The talk even of an honest man must often represent merely his wish to be inoffensive or agreeable rather than his genuine opinion or feeling on the matter in hand. His thought, if uttered, might be wounding; or he has not the ability to utter it with exactness and snatches at a loose paraphrase; or he has really no genuine thought on the question and is driven to fill up the vacancy by borrowing the remarks in vogue. These are the winds and currents we have all to steer amongst, and they are often too strong for our truthfulness or our wit. Let us not bear too hardly on each other for this common incidental frailty, or think that we rise superior to it by dropping all considerateness and deference.

"But there are studious, deliberate forms of insincerity which it is fair to be impatient with: Hinze's, for example. From his name you might suppose him to be German: in fact, his family is Alsatian, but has been settled in England for more than one generation. He is the superlatively deferential man, and walks about with murmured wonder at the wisdom and discernment of everybody who talks to him. ... Still, it must happen to her as to every one else to speak of many subjects on which the best things were said long ago, and in conversation with a person who has been newly introduced those well-worn themes naturally recur as a further development of salutations and preliminary media of understanding, such as pipes, chocolate, or mastic-chewing, which serve to confirm the impression that our new acquaintance is on a civilised footing and has enough regard for formulas to save us from shocking outbursts of individualism, to which we are always exposed with the tamest bear or baboon. Considered purely as a matter of information, it cannot any longer be important for us to learn that a British subject included in the last census holds Shakspere to be supreme in the presentation of character; still, it is as admissible for any one to make this statement about himself as to rub his hands and tell you that the air is brisk, if only he will let it fall as a matter of course, with a parenthetic lightness, and not announce his adhesion to a commonplace with an emphatic insistance, as if it were a proof of singular insight. We mortals should chiefly like to talk to each other out of goodwill and fellowship, not for the sake of hearing revelations or being stimulated by witticisms; and I have usually found that it is the rather dull person who appears to be disgusted with his contemporaries because they are not always strikingly original, and to satisfy whom the party at a country house should have included the prophet Isaiah, Plato, Francis Bacon, and Voltaire. It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue. It is right and meet that there should be an abundant utterance of good sound commonplaces. Part of an agreeable talker's charm is that he lets them fall continually with no more than their due emphasis. Giving a pleasant voice to what we are all well assured of, makes a sort of wholesome air for more special and dubious remark to move in.

"Hence it seemed to me far from unbecoming in Felicia that in her first dialogue with Hinze, previously quite a stranger to her, her observations were those of an ordinarily refined and well-educated woman on standard subjects, and might have been printed in a manual of polite topics and creditable opinions. She had no desire to astonish a man of whom she had heard nothing particular. It was all the more exasperating to see and hear Hinze's reception of her well-bred conformities. Felicia's acquaintances know her as the suitable wife of a distinguished man, a sensible, vivacious, kindly-disposed woman, helping her husband with graceful apologies written and spoken, and making her receptions agreeable to all comers. But you would have imagined that Hinze had been prepared by general report to regard this introduction to her as an opportunity comparable to an audience of the Delphic Sibyl. When she had delivered herself on the changes in Italian travel, on the difficulty of reading Ariosto in these busy times, on the want of equilibrium in French political affairs, and on the pre-eminence of German music, he would know what to think. Felicia was evidently embarrassed by his reverent wonder, and, in dread lest she should seem to be playing the oracle, became somewhat confused, stumbling on her answers rather than choosing them. But this made no difference to Hinze's rapt attention and subdued eagerness of inquiry. He continued to put large questions, bending his head slightly that his eyes might be a little lifted in awaiting her reply."

" ... Presently he was quite sure that her favourite author was Shakspere, and wished to know what she thought of Hamlet's madness. When she had quoted Wilhelm Meister on this point, and had afterwards testified that "Lear" was beyond adequate presentation, that "Julius Caesar" was an effective acting play, and that a poet may know a good deal about human nature while knowing little of geography, Hinze appeared so impressed with the plenitude of these revelations that he recapitulated them, weaving them together with threads of compliment—"As you very justly observed;" and—"It is most true, as you say;" and—"It were well if others noted what you have remarked."

"Some listeners incautious in their epithets would have called Hinze an "ass." For my part I would never insult that intelligent and unpretending animal who no doubt brays with perfect simplicity and substantial meaning to those acquainted with his idiom, and if he feigns more submission than he feels, has weighty reasons for doing so—I would never, I say, insult that historic and ill-appreciated animal, the ass, by giving his name to a man whose continuous pretence is so shallow in its motive, so unexcused by any sharp appetite as this of Hinze's."

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" ... Some persons conscious of sagacity decide at once that Hinze knows what he is about in flattering Tulpian, and has a carefully appraised end to serve though they may not see it They are misled by the common mistake of supposing that men's behaviour, whether habitual or occasional, is chiefly determined by a distinctly conceived motive, a definite object to be gained or a definite evil to be avoided. The truth is, that, the primitive wants of nature once tolerably satisfied, the majority of mankind, even in a civilised life full of solicitations, are with difficulty aroused to the distinct conception of an object towards which they will direct their actions with careful adaptation, and it is yet rarer to find one who can persist in the systematic pursuit of such an end. Few lives are shaped, few characters formed, by the contemplation of definite consequences seen from a distance and made the goal of continuous effort or the beacon of a constantly avoided danger: such control by foresight, such vivid picturing and practical logic are the distinction of exceptionally strong natures; but society is chiefly made up of human beings whose daily acts are all performed either in unreflecting obedience to custom and routine or from immediate promptings of thought or feeling to execute an immediate purpose. ... It does not in the least follow that they are seeking by studied hypocrisy to get something for themselves. And so with Hinze's deferential bearing, complimentary parentheses, and worshipful tones, which seem to some like the over-acting of a part in a comedy. He expects no appointment or other appreciable gain through Tulpian's favour; he has no doubleness towards Felicia; there is no sneering or backbiting obverse to his ecstatic admiration. He is very well off in the world, and cherishes no unsatisfied ambition that could feed design and direct flattery. As you perceive, he has had the education and other advantages of a gentleman without being conscious of marked result, such as a decided preference for any particular ideas or functions: his mind is furnished as hotels are, with everything for occasional and transient use. ... His nature is not tuned to the pitch of a genuine direct admiration, only to an attitudinising deference which does not fatigue itself with the formation of real judgments. All human achievement must be wrought down to this spoon-meat—this mixture of other persons' washy opinions and his own flux of reverence for what is third-hand, before Hinze can find a relish for it.

"He has no more leading characteristic than the desire to stand well with those who are justly distinguished; he has no base admirations, and you may know by his entire presentation of himself, from the management of his hat to the angle at which he keeps his right foot, that he aspires to correctness. Desiring to behave becomingly and also to make a figure in dialogue, he is only like the bad artist whose picture is a failure. ... He is not fairly to be called a hypocrite, but I have already confessed to the more exasperation at his make-believe reverence, because it has no deep hunger to excuse it."

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VI. Only Temper.

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George Eliot begins admirably, in recognition of a common phenomenon and a common mistake in forgiving it, and thereby encouraging it - that of a man's bad temper.

"What is temper? Its primary meaning, the proportion and mode in which qualities are mingled, is much neglected in popular speech, yet even here the word often carries a reference to an habitual state or general tendency of the organism in distinction from what are held to be specific virtues and vices. As people confess to bad memory without expecting to sink in mental reputation, so we hear a man declared to have a bad temper and yet glorified as the possessor of every high quality. When he errs or in any way commits himself, his temper is accused, not his character, and it is understood that but for a brutal bearish mood he is kindness itself. If he kicks small animals, swears violently at a servant who mistakes orders, or is grossly rude to his wife, it is remarked apologetically that these things mean nothing—they are all temper.

"Certainly there is a limit to this form of apology, and the forgery of a bill, or the ordering of goods without any prospect of paying for them, has never been set down to an unfortunate habit of sulkiness or of irascibility. But on the whole there is a peculiar exercise of indulgence towards the manifestations of bad temper which tends to encourage them, so that we are in danger of having among us a number of virtuous persons who conduct themselves detestably, just as we have hysterical patients who, with sound organs, are apparently labouring under many sorts of organic disease. Let it be admitted, however, that a man may be "a good fellow" and yet have a bad temper, so bad that we recognise his merits with reluctance, and are inclined to resent his occasionally amiable behaviour as an unfair demand on our admiration."

But she makes a mistake, through negligence, of using a word inappropriately, in that it has roots in contempt prevalent in west since antiquity for women, and has been, is, thus used commonly by males in west - hysterical. The word simply means, like someone has "hyster", which is literally a womb.

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She proceeds admirably, even though it's in generality so far.

"Touchwood is that kind of good fellow. He is by turns insolent, quarrelsome, repulsively haughty to innocent people who approach him with respect, neglectful of his friends, angry in face of legitimate demands, procrastinating in the fulfilment of such demands, prompted to rude words and harsh looks by a moody disgust with his fellow-men in general—and yet, as everybody will assure you, the soul of honour, a steadfast friend, a defender of the oppressed, an affectionate-hearted creature. Pity that, after a certain experience of his moods, his intimacy becomes insupportable! A man who uses his balmorals to tread on your toes with much frequency and an unmistakeable emphasis may prove a fast friend in adversity, but meanwhile your adversity has not arrived and your toes are tender. The daily sneer or growl at your remarks is not to be made amends for by a possible eulogy or defence of your understanding against depredators who may not present themselves, and on an occasion which may never arise. I cannot submit to a chronic state of blue and green bruise as a form of insurance against an accident."

What she hasn't said so far, is that, such males usually take the temper out on those calculated not to swat them down - he may come home and beat up his wife, children, or old mother-in-law, but he will control his temper if a man of power takes a swipe at his face with his cane, and won't express his opinion to his boss if it's adverse.

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" ... If Touchwood's behaviour affects you very closely you had better break your leg in the course of the day: his bad temper will then vanish at once; he will take a painful journey on your behalf; he will sit up with you night after night; he will do all the work of your department so as to save you from any loss in consequence of your accident; he will be even uniformly tender to you till you are well on your legs again, when he will some fine morning insult you without provocation, and make you wish that his generous goodness to you had not closed your lips against retort.

"It is not always necessary that a friend should break his leg for Touchwood to feel compunction and endeavour to make amends for his bearishness or insolence. He becomes spontaneously conscious that he has misbehaved, and he is not only ashamed of himself, but has the better prompting to try and heal any wound he has inflicted. Unhappily the habit of being offensive "without meaning it" leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it. The kindnesses, the complimentary indications or assurances, are apt to appear in the light of a penance adjusted to the foregoing lapses, and by the very contrast they offer call up a keener memory of the wrong they atone for. They are not a spontaneous prompting of goodwill, but an elaborate compensation. And, in fact, Dion's atoning friendliness has a ring of artificiality. Because he formerly disguised his good feeling towards you he now expresses more than he quite feels. It is in vain. Having made you extremely uncomfortable last week he has absolutely diminished his power of making you happy to-day: he struggles against this result by excessive effort, but he has taught you to observe his fitfulness rather than to be warmed by his episodic show of regard."

" ... This determination of partisanship by temper has its worst effects in the career of the public man, who is always in danger of getting so enthralled by his own words that he looks into facts and questions not to get rectifying knowledge, but to get evidence that will justify his actual attitude which was assumed under an impulse dependent on something else than knowledge. ... "
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Few have the courage and honesty to state thus, so unequivocally, even though most might feel it about themselves; most, however, are not only hypocritical enough to profess virtue of forgiveness, but attempt to force such an attitude on the helpless, those injured and offended but without power, and in fact take unbrage at the very thought that such powerless creatures are not overwhelmed by gratitude by the very thought of someone who injured them is magnanimous enough to apologise at all.

"If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up false attitudes, intermits his acts of kindness with rude behaviour or cruel words, and falls into the consequent vulgar error of supposing that he can make amends by laboured agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the less ugly because they are ascribed to "temper." Especially I object to the assumption that his having a fundamentally good disposition is either an apology or a compensation for his bad behaviour. If his temper yesterday made him lash the horses, upset the curricle and cause a breakage in my rib, I feel it no compensation that to-day he vows he will drive me anywhere in the gentlest manner any day as long as he lives. Yesterday was what it was, my rib is paining me, it is not a main object of my life to be driven by Touchwood—and I have no confidence in his lifelong gentleness. The utmost form of placability I am capable of is to try and remember his better deeds already performed, and, mindful of my own offences, to bear him no malice. But I cannot accept his amends.

"If the bad-tempered man wants to apologise he had need to do it on a large public scale, make some beneficent discovery, produce some stimulating work of genius, invent some powerful process—prove himself such a good to contemporary multitudes and future generations, as to make the discomfort he causes his friends and acquaintances a vanishing quality, a trifle even in their own estimate."

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VII. A Political Molecule.

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"The most arrant denier must admit that a man often furthers larger ends than he is conscious of, and that while he is transacting his particular affairs with the narrow pertinacity of a respectable ant, he subserves an economy larger than any purpose of his own. Society is happily not dependent for the growth of fellowship on the small minority already endowed with comprehensive sympathy: any molecule of the body politic working towards his own interest in an orderly way gets his understanding more or less penetrated with the fact that his interest is included in that of a large number. I have watched several political molecules being educated in this way by the nature of things into a faint feeling of fraternity. ... "

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" ... He was abstemious, and had none of those temptations to sensual excess which fill up a man's time first with indulgence and then with the process of getting well from its effects. He had not, indeed, exhausted the sources of knowledge, but here again his notions of human pleasure were narrowed by his want of appetite; for though he seemed rather surprised at the consideration that Alfred the Great was a Catholic, or that apart from the Ten Commandments any conception of moral conduct had occurred to mankind, he was not stimulated to further inquiries on these remote matters. Yet he aspired to what he regarded as intellectual society, willingly entertained beneficed clergymen, and bought the books he heard spoken of, arranging them carefully on the shelves of what he called his library, and occasionally sitting alone in the same room with them. ... If he had been born a little later he could have been accepted as an eligible member of Parliament, and if he had belonged to a high family he might have done for a member of the Government. Perhaps his indifference to "views" would have passed for administrative judiciousness, and he would have been so generally silent that he must often have been silent in the right place. But this is empty speculation: there is no warrant for saying what Spike would have been and known so as to have made a calculable political element, if he had not been educated by having to manage his trade. A small mind trained to useful occupation for the satisfying of private need becomes a representative of genuine class-needs. Spike objected to certain items of legislation because they hampered his own trade, but his neighbours' trade was hampered by the same causes; and though he would have been simply selfish in a question of light or water between himself and a fellow-townsman, his need for a change in legislation, being shared by all his neighbours in trade, ceased to be simply selfish, and raised him to a sense of common injury and common benefit. ... Certainly if Spike had been born a marquis he could not have had the same chance of being useful as a political element. But he might have had the same appearance, have been equally null in conversation, sceptical as to the reality of pleasure, and destitute of historical knowledge; perhaps even dimly disliking Jesuitism as a quality in Catholic minds, or regarding Bacon as the inventor of physical science. The depths of middle-aged gentlemen's ignorance will never be known, for want of public examinations in this branch."

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VIII. The Watch-Dog of Knowledge.

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"Mordax is an admirable man, ardent in intellectual work, public-spirited, affectionate, and able to find the right words in conveying ingenious ideas or elevated feeling. Pity that to all these graces he cannot add what would give them the utmost finish—the occasional admission that he has been in the wrong, the occasional frank welcome of a new idea as something not before present to his mind! But no: Mordax's self-respect seems to be of that fiery quality which demands that none but the monarchs of thought shall have an advantage over him, and in the presence of contradiction or the threat of having his notions corrected, he becomes astonishingly unscrupulous and cruel for so kindly and conscientious a man."

" ... It does not need much love of truth and justice in me to say that Aldebaran is a bright star, or Isaac Newton the greatest of discoverers; nor much kindliness in me to want my notes to be heard above the rest in a chorus of hallelujahs to one already crowned. It is my way to apply tests. Does the man who has the ear of the public use his advantage tenderly towards poor fellows who may be hindered of their due if he treats their pretensions with scorn? That is my test of his justice and benevolence."

"My answer was, that his system of moral tests might be as delusive as what ignorant people take to be tests of intellect and learning. If the scholar or savant cannot answer their haphazard questions on the shortest notice, their belief in his capacity is shaken. But the better-informed have given up the Johnsonian theory of mind as a pair of legs able to walk east or west according to choice. Intellect is no longer taken to be a ready-made dose of ability to attain eminence (or mediocrity) in all departments; it is even admitted that application in one line of study or practice has often a laming effect in other directions, and that an intellectual quality or special facility which is a furtherance in one medium of effort is a drag in another. We have convinced ourselves by this time that a man may be a sage in celestial physics and a poor creature in the purchase of seed-corn, or even in theorising about the affections; that he may be a mere fumbler in physiology and yet show a keen insight into human motives; that he may seem the "poor Poll" of the company in conversation and yet write with some humorous vigour. It is not true that a man's intellectual power is like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point."

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" ... There is a fable that when the badger had been stung all over by bees, a bear consoled him by a rhapsodic account of how he himself had just breakfasted on their honey. The badger replied, peevishly, "The stings are in my flesh, and the sweetness is on your muzzle." The bear, it is said, was surprised at the badger's want of altruism."

" ... Depend upon it, his conscience, though active enough in some relations, has never given him a twinge because of his polemical rudeness and even brutality. He would go from the room where he has been tiring himself through the watches of the night in lifting and turning a sick friend, and straightway write a reply or rejoinder in which he mercilessly pilloried a Laniger who had supposed that he could tell the world something else or more than had been sanctioned by the eminent Mordax—and what was worse, had sometimes really done so. Does this nullify the genuineness of motive which made him tender to his suffering friend? Not at all. It only proves that his arrogant egoism, set on fire, sends up smoke and flame where just before there had been the dews of fellowship and pity. He is angry and equips himself accordingly—with a penknife to give the offender a comprachico countenance, a mirror to show him the effect, and a pair of nailed boots to give him his dismissal. All this to teach him who the Romans really were, and to purge Inquiry of incompetent intrusion, so rendering an important service to mankind."

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""Pummel," I observed, a little irritated at not getting my coffee, "if you were to carry your kettle and spirits of wine up a mountain of a morning, your water would boil there sooner." "I should say, sir." "Or, there are boiling springs in Iceland. Better go to Iceland." "That's what I've been thinking, sir."

"I have taken to asking him hard questions, and as I expected, he never admits his own inability to answer them without representing it as common to the human race. "What is the cause of the tides, Pummel?" "Well, sir, nobody rightly knows. Many gives their opinion, but if I was to give mine, it 'ud be different."

"But while he is never surprised himself, he is constantly imagining situations of surprise for others. His own consciousness is that of one so thoroughly soaked in knowledge that further absorption is impossible, but his neighbours appear to him to be in the state of thirsty sponges which it is a charity to besprinkle. His great interest in thinking of foreigners is that they must be surprised at what they see in England, and especially at the beef. He is often occupied with the surprise Adam must have felt at the sight of the assembled animals—"for he was not like us, sir, used from a b'y to Wombwell's shows." He is fond of discoursing to the lad who acts as shoe-black and general subaltern, and I have overheard him saying to that small upstart, with some severity, "Now don't you pretend to know, because the more you pretend the more I see your ignirance"—a lucidity on his part which has confirmed my impression that the thoroughly self-satisfied person is the only one fully to appreciate the charm of humility in others."

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September 19, 2021 - September 19, 2021.

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IX. A Half-Breed.

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"An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. I refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, practical beliefs, and social habits. And faithlessness here means not a gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original choice was a mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. ... "

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Here's another root of the tragedy of Lydgate, married to Rosamond, in George Eliot's Middlemarch

" ... he married Scintilla, who fascinated him as she had fascinated others, by her prettiness, her liveliness, and her music. It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal; or if not wholly captivated, at least effectively captured by a combination of circumstances along with an unwarily manifested inclination which might otherwise have been transient. Mixtus was captivated and then captured on the worldly side of his disposition, which had been always growing and flourishing side by side with his philanthropic and religious tastes. He had ability in business, and he had early meant to be rich; also, he was getting rich, and the taste for such success was naturally growing with the pleasure of rewarded exertion. It was during a business sojourn in London that he met Scintilla, who, though without fortune, associated with families of Greek merchants living in a style of splendour, and with artists patronised by such wealthy entertainers. Mixtus on this occasion became familiar with a world in which wealth seemed the key to a more brilliant sort of dominance than that of a religious patron in the provincial circles of X. Would it not be possible to unite the two kinds of sway? A man bent on the most useful ends might, with a fortune large enough, make morality magnificent, and recommend religious principle by showing it in combination with the best kind of house and the most liberal of tables; also with a wife whose graces, wit, and accomplishments gave a finish sometimes lacking even to establishments got up with that unhesitating worldliness to which high cost is a sufficient reason. Enough.

"Mixtus married Scintilla. ... In general, people who appeared seriously to believe in any sort of doctrine, whether religious, social, or philosophical, seemed rather absurd to Scintilla. Ten to one these theoretic people pronounced oddly, had some reason or other for saying that the most agreeable things were wrong, wore objectionable clothes, and wanted you to subscribe to something. They were probably ignorant of art and music, did not understand badinage, and, in fact, could talk of nothing amusing. In Scintilla's eyes the majority of persons were ridiculous and deplorably wanting in that keen perception of what was good taste, with which she herself was blest by nature and education; but the people understood to be religious or otherwise theoretic, were the most ridiculous of all, without being proportionately amusing and invitable.

"Did Mixtus not discover this view of Scintilla's before their marriage? Or did he allow her to remain in ignorance of habits and opinions which had made half the occupation of his youth?

"When a man is inclined to marry a particular woman, and has made any committal of himself, this woman's opinions, however different from his own, are readily regarded as part of her pretty ways, especially if they are merely negative; as, for example, that she does not insist on the Trinity or on the rightfulness or expediency of church rates, but simply regards her lover's troubling himself in disputation on these heads as stuff and nonsense. The man feels his own superior strength, and is sure that marriage will make no difference to him on the subjects about which he is in earnest. And to laugh at men's affairs is a woman's privilege, tending to enliven the domestic hearth. If Scintilla had no liking for the best sort of nonconformity, she was without any troublesome bias towards Episcopacy, Anglicanism, and early sacraments, and was quite contented not to go to church.

"As to Scintilla's acquaintance with her lover's tastes on these subjects, she was equally convinced on her side that a husband's queer ways while he was a bachelor would be easily laughed out of him when he had married an adroit woman. Mixtus, she felt, was an excellent creature, quite likable, who was getting rich; and Scintilla meant to have all the advantages of a rich man's wife. She was not in the least a wicked woman; she was simply a pretty animal of the ape kind, with an aptitude for certain accomplishments which education had made the most of."

" ... He has become richer even than he dreamed of being, has a little palace in London, and entertains with splendour the half-aristocratic, professional, and artistic society which he is proud to think select. This society regards him as a clever fellow in his particular branch, seeing that he has become a considerable capitalist, and as a man desirable to have on the list of one's acquaintance. But from every other point of view Mixtus finds himself personally submerged: what he happens to think is not felt by his esteemed guests to be of any consequence, and what he used to think with the ardour of conviction he now hardly ever expresses. He is transplanted, and the sap within him has long been diverted into other than the old lines of vigorous growth. ... And his references to his historical and geographical studies towards a survey of possible markets for English products are received with an air of ironical suspicion by many of his political friends, who take his pretension to give advice concerning the Amazon, the Euphrates, and the Niger as equivalent to the currier's wide views on the applicability of leather. He can only make a figure through his genial hospitality. It is in vain that he buys the best pictures and statues of the best artists. Nobody will call him a judge in art. If his pictures and statues are well chosen it is generally thought that Scintilla told him what to buy; and yet Scintilla in other connections is spoken of as having only a superficial and often questionable taste. Mixtus, it is decided, is a good fellow, not ignorant—no, really having a good deal of knowledge as well as sense, but not easy to classify otherwise than as a rich man. He has consequently become a little uncertain as to his own point of view, and in his most unreserved moments of friendly intercourse, even when speaking to listeners whom he thinks likely to sympathise with the earlier part of his career, he presents himself in all his various aspects and feels himself in turn what he has been, what he is, and what others take him to be (for this last status is what we must all more or less accept). ... He has long been wont to feel bashful about his former religion; as if it were an old attachment having consequences which he did not abandon but kept in decent privacy, his avowed objects and actual position being incompatible with their public acknowledgment."

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" ... Indeed, hardly any of his acquaintances know what Mixtus really is, considered as a whole—nor does Mixtus himself know it."

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September 19, 2021 - September 19, 2021.

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X. Debasing the Moral Currency.

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Again, George Eliot observes something we've all experienced, and sets out to dissect the negative.

" ... I observe that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiring acceptance solely by virtue of the French language, and one may fairly desire that what seems a just discrimination should profit by the fashionable prejudice in favour of La Bruyhre's idiom. But I wish he had added that the habit of dragging the ludicrous into topics where the chief interest is of a different or even opposite kind is a sign not of endowment, but of deficiency. The art of spoiling is within reach of the dullest faculty: the coarsest clown with a hammer in his hand might chip the nose off every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand grinning at the effect of his work."

But here she could have stopped a moment, to pay a little attention to what she wrote, and consider it "every statue and bust in the Vatican". Obviously those are considered holy, by their association with the place, by those that worship it. They do not realise the contradictions therein, of indulging, in what amounts to idol worship, whether of the statues or of the place, while they disparage such practices elsewhere.

It has been, moreover, monotheistic conversionism that caused most damage around the world, invading and colonising, looting, besmirching and attempting to destroy cultures other than ones own, and giving them names that aren't bad to begin with but begin to seem so after the contempt and horror heaped on them. Words and phrases such as idol, idol worship, pagan, even the word grotesque, belong to this category.

But why do abrahmic get to define them? After all, erecting any statue, or putting up a poster with an image, is no different from idol; and worship cannot be defined by flowers and incense alone, it's in the reverence that accompanies such putting up if statues and posters. For that matter, calling a book or a male holy, and indulging in mayhem taking lives when there's an act by anyone ridiculing either, isn't that idol worship? If an image in matter is merely matter, a book after is all is merely squiggles on treated wood pulp, or on stone; a name is merely a sound, one amongst others.

But Cortez destroying exquisite emerald statues wasn't seen as a horror by the "faithful" of Europe, any more than destruction of temples in India was, or robbing the world by all these invaders colonizing and enslaving others. Why is destruction of statues in Vatican the only example George Eliot could come up with as an example of such horror?

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" ... Because wit is an exquisite product of high powers, we are not therefore forced to admit the sadly confused inference of the monotonous jester that he is establishing his superiority over every less facetious person, and over every topic on which he is ignorant or insensible, by being uneasy until he has distorted it in the small cracked mirror which he carries about with him as a joking apparatus. ... "

Indeed! And how often have we observed those that considered themselves above, indulging at cost of those considered below? And the coterie around, in between, enjoying laughter in chorus?

" ... Some high authority is needed to give many worthy and timid persons the freedom of muscular repose under the growing demand on them to laugh when they have no other reason than the peril of being taken for dullards; still more to inspire them with the courage to say that they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and their children of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men, by burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich fishmongers in the stalls and their assistants in the gallery. ... "

Again, indeed!

"I have been amazed to find that some artists whose own works have the ideal stamp, are quite insensible to the damaging tendency of the burlesquing spirit which ranges to and fro and up and down on the earth, seeing no reason (except a precarious censorship) why it should not appropriate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves to make up the treasure of human admiration, hope, and love. One would have thought that their own half-despairing efforts to invest in worthy outward shape the vague inward impressions of sublimity, and the consciousness of an implicit ideal in the commonest scenes, might have made them susceptible of some disgust or alarm at a species of burlesque which is likely to render their compositions no better than a dissolving view, where every noble form is seen melting into its preposterous caricature. It used to be imagined of the unhappy medieval Jews that they parodied Calvary by crucifying dogs; if they had been guilty they would at least have had the excuse of the hatred and rage begotten by persecution. Are we on the way to a parody which shall have no other excuse than the reckless search after fodder for degraded appetites—after the pay to be earned by pasturing Circe's herd where they may defile every monument of that growing life which should have kept them human?"

That applies, to every disparagement, of everything outside Europe and West Asia, by every conquistadors and all their spreaders of their own faiths, from Arabs and Cortez to Macaulay and more. wreaking havoc through the world.

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September 20, 2021 - September 20, 2021.

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XI. The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb.

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This makes one smile, especially with West attempting to patent and copyright all human knowledge even when openly stolen from elsewhere!

"No man, I imagine, would object more strongly than Euphorion to communistic principles in relation to material property, but with regard to property in ideas he entertains such principles willingly, and is disposed to treat the distinction between Mine and Thine in original authorship as egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed, insist at some expense of erudition on the prior right of an ancient, a medieval, or an eighteenth century writer to be credited with a view or statement lately advanced with some show of originality; and this championship seems to imply a nicety of conscience towards the dead. He is evidently unwilling that his neighbours should get more credit than is due to them, and in this way he appears to recognise a certain proprietorship even in spiritual production. But perhaps it is no real inconsistency that, with regard to many instances of modern origination, it is his habit to talk with a Gallic largeness and refer to the universe: he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intellectual products, free and all-embracing as the liberal air; on the infinitesimal smallness of individual origination compared with the massive inheritance of thought on which every new generation enters; on that growing preparation for every epoch through which certain ideas or modes of view are said to be in the air, and, still more metaphorically speaking, to be inevitably absorbed, so that every one may be excused for not knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the proper subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea or combination which, being produced by the sum total of the human race, must belong to that multiple entity, from the accomplished lecturer or populariser who transmits it, to the remotest generation of Fuegians or Hottentots, however indifferent these may be to the superiority of their right above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic author."

India has been now, for decades, fighting U.S. and other multinational corporations who have habitually gone and patented everything India has known for millennia, and not just lying dusty in a corner, but used in practice in every household, taught by older women to their young, as necessities of life everyone must know.

And yet there is every attempt, largely in U.S. surprisingly, of throwing mud at India and her culture of antiquity, attempting to butcher it by such means as heaping contempt on some aspects of culture of India, while denying that other parts- which West cannot heap even discredit, much less contempt, on, are just as much part of eternal ancient culture of India. The former category they include India's worship, religion and social systems; the latter, Yoga, Ayurveda and more. And the ridiculousness of it all is the extreme length they go to - some have "patented" some "yoga" they "invented", while others, indignant at the confrontation of fact of Yoga having originated from India, and not only known but practiced in India for millennia until now, ask if they must pay India a fee for practicing it!

" ... I protest against the use of these majestic conceptions to do the dirty work of unscrupulosity and justify the non-payment of conscious debts which cannot be defined or enforced by the law. Especially since it is observable that the large views as to intellectual property which can apparently reconcile an able person to the use of lately borrowed ideas as if they were his own, when this spoliation is favoured by the public darkness, never hinder him from joining in the zealous tribute of recognition and applause to those warriors of Truth whose triumphal arches are seen in the public ways, those conquerors whose battles and "annexations" even the carpenters and bricklayers know by name. Surely the acknowledgment of a mental debt which will not be immediately detected, and may never be asserted, is a case to which the traditional susceptibility to "debts of honour" would be suitably transferred. There is no massive public opinion that can be expected to tell on these relations of thinkers and investigators—relations to be thoroughly understood and felt only by those who are interested in the life of ideas and acquainted with their history. To lay false claim to an invention or discovery which has an immediate market value; to vamp up a professedly new book of reference by stealing from the pages of one already produced at the cost of much labour and material; to copy somebody else's poem and send the manuscript to a magazine, or hand it about among; friends as an original "effusion;" to deliver an elegant extract from a known writer as a piece of improvised eloquence:—these are the limits within which the dishonest pretence of originality is likely to get hissed or hooted and bring more or less shame on the culprit. ... "

Except, of course, when west steals from india - then combination of Macaulay policy with colonisation and loot that culminated in genocide twice in a decade, leads to an attitude in west whereby its respectable to steal from India and deny India. George Eliot explains.

"I can therefore only explain the apparent infirmity of his memory in cases of larger "conveyance" by supposing that he is accustomed by the very association of largeness to range them at once under those grand laws of the universe in the light of which Mine and Thine disappear and are resolved into Everybody's or Nobody's, and one man's particular obligations to another melt untraceably into the obligations of the earth to the solar system in general.

" ... Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowledgment were brought home to him, would probably take a narrower ground of explanation. It was a lapse of memory; or it did not occur to him as necessary in this case to mention a name, the source being well known—or (since this seems usually to act as a strong reason for mention) he rather abstained from adducing the name because it might injure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-mark casts discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer who has furnished himself from a quarter not likely to be esteemed first-rate. No doubt this last is a genuine and frequent reason for the non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of the cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for sound learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and disguised his references to it under contractions in which Us. Knowl.. took the place of the low word Penny. Works of this convenient stamp, easily obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt to be like rich but unfashionable relations who are visited and received in privacy, and whose capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insistance on their names and places of abode. As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love—when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them. But it is always interesting to bring forward eminent names, such as Patricius or Scaliger, Euler or Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To know exactly what has been drawn from them is erudition and heightens our own influence, which seems advantageous to mankind; whereas to cite an author whose ideas may pass as higher currency under our own signature can have no object except the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over his figure when it is important to be seen oneself. All these reasons must weigh considerably with those speculative persons who have to ask themselves whether or not Universal Utilitarianism requires that in the particular instance before them they should injure a man who has been of service to them, and rob a fellow-workman of the credit which is due to him."

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"True, some persons are so constituted that the very excellence of an idea seems to them a convincing reason that it must be, if not solely, yet especially theirs. It fits in so beautifully with their general wisdom, it lies implicitly in so many of their manifested opinions, that if they have not yet expressed it (because of preoccupation) it is clearly a part of their indigenous produce, and is proved by their immediate eloquent promulgation of it to belong more naturally and appropriately to them than to the person who seemed first to have alighted on it, and who sinks in their all-originating consciousness to that low kind of entity, a second cause. This is not lunacy, nor pretence, but a genuine state of mind very effective in practice, and often carrying the public with it, so that the poor Columbus is found to be a very faulty adventurer, and the continent is named after Amerigo. ... "

Europe had no business naming the continent, in the first place - it wasn't empty! Not bothering to ask what the natives called their land and naming it after a forgotten sailor has chutzpah peculiar to the continent of dark latitudes (- yes, summer isn't dark, but people aren't bears, and humans sleep in summer the same amount as in winters, so on the whole if you live in Europe, you live in dark -) that would be equivalent of, say, India naming U.S. after the first migrant from India landing on the continent.

Or 'Kamala' will do just as well.

But fact is, George Eliot forgets, or was unaware, of the Vikings having not only known the continent across Atlantic, and having travelled there, but having settled there as well, for centuries, before giving up and returning due to lack of a n mass migration. They lived in harmony with local people, and had stations as far south as Massachusetts. This was a couple of centuries prior to Columbus.

And the reason Amerigo, not Columbus, was who the continent was named after - was it antisemitism?

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"It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and performances in general, have qualities assigned them not by a direct judgment on the performances themselves, but by a presumption of what they are likely to be, considering who is the performer. ... "

And here West uses caste system of West to determine thus issue, whereby wealth, colour and above all, gender, are the criteria - a tall WASP male is obviously considered superior to a dark poor female, no matter how wrong his pronouncements and his correct her observations; and antisemitism is included here.

George Eliot ends with the lovely satire of a fable related to discovery of a honeycomb and an animal council thanking wasp for the sweet produce because a wasp had stung the fox when he questioned the wasp's claim.

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September 20, 2021 - September 20, 2021.

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XII. “So Young!”

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" ... If we imagine with due charity the effect on Ganymede, we shall think it greatly to his credit that he continued to feel the necessity of being something more than young, and did not sink by rapid degrees into a parallel of that melancholy object, a superannuated youthful phenomenon. ... He has continued to be productive both of schemes and writings, being perhaps helped by the fact that his 'Comparative Estimate' did not greatly affect the currents of European thought, and left him with the stimulating hope that he had not done his best, but might yet produce what would make his youth more surprising than ever."

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" ... Owing to my absence on travel and to other causes I had lost sight of him for several years, but such a separation between two who have not missed each other seems in this busy century only a pleasant reason, when they happen to meet again in some old accustomed haunt, for the one who has stayed at home to be more communicative about himself than he can well be to those who have all along been in his neighbourhood. He had married in the interval, and as if to keep up his surprising youthfulness in all relations, he had taken a wife considerably older than himself. It would probably have seemed to him a disturbing inversion of the natural order that any one very near to him should have been younger than he, except his own children who, however young, would not necessarily hinder the normal surprise at the youthfulness of their father. ... "

"I left him on that occasion without any melancholy forecast that his illusion would be suddenly or painfully broken up. I saw that he was well victualled and defended against a ten years' siege from ruthless facts; and in the course of time observation convinced me that his resistance received considerable aid from without. Each of his written productions, as it came out, was still commented on as the work of a very young man. One critic, finding that he wanted solidity, charitably referred to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy, seemed to regard his youth as so wondrous that all other authors appeared decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be looked for from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a familiar metaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humouredly, implying that Ganymede's crudities were pardonable in one so exceedingly young. Such unanimity amid diversity, which a distant posterity might take for evidence that on the point of age at least there could have been no mistake, was not really more difficult to account for than the prevalence of cotton in our fabrics. Ganymede had been first introduced into the writing world as remarkably young, and it was no exceptional consequence that the first deposit of information about him held its ground against facts which, however open to observation, were not necessarily thought of. ... the precocious author of the 'Comparative Estimate' heard the echoes repeating "Young Ganymede" when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would have given him forty years at least. ... "

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September 20, 2021 - September 20, 2021.

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XIII. How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials, and Believe in Them.

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"Introspection which starts with the purpose of finding out one's own absurdities is not likely to be very mischievous, yet of course it is not free from dangers any more than breathing is, or the other functions that keep us alive and active. ... One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment: it resembles appropriate muscular action, which is attained by the myriad lessons in nicety of balance and of aim that only practice can give. ... and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's kinship with all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battles against wrong."

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" ... To be unaware of our own little tricks of manner or our own mental blemishes and excesses is a comprehensible unconsciousness; the puzzling fact is that people should apparently take no account of their deliberate actions, and should expect them to be equally ignored by others. It is an inversion of the accepted order: there it is the phrases that are official and the conduct or privately manifested sentiment that is taken to be real; here it seems that the practice is taken to be official and entirely nullified by the verbal representation which contradicts it. The thief making a vow to heaven of full restitution and whispering some reservations, expecting to cheat Omniscience by an "aside," is hardly more ludicrous than the many ladies and gentlemen who have more belief, and expect others to have it, in their own statement about their habitual doings than in the contradictory fact which is patent in the daylight. One reason of the absurdity is that we are led by a tradition about ourselves, so that long after a man has practically departed from a rule or principle, he continues innocently to state it as a true description of his practice—just as he has a long tradition that he is not an old gentleman, and is startled when he is seventy at overhearing himself called by an epithet which he has only applied to others."

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September 20, 2021 - September 20, 2021.

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XIV. The too Ready Writer.

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"One who talks too much, hindering the rest of the company from taking their turn, and apparently seeing no reason why they should not rather desire to know his opinion or experience in relation to all subjects, or at least to renounce the discussion of any topic where he can make no figure, has never been praised for this industrious monopoly of work which others would willingly have shared in. However various and brilliant his talk may be, we suspect him of impoverishing us by excluding the contributions of other minds, which attract our curiosity the more because he has shut them up in silence. Besides, we get tired of a "manner" in conversation as in painting, when one theme after another is treated with the same lines and touches. I begin with a liking for an estimable master, but by the time he has stretched his interpretation of the world unbrokenly along a palatial gallery, I have had what the cautious Scotch mind would call "enough" of him. There is monotony and narrowness already to spare in my own identity; what comes to me from without should be larger and more impartial than the judgment of any single interpreter. ... "

"Why is there a different standard of judgment with regard to a writer who plays much the same part in literature as the excessive talker plays in what is traditionally called conversation? ... The excessive talker can only be in one gathering at a time, and there is the comfort of thinking that everywhere else other fellow-citizens who have something to say may get a chance of delivering themselves; but the exorbitant writer can occupy space and spread over it the more or less agreeable flavour of his mind in four "mediums" at once, and on subjects taken from the four winds. ... "

"Such entertainment of scruple can hardly be expected from the young; but happily their readiness to mirror the universe anew for the rest of mankind is not encouraged by easy publicity. ... In relation to all subjects I had a joyous consciousness of that ability which is prior to knowledge, and of only needing to apply myself in order to master any task—to conciliate philosophers whose systems were at present but dimly known to me, to estimate foreign poets whom I had not yet read, to show up mistakes in an historical monograph that roused my interest in an epoch which I had been hitherto ignorant of, when I should once have had time to verify my views of probability by looking into an encyclopaedia. ... That impulse to decide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, that dream of aerial unlimited movement at will without feet or wings, which were once but the joyous mounting of young sap, are already taking shape as unalterable woody fibre: the impulse has hardened into "style," and into a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in the presence of other men's failures is turning into the official arrogance of one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself been called on to execute; the dreamy buoyancy of the stripling has taken on a fatal sort of reality in written pretensions which carry consequences. ... copying the just humility of the old Puritan, I may say, "But for the grace of discouragement, this coxcombry might have been mine.""

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" ... having bound himself to express judgments which will satisfy some other demands than that of veracity, he has blunted his perceptions by continual preoccupation. We cannot command veracity at will: the power of seeing and reporting truly is a form of health that has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnly said, "The penalty of untruth is untruth." But Pepin is only a mild example of the fact that incessant writing with a view to printing carries internal consequences which have often the nature of disease. And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we have anything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which has not been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth considering what effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearly there is a sort of writing which helps to keep the writer in a ridiculously contented ignorance; raising in him continually the sense of having delivered himself effectively, so that the acquirement of more thorough knowledge seems as superfluous as the purchase of costume for a past occasion. He has invested his vanity (perhaps his hope of income) in his own shallownesses and mistakes, and must desire their prosperity. Like the professional prophet, he learns to be glad of the harm that keeps up his credit, and to be sorry for the good that contradicts him. It is hard enough for any of us, amid the changing winds of fortune and the hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which is another's calamity; but one may choose not to enter on a course which will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, committing ourselves to be continually pleased that others should appear to be wrong in order that we may have the air of being right."

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September 20, 2021 - September 20, 2021.

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XV. Diseases of Small Authorship.

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" ... I was thinking principally of Vorticella, who flourished in my youth not only as a portly lady walking in silk attire, but also as the authoress of a book entitled 'The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appendix.' ... What one would have wished, after experience, was that she had refrained from producing even that single volume, and thus from giving her self-importance a troublesome kind of double incorporation which became oppressive to her acquaintances, and set up in herself one of those slight chronic forms of disease to which I have just referred. ... "

"Vorticella being the wife of an important townsman had naturally the satisfaction of seeing 'The Channel Islands' reviewed by all the organs of Pumpiter opinion, and their articles or paragraphs held as naturally the opening pages in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for the reception of " critical opinions." This ornamental volume lay on a special table in her drawing-room close to the still more gorgeously bound work of which it was the significant effect, and every guest was allowed the privilege of reading what had been said of the authoress and her work in the 'Pumpiter Gazette and Literary Watchman,' the 'Pumpshire Post,' the 'Church Clock,' the 'Independent Monitor,' and the lively but judicious publication known as the 'Medley Pie;' to be followed up, if he chose, by the instructive perusal of the strikingly confirmatory judgments, sometimes concurrent in the very phrases, of journals from the most distant counties; as the 'Latchgate Argus,' the Penllwy Universe,' the 'Cockaleekie Advertiser,' the 'Goodwin Sands Opinion,' and the 'Land's End Times.'"

" ... This ad libitum perusal had its interest for me. The private truth being that I had not read 'The Channel Islands,' I was amazed at the variety of matter which the volume must contain to have impressed these different judges with the writer's surpassing capacity to handle almost all branches of inquiry and all forms of presentation. In Jersey she had shown herself an historian, in Guernsey a poetess, in Alderney a political economist, and in Sark a humorist: there were sketches of character scattered through the pages which might put our "fictionists" to the blush; the style was eloquent and racy, studded with gems of felicitous remark; and the moral spirit throughout was so superior that, said one, "the recording angel" (who is not supposed to take account of literature as such) "would assuredly set down the work as a deed of religion." The force of this eulogy on the part of several reviewers was much heightened by the incidental evidence of their fastidious and severe taste, which seemed to suffer considerably from the imperfections of our chief writers, even the dead and canonised: one afflicted them with the smell of oil, another lacked erudition and attempted (though vainly) to dazzle them with trivial conceits, one wanted to be more philosophical than nature had made him, another in attempting to be comic produced the melancholy effect of a half-starved Merry-Andrew; while one and all, from the author of the 'Areopagitica' downwards, had faults of style which must have made an able hand in the 'Latchgate Argus' shake the many-glanced head belonging thereto with a smile of compassionate disapproval. Not so the authoress of 'The Channel Islands:' Vorticella and Shakspere were allowed to be faultless. I gathered that no blemishes were observable in the work of this accomplished writer, and the repeated information that she was "second to none" seemed after this superfluous. Her thick octavo—notes, appendix and all—was unflagging from beginning to end; and the 'Land's End Times,' using a rather dangerous rhetorical figure, recommended you not to take up the volume unless you had leisure to finish it at a sitting. It had given one writer more pleasure than he had had for many a long day—a sentence which had a melancholy resonance, suggesting a life of studious languor such as all previous achievements of the human mind failed to stimulate into enjoyment. ... "

""You are probably surprised to see no notices from the London press," said Vorticella. "I have one—a very remarkable one. But I reserve it until the others have spoken, and then I shall introduce it to wind up. I shall have them reprinted, of course, and inserted in future copies. This from the 'Candelabrum' is only eight lines in length, but full of venom. It calls my style dull and pompous. I think that will tell its own tale, placed after the other critiques."

""People's impressions are so different," said I. "Some persons find 'Don Quixote' dull."

""Yes," said Vorticella, in emphatic chest tones, "dulness is a matter of opinion; but pompous! That I never was and never could be. Perhaps he means that my matter is too important for his taste; and I have no objection to that. I did not intend to be trivial. I should just like to read you that passage about the drag-nets, because I could make it clearer to you."

"A second (less ornamental) copy was at her elbow and was already opened, when to my great relief another guest was announced, and I was able to take my leave without seeming to run away from 'The Channel Islands,' though not without being compelled to carry with me the loan of "the marked copy," which I was to find advantageous in a re-perusal of the appendix, and was only requested to return before my departure from Pumpiter. Looking into the volume now with some curiosity, I found it a very ordinary combination of the commonplace and ambitious, one of those books which one might imagine to have been written under the old Grub Street coercion of hunger and thirst, if they were not known beforehand to be the gratuitous productions of ladies and gentlemen whose circumstances might be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanity that happened to have been directed towards authorship. ... I understand that the chronic complaint of 'The Channel Islands' never left her. As the years went on and the publication tended to vanish in the distance for her neighbours' memory, she was still bent on dragging it to the foreground, and her chief interest in new acquaintances was the possibility of lending them her book, entering into all details concerning it, and requesting them to read her album of "critical opinions." This really made her more tiresome than Gregarina, whose distinction was that she had had cholera, and who did not feel herself in her true position with strangers until they knew it."

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"My experience with Vorticella led me for a time into the false supposition that this sort of fungous disfiguration, which makes Self disagreeably larger, was most common to the female sex; but I presently found that here too the male could assert his superiority and show a more vigorous boredom. I have known a man with a single pamphlet containing an assurance that somebody else was wrong, together with a few approved quotations, produce a more powerful effect of shuddering at his approach than ever Vorticella did with her varied octavo volume, including notes and appendix. Males of more than one nation recur to my memory who produced from their pocket on the slightest encouragement a small pink or buff duodecimo pamphlet, wrapped in silver paper, as a present held ready for an intelligent reader. "A mode of propagandism," you remark in excuse; "they wished to spread some useful corrective doctrine." Not necessarily: the indoctrination aimed at was perhaps to convince you of their own talents by the sample of an "Ode on Shakspere's Birthday," or a translation from Horace.

"Vorticella may pair off with Monas, who had also written his one book—'Here and There; or, a Trip from Truro to Transylvania'—and not only carried it in his portmanteau when he went on visits, but took the earliest opportunity of depositing it in the drawing-room, and afterwards would enter to look for it, as if under pressure of a need for reference, begging the lady of the house to tell him whether she, had seen "a small volume bound in red." One hostess at last ordered it to be carried into his bedroom to save his time; but it presently reappeared in his hands, and was again left with inserted slips of paper on the drawing-room table.

"Depend upon it, vanity is human, native alike to men and women; only in the male it is of denser texture, less volatile, so that it less immediately informs you of its presence, but is more massive and capable of knocking you down if you come into collision with it; while in women vanity lays by its small revenges as in a needle-case always at hand. The difference is in muscle and finger-tips, in traditional habits and mental perspective, rather than in the original appetite of vanity. ... "

"No! there is no need to admit that women would carry away the prize of vanity in a competition where differences of custom were fairly considered. A man cannot show his vanity in a tight skirt which forces him to walk sideways down the staircase; but let the match be between the respective vanities of largest beard and tightest skirt, and here too the battle would be to the strong."

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September 20, 2021 - September 20, 2021.

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XVI. Moral Swindlers.

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One hadn't thought of George Eliot being a colonial racist, ignorant person,

"It is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of words that "what a man is worth" has come to mean how much money he possesses; but there seems a deeper and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that popular or polite speech assigns to "morality" and "morals." The poor part these words are made to play recalls the fate of those pagan divinities who, after being understood to rule the powers of the air and the destinies of men, came down to the level of insignificant demons, or were even made a farcical show for the amusement of the multitude."

No, one hadn't thought of George Eliot being a colonial racist, ignorant person,

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One hadn't thought of George Eliot being a colonial racist, ignorant person, much less siding with a butcher like Macaulay, who she mentions with casual respect.

Interesting, though, that she begins an essay on moral swindlers by invoking name of Macaulay, even if it's in a twisted way. But who could fit the title better!

"Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls."

Wasn't England's own history replete with males, including kings, of dubious morals in this regard, or why was mention of India necessary in this reference? Wasn't Henry the VIIth bad enough?

As for Macaulay, he set up the policy to destroy India by lying about everything good about India, badmouthing India fraudulently, until her spirit and her spine was broken, so as to enslave people of India and loot wealth of India without any obstruction.

Was George Eliot in accord with all this policy of butchering, looting, enslaving???

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"The informal definitions of popular language are the only medium through which theory really affects the mass of minds even among the nominally educated; and when a man whose business hours, the solid part of every day, are spent in an unscrupulous course of public or private action which has every calculable chance of causing widespread injury and misery, can be called moral because he comes home to dine with his wife and children and cherishes the happiness of his own hearth, the augury is not good for the use of high ethical and theological disputation."

Doesn't that describe Brit ish in India, looting and enslaving Indians causing famines by stealing harvests and ignoring deaths of millions that resulted thereby, massacring unarmed civilians by using tanks and machine guns, and calling themselves civilised?

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" ... To rob words of half their meaning, while they retain their dignity as qualifications, is like allowing to men who have lost half their faculties the same high and perilous command which they won in their time of vigour; or like selling food and seeds after fraudulently abstracting their best virtues: in each case what ought to be beneficently strong is fatally enfeebled, if not empoisoned. Until we have altered our dictionaries and have found some other word than morality to stand in popular use for the duties of man to man, let us refuse to accept as moral the contractor who enriches himself by using large machinery to make pasteboard soles pass as leather for the feet of unhappy conscripts fighting at miserable odds against invaders: let us rather call him a miscreant, though he were the tenderest, most faithful of husbands, and contend that his own experience of home happiness makes his reckless infliction of suffering on others all the more atrocious. ... "

Agreed - and considering how British looted, chiefly India, and then created a terrorist factory (because they wanted a free use of military bases for west for use against USSR), causing deaths of thousands- in India, in U.S. chiefly in 2001, and everywhere since - what does that say about England, about British, about anyone of British ancestry?

Thieves, killers, thugs, frauds, ...??? All of that, and worse?

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" ... And though we were to find among that class of journalists who live by recklessly reporting injurious rumours, insinuating the blackest motives in opponents, descanting at large and with an air of infallibility on dreams which they both find and interpret, and stimulating bad feeling between nations by abusive writing which is as empty of real conviction as the rage of a pantomime king, and would be ludicrous if its effects did not make it appear diabolical—though we were to find among these a man who was benignancy itself in his own circle, a healer of private differences, a soother in private calamities, let us pronounce him nevertheless flagrantly immoral, a root of hideous cancer in the commonwealth, turning the channels of instruction into feeders of social and political disease."

And guess who fit right in? BBC, NYT, ... all those lying against India, against Hindus, against Hinduism, ... All those who refused to admit, much less mention, that pakis were supporting terrorists, despite being advertised as 'partners in war on terror', which they emphatically never were, never had been, never have intentions of being; all those who knew that pakis defrauded U.S. of hundreds of billions that were supposedly aid, but poor of pal remained poor, forced to send their sons to terrorist factory schools, just to feed them (and then provide their daughters to terrorists as and when demanded!); And, too, all those who knew that Daniel Pearl wasn't killed without knowledge of authorities, and the trucks filled with U.S. ammunition were changed into potatoes because the ammunition was handed over to terrorists who used it to kill U.S. forces and other personnel. Was it worth lying against India, destroying India, raising this demon that turned and bit? Hid terrorists and denied it, and denied it even now, despite marines having killed him in Abbottabad, equivalent of paki West Point?

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" ... meanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to the average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace of immorality, though there is not a member of society who is not daily suffering from it materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatal cause that must degrade our national rank and our commerce in spite of all open markets and discovery of available coal-seams."

Open market nothing! As long as markets were even slightly fair, England used India muslin, better than any; when English factory manufactured cheap cloth coukdnt be forced on India, British chopped off Indian weavers' hands, to force a shutdown of Indian cloth industry.

""I suppose one may take the popular misuse of the words Morality and Morals as some excuse for certain absurdities which are occasional fashions in speech and writing—certain old lay-figures, as ugly as the queerest Asiatic idol, which at different periods get propped into loftiness, and attired in magnificent Venetian drapery, so that whether they have a human face or not is of little consequence. ... "

Yes, definitely racist, apart from ignorant and lying, blind and more. Venetian drapery? Best fabric was Indian! "

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" ... One is, the notion that there is a radical, irreconcilable opposition between intellect and morality. I do not mean the simple statement of fact, which everybody knows, that remarkably able men have had very faulty morals, and have outraged public feeling even at its ordinary standard; but the supposition that the ablest intellect, the highest genius, will see through morality as a sort of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, a doctrine of dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity. We begin to understand the acceptance of this foolishness by considering that we live in a society where we may hear a treacherous monarch, or a malignant and lying politician, or a man who uses either official or literary power as an instrument of his private partiality or hatred, or a manufacturer who devises the falsification of wares, or a trader who deals in virtueless seed-grains, praised or compassionated because of his excellent morals."

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September 20, 2021 - September 20, 2021.

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XVII. Shadows of the Coming Race.

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"My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universe hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the duration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possible worlds—a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficent qualities—my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under the sight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that "all this will soon be done by machinery." But he sometimes neutralises the consolation by extending it over so large an area of human labour, and insisting so impressively on the quantity of energy which will thus be set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an occasional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the humbler kinds of work should be entirely nullified while there are still left some men and women who are not fit for the highest.

"Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in which some of the most exalted tasks are already executed by those who are understood to be educated for them, there rises a fearful vision of the human race evolving machinery which will by-and-by throw itself fatally out of work. ... "

British couldn't do that in India, attempting to reverse the flow of trade - Indian goods were superior, Manchester cloth wasn't likely to sell in India. So British chopped off hands of Indian weavers, to force india to buy the low quality british products flooding the market.

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""Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?"

India's pre-mechanisation products were superior, because they weren't inaccurate or slovenly, India was known for quality products. Scientists have been unable to decipher secrets of several marvels thereof, list because invaders massacred indigenous people of India over a millennium and half, to reduce India to slavery.

George Eliot's diatribe at this point, questioning mechanisation, sounds so very familiar - its flavour and tone is so very like Bengali similar expressions, familiar from Bengali literature and films!

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But her flight of fancy, about industry and machines on one hand, and what humans could do, on the other, are equally funny, and not intentionally either -

"Say, for example, that all the scavengers work of London were done, so far as human attention is concerned, by the occasional pressure of a brass button (as in the ringing of an electric bell), you will then have a multitude of brains set free for the exquisite enjoyment of dealing with the exact sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted by the delicate machines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and give readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the production of epic poems or great judicial harangues."

How, those that were not in tune with mechanisation, and were baffled, or terrorised, at machines supplanting human labour of future, we're unable to comprehend reality! Although they were quite insensitive to the current reality of their times, of what atrocities were perpetrated by their nation, looting the world and worse.

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""Naturally," I persisted, "it is less easy to you than to me to imagine our race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being is possessed of, the harder it must be for him to conceive his own death. But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine myself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and giving way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What I would ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a new light along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination or structure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw, there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical and chemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supply its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This last stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as an unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged to supply them with work, found too much of everything done in too short a time. ... Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted existences do before the fittest ... "

U.S., a nation founded on colonial invaders replacing the indigenous almost entirely, indeed, does proliferate with what they call couch potatoes, having begin with pioneers who built their own log cabins and tilled earth, until mechanisation took over. But the couch potatoes are unlikely to be extinct, except individually - the very existence of several industries, from processed food to medicine to slimming and more, depend on them not only existing, but being in dire trouble.

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September 20, 2021 - September 21, 2021.

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XVIII. The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!

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She couldn't be unique in this, of course - this is probably true of most of West.

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"To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print; but the neglect of resemblances is a common property of dulness which unites all the various points of view—the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally ignorant."

Why do most, in West Asia as well as in West - Europe and lands settled or colonised by Europe to almost exclusion of earlier residents - forget the most important part, even as they profess their faith weekly? Namely, that their faiths are abrahmic, rooted therefore chiefly in Judaism? That not only their son of God (or a major prophet) was Jewish, as were his parents, siblings, and whole clan, inclu6all the disciples, but the two major books are a history of Jews too, even though the latter was falsified largely when written after church compromised with Rome for sake of power, turning and blaming crucifixion on Jews, even though it's easy to see the lie (Rome had occupied Judea and israel; as for crucifixion, those was carried out every day, by roman soldiers; victims, not conductors, were Jewish; and Roman authority, while it coukdnt always blame Jews - as masters in U.S. or English in Australia would blame slaves or native Australians for every whipping or other torture, including rapes, perpetrated by the masters, invaders, colonial occupiers), it would be a lie to say Romans were forced to act according to any wish expressed by any Jew.

In short, antisemitism is revenge by racists against the faith they are forced to profess weekly, whether on Sunday or a couple of days before - or three to five times a day, depending on the particular later abrahmic faith.

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Brilliant discourse by George Eliot, simultaneously defending a Jewish identity and destroying arguments for antisemitism.

"That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving nationality, that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, that even such a corporate existence as that of a Roman legion or an English regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards,—these are the glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public schools and universities, being happily ingrained in Greek and Latin classics. They have also been impressed on the world by conspicuous modern instances. That there is a free modern Greece is due—through all infiltration of other than Greek blood—to the presence of ancient Greece in the consciousness of European men; and every speaker would feel his point safe if he were to praise Byron's devotion to a cause made glorious by ideal identification with the past; hardly so, if he were to insist that the Greeks were not to be helped further because their history shows that they were anciently unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and that many modern Greeks are highly disreputable characters, while others are disposed to grasp too large a share of our commerce. The same with Italy: the pathos of his country's lot pierced the youthful soul of Mazzini, because, like Dante's, his blood was fraught with the kinship of Italian greatness, his imagination filled with a majestic past that wrought itself into a majestic future. Half a century ago, what was Italy? An idling-place of dilettanteism or of itinerant motiveless wealth, a territory parcelled out for papal sustenance, dynastic convenience, and the profit of an alien Government. What were the Italians? No people, no voice in European counsels, no massive power in European affairs: a race thought of in English and French society as chiefly adapted to the operatic stage, or to serve as models for painters; disposed to smile gratefully at the reception of halfpence; and by the more historical remembered to be rather polite than truthful, in all probability a combination of Machiavelli, Rubini, and Masaniello. Thanks chiefly to the divine gift of a memory which inspires the moments with a past, a present, and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and innocent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed."

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Here's why British made up a fraudulent theory of Aryan invasion and war against Dravidian whom they fraudulently termed races (- they were never races, much less separate as people) -

"Again, one of our living historians finds just sympathy in his vigorous insistance on our true ancestry, on our being the strongly marked heritors in language and genius of those old English seamen who, beholding a rich country with a most convenient seaboard, came, doubtless with a sense of divine warrant, and settled themselves on this or the other side of fertilising streams, gradually conquering more and more of the pleasant land from the natives who knew nothing of Odin, and finally making unusually clean work in ridding themselves of those prior occupants. ... "

But times change, and now, not only Welsh but Scots too have debated independence to extent they find comfortable; while former have resurrected their language, once forbidden even at home, latter have cited on independence from U.K..

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"True, we are not indebted to those ancestors for our religion: we are rather proud of having got that illumination from elsewhere. ... "

Why not admit it? Religion came from Jews, via Rome because Rome had occupied Judea, just as algebra came from India - as did numerals, and concept of zero - via arabs, who were traders travelling the silk route, trading, collecting manuscripts, and thus, along with Jews, preserved and transmitted knowledge (renaissance was only possible due to the manuscripts copied and preserved by Arabs and jews).

" ... The men who planted our nation were not Christians, though they began their work centuries after Christ; and they had a decided objection to Christianity when it was first proposed to them: they were not monotheists, and their religion was the reverse of spiritual. ... "

Equating monotheism with virtue is as false as a firm beluef that pole star is "above", or holding up Sun as the only, unique, source of light; and it's not even a great concept unless perception of Reality is admitted, which a male trinity makes a mockery of in every way. Holding your own, limited, faith above those of others, is no different from racism, just as holding males above females - as abrahmic cultures do - is merely animal law where physical force is above all else.

Racism is rampant in "religion was the reverse of spiritual.", and while nobody has yet openly admitted either that building tall structures is not superior achievement, nor admitted that modern Europe is inferior, nor have they understood just what ancient stupendous structures throughout the world were, much less how they were built - Stonehenge, pyramids, and much more. If they arent evidence of inferiority of subsequent cultures, cathedrals are positively stupid.

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"The Red Indians, not liking us when we settled among them, might have been willing to fling such facts in our faces, but they were too ignorant, and besides, their opinions did not signify, because we were able, if we liked, to exterminate them."

If? " ... because we were able, if we liked, to exterminate them.""??? Wasnt it proved in action? They are now penned like animals in a zoo without a fence, but penned they are, if they choose not to assimilate and convert; that is, wghat remains of them. And in South of Panama, they are slaves in all but name.

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This is not merely false, it's abusive too.

And, of course, rabidly racist, almost Nazi in it's ignorance and pugnacious attitude.

" ... The Hindoos also have doubtless had their rancours against us and still entertain enough ill-will to make unfavourable remarks on our character, especially as to our historic rapacity and arrogant notions of our own superiority; they perhaps do not admire the usual English profile, and they are not converted to our way of feeding: but though we are a small number of an alien race profiting by the territory and produce of these prejudiced people, they are unable to turn us out; at least, when they tried we showed them their mistake. We do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished people: we are a colonising people, and it is we who have punished others."

How times change! She coukdnt have foreseen that her philosophy would be taken by nazis, perfected, and used right there in Europe; that triumph over them cost colonial expansionism; that by the time Brits left, they couldn't possibly be fraudulently portrayed as merely humans dealing with animals, but were exposed as killers of innocent, in hundreds, thousands, millions; and they caused deaths of tens of millions by leaving India after dividing it, so they were cowards exposed as such. Shameful Flight, anyone?

Virtues of British?!!! Go just ask Irish, if you are racist and don't think India deserves a fair treatment. They too suffered most of what India did.

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" ... A people having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and gradual growth through past labours and struggles, such as are still demanded of it in order that the freedom and wellbeing thus inherited may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its institutions. ... "

And yet she respects Macaulay, who put in place an explicitly stated policy of fraudulent propaganda against India, badmouthing every good or great thing about India, so as to kill the spirit of India and to enslave people. Nazis indeed, until Germany perfected and turned it against them, conquering far more of Europe than anyone else.

" ... It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity, will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action. ... "

As India did, before, during and after George Eliot lived, while she is here glorifying her nation behaving like hyenas tearing up other people, whether during her times or in history.

" ... An individual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in actual existence yet existing in the past, in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored. A common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes a complete man. The time is not come for cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism to suffice for social energy. ... "

Why carp about India disliking English, which was due to the misbehaviour of the British, and why pretend it was about unreasonable reaction to "profile" rather than arrogant, beastly behaviour indulged in by British in India?

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" ... I am not bound to feel for a Chinaman as I feel for my fellow-countryman: I am bound not to demoralise him with opium, not to compel him to my will by destroying or plundering the fruits of his labour on the alleged ground that he is not cosmopolitan enough, and not to insult him for his want of my tailoring and religion when he appears as a peaceable visitor on the London pavement. ... "

Opium wars were, in fact, about West asserting right to sell opium to China (legally prohibited in China), which Brits forced India to grow, empoverishing India in every way. U.S. did the same to Afghanistan in recent decades, discouraged planting food grains and encouraging opium planting.

No wonder they - China, Afghanistan, West Asia, .... - hate West.

And the Vidambanaa - is there an approximately sufficient word in English? - is, that West fails to see, fails completely to see, the benevolence, the love, the complete lack of s servility (and consequent hatred), that emanates from india - in a way that a stupid male teenager fails to value hus mother, but gives importance to the gangsters out there.

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" ... It is admirable in a Briton with a good purpose to learn Chinese, but it would not be a proof of fine intellect in him to taste Chinese poetry in the original more than he tastes the poetry of his own tongue. ... "

If it's true, that truth must be universal; and yet, English speakers not only are racist against those of rest of the world, but fail to comprehend why other Europeans dislike them for not learning other languages and behaving as if it's a favour to others if they do (however imcompetently), hate their English speakers' - arrogance in expecting everyone to speak and understand English, despise them for their presumptuous conduct when not at home.

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" ... Affection, intelligence, duty, radiate from a centre, and nature has decided that for us English folk that centre can be neither China nor Peru. Most of us feel this unreflectingly; for the affectation of undervaluing everything native, and being too fine for one's own country, belongs only to a few minds of no dangerous leverage. What is wanting is, that we should recognise a corresponding attachment to nationality as legitimate in every other people, and understand that its absence is a privation of the greatest good."

Again, if it's true, it must be universal; so if you can't be willing to see others as equal humans, stay home.

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"For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the presence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each individual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease or prosperity. And a people possessing this good should surely feel not only a ready sympathy with the effort of those who, having lost the good, strive to regain it, but a profound pity for any degradation resulting from its loss; nay, something more than pity when happier nationalities have made victims of the unfortunate whose memories nevertheless are the very fountain to which the persecutors trace their most vaunted blessings."

This is so close to the Nazi sentiment that one wouldn't be surprised if this had, in fact, inspired them, however indirectly.

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" ... The European world has long been used to consider the Jews as altogether exceptional, and it has followed naturally enough that they have been excepted from the rules of justice and mercy, which are based on human likeness. But to consider a people whose ideas have determined the religion of half the world, and that the more cultivated half, and who made the most eminent struggle against the power of Rome, as a purely exceptional race, is a demoralising offence against rational knowledge, a stultifying inconsistency in historical interpretation. Every nation of forcible character—i.e., of strongly marked characteristics, is so far exceptional. The distinctive note of each bird-species is in this sense exceptional, but the necessary ground of such distinction is a deeper likeness. The superlative peculiarity in the Jews admitted, our affinity with them is only the more apparent when the elements of their peculiarity are discerned."

Read this bit again -

" ... But to consider a people whose ideas have determined the religion of half the world, and that the more cultivated half, and who made the most eminent struggle against the power of Rome, as a purely exceptional race, is a demoralising offence against rational knowledge, a stultifying inconsistency in historical interpretation. ... "

And here's both racism and antisemitism - even though shes admitting the roman occu6,Jewish struggle, and Judaic roots of her faith, to which she admits ascribing her civilisation, which she considers superior to all others. Nevertheless, it's "a demoralising offence against rational knowledge" "to consider a people whose ideas have determined the religion of half the world, and that the more cultivated half" "as a purely exceptional race" - but George Eliot stating superiority of English is not "a demoralising offence against rational knowledge"????!!!!!

If that wasn't irrational, what is? How else does one categorise irrational, for ordinary definition for use of normal discourse, or even philosophy? (Obviously she's not speaking mathematics!)

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"From whatever point of view the writings of the Old Testament may be regarded, the picture they present of a national development is of high interest and speciality, nor can their historic momentousness be much affected by any varieties of theory as to the relation they bear to the New Testament or to the rise and constitution of Christianity. Whether we accept the canonical Hebrew books as a revelation or simply as part of an ancient literature, makes no difference to the fact that we find there the strongly characterised portraiture of a people educated from an earlier or later period to a sense of separateness unique in its intensity, a people taught by many concurrent influences to identify faithfulness to its national traditions with the highest social and religious blessings. Our too scanty sources of Jewish history, from the return under Ezra to the beginning of the desperate resistance against Rome, show us the heroic and triumphant struggle of the Maccabees, which rescued the religion and independence of the nation from the corrupting sway of the Syrian Greeks, adding to the glorious sum of its memorials, and stimulating continuous efforts of a more peaceful sort to maintain and develop that national life which the heroes had fought and died for, by internal measures of legal administration and public teaching. ... "

Right, now think India where she writes Jews or Israel- all but migration - and English where she says Syrian Greeks. It fits. For bible, there are far greater treasures of India, but if those she's ignorant. West, in general, is ignorant.

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" ... Thenceforth the virtuous elements of the Jewish life were engaged, as they had been with varying aspects during the long and changeful prophetic period and the restoration under Ezra, on the side of preserving the specific national character against a demoralising fusion with that of foreigners whose religion and ritual were idolatrous and often obscene. ... "

And yet she fails to understand how obscene their own religion and rituals are, even when they partake of a Jewish man's blood and flesh - every Sunday, even if symbolically. Did Romans indulge in cannibalism while occupying other lands?

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" ... There was always a Foreign party reviling the National party as narrow, and sometimes manifesting their own breadth in extensive views of advancement or profit to themselves by flattery of a foreign power. ... "

Familiar! And the Brits in India set up their caste system, comprising of layers added to the British caste system, whereby this "Foreign party" including all non-Hindu Indians was set up above all majority of India, exceptions being those who were willing to side with Brits and treat India abominably. It was quite complex, too, this British caste system for India, based on caste system of England.

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" ... Such internal conflict naturally tightened the bands of conservatism, which needed to be strong if it were to rescue the sacred ark, the vital spirit of a small nation—"the smallest of the nations"—whose territory lay on the highway between three continents; and when the dread and hatred of foreign sway had condensed itself into dread and hatred of the Romans, many Conservatives became Zealots, whose chief mark was that they advocated resistance to the death against the submergence of their nationality. Much might be said on this point towards distinguishing the desperate struggle against a conquest which is regarded as degradation and corruption, from rash, hopeless insurrection against an established native government; and for my part (if that were of any consequence) I share the spirit of the Zealots. ... "

And she still fails to see it all mirrored in India subjugated by British, resisting, fighting back - there she turns Pontius Pilate, favouring crucifixion of Indians, "teaching them" who was superior. Why then fight nazis? Wasn't theirs the identical principle, with victor and subject changed?

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George Eliot doesn't mind convoluted, twisted logic to suit her purpose -

"We have not been noted for forming a low estimate of ourselves in comparison with foreigners, or for admitting that our institutions are equalled by those of any other people under the sun. Many of us have thought that our sea-wall is a specially divine arrangement to make and keep us a nation of sea-kings after the manner of our forefathers, secure against invasion and able to invade other lands when we need them, though they may lie on the other side of the ocean. Again, it has been held that we have a peculiar destiny as a Protestant people, not only able to bruise the head of an idolatrous Christianity in the midst of us, but fitted as possessors of the most truth and the most tonnage to carry our purer religion over the world and convert mankind to our way of thinking. The Puritans, asserting their liberty to restrain tyrants, found the Hebrew history closely symbolical of their feelings and purpose; and it can hardly be correct to cast the blame of their less laudable doings on the writings they invoked, since their opponents made use of the same writings for different ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine right of kings and the denunciation of those who, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, took on themselves the office of the priesthood which belonged of right solely to Aaron and his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained by the English bishops. We must rather refer the passionate use of the Hebrew writings to affinities of disposition between our own race and the Jewish. Is it true that the arrogance of a Jew was so immeasurably beyond that of a Calvinist? And the just sympathy and admiration which we give to the ancestors who resisted the oppressive acts of our native kings, and by resisting rescued or won for us the best part of our civil and religious liberties—is it justly to be withheld from those brave and steadfast men of Jewish race who fought and died, or strove by wise administration to resist, the oppression and corrupting influences of foreign tyrants, and by resisting rescued the nationality which was the very hearth of our own religion? At any rate, seeing that the Jews were more specifically than any other nation educated into a sense of their supreme moral value, the chief matter of surprise is that any other nation is found to rival them in this form of self-confidence."

How does she negate the relationship of home and land with native, equating what she sees as rights invaders in case of English, with rights of Jews against Rome? Only to suit her purpose, establishing equivalence between Jewish and protestant as two superior races!

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" ... As the slave-holders in the United States counted the curse on Ham a justification of negro slavery, so the curse on the Jews was counted a justification for hindering them from pursuing agriculture and handicrafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiar dress; for torturing them to make them part with their gains, or for more gratuitously spitting at them and pelting them; for taking it as certain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned the wells, and took pains to spread the plague; for putting it to them whether they would be baptised or burned, and not failing to burn and massacre them when they were obstinate; but also for suspecting them of disliking the baptism when they had got it, and then burning them in punishment of their insincerity; finally, for hounding them by tens on tens of thousands from the homes where they had found shelter for centuries, and inflicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new dispersion. All this to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or else to compel these stiff-necked people to acknowledge a Master whose servants showed such beneficent effects of His teaching."

Is she totally obtuse? "avenge the Saviour"? Wasnt he crucified by Rome, as were thousands of other Jews? For the struggle against Rome? Never mind the official lie spread by Rome! Persecution of Jews by Europe is merely continuation of that by Rome, coupled with racism. Unless one labels it correctly as persecution of superior by inferior.

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" ... An oppressive government and a persecuting religion, while breeding vices in those who hold power, are well known to breed answering vices in those who are powerless and suffering. ... "

How does she fail to see India oppressed by Brits in this sentence? How does she presume stating India hates English for their profiles? Blind! Blinded by colour of skin, or need of robbing India?

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" ... The Jews, it is said, resisted the expansion of their own religion into Christianity; they were in the habit of spitting on the cross; they have held the name of Christ to be Anathema. Who taught them that? The men who made Christianity a curse to them: the men who made the name of Christ a symbol for the spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, made the execution of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their own savageness, greed, and envy: the men who sanctioned with the name of Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the words "His blood be upon us and on our children" as a divinely appointed verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on the people from whose sacred writings Christ drew His teaching. Strange retrogression in the professors of an expanded religion, boasting an illumination beyond the spiritual doctrine of Hebrew prophets! For Hebrew prophets proclaimed a God who demanded mercy rather than sacrifices. The Christians also believed that God delighted not in the blood of rams and of bulls, but they apparently conceived Him as requiring for His satisfaction the sighs and groans, the blood and roasted flesh of men whose forefathers had misunderstood the metaphorical character of prophecies which spoke of spiritual pre-eminence under the figure of a material kingdom. Was this the method by which Christ desired His title to the Messiahship to be commended to the hearts and understandings of the nation in which He was born? Many of His sayings bear the stamp of that patriotism which places fellow-countrymen in the inner circle of affection and duty. And did the words "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do," refer only to the centurion and his band, a tacit exception being made of every Hebrew there present from the mercy of the Father and the compassion of the Son?—nay, more, of every Hebrew yet to come who remained unconverted after hearing of His claim to the Messiahship, not from His own lips or those of His native apostles, but from the lips of alien men whom cross, creed, and baptism had left cruel, rapacious, and debauched? It is more reverent to Christ to believe that He must have approved the Jewish martyrs who deliberately chose to be burned or massacred rather than be guilty of a blaspheming lie, more than He approved the rabble of crusaders who robbed and murdered them in His name. But these remonstrances seem to have no direct application to personages who take up the attitude of philosophic thinkers and discriminating critics, professedly accepting Christianity from a rational point of view as a vehicle of the highest religious and moral truth, and condemning the Jews on the ground that they are obstinate adherents of an outworn creed, maintain themselves in moral alienation from the peoples with whom they share citizenship, and are destitute of real interest in the welfare of the community and state with which they are thus identified. These anti-Judaic advocates usually belong to a party which has felt itself glorified in winning for Jews, as well as Dissenters and Catholics, the full privileges of citizenship, laying open to them every path to distinction. At one time the voice of this party urged that differences of creed were made dangerous only by the denial of citizenship—that you must make a man a citizen before he could feel like one. At present, apparently, this confidence has been succeeded by a sense of mistake: there is a regret that no limiting clauses were insisted on, such as would have hindered the Jews from coming too far and in too large proportion along those opened pathways; and the Roumanians are thought to have shown an enviable wisdom in giving them as little chance as possible. But then, the reflection occurring that some of the most objectionable Jews are baptised Christians, it is obvious that such clauses would have been insufficient, and the doctrine that you can turn a Jew into a good Christian is emphatically retracted. ... that they have suffered an inward degradation stamping them as morally inferior, and—"serve them right," since they rejected Christianity. All which is mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a servile race, who have rejected Protestantism though it has been repeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose place in the moral scale may be judged by our advertisements, where the clause, "No Irish need apply," parallels the sentence which for many polite persons sums up the question of Judaism—"I never did like the Jews.""
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" ... If they drop that separateness which is made their reproach, they may be in danger of lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of missing that inward identification with the nationality immediately around them which might make some amends for their inherited privation. No dispassionate observer can deny this danger. Why, our own countrymen who take to living abroad without purpose or function to keep up their sense of fellowship in the affairs of their own land are rarely good specimens of moral healthiness; still, the consciousness of having a native country, the birthplace of common memories and habits of mind, existing like a parental hearth quitted but beloved; the dignity of being included in a people which has a part in the comity of nations and the growing federation of the world; that sense of special belonging which is the root of human virtues, both public and private,—all these spiritual links may preserve migratory Englishmen from the worst consequences of their voluntary dispersion. ... Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the corpus vile on which rage or wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their name flung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and contempt, they have remained proud of their origin. Does any one call this an evil pride? Perhaps he belongs to that order of man who, while he has a democratic dislike to dukes and earls, wants to make believe that his father was an idle gentleman, when in fact he was an honourable artisan, or who would feel flattered to be taken for other than an Englishman. It is possible to be too arrogant about our blood or our calling, but that arrogance is virtue compared with such mean pretence. The pride which identifies us with a great historic body is a humanising, elevating habit of mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or other selfish ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole; and no man swayed by such a sentiment can become completely abject. That a Jew of Smyrna, where a whip is carried by passengers ready to flog off the too officious specimens of his race, can still be proud to say, "I am a Jew," is surely a fact to awaken admiration in a mind capable of understanding what we may call the ideal forces in human history. And again, a varied, impartial observation of the Jews in different countries tends to the impression that they have a predominant kindliness which must have been deeply ingrained in the constitution of their race to have outlasted the ages of persecution and oppression. The concentration of their joys in domestic life has kept up in them the capacity of tenderness: the pity for the fatherless and the widow, the care for the women and the little ones, blent intimately with their religion, is a well of mercy that cannot long or widely be pent up by exclusiveness. And the kindliness of the Jew overflows the line of division between him and the Gentile. On the whole, one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of this scattered people, made for ages "a scorn and a hissing" is, that after being subjected to this process, which might have been expected to be in every sense deteriorating and vitiating, they have come out of it (in any estimate which allows for numerical proportion) rivalling the nations of all European countries in healthiness and beauty of physique, in practical ability, in scientific and artistic aptitude, and in some forms of ethical value. A significant indication of their natural rank is seen in the fact that at this moment, the leader of the Liberal party in Germany is a Jew, the leader of the Republican party in France is a Jew, and the head of the Conservative ministry in England is a Jew. And here it is that we find the ground for the obvious jealousy which is now stimulating the revived expression of old antipathies. "The Jews," it is felt, "have a dangerous tendency to get the uppermost places not only in commerce but in political life. Their monetary hold on governments is tending to perpetuate in leading Jews a spirit of universal alienism (euphemistically called cosmopolitanism), even where the West has given them a full share in civil and political rights. A people with oriental sunlight in their blood, yet capable of being everywhere acclimatised, they have a force and toughness which enables them to carry off the best prizes; and their wealth is likely to put half the seats in Parliament at their disposal.""

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"Do they propose as a remedy for the impending danger of our healthier national influences getting overridden by Jewish predominance, that we should repeal our emancipatory laws? Not all the Germanic immigrants who have been settling among us for generations, and are still pouring in to settle, are Jews, but thoroughly Teutonic and more or less Christian craftsmen, mechanicians, or skilled and erudite functionaries; and the Semitic Christians who swarm among us are dangerously like their unconverted brethren in complexion, persistence, and wealth. Then there are the Greeks who, by the help of Phoenician blood or otherwise, are objectionably strong in the city. Some judges think that the Scotch are more numerous and prosperous here in the South than is quite for the good of us Southerners; and the early inconvenience felt under the Stuarts of being quartered upon by a hungry, hard-working people with a distinctive accent and form of religion, and higher cheek-bones than English taste requires, has not yet been quite neutralised. As for the Irish, it is felt in high quarters that we have always been too lenient towards them;—at least, if they had been harried a little more there might not have been so many of them on the English press, of which they divide the power with the Scotch, thus driving many Englishmen to honest and ineloquent labour.

"So far shall we be carried if we go in search of devices to hinder people of other blood than our own from getting the advantage of dwelling among us.

"Let it be admitted that it is a calamity to the English, as to any other great historic people, to undergo a premature fusion with immigrants of alien blood; that its distinctive national characteristics should be in danger of obliteration by the predominating quality of foreign settlers. I not only admit this, I am ready to unite in groaning over the threatened danger. To one who loves his native language, who would delight to keep our rich and harmonious English undefiled by foreign accent, foreign intonation, and those foreign tinctures of verbal meaning which tend to confuse all writing and discourse, it is an affliction as harassing as the climate, that on our stage, in our studios, at our public and private gatherings, in our offices, warehouses, and workshops, we must expect to hear our beloved English with its words clipped, its vowels stretched and twisted, its phrases of acquiescence and politeness, of cordiality, dissidence or argument, delivered always in the wrong tones, like ill-rendered melodies, marred beyond recognition; that there should be a general ambition to speak every language except our mother English, which persons "of style" are not ashamed of corrupting with slang, false foreign equivalents, and a pronunciation that crushes out all colour from the vowels and jams them between jostling consonants. ... "

Why be blind to India disliking invaders for the same reason? Because if she were to admit this, or that they had no right to loot India, they'd have to return amounts stolen and compensate for lives lost?

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Coming closer to truth, and flitting away -

" ... Are we to adopt the exclusiveness for which we have punished the Chinese? Are we to tear the glorious flag of hospitality which has made our freedom the world-wide blessing of the oppressed? It is not agreeable to find foreign accents and stumbling locutions passing from the piquant exception to the general rule of discourse. But to urge on that account that we should spike away the peaceful foreigner, would be a view of international relations not in the long-run favourable to the interests of our fellow-countrymen; for we are at least equal to the races we call obtrusive in the disposition to settle wherever money is to be made and cheaply idle living to be found. ... "

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"The only point in this connection on which Englishmen are agreed is, that England itself shall not be subject to foreign rule. The fiery resolve to resist invasion, though with an improvised array of pitchforks, is felt to be virtuous, and to be worthy of a historic people. Why? Because there is a national life in our veins. Because there is something specifically English which we feel to be supremely worth striving for, worth dying for, rather than living to renounce it. Because we too have our share—perhaps a principal share—in that spirit of separateness which has not yet done its work in the education of mankind, which has created the varying genius of nations, and, like the Muses, is the offspring of memory."

Over and over, she fails to see that India fighting British occupation was just as correct, and not about any profile! So was China resisting West forcing opium on China, and calling the opium wars "punish China" is arrogance indeed. Victory in one war or battle isn't about moral right, and if it were so, males would be justified looking at every female as an object for usage as and when required, unless occupied by someone stronger! There would be no sanctity of either the person or anybody's marriage.

But then, this can't be foreign to George Eliot, she's after all declaring pride in English history from invasion of British Isles onward, and is familiar with droit de seigneur. Why else mention Macaulay's disgusting reference to India, instead of simply mentioning Henry the VIIth?!!!

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" ... There is understood to be a peculiar odour from the negro body, and we know that some persons, too rationalistic to feel bound by the curse on Ham, used to hint very strongly that this odour determined the question on the side of negro slavery."

Now why didn't it occur to George Eliot that it might be the odour, not profile, of the English that couldn't be offensive? After all the English are proud to state they don't shower every day, just as Bavarian are - and Indians, especially Hindus, not only must bathe every morning before intake of any food, but also wear fresh, washed clothes. (A Bavarian stated that India must be very dirty, because he didn't wash every day, and didn't change into fresh clothes more than once a month; Han Suyin makes the same observation about Chinese reluctance to bathe more than once a year, so China must be much cleaner than Germany, I had informed him.)

Did it never occur to her that odour, even objectionable odour, is - just possibly, very likely, more than average - mutual?

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"And this is the usual level of thinking in polite society concerning the Jews. Apart from theological purposes, it seems to be held surprising that anybody should take an interest in the history of a people whose literature has furnished all our devotional language; and if any reference is made to their past or future destinies some hearer is sure to state as a relevant fact which may assist our judgment, that she, for her part, is not fond of them, having known a Mr Jacobson who was very unpleasant, or that he, for his part, thinks meanly of them as a race, though on inquiry you find that he is so little acquainted with their characteristics that he is astonished to learn how many persons whom he has blindly admired and applauded are Jews to the backbone. Again, men who consider themselves in the very van of modern advancement, knowing history and the latest philosophies of history, indicate their contemptuous surprise that any one should entertain the destiny of the Jews as a worthy subject, by referring to Moloch and their own agreement with the theory that the religion of Jehovah was merely a transformed Moloch-worship, while in the same breath they are glorifying "civilisation" as a transformed tribal existence of which some lineaments are traceable in grim marriage customs of the native Australians. Are these erudite persons prepared to insist that the name "Father" should no longer have any sanctity for us, because in their view of likelihood our Aryan ancestors were mere improvers on a state of things in which nobody knew his own father?"

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"Some of us consider this question dismissed when they have said that the wealthiest Jews have no desire to forsake their European palaces, and go to live in Jerusalem. But in a return from exile, in the restoration of a people, the question is not whether certain rich men will choose to remain behind, but whether there will be found worthy men who will choose to lead the return. Plenty of prosperous Jews remained in Babylon when Ezra marshalled his band of forty thousand and began a new glorious epoch in the history of his race, making the preparation for that epoch in the history of the world which has been held glorious enough to be dated from for evermore. The hinge of possibility is simply the existence of an adequate community of feeling as well as widespread need in the Jewish race, and the hope that among its finer specimens there may arise some men of instruction and ardent public spirit, some new Ezras, some modern Maccabees, who will know how to use all favouring outward conditions, how to triumph by heroic example, over the indifference of their fellows and the scorn of their foes, and will steadfastly set their faces towards making their people once more one among the nations."

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"Formerly, evangelical orthodoxy was prone to dwell on the fulfilment of prophecy in the "restoration of the Jews," Such interpretation of the prophets is less in vogue now. The dominant mode is to insist on a Christianity that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial growth having a genealogy, but is a vaporous reflex of modern notions. The Christ of Matthew had the heart of a Jew—"Go ye first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." The Apostle of the Gentiles had the heart of a Jew: "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came." Modern apostles, extolling Christianity, are found using a different tone: they prefer the mediaeval cry translated into modern phrase. But the mediaeval cry too was in substance very ancient—more ancient than the days of Augustus. Pagans in successive ages said, "These people are unlike us, and refuse to be made like us: let us punish them." The Jews were steadfast in their separateness, and through that separateness Christianity was born. A modern book on Liberty has maintained that from the freedom of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may be enriched. Why should we not apply this argument to the idiosyncrasy of a nation, and pause in our haste to hoot it down? ... "

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And herein the genesis of Daniel Deronda.

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But both George Eliot and Upton Sinclair, with all the professing of sympathy and regard, nevertheless profess, too, a separation. Daniel with all interaction with Gwendolyn nevertheless does not love her or respect her, and can only marry the Jewish girl he rescued. And Lanny Budd might encourage a half sister Bess to marry Hansi, but arranges his own daughter to meet a son of Eric Pomeroy-Nelson, before she can meet her childhood playmate, son of the brother of Hansi who was murdered by nazis. As for Bess, she must come to grief, although it's shown as her fault, not Hansi's, and hand I can only find happiness with another, of his own.

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September 21, 2021 - September 21, 2021.

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April 01, 2021 -

September 18, 2021 - September 21, 2021.

Purchased January 21, 2021

Kindle Edition, 137 pages

Published May 17th 2012

(first published 1879)

Original Title

Impressions of Theophrastus Such

ASIN:- B0084CDKHQ

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The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.

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I.—Carlyle’s Life of Sterling

CARLYLE’S LIFE OF STERLING.

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"As soon as the closing of the Great Exhibition afforded a reasonable hope that there would once more be a reading public, “The Life of Sterling” appeared. A new work by Carlyle must always be among the literary births eagerly chronicled by the journals and greeted by the public. In a book of such parentage we care less about the subject than about its treatment, just as we think the “Portrait of a Lord” worth studying if it come from the pencil of a Vandyck. The life of John Sterling, however, has intrinsic interest, even if it be viewed simply as the struggle of a restless aspiring soul, yearning to leave a distinct impress of itself on the spiritual development of humanity, with that fell disease which, with a refinement of torture, heightens the susceptibility and activity of the faculties, while it undermines their creative force. Sterling, moreover, was a man thoroughly in earnest, to whom poetry and philosophy were not merely another form of paper currency or a ladder to fame, but an end in themselves—one of those finer spirits with whom, amid the jar and hubbub of our daily life,

“The melodies abide

"Of the everlasting chime.”

"But his intellect was active and rapid, rather than powerful, and in all his writings we feel the want of a stronger electric current to give that vigor of conception and felicity of expression, by which we distinguish the undefinable something called genius; while his moral nature, though refined and elevated, seems to have been subordinate to his intellectual tendencies and social qualities, and to have had itself little determining influence on his life."

" ... We have often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently to the task of the biographer—that when some great or good personage dies, instead of the dreary three or five volumed compilations of letter, and diary, and detail, little to the purpose, which two thirds of the reading public have not the chance, nor the other third the inclination, to read, we could have a real “Life,” setting forth briefly and vividly the man’s inward and outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to make clear the meaning which his experience has for his fellows. A few such lives (chiefly, indeed, autobiographies) the world possesses, and they have, perhaps, been more influential on the formation of character than any other kind of reading. But the conditions required for the perfection of life writing—personal intimacy, a loving and poetic nature which sees the beauty and the depth of familiar things, and the artistic power which seizes characteristic points and renders them with lifelike effect—are seldom found in combination. “The Life of Sterling” is an instance of this rare conjunction. ... "

"From the period when Carlyle’s own acquaintance with Sterling commenced, the Life has a double interest, from the glimpses it gives us of the writer, as well as of his hero. We are made present at their first introduction to each other; we get a lively idea of their colloquies and walks together, and in this easy way, without any heavy disquisition or narrative, we obtain a clear insight into Sterling’s character and mental progress. Above all, we are gladdened with a perception of the affinity that exists between noble souls, in spite of diversity in ideas—in what Carlyle calls “the logical outcome” of the faculties. ... "

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September 21, 2021 - September 21, 2021.

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II.—Woman in France

WOMAN IN FRANCE: MADAME DE SABLÉ.

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Was George Eliot unaware of other good women authors in English literature who were her contemporary or a little prior?

"In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, leaving a library entirely composed of works written by women, in various languages, and this library amounted to nearly 32,000 volumes. We will not hazard any conjecture as to the proportion of these volumes which a severe judge, like the priest in Don Quixote, would deliver to the flames, but for our own part, most of these we should care to rescue would be the works of French women. With a few remarkable exceptions, our own feminine literature is made up of books which could have been better written by men—books which have the same relation to literature is general, as academic prize poems have to poetry: when not a feeble imitation, they are usually an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire. ... "

Was she unaware of Jane Austen, Bronte sisters?

" ... And to this day, Madame de Sévigné remains the single instance of a woman who is supreme in a class of literature which has engaged the ambition of men; Madame Dacier still reigns the queen of blue stockings, though women have long studied Greek without shame; [33] Madame de Staël’s name still rises first to the lips when we are asked to mention a woman of great intellectual power; Madame Roland is still the unrivalled type of the sagacious and sternly heroic, yet lovable woman; George Sand is the unapproached artist who, to Jean Jacques’ eloquence and deep sense of external nature, unites the clear delineation of character and the tragic depth of passion. ... "

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" ... No wise person, we imagine, wishes to restore the social condition of France in the seventeenth century, or considers the ideal programme of woman’s life to be a marriage de convenance at fifteen, a career of gallantry from twenty to eight-and-thirty, and penitence and piety for the rest of her days. Nevertheless, that social condition has its good results, as much as the madly superstitious Crusades had theirs.

"But the most indisputable source of feminine culture and development in France was the influence of the salons, which, as all the world knows, were réunions of both sexes, where conversation ran along the whole gamut of subjects, from the frothiest vers de société to the philosophy of Descartes. Richelieu had set the fashion of uniting a taste for letters with the habits of polite society and the pursuits of ambition; and in the first quarter of the seventeenth century there were already several hôtels in Paris, varying in social position from the closest proximity of the Court to the debatable ground of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, which served as a rendezvous for different circles of people, bent on entertaining themselves either by showing talent or admiring it. The most celebrated of these rendezvous was the Hôtel de Rambouillet, which was at the culmination of its glory in 1630, and did not become quite extinct until 1648, when the troubles of the Fronde commencing, its habitués were dispersed or absorbed by political interests. The presiding genius of this salon, the Marquise de Rambouillet, was the very model of the woman who can act as anamalgam to the most incongruous elements; beautiful, but not preoccupied by coquetry, or passion; an enthusiastic admirer of talent, but with no pretensions to talent on her own part; exquisitely refined in language and manners, but warm and generous withal; not given to entertain her guests with her own compositions, or to paralyze them by her universal knowledge. She had once meant to learn Latin, but had been prevented by an illness; perhaps she was all the better acquainted with Italian and Spanish productions, which, in default of a national literature, were then the intellectual pabulum of all cultivated persons in France who are unable to read the classics. In her mild, agreeable presence was accomplished that blending of the high-toned chivalry of Spain with the caustic wit and refined irony of Italy, which issued in the creation of a new standard of taste—the combination of the utmost exaltation in sentiment with the utmost simplicity of language. Women are peculiarly fitted to further such a combination—first, from their greater tendency to mingle affection and imagination with passion, and thus subtilize it into sentiment; and next, from that dread of what overtaxes their intellectual energies, either by difficulty, or monotony, which gives them an instinctive fondness for lightness of treatment and airiness of expression, thus making them cut short all prolixity and reject all heaviness. When these womanly characteristics were brought into conversational contact with the materials furnished by such minds as those of Richelieu, Corneille, the Great Condé, Balzac, and Bossuet, it is no wonder that the result was something piquant and charming. Those famous habitués of the Hôtel de Rambouillet did not, apparently, first lay themselves out to entertain the ladies with grimacing “small-talk,” and then take each other by the sword-knot to discuss matters of real interest in a corner; they rather sought to present their best ideas in the guise most acceptable to intelligent and accomplished women. And the conversation was not of literature only: war, politics, religion, the lightest details of daily news—everything was admissible, if only it were treated with refinement and intelligence. ... "

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"Another centre from which feminine influence radiated into the national literature was the Palais du Luxembourg, where Mademoiselle d’Orleans, in disgrace at court on account of her share in the Fronde, held a little court of her own, and for want of anything else to employ her active spirit busied herself with literature. One fine morning it occurred to this princess to ask all the persons who frequented her court, among whom were Madame de Sévigné, Madame de la Fayette, and La Rochefoucauld, to write their own portraits, and she at once set the example. It was understood that defects and virtues were to be spoken of with like candor. The idea was carried out; those who were not clever or bold enough to write for themselves employing the pen of a friend.

"“Such,” says M. Cousin, “was the pastime of Mademoiselle and her friends during the years 1657 and 1658: from this pastime proceeded a complete literature. In 1659 Ségrais revised these portraits, added a considerable number in prose and even in verse, and published the whole in a handsome quarto volume, admirably printed, and now become very rare, under the title, ‘Divers Portraits.’ Only thirty copies were printed, not for sale, but to be given as presents by Mademoiselle. The work had a prodigious success. That which had made the fortune of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s romances—the pleasure of seeing one’s portrait a little flattered, curiosity to see that of others, the passion which the middle class always have had and will have for knowing what goes on in the aristocratic world (at that time not very easy of access), the names of the illustrious persons who were here for the first time described physically and morally with the utmost detail, great ladies transformed all at once into writers, and unconsciously inventing a new manner of writing, of which no book gave the slightest idea, and which was the ordinary manner of speaking of the aristocracy; this undefinable mixture of the natural, the easy, and at the same time of the agreeable, and supremely distinguished—all this charmed the court and the town, and very early in the year 1659 permission was asked of Mademoiselle to give a new edition of the privileged book for the use of the public in general.”"

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"In proportion as the literature of a country is enriched and culture becomes more generally diffused, personal influence is less effective in the formation of taste and in the furtherance of social advancement. It is no longer the coterie which acts on literature, but literature which acts on the coterie; the circle represented by the word public is ever widening, and ambition, poising itself in order to hit a more distant mark, neglects the successes of the salon. What was once lavished prodigally in conversation is reserved for the volume or the “article,” and the effort is not to betray originality rather than to communicate it. As the old coach-roads have sunk into disuse through the creation of railways, so journalism tends more and more to divert information from the channel of conversation into the channel of the Press; no one is satisfied with a more circumscribed audience than that very indeterminate abstraction “the public,” and men find a vent for their opinions not in talk, but in “copy.” We read the Athenæum askance at the tea-table, and take notes from the Philosophical Journal at a soirée; we invite our friends that we may thrust a book into their hands, and presuppose an exclusive desire in the “ladies” to discuss their own matters, “that we may crackle the Times” at our ease. In fact, the evident tendency of things to contract personal communication within the narrowest limits makes us tremble lest some further development of the electric telegraph should reduce us to a society of mutes, or to a sort of insects communicating by ingenious antenna of our own invention."

Television did that!

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"Madeline de Souvré, daughter of the Marquis of Courtenvaux, a nobleman distinguished enough to be chosen as governor of Louis XIII., was born in 1599, on the threshold of that seventeenth century, the brilliant genius of which is mildly reflected in her mind and history. Thus, when in 1635 her more celebrated friend, Mademoiselle de Bourbon, afterward the Duchess de Longueville, made her appearance at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, Madame de Sablé had nearly crossed that tableland of maturity which precedes a woman’s descent toward old age. She had been married in 1614, to Philippe Emanuel de Laval-Montmorency, Seigneur de Bois-Dauphin, and Marquis de Sablé, of whom nothing further is known than that he died in 1640, leaving her the richer by four children, but with a fortune considerably embarrassed. With beauty and high rank added to the mental attractions of which we have abundant evidence, we may well believe that Madame de Sablé’s youth was brilliant. For her beauty, we have the testimony of sober Madame de Motteville, who also speaks of her as having “beaucoup de lumière et de sincérité;” and in the following passage very graphically indicates one phase of Madame de Sablé’s character:

"“The Marquise de Sablé was one of those whose beauty made the most noise when the Queen came into France. But if she was amiable, she was still more desirous of appearing so; this lady’s self-love rendered her too sensitive to the regard which men exhibited toward her. There yet existed in France some remains of the politeness which Catherine de Medici had introduced from Italy, and the new dramas, with all the other works in prose and verse, which page 43 came from Madrid, were thought to have such great delicacy, that she (Madame de Sablé) had conceived a high idea of the gallantry which the Spaniards had learned from the Moors."

"Here is the grand element of the original femme précieuse, and it appears farther, in a detail also reported by Madame de Motteville, that Madame de Sablé had a passionate admirer in the accomplished Duc de Montmorency, and apparently reciprocated his regard; but discovering (at what period of their attachment is unknown) that he was raising a lover’s eyes toward the queen, she broke with him at once. “I have heard her say,” tells Madame de Motteville, “that her pride was such with regard to the Duc de Montmorency, that at the first demonstrations which he gave of his change, she refused to see him any more, being unable to receive with satisfaction attentions which she had to share with the greatest princess in the world.” There is no evidence except the untrustworthy assertion of Tallement de Réaux, that Madame de Sablé had any other liaison than this; and the probability of the negative is increased by the ardor of her friendships. The strongest of these was formed early in life with Mademoiselle Dona d’Attichy, afterward Comtesse de Maure; it survived the effervescence of youth, and the closest intimacy of middle age, and was only terminated by the death of the latter in 1663. A little incident in this friendship is so characteristic in the transcendentalism which was then carried into all the affections, that it is worth relating at length. Mademoiselle d’Attichy, in her grief and indignation at Richelieu’s treatment of her relative, quitted Paris, and was about to join her friend at Sablé, when she suddenly discovered that Madame de Sablé, in a letter to Madame de Rambouillet, had said that her greatest happiness would be to pass her life with Julie de Rambouillet, afterward Madame de Montausier. To Anne d’Attichy this appears nothing less than the crime of lèse-amitié. No explanations will appease her: she refuses to accept the assurance that the offensive expression was used simply out of unreflecting conformity to the style of the Hôtel de Rambouillet—that it was mere “galimatias.” She gives up her journey, and writes a letter, which is the only one Madame de Sablé chose to preserve, when, in her period of devotion, she sacrificed the records of her youth."

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"Peculiarities like this always deepen with age, and accordingly, fifteen years later, we find Madame D’Orleans in her “Princesse de Paphlagonia”—a romance in which she describes her court, with the little quarrels and other affairs that agitated it—giving the following amusing picture, or rather caricature, of the extent to which Madame de Sablé carried her pathological mania, which seems to have been shared by her friend the Countess de Maure (Mademoiselle d’Attichy). In the romance, these two ladies appear under the names of Princesse Parthénie and the Reine de Mionie.

"“There was not an hour in the day in which they did not confer together on the means of avoiding death, and on the art of rendering themselves immortal. Their conferences did not take place like those of other people; the fear of breathing an air which was too cold or top warm, the dread lest the wind should be too dry or too moist—in short, the imagination that the weather might not be as temperate as they thought necessary for the preservation of their health, caused them to write letters from one room to the other. ... If these letters were discovered, great advantages of all kinds might be derived from them, for they were princesses who had nothing mortal about them but the knowledge that they were mortal. ... The Princess Parthénie (Mme. de Sablé) had a palate as delicate as her mind; nothing could equal the magnificence of the entertainments she gave; all the dishes were exquisite, and her cleanliness was beyond all that could be imagined. It was in their time that writing came into use; previously nothing was written but marriage contracts, and letters were never heard of; thus it is to them that we owe a practice so convenient in intercourse.”"

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" ... La Rochefoucauld writes: “You cannot do me a greater charity than to permit the bearer of this letter to enter into the mysteries of your marmalade and your genuine preserves, and I humbly entreat you to do everything you can in his favor. If I could hope for two dishes of those preserves, which I did not deserve to eat before, I should be indebted to you all my life.” For our own part, being as far as possible from fraternizing with those spiritual people who convert a deficiency into a principle, and pique themselves on an obtuse palate as a point of superiority, we are not inclined to number Madame de Sablé’s friandise among her defects. ... "

"“ ... Mme. de Sablé is represented in her first youth at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, maintaining that woman is born to be an ornament to the world, and to receive the adoration of men. The woman worthy of the name ought always to appear above material wants, and retain, even in the most vulgar details of life, something distinguished and purified. Eating is a very necessary operation, but one which is not agreeable to the eye. Mme. de Sablé insisted on its being conducted with a peculiar cleanliness. According to her it was not every woman who could with impunity be at table in the presence of a lover; the first distortion of the face, she said, would be enough to spoil all. Gross meals made for the body merely ought to be abandoned to bourgeoises, and the refined woman should appear to take a little nourishment merely to sustain her, and even to divert her, as one takes refreshments and ices. Wealth did not suffice for this: a particular talent was required. Mme. de Sablé was a mistress in this art. She had transported the aristocratic spirit, and the genre précieux, good breeding and good taste, even into cookery. Her dinners, without any opulence, were celebrated and sought after.”

"It is quite in accordance with all this that Madame de Sablé should delight in fine scents, and we find that she did; for being threatened, in her Port Royal days, when she was at an advanced age, with the loss of smell, and writing for sympathy and information to Mère Agnès, who had lost that sense early in life, she receives this admonition from the stern saint: “You would gain by this loss, my very dear sister, if you made use of it as a satisfaction to God, for having had too much pleasure in delicious scents.” ... "

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" ... Soon after followed the commotions of the Fronde, which put a stop to social intercourse, and threw the closest friends into opposite ranks. According to Lenet, who relies on the authority of Gourville, Madame de Sablé was under strong obligations to the court, being in the receipt of a pension of 2000 crowns; at all events, she adhered throughout to the Queen and Mazarin, but being as far as possible from a fierce partisan, and given both by disposition and judgment to hear both sides of the question, she acted as a conciliator, and retained her friends of both parties. The Countess de Maure, whose husband was the most obstinate of frondeurs, remained throughout her most cherished friend, and she kept up a constant correspondence with the lovely and intrepid heroine of the Fronde, Madame de Longueville. Her activity was directed to the extinction of animosities, by bringing about marriages between the Montagues and Capulets of the Fronde—between the Prince de Condé, or his brother, and the niece of Mazarin, or between the three nieces of Mazarin and the sons of three noblemen who were distinguished leaders of the Fronde. Though her projects were not realized, her conciliatory position enabled her to preserve all her friendships intact, and when the political tempest was over, she could assemble around her in her residence, in the Place Royal, the same society as before. Madame de Sablé was now approaching her twelfth lustrum, and though the charms of her mind and character made her more sought after than most younger women, it is not surprising that, sharing as she did in the religious ideas of her time, the concerns of “salvation” seemed to become pressing. A religious retirement, which did not exclude the reception of literary friends or the care for personal comforts, made the most becoming frame for age and diminished fortune. Jansenism was then to ordinary Catholicism what Puseyism is to ordinary Church of Englandism in these days—it was a récherché form of piety unshared by the vulgar; and one sees at once that it must have special attractions for the précieuse. Madame de Sablé, then, probably about 1655 or ’56, determined to retire to Port Royal, not because she was already devout, but because she hoped to become so; as, however, she wished to retain the pleasure of intercourse with friends who were still worldly, she built for herself a set of apartments at once distinct from the monastery and attached to it. ... "

" ... But she was much more than this: she was the valuable, trusted friend of noble women and distinguished men; she was the animating spirit of a society, whence issued a new form of French literature; she was the woman of large capacity and large heart, whom Pascal sought to please, to whom Arnauld submitted the Discourse prefixed to his “Logic,” and to whom La Rochefoucauld writes: “Vous savez que je ne crois que vous êtes sur de certains chapitres, et surtout sur les replis da cœur.” The papers preserved by her secretary, Valant, show that she maintained an extensive correspondence with persons of various rank and character; that her pen was untiring in the interest of others; that men made her the depositary of their thoughts, women of their sorrows; that her friends were as impatient, when she secluded herself, as if they had been rival lovers and she a youthful beauty. It is into her ear that Madame de Longueville pours her troubles and difficulties, and that Madame de la Fayette communicates her little alarms, lest young Count de St. Paul should have detected her intimacy with La Rochefoucauld. ... "

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"Was not the woman, who could unite the ease and grace indicated by this letter, with an intellect that men thought worth consulting on matters of reasoning and philosophy, with warm affections, untiring activity for others, no ambition as an authoress, and an insight into confitures and ragoûts, a rare combination? No wonder that her salon at Port Royal was the favorite resort of such women as Madame de la Fayette, Madame de Montausier, Madame de Longueville, and Madame de Hautefort; and of such men as Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Nicole, and Domat. The collections of Valant contain papers which show what were the habitual subjects of conversation in this salon. Theology, of course, was a chief topic; but physics and metaphysics had their turn, and still more frequently morals, taken in their widest sense. There were “Conferences on Calvinism,” of which an abstract is preserved. When Rohault invented his glass tubes to serve for the barometrical experiments in which Pascal had roused a strong interest, the Marquis de Sourdis entertained the society with a paper entitled “Why Water Mounts in a Glass Tube.” Cartesianism was an exciting topic here, as well as everywhere else in France; it had its partisans and opponents, and papers were read containing “Thoughts on the Opinions of M. Descartes.” These lofty matters were varied by discussions on love and friendship, on the drama, and on most of the things in heaven and earth which the philosophy of that day dreamt of. Morals—generalizations on human affections, sentiments, and conduct—seem to have been the favorite theme; and the aim was to reduce these generalizations to their briefest form of expression, to give them the epigrammatic turn which made them portable in the memory. This was the specialty of Madame de Sablé’s circle, and was, probably, due to her own tendency. As the Hôtel de Rambouillet was the nursery of graceful letter-writing, and the Luxembourg of “portraits” and “characters,” so Madame de Sablé’s salon fostered that taste for the sententious style, to which we owe, probably, some of the best Pensées of Pascal, and certainly, the “Maxims” of La Rochefoucauld. Madame de Sablé herself wrote maxims, which were circulated among her friends; and, after her death, were published by the Abbé d’Ailly. They have the excellent sense and nobility of feeling which we should expect in everything of hers; but they have no stamp of genius or individual character: they are, to the “Maxims” of La Rochefoucauld, what the vase moulded in dull, heavy clay is to the vase which the action of fire has made light, brittle, and transparent. She also wrote a treatise on Education, which is much praised by La Rochefoucauld and M. d’Andilly; but which seems no longer to be found: probably it was not much more elaborate than her so-called “Treatise on Friendship,” which is but a short string of maxims. Madame de Sablé’s forte was evidently not to write herself, but to stimulate others to write; to show that sympathy and appreciation which are as genial and encouraging as the morning sunbeams. She seconded a man’s wit with understanding—one of the best offices which womanly intellect has rendered to the advancement of culture; and the absence of originality made her all the more receptive toward the originality of others.

"The manuscripts of Pascal show that many of the Pensées, which are commonly supposed to be raw materials for a great work on religion, were remodelled again and again, in order to bring them to the highest degree of terseness and finish, which would hardly have been the case if they had only been part of a quarry for a greater production. Thoughts, which are merely collected as materials, as stones out of which a building is to be erected, are not cut into facets, and polished like amethysts or emeralds. Since Pascal was from the first in the habit of visiting Madame de Sablé, at Port Royal, with his sister, Madame Périer (who was one of Madame de Sablé’s dearest friends), we may well suppose that he would throw some of his jewels among the large and small coin of maxims, which were a sort of subscription money there. Many of them have an epigrammatical piquancy, which was just the thing to charm a circle of vivacious and intelligent women: they seem to come from a La Rochefoucauld who has been dipped over again in philosophy and wit, and received a new layer. ... "

"It is curious to see La Rochefoucauld’s nervous anxiety about presenting himself before the public as an author; far from rushing into print, he stole into it, and felt his way by asking private opinions. Through Madame de Sablé he sent manuscript copies to various persons of taste and talent, both men and women, and many of the written opinions which he received in reply are still in existence. The women generally find the maxims distasteful, but the men write approvingly. These men, however, are for the most part ecclesiastics, who decry human nature that they may exalt divine grace. The coincidence between Augustinianism or Calvinism, with its doctrine of human corruption, and the hard cynicism of the maxims, presents itself in quite a piquant form in some of the laudatory opinions on La Rochefoucauld. ... She not only assisted him, as we have seen, in getting criticisms, and carrying out the improvements suggested by them, but when the book was actually published she prepared a notice of it for the only journal then existing—the Journal des Savants. This notice was originally a brief statement of the nature of the work, and the opinions which had been formed for and against it, with a moderate eulogy, in conclusion, on its good sense, wit, and insight into human nature. But when she submitted it to La Rochefoucauld he objected to the paragraph which stated the adverse opinion, and requested her to alter it. ... "

" ... We have mentioned that Arnauld asked her opinion on the “Discourse” prefixed to his “Logic,” and we may conclude from this that he had found her judgment valuable in many other cases. Moreover, the persecution of the Port Royalists had commenced, and she was uniting with Madame de Longueville in aiding and protecting her pious friends. Moderate in her Jansenism, as in everything else, she held that the famous formulary denouncing the Augustinian doctrine, and declaring it to have been originated by Jansenius, should be signed without reserve, and, as usual, she had faith in conciliatory measures; but her moderation was no excuse for inaction. She was at one time herself threatened with the necessity of abandoning her residence at Port Royal, and had thought of retiring to a religions house at Auteuil, a village near Paris. She did, in fact, pass some summers there, and she sometimes took refuge with her brother, the Commandeur de Souvré, with Madame de Montausier, or Madame de Longueville. The last was much bolder in her partisanship than her friend, and her superior wealth and position enabled her to give the Port Royalists more efficient aid. Arnauld and Nicole resided five years in her house; it was under her protection that the translation of the New Testament was carried on and completed, and it was chiefly through her efforts that, in 1669, the persecution was brought to an end. Madame de Sablé co-operated with all her talent and interest in the same direction; but here, as elsewhere, her influence was chiefly valuable in what she stimulated others to do, rather than in what she did herself. It was by her that Madame de Longueville was first won to the cause of Port Royal; and we find this ardent brave woman constantly seeking the advice and sympathy of her more timid and self-indulgent, but sincere and judicious friend."

"It is worth while to notice, that with Madame de Sablé, as with some other remarkable French women, the part of her life which is richest in interest and results is that which is looked forward to by most of her sex with melancholy as the period of decline. When between fifty and sixty, she had philosophers, wits, beauties, and saints clustering around her; and one naturally cares to know what was the elixir which gave her this enduring and general attraction. We think it was, in a great degree, that well-balanced development of mental powers which gave her a comprehension of varied intellectual processes, and a tolerance for varied forms of character, which is still rarer in women than in men. Here was one point of distinction between her and Madame de Longueville; and an amusing passage, which Sainte-Beuve has disinterred from the writings of the Abbé St. Pierre, so well serves to indicate, by contrast, what we regard as the great charm of Madame de Sablé’s mind, that we shall not be wandering from our subject in quoting it.

"“I one day asked M. Nicole what was the character of Mme. de Longueville’s intellect; he told me it was very subtle and delicate in the penetration of character; but very small, very feeble, and that her comprehension was extremely narrow in matters of science and reasoning, and on all speculations that did not concern matters of sentiment. For example, he added, I one day said to her that I could wager and demonstrate that there were in Paris at least two inhabitants who had the same number of hairs, although I could not point out who these two men were. She told me I could never be sure of it until I had counted the hairs of these two men. Here is my demonstration, I said: I take it for granted that the head which is most amply supplied with hairs has not more than 200,000, and the head which is least so has but one hair. Now, if you suppose that 200,000 heads have each a different number of hairs, it necessarily follows that they have each one of the numbers of hairs which form the series from one to 200,000; for if it were supposed that there were two among these 200,000 who had the same number of hairs, I should have gained my wager. Supposing, then, that these 200,000 inhabitants have all a different number of hairs, if I add a single inhabitant who has hairs, and who has not more than 200,000, it necessarily follows that this number of hairs, whatever it may be, will be contained in the series from one to 200,000, and consequently will be equal to the number of hairs on one of the previous 200,000 inhabitants. Now as, instead of one inhabitant more than 200,000, there an nearly 800,000 inhabitants in Paris, you see clearly that there must be many heads which have an equal number of hairs, though I have not counted them. Still Mme. de Longueville could never comprehend that this equality of hairs could be demonstrated, and always maintained that the only way of proving it was to count them.”"

It is interesting that George Eliot comprehended this, but her own work shows no clarity of thinking that must result from understanding mathematics; on the contrary, her writing is seldom graced with simplicity, and a sentence is most often convoluted.

"Surely, the meet ardent admirer of feminine shallowness must have felt some irritation when he found himself arrested by this dead wall of stupidity, and have turned with relief to the larger intelligence of Madame de Sablé, who was not the less graceful, delicate, and feminine because she could follow a train of reasoning, or interest herself in a question of science. In this combination consisted her pre-eminent charm: she was not a genius, not a heroine, but a woman whom men could more than love—whom they could make their friend, confidante, and counsellor; the sharer, not of their joys and sorrows only, but of their ideas and aims."

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"Such was Madame de Sablé, whose name is, perhaps, new to some of our readers, so far does it lie from the surface of literature and history. We have seen, too, that she was only one among a crowd—one in a firmament of feminine stars which, when once the biographical telescope is turned upon them, appear scarcely less remarkable and interesting. Now, if the reader recollects what was the position and average intellectual character of women in the high society of England during the reigns of James the First and the two Charleses—the period through which Madame de Sablé’s career extends—we think he will admit our position as to the early superiority of womanly development in France, and this fact, with its causes, has not merely an historical interest: it has an important bearing on the culture of women in the present day. Women become superior in France by being admitted to a common fund of ideas, to common objects of interest with men; and this must ever be the essential condition at once of true womanly culture and of true social well-being. We have no faith in feminine conversazioni, where ladies are eloquent on Apollo and Mars; though we sympathize with the yearning activity of faculties which, deprived of their proper material, waste themselves in weaving fabrics out of cobwebs. Let the whole field of reality be laid open to woman as well as to man, and then that which is peculiar in her mental modification, instead of being, as it is now, a source of discord and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a necessary complement to the truth and beauty of life. Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness."

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September 21, 2021 - September 22, 2021.

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III.—Evangelical Teaching

EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING

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Most amusing, until it turns disgusting.

As George Eliot remarks,

"" ... Imbecility that is not even meek, ceases to be pitiable, and becomes simply odious.""

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"Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity. Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic; let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of Time; ardent and imaginative on the pro-millennial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious toward every other infringement of the status quo. Let him fish for souls not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries, but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth century, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, and rival Moore’s Almanack in the prediction of political events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as the “horn that had eyes,” “the lying prophet,” and the “unclean spirits.” In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious “light reading” the demonstration that the prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail, is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander’s having taken a horse’s tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the Revelations."

Amusing, because one is likely to assume that all this came to pass in U.S. soon post '80s, not realising it was going on well before George Eliot wrote - and of course, it was not restricted to either side of Atlantic. What television did was merely to provide some charlatans with an instrument to instant millionairehood, via the same tools that others before them had used along with speech and printed pamphlets, thus with only a moderate comfortable life based on fraud.

And she explains their success.

"Pleasant to the clerical flesh under such circumstances is the arrival of Sunday! Somewhat at a disadvantage during the week, in the presence of working-day interests and lay splendors, on Sunday the preacher becomes the cynosure of a thousand eyes, and predominates at once over the Amphitryon with whom he dines, and the most captious member of his church or vestry. He has an immense advantage over all other public speakers. The platform orator is subject to the criticism of hisses and groans. Counsel for the plaintiff expects the retort of counsel for the defendant. The honorable gentleman on one side of the House is liable to have his facts and figures shown up by his honorable friend on the opposite side. Even the scientific or literary lecturer, if he is dull or incompetent, may see the best part of his audience quietly slip out one by one. But the preacher is completely master of the situation: no one may hiss, no one may depart. Like the writer of imaginary conversations, he may put what imbecilities he pleases into the mouths of his antagonists, and swell with triumph when he has refuted them. He may riot in gratuitous assertions, confident that no man will contradict him; he may exercise perfect free-will in logic, and invent illustrative experience; he may give an evangelical edition of history with the inconvenient facts omitted:—all this he may do with impunity, certain that those of his hearers who are not sympathizing are not listening. For the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a “feature” in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that they do not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are often induced to fix them in that black and white in which they are open to the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to treat them with thorough freedom of speech and pen."

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"It is because we think this criticism of clerical teaching desirable for the public good that we devote some pages to Dr. Cumming. He is, as every one knows, a preacher of immense popularity, and of the numerous publications in which he perpetuates his pulpit labors, all circulate widely, and some, according to their title-page, have reached the sixteenth thousand. Now our opinion of these publications is the very opposite of that given by a newspaper eulogist: we do not “believe that the repeated issues of Dr. Cumming’s thoughts are having a beneficial effect on society,” but the reverse; and hence, little inclined as we are to dwell on his pages, we think it worth while to do so, for the sake of pointing out in them what we believe to be profoundly mistaken and pernicious. Of Dr. Cumming personally we know absolutely nothing: our acquaintance with him is confined to a perusal of his works, our judgment of him is founded solely on the manner in which he has written himself down on his pages. We know neither how he looks nor how he lives. ... "

"Dr. Cumming’s mind is evidently not of the pietistic order. There is not the slightest leaning toward mysticism in his Christianity—no indication of religious raptures, of delight in God, of spiritual communion with the Father. He is most at home in the forensic view of Justification, and dwells on salvation as a scheme rather than as an experience. He insists on good works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors to be achieved to the glory of God, but he rarely represents them as the spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled with Divine love. He is at home in the external, the polemical, the historical, the circumstantial, and is only episodically devout and practical. The great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against Romanists and unbelievers, with “vindications” of the Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events; and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual and practical exhortation, is tacked to them as a sort of fringe in a hurried sentence or two at the end. He revels in the demonstration that the Pope is the Man of Sin; he is copious on the downfall of the Ottoman empire; he appears to glow with satisfaction in turning a story which tends to show how he abashed an “infidel;” it is a favorite exercise with him to form conjectures of the process by which the earth is to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce being caught up to meet Christ in the air, while Romanists, Puseyites, and infidels are given over to gnashing of teeth. But of really spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of Christ as a manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime prayer, “Father, forgive them,” of the gentler fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth understanding—of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming’s discourses.

"His style is in perfect correspondence with this habit of mind. Though diffuse, as that of all preachers must be, it has rapidity of movement, perfect clearness, and some aptness of illustration. He has much of that literary talent which makes a good journalist—the power of beating out an idea over a large space, and of introducing far-fetched à propos. His writings have, indeed, no high merit: they have no originality or force of thought, no striking felicity of presentation, no depth of emotion. ... Everywhere there is commonplace cleverness, nowhere a spark of rare thought, of lofty sentiment, or pathetic tenderness. We feel ourselves in company with a voluble retail talker, whose language is exuberant but not exact, and to whom we should never think of referring for precise information or for well-digested thought and experience. His argument continually slides into wholesale assertion and vague declamation, and in his love of ornament he frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells us (“Apoc. Sketches,” p. 265) that “Botany weaves around the cross her amaranthine garlands; and Newton comes from his starry home—Linnæus from his flowery resting-place—and Werner and Hutton from their subterranean graves at the voice of Chalmers, to acknowledge that all they learned and elicited in their respective provinces has only served to show more clearly that Jesus of Nazareth is enthroned on the riches of the universe:”—and so prosaic an injunction to his hearers as that they should choose a residence within an easy distance of church, is magnificently draped by him as an exportation to prefer a house “that basks in the sunshine of the countenance of God.” ... "

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" ... Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts, as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. They become accustomed to reject the more direct evidence in favor of the less direct, and where adverse evidence reaches demonstration they must resort to devices and expedients in order to explain away contradiction. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.

"We have entered into this digression for the sake of mitigating the inference that is likely to be drawn from that characteristic of Dr. Cumming’s works to which we have pointed. He is much in the same intellectual condition as that professor of Padua; who, in order to disprove Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s satellites, urged that as there were only seven metals there could not be more than seven planets—a mental condition scarcely compatible with candor. And we may well suppose that if the professor had held the belief in seven planets, and no more, to be a necessary condition of salvation, his mental condition would have been so dazed that even if he had consented to look through Galileo’s telescope, his eyes would have reported in accordance with his inward alarms rather than with the external fact. ... "

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" ... We quote from the “Manual of Christian Evidences,” p. 62.

"“Some of the gods which the heathen worshipped were among the greatest monsters that ever walked the earth. Mercury was a thief; and because he was an expert thief he was enrolled among the gods. Bacchus was a mere sensualist and drunkard, and therefore he was enrolled among the gods. Venus was a dissipated and abandoned courtesan, and therefore she was enrolled among the goddesses. Mars was a savage, that gloried in battle and in blood, and therefore he was deified and enrolled among the gods.”

"Does Dr. Cumming believe the purport of these sentences? If so, this passage is worth handing down as his theory of the Greek myth—as a specimen of the astounding ignorance which was possible in a metropolitan preacher, a.d. 1854. And if he does not believe them . . . The inference must then be, that he thinks delicate veracity about the ancient Greeks is not a Christian virtue, but only a “splendid sin” of the unregenerate. ... "

Disgusting guy, indeed!

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" ... For example, on the question of the genuineness and authenticity of the New Testament writing’s, he says: “If, therefore, at a period long subsequent to the death of Christ, a number of men had appeared in the world, drawn up a book which they christened by the name of the Holy Scripture, and recorded these things which appear in it as facts when they were only the fancies of their own imagination, surely the Jews would have instantly reclaimed that no such events transpired, that no such person as Jesus Christ appeared in their capital, and that their crucifixion of Him, and their alleged evil treatment of his apostles, were mere fictions.” ... "

It was Roman empire who was in charge, and disciples were as Jewish as their teacher.

" ... He seems to be ignorant—or he chooses to ignore the fact—that there is a large body of eminently instructed and earnest men who regard the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as a series of historical documents, to be dealt with according to the rules of historical criticism, and that an equally large number of men, who are not historical critics, find the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the Scriptures opposed to their profoundest moral convictions. Dr. Cumming’s infidel is a man who, because his life is vicious, tries to convince himself that there is no God, and that Christianity is an imposture, but who is all the while secretly conscious that he is opposing the truth, and cannot help “letting out” admissions “that the Bible is the Book of God.” We are favored with the following “Creed of the Infidel:”

"“I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is matter; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not. I believe also that the world was not made, but that the world made itself, or that it had no beginning, and that it will last forever. I believe that man is a beast; that the soul is the body, and that the body is the soul; and that after death there is neither body nor soul. I believe there is no religion, that natural religion is the only religion, and all religion unnatural. I believe not in Moses; I believe in the first philosophers. I believe not in the evangelists; I believe in Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Hobbes. I believe in Lord Bolingbroke, and I believe not in St. Paul. I believe not in revelation; I believe in tradition; I believe in the Talmud; I believe in the Koran; I believe not in the Bible. I believe in Socrates; I believe in Confucius; I believe in Mahomet; I believe not in Christ. And lastly, I believe in all unbelief.”"

" ... Like the Catholic preacher who, after throwing down his cap and apostrophizing it as Luther, turned to his audience and said, “You see this heretical fellow has not a word to say for himself,” Dr. Cumming, having drawn his ugly portrait of the infidel, and put arguments of a convenient quality into his mouth, finds a “short and easy method” of confounding this “croaking frog.”"

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" ... And why should Dr. Cumming suppose, as we shall presently find him supposing, that men of science hesitate to accept the Bible, because it appears to contradict their discoveries? By his own statement, that appearance of contradiction does not exist; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated that the Bible precisely agrees with their discoveries. Perhaps, however, in saying of the Bible that its “slightest intimations of scientific principles or natural phenomena have in every instance been demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true,” Dr. Cumming merely means to imply that theologians have found out a way of explaining the biblical text so that it no longer, in their opinion, appears to be in contradiction with the discoveries of science. One of two things, therefore: either he uses language without the slightest appreciation of its real meaning, or the assertions he makes on one page are directly contradicted by the arguments he urges on another.

"Dr. Cumming’s principles—or, we should rather say, confused notions—of biblical interpretation, as exhibited in this volume, are particularly significant of his mental calibre. He says (“Church before the Flood,” p. 93): “Men of science, who are full of scientific investigation and enamored of scientific discovery, will hesitate before they accept a book which, they think, contradicts the plainest and the most unequivocal disclosures they have made in the bowels of the earth, or among the stars of the sky. To all these we answer, as we have already indicated, there is not the least dissonance between God’s written book and the most mature discoveries of geological science. One thing, however, there may be: there may be a contradiction between the discoveries of geology and our preconceived interpretations of the Bible. But this is not because the Bible is wrong, but because our interpretation is wrong.” (The italics in all cases are our own.)"

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" ... Imbecility that is not even meek, ceases to be pitiable, and becomes simply odious."

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" ... Romanism is the masterpiece of Satan; but reassure yourselves! Dr. Cumming has been created. Antichrist is enthroned in the Vatican; but he is stoutly withstood by the Boanerges of Crown-court. The personality of Satan, as might be expected, is a very prominent tenet in Dr. Cumming’s discourses; those who doubt it are, he thinks, “generally specimens of the victims of Satan as a triumphant seducer;” and it is through the medium of this doctrine that he habitually contemplates Roman Catholics. They are the puppets of which the devil holds the strings. It is only exceptionally that he speaks of them as fellow-men, acted on by the same desires, fears, and hopes as himself; his rule is to hold them up to his hearers as foredoomed instruments of Satan and vessels of wrath. If he is obliged to admit that they are “no shams,” that they are “thoroughly in earnest”—that is because they are inspired by hell, because they are under an “infra-natural” influence. If their missionaries are found wherever Protestant missionaries go, this zeal in propagating their faith is not in them a consistent virtue, as it is in Protestants, but a “melancholy fact,” affording additional evidence that they are instigated and assisted by the devil. And Dr. Cumming is inclined to think that they work miracles, because that is no more than might be expected from the known ability of Satan who inspires them. ... "

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"This leads us to mention another conspicuous characteristic of Dr. Cumming’s teaching—the absence of genuine charity. It is true that he makes large profession of tolerance and liberality within a certain circle; he exhorts Christians to unity; he would have Churchmen fraternize with Dissenters, and exhorts these two branches of God’s family to defer the settlement of their differences till the millennium. But the love thus taught is the love of the clan, which is the correlative of antagonism to the rest of mankind. It is not sympathy and helpfulness toward men as men, but toward men as Christians, and as Christians in the sense of a small minority. Dr. Cumming’s religion may demand a tribute of love, but it gives a charter to hatred; it may enjoin charity, but it fosters all uncharitableness. If I believe that God tells me to love my enemies, but at the same time hates His own enemies and requires me to have one will with Him, which has the larger scope, love or hatred? And we refer to those pages of Dr. Cumming’s in which he opposes Roman Catholics, Puseyites, and infidels—pages which form the larger proportion of what he has published—for proof that the idea of God which both the logic and spirit of his discourses keep present to his hearers, is that of a God who hates his enemies, a God who teaches love by fierce denunciations of wrath—a God who encourages obedience to his precepts by elaborately revealing to us that his own government is in precise opposition to those precepts. We know the usual evasions on this subject. We know Dr. Cumming would say that even Roman Catholics are to be loved and succored as men; that he would help even that “unclean spirit,” Cardinal Wiseman, out of a ditch. But who that is in the slightest degree acquainted with the action of the human mind will believe that any genuine and large charity can grow out of an exercise of love which is always to have an arrière-pensée of hatred? Of what quality would be the conjugal love of a husband who loved his spouse as a wife, but hated her as a woman? ... "

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" ... He assures us that he does not “delight to dwell on the misery of the lost:” and we believe him. That misery does not seem to be a question of feeling with him, either one way or the other. He does not merely resign himself to the awful mystery of eternal punishment; he contends for it. Do we object, he asks, [90] to everlasting happiness? then why object to everlasting misery?—reasoning which is perhaps felt to be cogent by theologians who anticipate the everlasting happiness for themselves, and the everlasting misery for their neighbors.

"The compassion of some Christians has been glad to take refuge in the opinion that the Bible allows the supposition of annihilation for the impenitent; but the rigid sequence of Dr. Cumming’s reasoning will not admit of this idea. He sees that flax is made into linen, and linen into paper; that paper, when burned, partly ascends as smoke and then again descends in rain, or in dust and carbon. “Not one particle of the original flax is lost, although there may be not one particle that has not undergone an entire change: annihilation is not, but change of form is. It will be thus with our bodies at the resurrection. The death of the body means not annihilation. Not one feature of the face will be annihilated.” Having established the perpetuity of the body by this close and clear analogy, namely, that as there is a total change in the particles of flax in consequence of which they no longer appear as flax, so there will not be a total change in the particles of the human body, but they will reappear as the human body, he does not seem to consider that the perpetuity of the body involves the perpetuity of the soul, but requires separate evidence for this, and finds such evidence by begging the very question at issue—namely, by asserting that the text of the Scripture implies “the perpetuity of the punishment of the lost, and the consciousness of the punishment which they endure.” Yet it is drivelling like this which is listened to and lauded as eloquence by hundreds, and which a Doctor of Divinity can believe that he has his “reward as a saint” for preaching and publishing!"

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" ... Now, Dr. Cumming invariably assumes that, in fulminating against those who differ from him, he is standing on a moral elevation to which they are compelled reluctantly to look up; that his theory of motives and conduct is in its loftiness and purity a perpetual rebuke to their low and vicious desires and practice. It is time he should be told that the reverse is the fact; that there are men who do not merely cast a superficial glance at his doctrine, and fail to see its beauty or justice, but who, after a close consideration of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development, and therefore positively noxious. Dr. Cumming is fond of showing up the teaching of Romanism, and accusing it of undermining true morality: it is time he should be told that there is a large body, both of thinkers and practical men, who hold precisely the same opinion of his own teaching—with this difference, that they do not regard it as the inspiration of Satan, but as the natural crop of a human mind where the soil is chiefly made up of egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs."

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September 21, 2021 - September 22, 2021.

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IV.—German Wit

GERMAN WIT: HENRY HEINE

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"“Nothing,” says Goethe, “is more significant of men’s character than what they find laughable.” The truth of this observation would perhaps have been more apparent if he had said culture instead of character. The last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar is their jocularity; and we can hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide gulf which separates him from them, than by comparing the object which shakes the diaphragm of a coal-heaver with the highly complex pleasure derived from a real witticism. That any high order of wit is exceedingly complex, and demands a ripe and strong mental development, has one evidence in the fact that we do not find it in boys at all in proportion to their manifestation of other powers. Clever boys generally aspire to the heroic and poetic rather than the comic, and the crudest of all their efforts are their jokes. ... "

So far, true; but then George Eliot says -

" ... It seems to have been the same with the boyhood of the human race. The history and literature of the ancient Hebrews gives the idea of a people who went about their business and their pleasure as gravely as a society of beavers; the smile and the laugh are often mentioned metaphorically, but the smile is one of complacency, the laugh is one of scorn. Nor can we imagine that the facetious element was very strong in the Egyptians; no laughter lurks in the wondering eyes and the broad calm lips of their statues. Still less can the Assyrians have had any genius for the comic: the round eyes and simpering satisfaction of their ideal faces belong to a type which is not witty, but the cause of wit in others. The fun of these early races was, we fancy, of the after-dinner kind—loud-throated laughter over the wine-cup, taken too little account of in sober moments to enter as an element into their Art, and differing as much from the laughter of a Chamfort or a Sheridan as the gastronomic enjoyment of an ancient Briton, whose dinner had no other “removes” than from acorns to beech-mast and back again to acorns, differed from the subtle pleasures of the palate experienced by his turtle-eating descendant. ... "

And even if she were correct in all of that, which is unlikely, she's definitely incorrect in using blinders to not look at other, far more ancient civilisations, from India and China to those who built various megalithic structures around the globe, and more. Indian ancient literature is certainly far richer, and is far from devoid of humour.

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"Humor is of earlier growth than Wit, and it is in accordance with this earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic tendencies, while Wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humor draws its materials from situations and characteristics; Wit seizes on unexpected and complex relations. Humor is chiefly representative and descriptive; it is diffuse, and flows along without any other law than its own fantastic will; or it flits about like a will-of-the-wisp, amazing us by its whimsical transitions. Wit is brief and sudden, and sharply defined as a crystal; it does not make pictures, it is not fantastic; but it detects an unsuspected analogy or suggests a startling or confounding inference. Every one who has had the opportunity of making the comparison will remember that the effect produced on him by some witticisms is closely akin to the effect produced on him by subtle reasoning which lays open a fallacy or absurdity, and there are persons whose delight in such reasoning always manifests itself in laughter. This affinity of wit with ratiocination is the more obvious in proportion as the species of wit is higher and deals less with less words and with superficialities than with the essential qualities of things. Some of Johnson’s most admirable witticisms consist in the suggestion of an analogy which immediately exposes the absurdity of an action or proposition; and it is only their ingenuity, condensation, and instantaneousness which lift them from reasoning into Wit—they are reasoning raised to a higher power. On the other hand, Humor, in its higher forms, and in proportion as it associates itself with the sympathetic emotions, continually passes into poetry: nearly all great modern humorists may be called prose poets."

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" ... Here, as elsewhere, the German shows the absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility to gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the necessary concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region of metaphysics. For Identität in the abstract no one can have an acuter vision, but in the concrete he is satisfied with a very loose approximation. He has the finest nose for Empirismus in philosophical doctrine, but the presence of more or less tobacco smoke in the air he breathes is imperceptible to him. To the typical German—Vetter Michel—it is indifferent whether his door-lock will catch, whether his teacup be more or less than an inch thick; whether or not his book have every other leaf unstitched; whether his neighbor’s conversation be more or less of a shout; whether he pronounce b or p, t or d; whether or not his adored one’s teeth be few and far between. He has the same sort of insensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like a German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word Langeweile, the equivalent for ennui, and we have secretly wondered what it can be that produces ennui in a German. Not the longest of long tragedies, for we have known him to pronounce that höchst fesselnd (so enchaining!); not the heaviest of heavy books, for he delights in that as gründlich (deep, Sir, deep!); not the slowest of journeys in a Postwagen, for the slower the horses, the more cigars he can smoke before he reaches his journey’s end. German ennui must be something as superlative as Barclay’s treble X, which, we suppose, implies an extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction."

" ... we can also believe that Germany will, one day, yield a crop of wits and humorists.

"Perhaps there is already an earnest of that future crop in the existence of Heinrich Heine, a German born with the present century, who, to Teutonic imagination, sensibility, and humor, adds an amount of esprit that would make him brilliant among the most brilliant of Frenchmen. True, this unique German wit is half a Hebrew; but he and his ancestors spent their youth in German air, and were reared on Wurst and Sauerkraut, so that he is as much a German as a pheasant is an English bird, or a potato an Irish vegetable. But whatever else he may be, Heine is one of the most remarkable men of this age: no echo, but a real voice, and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth studying; a surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art—who sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most scorching lightnings of satire; an artist in prose literature, who has shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose; and—in spite of all charges against him, true as well as false—a lover of freedom, who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. ... "

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"“I first saw the light on the banks of that lovely stream, where Folly grows on the green hills, and in autumn is plucked, pressed, poured into casks, and sent into foreign lands. Believe me, I yesterday heard some one utter folly which, in anno 1811, lay in a bunch of grapes I then saw growing on the Johannisberg. . . . Mon Dieu! if I had only such faith in me that I could remove mountains, the Johannisberg would be the very mountain I should send for wherever I might be; but as my faith is not so strong, imagination must help me, and it transports me at once to the lovely Rhine. . . . I am again a child, and playing with other children on the Schlossplatz, at Düsseldorf on the Rhine. Yes, madam, there was I born; and I note this expressly, in case, after my death, seven cities—Schilda, Krähwinkel, Polkwitz, Bockum, Dülken, Göttingen, and Schöppenstädt—should contend for the honor of being my birthplace. ... I went home and wept, and wailed out, ‘The Elector has abdicated!’ In vain my mother took a world of trouble to explain the thing to me. I knew what I knew; I was not to be persuaded, but went crying to bed, and in the night dreamed that the world was at an end.”

"“The next day the world was again all in order, and we had school as before, and things were got by heart as before—the Roman emperors, chronology, the nouns in im, the verba irregularia, Greek, Hebrew, geography, mental arithmetic!—heavens! my head is still dizzy with it—all must be learned by heart! And a great deal of this came very conveniently for me in after life. For if I had not known the Roman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite indifferent to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that they never really existed. . . . But oh! the trouble I had at school with the endless dates. And with arithmetic it was still worse. What I understood best was subtraction, for that has a very practical rule: ‘Four can’t be taken from three, therefore I must borrow one.’ But I advise every one in such a case to borrow a few extra pence, for no one can tell what may happen. . . . As for Latin, you have no idea, madam, what a complicated affair it is. The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had first had to learn Latin. Luckily for them, they already knew in their cradles what nouns have their accusative in im. I, on the contrary, had to learn them by heart in the sweat of my brow; nevertheless, it is fortunate for me that I know them . . . and the fact that I have them at my finger-ends if I should ever happen to want them suddenly, affords me much inward repose and consolation in many troubled hours of life. . . . Of Greek I will not say a word, I should get too much irritated. The monks in the Middle Ages were not so far wrong when they maintained that Greek was an invention of the devil. God knows the suffering I endured over it. . . . With Hebrew it went somewhat better, for I had always a great liking for the Jews, though to this very hour they crucify my good name; but I could never get on so far in Hebrew as my watch, which had much familiar intercourse with pawnbrokers, and in this way contracted many Jewish habits—for example, it wouldn’t go on Saturdays.”"

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" ...So commerce was at length given up for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the University of Bonn. He had already published some poems in the corner of a newspaper, and among them was one on Napoleon, the object of his youthful enthusiasm. This poem, he says in a letter to St. Réné Taillandier, was written when he was only sixteen. It is still to be found in the “Buch der Lieder” under the title “Die Grenadiere,” and it proves that even in its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly specific character. ..."

"In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen. ... He remained between two and three years at Berlin, and the society he found there seems to have made these years an important epoch in his culture. He was one of the youngest members of a circle which assembled at the house of the poetess Elise von Hohenhausen, the translator of Byron—a circle which included Chamisso, Varnhagen, and Rahel (Varnhagen’s wife). ... "

"It was apparently during this residence in Berlin that Heine united himself with the Lutheran Church. He would willingly, like many of his friends, he tells us, have remained free from all ecclesiastical ties if the authorities there had not forbidden residence in Prussia, and especially in Berlin, to every one who did not belong to one of the positive religions recognized by the State."

"At the same period, too, Heine became acquainted with Hegel. In his lately published “Geständnisse” (Confessions) he throws on Hegel’s influence over him the blue light of demoniacal wit, and confounds us by the most bewildering double-edged sarcasms; but that influence seems to have been at least more wholesome than the one which produced the mocking retractations of the “Geständnisse.” Through all his self-satire, we discern that in those days he had something like real earnestness and enthusiasm, which are certainly not apparent in his present theistic confession of faith.

"“On the whole, I never felt a strong enthusiasm for this philosophy, and conviction on the subject was out of question. I never was an abstract thinker, and I accepted the synthesis of the Hegelian doctrine without demanding any proof; since its consequences flattered my vanity. ... "

"“To speak frankly, I seldom understood him, and only arrived at the meaning of his words by subsequent reflection. I believe he wished not to be understood; and hence his practice of sprinkling his discourse with modifying parentheses; hence, perhaps, his preference for persons of whom he knew that they did not understand him, and to whom he all the more willingly granted the honor of his familiar acquaintance. Thus every one in Berlin wondered at the intimate companionship of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich Beer, a brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by his reputation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists. This Beer, namely Heinrich, was a thoroughly stupid fellow, and indeed was afterward actually declared imbecile by his family, and placed under guardianship, because instead of making a name for himself in art or in science by means of his great fortune, he squandered his money on childish trifles; and, for example, one day bought six thousand thalers’ worth of walking-sticks. ... ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried, ‘is there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is rewarded after death?’ But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said, cuttingly, ‘So you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick mother, and refrained from poisoning your worthy brother?’ At these words he looked anxiously round, but appeared immediately set at rest when he observed that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to a game at whist.”

"In 1823 Heine returned to Göttingen to complete his career as a law-student, and this time he gave evidence of advanced mental maturity, not only by producing many of the charming poems subsequently included in the “Reisebilder,” but also by prosecuting his professional studies diligently enough to leave Göttingen, in 1825, as Doctor juris. ... Occasionally an inhabitant more literary than usual would point out this young man to his companion as Heinrich Heine; but in general the young poet had not to endure the inconveniences of being a lion. His poems were devoured, but he was not asked to devour flattery in return. ... Not, however, from another persecution of Genius—nervous headaches, which some persons, we are told, regarded as an improbable fiction, intended as a pretext for raising a delicate white hand to his forehead. It is probable that the sceptical persons alluded to were themselves untroubled with nervous headaches, and that their hands were not delicate. ... "

"It was, perhaps, in these Hamburg days that Heine paid the visit to Goethe, of which he gives us this charming little picture:

"“When I visited him in Weimar, and stood before him, I involuntarily glanced at his side to see whether the eagle was not there with the lightning in his beak. I was nearly speaking Greek to him; but, as I observed that he understood German, I stated to him in German that the plums on the road between Jena and Weimar were very good. I had for so many long winter nights thought over what lofty and profound things I would say to Goethe, if ever I saw him. And when I saw him at last, I said to him, that the Saxon plums were very good! And Goethe smiled.”

"During the next few years Heine produced the most popular of all his works—those which have won him his place as the greatest of living German poets and humorists. Between 1826 and 1829 appeared the four volumes of the “Reisebilder” (Pictures of Travel) and the “Buch der Lieder” (Book of Songs), a volume of lyrics, of which it is hard to say whether their greatest charm is the lightness and finish of their style, their vivid and original imaginativeness, or their simple, pure sensibility. In his “Reisebilder” Heine carries us with him to the Hartz, to the isle of Norderney, to his native town Düsseldorf, to Italy, and to England, sketching scenery and character, now with the wildest, most fantastic humor, now with the finest idyllic sensibility—letting his thoughts wander from poetry to politics, from criticism to dreamy reverie, and blending fun, imagination, reflection, and satire in a sort of exquisite, ever-varying shimmer, like the hues of the opal."

"“It is certainly a frightful injustice to pronounce sentence of condemnation on an entire people. But with regard to the English, momentary disgust might betray me into this injustice; and on looking at the mass I easily forget the many brave and noble men who distinguished themselves by intellect and love of freedom. But these, especially the British poets, were always all the more glaringly in contrast with the rest of the nation; they were isolated martyrs to their national relations; and, besides, great geniuses do not belong to the particular land of their birth: they scarcely belong to this earth, the Golgotha of their sufferings. The mass—the English blockheads, God forgive me!—are hateful to me in my inmost soul; and I often regard them not at all as my fellow-men, but as miserable automata—machines, whose motive power is egoism. In these moods, it seems to me as if I heard the whizzing wheelwork by which they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray: their praying, their mechanical Anglican church-going, with the gilt Prayer-book under their arms, their stupid, tiresome Sunday, their awkward piety, is most of all odious to me. I am firmly convinced that a blaspheming Frenchman is a more pleasing sight for the Divinity than a praying Englishman.”"

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"It is all like a dream to me; especially the name Lafayette sounds to me like a legend out of my earliest childhood. Does he really sit again on horseback, commanding the National Guard? I almost fear it may not be true, for it is in print. I will myself go to Paris, to be convinced of it with my bodily eyes. . . . It must be splendid, when he rides through the street, the citizen of two worlds, the godlike old man, with his silver locks streaming down his sacred shoulder. . . . He greets, with his dear old eyes, the grandchildren of those who once fought with him for freedom and equality. . . . It is now sixty years since he returned from America with the Declaration of Human Rights, the decalogue of the world’s new creed, which was revealed to him amid the thunders and lightnings of cannon. . . . And the tricolored flag waves again on the towers of Paris, and its streets resound with the Marseillaise! ... Even the poor Heligolanders shout for joy, although they have only a sort of dim instinct of what has occurred. The fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little sand island, which is the bathing-place here, said to me smilingly, ‘The poor people have won!’ Yes; instinctively the people comprehend such events, perhaps, better than we, with all our means of knowledge. Thus Frau von Varnhagen once told me that when the issue of the Battle of Leipzig was not yet known, the maid-servant suddenly rushed into the room with the sorrowful cry, ‘The nobles have won!’ ... "

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"That it was not merely interest in French politics which sent Heine to Paris in 1831, but also a perception that German air was not friendly to sympathizers in July revolutions, is humorously intimated in the “Geständnisse.”

"“I had done much and suffered much, and when the sun of the July Revolution arose in France, I had become very weary, and needed some recreation. Also, my native air was every day more unhealthy for me, and it was time I should seriously think of a change of climate. I had visions: the clouds terrified me, and made all sorts of ugly faces at me. It often seemed to me as if the sun were a Prussian cockade; at night I dreamed of a hideous black eagle, which gnawed my liver; and I was very melancholy. Add to this, I had become acquainted with an old Berlin Justizrath, who had spent many years in the fortress of Spandau, and he related to me how unpleasant it is when one is obliged to wear irons in winter. For myself I thought it very unchristian that the irons were not warmed a trifle. If the irons were warmed a little for us they would not make so unpleasant an impression, and even chilly natures might then bear them very well; it would be only proper consideration, too, if the fetters were perfumed with essence of roses and laurels, as is the case in this country (France). I asked my Justizrath whether he often got oysters to eat at Spandau? He said, No; Spandau was too far from the sea. Moreover, he said meat was very scarce there, and there was no kind of volaille except flies, which fell into one’s soup. . . . Now, as I really needed some recreation, and as Spandau is too far from the sea for oysters to be got there, and the Spandau fly-soup did not seem very appetizing to me, as, besides all this, the Prussian chains are very cold in winter, and could not be conducive to my health, I resolved to visit Paris.”

"Since this time Paris has been Heine’s home, and his best prose works have been written either to inform the Germans on French affairs or to inform the French on German philosophy and literature. He became a correspondent of the Allgemeine Zeitung, and his correspondence, which extends, with an interruption of several years, from 1831 to 1844, forms the volume entitled “Französische Zustände” (French Affairs), and the second and third volume of his “Vermischte Schriften.” It is a witty and often wise commentary on public men and public events: Louis Philippe, Casimir Périer, Thiers, Guizot, Rothschild, the Catholic party, the Socialist party, have their turn of satire and appreciation, for Heine deals out both with an impartiality which made his less favorable critics—Börne, for example—charge him with the rather incompatible sins of reckless caprice and venality. Literature and art alternate with politics: we have now a sketch of George Sand or a description of one of Horace Vernet’s pictures; now a criticism of Victor Hugo or of Liszt; now an irresistible caricature of Spontini or Kalkbrenner; and occasionally the predominant satire is relieved by a fine saying or a genial word of admiration. And all is done with that airy lightness, yet precision of touch, which distinguishes Heine beyond any living writer. The charge of venality was loudly made against Heine in Germany: first, it was said that he was paid to write; then, that he was paid to abstain from writing; page 122 and the accusations were supposed to have an irrefragable basis in the fact that he accepted a stipend from the French government. He has never attempted to conceal the reception of that stipend, and we think his statement (in the “Vermischte Schriften”) of the circumstances under which it was offered and received, is a sufficient vindication of himself and M. Guizot from any dishonor in the matter."

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" ... Such a man could not be neglected in Paris, and Heine was sought on all sides—as a guest in distinguished salons, as a possible proselyte in the circle of the Saint Simonians. His literary productiveness seems to have been furthered by his congenial life, which, however, was soon to some extent embittered by the sense of exile; for since 1835 both his works and his person have been the object of denunciation by the German governments. Between 1833 and 1845 appeared the four volumes of the “Salon,” “Die Romantische Schule” (both written, in the first instance, in French), the book on Börne, “Atta Troll,” a romantic poem, “Deutschland,” an exquisitely humorous poem, describing his last visit to Germany, and containing some grand passages of serious writing; and the “Neue Gedichte,” a collection of lyrical poems. Among the most interesting of his prose works are the second volume of the “Salon,” which contains a survey of religion and philosophy in Germany, and the “Romantische Schule,” a delightful introduction to that phase of German literature known as the Romantic school. The book on Börne, which appeared in 1840, two years after the death of that writer, excited great indignation in Germany, as a wreaking of vengeance on the dead, an insult to the memory of a man who had worked and suffered in the cause of freedom—a cause which was Heine’s own. Börne, we may observe parenthetically for the information of those who are not familiar with recent German literature, was a remarkable political writer of the ultra-liberal party in Germany, who resided in Paris at the same time with Heine: a man of stern, uncompromising partisanship and bitter humor. Without justifying Heine’s production of this book, we see excuses for him which should temper the condemnation passed on it. There was a radical opposition of nature between him and Börne; to use his own distinction, Heine is a Hellene—sensuous, realistic, exquisitely alive to the beautiful; while Börne was a Nazarene—ascetic, spiritualistic, despising the pure artist as destitute of earnestness. Heine has too keen a perception of practical absurdities and damaging exaggerations ever to become a thoroughgoing partisan; and with a love of freedom, a faith in the ultimate triumph of democratic principles, of which we see no just reason to doubt the genuineness and consistency, he has been unable to satisfy more zealous and one-sided liberals by giving his adhesion to their views and measures, or by adopting a denunciatory tone against those in the opposite ranks. Börne could not forgive what he regarded as Heine’s epicurean indifference and artistic dalliance, and he at length gave vent to his antipathy in savage attacks on him through the press, accusing him of utterly lacking character and principle, and even of writing under the influence of venal motives. To these attacks Heine remained absolutely mute—from contempt according to his own account; but the retort, which he resolutely refrained from making during Börne’s life, comes in this volume published after his death with the concentrated force of long-gathering thunder. ... "

"“To the disgust which, in intercourse with Börne, I was in danger of feeling toward those who surrounded him, was added the annoyance I felt from his perpetual talk about politics. ... For example, Börne was indignant that immediately on my arrival in Paris I had nothing better to do than to write for German papers a long account of the Exhibition of Pictures. I omit all discussion as to whether that interest in Art which induced me to undertake this work was so utterly irreconcilable with the revolutionary interests of the day; but Börne saw in it a proof of my indifference toward the sacred cause of humanity, and I could in my turn spoil the taste of his patriotic sauerkraut for him by talking all dinner-time of nothing but pictures, of Robert’s ‘Reapers,’ Horace Vernet’s ‘Judith,’ and Scheffer’s ‘Faust.’ . . . That I never thought it worth while to discuss my political principles with him it is needless to say; and once when he declared that he had found a contradiction in my writings, I satisfied myself with the ironical answer, ‘You are mistaken, mon cher; such contradictions never occur in my works, for always before I begin to write, I read over the statement of my political principles in my previous writings, that I may not contradict myself, and that no one may be able to reproach me with apostasy from my liberal principles.’”

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"In one of these years Heine was married, and, in deference to the sentiments of his wife, married according to the rites of the Catholic Church. On this fact busy rumor afterward founded the story of his conversion to Catholicism, and could of course name the day and spot on which he abjured Protestanism. In his “Geständnisse” Heine publishes a denial of this rumor; less, he says, for the sake of depriving the Catholics of the solace they may derive from their belief in a new convert, than in order to cut off from another party the more spiteful satisfaction of bewailing his instability:

"“That statement of time and place was entirely correct. I was actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was, moreover, a Jesuit church, namely, St. Sulpice; and I then went through a religious act. But this act was no odious abjuration, but a very innocent conjugation; that is to say, my marriage, already performed, according to the civil law there received the ecclesiastical consecration, because my wife, whose family are staunch Catholics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough without such a ceremony. And I would on no account cause this beloved being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views.”

"For sixteen years—from 1831 to 1847—Heine lived that rapid concentrated life which is known only in Paris; but then, alas! stole on the “days of darkness,” and they were to be many. In 1847 he felt the approach of the terrible spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed in acute suffering. The last time he went out of doors, he tells us, was in May, 1848:

"“With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time disconsolately, as if she would say, Dost thou not see, then, that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?”

"Since 1848, then, this poet, whom the lovely objects of Nature have always “haunted like a passion,” has not descended from the second story of a Parisian house; this man of hungry intellect has been shut out from all direct observation of life, all contact with society, except such as is derived from visitors to his sick-room. The terrible nervous disease has affected his eyes; the sight of one is utterly gone, and he can only raise the lid of the other by lifting it with his finger. Opium alone is the beneficent genius that stills his pain. We hardly know whether to call it an alleviation or an intensification of the torture that Heine retains his mental vigor, his poetic imagination, and his incisive wit; for if this intellectual activity fills up a blank, it widens the sphere of suffering. His brother described him in 1851 as still, in moments when the hand of pain was not too heavy on him, the same Heinrich Heine, poet and satirist by turns. ... Very plaintive is the poet’s own description of his condition, in the epilogue to the “Romanzero:”

"“Do I really exist? My body is so shrunken that I am hardly anything but a voice; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave of the magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in Brittany, under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames toward heaven. Alas! I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that moves their branches, brother Merlin, for no green leaf rustles about my mattress-grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but the rolling of vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strumming. ... But patience: everything has an end. You will one day find the booth closed where the puppet-show of my humor has so often delighted you.”

"As early as 1850 it was rumored that since Heine’s illness a change had taken place in his religious views; and as rumor seldom stops short of extremes, it was soon said that he had become a thorough pietist. Catholics and Protestants by turns claiming him as a convert. Such a change in so uncompromising an iconoclast, in a man who had been so zealous in his negations as Heine, naturally excited considerable sensation in the camp he was supposed to have quitted, as well as in that he was supposed to have joined. In the second volume of the “Salon,” and in the “Romantische Schule,” written in 1834 and ’35, the doctrine of Pantheism is dwelt on with a fervor and unmixed seriousness which show that Pantheism was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity as the enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well-being. Now, however, it was said that Heine had recanted all his heresies; but from the fact that visitors to his sick-room brought away very various impressions as to his actual religious views, it seemed probable that his love of mystification had found a tempting opportunity for exercise on this subject, and that, as one of his friends said, he was not inclined to pour out unmixed wine to those who asked for a sample out of mere curiosity. At length, in the epilogue to the “Romanzero,” dated 1851, there appeared, amid much mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced Theism and the belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and reliability to this affirmation was the fact that he took care to accompany it with certain negations:

"“ ... But I must expressly contradict the report that my retrograde movement has carried me as far as to the threshold of a Church, and that I have even been received into her lap. No: my religions convictions and views have remained free from any tincture of ecclesiasticism; no chiming of bells has allured me, no page 129 altar candles have dazzled me. I have dallied with no dogmas, and have not utterly renounced my reason.”

" ...For example, our dear Dr. Martin Luther kept fast by his doctrine of Grace, about which he had for three hundred years daily written down the same mouldy arguments—just in the same way as the late Baron Ekstein, who during twenty years printed in the Allgemeine Zeitung one and the same article, perpetually chewing over again the old cud of Jesuitical doctrine. But, as we have said, all persons who once figured here below were not found by Swedenborg in such a state of fossil immutability: many had considerably developed their character, both for good and evil, in the other world; and this gave rise to some singular results. Some who had been heroes and saints on earth had there sunk into scamps and good-for-nothings; and there were examples, too, of a contrary transformation. For instance, the fumes of self-conceit mounted to Saint Anthony’s head when he learned what immense veneration and adoration had been paid to him by all Christendom; and he who here below withstood the most terrible temptations was now quite an impertinent rascal and dissolute gallows-bird, who vied with his pig in rolling himself in the mud. The chaste Susanna, from having been excessively vain of her virtue, which she thought indomitable, came to a shameful fall, and she who once so gloriously resisted the two old men, was a victim to the seductions of the young Absalom, the son of David. On the contrary, Lot’s daughters had in the lapse of time become very virtuous, and passed in the other world for models of propriety: the old man, alas! had stuck to the wine-flask.”"

" ... It is not for us to condemn, who have never had the same burden laid on us; it is not for pigmies at their ease to criticise the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock."

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" ... There is a standing accusation against him in some quarters of wanting political principle, of wishing to denationalize himself, and of indulging in insults against his native country. Whatever ground may exist for these accusations, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be found in his writings. He may not have much faith in German revolutions and revolutionists; experience, in his case as in that of others, may have thrown his millennial anticipations into more distant perspective; but we see no evidence that he has ever swerved from his attachment to the principles of freedom, or written anything which to a philosophic mind is incompatible with true patriotism. He has expressly denied the report that he wished to become naturalized in France; and his yearning toward his native land and the accents of his native language is expressed with a pathos the more reliable from the fact that he is sparing in such effusions. We do not see why Heine’s satire of the blunders and foibles of his fellow-countrymen should be denounced as a crime of lèse-patrie, any more than the political caricatures of any other satirist. ... "

"“Rhenish Bavaria was to be the starting-point of the German revolution. Zweibrücken was the Bethlehem in which the infant Saviour—Freedom—lay in the cradle, and gave whimpering promise of redeeming the world. Near his cradle bellowed many an ox, who afterward, when his horns were reckoned on, showed himself a very harmless brute. It was confidently believed that the German revolution would begin in Zweibrücken, and everything was there ripe for an outbreak. But, as has been hinted, the tender-heartedness of some persons frustrated that illegal undertaking. For example, among the Bipontine conspirators there was a tremendous braggart, who was always loudest in his rage, who boiled over with the hatred of tyranny, and this man was fixed on to strike the first blow, by cutting down a sentinel who kept an important post. . . . . ‘What!’ cried the man, when this order was given him—‘What!—me! Can you expect so horrible, so bloodthirsty an act of me? I—I, kill an innocent sentinel? I, who am the father of a family! And this sentinel is perhaps also father of a family. One father of a family kill another father of a family? Yes. Kill—murder!’”"

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"In political matters Heine, like all men whose intellect and taste predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted “trimmer.” He has no sympathy, as he says, with “that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from the top of a mast into the sea, crying, “I die for General Jackson!”

"“But thou liest, Brutus, thou liest, Cassius, and thou, too, liest, Asinius, in maintaining that my ridicule attacks those ideas which are the precious acquisition of Humanity, and for which I myself have so striven and suffered. No! for the very reason that those ideas constantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, he is the more irresistibly overcome by laughter when he sees how rudely, awkwardly, and clumsily those ideas are seized and mirrored in the contracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mirrors which have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in them becomes a caricature, and excites our laughter. But we laugh then only at the caricature, not at the god.”

"For the rest, why should we demand of Heine that he should be a hero, a patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than we should demand of a gazelle that it should draw well in harness? Nature has not made him of her sterner stuff—not of iron and adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the juice of the grape, and Puck’s mischievous brain, plenteously mixing also the dews of kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble thoughts. It is, after all, a tribute which his enemies pay him when they utter their bitterest dictum, namely, that he is “nur Dichter”—only a poet. Let us accept this point of view for the present, and, leaving all consideration of him as a man, look at him simply as a poet and literary artist."

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"Heine is essentially a lyric poet. The finest products of his genius are

"“Short swallow flights of song that dip

"Their wings in tears, and skim away;”

"and they are so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same inspiration. Heine is too impressible and mercurial for any sustained production; even in his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into laughter and his laughter into tears; and his longer poems, “Atta Troll” and “Deutschland,” are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His song has a wide compass of notes; he can take us to the shores of the Northern Sea and thrill us by the sombre sublimity of his pictures and dreamy fancies; he can draw forth our tears by the voice he gives to our own sorrows, or to the sorrows of “Poor Peter;” he can throw a cold shudder over us by a mysterious legend, a ghost story, or a still more ghastly rendering of hard reality; he can charm us by a quiet idyl, shake us with laughter at his overflowing fun, or give us a piquant sensation of surprise by the ingenuity of his transitions from the lofty to the ludicrous. This last power is not, indeed, essentially poetical; but only a poet can use it with the same success as Heine, for only a poet can poise our emotion and expectation at such a height as to give effect to the sudden fall. Heine’s greatest power as a poet lies in his simple pathos, in the ever-varied but always natural expression he has given to the tender emotions. We may perhaps indicate this phase of his genius by referring to Wordsworth’s beautiful little poem, “She dwelt among the untrodden ways;” the conclusion—

“She dwelt alone, and few could know

"When Lucy ceased to be;

"But she is in her grave, and, oh!

"The difference to me”—

"is entirely in Heine’s manner; and so is Tennyson’s poem of a dozen lines, called “Circumstance.” Both these poems have Heine’s pregnant simplicity. But, lest this comparison should mislead, we must say that there is no general resemblance between either Wordsworth, or Tennyson, and Heine. Their greatest qualities lie quite a way from the light, delicate lucidity, the easy, rippling music, of Heine’s style. The distinctive charm of his lyrics may best be seen by comparing them with Goethe’s. Both have the same masterly, finished simplicity and rhythmic grace; but there is more thought mingled with Goethe’s feeling—his lyrical genius is a vessel that draws more water than Heine’s, and, though it seems to glide along with equal ease, we have a sense of greater weight and force, accompanying the grace of its movements.

"But for this very reason Heine touches our hearts more strongly; his songs are all music and feeling—they are like birds that not only enchant us with their delicious notes, but nestle against us with their soft breasts, and make us feel the agitated beating of their hearts. He indicates a whole sad history in a single quatrain; there is not an image in it, not a thought; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a “big round tear”—it is pure feeling, breathed in pure music:

"“Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen

"Und ich glaubt’ ich trug es nie,

"Und ich hab’ es doch getragen—

"Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie.”

"He excels equally in the more imaginative expression of feeling: he represents it by a brief image, like a finely cut cameo; he expands it into a mysterious dream, or dramatizes it in a little story, half ballad, half idyl; and in all these forms his art is so perfect that we never have a sense of artificiality or of unsuccessful effort; but all seems to have developed itself by the same beautiful necessity that brings forth vine-leaves and grapes and the natural curls of childhood. ... Few could forget, after once hearing them, the stanzas at the close of “Deutschland,” in which he warns the King of Prussia not to incur the irredeemable hell which the injured poet can create for him—the singing flames of a Dante’s terza rima!

"“Kennst du die Hölle des Dante nicht,

"Die schrecklichen Terzetten?

"Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt

"Den kann kein Gott mehr retten.

"“Kein Gott, kein Heiland, erlöst ihn je

"Aus diesen singenden Flammen!

"Nimm dich in Acht, das wir dich nicht

"Zu solcher Hölle verdammen.”"

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"Persons the most familiar with German prose testify that there is an extra fatigue in reading it, just as we feel an extra fatigue from our walk when it takes us over ploughed clay. But in Heine’s hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull, becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic, brilliant; it is German in an allotropic condition. No dreary labyrinthine sentences in which you find “no end in wandering mazes lost;” no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision, all those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest order of prose. ... "

George Eliot has, on the other hand, compensated for the loss to German literature due to Heine, by importing all those "dreary labyrinthine sentences in which you find “no end in wandering mazes lost;” no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions thrown in as parentheses", or most thereof, into English literature, via her own writing - as a solo hero!

" ... And Heine has proved—what Madame de Stäel seems to have doubted—that it is possible to be witty in German; indeed, in reading him, you might imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit, so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his management. He is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth and repose, and the calm development which belong to Goethe’s style, for they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow: he alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion, and daring piquancy; and athwart all these there runs a vein of sadness, tenderness, and grandeur which reveals the poet. He continually throws out those finely chiselled sayings which stamp themselves on the memory, and become familiar by quotation. For example: “The People have time enough, they are immortal; kings only are mortal.”—“Wherever a great soul utters its thoughts, there is Golgotha.”—“Nature wanted to see how she looked, and she created Goethe.”—“Only the man who has known bodily suffering is truly a man; his limbs have their Passion history, they are spiritualized.” He calls Rubens “this Flemish Titan, the wings of whose genius were so strong that he soared as high as the sun, in spite of the hundred-weight of Dutch cheeses that hung on his legs.” Speaking of Börne’s dislike to the calm creations of the true artist, he says, “He was like a child which, insensible to the glowing significance of a Greek statue, only touches the marble and complains of cold.”"

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"The years, if they have intensified his satirical bitterness, have also given his wit a finer edge and polish. His sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slily allusive, that they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not very acute; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors of style, there can hardly be any wit more irresistible than Heine’s. We may measure its force by the degree in which it has subdued the German language to its purposes, and made that language brilliant in spite of a long hereditary transmission of dulness. As one of the most harmless examples of his satire, take this on a man who has certainly had his share of adulation:

"“Assuredly it is far from my purpose to depreciate M. Victor Cousin. The titles of this celebrated philosopher even lay me under an obligation to praise him. He belongs to that living pantheon of France which we call the peerage, and his intelligent legs rest on the velvet benches of the Luxembourg. I must indeed sternly repress all private feelings which might seduce me into an excessive enthusiasm. Otherwise I might be suspected of servility; for M. Cousin is very influential in the State by means of his position and his tongue. This consideration might even move me to speak of his faults as frankly as of his virtues. Will he himself disapprove of this? Assuredly not. I know that we cannot do higher honor to great minds than when we throw as strong a light on their demerits as on their merits. When we sing the praises of a Hercules, we must also mention that he once laid aside the lion’s skin and sat down to the distaff: what then? he remains notwithstanding a Hercules! So when we relate similar circumstances concerning M. Cousin, we must nevertheless add, with discriminating eulogy: M. Cousin, if he has sometimes sat twaddling at the distaff, has never laid aside the lion’s skin. . . . It is true that, having been suspected of demagogy, he spent some time in a German prison, just as Lafayette and Richard Cœur de Lion. But that M. Cousin there in his leisure hours studied Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ is to be doubted on three grounds. First, this book is written in German. Secondly, in order to read this book, a man must understand German. Thirdly, M. Cousin does not understand German. . . . I fear I am passing unawares from the sweet waters of praise into the bitter ocean of blame. Yes, on one account I cannot refrain from bitterly blaming M. Cousin—namely, that he who loves truth far more than he loves Plato and Tenneman is unjust to himself when he wants to persuade us that he has borrowed something from the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel. Against this self-accusation I must take M. Cousin under my protection. On my word and conscience! this honorable man has not stolen a jot from Schelling and Hegel, and if he brought home anything of theirs, it was merely their friendship. That does honor to his heart. But there are many instances of such false self-accusation in psychology. I knew a man who declared that he had stolen silver spoons at the king’s table; and yet we all knew that the poor devil had never been presented at court, and accused himself of stealing these spoons to make us believe that he had been a guest at the palace. No! In German philosophy M. Cousin has always kept the sixth commandment; here he has never pocketed a single idea, not so much as a salt-spoon of an idea. All witnesses agree in attesting that in this respect M. Cousin is honor itself. . . . I prophesy to you that the renown of M. Cousin, like the French Revolution, will go round the world! I hear some one wickedly add: Undeniably the renown of M. Cousin is going round the world, and it has already taken its departure from France.”"

................................................................................................

"The following “symbolical myth” about Louis Philippe is very characteristic of Heine’s manner:

"“I remember very well that immediately on my arrival (in Paris) I hastened to the Palais Royal to see Louis Philippe. The friend who conducted me told me that the king now appeared on the terrace only at stated hours, but that formerly he was to be seen at any time for five francs. ‘For five francs!’ I cried with amazement; ‘does he then show himself for money?’ ‘No, but he is shown for money, and it happens in this way: There is a society of claqueurs, marchands de contremarques, and such riff-raff, who offered every page 140 foreigner to show him the king for five francs: if he would give ten francs, he might see the king raise his eyes to heaven, and lay his hand protestingly on his heart; if he would give twenty francs, the king would sing the Marseillaise. If the foreigner gave five francs, they raised a loud cheering under the king’s windows, and His Majesty appeared on the terrace, bowed, and retired. If ten francs, they shouted still louder, and gesticulated as if they had been possessed, when the king appeared, who then, as a sign of silent emotion, raised his eyes to heaven and laid his hand on his heart. English visitors, however, would sometimes spend as much as twenty francs, and then the enthusiasm mounted to the highest pitch; no sooner did the king appear on the terrace than the Marseillaise was struck up and roared out frightfully, until Louis Philippe, perhaps only for the sake of putting an end to the singing, bowed, laid his hand on his heart, and joined in the Marseillaise. Whether, as is asserted, he beat time with his foot, I cannot say.’”"

................................................................................................

Why did George Eliot find such a joy in running down fellow women authors?

"One more quotation, and it must be our last:

"“Oh the women! We must forgive them much, for they love much—and many. Their hate is properly only love turned inside out. Sometimes they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they can in this way gratify another man. When they write, they have always one eye on the paper and the other on a man; and this is true of all authoresses, except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who has only one eye.”"

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...............................................

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September 22, 2021 - September 23, 2021.

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................................................................................................

V.—Natural History of German Life

................................................................................................

George Eliot surprises, as she often does, at the width of horizons of her knowledge - or, better termed (since calling it knowledge might be going too far), variety of information her mind grasped and dealt with and wove together.

"It is an interesting branch of psychological observation to note the images that are habitually associated with abstract or collective terms—what may be called the picture-writing of the mind, which it carries on concurrently with the more subtle symbolism of language. Perhaps the fixity or variety of these associated images would furnish a tolerably fair test of the amount of concrete knowledge and experience which a given word represents, in the minds of two persons who use it with equal familiarity. The word railways, for example, will probably call up, in the mind of a man who is not highly locomotive, the image either of a “Bradshaw,” or of the station with which he is most familiar, or of an indefinite length of tram-road; he will alternate between these three images, which represent his stock of concrete acquaintance with railways. But suppose a man to have had successively the experience of a “navvy,” an engineer, a traveller, a railway director and shareholder, and a landed proprietor in treaty with a railway company, and it is probable that the range of images which would by turns present themselves to his mind at the mention of the word “railways,” would include all the essential facts in the existence and relations of the thing. Now it is possible for the first-mentioned personage to entertain very expanded views as to the multiplication of railways in the abstract, and their ultimate function in civilization. He may talk of a vast network of railways stretching over the globe, of future “lines” in Madagascar, and elegant refreshment-rooms in the Sandwich Islands, with none the less glibness because his distinct conceptions on the subject do not extend beyond his one station and his indefinite length of tram-road. But it is evident that if we want a railway to be made, or its affairs to be managed, this man of wide views and narrow observation will not serve our purpose."

The conclusion isn't clear, except it seems facile to concur - and if one grants it, isn't it obvious that George Eliot should oppose colonial empires, especially British colonial rule of India? They knew nothing but England, ocean faring, and looting others.

"Probably, if we could ascertain the images called up by the terms “the people,” “the masses,” “the proletariat,” “the peasantry,” by many who theorize on those bodies with eloquence, or who legislate without eloquence, we should find that they indicate almost as small an amount of concrete knowledge—that they are as far from completely representing the complex facts summed up in the collective term, as the railway images of our non-locomotive gentleman. How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as well as by our political and social theories. ... "

So she, and anyone in agreement with the above argument, ought to either oppose all rule by rich over poor, including and especially, monarchy, landlords, colonial empires, and non-participation of labour in decision making of industry. This last factor must be turned completely around, by the logic she presents, if one agrees with it and opposes government or speeches by those whose information is not from actual labour.

This must naturally include any statement, decision or dictum from any male about motherhood or pregnancy and related matters, unless he is the consulting medical professional in a particular case.

................................................................................................

Suddenly it becomes very interesting.

"In Germany, perhaps more than in any other country, it is among the peasantry that we must look for the historical type of the national physique. In the towns this type has become so modified to express the personality of the individual that even “family likeness” is often but faintly marked. But the peasants may still be distinguished into groups, by their physical peculiarities. In one part of the country we find a longer-legged, in another a broader-shouldered race, which has inherited these peculiarities for centuries. For example, in certain districts of Hesse are seen long faces, with high foreheads, long, straight noses, and small eyes, with arched eyebrows and large eyelids. On comparing these physiognomies with the sculptures in the church of St. Elizabeth, at Marburg, executed in the thirteenth century, it will be found that the same old Hessian type of face has subsisted unchanged, with this distinction only, that the sculptures represent princes and nobles, whose features then bore the stamp of their race, while that stamp is now to be found only among the peasants. A painter who wants to draw mediæval characters with historic truth must seek his models among the peasantry. This explains why the old German painters gave the heads of their subjects a greater uniformity of type than the painters of our day; the race had not attained to a high degree of individualization in features and expression. It indicates, too, that the cultured man acts more as an individual, the peasant more as one of a group. Hans drives the plough, lives, and thinks, just as Kunz does; and it is this fact that many thousands of men are as like each other in thoughts and habits as so many sheep or oysters, which constitutes the weight of the peasantry in the social and political scale.

"In the cultivated world each individual has his style of speaking and writing. But among the peasantry it is the race, the district, the province, that has its style—namely, its dialect, its phraseology, its proverbs, and its songs, which belong alike to the entire body of the people. This provincial style of the peasant is again, like his physique, a remnant of history, to which he clings with the utmost tenacity. In certain parts of Hungary there are still descendants of German colonists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who go about the country as reapers, retaining their old Saxon songs and manners, while the more cultivated German emigrants in a very short time forget their own language, and speak Hungarian. Another remarkable case of the same kind is that of the Wends, a Slavonic race settled in Lusatia, whose numbers amount to 200,000, living either scattered among the German population or in separate parishes. They have their own schools and churches, and are taught in the Slavonic tongue. The Catholics among them are rigid adherents of the Pope; the Protestants not less rigid adherents of Luther, or Doctor Luther, as they are particular in calling him—a custom which a hundred years ago was universal in Protestant Germany. The Wend clings tenaciously to the usages of his Church, and perhaps this may contribute not a little to the purity in which he maintains the specific characteristics of his race. German education, German law and government, service in the standing army, and many other agencies, are in antagonism to his national exclusiveness; but the wives and mothers here, as elsewhere, are a conservative influence, and the habits temporarily laid aside in the outer world are recovered by the fireside. The Wends form several stout regiments in the Saxon army; they are sought far and wide, as diligent and honest servants; and many a weakly Dresden or Leipzig child becomes thriving under the care of a Wendish nurse. In their villages they have the air and habits of genuine sturdy peasants, and all their customs indicate that they have been from the first an agricultural people. For example, they have traditional modes of treating their domestic animals. Each cow has its own name, generally chosen carefully, so as to express the special qualities of the animal; and all important family events are narrated to the bees—a custom which is found also in Westphalia. Whether by the help of the bees or not, the Wend farming is especially prosperous; and when a poor Bohemian peasant has a son born to him he binds him to the end of a long pole and turns his face toward Lusatia, that he may be as lucky as the Wends, who live there."

Do these differences, individual tribes, still exist?

"The peasant’s adherence to the traditional has much greater inconvenience than that entailed by a paucity of proper names. In the Black Forest and in Hüttenberg you will see him in the dog-days wearing a thick fur cap, because it is an historical fur cap—a cap worn by his grandfather. In the Wetterau, that peasant girl is considered the handsomest who wears the most petticoats. To go to field-labor in seven petticoats can be anything but convenient or agreeable, but it is the traditionally correct thing, and a German peasant girl would think herself as unfavorably conspicuous in an untraditional costume as an English servant-girl would now think herself in a “linsey-wolsey” apron or a thick muslin cap. In many districts no medical advice would induce the rustic to renounce the tight leather belt with which he injures his digestive functions; you could more easily persuade him to smile on a new communal system than on the unhistorical invention of braces. In the eighteenth century, in spite of the philanthropic preachers of potatoes, the peasant for years threw his potatoes to the pigs and the dogs, before he could be persuaded to put them on his own table. However, the unwillingness of the peasant to adopt innovations has a not unreasonable foundation in the fact that for him experiments are practical, not theoretical, and must be made with expense of money instead of brains—a fact that is not, perhaps, sufficiently taken into account by agricultural theorists, who complain of the farmer’s obstinacy. ... "

"But it must not be supposed that the historical piety of the German peasant extends to anything not immediately connected with himself. He has the warmest piety toward the old tumble-down house which his grandfather built, and which nothing will induce him to improve, but toward the venerable ruins of the old castle that overlooks his village he has no piety at all, and carries off its stones to make a fence for his garden, or tears down the gothic carving of the old monastic church, which is “nothing to him,” to mark off a foot-path through his field. ... "

"The peasant never begins his lawsuit in summer, for the same reason that he does not make love and marry in summer—because he has no time for that sort of thing. Anything is easier to him than to move out of his habitual course, and he is attached even to his privations. Some years ago a peasant youth, out of the poorest and remotest region of the Westerwald, was enlisted as a recruit, at Weilburg in Nassau. The lad, having never in his life slept in a bed, when he had got into one for the first time began to cry like a child; and he deserted twice because he could not reconcile himself to sleeping in a bed, and to the “fine” life of the barracks: he was homesick at the thought of his accustomed poverty and his thatched hut. A strong contrast, this, with the feeling of the poor in towns, who would be far enough from deserting because their condition was too much improved! The genuine peasant is never ashamed of his rank and calling; he is rather inclined to look down on every one who does not wear a smock frock, and thinks a man who has the manners of the gentry is likely to be rather windy and unsubstantial. In some places, even in French districts, this feeling is strongly symbolized by the practice of the peasantry, on certain festival days, to dress the images of the saints in peasant’s clothing. History tells us of all kinds of peasant insurrections, the object of which was to obtain relief for the peasants from some of their many oppressions; but of an effort on their part to step out of their hereditary rank and calling, to become gentry, to leave the plough and carry on the easier business of capitalists or government functionaries, there is no example."

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"The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of peasant-life fall into the same mistake as our English novelists: they transfer their own feelings to ploughmen and woodcutters, and give them both joys and sorrows of which they know nothing. The peasant never questions the obligation of family ties—he questions no custom—but tender affection, as it exists among the refined part of mankind, is almost as foreign to him as white hands and filbert-shaped nails. ... "

"Marriage is a very prudential affair, especially among the peasants who have the largest share of property. Politic marriages are as common among them as among princes; and when a peasant-heiress in Westphalia marries, her husband adopts her name, and places his own after it with the prefix geborner (née). The girls marry young, and the rapidity with which they get old and ugly is one among the many proofs that the early years of marriage are fuller of hardships than of conjugal tenderness. “When our writers of village stories,” says Riehl, “transferred their own emotional life to the peasant, they obliterated what is precisely his most predominant characteristic, namely, that with him general custom holds the place of individual feeling.”"

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"We pay for greater emotional susceptibility too often by nervous diseases of which the peasant knows nothing. To him headache is the least of physical evils, because he thinks head-work the easiest and least indispensable of all labor. Happily, many of the younger sons in peasant families, by going to seek their living in the towns, carry their hardy nervous system to amalgamate with the overwrought nerves of our town population, and refresh them with a little rude vigor. And a return to the habits of peasant life is the best remedy for many moral as well as physical diseases induced by perverted civilization. Riehl points to colonization as presenting the true field for this regenerative process. On the other side of the ocean a man will have the courage to begin life again as a peasant, while at home, perhaps, opportunity as well as courage will fail him. Apropos of this subject of emigration, he remarks the striking fact, that the native shrewdness and mother-wit of the German peasant seem to forsake him entirely when he has to apply them under new circumstances, and on relations foreign to his experience. Hence it is that the German peasant who emigrates, so constantly falls a victim to unprincipled adventurers in the preliminaries to emigration; but if once he gets his foot on the American soil he exhibits all the first-rate qualities of an agricultural colonist; and among all German emigrants the peasant class are the most successful."

That explains Ohio, Michigan and so on - Kansas, perhaps? - but it is used as a cover-up for war criminals who fled across South Atlantic to find, not only refuge, but welcome, in many countries. In Germany we were told a German migrates to those lands because he is happy to work; but factual conditions South of equator are different, with indigenous population being treated as bonded slaves, and European settlers in upper echelons of society. It's North, in U.S. and Canada, that they must work at manual labour, as described in Germany by those that would lie about nazis flight across South Atlantic. But the same people lied also made statements about their fear of U.S. troops raping German young girls, which never took place!

Their own, nazi, doctrine and regime, on the other hand, had not only exalted but made it mandatory, for unmarried German maidens and even married ones, to provide sexual services for nazis nazis and troops, as and when demanded or desired by them; any unwillingness was dealt with as unpatriotic.

Russian troops, having gone through devastation wrought upon their lands by Germany, with villages burned and millions of Russian civilians murdered - quite deliberately, not only preplanned, but with an intention, an ideology behind it - was another story.

But we were lied to, with U.S. troops blamed. This was chiefly racism, which we did not immediately understand. So they explained. When they said they feared U.S. troops raping German young girls, they meant those of visibly non-European ancestry, specifically African. Individually, German girls raped by others - nazis, Russian troops - had, of course, suffered; but none of this, actual suffering (through ideology and practice, of former, or events in latter case) was mentioned.

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" ... In the wine districts especially, the inability of the small proprietors to bear up under the vicissitudes of the market, or to insure a high quality of wine by running the risks of a late vintage and the competition of beer and cider with the inferior wines, have tended to produce that uncertainty of gain which, with the peasant, is the inevitable cause of demoralization. The small peasant proprietors are not a new class in Germany, but many of the evils of their position are new. They are more dependent on ready money than formerly; thus, where a peasant used to get his wood for building and firing from the common forest, he has now to pay for it with hard cash; he used to thatch his own house, with the help perhaps of a neighbor, but now he pays a man to do it for him; he used to pay taxes in kind, he now pays them in money. The chances of the market have to be discounted, and the peasant falls into the hands of money-lenders. Here is one of the cases in which social policy clashes with a purely economical policy. ... The interference with the communal regulations has been of this fatal character. Instead of endeavoring to promote to the utmost the healthy life of the Commune, as an organism the conditions of which are bound up with the historical characteristics of the peasant, the bureaucratic plan of government is bent on improvement by its patent machinery of state-appointed functionaries and off-hand regulations in accordance with modern enlightenment.The spirit of communal exclusiveness—the resistance to the indiscriminate establishment of strangers, is an intense traditional feeling in the peasant. “This gallows is for us and our children,” is the typical motto of this spirit. But such exclusiveness is highly irrational and repugnant to modern liberalism; therefore a bureaucratic government at once opposes it, and encourages to the utmost the introduction of new inhabitants in the provincial communes. ... "

"Another questionable plan for elevating the peasant is the supposed elevation of the clerical character by preventing the clergyman from cultivating more than a trifling part of the land attached to his benefice; that he may be as much as possible of a scientific theologian, and as little as possible of a peasant. In this, Riehl observes, lies one great source of weakness to the Protestant Church as compared with the Catholic, which finds the great majority of its priests among the lower orders; and we have had the opportunity of making an analogous comparison in England, where many of us can remember country districts in which the great mass of the people were christianized by illiterate Methodist and Independent ministers, while the influence of the parish clergyman among the poor did not extend much beyond a few old women in scarlet cloaks and a few exceptional church-going laborers."

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" ... When a few sparks from the first French Revolution fell among the German peasantry, and in certain villages of Saxony the country people assembled together to write down their demands, there was no glimpse in their petition of the “universal rights of man,” but simply of their own particular affairs as Saxon peasants. Again, after the July revolution of 1830, there were many insignificant peasant insurrections; but the object of almost all was the removal of local grievances. Toll-houses were pulled down; stamped paper was destroyed; in some places there was a persecution of wild boars, in others, of that plentiful tame animal, the German Rath, or councillor who is never called into council. But in 1848 it seemed as if the movements of the peasants had taken a new character; in the small western states of Germany it seemed as if the whole class of peasantry was in insurrection. But, in fact, the peasant did not know the meaning of the part he was playing. He had heard that everything was being set right in the towns, and that wonderful things were happening there, so he tied up his bundle and set off. Without any distinct object or resolution, the country people presented themselves on the scene of commotion, and were warmly received by the party leaders. But, seen from the windows of ducal palaces and ministerial hotels, these swarms of peasants had quite another aspect, and it was imagined that they had a common plan of co-operation. This, however, the peasants have never had. Systematic co-operation implies general conceptions, and a provisional subordination of egoism, to which even the artisans of towns have rarely shown themselves equal, and which are as foreign to the mind of the peasant as logarithms or the doctrine of chemical proportions. And the revolutionary fervor of the peasant was soon cooled. The old mistrust of the towns was reawakened on the spot. The Tyrolese peasants saw no great good in the freedom of the press and the constitution, because these changes “seemed to please the gentry so much.” Peasants who had given their voices stormily for a German parliament asked afterward, with a doubtful look, whether it were to consist of infantry or cavalry. When royal domains were declared the property of the State, the peasants in some small principalities rejoiced over this, because they interpreted it to mean that every one would have his share in them, after the manner of the old common and forest rights.

"The very practical views of the peasants with regard to the demands of the people were in amusing contrast with the abstract theorizing of the educated townsmen. The peasant continually withheld all State payments until he saw how matters would turn out, and was disposed to reckon up the solid benefit, in the form of land or money, that might come to him from the changes obtained. While the townsman was heating his brains about representation on the broadest basis, the peasant asked if the relation between tenant and landlord would continue as before, and whether the removal of the “feudal obligations” meant that the farmer should become owner of the land!"

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George Eliot describes a phenomenon that really is more universal than she thought.

"It is in the same naïve way that Communism is interpreted by the German peasantry. The wide spread among them of communistic doctrines, the eagerness with which they listened to a plan for the partition of property, seemed to countenance the notion that it was a delusion to suppose the peasant would be secured from this intoxication by his love of secure possession and peaceful earnings. But, in fact, the peasant contemplated “partition” by the light of an historical reminiscence rather than of novel theory. The golden age, in the imagination of the peasant, was the time when every member of the commune had a right to as much wood from the forest as would enable him to sell some, after using what he wanted in firing—in which the communal possessions were so profitable that, instead of his having to pay rates at the end of the year, each member of the commune was something in pocket. Hence the peasants in general understood by “partition,” that the State lands, especially the forests, would be divided among the communes, and that, by some political legerdemain or other, everybody would have free fire-wood, free grazing for his cattle, and over and above that, a piece of gold without working for it. That he should give up a single clod of his own to further the general “partition” had never entered the mind of the peasant communist; and the perception that this was an essential preliminary to “partition” was often a sufficient cure for his Communism."

But in reality few are completely willing to give up their own possessions for common good, and most see themselves either sharing those of others, or, at the very least, take an administrator position with power of decision as to the distribution, with of course a goodly share of the lot and more of power, prestige, recognition, et al. One is reminded of a joke.

"So you really believe in communism, distribution of wealth, and all that carp?

"Of course!"

"So if you had two cars, you'd give me one?"

"Of course!"

"If you had two houses, you'd give me one?"

"Of course!"

"If you had two shirts, you'd give me one?"

"NO!"

"How come?"

"I have two shirts."

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"In villages lying in the neighborhood of large towns, however, where the circumstances of the peasantry are very different, quite another interpretation of Communism is prevalent. Here the peasant is generally sunk to the position of the proletaire living from hand to mouth: he has nothing to lose, but everything to gain by “partition.” The coarse nature of the peasant has here been corrupted into bestiality by the disturbance of his instincts, while he is as yet incapable of principles; and in this type of the degenerate peasant is seen the worst example of ignorance intoxicated by theory.

"A significant hint as to the interpretation the peasants put on revolutionary theories may be drawn from the way they employed the few weeks in which their movements were unchecked. They felled the forest trees and shot the game; they withheld taxes; they shook off the imaginary or real burdens imposed on them by their mediatized princes, by presenting their “demands” in a very rough way before the ducal or princely “Schloss;” they set their faces against the bureaucratic management of the communes, deposed the government functionaries who had been placed over them as burgomasters and magistrates, and abolished the whole bureaucratic system of procedure, simply by taking no notice of its regulations, and recurring to some tradition—some old order or disorder of things. In all this it is clear that they were animated not in the least by the spirit of modern revolution, but by a purely narrow and personal impulse toward reaction.

"The idea of constitutional government lies quite beyond the range of the German peasant’s conceptions. His only notion of representation is that of a representation of ranks—of classes; his only notion of a deputy is of one who takes care, not of the national welfare, but of the interests of his own order. Herein lay the great mistake of the democratic party, in common with the bureaucratic governments, that they entirely omitted the peculiar character of the peasant from their political calculations. They talked of the “people” and forgot that the peasants were included in the term. Only a baseless misconception of the peasant’s character could induce the supposition that he would feel the slightest enthusiasm about the principles involved in the reconstitution of the Empire, or even about the reconstitution itself. He has no zeal for a written law, as such, but only so far as it takes the form of a living law—a tradition. ... "

"Such, Riehl tells us, are the general characteristics of the German peasantry—characteristics which subsist amid a wide variety of circumstances. In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Brandenburg the peasant lives on extensive estates; in Westphalia he lives in large isolated homesteads; in the Westerwald and in Sauerland, in little groups of villages and hamlets; on the Rhine land is for the most part parcelled out among small proprietors, who live together in large villages. ... "

"This conception of European society as incarnate history is the fundamental idea of Riehl’s books. ... He thinks it wise to pause a little from theorizing, and see what is the material actually present for theory to work upon. It is the glory of the Socialists—in contrast with the democratic doctrinaires who have been too much occupied with the general idea of “the people” to inquire particularly into the actual life of the people—that they have thrown themselves with enthusiastic zeal into the study at least of one social group, namely, the factory operatives; and here lies the secret of their partial success. But, unfortunately, they have made this special duty of a single fragment of society the basis of a theory which quietly substitutes for the small group of Parisian proletaires or English factory-workers the society of all Europe—nay, of the whole world. And in this way they have lost the best fruit of their investigations. For, says Riehl, the more deeply we penetrate into the knowledge of society in its details, the more thoroughly we shall be convinced that a universal social policy has no validity except on paper, and can never be carried into successful practice. The conditions of German society are altogether different from those of French, of English, or of Italian society; and to apply the same social theory to these nations indiscriminately is about as wise a procedure as Triptolemus Yellowley’s application of the agricultural directions in Virgil’s “Georgics” to his farm in the Shetland Isles."

" ... And just as the most thorough acquaintance with physics, or chemistry, or general physiology, will not enable you at once to establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your particular society of zoophytes, mollusks, and echinoderms may feel themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skin; so the most complete equipment of theory will not enable a statesman or a political and social reformer to adjust his measures wisely, in the absence of a special acquaintance with the section of society for which he legislates, with the peculiar characteristics of the nation, the province, the class whose well-being he has to consult. In other words, a wise social policy must be based not simply on abstract social science, but on the natural history of social bodies."

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"Riehl’s books are not dedicated merely to the argumentative maintenance of this or of any other position; they are intended chiefly as a contribution to that knowledge of the German people on the importance of which he insists. He is less occupied with urging his own conclusions than with impressing on his readers the facts which have led him to those conclusions. In the volume entitled “Land und Leute,” which, though published last, is properly an introduction to the volume entitled “Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” he considers the German people in their physical geographical relations; he compares the natural divisions of the race, as determined by land and climate, and social traditions, with the artificial divisions which are based on diplomacy; and he traces the genesis and influences of what we may call the ecclesiastical geography of Germany—its partition between Catholicism and Protestantism. He shows that the ordinary antithesis of North and South Germany represents no real ethnographical distinction, and that the natural divisions of Germany, founded on its physical geography are threefold—namely, the low plains, the middle mountain region, and the high mountain region, or Lower, Middle, and Upper Germany; and on this primary natural division all the other broad ethnographical distinctions of Germany will be I found to rest. The plains of North or Lower Germany include all the seaboard the nation possesses; and this, together with the fact that they are traversed to the depth of 600 miles by navigable rivers, makes them the natural seat of a trading race. Quite different is the geographical character of page 169 Middle Germany. While the northern plains are marked off into great divisions, by such rivers as the Lower Rhine, the Weser, and the Oder, running almost in parallel lines, this central region is cut up like a mosaic by the capricious lines of valleys and rivers. Here is the region in which you find those famous roofs from which the rain-water runs toward two different seas, and the mountain-tops from which you may look into eight or ten German states. ... "

"This triple division corresponds with the broad distinctions of climate. In the northern plains the atmosphere is damp and heavy; in the southern mountain region it is dry and rare, and there are abrupt changes of temperature, sharp contrasts between the seasons, and devastating storms; but in both these zones men are hardened by conflict with the roughness of the climate. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is little of this struggle; the seasons are more equable, and the mild, soft air of the valleys tends to make the inhabitants luxurious and sensitive to hardships. It is only in exceptional mountain districts that one is here reminded of the rough, bracing air on the heights of Southern Germany. It is a curious fact that, as the air becomes gradually lighter and rarer from the North German coast toward Upper Germany, the average of suicides regularly decreases. Mecklenburg has the highest number, then Prussia, while the fewest suicides occur in Bavaria and Austria.

"Both the northern and southern regions have still a large extent of waste lands, downs, morasses, and heaths; and to these are added, in the south, abundance of snow-fields and naked rock; while in Middle Germany culture has almost over-spread the face of the land, and there are no large tracts of waste. There is the same proportion in the distribution of forests. Again, in the north we see a monotonous continuity of wheat-fields, potato-grounds, meadow-lands, and vast heaths, and there is the same uniformity of culture over large surfaces in the southern table-lands and the Alpine pastures. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is a perpetual variety of crops within a short space; the diversity of land surface and the corresponding variety in the species of plants are an invitation to the splitting up of estates, and this again encourages to the utmost the motley character of the cultivation.

"According to this threefold division, it appears that there are certain features common to North and South Germany in which they differ from Central Germany, and the nature of this difference Riehl indicates by distinguishing the former as Centralized Land and the latter as Individualized Land; a distinction which is well symbolized by the fact that North and South Germany possess the great lines of railway which are the medium for the traffic of the world, while Middle Germany is far richer in lines for local communication, and possesses the greatest length of railway within the smallest space. Disregarding superficialities, the East Frieslanders, the Schleswig-Holsteiners, the Mecklenburghers, and the Pomeranians are much more nearly allied to the old Bavarians, the Tyrolese, and the Styrians than any of these are allied to the Saxons, the Thuringians, or the Rhinelanders. Both in North and page 171 South Germany original races are still found in large masses, and popular dialects are spoken; you still find there thoroughly peasant districts, thorough villages, and also, at great intervals, thorough cities; you still find there a sense of rank. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, the original races are fused together or sprinkled hither and thither; the peculiarities of the popular dialects are worn down or confused; there is no very strict line of demarkation between the country and the town population, hundreds of small towns and large villages being hardly distinguishable in their characteristics; and the sense of rank, as part of the organic structure of society, is almost extinguished. Again, both in the north and south there is still a strong ecclesiastical spirit in the people, and the Pomeranian sees Antichrist in the Pope as clearly as the Tyrolese sees him in Doctor Luther; while in Middle Germany the confessions are mingled, they exist peaceably side by side in very narrow space, and tolerance or indifference has spread itself widely even in the popular mind. ... "

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And the explicitly defined caste system of West, especially so of Europe -

"Riehl gives us a series of studies in that natural history of the people which he regards as the proper basis of social policy. He holds that, in European society, there are three natural ranks or estates: the hereditary landed aristocracy, the citizens or commercial class, and the peasantry or agricultural class. By natural ranks he means ranks which have their roots deep in the historical structure of society, and are still, in the present, showing vitality above ground; he means those great social groups which are not only distinguished externally by their vocation, but essentially by their mental character, their habits, their mode of life—by the principle they represent in the historical development of society. In his conception of the “Fourth Estate” he differs from the usual interpretation, according to which it is simply equivalent to the Proletariat, or those who are dependent on daily wages, whose only capital is their skill or bodily strength—factory operatives, artisans, agricultural laborers, to whom might be added, especially in Germany, the day-laborers with the quill, the literary proletariat. This, Riehl observes, is a valid basis of economical classification, but not of social classification. In his view, the Fourth Estate is a stratum produced by the perpetual abrasion of the other great social groups; it is the sign and result of the decomposition which is commencing in the organic constitution of society. Its elements are derived alike from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry. It assembles under its banner the deserters of historical society, and forms them into a terrible army, which is only just awaking to the consciousness of its corporate power. The tendency of this Fourth Estate, by the very process of its formation, is to do away with the distinctive historical character of the other estates, and to resolve their peculiar rank and vocation into a uniform social relation founded on an abstract conception of society. According to Riehl’s classification, the day-laborers, whom the political economist designates as the Fourth Estate, belong partly to the peasantry or agricultural class, and partly to the citizens or commercial class. ... "

By whatever name or label, that's the explicitly defined caste system of West, especially so of Europe.

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Funny, George Eliot does not connect, perhaps due to a survival mechanism operating subconsciously -

" ... English visitor in Germany will probably take an opportunity of asking is, “What is the strict meaning of the word Philister?” Riehl’s answer is, that the Philister “is one who is indifferent to all social interests, all public life, as distinguished from selfish and private interests; he has no sympathy with political and social events except as they affect his own comfort and prosperity, as they offer him material for amusement or opportunity for gratifying his vanity. He has no social or political creed, but is always of the opinion which is most convenient for the moment. He is always in the majority, and is the main element of unreason and stupidity in the judgment of a “discerning public.” It seems presumptuous in us to dispute Riehl’s interpretation of a German word, but we must think that, in literature, the epithet Philister has usually a wider meaning than this—includes his definition and something more. We imagine the Philister is the personification of the spirit which judges everything from a lower point of view than the subject demands; which judges the affairs of the parish from the egotistic or purely personal point of view; which judges the affairs of the nation from the parochial point of view, and does not hesitate to measure the merits of the universe from the human point of view. At least this must surely be the spirit to which Goethe alludes in a passage cited by Riehl himself, where he says that the Germans need not be ashamed of erecting a monument to him as well as to Blucher; for if Blucher had freed them from the French, he (Goethe) had freed them from the nets of the Philister ... "

Obviously the word is philistine in English and was, with all those connotations, Palestine in Latin, and that epithet was a label stuck by Romans to lands that belonged to Jews, long before they were forced to leave, for purpose of false insult and humiliation, a practice not invented by Macaulay but followed by British in various colonies, including Ireland, India and more.

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"The Fourth Estate in Germany, says Riehl, has its centre of gravity not, as in England and France, in the day laborers and factory operatives, and still less in the degenerate peasantry. In Germany the educated proletariat is the leaven that sets the mass in fermentation; the dangerous classes there go about, not in blouses, but in frock coats; they begin with the impoverished prince and end in the hungriest littérateur. The custom that all the sons of a nobleman shall inherit their father’s title necessarily goes on multiplying that class of aristocrats who are not only without function but without adequate provision, and who shrink from entering the ranks of the citizens by adopting some honest calling. The younger son of a prince, says Riehl, is usually obliged to remain without any vocation; and however zealously he may study music, painting, literature, or science, he can never be a regular musician, painter, or man of science; his pursuit will be called a “passion,” not a “calling,” and to the end of his days he remains a dilettante. “But the ardent pursuit of a fixed practical calling can alone satisfy the active man.” Direct legislation cannot remedy this evil. The inheritance of titles by younger sons is the universal custom, and custom is stronger than law. But if all government preference for the “aristocratic proletariat” were withdrawn, the sensible men among them would prefer emigration, or the pursuit of some profession, to the hungry distinction of a title without rents."

Of course, Europe's grandma took care care of a good many - by arranging holidays together for her numerous grandchildren, creating matchmaking circumstances thereby, so the story goes; between her children and grandchildren, a sizable quantity of German, apart from other European, royals must have found - did find - suitable positions. Until, of course, WWI, which ended up with devastation amongst the royal mob.

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Amazing how much disdain Riehl, and George Eliot, show for their own sort -

"The intellectual proletaires Riehl calls the “church militant” of the Fourth Estate in Germany. In no other country are they so numerous; in no other country is the trade in material and industrial capital so far exceeded by the wholesale and retail trade, the traffic and the usury, in the intellectual capital of the nation. Germany yields more intellectual produce than it can use and pay for.

"“This over-production, which is not transient but permanent, nay, is constantly on the increase, evidences a diseased state of the national industry, a perverted application of industrial powers, and is a far more pungent satire on the national condition than all the poverty of operatives and peasants. . . . Other nations need not envy us the preponderance of the intellectual proletariat over the proletaires of manual labor. For man more easily becomes diseased from over-study than from the labor of the hands; and it is precisely in the intellectual proletariat that there are the most dangerous seeds of disease. This is the group in which the opposition between earnings and wants, between the ideal social position and the real, is the most hopelessly irreconcilable.”"

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" ... He is as far as possible from the folly of supposing that the sun will go backward on the dial because we put the hands of our clock backward; he only contends against the opposite folly of decreeing that it shall be mid-day while in fact the sun is only just touching the mountain-tops, and all along the valley men are stumbling in the twilight."

Funny, Germany has since gone quite opposite, and European countriesnever corrected that - since WWII while Germany occupied most of Europe, even Paris follows Berlin time, which is not suitable for Germany to begin with, Berlin being extremely northeast; his dislocated minds of most to the extent they do not realise clocks can be - and in their land are - set arbitrarily, and it shouldn't be so; if reminded that at midday, sun ought to be as close to aligned with North-South longitudinal line as possible, they - specifically, females in Germany in charge of teaching foreigners (specifically, the langyage; but, one suspects, secretly, charged with impressing them with glories of Germany, innocence of nazis, and very likely, guilt of Jews) respond by saying they will ask someone who (male, of course, of right colour) studies radio, hence knows better.

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September 23, 2021 - September 24, 2021.

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VI.—Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

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Even before one begins reading, it's obvious the title is not only misogynistic and illogical, its as silly as it gets; for, there must be a great deal many silly things in the world, and some of them novels - but who guaranteed there were none written by males? Or is that so much an assumption, is why Mary Evans had to take the name George Eliot, just so she wasn't suspected of being silly before bring read? Nobody accused Jane Austen of being silly, and she never took a male name! Nor did most of women authirs who wrote novels, silly or not, before and during time of Jane Austen.

Did public and publishers alike suddenly turn misogynistic? Why, because Jane Austen was so superlative?

Or is it simply that, someone who knew George Eliot and wished to discourage women, a wife, some daughters, from writing, or at least from being expected to publish it, asked her - George Eliot - to write this, so that it's done without him looking guilty?

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George Eliot describes the subject elaborately.

"Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress—that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations amazingly witty. She is understood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well. The men play a very subordinate part by her side. You are consoled now and then by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps you in mind that the working-day business of the world is somehow being carried on, but ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may accompany the heroine on her “starring” expedition through life. They see her at a ball, and they are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on a riding excursion, and they are witched by her noble horsemanship; at church, and they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanor. She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces. For all this she as often as not marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even death has a soft place in his heart for such a paragon, and remedies all mistakes for her just at the right moment. The vicious baronet is sure to be killed in a duel, and the tedious husband dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favor to him, to marry the man she loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the lover informing him of the comfortable arrangement. Before matters arrive at this desirable issue our feelings are tried by seeing the noble, lovely, and gifted heroine pass through many mauvais moments, but we have the satisfaction of knowing that her sorrows are wept into embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs, that her fainting form reclines on the very best upholstery, and that whatever vicissitudes she may undergo, from being dashed out of her carriage to having her head shaved in a fever, she comes out of them all with a complexion more blooming and locks more redundant than ever."

That tells us why good, beautiful young heiresses of George Eliot world suffer, due to their husbands being neither dazzled by beauty nor virtue, while lesser women do very well - Dorothea, Romola vs Celia, Rosamond - and why she felt bound to make it so. But the middle part, is that a snide hit at the almost most loved heroine, Elizabeth Bennet?

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"We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved from a serious scruple by discovering that silly novels by lady page 180 novelists rarely introduce us into any other than very lofty and fashionable society. We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other “ladylike” means of getting their bread. ... "

Hence Gwendolyn married Grandcourt, and suffered forever? Because being governess or novelist is infradig?

" ... On this supposition, vacillating syntax, and improbable incident had a certain pathos for us, like the extremely supererogatory pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a blind man. ... "

How snide does George Eliot get! Really, women writers of novels compared with clothes tailored by blind men?

Did she even read Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, even Charlotte Bronte?

" ... We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but we were glad to think that the money went to relieve the necessitous, and we pictured to ourselves lonely women struggling for a maintenance, or wives and daughters devoting themselves to the production of “copy” out of pure heroism—perhaps to pay their husband’s debts or to purchase luxuries for a sick father. ... "

If readers were so generous to women writers, why would Mary Evans not only write as George Eliot, but pretend explicitly to be male, in writing Looking Backward?

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" ... Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a lady’s novel: her English might be faulty, but we said to ourselves her motives are irreproachable; her imagination may be uninventive, but her patience is untiring. Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears. But no! This theory of ours, like many other pretty theories, has had to give way before observation. Women’s silly novels, we are now convinced, are written under totally different circumstances. The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as “dependents;” they think five hundred a year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and “baronial halls” are their primary truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. ... "

Funny, that description fits none of the four excellent women writers she ought to have heard of, even if she disdained reading them! All four - Jane Austen, and Bronte sisters - were clergymen's daughters, gentry and struggling to stay gentry, like George Eliot until she married.

" ... It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness. ... "

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George Eliot goes on to shred a few novels she's been reading, beginning with one titled 'Compensation'.

" ... There is a certain flavor of orthodoxy mixed with the parade of fortunes and fine carriages in “Laura Gay,” but it is an orthodoxy mitigated by study of “the humane Cicero,” and by an “intellectual disposition to analyze.”

"“Compensation” is much more heavily dosed with doctrine, but then it has a treble amount of snobbish worldliness and absurd incident to tickle the palate of pious frivolity. ... "

Why she chose those for review, insted of an Austen or a Bronte work, is a puzzle.

Just to justify this writing?

"... Even Miss Susan Barton, the superior authoress, whose pen moves in a “quick, decided manner when she is composing,” declines the finest opportunities of marriage; and though old enough to be Linda’s mother (since we are told that she refused Linda’s father), has her hand sought by a young earl, the heroine’s rejected lover. Of course, genius and morality must be backed by eligible offers, or they would seem rather a dull affair; and piety, like other things, in order to be comme il faut, must be in “society,” and have admittance to the best circles.

"“Rank and Beauty” is a more frothy and less religious variety of the mind-and-millinery species. ... "

" ... The authoress of “Laura Gay,” for example, having married her hero and heroine, improves the event by observing that “if those sceptics, whose eyes have so long gazed on matter that they can no longer see aught else in man, could once enter with heart and soul, into such bliss as this, they would come to say that the soul of man and the polypus are not of common origin, or of the same texture.” Lady novelists, it appears, can see something else besides matter; they are not limited to phenomena, but can relieve their eyesight by occasional glimpses of the noumenon, and are, therefore, naturally better able than any one else to confound sceptics, even of that remarkable but to us unknown school which maintains that the soul of man is of the same texture as the polypus."

" ... To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such difficulties is something like this: Take a woman’s head, stuff it with a smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, and serve up hot in feeble English when not required. You will rarely meet with a lady novelist of the oracular class who is diffident of her ability to decide on theological questions—who has any suspicion that she is not capable of discriminating with the nicest accuracy between the good and evil in all church parties—who does not see precisely how it is that men have gone wrong hitherto—and pity philosophers in general that they have not had the opportunity of consulting her. ... "

"As typical a novel of the oracular kind as we can hope to meet with, is “The Enigma: a Leaf from the Chronicles of the Wolchorley House.” The “enigma” which this novel is to solve is certainly one that demands powers no less gigantic than those of a lady novelist, being neither more nor less than the existence of evil. ... "

"Such stories as this of “The Enigma” remind us of the pictures clever children sometimes draw “out of their own head,” where you will see a modern villa on the right, two knights in helmets fighting in the foreground, and a tiger grinning in a jungle on the left, the several objects being brought together because the artist thinks each pretty, and perhaps still more because he remembers seeing them in other pictures."

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"The epithet “silly” may seem impertinent, applied to a novel which indicates so much reading and intellectual activity as “The Enigma,” but we use this epithet advisedly. If, as the world has long agreed, a very great amount of instruction will not make a wise man, still less will a very mediocre amount of instruction make a wise woman. And the most mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form, because it tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the more solid education of women.

"When men see girls wasting their time in consultations about bonnets and ball dresses, and in giggling or sentimental love-confidences, or middle-aged women mismanaging their children, and solacing themselves with acrid gossip, they can hardly help saying, “For Heaven’s sake, let girls be better educated; let them have some better objects of thought—some more solid occupations.” But after a few hours’ conversation with an oracular literary woman, or a few hours’ reading of her books, they are likely enough to say, “After all, when a woman gets some knowledge, see what use she makes of it! Her knowledge remains acquisition instead of passing into culture; instead of being subdued into modesty and simplicity by a larger acquaintance with thought and fact, she has a feverish consciousness of her attainments; she keeps a sort of mental pocket-mirror, and is continually looking in it at her own ‘intellectuality;’ she spoils the taste of one’s muffin by questions of metaphysics; ‘puts down’ men at a dinner-table with her superior information; and seizes the opportunity of a soirée to catechise us on the vital question of the relation between mind and matter. And then, look at her writings! She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality; she struts on one page, rolls her eyes on another, grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth. She may have read many writings of great men, and a few writings of great women; but she is as unable to discern the difference between her own style and theirs as a Yorkshireman is to discern the difference between his own English and a Londoner’s: rhodomontade is the native accent of her intellect. No—the average nature of women is too shallow and feeble a soil to bear much tillage; it is only fit for the very lightest crops.”

"It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such very superficial and imperfect observation may not be among the wisest in the world; but we have not now to contest their opinion—we are only pointing out how it is unconsciously encouraged by many women who have volunteered themselves as representatives of the feminine intellect. We do not believe that a man was ever strengthened in such an opinion by associating with a woman of true culture, whose mind had absorbed her knowledge instead of being absorbed by it. A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful. She does not write books to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that delight them. In conversation she is the least formidable of women, because she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you can’t understand her. She does not give you information, which is the raw material of culture—she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence."

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"The Orlando of Evangelical literature is the young curate, looked at from the point of view of the middle class, where cambric bands are understood to have as thrilling an effect on the hearts of young ladies as epaulettes have in the classes above and below it. In the ordinary type of these novels the hero is almost sure to be a young curate, frowned upon, perhaps by worldly mammas, but carrying captive the hearts of their daughters, who can “never forget that sermon;” tender glances are seized from the pulpit stairs instead of the opera-box; tête-à-têtes are seasoned with quotations from Scripture instead of quotations from the poets; and questions as to the state of the heroine’s affections are mingled with anxieties as to the state of her soul. The young curate always has a background of well-dressed and wealthy if not fashionable society—for Evangelical silliness is as snobbish as any other kind of silliness—and the Evangelical lady novelist, while she explains to you the type of the scapegoat on one page, is ambitious on another to represent the manners and conversations of aristocratic people. Her pictures of fashionable society are often curious studies, considered as efforts of the Evangelical imagination; but in one particular the novels of the White Neck-cloth School are meritoriously realistic—their favorite hero, the Evangelical young curate, is always rather an insipid personage."

Isn't that Daniel Deronda, all but the formality of curate living? Which is compensated amply throughout the book.

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"It is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist than in any other, gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and carriages. The real drama of Evangelicalism—and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it—lies among the middle and lower classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood to give an especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather than in the mighty? Why, then, cannot our Evangelical lady novelists show us the operation of their religious views among people (there really are many such in the world) who keep no carriage, “not so much as a brass-bound gig,” who even manage to eat their dinner without a silver fork, and in whose mouths the authoress’s questionable English would be strictly consistent? Why can we not have pictures of religious life among the industrial classes in England, as interesting as Mrs. Stowe’s pictures of religious life among the negroes? Instead of this pious ladies nauseate us with novels which remind us of what we sometimes see in a worldly woman recently “converted;”—she is as fond of a fine dinner-table as before, but she invites clergymen instead of beaux; she thinks as much of her dress as before, but she adopts a more sober choice of colors and patterns; her conversation is as trivial as before, but the triviality is flavored with gospel instead of gossip. In “The Old Grey Church” we have the same sort of Evangelical travesty of the fashionable novel, and of course the vicious, intriguing baronet is not wanting."

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" ...A recent example of this heavy imbecility is “Adonijah, a Tale of the Jewish Dispersion,” which forms part of a series, “uniting,” we are told, “taste, humor, and sound principles.” “Adonijah,” we presume, exemplifies the tale of “sound principles;” the taste and humor are to be found in other members of the series. We are told on the cover that the incidents of this tale are “fraught with unusual interest,” and the preface winds up thus: “To those who feel interested in the dispersed of Israel and Judea, these pages may afford, perhaps, information on an important subject, as well as amusement.” Since the “important subject” on which this book is to afford information is not specified, it may possibly lie in some esoteric meaning to which we have no key; but if it has relation to the dispersed of Israel and Judea at any period of their history, we believe a tolerably well-informed school-girl already knows much more of it than she will find in this “Tale of the Jewish Dispersion.” “Adonijah” is simply the feeblest kind of love story, supposed to be instructive, we presume, because the hero is a Jewish captive and the heroine a Roman vestal; because they and their friends are converted to Christianity after the shortest and easiest method approved by the “Society for Promoting the Conversion of the Jews;” and because, instead of being written in plain language, it is adorned with that peculiar style of grandiloquence which is held by some lady novelists to give an antique coloring, and which we recognize at once in such phrases as these:—“the splendid regnal talent, undoubtedly, possessed by the Emperor Nero”—“the expiring scion of a lofty stem”—“the virtuous partner of his couch”—“ah, by Vesta!”—and “I tell thee, Roman.” Among the quotations which serve at once for instruction and ornament on the cover of this volume, there is one from Miss Sinclair, which informs us that “Works of imagination are avowedly read by men of science, wisdom, and piety;” from which we suppose the reader is to gather the cheering inference that Dr. Daubeny, Mr. Mill, or Mr. Maurice may openly indulge himself with the perusal of “Adonijah,” without being obliged to secrete it among the sofa cushions, or read it by snatches under the dinner-table."

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"“Be not a baker if your head be made of butter,” says a homely proverb, which, being interpreted, may mean, let no woman rush into print who is not prepared for the consequences. We are aware that our remarks are in a very different tone from that of the reviewers who, with perennial recurrence of precisely similar emotions, only paralleled, we imagine, in the experience of monthly nurses, tell one lady novelist after another that they “hail” her productions “with delight.” We are aware that the ladies at whom our criticism is pointed are accustomed to be told, in the choicest phraseology of puffery, that their pictures of life are brilliant, their characters well drawn, their style fascinating, and their sentiments lofty. But if they are inclined to resent our plainness of speech, we ask them to reflect for a moment on the chary praise, and often captious blame, which their panegyrists give to writers whose works are on the way to become classics. No sooner does a woman show that she has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being moderately praised and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men. ... The foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being counterbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral derogation implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the extremely false impression that to write at all is a proof of superiority in a woman. On this ground we believe that the average intellect of women is unfairly represented by the mass of feminine literature, and that while the few women who write well are very far above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many women who write ill are very far below it. So that, after all, the severer critics are fulfilling a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine authorship of any false prestige which may give it a delusive attraction, and in recommending women of mediocre faculties—as at least a negative service they can render their sex—to abstain from writing."

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"Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest—novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements—genuine observation, humor, and passion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which had its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery."

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September 24, 2021 - September 24, 2021.

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VII.—Worldliness and Other-Worldliness

WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS:

THE POET YOUNG

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If anyone thought that George Eliot only went after lady novelists for writing silly novels, here's refutation - but only individually.

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"The study of men, as they have appeared in different ages and under various social conditions, may be considered as the natural history of the race. Let us, then, for a moment imagine ourselves, as students of this natural history, “dredging” the first half of the eighteenth century in search of specimens. About the year 1730 we have hauled up a remarkable individual of the species divine—a surprising name, considering the nature of the animal before us, but we are used to unsuitable names in natural history. Let us examine this individual at our leisure. He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the “Last Day” and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After spending “a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets,” after being a hanger-on of the profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general mendicancy business to a particular branch; in other words, he has determined on that renunciation of the world implied in “taking orders,” with the prospect of a good living and an advantageous matrimonial connection. And no man can be better fitted for an Established Church. He personifies completely her nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for immortal life and for “livings;” he has a fervid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things; and he will feel something more than private disgust if his meritorious efforts in directing men’s attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic attire for “an ornament of religion and virtue;” hopes courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes begging letters to the King’s mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Golgotha and “the skies;” it walks in graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers, it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent or to murder one’s father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its “relation to the stalls,” and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of death-beds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next; and by this double process you get the Christian—“the highest style of man.” With all this, our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive: for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of the “Night Thoughts.”"

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"Judging from Young’s works, one might imagine that the preacher had been organized in him by hereditary transmission through a long line of clerical forefathers—that the diamonds of the “Night Thoughts” had been slowly condensed from the charcoal of ancestral sermons. Yet it was not so. His grandfather, apparently, wrote himself gentleman, not clerk; and there is no evidence that preaching had run in the family blood before it took that turn in the person of the poet’s father, who was quadruply clerical, being at once rector, prebendary, court chaplain, and dean. Young was born at his father’s rectory of Upham in 1681. ... "

"In due time the boy went to Winchester College, and subsequently, though not till he was twenty-two, to Oxford, where, for his father’s sake, he was befriended by the wardens of two colleges, and in 1708, three years after his father’s death, nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law fellowship at All Souls. Of Young’s life at Oxford in these years, hardly anything is known. His biographer, Croft, has nothing to tell us but the vague report that, when “Young found himself independent and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality that he afterward became,” and the perhaps apocryphal anecdote, that Tindal, the atheist, confessed himself embarrassed by the originality of Young’s arguments. ... His career as an author did not commence till he was nearly thirty, even dating from the publication of a portion of the “Last Day,” in the Tatler; so that he could hardly have been absorbed in composition. But where the fully developed insect is parasitic, we believe the larva is usually parasitic also, and we shall probably not be far wrong in supposing that Young at Oxford, as elsewhere, spent a good deal of his time in hanging about possible and actual patrons, and accommodating himself to the habits with considerable flexibility of conscience and of tongue; being none the less ready, upon occasion, to present himself as the champion of theology and to rhapsodize at convenient moments in the company of the skies or of skulls. That brilliant profligate, the Duke of Wharton, to whom Young afterward clung as his chief patron, was at this time a mere boy; and, though it is probable that their intimacy had commenced, since the Duke’s father and mother were friends of the old dean, that intimacy ought not to aggravate any unfavorable inference as to Young’s Oxford life. ... "

"There is some irony in the fact that the two first poetical productions of Young, published in the same year, were his “Epistles to Lord Lansdowne,” celebrating the recent creation of peers—Lord Lansdowne’s creation in particular; and the “Last Day.” Other poets besides Young found the device for obtaining a Tory majority by turning twelve insignificant commoners into insignificant lords, an irresistible stimulus to verse; but no other poet showed so versatile an enthusiasm—so nearly equal an ardor for the honor of the new baron and the honor of the Deity. But the twofold nature of the sycophant and the psalmist is not more strikingly shown in the contrasted themes of the two poems than in the transitions from bombast about monarchs to bombast about the resurrection, in the “Last Day” itself. The dedication of the poem to Queen Anne, Young afterward suppressed, for he was always ashamed of having flattered a dead patron. In this dedication, Croft tells us, “he gives her Majesty praise indeed for her victories, but says that the author is more pleased to see her rise from this lower world, soaring above the clouds, passing the first and second heavens, and leaving the fixed stars behind her; nor will he lose her there, he says, but keep her still in view through the boundless spaces on the other side of creation, in her journey toward eternal bliss, till he behold the heaven of heavens open, and angels receiving and conveying her still onward from the stretch of his imagination, which tires in her pursuit, and falls back again to earth.”"

"In 1717 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke of Wharton to Ireland, though so slender are the materials for his biography that the chief basis for this supposition is a passage in his “Conjectures on Original Composition,” written when he was nearly eighty, in which he intimates that he had once been in that country. But there are many facts surviving to indicate that for the next eight or nine years Young was a sort of attaché of Wharton’s. In 1719, according to legal records, the Duke granted him an annuity, in consideration of his having relinquished the office of tutor to Lord Burleigh, with a life annuity of £100 a year, on his Grace’s assurances that he would provide for him in a much more ample manner. And again, from the same evidence, it appears that in 1721 Young received from Wharton a bond for £600, in compensation of expenses incurred in standing for Parliament at the Duke’s desire, and as an earnest of greater services which his Grace had promised him on his refraining from the spiritual and temporal advantages of taking orders, with a certainty of two livings in the gift of his college. It is clear, therefore, that lay advancement, as long as there was any chance of it, had more attractions for Young than clerical preferment; and that at this time he accepted the Duke of Wharton as the pilot of his career."

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"It is a coincidence worth noticing, that this seventh Satire was published in 1726, and that the warrant of George the First, granting Young a pension of £200 a year from Lady-day, 1725, is dated May 3d, 1726. The gratitude exhibited in this Satire may have been chiefly prospective, but the “Instalment,” a poem inspired by the thrilling event of Walpole’s installation as Knight of the Garter, was clearly written with the double ardor of a man who has got a pension and hopes for something more. His emotion about Walpole is precisely at the same pitch as his subsequent emotion about the Second Advent. In the “Instalment” he says:

"“With invocations some their hearts inflame;

"I need no muse, a Walpole is my theme.”

"And of God coming to judgment, he says, in the “Night Thoughts:”

“I find my inspiration is my theme;

"The grandeur of my subject is my muse.”"

"Herbert Croft tells us that Young made more than three thousand pounds by his “Satires”—a surprising statement, taken in connection with the reasonable doubt he throws on the story related in Spence’s “Anecdotes,” that the Duke of Wharton gave Young £2000 for this work. Young, however, seems to have been tolerably fortunate in the pecuniary results of his publications; and, with his literary profits, his annuity from Wharton, his fellowship, and his pension, not to mention other bounties which may be inferred from the high merits he discovers in many men of wealth and position, we may fairly suppose that he now laid the foundation of the considerable fortune he left at his death.

"It is probable that the Duke of Wharton’s final departure for the Continent and disgrace at Court in 1726, and the consequent cessation of Young’s reliance on his patronage, tended not only to heighten the temperature of his poetical enthusiasm for Sir Robert Walpole, but also to turn his thoughts toward the Church again, as the second-best means of rising in the world. On the accession of George the Second, Young found the same transcendent merits in him as in his predecessor, and celebrated them in a style of poetry previously unattempted by him—the Pindaric ode, a poetic form which helped him to surpass himself in furious bombast. “Ocean, an Ode: concluding with a Wish,” was the title of this piece. He afterward pruned it, and cut off, among other things, the concluding Wish, expressing the yearning for humble retirement, which, of course, had prompted him to the effusion; but we may judge of the rejected stanzas by the quality of those he has allowed to remain."

"Soon after this notable production, which was written with the ripe folly of forty-seven, Young took orders, and was presently appointed chaplain to the King. “The Brothers,” his third and last tragedy, which was already in rehearsal, he now withdrew from the stage, and sought reputation in a way more accordant with the decorum of his new profession, by turning prose writer. But after publishing “A True Estimate of Human Life,” with a dedication to the Queen, as one of the “most shining representatives” of God on earth, and a sermon, entitled “An Apology for Princes; or, the Reverence due to Government,” preached before the House of Commons, his Pindaric ambition again seized him, and he matched his former ode by another, called “Imperium Pelagi, a Naval Lyric; written in imitation of Pindar’s spirit, occasioned by his Majesty’s return from Hanover, 1729, and the succeeding Peace.” Since he afterward suppressed this second ode, we must suppose that it was rather worse than the first. Next came his two “Epistles to Pope, concerning the Authors of the Age,” remarkable for nothing but the audacity of affectation with which the most servile of poets professes to despise servility.

"In 1730 Young was presented by his college with the rectory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire, and, in the following year, when he was just fifty, he married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a widow with two children, who seems to have been in favor with Queen Caroline, and who probably had an income—two attractions which doubtless enhanced the power of her other charms. Pastoral duties and domesticity probably cured Young of some bad habits; but, unhappily, they did not cure him either of flattery or of fustian. Three more odes followed, quite as bad as those of his bachelorhood, except that in the third he announced the wise resolution of never writing another. It must have been about this time, since Young was now “turned of fifty,” that he wrote the letter to Mrs. Howard (afterward Lady Suffolk), George the Second’s mistress, which proves that he used other engines, besides Pindaric ones, in “besieging Court favor.”"

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"Young’s wife died in 1741, leaving him one son, born in 1733. That he had attached himself strongly to her two daughters by her former marriage, there is better evidence in the report, mentioned by Mrs. Montagu, of his practical kindness and liberality to the younger, than in his lamentations over the elder as the “Narcissa” of the “Night Thoughts.” “Narcissa” had died in 1735, shortly after marriage to Mr. Temple, the son of Lord Palmerston; and Mr. Temple himself, after a second marriage, died in 1740, a year before Lady Elizabeth Young. These, then, are the three deaths supposed to have inspired “The Complaint,” which forms the three first books of the “Night Thoughts:”

"“Insatiate archer, could not one suffice?

"Thy shaft flew thrice: and thrice my peace was slain:

"And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had fill’d her horn.”

"Since we find Young departing from the truth of dates, in order to heighten the effect of his calamity, or at least of his climax, we need not be surprised that he allowed his imagination great freedom in other matters besides chronology, and that the character of “Philander” can, by no process, be made to fit Mr. Temple. The supposition that the much-lectured “Lorenzo” of the “Night Thoughts” was Young’s own son is hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the poem was written when that son was a boy, than by the obvious artificiality of the characters Young introduces as targets for his arguments and rebukes. Among all the trivial efforts of conjectured criticism, there can hardly be one more futile than the attempts to discover the original of those pitiable lay-figures, the “Lorenzos” and “Altamonts” of Young’s didactic prose and poetry. His muse never stood face to face with a genuine living human being; she would have been as much startled by such an encounter as a necromancer whose incantations and blue fire had actually conjured up a demon.

"The “Night Thoughts” appeared between 1741 and 1745. Although he declares in them that he has chosen God for his “patron” henceforth, this is not at all to the prejudice of some half dozen lords, duchesses, and right honorables who have the privilege of sharing finely-turned compliments with their co-patron. ... his apostrophe to the moon as more likely to be favorable to his song if he calls her “fair Portland of the skies,” is worthy even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostentatious renunciation of worldly schemes, and especially of his twenty-years’ siege of Court favor, are in the tone of one who retains some hope in the midst of his querulousness.

"He descended from the astronomical rhapsodies of his “Ninth Night,” published in 1745, to more terrestrial strains in his “Reflections on the Public Situation of the Kingdom,” dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle; but in this critical year we get a glimpse of him through a more prosaic and less refracting medium. He spent a part of the year at Tunbridge Wells; and Mrs. Montagu, who was there too, gives a very lively picture of the “divine Doctor” in her letters to the Duchess of Portland, on whom Young had bestowed the superlative bombast to which we have recently alluded. ... "

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" ... —Mrs. Montagu was not aware that Cibber, whom Young had named not disparagingly in his Satires, was the brother of his old school-fellow; but to return to our hero. ‘The waters,’ says Mrs. Montagu, ‘have raised his spirits to a fine pitch, as your grace will imagine, when I tell you how sublime an answer he made to a very vulgar question. I asked him how long he stayed at the Wells; he said, ‘As long as my rival stayed;—as long as the sun did.’ Among the visitors at the Wells were Lady Sunderland (wife of Sir Robert Sutton), and her sister, Mrs. Tichborne. ‘He did an admirable thing to Lady Sunderland: on her mentioning Sir Robert Sutton, he asked her where Sir Robert’s lady was; on which we all laughed very heartily, and I brought him off, half ashamed, to my lodgings, where, during breakfast, he assured me he had asked after Lady Sunderland, because he had a great honor for her; and that, having a respect for her sister, he designed to have inquired after her, if we had not put it out of his head by laughing at him. You must know, Mrs. Tichborne sat next to Lady Sunderland. It would have been admirable to have had him finish his compliment in that manner.’ ... ‘The night silenced all but our divine doctor, who sometimes uttered things fit to be spoken in a season when all nature seems to be hushed and hearkening. I followed, gathering wisdom as I went, till I found, by my horse’s stumbling, that I was in a bad road, and that the blind was leading the blind. So I placed my servant between the doctor and myself; which he not perceiving, went on in a most philosophical strain, to the great admiration of my poor clown of a servant, who, not being wrought up to any pitch of enthusiasm, nor making any answer to all the fine things he heard, the doctor, wondering I was dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, looked round and declared his surprise.’”

"Young’s oddity and absence of mind are gathered from other sources besides these stories of Mrs. Montagu’s, and gave rise to the report that he was the original of Fielding’s “Parson Adams;” but this Croft denies, and mentions another Young, who really sat for the portrait, and who, we imagine, had both more Greek and more genuine simplicity than the poet. His love of chatting with Colley Cibber was an indication that the old predilection for the stage survived, in spite of his emphatic contempt for “all joys but joys that never can expire;” and the production of “The Brothers,” at Drury Lane in 1753, after a suppression of fifteen years, was perhaps not entirely due to the expressed desire to give the proceeds to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The author’s profits were not more than £400—in those days a disappointing sum; and Young, as we learn from his friend Richardson, did not make this the limit of his donation, but gave a thousand guineas to the Society. ... "

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"The estrangement from his son, which must have embittered the later years of his life, appears to have begun not many years after the mother’s death. On the marriage of her second daughter, who had previously presided over Young’s household, a Mrs. Hallows, understood to be a woman of discreet age, and the daughter (a widow) of a clergyman who was an old friend of Young’s, became housekeeper at Welwyn. Opinions about ladies are apt to differ. “Mrs. Hallows was a woman of piety, improved by reading,” says one witness. “She was a very coarse woman,” says Dr. Johnson; and we shall presently find some indirect evidence that her temper was perhaps not quite so much improved as her piety. Servants, it seems, were not fond of remaining long in the house with her; a satirical curate, named Kidgell, hints at “drops of juniper” taken as a cordial (but perhaps he was spiteful, and a teetotaller); and Young’s son is said to have told his father that “an old man should not resign himself to the management of anybody.” The result was, that the son was banished from home for the rest of his father’s life-time, though Young seems never to have thought of disinheriting him."

"“Having mentioned this young gentleman (Dr. Young’s son), I would acquaint you next, that he came hither this morning, having been sent for, as I am told, by the direction of Mrs. Hallows. Indeed, she intimated to me as much herself. And if this be so, I must say, that it is one of the most prudent Acts she ever did, or could have done in such a case as this; as it may prove a means of preventing much confusion after the death of the Doctor. I have had some little discourse with the son: he seems much affected, and I believe really is so. He earnestly wishes his father might be pleased to ask after him; for you must know he has not yet done this, nor is, in my opinion, like to do it. And it has been said farther, that upon a late application made to him on the behalf of his son, he desired that no more might be said to him about it. How true this may be I cannot as yet be certain; all I shall say is, it seems not improbable . . . I heartily wish the ancient man’s heart may prove tender toward his son; though, knowing him so well, I can scarce hope to hear such desirable news.”"

"To Mrs. Hallows, Young left a legacy of £1000, with the request that she would destroy all his manuscripts. This final request, from some unknown cause, was not complied with, and among the papers he left behind him was the following page 227 letter from Archbishop Secker, which probably marks the date of his latest effort after preferment:

"“Deanery of St. Paul’s, July 8, 1758.

"“Good Dr. Young: I have long wondered that more suitable notice of your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. But how to remedy the omission I see not. No encouragement hath ever been given me to mention things of this nature to his Majesty. And therefore, in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would be weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on some other occasions. Your fortune and your reputation set you above the need of advancement; and your sentiments above that concern for it, on your own account, which, on that of the public, is sincerely felt by

"“Your loving Brother,

"“Tho. Cant.”

"The loving brother’s irony is severe!"

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" ... Young’s character is too distinctly traceable in the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the self-betrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear that our general estimate of him may be false. For, while no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no poet discloses himself more completely. Men’s minds have no hiding-place out of themselves—their affectations do but betray another phase of their nature. And if, in the present view of Young, we seem to be more intent on laying bare unfavorable facts than on shrouding them in “charitable speeches,” it is not because we have any irreverential pleasure in turning men’s characters “the seamy side without,” but because we see no great advantage in considering a man as he was not. Young’s biographers and critics have usually set out from the position that he was a great religious teacher, and that his poetry is morally sublime; and they have toned down his failings into harmony with their conception of the divine and the poet. For our own part, we set out from precisely the opposite conviction—namely, that the religious and moral spirit of Young’s poetry is low and false, and we think it of some importance to show that the “Night Thoughts” are the reflex of the mind in which the higher human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is entirely opposed to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm. The sweet garden-breath of early enjoyment lingers about many a page of the “Night Thoughts,” and even of the “Last Day,” giving an extrinsic charm to passages of stilted rhetoric and false sentiment; but the sober and repeated reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly be possible to find a more typical instance than Young’s poetry, of the mistake which substitutes interested obedience for sympathetic emotion, and baptizes egoism as religion.

"Pope said of Young, that he had “much of a sublime genius without common-sense.” The deficiency Pope meant to indicate was, we imagine, moral rather than intellectual: it was the want of that fine sense of what is fitting in speech and action, which is often eminently possessed by men and women whose intellect is of a very common order, but who have the sincerity and dignity which can never coexist with the selfish preoccupations of vanity or interest. This was the “common-sense” in which Young was conspicuously deficient; and it was partly owing to this deficiency that his genius, waiting to be determined by the highest prize, fluttered uncertainly from effort to effort, until, when he was more than sixty, it suddenly spread its broad wing, and soared so as to arrest the gaze of other generations besides his own. For he had no versatility of faculty to mislead him. The “Night Thoughts” only differ from his previous works in the degree and not in the kind of power they manifest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank verse, dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, we see everywhere the same Young—the same narrow circle of thoughts, the same love of abstractions, the same telescopic view of human things, the same appetency toward antithetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax. The passages that arrest us in his tragedies are those in which he anticipates some fine passage in the “Night Thoughts,” and where his characters are only transparent shadows through which we see the bewigged embonpoint of the didactic poet, excogitating epigrams or ecstatic page 230 soliloquies by the light of a candle fixed in a skull. ... "

"In a burst of prayer and homage to God, called forth by the contemplation of Christ coming to judgment, he asks, Who brings the change of the seasons? and answers:

"“Not the great Ottoman, or Greater Czar;

"Not Europe’s arbitress of peace and war!”

"Conceive the soul in its most solemn moments, assuring God that it doesn’t place his power below that of Louis Napoleon or Queen Victoria!

"But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, vaulting sublimity that o’erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we have in this poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch of simple grandeur, which promises as much as Young ever achieved. Describing the on-coming of the dissolution of all things, he says:

"“No sun in radiant glory shines on high;

"No light but from the terrors of the sky.”

"And again, speaking of great armies:

"“Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn

"Rous’d the broad front, and call’d the battle on.”

"And this wail of the lost souls is fine:

"“And this for sin? Could I offend if I had never been?

"But still increas’d the senseless, happy mass,

"Flow’d in the stream, or shiver’d in the grass?

"Father of mercies! Why from silent earth

"Didst thou awake and curse me into birth?

"Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night,

"And make a thankless present of thy light?

"Push into being a reverse of Thee,

"And animate a clod with misery?”"

................................................................................................

" ... Satires, read seriatim, have a flatness to us, which, when we afterward read picked passages, we are inclined to disbelieve in, and to attribute to some deficiency in our own mood. But there are deeper reasons for that dissatisfaction. Young is not a satirist of a high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigor, the lacerating energy of genuine indignation, nor the humor which owns loving fellowship with the poor human nature it laughs at; nor yet the personal bitterness which, as in Pope’s characters of Sporus and Atticus, insures those living touches by virtue of which the individual and particular in Art becomes the universal and immortal. Young could never describe a real, complex human being; but what he could do with eminent success was to describe, with neat and finished point, obvious types, of manners rather than of character—to write cold and clever epigrams on personified vices and absurdities. There is no more emotion in his satire than if he were turning witty verses on a waxen image of Cupid or a lady’s glove. He has none of these felicitious epithets, none of those pregnant lines, by which Pope’s Satires have enriched the ordinary speech of educated men. Young’s wit will be found in almost every instance to consist in that antithetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms of wit, is most within reach of a clever effort. In his gravest arguments, as well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that he had set himself to work out the problem, how much antithesis might be got out of a given subject. And there he completely succeeds. ... "

"Like Pope, whom he imitated, he sets out with a psychological mistake as the basis of his satire, attributing all forms of folly to one passion—the love of fame, or vanity—a much grosser mistake, indeed, than Pope’s, exaggeration of the extent to which the “ruling passion” determines conduct in the individual. Not that Young is consistent in his mistake. He sometimes implies no more than what is the truth—that the love of fame is the cause, not of all follies, but of many.

"Young’s satires on women are superior to Pope’s, which is only saying that they are superior to Pope’s greatest failure. We can more frequently pick out a couplet as successful than an entire sketch. ... "

................................................................................................

"The outburst of genius in the earlier books of the “Night Thoughts” is the more remarkable, that in the interval between them and the Satires he had produced nothing but his Pindaric odes, in which he fell far below the level of his previous works. Two sources of this sudden strength were the freedom of blank verse and the presence of a genuine emotion. Most persons, in speaking of the “Night Thoughts,” have in their minds only the two or three first Nights, the majority of readers rarely getting beyond these, unless, as Wilson says, they “have but few books, are poor, and live in the country.” And in these earlier Nights there is enough genuine sublimity and genuine sadness to bribe us into too favorable a judgment of them as a whole. Young had only a very few things to say or sing—such as that life is vain, that death is imminent, that man is immortal, that virtue is wisdom, that friendship is sweet, and that the source of virtue is the contemplation of death and immortality—and even in his two first Nights he had said almost all he had to say in his finest manner. Through these first outpourings of “complaint” we feel that the poet is really sad, that the bird is singing over a rifled nest; and we bear with his morbid picture of the world and of life, as the Job-like lament of a man whom “the hand of God hath touched.” Death has carried away his best-beloved, and that “silent land” whither they are gone has more reality for the desolate one than this world which is empty of their love:

"“This is the desert, this the solitude;

"How populous, how vital is the grave!”

"Joy died with the loved one:

"“The disenchanted earth

"Lost all her lustre.

"Where her glitt’ring towers?

"Her golden mountains, where?

"All darkened down

"To naked waste; a dreary vale of tears:

"The great magician’s dead!”"

"In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, we tolerate morbid exaggerations; we are prepared to see him turn away a weary eye from sunlight and flowers and sweet human faces, as if this rich and glorious life had no significance but as a preliminary of death; we do not criticise his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is with Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some artificiality even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but through it all we are thrilled with the unmistakable cry of pain, which makes us tolerant of egoism and hyperbole ... "

"But when he becomes didactic, rather than complaining—when he ceases to sing his sorrows, and begins to insist on his opinions—when that distaste for life which we pity as a transient feeling is thrust upon us as a theory, we become perfectly cool and critical, and are not in the least inclined to be indulgent to false views and selfish sentiments."

"One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his radical insincerity as a poetic artist. This, added to the thin and artificial texture of his wit, is the true explanation of the paradox—that a poet who is often inopportunely witty has the opposite vice of bombastic absurdity. The source of all grandiloquence is the want of taking for a criterion the true qualities of the object described or the emotion expressed. The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying what he feels or what he sees, but on producing a certain effect on his audience; hence he may float away into utter inanity without meeting any criterion to arrest him. Here lies the distinction between grandiloquence and genuine fancy or bold imaginativeness. The fantastic or the boldly imaginative poet may be as sincere as the most realistic: he is true to his own sensibilities or inward vision, and in his wildest flights he never breaks loose from his criterion—the truth of his own mental state. Now, this disruption of language from genuine thought and feeling is what we are constantly detecting in Young; and his insincerity is the more likely to betray him into absurdity, because he habitually treats of abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific emotions. He descants perpetually on virtue, religion, “the good man,” life, death, immortality, eternity—subjects which are apt to give a factitious grandeur to empty wordiness. When a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird’s-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven. Thus:

"“His hand the good man fixes on the skies,

"And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl,”

"may, perhaps, pass for sublime with some readers. But pause a moment to realize the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man’s grasping the skies, and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously bids the earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural a conception. Again,

"“See the man immortal: him, I mean,

"Who lives as such; whose heart, full bent on Heaven,

"Leans all that way, his bias to the stars.”

"This is worse than the previous example: for you can at least form some imperfect conception of a man hanging from the skies, though the position strikes you as uncomfortable and of no particular use; but you are utterly unable to imagine how his heart can lean toward the stars. Examples of such vicious imagery, resulting from insincerity, may be found, perhaps, in almost every page of the “Night Thoughts.” But simple assertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, are often equally false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked by the slightest truthful intentions could have said—

"“An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,

"And roll forever.”

"Abstracting the more poetical associations with the eye, this is hardly less absurd than if he had wished to stand forever with his mouth open.

"Again:

"“Far beneath

"A soul immortal is a mortal joy.”

"Happily for human nature, we are sure no man really believes that. Which of us has the impiety not to feel that our souls are only too narrow for the joy of looking into the trusting eyes of our children, of reposing on the love of a husband or a wife—nay, of listening to the divine voice of music, or watching the calm brightness of autumnal afternoons? But Young could utter this falsity without detecting it, because, when he spoke of “mortal joys,” he rarely had in his mind any object to which he could attach sacredness. He was thinking of bishoprics, and benefices, of smiling monarchs, patronizing prime ministers, and a “much indebted muse.” Of anything between these and eternal bliss he was but rarely and moderately conscious. Often, indeed, he sinks very much below even the bishopric, and seems to have no notion of earthly pleasure but such as breathes gaslight and the fumes of wine. ... "

"“Earth” means lords and levees, duchesses and Dalilahs, South-Sea dreams, and illegal percentage; and the only things distinctly preferable to these are eternity and the stars. Deprive Young of this antithesis, and more than half his eloquence would be shrivelled up. Place him on a breezy common, where the furze is in its golden bloom, where children are playing, and horses are standing in the sunshine with fondling necks, and he would have nothing to say. Here are neither depths of guilt nor heights of glory; and we doubt whether in such a scene he would be able to pay his usual compliment to the Creator ... "

"There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any strong attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for patronage, and “pays his court” to her. It is reckoned among the many deficiencies of “Lorenzo” that he “never asked the moon one question”—an omission which Young thinks eminently unbecoming a rational being. He describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond detail over nothing more familiar than the day of judgment and an imaginary journey among the stars. Once on Saturn’s ring he feels at home, and his language becomes quite easy:

"“What behold I now?

"A wilderness of wonders burning round,

"Where larger suns inhabit higher spheres;

"Perhaps the villas of descending gods!”"

................................................................................................

"It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, in the “Night Thoughts,” we come on any allusion that carries us to the lanes, woods, or fields. Such allusions are amazingly rare, and we could almost count them on a single hand. That we may do him no injustice, we will quote the three best:

“Like blossom’d trees o’erturned by vernal storm,

"Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay.

* * * * *

“In the same brook none ever bathed him twice:

"To the same life none ever twice awoke.

"We call the brook the same—the same we think

"Our life, though still more rapid in its flow;

"Nor mark the much irrevocably lapsed

"And mingled with the sea.”

* * * * *

“The crown of manhood is a winter joy;

"An evergreen that stands the northern blast,

"And blossoms in the rigor of our fate.”"

................................................................................................

"The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions, is closely allied in Young to the want of genuine emotion. He sees virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists and storms of earth; he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with this world in her left hand and the other world in her right; but we never find him dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists—in the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter, in courageous effort for unselfish ends ..."

................................................................................................

George Eliot goes overboard in her criticism of a natural emotion, however justified her criticism otherwise, of Young and his works.

"And even in the “Narcissa” Night, Young repels us by the low moral tone of his exaggerated lament. This married step-daughter died at Lyons, and, being a Protestant, was denied burial, so that her friends had to bury her in secret—one of the many miserable results of superstition, but not a fact to throw an educated, still less a Christian man, into a fury of hatred and vengeance, in contemplating it after the lapse of five years."

And her diatribe on the next page is unbelievable! She recovers in the next long paragraph.

" ...Do writers of sermons and religious novels prefer that men should be vicious in order that there may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed sermons and clerical fictions? Because learned gentlemen are theological, are we to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread of common springs; but, for our own part, we think there cannot be too great a security against a lack of fresh water or of pure morality. To us it is a matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessary of healthful life is independent of theological ink, and that its evolution is insured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable limits."

And further on Young -

"This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks God “most:”

"“For all I bless thee, most, for the severe;

"Her death—my own at hand—the fiery gulf,

"That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent!

"It thunders;—but it thunders to preserve;

". . . its wholesome dread

"Averts the dreaded pain; its hideous groans

"Join Heaven’s sweet Hallelujahs in

"Thy praise, Great Source of good alone! How kind in all!

"In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, save” . . .

"i.e., save me, Dr. Young, who, in return for that favor, promise to give my divine patron the monopoly of that exuberance in laudatory epithet, of which specimens may be seen at any moment in a large number of dedications and odes to kings, queens, prime ministers, and other persons of distinction. That, in Young’s conception, is what God delights in. His crowning aim in the “drama” of the ages, is to vindicate his own renown. The God of the “Night Thoughts” is simply Young himself “writ large”—a didactic poet, who “lectures” mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven; and expects the tribute of inexhaustible “applause.” Young has no conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned heavenward; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on it. Religion, he tells us, in argumentative passages too long to quote, is “ambition, pleasure, and the love of gain,” directed toward the joys of the future life instead of the present. And his ethics correspond to his religion. He vacillates, indeed, in his ethical theory, and shifts his position in order to suit his immediate purpose in argument; but he never changes his level so as to see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness. Sometimes he insists, as we have seen, that the belief in a future life is the only basis of morality; but elsewhere he tells us—

"“In self-applause is virtue’s golden prize.”

"Virtue, with Young, must always squint—must never look straight toward the immediate object of its emotion and effort. Thus, if a man risks perishing in the snow himself rather than forsake a weaker comrade, he must either do this because his hopes and fears are directed to another world, or because he desires to applaud himself afterward! Young, if we may believe him, would despise the action as folly unless it had these motives. Let us hope he was not so bad as he pretended to be!"

................................................................................................

" ... As the tendency to see our own sadness reflected in the external world has been called by Mr. Ruskin the “pathetic fallacy,” page 252 so we may call Young’s disposition to see a rebuke or a warning in every natural object, the “pedagogic fallacy.” To his mind, the heavens are “forever scolding as they shine;” and the great function of the stars is to be a “lecture to mankind.” The conception of the Deity as a didactic author is not merely an implicit point of view with him; he works it out in elaborate imagery, and at length makes it the occasion of his most extraordinary achievement in the “art of sinking,” by exclaiming, à propos, we need hardly say, of the nocturnal heavens,

"“Divine Instructor! Thy first volume this

"For man’s perusal! all in capitals!”

"It is this pedagogic tendency, this sermonizing attitude of Young’s mind, which produces the wearisome monotony of his pauses. After the first two or three nights he is rarely singing, rarely pouring forth any continuous melody inspired by the spontaneous flow of thought or feeling. He is rather occupied with argumentative insistence, with hammering in the proofs of his propositions by disconnected verses, which he puts down at intervals. The perpetual recurrence of the pause at the end of the line throughout long passages makes them as fatiguing to the ear as a monotonous chant, which consists of the endless repetition of one short musical phrase."

................................................................................................

George Eliot shares Jane Austen's appreciation of Cowper.

" ...Indeed, it is hardly possible to criticise Young without being reminded at every step of the contrast presented to him by Cowper. And this contrast urges itself upon us the more from the fact that there is, to a certain extent, a parallelism between the “Night Thoughts” and the “Task.” In both poems the author achieves his greatest in virtue of the new freedom conferred by blank verse; both poems are professionally didactic, and mingle much satire with their graver meditations; both poems are the productions of men whose estimate of this life was formed by the light of a belief in immortality, and who were intensely attached to Christianity. On some grounds we might have anticipated a more morbid view of things from Cowper than from Young. Cowper’s religion was dogmatically the more gloomy, for he was a Calvinist; while Young was a “low” Arminian, believing that Christ died for all, and that the only obstacle to any man’s salvation lay in his will, which he could change if he chose. There was real and deep sadness involved in Cowper’s personal lot; while Young, apart from his ambitious and greedy discontent, seems to have had no great sorrow.

"Yet, see how a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in spite of creed and circumstance! Where is the poem that surpasses the “Task” in the genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate existence—in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of presentation—in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects for their own sake, without self-reference—in divine sympathy with the lowliest pleasures, with the most short-lived capacity for pain? Here is no railing at the earth’s “melancholy map,” but the happiest lingering over her simplest scenes with all the fond minuteness of attention that belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the inferiority of the “brutes,” but a warm plea on their behalf against man’s inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that close and vivid presentation of particular sorrows and privations, of particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions. How Cowper’s exquisite mind falls page 254 with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail, and investing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his song—not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town-lodging with a “hint that Nature lives;” and yet his song is never trivial, for he is alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his glance is clear and his heart is large. Instead of trying to edify us by supercilious allusions to the “brutes” and the “stalls,” he interests us in that tragedy of the hen-roost when the thief has wrenched the door, ... "

"Not, like Young, that the movements of the planets show a mutual dependence, and that

"“Thus man his sovereign duty learns in this

"Material picture of benevolence,”

"or that—

"“More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts,

"And conscious virtue mitigates the pang.”

"What is Cowper’s answer, when he imagines some “sage, erudite, profound,” asking him “What’s the world to you?”

"“Much. I was born of woman, and drew milk

"As sweet as charity from human breasts.

"I think, articulate, I laugh and weep,

"And exercise all functions of a man.

""How then should I and any man that lives

"Be strangers to each other?”"

................................................................................................

"Young flies for his utmost consolation to the day of judgment, when

"“Final Ruin fiercely drives Her ploughshare o’er creation;”

"when earth, stars, and sun are swept aside,

"“And now, all dross removed, Heaven’s own pure day, Full on the confines of our ether, flames:

"While (dreadful contrast!) far (how far!) beneath, Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas,

"And storms suphureous; her voracious jaws

"Expanding wide, and roaring for her prey,”"

He does seem to find solace in hell.

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September 24, 2021 - September 25, 2021.

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VIII.—The Influence of Rationalism

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This article by George Eliot might have been read by Ayn Rand!

"There is a valuable class of books on great subjects which have something of the character and functions of good popular lecturing. They are not original, not subtle, not of close logical texture, not exquisite either in thought or style; but by virtue of these negatives they are all the more fit to act on the average intelligence. They have enough of organizing purpose in them to make their facts illustrative, and to leave a distinct result in the mind even when most of the facts are forgotten; and they have enough of vagueness and vacillation in their theory to win them ready acceptance from a mixed audience. The vagueness and vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the honest result of the writer’s own mental character, which adapts him to be the instructor and the favorite of “the general reader.” For the most part, the general reader of the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes; he only knows that he does not go “too far.” Of any remarkable thinker, whose writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said that “his errors are to be deplored,” leaving it not too certain what those errors are; he is fond of what may be called disembodied opinions, that float in vapory phrases above all systems of thought or action; he likes an undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in particular, an undefined education of the people, an undefined amelioration of all things: in fact, he likes sound views—nothing extreme, but something between the excesses of the past and the excesses of the present. This modern type of the general reader may be known in conversation by the cordiality with which he assents to indistinct, blurred statements: say that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it; say that black is not so very black, he will reply, “Exactly.” ... "

And next part was genesis of two of the most known works of hers, Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged.

" ... He has no hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up at a public meeting and express his conviction that at times, and within certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal; but, on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of geometry may be carried a little too far. His only bigotry is a bigotry against any clearly defined opinion; not in the least based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of coherent thought—a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to nothing. The one thing he is staunch for is, the utmost liberty of private haziness."

Genesis of the idiots and villains, that is!

................................................................................................

"Mr. Lecky’s “History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe” entitles him to a high place. He has prepared himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading; he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; and he gives proof of those important moral qualifications, impartiality, seriousness, and modesty."

"The history of magic and witchcraft has been judiciously chosen by Mr. Lecky as the subject of his first section on the Declining Sense of the Miraculous, because it is strikingly illustrative of a position with the truth of which he is strongly impressed, though he does not always treat of it with desirable clearness and precision, namely, that certain beliefs become obsolete, not in consequence of direct arguments against them, but because of their incongruity with prevalent habits of thought. Here is his statement of the two “classes of influences” by which the mass of men, in what is called civilized society, get their beliefs gradually modified:

"“If we ask why it is that the world has rejected what was once so universally and so intensely believed, why a narrative of an old woman who had been seen riding on a broomstick, or who was proved to have transformed herself into a wolf, and to have devoured the flocks of her neighbors, is deemed so entirely incredible, most persons would probably be unable to give a very definite answer to the question. It is not because we have examined the evidence and found it insufficient, for the disbelief always precedes, when it does not prevent, examination. It is rather because the idea of absurdity is so strongly attached to such narratives, that it is difficult even to consider them with gravity. Yet at one time no such improbability was felt, and hundreds of persons have been burnt simply on the two grounds I have mentioned.

"Here is his statement of the two “classes of influences” by which the mass of men, in what is called civilized society, get their beliefs gradually modified: “If we ask why it is that the world has rejected what was once so universally and so intensely believed, why a narrative of an old woman who had been seen riding on a broomstick, or who was proved to have transformed herself into a wolf, and to have devoured the flocks of her neighbors, is deemed so entirely incredible, most persons would probably be unable to give a very definite answer to the question. It is not because we have examined the evidence and found it insufficient, for the disbelief always precedes, when it does not prevent, examination. It is rather because the idea of absurdity is so strongly attached to such narratives, that it is difficult even to consider them with gravity. Yet at one time no such improbability was felt, and hundreds of persons have been burnt simply on the two grounds I have mentioned.

"Mr. Lecky proceeds to some questionable views concerning the evidences of witchcraft, which seem to be irreconcilable even with his own remarks later on; but they lead him to the page 260 statement, thoroughly made out by his historical survey, that “movement was mainly silent, unargumentative, and insensible; that men came gradually to disbelieve in witchcraft, because they came gradually to look upon it as absurd; and that this new tone of thought appeared, first of all, in those who were least subject to theological influences, and soon spread through the educated laity, and, last of all, took possession of the clergy.”

"We have rather painful proof that this “second class of influences,” with a vast number go hardly deeper than Fashion, and that witchcraft to many of us is absurd only on the same ground that our grandfathers’ gigs are absurd. ... No séances at a guinea a head for the sake of being pinched by “Mary Jane” can annihilate railways, steamships, and electric telegraphs, which are demonstrating the interdependence of all human interests, and making self-interest a duct for sympathy. These things are part of the external Reason to which internal silliness has inevitably to accommodate itself."

................................................................................................

"Three points in the history of magic and witchcraft are well brought out by Mr. Lecky. First, that the cruelties connected with it did not begin until men’s minds had ceased to repose implicitly in a sacramental system which made them feel well armed against evil spirits; that is, until the eleventh century, when there came a sort of morning dream of doubt and heresy, bringing on the one side the terror of timid consciences, and on the other the terrorism of authority or zeal bent on checking the rising struggle. ... "

"The Church was disposed to confound heretical opinion with sorcery; false doctrine was especially the devil’s work, and it was a ready conclusion that a denier or innovator had held consultation with the father of lies. ... "

Lecky and George Eliot both give more credit to church than due; it wasn't an error on side of safety, any more than the idea that church is opposed to lies or murder, on any scale, as long as it serves to keep power in hands of church.

There are historical documents cited in Holy Blood, Holy Grail whereby church authority not only sanctions but insists on lies to promote the agenda of the church.

Queen Elizabeth I would have been murdered by church of Rome, as woukdnt Galileo, but for Divine protection.

Children victimised by catholic clergy around the world had no protection, until, beginning in Boston a couple of decades or so ago, the preying paedophile clergy were exposed; then church got even more busy attempting to protect the paedophile clergy.

At the moment, a case of rape of more than one nun by a bishop is between court and press, with church throwing the victims out for having spoken, and the bishop badmouthing the said nuns in every way possible. He isn't claiming celibacy, innocence, or anything that would exculpate him. Church nevertheless is silent on his guilt, protecting him, and decreed against the raped nuns.

There is no reason to give credit to an institution that burnt people alive for disagreement, to suppress any possible reduction in power over minds and spirits of populace, using terror and murders of thousands of its victims.

"Mr. Lecky shows clearly that dogmatic Protestantism, holding the vivid belief in Satanic agency to be an essential of piety, would have felt it shame to be a whit behind Catholicism in severity against the devil’s servants. Luther’s sentiment was that he would not suffer a witch to live (he was not much more merciful to Jews); and, in spite of his fondness for children, believing a certain child to have been begotten by the devil, he recommended the parents to throw it into the river. The torch must be turned on the worst errors of heroic minds—not in irreverent ingratitude, but for the sake of measuring our vast and various debt to all the influences which have concurred, in the intervening ages, to make us recognize as detestable errors the honest convictions of men who, in mere individual capacity and moral force, were very much above us. Again, the Scotch Puritans, during the comparatively short period of their ascendency, surpassed all Christians before them in the elaborate ingenuity of the page 263 tortures they applied for the discovery of witchcraft and sorcery, and did their utmost to prove that if Scotch Calvinism was the true religion, the chief “note” of the true religion was cruelty. It is hardly an endurable task to read the story of their doings; thoroughly to imagine them as a past reality is already a sort of torture. ... "

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Speaking of Bodin and Wier, George Eliot remarks -

" ... We must remember that this was in 1581, when the great scientific movement of the Renaissance had hardly begun—when Galileo was a youth of seventeen, and Kepler a boy of ten.

"But directly afterward, on the other side, came Montaigne, whose sceptical acuteness could arrive at negatives without any apparatus of method. A certain keen narrowness of nature will secure a man from many absurd beliefs which the larger soul, vibrating to more manifold influences, would have a long struggle to part with. And so we find the charming, chatty Montaigne—in one of the brightest of his essays, “Des Boiteux,” where he declares that, from his own observation of witches and sorcerers, he should have recommended them to be treated with curative hellebore—stating in his own way a pregnant doctrine, since taught more gravely. It seems to him much less of a prodigy that men should lie, or that their imaginations should deceive them, than that a human body should be carried through the air on a broomstick, or up a chimney by some unknown spirit. He thinks it a sad business to persuade oneself that the test of truth lies in the multitude of believers—“en une prosse où les fols surpassent de tant les sages en nombre.” Ordinarily, he has observed, when men have something stated to them as a fact, they are more ready to explain it than to inquire whether it is real: “ils passent pardessus les propositions, mais ils examinent les conséquences; ils laissent les choses, et courent aux causes.” There is a sort of strong and generous ignorance which is as honorable and courageous as science—“ignorance pour laquelle concevoir il n’y a pas moins de science qu’à concevoir la science.” And à propos of the immense traditional evidence which weighed with such men as Bodin, he says—“As for the proofs and arguments founded on experience and facts, I do not pretend to unravel these. What end of a thread is there to lay hold of? I often cut them as Alexander did his knot. Après tout, c’est mettre ses conjectures â bien haut prix, que d’en faire cuire un homme tout dif.”

"Writing like this, when it finds eager readers, is a sign that the weather is changing; yet much later, namely, after 1665, when the Royal Society had been founded, our own Glanvil, the author of the “Scepsis Scientifica,” a work that was a remarkable advance toward the true definition of the limits of inquiry, and that won him his election as fellow of the society, published an energetic vindication of the belief in witchcraft, ... "

" ... In order to combat it, Glanvil proceeded to examine the general question of the credibility of the miraculous. He saw that the reason why witchcraft was ridiculed was, because it was a phase of the miraculous and the work of the devil; that the scepticism was chiefly due to those who disbelieved in miracles and the devil; and that the instances of witchcraft or possession in the Bible were invariably placed on a level with those that were tried in the law courts of England. That the evidence of the belief was overwhelming, he firmly believed; and this, indeed, was scarcely disputed; but, until the sense of à priori improbability was removed, no possible accumulation of facts would cause men to believe it. To that task he accordingly addressed himself. Anticipating the idea and almost the words of modern controversialists, he urged that there was such a thing as a credulity of unbelief; and that those who believed so strange a concurrence of delusions, as was necessary on the supposition of the unreality of witchcraft, were far more credulous than those who accepted the belief. He made his very scepticism his principal weapon; and, analyzing with much acuteness the à priori objections, he showed that they rested upon an unwarrantable confidence in our knowledge of the laws of the spirit world; that they implied the existence of some strict analogy between the faculties of men and of spirits; and that, as such analogy most probably did not exist, no reasoning based on the supposition could dispense men from examining the evidence. He concluded with a large collection of cases, the evidence of which was, as he thought, incontestable.”"

" ... Glanvil, in combating an incredulity that does not happen to be his own, wielding that very argument of traditional evidence which he had made the subject of vigorous attack in his “Scepsis Scientifica.” But perhaps large minds have been peculiarly liable to this fluctuation concerning the sphere of tradition, because, while they have attacked its misapplications, they have been the more solicited by the vague sense that tradition is really the basis of our best life. Our sentiments may be called organized traditions; and a large part of our actions gather all their justification, all their attraction and aroma, from the memory of the life lived, of the actions done, before we were born. In the absence of any profound research into psychological functions or into the mysteries of inheritance, in the absence of any comprehensive view of man’s historical development and the dependence of one age on another, a mind at all rich in sensibilities must always have had an indefinite uneasiness in an undistinguishing attack on the coercive influence of tradition. And this may be the apology for the apparent inconsistency of Glanvil’s acute criticism on the one side, and his indignation at the “looser gentry,” who laughed at the evidences for witchcraft on the other. ... "

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George Eliot praises Lecky.

" ... Persecution, he shows, is not in any sense peculiar to the Catholic Church; it is a direct sequence of the doctrines that salvation is to be had only within the Church, and that erroneous belief is damnatory—doctrines held as fully by Protestant sects as by the Catholics; and in proportion to its power, Protestantism has been as persecuting as Catholicism. He maintains, in opposition to the favorite modern notion of persecution defeating its own object, that the Church, holding the dogma of exclusive salvation, was perfectly consequent, and really achieved its end of spreading one belief and quenching another, by calling in the aid of the civil arm. Who will say that governments, by their power over institutions and patronage, as well as over punishment, have not power also over the interests and inclinations of men, and over most of those external conditions into which subjects are born, and which make them adopt the prevalent belief as a second nature? Hence, to a sincere believer in the doctrine of exclusive salvation, governments had it in their power to save men from perdition; and wherever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result."

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"In other parts of his work, where he attempts to trace the action of the same conditions on the acceptance of miracles and on other chief phases of our historical development, Mr. Lecky has laid himself open to considerable criticism. The chapters on the “Miracles of the Church,” the æsthetic, scientific, and moral development of Rationalism, the Secularization of Politics, and the Industrial History of Rationalism, embrace a wide range of diligently gathered facts; but they are nowhere illuminated by a sufficiently clear conception and statement of the agencies at work, or the mode of their action, in the gradual modification of opinion and of life. The writer frequently impresses us as being in a state of hesitation concerning his own standing-point, which may form a desirable stage in private meditation but not in published exposition. ... "

" ... The supremely important fact, that the gradual reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law, which carries as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous, has its determining current in the development of physical science, seems to have engaged comparatively little of his attention; at least, he gives it no prominence. ... "

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September 25, 2021 - September 25, 2021.

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IX.—The Grammar of Ornament

THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT

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"The inventor of movable types, says the venerable Teufelsdröckh, was disbanding hired armies, cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world. Has any one yet said what great things are being done by the men who are trying to banish ugliness from our streets and our homes, and to make both the outside and inside of our dwellings worthy of a world where there are forests and flower-tressed meadows, and the plumage of birds; where the insects carry lessons of color on their wings, and even the surface of a stagnant pool will show us the wonders of iridescence and the most delicate forms of leafage? They, too, are modifying opinions, for they are modifying men’s moods and habits, which are the mothers of opinions, having quite as much to do with their formation as the responsible father—Reason. Think of certain hideous manufacturing towns where the piety is chiefly a belief in copious perdition, and the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy surface of wall pierced by the ugliest windows, the staring shop-fronts, paper-hangings, carpets, brass and gilt mouldings, and advertising placards, have an effect akin to that of malaria; it is easy to understand that with such surroundings there is more belief in cruelty than in beneficence, and that the best earthly bliss attainable is the dulling of the external senses. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is taken for beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty; the subtle relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life forbids that bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral sensibility or our intellectual discernment; and—more than that—as it is probable that fine musical harmonies have a sanative influence over our bodily organization, it is also probable that just coloring and lovely combinations of lines may be necessary to the complete well-being of our systems apart from any conscious delight in them. ... who shall say that the ugliness of our streets, the falsity of our ornamentation, the vulgarity of our upholstery, have not something to do with those bad tempers which breed false conclusions?

"On several grounds it is possible to make a more speedy and extensive application of artistic reform to our interior decoration than to our external architecture. One of these grounds is that most of our ugly buildings must stand; we cannot afford to pull them down. But every year we are decorating interiors afresh, and people of modest means may benefit by the introduction of beautiful designs into stucco ornaments, paper-hangings, draperies, and carpets. Fine taste in the decoration of interiors is a benefit that spreads from the palace to the clerk’s house with one parlor."

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"All honor, then, to the architect who has zealously vindicated the claim of internal ornamentation to be a part of the architect’s function, and has labored to rescue that form of art which is most closely connected with the sanctities and pleasures of our hearths from the hands of uncultured tradesmen. All the nation ought at present to know that this effort is peculiarly associated with the name of Mr. Owen Jones; and those who are most disposed to dispute with the architect about his coloring must at least recognize the high artistic principle which has directed his attention to colored ornamentation as a proper branch of architecture. One monument of his effort in this way is his “Grammar of Ornament,” of which a new and cheaper edition has just been issued. The one point in which it differs from the original and more expensive edition, viz., the reduction in the size of the pages (the amount of matter and number of plates are unaltered), is really an advantage; it is now a very manageable folio, and when the reader is in a lounging mood may be held easily on the knees. It is a magnificent book; and those who know no more of it than the title should be told that they will find in it a pictorial history of ornamental design, from its rudimentary condition as seen in the productions of savage tribes, through all the other great types of art—the Egyptian, Assyrian, ancient Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Moresque, Mohammedan-Persian, Indian, Celtic, Mediæval, Renaissance, Elizabethan, and Italian. ... "

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"The title “Grammar of Ornament” is so far appropriate that it indicates what Mr. Owen Jones is most anxious to be understood concerning the object of his work, namely, that it is intended to illustrate historically the application of principles, and not to present a collection of models for mere copyists. The plates correspond to examples in syntax, not to be repeated parrot-like, but to be studied as embodiments of syntactical principles. There is a logic of form which cannot be departed from in ornamental design without a corresponding remoteness from perfection; unmeaning, irrelevant lines are as bad as irrelevant words or clauses, that tend no whither. ... "

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September 25, 2021 - September 25, 2021.

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X.—Felix Holt’s Address to Workingmen

ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT

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This is supposed to be a speech by Felix Holt, to working men - not an article printed and distributed. If anyone spoke in this manner, what are the chances Felix Holt will be heard, rather than booed and pulled down?

George Eliot ridicules "Silly Novels By Lady Novelists", and one of the points she makes is about authenticity of speech by any character. Here, she herself does not see how hifalutin she sounds, writing this as a speech given to working men by one of their own! He may be educated, but if they were all at a college, thus speech would have audience sneaking out.

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" ... If it were true that we who work for wages had more of the wisdom and virtue necessary to the right use of power than has been shown by the aristocratic and mercantile classes, we should not glory much in that fact, or consider that it carried with it any near approach to infallibility."

" ... If we have the beginning of wisdom, which is, to know a little truth about ourselves, we know that as a body we are neither very wise nor very virtuous. And to prove this, I will not point specially to our own habits and doings, but to the general state of the country. Any nation that had within it a majority of men—and we are the majority—possessed of much wisdom and virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating, and the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. ... if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the multitude of us artisans, and factory hands, and miners, and laborers of all sorts, had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious, sober—and I don’t see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere without these qualities—we should have made an audience that would have shamed the other classes out of their share in the national vices. We should have had better members of Parliament, better religious page 276 teachers, honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous and brutal men; and we should not have had among us the abomination of men calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten gains. I say, it is not possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is—to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows. Therefore, let us have none with this nonsense about our being much better than the rest of our countryman, or the pretence that that was a reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has been given to us. The reason for our having the franchise, as I want presently to show, lies somewhere else than in our personal good qualities, and does not in the least lie in any high betting chance that a delegate is a better man than a duke, or that a Sheffield grinder is a better man than any one of the firm he works for."

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Hissing would begin in a minute, now!

"However, we have got our franchise now. We have been sarcastically called in the House of Commons the future masters of the country; and if that sarcasm contains any truth, it seems to me that the first thing we had better think of is, our heavy responsibility; that is to say, the terrible risk we run of working mischief and missing good, as others have done before us. Suppose certain men, discontented with the irrigation of a country which depended for all its prosperity on the right direction being given to the waters of a great river, had got the management of the irrigation before they were quite sure how exactly it could be altered for the better, or whether they could command the necessary agency for such on alteration. Those men would have a difficult and dangerous business on their hands; and the more sense, feeling, and knowledge they had, the more they would be likely to tremble rather than to triumph. Our situation is not altogether unlike theirs. For general prosperity and well-being is a vast crop, that like the corn in Egypt can be come at, not at all by hurried snatching, but only by a well-judged patient process; and whether our political power will be any good to us now we have got it, must depend entirely on the means and materials—the knowledge, ability, and honesty we have at command. ... But the long-growing evils of a great nation are a tangled business, asking for a good deal more than indignation in order to be got rid of. Indignation is a fine war-horse, but the war-horse must be ridden by a man: it must be ridden by rationality, skill, courage, armed with the right weapons, and taking definite aim."

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George Eliot switches from boring them by being merely long winded to seeming only slightly off, to worse, even as she's making Felix sound like a college professor talking down to preteen kids who might or might not be interested.

" ... I suppose there is hardly anything more to be shuddered at than that part of the history of disease which shows how, when a man injures his constitution by a life of vicious excess, his children and grandchildren inherit diseased bodies and minds, and how the effects of that unhappy inheritance continue to spread beyond our calculation. This is only one example of the law by which human lives are linked together; another example of what we complain of when we point to our pauperism, to the brutal ignorance of multitudes among our fellow countrymen, to the weight of taxation laid on us by blamable wars, to the wasteful channels made for the public money, to the expense and trouble of getting justice, and call these the effects of bad rule. This is the law that we all bear the yoke of, the law of no man’s making, and which no man can undo. Everybody now sees an example of it in the case of Ireland. We who are living now are sufferers by the wrong-doing of those who lived before us; we are the sufferers by each other’s wrong-doing; and the children who come after us are and will be sufferers from the same causes. Will any man say he doesn’t care for that law—it is nothing to him—what he wants is to better himself? With what face then will he complain of any injury? If he says that in politics or in any sort of social action he will not care to know what are likely to be the consequences to others besides himself, he is defending the very worst doings that have brought about his discontent. He might as well say that there is no better rule needful for men than that each should tug and drive for what will please him, without caring how that tugging will act on the fine widespread network of society in which he is fast meshed. If any man taught that as a doctrine, we should know him for a fool. But there are men who act upon it; every scoundrel, for example, whether he is a rich religious scoundrel who lies and cheats on a large scale, and will perhaps come and ask you to send him to Parliament, or a poor pocket-picking scoundrel, who will steal your loose pence while you are listening round the platform. None of us are so ignorant as not to know that a society, a nation is held together by just the opposite doctrine and action—by the dependence of men on each other and the sense they have of a common interest in preventing injury. And we working men are, I think, of all classes the last that can afford to forget this; for if we did we should be much like sailors cutting away the timbers of our own ship to warm our grog with. For what else is the meaning of our trades-unions? What else is the meaning of every flag we carry, every procession we make, every crowd we collect for the sake of making some protest on behalf of our body as receivers of wages, if not this: that it is our interest to stand by each other, and that this being the common interest, no one of us will try to make a good bargain for himself without considering what will be good for his fellows? And every member of a union believes that the wider he can spread his union, the stronger and surer will be the effect of it. So I think I shall be borne out in saying that a working man who can put two and two together, or take three from four and see what will be the remainder, can understand that a society, to be well off, must be made up chiefly of men who consider the general good as well as their own."

Then she's more obtuse for a crowd with short attention span, who aren't used to long winded lectures.

"Well, but taking the world as it is—and this is one way we must take it when we want to find out how it can be improved—no society is made up of a single class: society stands before us like that wonderful piece of life, the human body, with all its various parts depending on one another, and with a terrible liability to get wrong because of that delicate dependence. We all know how many diseases the human body is apt to suffer from, and how difficult it is even for the doctors to find out exactly where the seat or beginning of the disorder is. That is because the body is made up of so many various parts, all related to each other, or likely all to feel the effect if any one of them goes wrong. It is somewhat the same with our old nations or societies. No society ever stood long in the world without getting to be composed of different classes. Now, it is all pretence to say that there is no such thing as class interest. It is clear that if any particular number of men get a particular benefit from any existing institution, they are likely to band together, in order to keep up that benefit and increase it, until it is perceived to be unfair and injurious to another large number, who get knowledge and strength enough to set up a resistance. And this, again, has been part of the history of every great society since history began. But the simple reason for this being, that any large body of men is likely to have more of stupidity, narrowness, and greed than of farsightedness and generosity, it is plain that the number who resist unfairness and injury are in danger of becoming injurious in their turn. And in this way a justifiable resistance has become a damaging convulsion, making everything worse instead of better. This has been seen so often that we ought to profit a little by the experience. So long as there is selfishness in men; so long as they have not found out for themselves institutions which express and carry into practice the truth, that the highest interest of mankind must at last be a common and not a divided interest; so long as the gradual operation of steady causes has not made that truth a part of every man’s knowledge and feeling, just as we now not only know that it is good for our health to be cleanly, but feel that cleanliness is only another word for comfort, which is the under-side or lining of all pleasure; so long, I say as men wink at their own knowingness, or hold their heads high because they have got an advantage over their fellows; so long class interest will be in danger of making itself felt injuriously. No set of men will get any sort of power without being in danger of wanting more than their right share. But, on the other hand, it is just as certain that no set of men will get angry at having less than their right share, and set up a claim on that ground, without falling into just the same danger of exacting too much, and exacting it in wrong ways. It’s human nature we have got to work with all round, and nothing else. That seems like saying something very commonplace—nay, obvious; as if one should say that where there are hands there are mouths. Yet, to hear a good deal of the speechifying and to see a good deal of the action that go forward, one might suppose it was forgotten."

By this time, if they haven't thrown shoes at Felix, they've left.

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But Felix Holt continues.

"But I come back to this: that, in our old society, there are old institutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our commerce, and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought and professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water distributed or it will bear no crop; there are the old channels, the old banks, and the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have been prepared, or the structure of the old has been gradually altered. But it would be fool’s work to batter down a pump only because a better might be made, when you had no machinery ready for a new one: it would be wicked work, if villages lost their crops by it. Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved and our worst evils reduced, is not by any attempt to do away directly with the actually existing class distinctions and advantages, as if everybody could have the same sort of work, or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers are stupid enough to suppose), but by the turning of class interests into class functions or duties. What I mean is, that each class should be urged by the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large; that our public affairs should be got into a state in which there should be no impunity for foolish or faithless conduct. In this way the public judgment would sift out incapability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the desires of the most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the opinions of those around them; and for page 281 one person to put on a cap and bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he may spend a vast sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors, he must be pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him. Now, changes can only be good in proportion as they help to bring about this sort of result: in proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance, and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of that substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character, and represent the varying duties of men, not their varying interests. But this end will not come by impatience. “Day will not break the sooner because we get up before the twilight.” Still less will it come by mere undoing, or change merely as change. And moreover, if we believed that it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the franchise, we should be what I call superstitious men, believing in magic, or the production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of things in this world has been determined for us beforehand, and in such a way that no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult voyage, and reach the right port, unless it is well manned: the nature of the winds and the waves, of the timbers, the sails, and the cordage, will not accommodate itself to drunken, mutinous sailors."

But then she's positively blind, putting Felix in direct danger. He goes on -

"You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to you, or of joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine way, and need not be made better. What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care, the precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so that the public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are bound up. After the Reform Bill of 1832 I was in an election riot, which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must always be; and I have never forgotten that the riot was brought about chiefly by the agency of dishonest men who professed to be on the people’s side. Now, the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men, whose notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands, and may do pretty much as they like. If any one can look round us and say that he sees no signs of any such danger now, and that our national condition is running along like a clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I call him a cheerful man: perhaps he does his own gardening, and seldom taken exercise far away from home. To us who have no gardens, and often walk abroad, it is plain that we can never get into a bit of a crowd but we must rub clothes with a set of roughs, who have the worst vices of the worst rich—who are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else mere sensual simpletons and victims. They are the ugly crop that has sprung up while the stewards have been sleeping; they are the multiplying brood begotten by parents who have been left without all teaching save that of a too craving body, without all well-being save the fading delusions of drugged beer and gin. They are the hideous margin of society, at one edge drawing toward it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class. Here is one of the evils which cannot be got rid of quickly, and against which any of us who have got sense, decency, and instruction have need to watch. That these degraded fellow-men could really get the mastery in a persistent disobedience to the laws and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not believe; but wretched calamities must come from the very beginning of such a struggle, and the continuance of it would be a civil war, in which the inspiration on both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion of good, and might become the direct savage impulse of ferocity. We have all to see to it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage beast in the breasts of our generation—that we do not help to poison the nation’s blood, and make richer provision for bestiality to come. We know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way—that oppression has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to resist oppression. But let us, if possible, show that we can keep sane in our resistance, and shape our means more and more reasonably toward the least harmful, and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end. Let us, I say, show that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad, but can keep that sober determination which alone gives mastery over the adaptation of means. And a first guarantee of this sanity will be to act as if we understood that the fundamental duty of a government is to preserve order, to enforce obedience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a man can be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and comfort to lose. But a better state of things would be, that men who had little money and not much comfort page 283 should still be guardians of order, because they had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a heart of justice, pity, and fortitude, to keep them from making more misery only because they felt some misery themselves. There are thousands of artisans who have already shown this fine spirit, and have endured much with patient heroism. If such a spirit spread, and penetrated us all, we should soon become the masters of the country in the best sense and to the best ends. For, the public order being preserved, there can be no government in future that will not be determined by our insistance on our fair and practicable demands. It is only by disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall find ourselves lost among a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of the country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of guns that will sweep us down in the ignoble martyrdom of fools."

Doesn't she get it? He's supposed to be talking to workers, and he's talking of rough guys being dangerous?

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On and on, the speech is only good for a crowd with at least school level education, and only if they find it a usual entertainment to hear speeches like this. That's not often. She writes it suitable for a printed article, a pamphlet, a church sermon.

"It has been a too common notion that to insist much on the preservation of order is the part of a selfish aristocracy and a selfish commercial class, because among these, in the nature of things, have been found the opponents of change. I am a Radical; and, what is more, I am not a Radical with a title, or a French cook, or even an entrance into fine society. I expect great changes, and I desire them. But I don’t expect them to come in a hurry, by mere inconsiderate sweeping. A Hercules with a big besom is a fine thing for a filthy stable, but not for weeding a seed-bed, where his besom would soon make a barren floor.

"That is old-fashioned talk, some one may say. We know all that.

"Yes, when things are put in an extreme way, most people think they know them; but, after all, they are comparatively few who see the small degrees by which those extremes are arrived at, or have the resolution and self-control to resist the little impulses by which they creep on surely toward a fatal end. Does anybody set out meaning to ruin himself, or to drink himself to death, or to waste his life so that he becomes a despicable old man, a superannuated nuisance, like a fly in winter. Yet there are plenty, of whose lot this is the pitiable story. Well now, supposing us all to have the best intentions, we working men, as a body, run some risk of bringing evil on the nation in that unconscious manner—half hurrying, half pushed in a jostling march toward an end we are not thinking of. For just as there are many things which we know better and feel much more strongly than the richer, softer-handed classes can know or feel them; so there are many things—many precious benefits—which we, by the very fact of our privations, our lack of leisure and instruction, are not so likely to be aware of and take into our account. Those precious benefits form a chief part of what I may call the common estate of society: a wealth over and above buildings, machinery, produce, shipping, and so on, though closely connected with these; a wealth of a more delicate kind, that we may more unconsciously bring into danger, doing harm and not knowing that we do it. I mean that treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners, great memories and the interpretation of great records, which is carried on from the minds of one generation to the minds of another. This is something distinct from the indulgences of luxury and the pursuit of vain finery; and one of the hardships in the lot of working men is that they have been for the most part shut out from sharing in this treasure. It can make a man’s life very great, very full of delight, though he has no smart furniture and no horses: it also yields a great deal of discovery that corrects error, and of invention that lessens bodily pain, and must at least make life easier for all."

" ... Just as in the case of material wealth and its distribution we are obliged to take the selfishness and weaknesses of human nature into account, and however we insist that men might act better, are forced, unless we are fanatical simpletons, to consider how they are likely to act; so in this matter of the wealth that is carried in men’s minds, we have to reflect that the too absolute predominance of a class whose wants have been of a common sort, who are chiefly struggling to get better and more food, clothing, shelter, and bodily recreation, may lead to hasty measures for the sake of having things more fairly shared, which, even if they did not fail of their object, would at last debase the life of the nation. Do anything which will throw the classes who hold the treasures of knowledge—nay, I may say, the treasure of refined page 285 needs—into the background, cause them to withdraw from public affairs, stop too suddenly any of the sources by which their leisure and ease are furnished, rob them of the chances by which they may be influential and pre-eminent, and you do something as short-sighted as the acts of France and Spain when in jealousy and wrath, not altogether unprovoked, they drove from among them races and classes that held the traditions of handicraft and agriculture. You injure your own inheritance and the inheritance of your children. You may truly say that this which I call the common estate of society has been anything but common to you; but the same may be said, by many of us, of the sunlight and the air, of the sky and the fields, of parks and holiday games. Nevertheless that these blessings exist makes life worthier to us, and urges us the more to energetic, likely means of getting our share in them; and I say, let us watch carefully, lest we do anything to lessen this treasure which is held in the minds of men, while we exert ourselves, first of all, and to the very utmost, that we and our children may share in all its benefits. Yes; exert ourselves to the utmost, to break the yoke of ignorance. If we demand more leisure, more ease in our lives, let us show that we don’t deserve the reproach of wanting to shirk that industry which, in some form or other, every man, whether rich or poor, should feel himself as much bound to as he is bound to decency. Let us show that we want to have some time and strength left to us, that we may use it, not for brutal indulgence, but for the rational exercise of the faculties which make us men. Without this no political measures can benefit us. No political institution will alter the nature of Ignorance, or hinder it from producing vice and misery. Let Ignorance start how it will, it must run the same round of low appetites, poverty, slavery, and superstition. Some of us know this well—nay, I will say, feel it; for knowledge of this kind cuts deep; and to us it is one of the most painful facts belonging to our condition that there are numbers of our fellow-workmen who are so far from feeling in the same way, that they never use the imperfect opportunities already offered them for giving their children some schooling, but turn their little ones of tender age into bread-winners, often at cruel tasks, exposed to the horrible infection of childish vice. Of course, the causes of these hideous things go a long way back. Parents’ misery has made parents’ wickedness. But we, who are still blessed with the hearts of fathers and the consciences of men—we who have some knowledge of the curse entailed on broods of creatures in page 286 human shape, whose enfeebled bodies and dull perverted minds are mere centres of uneasiness in whom even appetite is feeble and joy impossible—I say we are bound to use all the means at our command to help in putting a stop to this horror. Here, it seems to me, is a way in which we may use extended co-operation among us to the most momentous of all purposes, and make conditions of enrolment that would strengthen all educational measures. It is true enough that there is a low sense of parental duties in the nation at large, and that numbers who have no excuse in bodily hardship seem to think it a light thing to beget children, to bring human beings with all their tremendous possibilities into this difficult world, and then take little heed how they are disciplined and furnished for the perilous journey they are sent on without any asking of their own. This is a sin shared in more or less by all classes; but there are sins which, like taxation, fall the heaviest on the poorest, and none have such galling reasons as we working men to try and rouse to the utmost the feeling of responsibility in fathers and mothers. We have been urged into co-operation by the pressure of common demands. In war men need each other more; and where a given point has to be defended, fighters inevitably find themselves shoulder to shoulder. So fellowship grows, so grow the rules of fellowship, which gradually shape themselves to thoroughness as the idea of a common good becomes more complete. We feel a right to say, If you will be one of us, you must make such and such a contribution—you must renounce such and such a separate advantage—you must set your face against such and such an infringement. If we have any false ideas about our common good, our rules will be wrong, and we shall be co-operating to damage each other. But, now, here is a part of our good, without which everything else we strive for will be worthless—I mean the rescue of our children. Let us demand from the members of our unions that they fulfil their duty as parents in this definite matter, which rules can reach. Let us demand that they send their children to school, so as not to go on recklessly, breeding a moral pestilence among us, just as strictly as we demand that they pay their contributions to a common fund, understood to be for a common benefit. While we watch our public men, let us watch one another as to this duty, which is also public, and more momentous even than obedience to sanitary regulations. While we resolutely declare against the wickedness in high places, let us set ourselves also against the wickedness in low places, not quarrelling which came first, or which is the worse of the two—not trying to settle the miserable precedence of plague or famine, but insisting unflinchingly on remedies once ascertained, and summoning those who hold the treasure of knowledge to remember that they hold it in trust, and that with them lies the task of searching for new remedies, and finding the right methods of applying them."

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"To get the chief power into the hands of the wisest, which means to get our life regulated according to the truest principles mankind is in possession of, is a problem as old as the very notion of wisdom. The solution comes slowly, because men collectively can only be made to embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching of the world’s events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and nothing else but potatoes, till a potato disease comes and forces them to find out the advantage of a varied crop. Selfishness, stupidity, sloth, persist in trying to adapt the world to their desires, till a time comes when the world manifests itself as too decidedly inconvenient to them. Wisdom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the marks of the changing seasons, before it finds a home within him, directs his actions, and from the precious effects of obedience begets a corresponding love."

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"But now, for our own part, we have seriously to consider this outside wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable nature of things, and watch to give it a home within us and obey it. If the claims of the unendowed multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which no worthy, noble future can be moulded. Many of the highest uses of life are in their keeping; and if privilege has often been abused, it has also been the nurse of excellence. Here again we have to submit ourselves to the great law of inheritance. If we quarrel with the way in which the labors and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down, we are just as bigoted, just as narrow, just as wanting in that religion which keeps an open ear and an obedient mind to the teachings of fact, as we accuse those of being, who quarrel with the new truths and new needs which are disclosed in the present. The deeper insight we get into the causes of human trouble, and the ways by which men are made better and happier, the less we shall be inclined to the unprofitable spirit and practice of reproaching classes as such in a wholesale fashion. Not all the evils of our condition are such as we can justly blame others for; and, I repeat, many of them are such as no changes of institutions can quickly remedy. To discern between the evils that energy can remove and the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness and childishness, between good sense and folly. And more than that, without such discernment, seeing that we have grave duties toward our own body and the country at large, we can hardly escape acts of fatal rashness and injustice.

"I am addressing a mixed assembly of workmen, and some of you may be as well or better fitted than I am to take up this office. But they will not think it amiss in me that I have tried to bring together the considerations most likely to be of service to us in preparing ourselves for the use of our new opportunities. I have avoided touching on special questions. The best help toward judging well on these is to approach them in the right temper without vain expectation, and with a resolution which is mixed with temperance."

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September 25, 2021 - September 25, 2021.

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September 21, 2021 - September 25, 2021.

Purchased January 21, 2021.

Kindle Edition, 178 pages

Published March 30th 2011

(first published 2007)

ASIN:- B004UJHQXQ

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From the Note-Book of an Eccentric,

and

Other Essays,

by George Eliot.

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From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.

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When one begins to read this, it's a tad startling.

"A week ago, I stood sole mourner at the grave of my friend Macarthy. He lies in a village churchyard;—not one of those peaceful green plots which seem to speak well for the influence of the bishop’s blessing, in which there is some spreading chestnut or yew of age immemorial, that seems to say to the world-weary, “Come and rest under my shadow.” No. The churchyard in which Macarthy lies looks not like a Gottes-acker, but a vicar’s acre, the profits of which (including the grazing of half-a-dozen sheep) go to eke out the curate’s yearly hundred, upon which he supports, or rather diets, the gentility of his wife and ten children. It is a thoroughfare for a materialized population, too entirely preoccupied with the needs of the living to retain an Old Mortality’s affectionate care for tomb-stones and epitaphs, or to offer to the graves that terrified veneration which hurries past them after sunset. They are in the strong grasp of giant Hunger, and fear no shadows. Not one of this plodding generation will long remember Macarthy, “the sick gentleman that lodged at widow Crowe’s,” and when the grass is green and long upon his grave, it will seem to say of him as truly as of others—“I cover the forgotten.” But it is not so, Macarthy. With me thou wilt still live: my thoughts will seem to be all spoken to thee, my actions all performed in thy presence; for ours was a love passing the love of women."

Is it possible, burials on land that's rented out for grazing, for benefit of poor curates? But one, of course, reads on, rather than go on a quest of an answer.

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"My friend was one of whom the world proved itself not worthy, for it never made a true estimate of him. His soul was a lyre of exquisite structure, but men knew not how to play on it: it was a bird endowed with rich and varied notes, which it was ready to bestow on human hearers; but their coarse fondling or brutal harshness scared it away, and the poor bird ceased to sing, save in the depths of the forest or the silence of night. To those who saw only the splendour of his genius, and the nobility of his sentiments, his childhood and youth seemed to promise a brilliant career; but any who were capable of a more discriminating estimate and refined analysis of his character, must have had a foreboding that it contained elements which would too probably operate as non-conductors, interposed between his highly charged mind and the negatively electrified souls around him. The quality on which a good prophet would have pronounced my friend’s fate to hang, was one which will be held to have placed him not above, but simply out of, the sphere of his fellow men. It was a morbid sensitiveness in his feeling of the beautiful, which I can compare to nothing but those alleged states of mesmeric lucidity, in which the patient obtains an unenviable cognizance of irregularities, happily imperceptible to us in the ordinary state of our consciousness."

" ... He moved among the things of this earth like a lapidarian among false gems, which fetch high prices and admiration from others, but to him are mere counterfeits. He seemed to have a preternaturally sharpened vision, which saw knots and blemishes, where all was smoothness to others. The unsightly condition of the masses—their dreary ignorance, the conventional distortion of human nature in upper classes—the absence of artistic harmony and beauty in the details of outward existence, were with him not merely themes for cold philosophy, indignant philippics, or pointed satire; but positively painful elements in his experience, sharp iron entering into his soul. Had his nature been less noble, his benevolence less God-like, he would have been a misanthropist, all compact of bitter sarcasm, and therefore no poet. As it was, he was a humourist—one who sported with all the forms of human life, as if they were so many May-day mummings, uncouth, monstrous disguises of poor human nature, which has not discovered its dignity. While he laughed at the follies of men, he wept over their sorrows; and while his wit lashed them as with a whip of scorpions, there was a stream of feeling in the deep caverns of his soul, which was all the time murmuring, “Would that I could die for thee, thou poor humanity!”

"From the age of twenty, I never knew him to form a particular predilection for any individual, or admit any new intimacy. He seemed to have learned by experience that his sensibility was too acute for special friendship—that his sympathy with mankind was that of a being of analogous, rather than of identical race."

" ... He seemed, indeed, to shrink from all organized existences. He was an ardent lover of Nature, but it was in her grand inorganic forms—the blue sky, the stars, the clouds, the sea, mountains, rocks, and rivers—in which she seems pregnant with some sublimer birth than the living races of this globe. He would lie on the grass gazing at the setting sun with a look of intense yearning which might have belonged to a banished Uriel. The roaring of the wind would produce in him an enthusiastic excitement, a spiritual intoxication. He felt a delight in the destructive power of the elements, which seemed to be in singular conflict with his angelic pity: had he been a witness of an earthquake, a city on fire, or the eruption of a volcano, I know not which would have predominated in him, bleeding compassion for the sufferers, or wild ecstacy at the triumphant fury of the forces of nature."

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One doesn't suspect George Eliot of beginning to write a satire or a spoof, however, until one has finished reading this piece, heartbreaking as it is so far, from the word go.

" ... When we had talked long and earnestly together, he pointed to a large trunk filled with manuscripts. “When I am dead,” he said, “take these as the only memorial I have to give, and use them as you will.” I refused to leave my friend until he was committed to his mother earth; and it then became my most interesting employment to examine the papers which contained the best history and image of his mind. I have found the results of profound thought and widely extended research-productions, some of which have been carefully meditated, others apparently thrown off with the rapidity of inspiration; but in all of them there is a strange mixture of wisdom and whimsicality, of sublime conception and stinging caricature, of deep melancholy and wild merriment. No publisher would venture to offer such caviare to the general; and my friend’s writings are not old and musty enough to fall within the scheme of any publishing club, so that the bulk of them will probably be their own tomb.

"Meanwhile, among his other manuscripts, I have discovered three thick little volumes, which were successively carried in his pocket for the purpose of noting down casual thoughts, sketches of character, and scenes out of the common; in short, as receptacles of what would probably have evaporated in conversation had my friend been in the habit of companionship. From these fragmentary stores I shall now and then give a selection in some modest nook of an unpretending journal—not to the world, far be so ambitious an aspiration from me—but to the half-dozen readers who can be attracted by unsophisticated thought and feeling, even though it be presented to them in the corner of the weekly newspaper of their own petty town."

Then it dawns - other pieces, their titles suggesting satires or spoofs, are a part of this.

Did she write this, spoofing such descriptions of persons by other authors, defyingobscure people for reasons not commonly given for exacting, as a satire on sentiments, even a pungent attack against fraud?

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September 26, 2021 - September 26, 2021.

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How to Avoid Disappointment.

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Inappropriate, (- or deliberately unassuming, low-key? -), title.

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One suspected the previous piece of being a satire or a spoof, and the rest of essays to follow the theme - but this opens differently -

"One of my favourite lounges in Paris is the studio of an artist, who tolerates my presence on the score of a slight service which I happened to render him some years ago, and which he magnifies into a lasting claim on his gratitude. I soon acquire an almost passionate interest in the progress of a noble picture. I love to think how the perfect whole exists in the imagination of the artist before his pencil has marked the canvas—to observe how every minute stroke, every dismal-looking layer of colour conduces to the ultimate effect, and how completely the creative genius which has conceived the result can calculate the necessary means. I love to watch the artist’s eye, so wrapt and unworldly in its glance, scrupulously attentive to the details of his actual labour, yet keeping ever in view the idea which that labour is to fulfil. I say to myself—this is an image of what our life should be—a series of efforts directed to the production of a contemplated whole, just as every stroke of the artist’s pencil has a purpose bearing on the conception which he retains in his mind’s eye. We should all be painting our picture, whether it be a home scene after Wilkie, a Paul preaching at Athens, or a Brutus passing sentence on his son. We should all have a purpose in life as perfectly recognised and definite as the painter’s idea of his subject. ... "

and after a - not unexpected - swift swoop down of a sharp beak of satire, taking a bite off the head of the worldly -

" ... “Indisputably,” says your man of the world, “I have never for a moment swerved from the determination to make myself rich and respectable. I chose my wife with that object; I send my sons to the University, I give dinners, I go to balls, I go to church—all that I may be ‘respectable.’ Am not I a man of purpose?” Then there is the man of public spirit, who has devoted his life to some pet project, which is to be the grand catholicon for all the diseases of society. He has travelled, he has lectured, he has canvassed, he has moved heaven and earth, has become the victim of a fixed idea, and died disappointed."

- soars very unexpectedly into a purely spiritual realm -

"Doubtless such men as these have a distinct purpose in life, but they are not the men of whom my artist reminds me—who seem to me to be painting a picture. The kind of purpose which makes life resemble a work of art in its isolated majesty or loveliness is not the attempt to satisfy that inconvenient troop of wants which metamorphose themselves like the sprites of an enchantress, so that no sooner have we provided food for the linnet’s beak than a huge lion’s maw gapes upon us. It is to live, not for our friends, not for those hostages to fortune, wives and children; not for any individual, any specific form; but for something which, while it dwells in these, has an existence beyond them. It is to live for the good, the true, the beautiful, which outlive every generation and are all-pervading as the light which vibrates from the remotest nebula to our own sun. The spirit which has ascertained its true relation to these can never be an orphan: it has its home in the eternal mind, from which neither things present nor to come can separate it. You may infallibly discern the man who lives thus. His eye has not that restless, irresolute glance which tells of no purpose beyond the present hour: it looks as you might imagine the eye of Numa to have looked after an interview with Egeria; the earnest attention and veneration with which it gazed on the divine instructress still lingering in its expression."

- way higher than expected from anyone who was normally so bound to her roots, of a religion so dominated by institutions, as this author.

It ends flat, way down -

"I said one day to my artist, when he was ardently engaged on a favourite picture, “Adolphe, has your love of art ever been tested by any great misfortune?” He replied, “I have suffered—I am suffering under a great calamity; not the blighting of ambition, not the loss of any loved one, but a far more withering sorrow; I have ceased to love the being whom I once believed that I must love while life lasted. I have cherished what I thought was a bright amethyst, and I have seen it losing its lustre day by day till I can no longer delude myself into a belief that it is not valueless. But you see,” said he, turning to me and smiling, “I love my pictures still; I should not like to die till I have worked up my chosen subjects.”

"Who would not have some purpose in life as independent in its value as art is to the artist?"

- but it's less disappointing than it could have been from a higher consciousness, and a culture that could nourish it.

Few can assure of that.

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September 27, 2021 - September 27, 2021.

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The Wisdom of the Child.

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George Eliot soars again to another spiritual height, or better, opens to a spiritual truth of simplicity -

"It may not be an original idea, but never mind, if it be a true one, that the proper result of intellectual cultivation is to restore the mind to that state of wonder and interest with which it looks on everything in childhood. Thus Jean Jacques Rousseau, couched on the grass by the side of a plant that he might examine its structure and appearance at his ease, would have seemed to a little child so like itself in taste and feeling that it would have lain down by him, in full confidence of entire sympathy between them in spite of his wizard-like, Armenian attire."

but again, relapses, and now this time, seriously -

" ... while the wonder of the wise man is the result of knowledge disclosing mystery, the simplicity and purity of his moral principles, the result of wide experience and hardly-attained self-conflict. A truce to your philosophers whose elevation above their fellow-beings consists in their ability to laugh at the ties which bind women and children, who have looked just so far into the principles of ethics as to be able to disconcert a simple soul that talks of vice and virtue as realities. The child which abstains from eating plums because grandmamma forbade is their superior in wisdom: it exercises faith and obedience to law—two of the most ennobling attributes of humanity which these philosophers have cast off. ... "

from the spiritual heights, just as she did after she soared to heights in the middle of the previous article, and this time it's not just flat.

" ... Self-renunciation, submission to law, trust, benignity, ingenuousness, rectitude—these are the qualities we delight most to witness in the child, and these are the qualities which most dignify the man."

It was almost a reaction of fear of soaring ingrained in a soul that had suffered inquisition not too long ago, in an immediately prior life.

" ... If he were to admit that all things were lawful to him, he would add, “I will not be thought under the power of any; I will not circumscribe or bring into bondage the action of any one of my highest endowments.” He feels that in submitting to the restraint of a self-imposed law, he would be presenting humanity in its grandest aspect. But it is only the highest human state at which he aims—not anything superhuman. ... "

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September 27, 2021 - September 27, 2021.

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A Little Fable with a Great Moral.

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George Eliot begins a lovely fable -

"In very early times indeed, when no maidens had looking-glasses, except the mermaidens, there lived in a deep valley two beautiful hamadryads. Now, the hamadryads are a race of nymphs that inhabit the forests. Whenever a little acorn, or a beech nut, or any other seed of a forest tree begins to sprout, a little hamadryad is born, and grows up and lives and dies with the tree. ... "

- but introduces ugliness in it for sake of a lesson - reminding one that a soul and mind and spirit warped early by fear, as church does to people in its quest of grip over them - despite its mask of benevolence - cannot take flight of beauty without a crash of horror into ugliness.

" ... So you see the hamadryads, the daughters of trees, live far longer than the daughters of men—some of them even a thousand years; still they do at last get old, and faded, and shrivelled."

And the ugliness begins before one can be steeped in the enchantment of the beauty, with the ugly name of hamdryad for a nymph that lives in a tree. Moreover, if thats insufficient to make one recoil in horror, one is reminded - more than once, which is overkill, surely, for so short a story? - that the hamdryad, living in her tree, gets old, and therefore ugly, before she dies!

"Now, the two hamadryads of whom I spoke lived in a forest by the side of a clear lake, and they loved better than anything to go down to the brink of the lake and look into the mirror of waters; but not for the same reason. Idione loved to look into the lake because she saw herself there; she would sit on the bank, weaving leaves and flowers in her silken hair, and smiling at her own image all the day long, and if the pretty water-lilies or any other plants began to spread themselves on the surface below her, and spoil her mirror, she would tear them up in anger. But Hieria cared not to look at herself in the lake; she only cared about watching the heavens as they were reflected in its bosom—the foamy clouds on the clear blue by day, and the moon and the stars by night. She did not mind that the water-lilies grew below her, for she was always looking farther off, into the deep part of the lake; she only thought the lilies pretty, and loved them.

"So, in the course of time, these two hamadryads grew old, and Idione began to be angry with the lake, and to hate it because it no longer gave back a pleasant image of herself, and she would carry little stones to the margin and dash them into the lake for vengeance; but she only tired herself, and did not hurt the lake. And as she was frowning and looking spiteful all the day, the lake only went on giving her an uglier and uglier picture of herself, till at last she ran away from it into the hollow of her tree, and sat there lonely and sad till she died. But Hieria grew old without finding it out, for she never looked for herself in the lake—only as, in the centuries she had lived, some of the thick forests had been cleared away from the earth, and men had begun to build and to plough, the sky was less often obscured by vapours, so that the lake was more and more beautiful to her, and she loved better and better the water-lilies that grew below her. Until one morning, after she had been watching the stars in the lake, she went home to her tree, and lying down, she fell into a gentle sleep, and dreamed that she had left her mouldering tree, and had been carried up to live in a star, from which she could still look down on her lake that she had loved so long. And while she was dreaming this, men came and cut down her tree, and Hieria died without knowing that she had become old."

What ugliness of a power-hungry institution is this, equating age with ugliness, and awarding death to fairies? Aren't fairies And nymphs immortal? And being creatures of not flesh, why tell lies about them ageing, much less getting ugly? Lies by misogynistic institutions, of course!

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September 27, 2021 - September 27, 2021.

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Hints on Snubbing.

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If anything, it's a British - more specifically, English - specialisation, along with hypocrisy. One could include caste system, but all West has them. Brits just had more complex ones for colonies, extended from one back home, but not without inverting that of unconverted natives.

George Eliot discourse here reminds one of How To Be An Alien, by Mikes, whom she preceded.

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"It has been sagely said that men reasoned before Aristotle was born; that animals used their limbs before anatomy was heard of; and that fingers were very efficient prehensile instruments long before the invention of forks; which ingenious observations are meant to illustrate the fact that nature is beforehand with art and science. So the faculty of snubbing has been in exercise ever since the days of Cain and Abel, though the great intellect which is to trace out the laws by which its phenomena are governed, and lay down rules for the development of all its hidden resources, has not yet arisen. There have, indeed, been examples of snubbing genius, and it is in the nature of genius to transcend all rules—rather, to furnish the type on which all rules are framed; nevertheless, it is undeniable that for snubbing to attain its complete scope and potency as a moral agent it must be reduced to an art accessible to the less intuitive mind of the many. A few crude suggestions towards this important end may not be unfruitful in the soil of some active intellect.

"Hobbes defined laughter to be the product of a triumphant feeling of superiority: substitute snubbing for laughter and you have a more just definition. The idea of snubbing presupposes inferiority in the snubbed. You can no more snub your betters than you can patronize them; on the contrary, toadyism towards superiors is the invariable attendant on a large endowment of the snubbing faculty. Toadyism, in fact, is the beautiful concavity which corresponds to the snubbing convexity: the angular posture of Baillie MacWheeble’s body is a perfect illustration."

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Did the famous incident, of Queen Victoria saying "We are not amused", take place before George Eliot wrote this?

" ... The monarchical species of snubbing is doubtless an interesting subject of investigation, but the urgent wants of society point rather to the social, political, religious, and domestic species. We throw out a few hints on these, as mere finger-posts to the rich mines below:"

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"1. All men of a thousand a year, who can occasionally afford to give champagne at their dinner parties, may feel authorized to snub any poorer genius of less magnitude than Dickens, especially if he live in the same town or neighbourhood, as in that case he can by no means be made available as a lion to be served up to the company with the soups and venison.

"2. Men of great or small wit who have established a reputation as diners-out, may give additional zest to their condiments and wine by snubbing any humbler aspirant to the applause of the company. Let them take Johnson as their model in this department.

"3. Editors of country newspapers who feel themselves and their cause in a precarious condition, and who, therefore, as Paley said of himself, cannot afford to keep a conscience, may find a forlorn hope in snubbing. Let them choose for a victim any individual who presumes to avow an opinion in opposition to their own—and, what is more, to act upon it. We assure the dullest poor fellow of an editor that he may put down such an upstart, and utterly ruin him in the esteem of the majority by keeping a stock of epithets, like so many little missies, to be hurled at him on every favourable occasion: such, for instance, as pseudo-philosopher, man of crotchets, infantine dreamer, etc. No matter how stale the epithets may be, paucity of invention is no disadvantage here, since the oftener a nickname is repeated the better it will tell. Do we not know that two-thirds of mankind are influenced, not by facts or principles, but by associations about as appropriate as the connection between a bright summer’s day and roast pig in the mind of the ingenious Mrs. Nickleby?"

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"5. Ladies who go to parties with the hope of being the belles of the evening, must on no account venture to snub any whose pretensions threaten to eclipse their own. This would look like envy. They must rather behave to such with a sweet, condescending blandness, as if unconscious of the danger of rivalry. They may, however, repay themselves by snubbing the plain and ill-dressed; nay, if they can manage to secure a brisk flirtation for the evening with any one of the gentlemen tolerably well to pass, they may even produce a very good effect by snubbing the remainder.

6. But the chief empire of feminine talent lies in the snub religious. Anacreon tells us that nature has given weapons of defence to all creatures—horns to bulls, hoofs to horses, etc., understanding to man, and to woman beauty. But this is mere poet’s flummery; he should have said bigotry, which is the far more generic attribute. All ladies of decidedly orthodox sentiments and serious habits, who, in short, form the public for whom young clergymen print volumes of sermons which may be compared to that popular specific, treacle and brimstone—all such ladies, we say, may snub any man not marriageable, and any woman not an heiress, though as full of talents or of good works as a Sir Philip Sidney or a John Howard, if he or she be suspected of diverging in opinion from that standard of truth which is lodged in the brain of the Rev. Amylatus Stultus, who keeps the key of these same ladies’ consciences. But let everyone beware of snubbing on religious grounds in quarters where there is wealth, or fashion, or influence. In such cases all aberrations from the standard are to be regarded as amiable eccentricities, which do not warrant an uncharitable construction. On the whole it must be admitted that the snub religious is a most valuable agent in society, resembling those compensating contrivances by which nature makes up for the loss of one organ by an extraordinary development of the functions of another. Now that we have no Star-Chamber, Pillory, Test Act, etc., what would become of society without this admirable refinement on the rougher measures of our ancestors? Do we not appeal to a stronger element in the minds of suspected heretics by silently putting a chalk hieroglyphic on their backs, than by hauling them off to prison or to Smithfield?

"7. As regards the snub domestic, gentlemen should by no means neglect one of the grand privileges of conjugal life, an unlimited power of snubbing their wives. Indeed, this may be said to be a sort of safety-valve for the masculine faculty of snubbing which, as men are somewhat amenable for its exercise and cannot, like women and priests, snub with impunity, might lead to no end of duels and horse-whippings, and thus reduce society to a horribly internecine state.

"8. Ladies may take reprisals for their endurance in this matter on such small deer as their governesses, servants, and such old maids of their acquaintance as are not useful in sewing or taking care of the children."

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"9. The servants, again, may snub the shoe-black or the vendor of hareskins. The shoe-black may snub the dog and cat in a variety of ingenious ways, and doubtless the beautiful chain, if we could trace it, descends to the lowest grades of existence. We have no warrant, however, to suppose that a faculty for snubbing is given to any other races than the terrestrial, since we have express authority for the fact that the archangel Michael, on a very remarkable occasion, abstained from snubbing the devil."

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September 27, 2021 - September 27, 2021.

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Margaret Fuller.

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Rare, praise from George Eliot.

"Our prediction as to the rich harvest of American biography that is now ripening finds a beautiful fulfilment in the “Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.” Reading this book after Carlyle’s “Life of Sterling,” we are reminded, by their similarity of subject and authorship, as well as by their simultaneous preparation, that it is “the same spirit which worketh all in all.” There is a noticeable resemblance between these two gifted beings: their studies, aspirations, endeavors, and influence were of a similar nature; they had the same unsettled career and the same premature end. But Margaret Fuller had a deeper, stronger, richer life, and wielded a mightier power over her companions and contemporaries. ... "

So she qualifies it promptly.

" ... If her aim was not higher, it was clearer; and what she aimed at she accomplished. It is not, however, in contrast with Sterling, but in the midst of her friends, that we must view her. Considering the remarkable influence she exercised over the circle which ultimately acknowledged her as its ruling spirit, we are at a loss whether to regard her as the parent or child of New England transcendentalism. ... "

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" ... It seems to have been a movement on the part of different minds, as spontaneous and independent in each as it was simultaneous in all,—a movement flowing from the undying vernal impulse of nature. It was essentially an intellectual, moral, and spiritual regeneration; a renewing of the whole man; a kindling of his aspirations after full development of faculty and perfect symmetry of being. Then followed the fruits of this spirit,—faith, hope, and love; self-sacrifice, mutual sympathy, fellowship, and earnest endeavor. ... "

Was this the movement that Emerson and others, of Wellesley neighbourhood, of the On Walden Pond fame, were part of?

" ... “Thus, by mere attraction of affinity,” says Mr. Channing, “grew together the brotherhood of the ‘like-minded,’ as they were pleasantly nicknamed by outsiders and by themselves, on the ground that no two were of the same opinion.” ... "

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" ... Of this sect Margaret Fuller was the priestess. In conversation she was as copious and oracular as Coleridge, brilliant as Sterling, pungent and paradoxical as Carlyle; gifted with the inspired powers of a pythoness, she saw into the hearts and over the heads of all who came near her; and, but for a sympathy as boundless as her self-esteem, she would have despised the whole human race! ... so right royally did she carry herself that her arrogance became a virtue, worshipful as the majesty of the gods! Yet along with all this there was much self-scrutiny; and underneath it all much womanly tenderness, which ripened and mellowed till, after all, few women were more womanly than Margaret Fuller. ... The two sides of her more mature character—the tender and the strong—were harmonized and tested by the peculiar position into which she was thrown during her sojourn at Rome, at the time of the Revolution. We have not space to explain our allusions to those who have not read, or do not intend to read, these Memoirs for themselves; but in indicating our general opinion of her character, we must say that from the time she became a mother till the final tragedy when she perished with her husband and child within sight of her native shore, she was an altered woman, and evinced a greatness of soul and heroism of character so grand and subduing that we feel disposed to extend to her whole career the admiration and sympathy inspired by the closing scenes. While her reputation was at its height in the literary circles of Boston and New York, she was so self-conscious that her life seemed to be a studied act, rather than a spontaneous growth; but this was the mere flutter on the surface. The well was deep, and the spring genuine; and it is creditable to her friends, as well as to herself, that such at all times was their belief."

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George Eliot criticises the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others.

"We have already spoken of her in connection with Sterling. Both have found kindred spirits to write their biographies; but Emerson and his colleagues must yield to Carlyle in mastery of the pencil. The “Life of Sterling,” though made up of fragments and reminiscences, is a finished portrait. But the “Memoirs of Margaret Fuller” is a book of reminiscences merely. No attempt is made at symmetry of form or color; nor are even the outward events of her life presented in their consecutive order. Something like an appropriation of periods and localities seems to have been prearranged, but not attended to; and according to the caprice of the writer’s memory you are carried hither and thither, backwards and forwards, over the scenes of her history. A little more attention to chronology and geography would have mended the matter considerably, and made the mechanism of the narrative as good as the material. “Memoirs,” then,—memoranda,—not a life, yet full of life and full of thought,—these volumes will be read and prized by all truth-loving, sympathetic souls."

But perhaps it was never their intention to produce a work of art? Perhaps they only wished to record memories of one they cared about!

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September 27, 2021 - September 28, 2021.

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George Forster.

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George Eliot writes about someone not so well known now as he was in her time, but does evidently not expect to be read over a century and a half later.

"We do not know a more touchingly tragical history than that of George Forster, who closed in so lonely and wretched a manner that life which, as a boy, he began so dazzlingly; leaping, when yet in his teens, into startling fame, and winning the lively interest of all Europe as the companion of Cook, and the recounter of his second expedition to those blessed isles of the Southern Sea. Other lives have been more violently checkered, or rent by abrupter incidents; but the web of none has been so altogether spun with the threads of straitened penury and grinding distress. ... "

Having grasped the reader's attention, she doesn't say what did happen, expecting her readers knew all of details thereof, but digresses, with a German style sentence to begin with.

" ... It is is curious to observe the course of lives: there are some whose very accidental adventures are pitched into such wondrous tune with their owners’ tempers, that fancy might stray to the thought of a moulding destiny designing their career from womb to death,—lives the turns and meetings of which strike so into their tendencies, that they foster them, whether for weal or woe, as it were out of necessity, and beyond any aid or power of repression of their own. ... "

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George Eliot explains away why some are brilliant achievers.

" ... Doubtless, when closely viewed, the mystery proves to be only that such souls, endowed with lively quickness, seize on everything akin to their promptings, while dullards stumble blindly on their way, and mysterious destiny resolves itself into a goodly dose of enterprise. ..."

More poetically,

" ... There are other lives which offer analogies more worthy of consideration: the lives of the children of their age, showing its sum total in their thoughts and doings as the blood and type of family come out in its offspring; the chance adventurers, who are transformed and diverted to their own purposes and feelings, as deluges turn to flooded lakes or rivers, according to the nature of the country that takes them in. ... "

And now George Eliot returns to the subject, but not in a vertical swoop, that wouldn't be her! She's not only spiralling around, but determined to match her long sentences to those of German literature, even though English won't lend itself to the split verb changing meanings as one turns the page before a sentence ends!

" ... Such men exist at all times; for times are the work of men, and in the summary of the man we learn to know mankind. George Forster was one of these. All his thoughts and doings are the utterings of that strange eighteenth century; as a boy turned into a mighty traveller suiting his age’s spirit of inquiry, he remains his whole life long an eager, restless wanderer, an Ishmaelite on the face of his century, ever seeking and peering on to a brighter future; his temper is marked by that simple and undoubting trust in new perfections and coming certainties, with a credulous leaning to all novel and hidden truths, prevalent in his age, when man awoke to belief after centuries of slumber; his heart is honest and generous, his spirit eager, and freed from all he considers prejudice,—allowing itself to soar into regions, the subtle air of which is too rare to live in; a sufferer by his father’s unbridled humors, in married life not slightly tried, and if not wholly wrecked then, saved only by a lifeboat of most thorough eighteenth-century build; renowned as a sailor round the world, and as the man who had brought to Europe knowledge of friendly savages, and who could, from personal acquaintance, describe new realms of nature and mankind to the sickened age yearning for fancied archetypes of man and the world;—all these characteristics give a special zest to poor George Forster’s life. ... "

And another spiral, before a small clue as to the subject.

" ... In short, we see mirrored in his history the whole painful lot and social shackling of a man of science of those days in Germany, and how a thinking and feeling mind became drifted athwart them into perilous rapids and breakneck eddies; we see a man gifted with the highest abilities and soundest learning, strong in spirit and heart, moreover privileged with a hold on the tastes of the public from the very nature of his fame,—we see this man, in spite of his advantages, doomed to toil his whole life long beneath a weight of trammels, unable to find the hand that might drag him out of the choking mud-sloughs of rotten petty courts, until at last he topples over the mighty chasm of the French Revolution. ... "

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" ... To the English public he is wholly unknown,—to that of his own country, by a freak of destiny, he was until lately only notorious; for while straitened circumstances deprived his fine intellect of that repose, as necessary to its nurture as light and space are to a tree to enable it to put forth perfect fruit, the peculiarities of his political adventures exposed him to an ill wind which blasted his memory. Almost all Forster’s writings partake of a fragmentary nature and hasty slightness of design, which were imparted to them of a necessity from the enforced circumstances of their production. They are mostly essays, contributed regularly to journals, or prefaces to translations of travels, undertaken at the bidding of publishers; but as soon as we look at them, we perceive a fund of learning, lively feeling, and suggestive thought set forth in wording so full of natural charm, that we at once guess a mind of no common power to be at work here. Twice only in the course of his hard-working life did he get respite enough to be able to undertake a connected production,—the first time, when, hardly past his boyhood, he wrote that account of his voyage with Cook, which at once made his name known all over the world; the second time, just before the close of his career, when he began, but did not finish, his journey through Brabant and England. The two volumes he accomplished are his most perfect literary work, and show what would have been the fulness of Forster. Here is a mass of thoughtful observation and rich suggestion. The whole tone and scope of his writing were wholly different from the abstractness and vagueness from which no German thinker of his day was free; it had the life of reality about it, and his truthful feeling and keen eye made him so lively an expounder of nature, that his method and style were the chosen model of Humboldt, as Forster’s example was his first incentive to scientific exploration."

And now another clue -

"The youth he had spent in his country had accustomed his mind to the ways of public life, and imparted to it habits of practical thought, which impregnated his whole being, and distinguished him for readiness of bearing amidst the dim haziness of his countrymen. His turn of mind found in the study of natural science the only nurture which the arid social system of Germany left for it; but as soon as the great French Revolution loosened the stoniness in which he had been bound, the promptings of his nature made him strike at once into the genial soil of politics. In truth, the quickenings of his mind were those that stamp the citizen; he was public-spirited in the true sense of the word; and bred in self-governing England, accustomed to public enterprise and rule, he stood before his countrymen, in the delicately organized manifoldness of his constitution, in the sparkle of his renown, and in charm of writing, like a prophet whose words, passing their understanding, were coarsely maligned. Therefore people’s minds turned away from Forster until, when after near half a century the growth of enlightenment stirred up feelings of independence, men found that in him they had possessed one whose sound and patriotic aspirations had been altogether calumniated, and who combined the qualities of a noble intellect with the virtues of the citizen."

Before George Eliot would actually condescend to return to the subject, but not before another spiral -

"It is the interesting history of this man that Heinrich König recounts in a book undertaken under the inspiration of times in many respects akin to those of his hero, and written with a most intimate knowledge of the scenery of the story’s plot. For many years he has studied every detail, however petty, of German history of the end of the last century; and before he entertained any thought of this book, he had already written a novel on the Revolution of Mayence, which is a wonderfully accurate picture of the times, and the close researches for which had made him intimately acquainted with many parts of Forster’s life."

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"George Forster was born on the 26th November, 1754, at the poor village of Nassenhuben, near Danzig, where his father, whose Christian names were John Reinhold, was the Calvinistic minister. He had been driven to this calling by his father, who had been highly displeased on learning that his son, while a student at Halle, had taken the liberty to desert the law for medicine and the natural sciences, in which he had made considerable progress. It thus happened that he was, as it were, turned off cramped from the very starting-post, and all through life’s race he limped. Though ever an honest Protestant, science was more his love than theology, and the straits of his position chafed his temper to that irascibility which afterwards so marred his good and sterling parts. His son, who amidst all his trials never laid aside a most dutiful bearing towards him, strikes off the following sketch of him once in a letter to Jacobi:—

"“My father is, in every respect, a useful man for the sciences,—possessed of solid learning, choice reading, and book-lore, besides being a good naturalist, antiquary, and also theologian, although the last study does not occupy him any more, nor can it interest him scientifically, as I think. His warmth, hot temper, and eager battling for his ideas, have done him immeasurable harm, as it is also his misfortune that he does not know, and never will know, mankind,—always suspicious and credulous exactly there where he should not be so.”"

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And finally, as George Eliot designs to delve into the subject, it get not only really interesting, but mind-boggling. But not before she pours it all in a deluge of a paragraph longer than a page, which perhaps isn't as German as a sentence of that length - which would be difficult in English; English being, according to German scholars, "a crazy mixture of French and German ".

"We can fancy the quarrelsome divine plagued by his boorish parishioners in the midst of his study of Buffon, and flying into whims of wrongs under the friction of such daily worries. The living was not a fat one, while his family—for he early married a cousin—was the contrary of meagre; seven children required feeding, and the means to do so were not ready at hand. Under these circumstances the elder Forster, with his hankering for the sciences and his discontent with his parish, jumped at an offer made to him by the Russian Government to inspect and report on the new colonies founded on the banks of the Volga. Taking his son George, then eleven years old, with him, he spent the summer of 1765 in performing the journey and returning to St. Petersburg; in the autumn he handed in his report, the matter of which is said to have been so good as to have given the Empress suggestions for her great code of laws. His blustering temper, however, which often proved his worst enemy, closed his promising career in Russia; and he spent the winter in St. Petersburg, urging obstinate claims for recompense and imperturbably refusing to accept the offers made. During this time his wants drove him to the shifts of a translator, in which he called his boy to his aid, who was following the course of lessons at the high-school, and who thus early was broken in to his life-long drudgery of an overworked literary hack. At last the priest-sage gave vent to his anger with the Russian Government, and left St. Petersburg with the satisfaction of having at least had his will, if not the very sum of money, and none other than that which he had made his mind up to have. But if St. Petersburg and the Russias were well behind him and his son, it was not very clear what land lay ahead. The good Christians of Nassenhuben had provided themselves, during their high-priest’s gaddings about on the Volga, with some ghostly vice-regent, who seems to have been unwilling to give up his realm on his lord’s advent; and so John Reinhold, who perhaps rather liked the chance, conscious of his real acquirements and sphere of action, took the sudden resolve to seek his fortune in England, and, without even visiting his wife or family, sailed thither with his son. They sturdily fought off the dreariness of the voyage, lengthened by storms, with the study of English; and soon after their arrival, the father’s solid scientific knowledge having gained him the good-will of many distinguished men in London, he was appointed teacher of natural history at an educational institution for dissenting clergymen, at Warrington in Lancashire. George was apprenticed to a Russian merchant named Lewin; but the sedentary application of this life so pulled the youth down, that when, on his mother and sisters’ arrival, he escorted them to Warrington, his father became alarmed at his favorite child’s looks, and kept him by him. George was thus brought back to the study of the natural sciences under his father’s immediate influence; and as the latter soon embroiled himself, as usual, with his superiors, while the wants of his large family caused him to feel sorely pinched in his resources, the son had to put himself into the family traces, and help sturdily to keep the household van going. We find him, therefore, not only combining the parts of scholar and teacher, learning botany and zoology from his restless father, and teaching French and German in a neighboring school to those who ought to have been his playfellows, but the poor youth’s strength was still further strained by continual translations of foreign books of travels into English. ... "

But George Eliot has to get enigmatic now, leaving a reader to flounder for her meaning.

" ... From this time of his life a story remains which is told by all his biographers, as foreshadowing in its small burden the haphazards which so often befell him, and the temper with which he took them. The pygmy professor’s road to his lecture-chair lay past a pastry-cook’s savory stall of sweet cakes, and the tale of this temptation ended as temptations will end when brought to bear on lively flesh and blood; the savor tingled through his veins, till, wholly rapt by its witchery, he swallowed as many cakes as he could cram. The cook, however, like a crafty worldly cook, only considered his pies’ sweetness as the means of barter; and before their taste was off poor George’s lips, the horror of dunnery and dismay of debt cut short his relish. Shame made him skulk along back ways; but the sharp cook’s twinkling eyes would flash on him still, until his little heart burst forth its bitter distress in a fervent prayer, when, lo! on crossing the next fence on his hiding by-path, his eye caught sight of a guinea embedded in a horse’s tread, and, having run to pay his debts, he bought with the remainder a gilt thimble for his sister. Painful troubles and dribbling windfalls of luck are indeed the tissue of his whole life; but if a lowness of spirit did come over him for a season in his gloomy times, one sunny ray was ever enough to lighten his heart and make it beat high and bold."

Pygmy professor, cakes, gold?

Again, George Eliot condescends to return to Foster's life.

"Under all these circumstances, and with the peculiar keen temper of Dr. John Reinhold Forster, it will be easily believed that he clutched at the sudden offer to accompany Cook as naturalist on his expedition. He only bargained to be allowed to take with him his son, then seventeen years of age; and so hurried was their departure that only nine days intervened between decision on the journey and embarkation. The history of this voyage is known to most persons. At that time all Europe eagerly watched its result; for since the discovery of America, no geographical riddles had so whetted its curiosity as those of the great Southern Sea. The fashionable idyllic sentimentalism of those times, so fostered by the hothouse breathings of B. de St. Pierre and Rousseau, was fascinated by the gentle savages and peaceful virgin isles of whose reality Cook’s first voyage had given the certainty; and all the smirking skirmishers of enlightenment were on the eager look-out for new and startling confirmation of their yearning dreams. How the many and large views of nature such a journey brought with it must have impressed the quick mind of young Forster, already so given to a wandering, shifting life, can be easily conceived. The driest man could not have met with such a chance at such an age of his life without learning from it somewhat which lasted for the remainder of it. George Forster bore away with him that largeness of views on nature and man which so nobly marked his thoughts in all stages of his life; he got his mind enriched with a tender, yet a large and manly sense of nature’s beauty, whose healthy freshness contrasted as vividly with the mawkish feeling of those times as a peasant girl’s ruddy cheek with a painted face; but he also bore away from these three roving years a hankering after travel which never left him, and to which, under the weight of trouble, he was too apt to give himself up, as the drinker grasps at his dram, while the seeds of lasting illness were laid in his body by an attack of scurvy."

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And now, finally, a reader unfamiliar with the subject of the article begins to comprehend the eulogistic opening paragraph.

"The enjoyment of these pleasures was somewhat marred by painful embarrassments arising from fresh outbursts of his father’s wild temper, which chafed at the discipline of a man-of-war, entailing on the commander the necessity of severe measures to repress his mutinous freaks. The youth himself was, however, a favorite with Cook; and the language in which he speaks of him in a biographical sketch, written many years later, shows how thoroughly he knew the worth of that daring seaman’s character. But when, on the return of the expedition, the Doctor, with headstrong stubbornness, ran foul of the Admiralty itself, George was dragged into the quarrel, or from filial love rushed into it to a degree which had a lasting influence. It seems that the elder Forster had not fully understood the meaning of his engagement with the Government, according to which no account of the voyage was to be published before the official one: the Admiralty, therefore, stopped the publication of a work he was preparing; and in consequence of the fiery naturalist’s persistence in contesting its right to do so, it proceeded to an act which seems harsh, and might have maddened many a quieter man so laden with troubles, who saw his hopes of gain vanish, and nothing before him but poverty, debts, and a starving family,—it despoiled him of any share in the proposed Government publication. The blow was a desperate one. Yet even now the old man could not curb his temper ever so little, or matters would still have come to run more smoothly: George himself says as much in a letter of later date, although at all times he held his father to have been unjustly and most cruelly treated. As no mention of his own name had been made in the engagement with Government, he balked the Admiralty’s precautions (probably at his father’s desire) by writing himself an account of the voyage,—a proceeding which at the time exposed him to much abuse, and poisoned the quarrel beyond remedy. In this work the journey and the countries visited are described with simple truth, and a color which shows how thoroughly his soul had become impregnated with the sunny warmth of the tropics. The artlessness of the account has a charm which carries the reader away, and is sufficient proof that, although the father looked over the scientific description of animals and flowers, the bulk of the work is entirely George’s own. The success of the book was great; the author’s name became at once well known, and the poor family garrets in Percy Street were enlivened by the hail of many a foreigner, anxious to see the lucky travellers who had, beyond doubt, beheld and been in the happy South Sea Isles. It was on the occasion of such a pilgrimage that George was first brought together with a young German physician, whose name was Sömmering. He had come over to England to attend its medical schools; and that attraction which had drawn him unto his renowned countrymen grew quickly into the tightest bonds of friendship with the younger of them, fastened by kinship in studies, and probably also by ties of masonic brotherhood, which then, and for many years after, largely took hold of their minds in that alchemistic form under which it so mightily swayed the thought of Europe of that century."

Next part, already heartbreaking -

"The proceeds of the book were, unfortunately, small in money; starvation daily haunted the wretched dwelling, barely staved off: by petty gifts from a friend, or some German princeling, coaxed into dribbling forth scanty alms by a present of South Sea rarities; the sale of the latter also came to an absolute standstill, and the Admiralty was deaf to the roar of claims, till at last hard-hearted creditors came down on the forlorn family, and bore away its mainstay and pillar, and dreary King’s Bench shut on the chafing Doctor. It was indeed a bleak and starving future which George had then to look upon,—his father imprisoned and no prospect of relief, his mother sick and his sisters weak and helpless, while he himself was racked by continued ill-health maiming the sinews of his good-will to work. He soon had to yield to the conviction that in England there was no chance of obtaining aid; so, with the one thought of straining his utmost nerve for his parents, he turned himself to his native country, from which sundry cheers of fellow-feeling had at times gladdened the wretchedness of Percy Street. Making up, therefore, a bale of dried plants and other specimens of natural history, in the hope some continental museums might buy them, he, whose name was then trumpeted forth as the foremost of explorers, embarked at Harwich, to cross to Holland as an anxious pedler and seeker of alms. Nothing can be more touching than to read in his letters to his parents his grief at their sorrows, and his unflinching trust in Providence:—

"“I am well and fresh” (he writes to his father), “resigned, and full of trust that God will not forsake us ; he has often proved his exceeding goodness, and will deliver us out of our present evil chances and hardships, which have weighed us down for these last years. I submit to all trials with the firm trust that they are meant for our best, and believe that, while I leave everything to the ordaining of the most perfect Being, I act neither unrighteously nor forwardly if I beseech him daily for the peace and earthly welfare of us all; for also here on earth we can reach to a certain pitch of happiness, and why, then, should we not pray for it?”"

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"Though he was received by the learned men of Holland with the most flattering kindness, and every sort of civil attention was paid him, he soon saw that he could have no hopes of bettering his family by any help from that country. ... "

"George hastened to Germany, reproaching himself with the slightest delay. At Düsseldorf, then renowned for its galleries of art, he was, however, waylaid by Jacobi, who, with enthusiastic kindness, as soon as he heard of the famed traveller’s arrival, wrote him before daybreak a pressing invitation to spend a whole day with him. Forster was fascinated by the society he was introduced to, and that spell in Jacobi’s bearing which had ravished Goethe with delight. One of the lords of the German commonwealth of letters, the bosom friend of Goethe and of its chief leaders, whom he loved to gather around him at his country-seat at Pempelfort, he enthralled the loving temper of young Forster by the welling forth of his speech, which he would let flow in the full stream of enthusiasm. Forster found himself transferred, as it were by a wizard’s wand, into the very midst of the choicest spirits of Germany, while the charm of Jacobi’s kindly hospitality soothed his aching heart like balm. The latest poems of Goethe; snatches from “Woldemar,” which Jacobi was then writing; freshly received letters from the stars of literature,—were the treats which, during four days, were thrust on Forster, spiced by the touching kindness of his host and his sisters; he tore himself from Düsseldorf, enraptured with his new friends. “Such people as these we shall not meet again on our whole journey,” was his exclamation to Alexander von Humboldt, when, twelve years later, on their trip to England, they turned out of their way to visit Jacobi.

"Cassel was the goal of his immediate expectations. He had hopes that the new Landgrave, Frederick II., who partook of the fashionable taste for dallying with enlightenment, provided it could be done cheaply, might be tempted to gain a man of his father’s fame for his new high-school. This sovereign, who, during his father’s lifetime, had forsaken his Protestant faith and ancestral views in politics, had, since his accession to his states, calmed the lively fears of the old servants of his house by steadily settling down into all the good old family ways. Although remaining a Catholic himself, he swore, as a true son of Hesse, to the maintenance of Protestantism in his country; and, quitting forthwith the Austrian Court, with which while heir apparent he had been unmindful enough of his blood to flirt, he left off all newfangled whims, to the delight of his gray-haired ministers, ruling as his father had ruled before him, to the comfort of himself and the fattening of his exchequer, which he shrewdly enriched by selling twenty-two thousand true Hessians to England for £7,000,000. If the sum seemed large, it also appears that the Landgrave had many calls for it. But George soon saw his hopes vanish afresh; the whole of the funds allotted for the mental enlightenment of such Hessians as were not gaining it in another way in America, had been sunk in a parcel of rubbishy marbles, which were their owner’s joy and pride. A sum that might have freed the starving traveller from King’s Bench, and have allowed him and his family to live at Cassel, could not possibly be made forthcoming; but, in its stead, his Highness deigned to admit George to a gracious audience in his statue gallery, and insisted on his delaying his filial researches till after the next sitting of his Academy of Antiquities, at which he accordingly held a discourse; and at last the Landgrave not only accepted a copy of the father’s books, but even strained his poverty to the disbursing of a gift of fifty louis, besides thrusting on the unwilling son the appointment of professor of natural history at the University of Cassel, with the dazzling salary of seventy pounds. It is touching to read how anxiously Forster debated with his conscience, whether he would be justified in accepting anything for himself as long as he had not achieved that relief for his parents which he had set out to seek; and when at last he did accept, it was with the express understanding that he should be allowed certain months of absence, wherein he might bring his endeavors to a satisfactory result. At Göttingen he made acquaintances which afterwards ripened into friendship,—especially that of Heyne; and he wrote a letter to his father—who he evidently feared might misinterpret his proceedings—in which he tried to enliven his gloom by the friendly greetings of the leading members of that University; but such kindly wishes were all he reaped, both here and at Berlin, with the exception of a pittance of one hundred louis from the Prince of Dessau, bestowed in a warm-hearted manner, and coupled with the promise to use his influence in England with the Admiralty, to obtain some recompense, which, however, proved vain. Such painful disappointments did not allow Forster to begin his stay at Cassel, in the spring of 1779, with a light heart; and his correspondence reveals his writhing efforts to burst his father’s prison bars, when, in the forlorn midnight of this gloom, a hidden hand all of a sudden thrust comfort and freedom on the wretched family. The masonic lodges of Germany, at the call of the Duke of Brunswick, their grand-master, paid the father’s debts, while the chair of natural history at Halle was to provide for his maintenance. True, however, to his self-willed temper, he nearly marred his own luck; for he could not for a long while be brought to give up the character of a victim, and insisted on his just claims, spurning what he deemed a dishonorable compromise, till the earnest entreaties of his family and the smarting reminiscences of imprisonment at last softened his resolve. ... Sömmering, the brother of his heart,—he to whom in the heyday of betrothal he wrote, “Love itself yields to the bond of soul which links me to thee,”—obtained the professorship of anatomy at Cassel, by dint of sundry diplomatic wiles which his eager friend suggested to him; for the Landgrave had snatched up the crotchet, that only Frenchmen knew the science, and it wanted no little knack to master his whims. ... Nor was the society of Cassel wanting in interest; besides many men of more or less distinction who were attached to its high-school, it counted the illustrious historian, Johannes von Müller, amongst its residents, between whom and Forster an intimacy sprang up; so that, had it not been for other discomforts, he might have contentedly endured the petty worries of Court attendance; for the Landgrave regarded his University, with its staff, as his toys, and Forster found, on promotion to the inspectorship of a most threadbare cabinet of natural history, that he shared with the statue gallery the honor of being his Highness’s chief entertainer. But the want of money, the canker of his life, soon made its gnawings felt. The pittance of his salary, and the loss by shipwreck of all his little property on its way from England, had made it impossible for the famished youth to start his establishment, however frugally, without a loan the cost of which shackled him like a galley-chain. ... “Fy! fy! I can’t get a book to look at here, unless I buy it,” he writes to Jacobi. “Cassel is a perfect wilderness, as regards new books, for the annual sum allotted for procuring such for the Prince’s library does not amount to £60.” ... "

"Freemasonry, in the garb of Illumination and Rosicrucian-ism, at that time had largely laid hold of the mind of Germany. ... "

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" ... He was offered the professorship of natural history at Wilna in Poland, and accepted it, not merely on his own hasty promptings, but by the counsel of such wary friends as Lichtenberg and Heyne. The conditions were, in fact, such as might have tempted many a literary man: besides a fair salary, a sum was settled for correspondence and the purchase of specimens of natural history, while the flattering language of the Primate Poniatowsky’s letter was backed by subscriptions which freed him from his liabilities at Cassel, and provided for his travelling outlay. Thus, at a moment when the atmosphere of Cassel choked his manly vigor, luck seemed to shower on him the very windfall befitting his wants; and with the good cheer with which he had formerly run to buy his sister a thimble with the chance sovereign that saved him from his boyish scrapes, he now leapt forward to snatch the happiness which seemed to be beckoning him.

"Happiness this time appeared to him in the guise of a young girl of twenty. During his visits to Göttingen he had learnt to know Theresa Heyne ..."

" ... George, on his part, with his susceptibility and generous feeling, was strongly drawn to the lively girl; and although the kindly old father, with his wary forethought, would not allow himself to be edged into express sanction of the marriage, as long as Forster’s worldly means were so doubtful, the eager girl soon dragged his good-will into a tacit understanding that the wedding should come off as soon as Polish pledges proved trustworthy; and he started for his new home with the consciousness of being betrothed. ... He passed through Vienna on his way ... The Emperor Joseph received him in his closet, with his well-known friendliness, and on dismissing him, after much talk, foretold him laughingly that he would not long stay in the wilderness of Poland; while invitations from the mighty Kaunitz, and choice meetings at the house of the celebrated Countess Theresa Thum, whose pride and joy it was to gather together the picked spirits of Vienna, showed in what esteem the traveller was held by all."

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"At Grodno he found himself in the very heart of the life and Court of Poland. The first free diet which had met since many years, was then holding its sittings there; and the mean huts and filthy lanes of the so-called city were thronged by the motley crush of Polish aristocracy, from the King and magnificent magnates with their dazzling followings, down to the equally haughty peasant nobles swaggering about with their big swords (the badge of their rank), while they floundered through the mammoth sloughs of mire in huge boots lined with dirty straw, in their proud disdain of the effeminacy of stockings and linen. Amongst the higher classes, however, he found many persons possessed of much elegant culture, which was, moreover, set off by a lordly hospitality, in which they vied with each other to show how highly they valued the gain of so noteworthy a man to their country. The King’s sister, commonly called Madame de Cracovie, because her deceased husband, Marshal Branicki, had been Castellan of Cracow, received him with the most marked kindliness, and presented him herself to her brother, whom he often saw in the familiarity of her evening meetings. That worn-out lover of the great Catherine, by whose bounty he had been pensioned with the royalty of Poland, had a mind whose dainty and over-refined taste delighted in the society of literary men, and Forster experienced the courtesy of his bearing, while the assurances of good-will which he gathered from the King and Primate for himself and the University encouraged his hopes for the future. ... "

"That worn-out lover of the great Catherine"? Is George Eliot quoting from sources, or merely fact everyone - at the time - was aware of, just didn't usually mention in print?

"The first acquaintance with Wilna did not discourage him. It was true that “the cabinet of natural history proved not only a child in its cradle, but not even a fine child, while the library was most meagre;” but then he had the assurance that their wants were acknowledged, and would be made good. The University, as most of the schools in Poland, had been founded by the Jesuits, in consequence of whose suppression the whole system of education was being remodelled. His lodging was in the old palace of the Order, and, though wretchedly bleak and bare, he comforted himself by comparing it with those of his fellow-teachers, and by the readiness with which such changes as he asked for were granted. Many of the Jesuits remained attached to the high-school as laymen; and although he arrived by no means well disposed towards them,—having been fully warned by the great Jesuit-croaker, Nicolai, against their wiles,—his first letters speak the praise of their unselfish behavior, so that he even utters his conviction that the Jesuits of Wilna, at least, do not deserve the suspicion under which their brethren generally labor. The difficulties of his position showed themselves immediately on entering upon his duties, when he had to deliver his lectures in Latin; for though a master in German style, and able to write English and French with wonderful correctness, Latin composition was a labor which cost him “an everlasting time;” while the unwonted tongue hampered his speech, which was at all times highly embarrassed in the professor’s chair, although its flow in conversation was astounding. ... As all such bits of economy were, however, altogether insufficient to mend the hole made in his income, he restlessly sought means of repairing it, and at last decided on perfecting himself in the study of medicine. There was a great want of physicians in the country, and the skill of such as there were was eagerly sought and richly paid by noble Poles, who seemed to have pinned their faith in health on the multitude of doctors; for we are told that as soon as anything like ailing was felt, the sick man called all the leeches together he could lay hold of, when he himself would preside, and adjudge their debate. With feverish looking forward to spring and happiness, he thus fretted through the dreariness of his first Polish winter in utter loneliness and daily worry; for, as time wore on, he saw that none of the pledges made to him were kept, while painful rheumatisms and weakened eyesight, brought on by climate, racked his poor body, until, at the very moment of his start on his longed-for journey, a putrid fever laid him for several weeks on a sick-bed, and threatened to cut short his life in its bloom. Convalescence, like all other things, is helped by a stout heart; thus, as soon as the crisis was surmounted, his eagerness quickened his recovery, so that he reached Göttingen in August, 1785; and, having been married in the beginning of the following month, he hastened back with his wife to his bleak banishment.

"Henceforth Forster’s household was the sanctuary wherein alone, during the remaining two years of his stay in Poland, he found refuge from endless teasing and annoyance. If fancy rather than thorough love had made Theresa become his wife, acquaintance with her husband at all events at first confirmed and increased her good opinion of him. Forster always maintained in his daily bearing so chaste a delicacy that his widow declares never to have seen him guilty of an unseemly outburst; and this overwrought unwillingness to ruffle her peace of mind was such, that he never brought himself to unfold his many straits to her, until this very silence produced the misunderstanding which it had been meant to avoid. Thus, while in his generous fear lest she should not be fully aware of the lot she was encountering, he had always dwelt much on the privations awaiting her in Poland, this nice feeling had kept him from alluding to the pet home he had prepared; so that the young woman was quite rapt with joy to find so snug a dwelling on her arrival at Wilna. It was, in truth, not more than they wanted; for beyond it they found no comfort. If Cassel was loathsome, yet how grand was it when compared with the Polish University, which had not even one bookseller. Intercourse with the world was slow and difficult; he could not often even hear of new books, much less get a sight of them; so that his letters to Lichtenberg piteously beg for the crumbs which might be swept from the fulness of his literary table. The want of all congenial society was the bitterest hardship to him; for the revels of the Lithuanian nobles had no charms, and his Jesuit fellows, on closer knowledge, had come out in their true light. Having failed in their stealthy stalking for the father and mother’s souls, they hoped to net that of George’s first-born child; but their wiles were roughly torn by a gruff sally, “that, as baptism must be, it should be done according to Calvinism,” and henceforth their friendship was at an end. The turmoils of the State and the ill-will discovered to be borne to the University by the Primate, who even applied its funds to the one of Cracow, abashed his trust in promised improvements which would have enabled him to make himself practically useful; yet every time that in a fit of anguish he eagerly jumped at a chance of escape from this forlorn banishment, he was quickly dragged back by the feeling of its impossibility. By agreement he had bound himself to serve for eight years, in consideration of the payments whereby he had been freed from his Cassel debts; and no literary labor in his present wilderness, obliged as he was to buy at great expense every book he might require, could ever enable him to pay off this loan. ... "

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"He even produced, besides sundry translations, two little works which deserve notice, to the writing of which he devoted himself so assiduously, that long before daybreak he sat at his desk, and his health began to suffer from the strain. The one was a dissertation on “The Human Race,” intended as an answer to an essay by Kant on the same subject, in which mistaken statements had been made about the South Sea Islanders. The dogmatic boldness with which the metaphysician laid down the law in matters of science displeased Forster, who in general had little liking for speculative philosophy, and even called Kant, in a private letter, “the archsophist and arch-scholastic of the age.” In this dissertation, which is written with great moderation, he maintained the existence of distinct races of men, though he did not deny their belonging to one kind. The other work was a “Life of Cook,” already alluded to, the dedication of which Was graciously acknowledged by the Emperor Joseph—a fact rendered highly remarkable by the broad freedom of thought running through the whole book, which contains, as in a summary, the political faith which guided Forster’s future conduct. It has often been noticed, that there is not a single passage in any of the French writers of the eighteenth century, which shows any foreknowledge of the revolution which was coming over their country, although many travellers (amongst them Goldsmith) foretold it; but there is no man whose prophecies can vie in clearness with those of Forster. As early as 1782, he exclaimed in a letter to his father, “Europe seems to be on the point of a fearful overthrow;” and in a remarkable fragment amongst his writings, the precise date of which is not known, the following striking words occur:—

"“We stand at the close of the century; this universal longing for change in our present forms, for relief from our many defects, the searching hither and thither, this revolt of reason against political pressure, this supremacy of understanding over feeling, these educational institutions for the rearing of sensible machines, these convulsive clutchings of faith at miraculous powers beyond the realm of understanding, this struggle between enlightenment and religion, this universal leavening,—herald a new teacher and a new doctrine.”

"Yielding to his heart’s ever warm interest in his fellow-beings’ weal, he had been steadily growing in his age’s political thought, so that it was ever engrossing the better part of his mind; and while, therefore, it is not wonderful that in 1787 he should have arrived at writing as he then did, it is most wonderful that the head of the Holy Roman Empire should have nodded approbation to such words as these:—

"“Human infallibility is disappearing before the dawn of knowledge. Tolerance and freedom of conscience proclaim the victory of reason, and make the way for freedom of the press and free search into all those relations which, under the name of truth, are of value to man. Lastly, luxury and industry are giving new worth to life; the arts are attaining the height of perfection and simplicity; observation and experience are enlarging and combining all knowledge, and all political powers are tending to an equality; in short, it is, or is about to be, the season of flowering.”"

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"Early one morning in the month of June, 1787, Forster was disturbed at his desk by the entry of a Russian naval officer, who, presenting him with a letter from the ambassador, Stackelberg, made the startling announcement that he had full power to settle all terms, if he would agree to accompany a voyage of discovery in the Southern Ocean. What a leap for Forster from dreariest banishment into the very Eden of dreams! The open-handedness of the Russian Government removed all difficulties about the repayment of his loans, and an ample salary was assigned to him, as also a pension for his wife in the event of his death; while his delight with luck was raised in the highest pitch by the promised companionship of Sömmering, whom the Empress immediately appointed physician to the expedition, on Forster’s recommendation; and as soon as ever he had brought his affairs to a close, he hastened away, traversing with six post-horses the space between Poland and Göttingen, which he reached on the 16th September. His hopes were fated to meet with a sad dash: the outbreak of the Turkish war caused the voyage to be laid aside for the present; and as Forster would not accept an appointment at St. Petersburg just after his escape from Polish winters, he was turned adrift on the world with a year’s salary, but free from debt, so that, though pleasant visions had come to nought, he yet blessed the wondrous luck which alone had been able to snatch him from Poland and set him down in the heart of Europe. ... "

"While Forster was thus anxiously looking around him for some opening suitable to his wants, his attention was drawn to the electoral city of Mayence, where his old friend Johannes von Müller had just vacated the librarianship, on promotion to be the Elector’s private secretary, while the prospect of the society of Sömmering, who had for several years taught anatomy there, was a most powerful attraction. By the counsel of friends he went thither, that his presence might draw attention to him; and, having been presented to the Elector by Müller, his appointment was decided on with a speed unwonted for the lazy sluggishness of spiritual courts. The salary was small; but then there was the advantage of a central position, which the portly Elector, with sly shrewdness, pointed out to him when, throwing open the casement of his closet, he showed him the view over the Rhine and its rich banks, asked him to compare it with Poland, and went on to reckon the cheapness of provisions,—backing the whole with promise of regular payment.

"It is as well shortly to describe the soil into which Forster was now transplanted; for it was owing to its nature that his life took the turn it did. The ancient German Empire was dying the death of corruption, and the very death-slumbers of its elders were being broken in upon by forward heirs; foremost among whom was Prussia, who, like a nightmare, bestrode and pinched them, even at the point of death. ... The time-honored See of Mayence, with whose spiritual electorate was coupled the arch-chancellorship of the empire, as it had ever been one of the chief pleasure-haunts of the lustiness of Rhenish prelacy, so was it in its decay the hotbed of corruption. The predecessors of the reigning Elector had, like the Emperor Joseph, partaken of the reforming fashion of his time, and had foolishly thought that the worn-out body might be quickened again into youth. The Elector—simple, good-natured man, the chief feature of whose temper was kindly trustful feeling, and a fondness for plain burgher-like life—forsook the wonted pomp of a high prince of the empire, to follow the bent of his homely likings. Instead of having courtly feasts, he not only mingled in the holiday gambols of the citizens, but he forfeited the indulgence of his courtiers, who with shrugs would have winked at these whims of a sovereign, by his harmful meddling in the olden habits of the State. Saints were curtailed of their dues, monkish trickery was checked; and when, in 1773, the Jesuits were suppressed by the Pope, Eusmerich Joseph seemed like a man who felt a load off his chest, and launched forth into plans for setting up sound schools in his lands. The Jesuit party was, however, not crushed, though beaten; and on the Elector’s suspicious death in the following year, before he had time to carry out all his plans, they carried by a push the election of Canon Erthal as his successor. Shrewd, ambitious, and thoroughly worldly, he had graduated in the schools of courtly diplomacy, where he had acquired that varnish whereby poor wits can for a time pass themselves off as minds of superior stuff. As the party had worked the strong Catholic feeling of the population, the new Elector began his reign with a mighty show of piety and devotion that edified the mob, but which were laid aside for more congenial pastimes, as soon as their need was less apparent; the banqueting halls of the archiepiscopal pleasure palaces rang with the revelry of feasts, the spice of whose cheer was set off by ribald wit."

George Eliot gives descriptions of the various corruptions prevailing, and proceeds to the caste system, which was in line with mist of Europe.

" ... The throng was choicely noble; for the utmost that was given to a burgher in Mayence was the gift of a clerkship. The nobility was, however, far from being all on an equality within itself, and the highest class, whose string of ancestors enabled them to stand the tests required for canonries, looked down as haughtily on their lower fellows as those again on the mob of burghers at large; while besides, and above all hereditary rank, there was the consecration of holy orders, whereby, first, only even the highest-born nobility became entitled to share fully the fatness of the State. Gluttony, wassailing, and a greedy craving for rich prebends, were the main qualities of these servants of the Church; and it was well when, in the revelry of their drinking-bouts over flagons of old Rhenish, which in summer time they loved to hold in the pleasure-grounds of their lordly abbeys scattered along the stately river’s banks, their wanton humor would be content with such harmless freaks as wagering whether this or that lady’s calves could be encircled by the ribbons of their gold canon’s crosses."

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"Yet were there some men amongst them who, athwart all this overcoat of fashionable dross, were not without stuff ... Forster found here Stadion, who, from a gay and enterprising canon, became one of the leading ministers of Austria; while the master of modern statesmen, Prince Metternich, took his first lesson in cunning in this high school of human worthlessness. High above these in nobleness of nature, as in the splendor of his birth, but so hampered by the contradictions between his position and his likings, that he never mastered their difficulties, and thus through life had an awkward hesitation in his public conduct which looked almost like wilful trimming, was Dalberg, Bishop of Erfurt, coadjutor and expected successor of the Elector; but who afterwards, under Napoleon, became Duke of Frankfort, and died as Bishop of Ratisbon. His love of letters was great; and so zealously had he devoted his fine intelligence to study, especially of metaphysics, that his works ranked him amongst his country’s leading writers, while his position and prospects caused him to be looked to, by such men as Schiller, as the coming Lorenzo de’ Medici of Germany. Everything without the circle of nobility was held to be mob; and at most a sort of half recognition was now and then extended as a favor to the professors, though never so far as to admit them with their wives to the houses of the aristocracy. ... in Mayence itself there were a few citizens whose Rhenish light-mindedness had been unwittingly rapt by the political freethinking of the professors. These latter were, indeed, a body by themselves, whose opinions, probably whetted by daily grinding against the world around, were so wholly at variance with its whole creed, that in their compactness they looked like a set of pioneers thrust forward into the enemy’s country in advance of the coming revolution. This circle was the only one which offered Forster any chance of society. The old Jesuit party, which had already declaimed often against the Protestant Johannes von Müller, looked with no friendly eyes on the new librarian; and such was the bigoted feeling fomented against everything that came from him, that his bare proposal to sell the duplicate copies of books was met by the cry that desecration was threatening the work of the fathers, every single book gathered by whom deserved being treasured as a relique. In truth, as far as public enterprise was concerned, there was nothing gained by change from Poland; for the Elector and his Court, like a host of locusts, ate up the wealth of the land in their lavish luxury, while the jealous ill-will of the Jesuit swarms stifled every undertaking which smacked of enlightenment or free thought. Mayence, therefore, had no resources beyond the society of a few friends, foremost amongst whom was Sömmering, and its position in the heart of Germany. The neighborhood of Düsseldorf reawakened the intimacy with Jacobi, which had slacked in distant Poland, while the literary activity of Heyne spurred Forster to share it by becoming a regular contributor to the “Göttingen Advertiser,” and the kindly old man’s fatherly love filled that gap in his heart which had been made by his wilful sire’s estrangement. ... "

"The family-ghost, poverty, showed itself in the household as soon as its tent had been pitched on the banks of the Rhine. Although he had been urged by the Elector to give lessons in natural history, the best of reasons stayed his doing so—for no pupils were to be found; and his duties as librarian were easy, since the fifteen thousand works which formed the boasted fifty thousand volumes of the library, were stowed away in a lumber-room beyond reach or use. ... The family-ghost, poverty, showed itself in the household as soon as its tent had been pitched on the banks of the Rhine. Although he had been urged by the Elector to give lessons in natural history, the best of reasons stayed his doing so—for no pupils were to be found; and his duties as librarian were easy, since the fifteen thousand works which formed the boasted fifty thousand volumes of the library, were stowed away in a lumber-room beyond reach or use. A private pupil—a certain Mr. Thomas Brand—was the only pecuniary advantage brought by the journey, beyond a crowd of vivid impressions; for he had seen the two chief events on which the attention of Europe was fastened. In England he had attended Warren Hastings’s trial, where he had heard and beheld all the oratory and the genius of the country; while in Paris he had looked on the pageantry of its strange liberty, in the enthusiastic preparations for the great feast of the Champs de Mars. The result he gave to the world in his “Views of the Rhine and Brabant;” a work which, written in the gloomiest period of his life, is a masterpiece of racy writing, both as regards clearness of wording as well as the ease with which an array of deep thought is marshalled. “I tell you I hold your ‘Views’ to be one of the best books in our language,” is the opinion pronounced by Lichtenberg."

" ... Huber appeared, on the occasion of these embarrassments, as the beam that propped the tumbling homestead; for while his simpering feeling had a charm for Theresa under the circumstances of her situation, he not only actually helped Forster in the toils of translation, but, from his many connections with leading publishers and literary journals, was enabled to be in many ways of real service to him. It was, therefore, in that state of inner strife which is brought about by want of happiness, that during her husband’s absence the wife was, as it were, thrust to rest herself in Huber, who naturally redoubled his nursing care, sanctioned, as it was, by Forster’s knowledge thereof; while, on the other hand, Theresa’s undisturbed attention fastened itself more and more on his devotion until it came out to her sight in striking relief against the dim canvas of household disappointment. Thus Forster returned from England after failure in his hopes, while the irresistible temptations of books and charts had largely added to the heavy outlay of his journey, to find that he had lost the greatest blessing of his life,—the peace of a loving home. ... Forster shrouded the barrenness of his home from every one, fighting, with a brave heart, the throng of his painful disappointments and the ever-growing load of poverty and debt. ... "

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"The household was not the only thing which had changed: time had borne Mayence itself along with it. The great world-drama in France was progressing in its mighty working; and all Europe was watching it, some with hearty sympathy, others with hatred and fear. The Elector and his pampered courtiers, too rotten at heart to be quickened into a manly outburst of hate, kept shooting from over their cups a shower of wit-bolts at King Mob. Soon a throng of noble exiles began to crowd the neighborhood of the Rhine, who loved rather to eat goodly messes in other men’s homes than to try to save their own; and great was the soul’s delight of the Electoral Court that chance should allow them to fawn in daily intimacy on so high and illustrious a brood. The town and country were literally overrun by boastful runaways, in pandering to whose whims it was felt to be an honor to squander the exchequer; and the general ill-will at these newcomers, which was powerfully fomented in the first instance by the dearness of food, was heightened into exasperation by the swaggering effrontery of their behavior. While every branch of the administration was neglected and its hardworking servants were being starved, every fund and resource of the country was drained to its uttermost farthing that the Electoral Court might not be stinted in its pomp. The Prince de Condé was splendidly lodged, with his mistress, the Princesse de Monaco, in the Episcopal Palace of Worms, which belonged to the Elector; and on Comte d’Artois’ visit to Mayence, his private household was defrayed by the impoverished principality at a daily cost of £200. Wherever money could be found, it was laid hold of by the clutches of the pilfering Court; and thus about a million of florins, which belonged to the University, out of the sale of church lands, were swallowed up in gormandizing and riot. ... Meanwhile the tide of German politics was rising, and rapidly bearing away the little princes who were unguardedly disporting themselves in its heavy swell. There was a mighty plotting of statecraft going on between Austria and Prussia; and the Elector of Mayence was puffed up and full of importance, for he had been admitted to look on in that innermost closet where the secretest designs were being concocted by wily heads, too glad to buy with a little flattery a cat’s-paw willing to pick for them the burning brands out of the fire. As he found his old ministers too awkward to handle such nice devices, he procured from Vienna Baron Albini as a master in statesmanship, and bestowing on him the title of Grand Chancellor, with a salary befitting his high dignity, he trustfully had himself launched, under his steering, upon the sea of political machination. The first fruits of such superior guidance was the glorious honor of holding Liège at a cost of three millions of florins, as a conqueror, with the Mayence army, as soon as the two heads of the empire decided that German troops should quash the revolutionary movement in that bishopric. This army was of a piece with the whole fabric of the State; for while it barely counted three thousand ill-appointed and worse-fed soldiers, its army list counted no less than twelve noble and richly paid generals. But when the coronation of the new Emperor Francis had come off at Frankfort, which the Elector, of course, attended with the pomp and state befitting his high rank, then it was that the flock of princely brains there assembled and laboring in the birth-throes of subtlest State thought, accepted the invitation to the hospitable retreat of Mayence as best suited to their deep councillings; and its sovereign gloated with delight at seeing himself the pivot around which the princes of Europe moved. Never had anything been beheld like the endless changes of dazzling revelry which followed on each other during the stay of princes and statesmen, so that it was a wonder at what time they snatched bare minutes for those cunning designs which it was whispered were being woven in a poor hut, away from din and distraction, on the shrouded islet of Weissanau. At last the high-born wiseacres were delivered, and the printing-presses of the Court published the Duke of Brunswick’s famous manifesto. “These are the men whose measures one is told to approve of,” Forster exclaimed. “That man is happy who has found a nook whence he can quietly look on the mad turmoil.”

"The French Revolution could not otherwise than powerfully interest one who was so alive to the welfare and doings of his fellow-beings. His letters to Heyne show how closely he watched its course, and that, keenly aware of its blemishes, he yet ever felt such sympathy for its struggles that he would become quite enraged at the fashion of overlooking its world-meaning in the flippant judgments currently passed upon it after flurried glances at some of its wild incidents. ... "

" ... Heyne, whose thoroughly humane feeling was being constantly shocked by the wanton temper of German aristocracy, but whose character partook of a certain painful caution, kept hovering about his outspoken son-in-law with timid hints and prudent counsels. ... Already, while Forster was writing his “Views,” Heyne had given vent to his fears as to how he would treat the political and religious considerations which would be suggested by the events of the countries he described, and Forster had felt so discouraged by his exceeding timidity, that he had given himself much trouble to explain away the meaning of his warnings. Soon after this, however, he was thrown into a mightier fit of alarm, on hearing that his son-in-law was translating a work of Brissot’s, of which he had written a review for the “Göttingen Advertiser,” in language which had attracted such attention that the name of its author had been repeatedly asked. In the trouble of his mind he posted off a letter of earnest warning as to the consequences likely to ensue from so rash an undertaking, when Forster answered as follows:—

"“I am not translating Brissot, and never thought of doing so. There is as much aristocratizing going on in my house as there is spoken on the other side; and as for myself, I certainly belong as little to the enragés of the one party as of the other. It is this very fairness which is hateful to all the fools and rogues who have espoused a party…. How should I tumble on the thought of wishing to preach an overthrow which I myself do not desire, but rather hold to be so great a mishap for Germany, that I make every effort to ward it off, and on this account chiefly blame all the lying reviewers, who only embitter the public by their partiality, inasmuch as they give themselves the appearance as if it must needs trust them on their word…. I can remain silent, but I cannot write against my insight and conviction.”"

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"His literary labors at this period brought his latterly somewhat forgotten name with fresh vividness to the memory of the general public. Besides his “Views,” which he wrote in such sunny moments as he could snatch, he translated the Sanscrit drama, “Sacontala,” from Sir W. Jones’s English version. This glowing flower, picked from the tropical garden of Indian poetry, excited such intense interest in Germany, that Goethe, in an epigram, styled it the embodiment of all beauty. ... In vain he would recur to his proposed work on the “Botany of the South Sea,” for which, when last in England, he had launched into the outlay of having the drawings colored by skilled artists: there was no one who would pay for the work. “I could find a publisher in Germany, but none who would pay me. Fruitlessly do I look about me for a Mæcenas amongst our magnates and princes, who would pay with a couple of hundred louis for being paraded in a dedication as the protector of the work, and becoming immortal in the world of science.” Soon after these sad bewailings, in a letter written late in 1791, it was the mockery of his lot, that just when they were too late, two chances were thrown to him, which a little earlier might have proved the cables of his rescue from shipwreck. Prospects of enlarged activity were opened to him in Mayence by the sudden decision of the Elector to assign the Jesuit church to the library, while on the death of the Professor of Natural History, his salary was added to Forster’s pay. On the other hand, a man of the highest standing and name, unexpectedly put himself in friendly communication with him. Amongst his literary jobs, he had received from the well-known Berlin publisher, Voss, the commission to write an account of the events of 1790, with an especial view to the part played in them by the Prussian statesman, Herzberg, between whom and Pitt he wished a parallel to be drawn. Herzberg, the old minister of Frederick the Great, and at that moment pretty much out of favor at the Court of his successor, felt himself too much interested in this work not to wish that an account bearing the name of such an author and publisher should be trustworthy. He wrote Forster a letter, marked by honorable esteem, in which, after sending him some printed documents, he offered, if the manuscript were communicated to him, to look through it, and see that its statements were historically true, “as the King had positively forbidden him to make known a collection of State Papers he had prepared, and which would have thrown much light on these events.” Forster thankfully accepted the offer; and Herzberg expressed himself highly satisfied with his exposition of his ministry. Before this business had, however, gone thus far, Mayence had been occupied by the French, and Forster had embarked in the new state-vessel, as he thought, beyond possibility of an honorable return. Herzberg wrote him, through Voss, a letter in which he expressed his hope that Forster would continue a well-intentioned Prussian, and accompanied it not only with a batch of books having reference to the history of the said times, but also with the silver medal of the Berlin Academy (of which Forster was a member and Herzberg curator), and sent him a considerable sum of money. It is plain that the statesman, who knew of Forster’s embarrassed circumstances, thought that he might by these means save a man, whose worth and abilities he had learnt to know, from following a path which he believed would lead to his destruction. ... "

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" ... Custine had suddenly passed the Rhine at Spiers, and was in full march on Mayence, having thoroughly beaten the Electoral troops under Colonel Winkelmann, an officer of such excellent sentiments that the bare words of freedom and the rights of man were enough to send him into a fit of raving. It was as if a pack of wild beasts had been suddenly let loose on a tea-party; the whole nobility of Mayence thought of nothing but to snatch up as much of their wealth as they could carry, and betake themselves with it beyond the Rhine. It was an endless bustle and trooping by day and night across the bridge and through the town gates: laden skiffs covered the river, and the roads were blocked with every sort of cart and wagon; while runaways on foot and horse hurried along in selfish haste to their hiding-places, thoughtless of all but their own safety. It is said that two hundred thousand florins were spent in means of transport out of the town in these few days. The Elector scurried into the town, to take a glimpse at it, but left it again secretly, after dark, on the day of his arrival, in well-closed chariots, with his mistress and his jewels, having first seen that his arms were well erased from his carriage-panels, after which he bethought himself of duly naming Chancellor Albini as Regent. The treasures of the churches were also packed up and got safely out of the town; and then the High Chancellor called the burghers (in truth, the only inhabitants who remained) to a meeting, at which he urged them not to lose courage, but, abiding by the town, to defend it to the last, and, addressing them as his brethren, read a proclamation, forbidding flight and removal of goods, on pain of severest punishment. The fraternal title, we are told, so dumfoundered the burgher brains, that a rough journeyman unwittingly gave vent to his astonishment by a thundering rap of his big fist on the table, accompanied by a monstrous oath; when, just as brotherly affection was about to make them all strike into that stream of bravery let loose by the Chancellor, an ill-timed meddler dashed this flow of mind by the shout that their most gracious brother, the Chancellor, in his heavily laden chariot, had just safely passed the gates. His Excellency General von Gymnich, Master-General of the Ordnance, swore loudly he would defend the town to his last shirt; and truly endless was the clatter and the bustle of warlike preparations during the next few days. ... Now and then a bit of news would come how Custine had advanced another march; and once the sight of a cloud of dust sent such a thrill of fear through the town, that the garrison nearly crushed itself to atoms in scampering across the bridge on the Rhine; until, on the 19th of October, the French arrived bodily under the walls of Mayence, and summoned the town to surrender; when General von Gymnich gathered his splendidly clad brother generals about him, amongst them the Elector’s relative, Count Hatzfeldt, to consider in council whether they should desert or defend the town. To desert was the decision they quickly came to; so, having bargained that each officer should be allowed to take away a horse out of the Elector’s stable, while he himself received six famous cream-colored steeds, his Excellency-in-Chief rode over to the opposite bank with the proud bearing of one who had worthily taken care of his master’s dearest interests; and, having received each officer’s pledge to restore his animal to its owner, he hastened to present himself, his horses, and his report, at Erfurt, whither his sovereign had retired.

"It was no wish to abet French conquest which made Forster remain in Mayence. His post was there; the world without was all strange to him, and offered him no home which he could make for in these troubles; and while his duty and his interests both told him to stay, his generous mind was, moreover, deeply shocked at the selfishness of the higher classes, and of every one connected with the Government. The very last act of the Elector was to pilfer and bear away with him the saving fund of widows and orphans, so that Forster could well exclaim, “The last quivering of despotism is one more piece of unrighteousness, which calls to Heaven for vengeance.” He determined, therefore, to abide events,—a resolve in which he was strengthened at the time by Theresa’s good cheer and encouragement. ... from being his fellow-professors’ champion for their dues and rights, he came to have to do with the equitable allotment of the demands of the French Commissariat, until step by step he was drawn into being the heart and soul of the new administration, and, on the appointment of a provisional government, allowed himself to be named one of its nine members. ... "

"This step was final; it tore almost all his ties of friendship; and even Sömmering was so overcome with fear and horror, that, turning away from one who loved him so dearly, he henceforth would have no further knowledge of him. Traitor and low designer were the names showered upon him; and the Duke of Brunswick’s remark, on hearing of Forster’s doings, was astonishment that one who had so many means of earning a livelihood should have sought a rebel’s calling! Yet if Forster proved wrong in his political belief, he shared his mistake with many keen thinkers; for even the shrewd Johannes von Müller, initiated as he was into all the springs and workings of German statecraft, gave it as his opinion, on a hasty visit to Mayence for matters of private business (where he was beset by hundreds of doubtful burghers seeking to steady their minds by the wisdom of so deep an oracle), that under the circumstances they would do best to rally round the republican Government. In the midst of the bustle of convening the assembly which was to decide whether Mayence would become independent or not, affairs without the walls grew dark and threatening."

" ... It was in the turmoil of such troubled times, when every day the look-out became more and more threatening, that he determined Theresa should no longer encounter the risks of his lot. She had been entirely deprived of society by the universal emigration (Huber, as Saxon agent, had been forced to leave the town), and hardships which would formerly have excited her romantic temper, now only tended to depress it; so it was decided that Thomas Brand, the English pupil, should take her to Strasburg, where she was to reside with good Jacobin friends of her husband. Thus was the knot of Forster’s marriage noiselessly untied, although it is certain that neither husband nor wife was fully aware that they were then unloosening it so completely forever. Much deep and earnest thought had Forster held within himself as to what it was his honest duty to do for his wife’s happiness; that secret about Huber weighed upon him, in spite of his philosophy; yet, seeing himself and the ship of his household becoming more and more engulfed in an eddy, he wished to see his wife at least landed beyond its reach; and thus this severing was, in truth, a renunciation on his part. Huber soon after vowed that as long as he lived Theresa should never suffer want, and, forsaking his diplomatic calling,—advancement in which was barred by his well-known friendship for the Jacobins,—he went to Switzerland, whither she had gone from Strasburg with her children. Strange to say, a happier and a better understanding between all three was the immediate result of this unwonted settlement. ... "

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" ... he was made to travel through the country districts, as Government Commissioner, to watch the elections of deputies for the Constituent Assembly of Mayence,—an office which brought him into collision with the nobles on their estates. The Union was voted at once, when Forster, with two other citizens, was sent to bear to the Convention the decree which he himself had drawn up. So little did he foresee, in the eagerness of that hour, how events were upon the point of turning, that he expected to be back before the end of three weeks, and even neglected to take any care for his books and papers. On the 30th of March he was admitted to the bar of the Convention, where he was received with the enthusiastic cheers of that France to which he was sent as the spokesman of its new brethren, although one short week was sufficient to prove how unstable and tottering was the Union he heralded.

"The allied armies had crossed the Rhine the day before Forster’s departure, and since then had advanced upon the town, so as to invest it completely. Under such circumstances, return was for the present out of the question; so to shift for himself as he best could in the heaving surf of Paris, on the pittance of eighteen assignat livres a day, was all the look-out left to him, and he tried to make it as cheery a one as good-will would allow. A large world suited Forster’s temper; the many shiftings of his early life had given him habits of largeness, and there was in the nature of Paris and its world-movement abundance to fasten and powerfully interest the peculiar tastes of his mind. Moreover, he came thither with a lively trust and belief in the great Revolution, which the excitement of partisanship had worked up into passionate liking; and yet the first impression of what he saw, when he began to sift and order the crush of sight which thronged on him, was disappointment, which, in spite of himself, stole with clammy chill over his boiling enthusiasm. He saw the ugly underworkings of parties and of party-chiefs, and his gossamer visions threatened absolutely to fade away at the strong glare of Paris light. “The only thing still wanting, after all I have suffered of late, is to have the conviction forced on me, that I have offered up my best strength to a monster, and have worked with honest zeal for a cause with which no one else will work honestly, and which is a cloak for the maddest passions.” Forster’s political faith, and keen glance into the workings of men and times, were, however, far too steady to be shaken or blinded by any sudden gust. He had become enamored of the Revolution for herself; and through the throng of low suitors who had jostled and dragged her along into the filth of their debaucheries, his eye, disregarding the harlotry of foisted fashion, dwelt ever lovingly on the beauty with which she had been born. Thus, while goaded to despair by the excesses and horrors of the violent party, he yet proclaimed himself a Jacobin, because he saw in extreme measures the State’s only safeguard against a return of old abuses. “I do not deny that the men of the Mountain often show themselves from a disadvantageous and impolitic side; but they seem withal to be freer from prejudice than the others, and, beyond doubt, they have more power and decision.” Thus Forster remained true to his convictions,—for with him they were the clear light of belief, which no chance storm could lastingly trouble, for he knew that, in the heaven of his world, certain seasons must have passing storms, and that the big darkness was but the shadow which must come along with the mighty lightning that would clear the firmament. ... "

" ... Affairs in Mayence grew daily worse; for not only were a hundred ducats put upon his outlawed head, about which he could afford to joke from his Paris garret, but what was infinitely more alarming, a thorough rain of shells and cannon-balls had been hurled upon the town, great part of which, and especially of his own neighborhood, had been burned; while, even if his house escaped destruction, there was small chance that he would be able to recover his papers, which he had so thoughtlessly forgotten to stow away. Without his papers he was like a palsied man pilfered of his crutches; for his hopes of active employment in the service of France did not wear a promising look. All France was then bustling about Paris and the office haunts of the ministers; and unless a man had big shoulders, and a strong will to make others afraid of him, there was small likelihood for his luck in picking up anything. Lebrun, Minister of Foreign Affairs, had indeed received him in a friendly manner, and he had the justest claims on the State for whose benefit he had risked and lost his all; yet, if such hopes were worth aught, their value was as yet to come, and so far not even in sight."

"He thought of studying Eastern languages, and of going to India for some years.

"“If I could only scrape together £400 or £500, and were it only £300, I would learn Persian and Arabic, and go overland to India to gather new experience, and besides make my fortune as a physician in a few years. Wholly new objects, foreign sights, movement, occupation, discomfort, and even danger,—all this together, with the consciousness that I am busy in the enjoyment and pursuit of such human work as suits my powers, knowledge, and taste, must infallibly prove healing balm to my wounded feelings. I might stay away from four to six years, or still longer, and then return not yet too old to enjoy the end of my days in my children’s arms; while, finding them happy, I should bring back to you a friend thankful for the fulfilment of your motherly duties.”"

"At times Lebrun threw out a sign which buoyed up his hope, and made him look nearer home than India for a beam whereon to float from drowning; until at last, in October, he really was named a French envoy, and was sent to Cambrai to negotiate an exchange of prisoners with the allied generals. On the very day of his appointment, the Angel of Blood had passed close by him with his sword. Lux, one of his two fellow-deputies from Mayence, and who had been the comrade of all his Paris penury, had been arrested that morning to be dragged before the revolutionary tribunal. The poor youth, crazed with admiration of Charlotte Corday’s heroism, had loudly said that he would hold it as his highest honor to be doomed to share her death, and wrote an apotheosis of her, in which he proposed that a statue should be erected to her as greater than Brutus. ... "

" ... Theresa was staying at Neufchâtel, which, being under Prussian supremacy, was forbidden ground to the outlaw. Yet for her to come over into France was even more dangerous than for Forster to break the decree of the Convention, which forbade any one to cross the boundaries without the Government’s express permission. The first petty police-officer might cheaply show his zeal by laying hold of her as a skulking emigrant; while Huber, as an enemy’s subject, could never be admitted.

"About the middle of October, being at last relieved from his diplomatic functions, Forster moved heaven and earth in Paris to be able to obtain his wishes. It was resolved that Theresa should come with Huber to Travers, a poor village in the Jura, a few miles from the French frontier, whither Forster was to cross from Pontarlier. He obtained a loan of one thousand livres from an old Mayence friend. He reckoned on his official character to overcome any difficulties on the frontier, while he hoped to shield himself against the penalty of death which was attached to the transport of coin out of the country, by bringing back a paper in Huber’s possession, which, written by Clermont Tonnerre, contained matters of high importance about General Luckner’s supposed treason, and which, if subjected to inquiry, Forster would pretend to have been bought with the money he had, in truth, carried to his children. At last the arrangements were ready, and early in November he left Paris for Pontarlier. The chief of the frontier post proved a friendly man, who willingly agreed to help him as far as he could; so, riding across the snowy ridges of the Jura, he reached unobserved the appointed hamlet on a November morning. ... "

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"“But a few lines from my bed of pain, that my darlings be not without tidings. ... You will understand that I can do no work. I can only save myself. I cannot continue this scrawl,—therefore, only be without anxiety. I beg of you, dear Huber, take care that our Theresa does not create herself any fancies. It is true that I am very and painfully ill; but once more—there is no danger. Your letters, my dear child, which I have all received, have been a dear gift to me in my illness; be sure to continue writing assiduously! We have everywhere been victorious like lions; the Frankfort call has been full of augury. I am curious to learn how public spirit will express itself on the other side of the Rhine, now that the truth of the news is undoubted. Is it not true, my children—a few words are better than nothing? I have no more strength to write. Farewell! Guard yourselves against illness,—kiss my darlings.”"

" ... at five o’clock in the afternoon of the 12th January, 1794, the brave soul breathed its last."

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" ... So forsaken was the end of one who had begun life so dazzlingly. Hardly a word was spoken about his death; and if so, then was it mostly a curse, for pity was barely dared to be whispered. Sömmering, peevish and fretting at the chattels he had lost during the Mayence outbreak, started back from the very name of Forster as from the Evil One. Lichtenberg timidly bewailed that his married state imposed caution, so that all he could afford to do for his friend’s memory was to think freely of him. Jacobi’s delicate nature did not mingle in the low choir of hooters, but still he stood silently aloof; and, most shocking of all, the old father at Halle, in the mad frenzy of hoary age, belched forth a yell of outrage against his George, to have seen whom swing on the gallows he declared would have been the closing pleasure of his life. One man alone dared to weep openly for him, and tenderly he wept over his loss,—kindly old Heyne, who, in the fulness of his honest heart, cast aside all his caution and regard for consequences, to let its sorrow pour itself forth.

"“Since yesterday’s news, which has altogether confounded me” (he wrote to Huber on the 31st of January), “I cannot collect my thoughts. I cannot console myself for the loss of my Forster. Truly was he my Forster. I loved him beyond expression; so many feelings were mingled in him. His worth—ah! he will never be replaced for the world. The knowledge that was gathered in him will not soon again be found in one man. The noblest nature—the noblest heart; and for me ever the object of sorrow, of pity. I always thought of him with emotion; he deserved to be happy more than thousand others, and yet was never so,—was so deeply unhappy! It is as yet impossible for me to think that I am never to see him again! I shall never be able to forget him; always will he float before my eyes,—thou noblest, best man! What would I give for one hour which I might have conversed with him! Rest in peace, my dear, my cherished Forster!”

"The man who had borne the name of Germany all over the world, whose writings were amongst the masterpieces of its language, whose feelings were so true and whose thought so national, that he first coined a thorough German word for public spirit (gemeingeist),—that man’s memory was tracked and hunted down as of the vilest traitor; so that, nearly forty years after his death, his wife did not dare to publish his letters without prefixing an apology. Four months after Forster’s death Theresa and Huber were married, and the remainder of their lives was at least happy and contented."

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September 28, 2021 - September 28, 2021.

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Leaves from a Note-Book

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One has to wonder if this was meant to be the second half of From the Note-Book of an Eccentric, and other pieces weren't really a part thereof; but it could be either way.

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"Authorship.

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"To lay down in the shape of practical moral rules courses of conduct only to be made real by the rarest states of motive and disposition, tends not to elevate, but to degrade the general standard, by turning that rare attainment from an object of admiration into an impossible prescription, against which the average nature first rebels and then flings out ridicule. It is for art to present images of a lovelier order than the actual, gently winning the affections, and so determining the taste. But in any rational criticism of the time which is meant to guide a practical reform, it is idle to insist that action ought to be this or that, without considering how far the outward conditions of such change are present, even supposing the inward disposition towards it. Practically, we must be satisfied to aim at something short of perfection—and at something very much further off it in one case than in another. While the fundamental conceptions of morality seem as stationary through ages as the laws of life, so that a moral manual written eighteen centuries ago still admonishes us that we are low in our attainments, it is quite otherwise with the degree to which moral conceptions have penetrated the various forms of social activity, and made what may be called the special conscience of each calling, art, or industry. ... "

"moral manual written eighteen centuries ago"?? Wasn't crossing over from Egypt far older? Or does George Eliot consider her people perfect about following ten commandments?

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Seriously, was she German?

"Among those callings which have not yet acquired anything near a full-grown conscience in the public mind is Authorship. Yet the changes brought about by the spread of instruction and the consequent struggles of an uneasy ambition, are, or at least might well be, forcing on many minds the need of some regulating principle with regard to the publication of intellectual products, which would override the rule of the market: a principle, that is, which should be derived from a fixing of the author’s vocation according to those characteristics in which it differs from the other bread-winning professions. Let this be done, if possible, without any cant, which would carry the subject into Utopia, away from existing needs. The guidance wanted is a clear notion of what should justify men and women in assuming public authorship, and of the way in which they should be determined by what is usually called success. But the forms of authorship must be distinguished; journalism, for example, carrying a necessity for that continuous production which in other kinds of writing is precisely the evil to be fought against, and judicious careful compilation, which is a great public service, holding in its modest diligence a guarantee against those deductions of vanity and idleness which draw many a young gentleman into reviewing, instead of the sorting and copying which his small talents could not rise to with any vigor and completeness."

It's not about the specific criteria she sets out, it's about the notion of society, state, setting out rules of authorship!

In Germany, we were told we cannot call ourselves Dr without permission of the government. Our doctorates, from reputed universities in U.S., we're of no consequence whatsoever. We responded say I g those laws don't apply to non citizens. But then we found out that not only setting up any trade - baking bread at home for sale, tailoring, ... required a government licence in Germany, it required a vocational school course certificate; and as to flying a small plane, you needed such rigmarole to go through to ride in one, not just flying one.

And here George Eliot suggests controlling authors!

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"A manufacturer goes on producing calicoes as long and as fast as he can find a market for them; and in obeying this indication of demand he gives his factory its utmost usefulness to the world in general and to himself in particular. Another manufacturer buys a new invention of some light kind likely to attract the public fancy, is successful in finding a multitude who will give their testers for the transiently desirable commodity, and before the fashion is out, pockets a considerable sum: the commodity was colored with a green which had arsenic in it that damaged the factory workers and the purchasers. What then? These, he contends (or does not know or care to contend), are superficial effects, which it is folly to dwell upon while we have epidemic diseases and bad government.

"The first manufacturer we will suppose blameless. Is an author simply on a par with him, as to the rules of production?"

When George Eliot prescribes control, she doesn't see the problems resulting, from authors - or anyone speaking against government- being sent to concentration camps by nazis, to their being sent to Siberia by another regime, to their being murdered and never heard of again, by yet others. Simplest was the complex network in U.S., "a free country", described by Upton Sinclair in his various works, including The Brass Check.

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" ... The calico scarcely varies in appropriateness of quality, no consumer is in danger of getting too much of it, and neglecting his boots, hats, and flannel shirts in consequence. That there should be large quantities of the same sort in the calico manufacture is an advantage: the sameness is desirable, and nobody is likely to roll his person in so many folds of calico as to become a mere bale of cotton goods, and nullify his senses of hearing and touch, while his morbid passion for Manchester shirtings makes him still cry “More!” The wise manufacturer gets richer and richer, and the consumers he supplies have their real wants satisfied and no more."

George Eliot never thought of fashion industry, artificially raised prices of - not calico, but - synthetic fabrics, and bullying if female customers in West, to buy tons of "season's fashion" and discard them next season, all ruinous for pockets, especially of women; all this, before accessories and cosmetics!

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"For a man who has a certain gift of writing to say, “I will make the most of it while the public likes my wares, as long as the market is open and I am able to supply it at a money profit—such profit being the sign of liking”—he should have a belief that his wares have nothing akin to the arsenic green in them, and also that his continuous supply is secure from a degradation in quality which the habit of consumption encouraged in the buyers may hinder them from marking their sense of by rejection; so that they complain, but pay, and read while they complain. Unless he has that belief, he is on a level with the manufacturer who gets rich by fancy-wares colored with arsenic green. He really cares for nothing but his income. He carries on authorship on the principle of the gin-palace."

Not only prohibition of alcohol has never succeeded, but even tobacco isn't banned yet, it's only smoking in public that's banned in most of West; one should see Westerners smoking arrogantly across Asia, even in airports, despite bans! Then there are cigarette sales outside schools, and police protecting them from protesters, in South East Asia - getting children of countrues other than U.S. addicted early. Afghanistan farmers were discouraged from sowing food crops, encouraged to sow opium crops, during two decades of Western occupation - just as British did to India. And we haven't discussed HFCS yet, which not only us addictive, but damages body; no legislation to ban it has even been thought of, it proliferated through U.S. almost unavoidable via all processed food including most bread, and of course, all "cola"s. Dieting industry benefits, as does medical industry.

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"It is in the highest sense lawful for him to get as good a price as he honorably can for the best work he is capable of; but not for him to force or hurry his production, or even do over again what has already been done, either by himself or others, so as to render his work no real contribution, for the sake of bringing up his income to the fancy pitch. An author who would keep a pure and noble conscience, and with that a developing instead of degenerating intellect and taste, must cast out of his aims the aim to be rich. And therefore he must keep his expenditure low—he must make for himself no dire necessity to earn sums in order to pay bills."

So says George Eliot with a severe piety, and yet, she proclaims rights of Anglican invasions around the world in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, as a heaven sanctioned right, to loot and massacre others, to chop off hands of weavers in India so British can sell substandard manufactured cloth of Britain to India, to starve millions of Indians to death by stealing India's harvest, and yes, to war against China to force China to buy opium from Brits so Chinese can get addicted. And if India or China don't want any of it, George Eliot thumps her fist and glories with satisfaction about having punished them.

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"But after the restraints and rules which must guide the acknowledged author, whose power of making a real contribution is ascertained, comes the consideration, how or on what principle are we to find a check for that troublesome disposition to authorship arising from the spread of what is called Education, which turns a growing rush of vanity and ambition into this current? The well-taught, an increasing number, are almost all able to write essays on given themes, which demand new periodicals to save them from lying in cold obstruction. The ill-taught—also an increasing number—read many books, seem to themselves able to write others surprisingly like what they read, and probably superior, since the variations are such as please their own fancy, and such as they would have recommended to their favorite authors: these ill-taught persons are perhaps idle and want to give themselves “an object;” or they are short of money, and feel disinclined to get it by a commoner kind of work; or they find a facility in putting sentences together which gives them more than a suspicion that they have genius, which, if not very cordially believed in by private confidants, will be recognized by an impartial public; or, finally, they observe that writing is sometimes well paid, and sometimes a ground of fame or distinction, and without any use of punctilious logic, they conclude to become writers themselves."

Did she ever think of looking at a mirror, as she wrote that?

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Judgments on Authors.

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"In endeavoring to estimate a remarkable writer who aimed at more than temporary influence, we have first to consider what was his individual contribution to the spiritual wealth of mankind? Had he a new conception? Did he animate long-known but neglected truths with new vigor, and cast fresh light on their relation to other admitted truths? Did he impregnate any ideas with a fresh store of emotion, and in this way enlarge the area of moral sentiment? Did he, by a wise emphasis here, and a wise disregard there, give a more useful or beautiful proportion to aims or motives? And even where his thinking was most mixed with the sort of mistake which is obvious to the majority, as well as that which can only be discerned by the instructed, or made manifest by the progress of things, has it that salt of a noble enthusiasm which should rebuke our critical discrimination if its correctness is inspired with a less admirable habit of feeling?"

Why not judge them, to begin with, as one would a baker? If it's healthy, attractive, tastes good, good enough. Modern art was born because painters found no takers for good work.

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Story-Telling.

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"What is the best way of telling a story? Since the standard must be the interest of the audience, there must be several or many good ways rather than one best. ... "

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"The modes of telling a story founded on these processes of outward and inward life derive their effectiveness from the superior mastery of images and pictures in grasping the attention—or, one might say with more fundamental accuracy, from the fact that our earliest, strongest impressions, our most intimate convictions, are simply images added to more or less of sensation. These are the primitive instruments of thought. Hence it is not surprising that early poetry took this way—telling a daring deed, a glorious achievement, without caring for what went before. The desire for orderly narration is a later, more reflective birth. The presence of the Jack in the box affects every child: it is the more reflective lad, the miniature philosopher, who wants to know how he got there."

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Historic Imagination.

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"What really took place in and around Constantine before, upon, and immediately after his declared conversion?"

Constantine had no intention of converting; he imposed his will, about monotheism, but the God was Sun, and church accepted - and when he died, they simply claimed he was converted. Such lies go on ever since.

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Value in Originality.

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"The supremacy given in European cultures to the literatures of Greece and Rome has had an effect almost equal to that of a common religion in binding the Western nations together. It is foolish to be forever complaining of the consequent uniformity, as if there were an endless power of originality in the human mind. Great and precious origination must always be comparatively rare, and can only exist on condition of a wide, massive uniformity. When a multitude of men have learned to use the same language in speech and writing, then and then only can the greatest masters of language arise. For in what does their mastery consist? They use words which are already a familiar medium of understanding and sympathy in such a way as greatly to enlarge the understanding and sympathy. Originality of this order changes the wild grasses into world-feeding grain. Idiosyncrasies are pepper and spices of questionable aroma."

Didn't the author pontificate exactly opposite, in 'Authorship'?

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To the Prosaic all Things are Prosaic.

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“Is the time we live in prosaic?” “That depends: it must certainly be prosaic to one whose mind takes a prosaic stand in contemplating it.” “But it is precisely the most poetic minds that most groan over the vulgarity of the present, its degenerate sensibility to beauty, eagerness for materialistic explanation, noisy triviality.” “Perhaps they would have had the same complaint to make about the age of Elizabeth, if, living then, they had fixed their attention on its more sordid elements, or had been subject to the grating influence of its everyday meannesses, and had sought refuge from them in the contemplation of whatever suited their taste in a former age.”

Wordplay?

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“Dear Religious Love”

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"We get our knowledge of perfect Love by glimpses and in fragments chiefly—the rarest only among us knowing what it is to worship and caress, reverence and cherish, divide our bread and mingle our thoughts at one and the same time, under inspiration of the same object. Finest aromas will so often leave the fruits to which they are native and cling elsewhere, leaving the fruit empty of all but its coarser structure!"

That last sentence is telling. Come to think of it, there isn't a love story in all her work.

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We Make our Own Precedents.

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"In the times of national mixture when modern Europe was, as one may say, a-brewing, it was open to a man who did not like to be judged by the Roman law to choose which of certain other codes he would be tried by. So, in our own times, they who openly adopt a higher rule than their neighbors do thereby make act of choice as to the laws and precedents by which they shall be approved or condemned, and thus it may happen that we see a man morally pilloried for a very customary deed, and yet having no right to complain, inasmuch as in his foregoing deliberative course of life he had referred himself to the tribunal of those higher conceptions, before which such a deed is without quetion condemnable."

What about the cheats?

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Birth of Tolerance.

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"Tolerance first comes through equality of struggle, as in the case of Arianism and Catholicism in the early times—Valens, Eastern and Arian, Valentinian, Western and Catholic, alike publishing edicts of tolerance; or it comes from a common need of relief from an oppressive predominance, as when James II. published his Act of Tolerance towards non-Anglicans, being forced into liberality towards the Dissenters by the need to get it for the Catholics. Community of interest is the root of justice; community of suffering, the root of pity; community of joy, the root of love."

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Felix qui non potuit.

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"Many feel themselves very confidently on safe ground when they say: It must be good for man to know the Truth. But it is clearly not good for a particular man to know some particular truth, as irremediable treachery in one whom he cherishes—better that he should die without knowing it.

"Of scientific truth, is it not conceivable that some facts as to the tendency of things affecting the final destination of the race might be more hurtful when they had entered into the human consciousness than they would have been if they had remained purely external in their activity?"

Such as?

Darwin's realisation about evolution?

Bible belt has gone from claiming equality to banning teaching evolution.

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Divine Grace a Real Emanation.

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"There is no such thing as an impotent or neutral deity, if the deity be really believed in, and contemplated either in prayer or meditation. Every object of thought reacts on the mind that conceives it, still more on that which habitually contemplates it. ... "

Reminds one of various internet debates - one, where a Jewish debater balked at importance of perception and claimed idea was important; another where a muslim female questioned why india nade up different Gods, why not just make up one for all purposes!

Are those, or any other monotheistic, really different from atheists? "Idea", "make up gods"???? If that's all there is to it, why bother converting?

As to faith, isn't Perception of Reality the real McCoy?

And while it's widely assumed that monotheism is superior, there's no reason in its support, much less evidence of Reality, on any level.

It's just domination by power of having conquered, massacred, looted. By which logic they can force people to chant "one is two", just as well.

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“A Fine Excess.”

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"Feeling is Energy. One can hardly insist too much, in the present stage of thinking, on the efficacy of feeling in stimulating to ardent co-operation, quite apart from the conviction that such co-operation is needed for the achievement of the end in view. Just as hatred will vent itself in private curses no longer believed to have any potency, and joy, in private singing far out among the woods and fields, so sympathetic feeling can only be satisfied by joining in the action which expresses it, though the added “Bravo!” the added push, the added penny is no more than a grain of dust on a rolling mass."

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September 28, 2021 - September 28, 2021.

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September 26, 2021 - September 29, 2021.

Paperback

Published May 28th 2020

ISBN:- 139798649357333

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Poems

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Poetry by George Eliot.

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Contents

- The Spanish Gypsy. (1868)

- The Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems (1874)

- Miscellaneous Poems

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The Spanish Gypsy. (1868)

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In a page or two, one gets a clue; George Eliot sets out to write about a time of great upheavals in life of Europe and of Spain. She begins by painting beautiful portrayal of Spain, and of the struggle between two religions, before she mentions Columbus. Is that what it's about? Doesn't explain the title though. It takes a while, some dozen or so pages, before one begins to guess - when a soldier reports that it isn't his opinion that the duke is marrying beneath him, it's the padre who says she won't confess - it is about inquisition, and a young bride caught between her heritage and the force of church, apart from racism.

The epic is divided in five books, and the story, the tragedy is not only budding, it's already set, unfolding, by the end of book I.

Book I is the beautiful introduction- of the story, and before that, of the time and space throat the story is set in; it takes us through the characters, main or others, and having established a love story, reveals a secret, and leaves us at a turn at once filled with suspense, sadness, and also relief. Book II takes it from there, a prior intent on breaking up a marriage and burning the bride alive, if she's found; a bridegroom aware of this, yet intent on defying the prior, finding and marrying her, although subconsciously fearing if the friar is right.

Book III is, in more than one sense, heart of the story, with surprise twists; the scene of confrontation between the three representing different elements - proud Gypsy chieftain, Spanish nobility, and she who is young womanhood that's love, life and joy, but is asked to sacrifice for her people.

An interesting detail, is that a poem titled "Roses", included in the Delphi collection of complete works of George Eliot, is an excerpt from Book III.

Book IV brings, not scenes of battle, but aftermath thereof, grief.

Book V is farewell, almost silent - after words of repentance and forgiveness - that makes one wish the author hadn't ended it thus, that it was turned to an embrace of love and a new life. But the two represent their people, and the author is portraying history through them.

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................................................................................................

Book I.

Book II

Book III

Book IV

Book V

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Book I

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"’T is the warm South, where Europe spreads her lands

"Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep:

"Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love

"(A calm earth-goddess crowned with corn and vines)

"On the Mid Sea that moans with memories

"And on the untravelled Ocean whose vast tides

"Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth

"This river, shadowed by the battlements

"And gleaming silvery towards the northern sky,

"Feeds the famed stream that waters

"Andalus And loiters, amorous of the fragrant air,

"By Córdova and Seville to the bay

"Fronting Algarva and the wandering flood

"Of Guadiana. This deep mountain gorge

"Slopes widening on the olive-plumed plains

"Of fair Granáda: one far-stretching arm

"Points to Elvira, one to eastward heights

"Of Alpujarras where the new-bathed Day

"With oriflamme uplifted o’er the peaks

"Saddens the breasts of northward-looking snows

"That loved the night, and soared with soaring stars;

"Flashing the signals of his nearing swiftness

"From Almeria’s purple-shadowed bay

"On to the far-off rooks that gaze and glow—

"On to Alhambra, strong and ruddy heart

"Of glorious Morisma, gasping now,

"A maimed giant in his agony.

"This town that dips its feet within the stream,

"And seems to sit a tower-crowned Cybele,

"Spreading her ample robe adown the rocks.

"Is rich Bedmár: ’t was Moorish long ago,

"But now the Cross is sparkling on the Mosque,

"And bells make Catholic the trembling air.

"The fortress gleams in Spanish sunshine now

"(’T is south a mile before the rays are Moorish),—

"Hereditary jewel, agraffe bright

"On all the many-titled privilege

"Of young Duke Silva. No Castilian knight

"That serves Queen Isabel has higher charge;

"For near this frontier sits the Moorish king,

"Not Boabdil the waverer, who usurps

"A throne he trembles in, and fawning licks

"The feet of conquerors, but that fierce lion

"Grisly El Zagal, who has made his lair

"In Guadix’ fort, and rushing thence with strength,

"Half his own fierceness, half the untainted heart

"Of mountain bands that fight for holiday,

"Wastes the fair lands that lie by Alcala,

"Wreathing his horse’s neck with Christian heads."

................................................................................................

"To keep the Christian frontier—such high trust

"Is young Duke Silva’s; and the time is great.

"(What times are little? To the sentinel

"That hour is regal when he mounts on guard)

"The fifteenth century since the Man Divine

"Taught and was hated in Capernaum

"Is near its end—is falling as a husk

"Away from all the fruit its years have ripened.

"The Moslem faith, now flickering like a torch

"In a night struggle on this shore of Spain,

"Glares, a broad column of advancing flame,

"Along the Danube and the Illyrian shore

"Far into Italy, where eager monks,

"Who watch in dreams and dream the while they watch,

"See Christ grow paler in the baleful light,

"Crying again the cry of the forsaken.

"But faith, the stronger for extremity,

"Becomes prophetic, hears the far-off tread

"Of western chivalry, sees downward sweep

"The archangel Michael with the gleaming sword,

"And listens for the shriek of hurrying fiends

"Chased from their revels in God’s sanctuary.

"So trusts the monk, and lifts appealing eyes

"To the high dome, the Church’s firmament,

"Where the blue light-pierced curtain, rolled away,

"Reveals the throne and Him who sits thereon.

"So trust the men whose best hope for the world

"Is ever that, the world is near its end:

"Impatient of the stars that keep their course

"And make ho pathway for the coming Judge."

................................................................................................

"But other futures stir the world’s great heart

"Europe is come to her majority,

"And enters on the vast inheritance

"Won from the tombs of mighty ancestors,

"The seeds, the gold, the gems, the silent harps

"That lay deep buried with the memories

"Of old renown. No more, as once in sunny Avignon,

"The poet-scholar spreads the Homeric page,

"And gazes sadly, like the deaf at song;

"For now the old epic voices ring again

"And vibrate with the beat and melody

"Stirred by the warmth of old Ionian days.

"The martyred sage, the Attic orator,

"Immortally incarnate, like the gods,

"In spiritual bodies, winged words

"Holding a universe impalpable,

"Find a new audience. Forevermore,

"With gander resurrection than was feigned

Gander seems like a mistake; didn't she mean grander?

Now, is this racist?

"Of Attila’s fierce Huns, the soul of Greece

"Conquers the bulk of Persia.

So it's soul of Greece vs bulk of Persia? George Eliot couldn't imagine Persia had a civilisation, a spirit, a soul?

Moreover, she's talking about Islamic forces at war against those of europe; but then, it's Arabic, not Persian! For Persian civilisation and culture, population and language suffered atrocious onslaught from Islamic invasion from Arabs, who massacred people and burnt hundreds of thousands of manuscripts; Persian script was lost and population illiterate in a century.

Which is why India is hated by them - butchering went on for over a millennium, and yet, India's civilisation lives, unlike Persia and Egypt and other lands that were completely converted within a century.

"The maimed form

"Of calmly joyous beauty, marble-limbed,

"Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its lips,

"Looks mild reproach from out its open grave

"At creeds of terror; and the vine-wreathed god

"Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns.

"The soul of man is widening towards the past:

"No longer hanging at the breast of life

"Feeding in blindness to bin parentage,—

"Quenching all wonder with Omnipotence,

"Praising a name with indolent piety—

"He spells the record of his long descent,

"More largely conscious of the life that was."

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"And from the height that shows where morning shone

"On far-off summits pale and gloomy now,

"The horizon widens round him, and the west

"Looks vast with untracked waves whereon his gaze

"Follows the flight of the swift-vanished bird

"That like the sunken sun is mirrored still

"Upon the yearning soul within the eye."

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"And so in Córdova through patient nights

"Columbus watches, or he sails in dreams

"Between the setting stars and finds new day;

"Then wakes again to the old weary days,

"Girds on the cord and frock of pale Saint Francis,

"And like him zealous pleads with foolish men.

"“I ask but for a million maravedis:

"Give me three caravels to find a world."

George Eliot here speaks of Columbus asking to win more worlds for the cross. Were they then unaware about his Jewish roots, and his attempting to find India so as to help several hundred Jews to escape the persecution thereby?

India was, has always been, a refuge from religious persecution that various people experienced elsewhere, with freedom of thought and freedom of worship, and more; until Israel came into being again in 1948, Jews of India, who had been in India for centuries, had had no reason to leave, and many made the choice even then to stay. One of the first acts of the Knesset of Israel was to pass an official resolution thanking India.

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"The sacred places shall be purged again,

"The Turk converted, and the Holy Church,

"Like the mild Virgin with the outspread robe,

"Shall fold all tongues and nations lovingly

"But since God works by armies, who shall be

"The modern Cyrus?"

No purge as such, nor conversion of Turk took place, but Turkey did get carved. George Eliot, however, doesn't see the contradictions there, or did she? When she says "Like the mild Virgin with the outspread robe, Shall fold all tongues and nations lovingly, But since God works by armies" - is she being devout and matter-of-fact, in the way church adherents do when dealing with colonial imperialism or slavery? Or had she discovered her son of God was, in fact, a warrior for freedom of Jews, against Romans?

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"The silver cross Glitters o’er Malaga and streams dread light

"On Moslem galleys, turning all their stores

"From threats to gifts. What Spanish knight is he

"Who, living now, holds it not shame to live

"Apart from that hereditary battle

"Which needs his sword? Castilian gentlemen

"Choose not their task—they choose to do it well."

It's rare indeed for adherents of church to admit openly that the cross is intended as a threat!

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"See now with soldiers in his front and rear

"He winds at evening through the narrow streets

"That toward the Castle gate climb devious:

"His charger, of fine Andalusian stock,

"An Indian beauty black but delicate,

"Is conscious of the herald trumpet note,

"The gathering glances, and familiar ways

"That lead fast homeward: she forgets fatigue,

"And at the light touch of the master’s spur

"Thrills with the zeal to bear him royally,

"Arches her neck and clambers up the stones

"As if disdainful of the difficult steep.

"Night-black the charger, black the rider’s plume,

"But all between is bright with morning hues—

"Seems ivory and gold and deep blue gems,

"And starry flashing steel and pale vermilion,

"All set in jasper: on his surcoat white

"Glitter the sword-belt and the jewelled hilt,

"Red on the back and breast the holy cross,

"And ’twixt the helmet and the soft-spun white

"Thick tawny wavelets like the lion’s mane

"Turn backward from his brow, pale, wide, erect.

"Shadowing blue eyes,—blue as the rain-washed sky

"That braced the early stem of Gothic kings

"He claims for ancestry. A goodly knight,

"A noble caballero, broad of chest

"And long of limb. So much the August sun,

"Now in the west but shooting half its beams

"Past a dark rocky profile toward thy plain,

"At winding opportunities across the slope

"Makes suddenly luminous for all who see:

"For women smiling from the terraced roofs;

"For boys that prone on trucks with head up-propped,

"Lazy and curious, stare irreverent;

For men who make obeisance with degrees

"Of good-will shading towards servility,

Where good-will ends and secret fear begins

"And curses, too, low-muttered through the teeth,

"Explanatory to the God of Shem.

"Five, grouped within a whitened tavern court

"Of Moorish fashion, where the trellised vines

"Purpling above their heads make odorous shade,

"Note through the open door the passers-by,

"Getting some rills of novelty to speed

"The lagging stream of talk and help the wine.

"’T is Christian to drink wine: whoso denies

"His flesh at bidding save of Holy Church,

"Let him beware and take to Christian sins

"Lest he be taxed with Moslem sanctity."

Was it as simple? "’T is Christian to drink wine: whoso denies His flesh at bidding save of Holy Church, Let him beware and take to Christian sins Lest he be taxed with Moslem sanctity."?

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Author describes five men at the tavern, whose conversation carries the tale forward. George Eliot is really good here in that she's writing this epic as play in verse, but the conversation is natural, not stilted, and for this to be achieved when it's not conversation between learned poets, just ordinary men, is no mean feat.

"Like Juan there, the spare man with the lute,

"Who makes you dizzy with his rapid tongue,

"Whirring athwart your mind with comment swift

"On speech you would have finished by and by,

"Shooting your bird for you while you are loading,

"Cheapening your wisdom as a pattern known

"And spun by any shuttle on demand."

"Most like the Fauns that roamed in days of old

"About the listening whispering woods, and shared

"The subtler sense of sylvan ears and eyes

"Undulled by scheming thought, yet joined the rout

"Of men and women on the festal days,

"And played the syrinx too, and knew love’s pains,

"Turning their anguish into melody.

"For Juan was a minstrel still, in times

"When minstrelsy was held a thing outworn.

"Spirits seem buried and their epitaph

"Is writ in Latin by severest pens,

"Yet still they flit above the trodden grave

"And find new bodies, animating them

"In quaint and ghostly way with antique souls.

"So Juan was a troubadour revived,

"Freshening life’s dusty road with babbling rills

"Of wit and song, living ’mid harnessed men

"With limbs ungalled by armour, ready so

"To soothe them weary, and to cheer them sad.

"Guest at the board, companion in the camp,

"A crystal mirror to the life around,

"Flashing the comment keen of simple fact

"Defined in words; lending brief lyric voice

"To grief and sadness; hardly taking note

"Of difference betwixt his own and others’;

"But rather singing as a listener

"To the deep moans, the cries, the wild strong joys

"Of universal Nature, old yet young.

"Such Juan, the third talker, shimmering bright

"As butterfly or bird with quickest life."

................................................................................................

"Host.

"Best treat your wasp with delicate regard;

"When the right moment comes say, “By your leave,’

"Use your heel—so! and make an end of him.

"That’s if we talked of wasps; but our young Duke,—

"Spain holds not a more gallant gentleman.

"Live, live, Duke Silva! ’T is a rare smile he has,

"But seldom seen.

"Juan.

"A true hidalgo’s smile,

"That gives much favor, but beseeches none.

"His smile is sweetened by his gravity:

"It comes like dawn upon Sierra snows,

"Seeming more generous for the coldness gone;

"Breaks from the calm—a sudden opening flower

"On dark deep waters: one moment shrouded close,

"A mystic shrine, the next a full-rayed star,

"Thrilling, pulse-quickening as a living word.

"I’ll make a song of that. Host. Prithee, not now.

"You’ll fall to staring like a wooden saint,

"And wag your head as it were set on wires.

"Here’s fresh sherbet Sit, be good company.

"(To Blasco) You are a stranger, sir, and cannot know

"How our Duke’s nature suits his princely frame.

"Blasco.

"Nay, but I marked his spurs—chased cunningly!

"A duke should know good gold and silver plate;

"Then he will know the quality of mine.

"I’ve ware for tables and for altars too,

"Our Lady in all sizes, crosses, bells:

"He’ll need such weapons full as much as swords

"If he would capture any Moorish town.

"For, let me tell you, when a mosque is cleansed . . .

"Juan.

"The demons fly so thick from sound of bells

"And smell of incense, you may see the air

"Streaked as with smoke. Why, they are spirits:

"You may well think how crowded they must be

"To make a sort of haze."

"Blasco.

"I knew not that.

"Still, they’re of smoky nature, demons are;

"And since you say so—well, it proves the more

"The need of bells and censers. Ay, your Duke

"Sat well: a true hidalgo. I can judge—

"Of harness specially. I saw the camp,

"The royal camp at Velez Malaga.

"’T was like the court of heaven,—such liveries!

"And torches carried by the score at night

"Before the nobles. Sirs, I made a dish

"To set an emerald in would fit a crown,

"For Don Alonzo, lord of Aguilar.

"Your Duke’s no whit behind him in his mien

"Or harness either. But you seem to say

"The people love him not."

"Host.

"They’ve naught against him.

"But certain winds will make men’s temper bad.

"When the Solano blows hot venomed breath,

"It acts upon men’s knives: steel takes to stabbing

"Which else, with cooler winds, were honest steel,

"Cutting but garlick. There’s a wind just now

"Blows right from Seville—"

"Blasco.

"Ay, you mean the wind….

"Yes, yes, a wind that’s rather hot…."

"Juan.

"A wind that suits not with oar townsmen’s blood

"Abram, ’t is said, objected to be scorched,

"And, as the learned Arabs vouch, he gave

"The antipathy, in full to Ishmael.

"’T is true, these patriarchs had their oddities."

This reference to Abraham and Ishmael might be significant, indicating that we are to infer that thereby Arabs have had the secret of keeping cool, which Europe lacks.

Now cones George Eliot's exposing the attitude of general crass public regarding persecution during inquisition.

"Blasco.

"Oddities? I’m of their mind, I know.

"Though, as to Abraham and Ishmael,

"I'm an old Christian, and owe naught to them

"Or any Jew among them. But I know

"We made a stir in Saragossa—we:

"The men of Aragon ring hard,—ttrue metal.

"Sirs, I’m no friend to heresy, but then

"A Christian’s money is not safe. As how?

"A lapsing Jew or any heretic

"May owe me twenty ounces: suddenly

"He’s prisoned, suffers penalties,—’t is well:

"If men will not believe, ’t is good to make them,

"But let the penalties fall on them alone.

"The Jew is stripped, his goods are confiscate;

"Now, where, I pray you, go my twenty ounces?

"God knows, and perhaps the King may, but not I.

"And more, my son may lose his young wife’s dower

"Because ’t was promised since her father’s soul

"Fell to wrong thinking. How was I to know?

"I could but use my sense and cross myself.

"Christian is Christian—I give in,—but still

"Taxing is taxing, though you call it holy.

"We Saragossans liked not this new tax

"They call the—nonsense, I’m from Aragon!

"I speak too bluntly. But, for Holy Church,

"No man believes more."

There was no sympathy for those persecuted, only an annoyance about not getting ones dues! Hence the power amassed by those who would persecute, torture and kill - no opposition. And heres clearer depiction of the onlookers, not averse to watching such procedures, and asserting their sympathy with the inquisitors.

"I speak my mind about the penalties, But, look you,

"I’m against assassination. You know my meaning—

"Master Arbuès, The grand Inquisitor in Aragon.

"I knew naught,—paid no copper towards the deed.

"But I was there, at prayers, within the church.

"How could I help it? Why, the saints were there,

"And looked straight on above the altars. I . . . .

"Juan.

"Looked carefully another way.

"Blasco. Why, at my beads.

"’T was after midnight, and the canons all

"Were chanting matins. I was not in church

"To gape and stare. I saw the martyr kneel:

"I never liked the look of him alive,—

"He was no martyr then. I thought he made

"An ugly shadow as he crept athwart

"The bands of light, then passed within the gloom

"By the broad pillar. ’T was in our great Seo,

"At Saragossa. The pillars tower so large

"You cross yourself to see them, lest white

"Death Should hide behind their dark.

"And so it was. I looked away again and told my beads

"Unthinkingly; but still a man has ears;

"And right across the chanting came a sound

"As if a tree had crashed above the roar

"Of some great torrent. So it seemed to me;

"For when yon listen long and shut your eyes

"Small sounds get thunderous. And he’d a shell

"Like any lobster: a good iron suit

"From top to toe beneath the innocent serge.

"That made the telltale sound. But then came shrieks.

"The chanting stopped and tamed to rushing feet,

"And in the midst lay Master Arbuès,

"Felled like an ox. ’T was wicked butchery.

"Some honest men had hoped it would have scared

"The Inquisition out of Aragon.

"’T was money thrown away,—I would say, crime,—

"Clean thrown away.

"Host.

"That was a pity now.

"Next to a missing thrust, what irks me most

"Is a neat well-aimed stroke that kills your man,

"Yet ends in mischief,—as in Aragon.

"It was a lesson to our people here.

"Else there’s a monk within our city walls,

"A holy, high-born, stern Dominican,

"They might have made the great mistake to kill.

"Blasco.

"What! Is he?….

"Host.

"Yes; a Master Arbuès Of finer quality.

"The Prior here And uncle to our Duke.

"Blasco.

"He will want plate: A holy pillar or a crucifix.

"But, did you say, he was like Arbuès?

"Juan.

"As a black eagle with gold beak and claws

"Is like a raven. Even in his cowl,

"Covered from head to foot, the Prior is known

"From all the black herd round. When he uncovers

"And stands white-frocked, with ivory face, his eyes

"Black-gleaming, black his crown of hair

"Like shredded jasper, he seems less a man

"With struggling aims than pure incarnate

"Will, Fit to subdue rebellious nations, nay,

"That human flesh he breathes in, charged with passion

"Which quivers in his nostril and his lip,

"But disciplined by long in-dwelling will

"To silent labor in the yoke of law.

"A truce to thy comparisons, Lorenzo!

"Thine is no subtle nose for difference;

"’T is dulled by feigning and civility."

................................................................................................

Blasco clarifies further, in case someone didn't get it.

"Look you, I’m dutiful, obey the Church

"When there’s no help for it: I mean to say,

"When Pope and Bishop and all customers

"Order alike. But there be bishops now,

"And were aforetime, who have held it wrong,

"This hurry to convert the Jews. As, how?

"Your Jew pays tribute to the bishop, say.

"That’s good, and must please God, to see the Church

"Maintained in ways that ease the Christian’s purse.

"Convert the Jew, and where’s the tribute, pray?

"He lapses, too: ’t is slippery work, conversion:

"And then the holy taxing carries off

"His money at one sweep. No tribute more!

"He’s penitent or burnt, and there’s an end.

"Now guess which pleases God….

"Juan.

"Whether he likes

"A well-burnt Jew or well-fed bishop best.

"[While Juan put this problem theologic

"Entered, with resonant step, another, guest,—

"A soldier: all his keenness in his sword,

"His eloquence in scars upon his cheek,

"His virtue in much slaying of the Moor:

"With brow well-creased in horizontal folds

"To save the space, as having naught to do:

"Lips prone to whistle whisperingly,—no tune,

"But trotting rhythm: meditative eyes,

"Most often fixed upon his legs and spurs:

"Invited much and held good company:

"Styled Captain Lopez.]"

"Lopez.

"’T is bad. We make no sally:

"We sit still here and wait whate’er the

"Moor Shall please to do.

"Host.

"Some townsmen will be glad.

"Lopez.

"Glad, will they be? But I’m not glad, not I,

"Nor any Spanish soldier of clean blood.

"But the Duke’s wisdom is to wait a siege

"Instead of laying one. Therefore—meantime—

"He will be married straightway."

....

"Some say, ’t was letters’ changed the Duke’s intent:

"From Malaga, says Blas. From Rome, says Quintin.

"From spies at Guadix, says Sebastian.

"Some say, ’t is all a pretext,—say, the

"Duke Is but a lapdog hanging on a skirt,

"Turning his eyeballs upward like a monk:

"’T was Don Diego said that,—so says Blas;

"Last week, he said…."

"Juan.

"O do without the “said”!

"Open thy mouth and pause in lieu of it.

"1 had as lief be pelted with a pea

"Irregularly in the selfsame spot

"As hear such iteration without rule,

"Such torture of uncertain certainty.

"Lopez.

"Santiago! Juan, thou art hard to please.

"I speak not for my own delighting, I.

"I can be silent, I.

"Blasco.

"Nay, sir, speak on!

"I like your matter well; I deal in plate.

"This wedding touches me. Who is the bride?

And here's a fine distinction of who's the real knight, of mind and heart and spirit.

"Lopez.

"One that some say the Duke does ill to wed;

"One that his mother reared—God rest her soul!—

"Duchess Diana,—she who died last year.

"A bird picked up away from any nest.

"Her name—the Duchess gave it—is Fedalma.

"No harm in that. But the Duke stoops, they say,

"In wedding her. And that’s the simple truth.

"Juan.

"Thy simple truth is but a false opinion:

"The simple truth of asses who believe

"Their thistle is the very best of food.

"Fie, Lopez, thou a Spaniard with a sword

"Dreamest a Spanish noble ever stoops

"By doing honour to the maid he loves!

"He stoops alone when he dishonors her.

"Lopez.

"Nay, I said naught against her.

"Juan.

"Better not.

"Else I would challenge thee to fight with wits,

"And spear thee through and through ere thou couldst draw

"The bluntest word. Yes, yes, consult thy spurs:

"Spurs are a sign of knighthood, and should tell thee

"That knightly love is blent with reverence

"As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue,

"Don Silva’s heart beats to a loyal tune;

"He wills no highest-born Castilian dame,

"Betrothed to highest noble, should be held

"More sacred than Fedalma. He enshrines

"Her virgin image for the general worship

"And for his own,—will guard her from the world,

"Nay, his profaner self, lest he should lose,

"The place of his religion. He does well.

"Naught can come closer to the poet’s strain."

Ah, here's a clue to the heart of the epic poem.

"Lopez.

"By making ditties, singing with round mouth

"Likest a crowing cock? Thou meanest that?

"Juan.

"Lopez, take physic, thou art getting ill,

"Growing descriptive; ’t is unnatural.

"I mean, Don Silva’s love expects reward,

"Kneels with a heaven to come; but the poor poet

"Worships without reward, nor hopes to find

"A heaven save in his worship. He adores

"The sweetest woman for her sweetness’ sake,

"Joys in the love that was not born for him,

"Because ’t is lovingness, as beggars joy,

"Warming their naked limbs on wayside walls,

"To hear a tale of princes and their glory.

"There’s a poor poet (poor, I mean, in coin)

"Worships Fedalma with so true a love

"That if her silken robe were changed for rags,

"And she were driven out to stony wilds

"Barefoot, a scorned wanderer, he would kiss

"Her ragged garment’s edge, and only ask

"For leave to be her slave. Digest that, friend,

"Or let it lie upon thee as a weight

"To check light thinking of Fedalma."

"Lopez.

"I? I think no harm of her; I thank the saints

"I wear a sword and peddle not in thinking.

"’T is Father Marcos says she’ll not confess

"And loves not holy water; says her blood

"Is infidel; says the Duke’s wedding her

Is union of light with darkness."

Oh, one hears distinct thunder of a tragedy coming on! And here it comes.

"Host.

"I’ll get this juggler, if he quits him well,

"An audience here as choice as can be lured.

"For me, when a poor devil does his best,

"’T is my delight to soothe his soul with praise.

"What though the best be bad? remains the good

"Of throwing food to a lean hungry dog.

"I’d give up the best jugglery in life

"To see a miserable juggler pleased.

"But that’s my humour. Crowds are malcontent,

"And cruel as the Holy…. Shall we go?

"All of us now together?

"Lopez.

"Well, not I.

"I may be there anon, but first I go

"To the lower prison. There is strict command

"That all our gypsy prisoners shall to-night

"Be lodged within the fort. They’ve forged enough

"Of balls and bullets,—used up all the metal.

"At morn to-morrow they must carry stones

"Up the south tower. ’T is a fine stalwart band,

"Fit for the hardest tasks. Some say, the queen

"Would have the Gypsies banished with the Jews.

"Some say, ’t were better harness them for work.

"They’d feed on any filth and save the Spaniard.

"Some say—but I must go. ’T will soon be time

"To head the escort. We shall meet again."

................................................................................................

One can see the roots of final solution and the crass argument - in the dialogues of the plate trader - against it, here.

Where did George Eliot get it all ? Was this argued in England too in her time? Or is it historic and she read most of it?

"Blasco.

"Go sir, with God (exit Lopez).

"A very popular man, And soldierly.

"But, for this banishment

"Some men are hot on, it ill pleases me.

"The Jews, now (sirs, if any Christian here

"Had Jews, for ancestors, I blame him not;

"We cannot all be Goths of Aragon),—

"Jews are not fit heaven, but on earth

"They are most useful. ’T is the same with mules,

"Horses, or oxen, or with any pig

"Except Saint Anthony’s. They are useful here

"(The Jews, I mean) though they may go to hell.

"And, look you, useful sins,—why Providence

"Sends Jews to do ‘em, saving Christian souls.

"The very Gypsies, curbed and harnessed well,

"Would make draught cattle, feed on vermin too,

"Cost less than grazing brutes, and turn bad food

"To handsome carcasses; sweat at the forge

"For little wages, and well drilled and flogged

"Might work like slaves, some Spaniards looking on.

"I deal in plate, and am no priest to say

"What God may mean, save when he means plain sense;

"But when he sent the Gypsies wandering

"In punishment because they sheltered not

"Our Lady and Saint Joseph (and no doubt

"Stole the small ass they fled with into Egypt),

"Why send them here? ’T is plain he saw the use

"They’d be to Spaniards. Shall we banish them,

"And tell God we know better? ’T is a sin.

"They talk of vermin; but, sirs, vermin large

"Were made to eat the small, or else to eat

"The noxious rubbish, and picked Gypsy men

"Might serve in war to climb, be killed, and fall,

"To make an easy ladder. Once I saw

"A Gypsy sorcerer, at a spring and grasp

"Kill one who came to seize him: talk of strength!

"Nay, Swiftness too, for while we crossed ourselves

"He vanished like,—say, like ..

"Juan.

"A swift black snake, Or like a living arrow fledged with will.

"Blasco.

"Why, did you see him, pray?

"Juan.

"Not then, but now,

"As painters see the many in the one.

"We have a Gypsy in Bedmár whose frame

"Nature compacted with such fine selection,

"’T would yield a dozen types: all Spanish knights,

"From him who slew Rolando at the pass

"Up to the mighty Cid; all deities,

"Thronging Olympus in fine attitudes;

"Or all hell’s heroes whom the poet saw

"Tremble like lions, writhe like demigods.

"Host.

"Pause not yet, Juan,—more hyperbole!

"Shoot upward still and flare -in meteors

"Before thou sink to earth in dull brown fact.

"Blasco.

"Nay, give me fact, high shooting suits not me.

"I never stare to look for soaring larks. What is this Gypsy?

"Host.

"Chieftain of a band,

"The Moor’s allies, whom full a month ago,

"Our Duke surprised and brought as captives home.

"He needed smiths, and doubtless the brave Moor

"Has missed some useful scouts and archers too.

"Juan’s fantastic pleasure is to watch

"These Gypsies forging, and to hold discourse

"With this great chief, whom he transforms at will

"To sage or warrior, and like the sun

"Plays daily at fallacious alchemy,

"Turns sand to gold and dewy spider-webs

"To myriad rainbows. Still the sand is sand,

"And still in sober shade you see the web.

"’T is so, I’ll wager, with his Gypsy chief,—

"A piece of stalwart cunning, nothing more."

................................................................................................

Is this the explanation of the title?

"Juan.

"No! My invention had been all too poor

"To frame this Zarca as I saw him first.

"’T was when they stripped him. In his chieftain’s gear,

"Amidst his men he seemed a royal barb

"Followed by. Wild-maned Andalusion colts.

"He had a necklace of a strange device

"In finest gold of unknown workmanship,

"But delicate as Moorish, fit to kiss

"Fedalma’s neck, and play in shadows there.

"He wore fine mail, a rich-wrought sword and belt,

"And on surcoat black a broidered torch,

"A pine-branch flaming, grasped by two dark hands.

"But when they stripped him of his ornaments

"It was the bawbles lost their grace, not he.

"His eyes, his mouth, his nostril, all inspired

"With scorn that mastered utterance of scorn,

"With power to check all rage until it turned

"To ordered force, unleashed on chosen prey,—

"It seemed the soul within him made his limbs

"And made them grand. The bawbles were well gone.

"He stood the more a king, when bared to man."

"Blasco.

"Maybe. But nakedness is bad for trade,

"And is not decent. Well-wrought metal, sir,

"Is not a bawble. Had you seen the camp,

"The royal camp at Velez Malaga,

"Ponce de Leon and the other dukes.

"The king himself and all his thousand knights

"For body-guard, ’t would not have left you breath

"To praise a Gypsy thus. A man’s a man;

"But when you see a king, you see the work

"Of many, thousand men. King Ferdinand

"Bears a fine presence, and hath proper limbs;

"But what though he were shrunken as a relic?

"You’d see the gold and gems that cased him o’er,

"And all the pages round him in brocade,

"And all the lords, themselves a sort of kings,

"Doing him reverence. That strikes an awe

"Into a common man,—especially A judge of plate.

"Host.

"Faith very wisely said.

"Purge thy speech, Juan. It is over-full

"Of this same Gypsy. Praise the Catholic King.

"And come now, let us see the juggler’s skill."

................................................................................................

"’T is daylight still, but now the golden cross

"Uplifted by the angel on the dome

"Stands rayless in calm color clear-defined

"Against the northern blue; from turrets high

"The flitting splendor sinks with folded wing

"Dark-hid till morning, and the battlements

"Wear soft relenting whiteness mellowed o’er

"By summers generous and winters bland.

"Now in the east the distance casts its veil,

"And gazes with a deepening earnestness.

"The old rain-fretted mountains in their robes

"Of shadow-broken gray; the rounded hills

"Reddened with blood of Titans, whose huge limbs

"Entombed within, feed full the hardy flesh

"Of cactus1 green and blue, broad-sworded aloes;

"The cypress soaring black above the lines

"Of white court-walls; the jointed sugar-canes

"Pale-golden with their feathers motionless

"In the warm quiet;—all thought-teaching form

"Utters itself in firm unshimmering hues.

"For the great rock has screened the westering sun

"That still on plains beyond streams vaporous gold

"Among their branches; and within Bedmár

"Has come the time of sweet serenity

"When colour glows unglittering, and the soul

"Of visible things shows silent happiness,

"As that of lovers trusting though apart.

"The ripe-cheeked fruits, the crimson-petalled flowers;

"The winged life that pausing seems a gem

"Cunningly carven on the dark green leaf;"

....

"The Plaça widens in the passive air,—

"The Plaça Santiago, where the church,

"A mosque converted, shows an eyeless face

"Red-checkered, faded, doing penance still,—

"Bearing with Moorish arch the imaged saint,

"Apostle, baron, Spanish warrior,

"Whose charger’s hoofs trample the turbaned dead,

"Whose banner with the Cross, the bloody sword,

"Flashes athwart the Moslem’s glazing eye,

"And mocks his trust in Allah who forsakes."

....

"Maids with arched eyebrows, delicate-pencilled, dark,

"Fold their round arms below the kerchief full;

"Men shoulder little girls; and grandames gray,

"But muscular still, hold babies on their arms;

"While mothers keep the stout-legged boys in front

"Against their skirts, as the Greek pictures old

"Show the Chief Mother with the Boy divine.

"Youths keep the places for themselves, and roll

"Large lazy eyes, and call recumbent dogs

"(For reasons deep below the reach of thought).

"The old men cough with purpose, wish to hint

"Wisdom within that cheapens jugglery,

"Maintain a neutral air, and knit their brows

"In observation. None are quarrelsome,

"Noisy, or very merry; for their blood

"Moves, slowly into fervor,—they rejoice

"Like those dark birds that sweep with heavy wing,

"Cheering their mates with melancholy cries."

....

"Lorenzo knits the crowd

"Into one family by showing all

"Good-will and recognition. Juan casts

"His large and rapid-measuring glance around;

"But—with faint quivering, transient as a breath

"Shaking a flame—his eyes make sudden pause

"Where by the jutting angle of a street

"Castle-ward leading, stands a female form,

"A kerchief pale square-drooping o’er the brow,

"About her shoulders dim brown serge,—in garb

"Most like a peasant woman from the vale,

"Who might have lingered after marketing

"To see the show. What thrill mysterious,

"Ray-borne from orb to orb of conscious eyes,

"The swift observing sweep of Juan’s glance

"Arrests an instant, then with prompting fresh

"Diverts it lastingly? He turns at once

"To watch the gilded balls, and nod and smile

"At little round Pepíta, blondest maid

"In all Bedmár,—Pepíta, fair yet flecked,

"Saucy of lip and nose, of hair as red

"As breasts of robins stepping on the snow,—

"Who stands in front with little tapping feet,

"And baby-dimpled hands that hide enclosed

"Those sleeping crickets, the dark castanets."

....

"The long notes linger on the trembling air,

"With subtle penetration enter all

"The myriad corridors of the passionate soul,

"Message-like spread, and answering action rouse.

"Not angular jigs that warm the chilly limbs

"In hoary northern mists, but action curved

"To soft andante strains pitched plaintively."

"Vibrations sympathetic stir all limbs:

"Old men live backward in their dancing prime,

"And move in memory; small legs and arms

"With pleasant agitation purposeless

"Go up and down like pretty fruits in gales.

"All long in common for the expressive act

"Yet wait for it; as in the olden time

"Men waited for the bard to tell their thought.

"“The dance! the dance!” is shouted all around.

"Now Pablo lifts the bow, Pepíta now,

"Ready as bird that sees the sprinkled corn,

"When Juan nods and smiles, puts forth her foot

"And lifted her arm to wake the castanets.

"Juan advances, too, from out the ring

"And bends to quit his lute; for now the scene

"Is empty; Roldan, weary, gathers pence,

"Followed by Annibal with purse and stick.

"The carpet lies a colored isle untrod,

"Inviting feet: “The dance, the dance,” resounds,

"The bow entreats with slow melodic strain,

"And all the air with expectation yearns.

"Sudden, with gliding motion like a flame

"That through dim vapor makes a path of glory,

"A figure lithe, all white and saffron-robed,

"Flashed right across the circle, and now stood

"With ripened arms uplift and regal head,

"Like some tall flower whose dark and intense heart

"Lies half within a tulip-tinted cup.

"Juan stood fixed and pale; Pepíta stepped

"Backward within the ring: the voices fell

"From shouts insistent to more passive tones

"Half meaning welcome, half astonishment.

"“Lady Fedalma!—will she dance for us?”"

................................................................................................

"The exquisite hour, the ardor of the crowd,

"The strains more plenteous, and the gathering might

"Of action passionate where no effort is,

"But self’s poor gates open to rushing power

"That blends the inward ebb and outward vast,—

"All gathering influences culminate

"And urge Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one,"

................................................................................................

"But sudden, at one point, the exultant throng

"Is pushed and hustled, and then thrust apart:

"Something approaches,—something cuts the ring

"Of jubilant idlers,—startling as a streak

"From alien wounds across the blooming flesh

"Of careless sporting childhood,

"’T is the band Of Gypsy prisoners. Soldiers lead the van

"And make sparse flanking guard, aloof surveyed

"By gallant Lopez, stringent in command.

"The Gypsies chained in couples, all save one,

"Walk in dark file with grand bare legs and arms

"And savage melancholy in their eyes

"That star-like gleam from out black clouds of hair;

"Now they are full in sight, now stretch

"Right to the centre of the open space.

"Fedalma now, with gentle wheeling sweep

"Returning, like the loveliest of the Hours

"Strayed from her sisters, truant lingering,

"Faces again the centre, swings again

"The uplifted tambourine…. When lo! with sound

"Stupendous throbbing, solemn as a voice

"Sent by the invisible choir of all the dead,

"Tolls the great passing bell that calls to prayer

"For souls departed: at the mighty beat

"It seems the light sinks awe-struck,—’t is the note

"Of the sun’s burial; speech and action pause;"

....

"The soldiers pray; the Gypsies stand unmoved

"As pagan statues with proud level gaze.

"But he who wears a solitary chain

"Heading the file, has turned to face Fedalma.

"She motionless, with arm uplifted, guards

"The tambourine aloft (lest, sudden-lowered,

"Its trivial jingle mar the duteous pause),"

"Reveres the general prayer, but prays not, stands

"With level glance meeting that Gypsy’s eyes,

"That seem to her the sadness of the world

"Rebuking her, the great bell’s hidden thought

"Now first unveiled,—the sorrows unredeemed

"Of races outcast, scorned, and wandering.

"Why does he look at her? why she at him?

"As if the meeting light between their eyes

"Made permanent union? Hist deep-knit brow,

"Inflated nostril, scornful lip compressed,

"Seem a dark hieroglyph of coming fate

"Written before her. Father Isidor

"Had terrible eyes and was her enemy;

"She knew it and defied him; all her soul

"Rounded and hardened in its separateness

"When they encountered. But this prisoner,—

"This Gypsy, passing, gazing casually,—

"Was he her enemy too? She stood all quelled,

"The impetuous joy that hurried in her veins

"Seemed backward rushing turned to chillest awe,

"Uneasy wonder, and a vague self-doubt.

"The minute brief stretched measureless, dream-filled

"By a dilated new-fraught consciousness.

"Now it was gone; the pious murmur ceased,

"The Gypsy band moved onward at command

"And careless noises blent confusedly.

"But the ring closed again, and many ears

"Waited for Pablo’s music, many eyes

"Turned towards the carpet: it lay bare and dim,

"Twilight was there,—the bright Fedalma gone."

................................................................................................

The priest here plays almost exactly the role of the villain in Othello, except for the Frank arrogance that differed from the play character, and the open attempt to terrorise the knight.

"Don Silva.

"Perhaps. I seek to justify my public acts

"And not my private joy. Before the world

"Enough if I am faithful in command,

"Betray not by my deeds, swerve from no task

"My knightly vows constrain me to: herein

"I ask all men to test me.

"Prior.

"Knightly vows?

"Is it by their constraint that you must marry?

"Don Silva.

"Marriage is not a breach of them.

"I use A sanctioned liberty…. your pardon, father,

"I need not teach you what the Church decrees.

"But facts may weaken texts, and so dry up

"The fount of eloquence. The Church relaxed

"Our Order’s rule before I took the vows.

"Prior.

"Ignoble liberty! you snatch your rule

"From what God tolerates, not what he loves?—

"Inquire what lowest offering may suffice,

"Cheapen it meanly to an obolus,

"Then buy and count the coin left in your purse

"For your debauch?—Measure obedience

"By scantest powers of feeble brethren

"Whom Holy Church indulges?—Ask great Law,

"The rightful Sovereign of the human soul,

"For what it pardons, not what it commands?

"O fallen knighthood, penitent of high vows,

"Asking a charter to degrade itself!

"Such poor apology of rules relaxed

"Blunts not suspicion of that doubleness

"Your enemies tax you with."

"Don Silva.

"Pause there! Leave unsaid

"Aught that will match that text.

"More were too much,

"Even from holy lips. I own no love

"But such as guards my honor, since it guards

"Hers whom I love! I suffer no foul words

"To stain the gift I lay before her feet;

"And, being hers, my honor is more safe."

"Prior.

"Verse-makers’ talk! fit for a world of rhymes,

"Where facts are feigned to tickle idle ears,

"Where good and evil play at tournament

"And end in amity,—a world of lies,—

"A carnival of words where every year

"Stale falsehoods serve fresh men. Your honor safe?

"What honor has a man with double bonds?

"Honor is shifting as the shadows are

"To souls that turn their passions into laws.

"A Christian knight who weds an infidel….

"Don Silva

"(fiercely). An Infidel!

Prior.

"May one day spurn the Cross,

"And call that honor!—one day find his sword

"Stained with his brother’s blood, and call that honor!

"Apostates’ honour?—harlots’ chastity!

"Renegades’ faithfulness?—Iscariot’s!

"Don Silva.

"Strong words and burning; but they scorch not me.

"Fedalma is a daughter of the Church,—

"Has been baptised and nurtured in the faith.

"Prior.

"Ay, as a thousand Jewesses, who yet

"Are brides of Satan in a robe of flames.

"Don Silva.

"Fedalma is no Jewess, bears no marks

"That tell of Hebrew blood.

"Prior.

"She bears the marks

"Of races unbaptized, that never bowed

"Before the holy signs, were never moved

"By stirrings of the sacramental gifts.

"Don Silva (scornfully).

"Holy accusers practise palmistry,

"And, other witness lacking, read the skin.

"Prior.

"I read a record deeper than the skin.

"What! Shall the trick of nostrils and of lips

"Descend through generations, and the soul

"That moves within our frame like God in worlds-

"Convulsing, urging, melting, withering—

"Imprint no record, leave no documents,

"Of her great history? Shall men bequeath

"The fancies of their palate to their sons,

"And shall the shudder of restraining awe,

"The slow-wept tears of contrite memory,

"Faith’s prayerful labor, and the food divine

"Of fasts ecstatic,—shall these pass away

"Like wind upon the waters, tracklessly?

"Shall the mere curl of eyelashes remain

"And god-enshrining symbols leave no trace

"Of tremors reverent?—That maiden’s blood

"Is as unchristian as the leopard’s.

"Don Silva.

"Say, Unchristian as the Blessed Virgin’s blood

"Before the angel spoke the word, “All hail!”

"Prior

"(smiling bitterly) Said I not truly? See, your passion weaves

"Already blasphemies!

"Don Silva.

"’T is you provoke them.

"Prior.

"I strive, as still the Holy Spirit strives,

"To move the will perverse. But failing this,

"God commands other means to save our blood,

"To save Castilian glory,—nay, to save

"The name of Christ from blot of traitorous deeds.

"Don Silva.

"Of traitorous deeds! Age, kindred, and your cowl,

"Give an ignoble licence to your tongue.

"As for your threats, fulfil them at your peril.

"’T is you, not I, will gibbet our great name

"To rot in infamy. If I am strong

"In patience now, trust me, I can be strong

"Then in defiance.

"Prior.

"Miserable man!

"Your strength will turn to anguish, like the strength

"Of fallen angels. Can you change your blood?

"You are a Christian, with the Christian awe

"In every vein. A Spanish noble, born

"To serve your people and your people’s faith.

"Strong, are you? Turn your back upon the Cross,—

"Its shadow is before you. Leave your place:

"Quit the great ranks of knighthood: you will walk

"Forever with a tortured double self,

"A self that will be hungry while yon feast,

"Will blush with shame while you are glorified,

"Will feel the ache and chill of desolation,

"Even in the very bosom of your love.

"Mate yourself with this woman, fit for what?

"To make the sport of Moorish palaces,

"A lewd Herodias….

"Don Silva.

"Stop! no other man,

"Priest though he were had had his throat left free

"For passage of those words. I would have clutched

"His serpent’s neck, and flung him out to hell!

"A monk must needs defile the name of love:

"He knows it but as tempting devils paint it.

"You think to scare my love from its resolve

"With arbitrary consequences, strained

"By rancorous effort from the thinnest motes

"Of possibility?—cite hideous lists

"Of sins irrelevant, to frighten me

"With bugbears’ names, as women fright a child?

"Poor pallid wisdom, taught by inference

"From blood-drained life, where phantom terrors rule,

"And all achievement is to leave undone!

"Paint the day dark, make sunshine cold to me,

"Abolish the earth’s fairness, prove it all

"A fiction of my eyes,—then, after that, Profane Fedalma.

"Prior.

"O, there is no need:

"She has profaned herself. Go, raving man,

"And see her dancing now. Go, see your bride

"Flaunting her beauties grossly in the gaze

"Of vulgar idlers,—eking out the show

"Made in the Plaça by a mountebank.

"I hinder you no farther.

"Don Silva.

"It is false!

"Prior. Go, prove it false, then."

................................................................................................

"If he spoke truth!

"To know were wound enough,—to see the truth

"Were fire upon the wound. It must be false!

"His hatred saw amiss, or snatched mistake

"In other men’s report. I am a fool!

"But where can she be gone? gone secretly?

"And in my absence? O, she meant no wrong!

"I am a fool!—But, where can she be gone?

"With only Inez? O, she meant no wrong!

"I swear she never meant it. There’s no wrong

"But she would make it momentary right

"By innocence in doing it…. And yet,

"What is our certainty? Why, knowing all

"That is not secret. Mighty confidence!"

....

"[As Perez oped the door,

"Then moved aside for passage of the Duke,

"Fedalma entered, cast away the cloud

"Of serge and linen, and outbeaming bright,

"Advanced a pace towards Silva,—but then paused,

"For he had started and retreated; she,

"Quick and responsive as the subtle air

"To change in him, divined that she must wait

"Until they were alone: they stood and looked.

"Within the Duke was struggling confluence

"Of feelings manifold,—pride, anger, dread,

"Meeting in stormy rush with sense secure

"That she was present, with the satisfied thirst

"Of gazing love, with trust inevitable

"As in beneficent virtues of the light

"And all earth’s sweetness, that Fedalma’s soul

"Was free from blemishing purpose. Yet proud wrath

"Leaped in dark flood above the purer stream

"That strove to drown it: Anger seeks its prey,—

"Something to tear with sharp-edged tooth and claw,

"Likes not to go off hungry, leaving Love

"To feast on milk and honeycomb at will."

"Fedalma

"(advancing a step towards him with a sudden look of anxiety).

"Are you angry?

"Don Silva

"(smiling bitterly). Angry?

"A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain

"To feel much anger.

"Fedalma

"(still more anxiously).

"You—deep-wounded?

"Don Silva.

"Yes! Have I not made your place and dignity

"The very heart of my ambition? You,—

"No enemy could do it,—you alone

"Can strike it mortally.

"Fedalma.

"Nay, Silva, nay. Has some one told you false? I only went

"To see the world with Inez,—see the town,

"The people, everything. It was no harm.

"I did not mean to dance: it happened so

"At last . . . .

"Don Silva.

"O God, it’s true then!—true that you,

"A maiden nurtured as rare flowers are,

"The very air of heaven sifted fine

"Lest motes should mar your purity,

"Have flung yourself out on the dusty way

"For common eyes to see your beauty soiled!

"You own it true,—you danced upon the Plaça?

"Fedalma

"(proudly). Yes, it is true. I was not wrong to dance.

"The air was filled with music, with a song

"That seemed the voice of the sweet eventide,—

"The glowing light entering through eye and ear,—

"That seemed our love,—mine, yours—they are but one,—

"Trembling through all my limbs, as fervent words

"Tremble within my soul and must be spoken.

"And all the people felt a common joy

"And shouted for the dance. A brightness soft

"As of the angels moving down to see

"Illumined the broad space. The joy, the life

"Around, within me, were one heaven: I longed

"To blend them visibly: I longed to dance

"Before the people,—be as mounting flame

"To all that burned within them! Nay, I danced;

"There was no longing: I but did the deed

"Being moved to do it.

(As Fedalma speaks she and Don Silva are gradually drawn nearer to each other.)

"O, I seemed new-waked

"To life in unison with a multitude,—

"Feeling my soul upborne by all their souls,

"Floating within their gladness! Soon I lost

"All sense of separateness: Fedalma died

"As a star dies, and melts into the light.

"I was not, but joy was, and love and triumph.

"Nay, my dear lord, I never could do aught

"But I must feel you present. And once done,

"Why, you must love it better than your wish.

"I pray you, say so,—say, it was not wrong!

(While Fedalma has been making this last appeal, they have gradually come close together, and at last embrace.)

"Don Silva

:(holding her hands). Dangerous rebel! if the world without

"Were pure as that within . .. . but ’t is a book

"Wherein you only read the poesy

"And miss all wicked meanings. Hence the need

"For trust—obedience,—call it what you will,—

"Towards him whose life will be your guard,—towards me

"Who now am soon to be your husband.

"Fedalma.

"Yes! That very thing that when I am your wife

"I shall be something different,—shall be

"I know not what, a Duchess with new thoughts,—

"For nobles never think like common men,

"Nor wives like maidens (O, you wot not yet

"How much I note, with all my ignorance),—

"That very thing has made me more resolve

"To have my will before I am your wife.

"How can the Duchess ever satisfy

"Fedalma’s unwed eyes? and so to-day

"I scolded Inez till she cried and went."

....

"Don Silva.

"It will be different when this war has ceased.

"You, wedding me, will make it different,

"Making one life more perfect.

"Fedalma.

"That is true! And I shall beg much kindness at your hands

"For those who are less happy than ourselves.—

"(Brightening.) O, I shall rule you! ask for many things

"Before the world, which you will not deny

"For very pride, lest men should say,

"“The Duke Holds lightly by his Duchess; he repents

"His humble choice.”"

....

"Don Silva.

"Fear not, my Duchess!

"Some knight who loves may say his lady-love

"Is fairer, being fairest. None can say

"Don Silva’s bride might better fit her rank.

"You will make rank seem natural as kind,

"As eagle’s plumage or the lion’s might.

"A crown upon your brow would seem God-made."

....

"Fedalma.

"Do you worship me?

"Don Silva.

"Ay, with that best of worship which adores Goodness adorable.

"Fedalma

"(archly). Goodness obedient, Doing your will, devoutest worshipper?

"Don Silva.

"Yes,—listening to this prayer.

This very night I shall go forth. And you will rise with day

"And wait for me?

"Fedalma.

"Yes.

"Don Silva.

"I shall surely come. And then we shall be married. Now I go

"To audience fixed in Abderahman’s tower.

"Farewell, love!

(They embrace.)

"Fedalma.

"Some chill dread possesses me!

"Don Silva.

"O, confidence has oft been evil augury,

"So dread may hold a promise. Sweet, farewell!

"I shall send tendance as I pass, to bear

"This casket to your chamber.—One more kiss.

(Exit.)

................................................................................................

"The saints were cowards who stood by to see

" Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves

"Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain,—

"The grandest death, to die in vain,—for love

"Greater than sways the forces of the world."

"Silva, sole love,—he came,—my father came.

"I am the daughter of the Gypsy chief

"Who means to be the Savior of our tribe.

"He calls on me to live for his great end.

"To live? Nay, die for it. Fedalma dies

"In leaving Silva: all that lives henceforth Is the Zincala."

................................................................................................

................................................

October 05, 2021 - October 06, 2021.

................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................
................................................................................................

Book II.

................................................................................................

Book II proceeds from where Book I left off, with Dule Silva informed by his friend of the prior intent on inquisition of the bride, who's left a note to Silva before her flight. Silva, grieving yet not giving up, makes plans.

Here George Eliot introduces the chief element of inquisition, the Jews persecuted and intent on saving, not only their own selves, but the race. However, she has them describe themselves in terms one cannot imagine them even thinking of!

"Conceive, with all the vulgar, that we Jews

"Must hold ourselves God’s outlaws, and defy

"All good with blasphemy, because we hold

"Your good is evil; think we must turn pale

"To see our portraits painted in your hell,

"And sin the more for knowing we. are lost."

Now why would anyone accept themselves God's outlaws, or that they hold the other God evil, just because their enemies accuse them thereof? This isn't true characterisation, it's silly! Jews are more likey to hold gentiles ridiculous for imagining that one of their own sons was - not only a God, but - the only one, and then proceeding to kill his blood relatives in his name. They are far more likely to keep silent, if not exposing this hypocrisy outright, as racist persecution of Jews by Rome, cloaking itself as holy for the purpose.

But it's not all - George Eliot has Book II end in yet a few more twists, delivered swift one upon another, after the exquisite descriptions of grieving Silva and his plans set in motion for rescue of his love, from both, the Gypsy father of the bride as well as, subsequently, the prior.

And here, she gives way to yet another prejudice - that of a gypsy being treacherous, of his being in cahoots against Christendom and selling them out to their enemies in crusades, for his own gains.

................................................................................................

"Sephardo.

"The Unnamable made not the search for truth

"To suit hidalgos’ temper. I abide

"By that wise spirit of listening reverence

"Which marks the boldest doctors of our race.

"For truth, to us, is like a living child

"Born of two parents: if the parents part

"And will divide the child, how shall it live?

"Or, I will rather say: Two angels guide

"The path of man, both aged and yet young,

"As angels are, ripening through endless years.

"On one he leans: some call her Memory,

"And some, Tradition; and her voice is sweet,

"With deep mysterious accords: the other,

"Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams

"A light divine and searching on the earth,

"Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields,

"Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew

"Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp

"Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked

"But for Tradition; we walk evermore

"To higher paths, by brightening Reason’s lamp.

"Still we are purblind, tottering. I hold less

"Than Aben-Ezra, of that aged lore

"Brought by long centuries from Chaldæan plains;

"The Jew-taught Florentine rejects it all."

....

"I weary your sick soul. Go now with me

"Into the turret. We will watch the spheres,

"And see the constellations bend and plunge

"Into a depth of being where our eyes

"Hold them no more. We’ll quit ourselves and be

"Red Aldebaran or bright Sirius,

"And sail as in a solemn voyage, bound

"On some great quest we know not.

"Don Silva.

"Let us go. She may be watching too, and thought of her

"Sways me, as if she knew, to every act

"Of pure allegiance.

"Sephardo.

"That is love’s perfection,—

"Tuning the soul to all her harmonies

"So that no chord can jar. Now we will mount."

................................................................................................

"Lorenzo.

"Well met, friend.

"Blasco.

"Ay, for we are soon to part,

:And I would see you at the hostelry,

"To take my reckoning. I go forth to-day.

"Lorenzo.

"’T is grievous parting with good company.

"I would I had the gold to pay such guests

"For all my pleasure in their talk.

"Blasco.

"Why, yes; A solid-headed man of Aragon

"Has matter in him that you Southerners lack.

"You like my company,—’t is natural.

"But, look you, I have done my business well,

"Have sold and ta’en commissions. I come straight

"From—you know who—I like not naming him.

"I’m a thick man: you reach not my backbone

"With any tooth-pick. But I tell you this:

"He reached it with his eye, right to the marrow!

"It gave me heart that I had plate to sell,

"For, saint or no saint, a good silversmith

"Is wanted for God’s service; and my plate—

"He judged it well—bought nobly.

"Lorenzo.

"A great man, And holy! Blasco. Yes, I’m glad I leave to-day.

"For there are stories give a sort of smell,—

"One’s nose has fancies. A good trader, sir,

"Likes not this plague of lapsing in the air,

"Most caught by men with funds. And they do say

"There’s a great terror here in Moors and Jews,

"I would say., Christians of unhappy blood.

"’T is monstrous, sure, that men of substance lapse,

"And risk their property. I know I’m sound.

"No heresy was ever bait to me.

"Whate’er Is the right faith, that I believe,—naught else.

"Lorenzo.

"Ay, truly, for the flavor of true faith

"Once known must sure be sweetest to the taste.

"But an uneasy mood is now abroad

"Within the town; partly, for that the Duke

"Being sorely sick, has yielded the command

"To Don Diego, a most valiant man,

"More Catholic than the Holy Father’s self,

"Half chiding God that he will tolerate

"A Jew or Arab; though ’t is plain they’re made

"For profit of good Christians. And weak heads—

"Panic will knit all disconnected facts—

"Draw hence belief in evil auguries,

"Rumors of accusation and arrest,

"All air-begotten. Sir, you need not go.

"But if it must be so, I’ll follow you

"In fifteen minutes,—finish marketing,

"Then be at home to speed you on your way.

"Blasco.

"Do so. I’ll back to Saragossa straight.

"The court and nobles are retiring now

"And wending northward. There’ll be fresh demand

"For bells and images against the Spring,

"When doubtless our great Catholic sovereigns

"Will move to conquest of these eastern part,

"And cleanse Granáda from the infidel.

"Stay, sir, with God, until we meet again!"

................................................................................................

"Lorenzo.

"Good day, my mistress. How’s your merchandise?

"Fit for a host to buy? Your apples now,

"They have fair cheeks; how are they at the core?

"Market-Woman.

"Good, good, sir! Taste and try.

"See, here is one Weighs a man’s head.

"The best are bound with tow:

"They’re worth the pains, to keep the peel from splits.

"(She takes out an apple bound with tow, and, as she puts it into Lorenzo’s hand, speaks in a lower tone.)

"’T is called the Miracle. You open it. And find it full of speech."

"Lorenzo.

"Ay, give it me, I’ll take it to the Doctor in the tower.

"He feeds on fruit, and if he likes the sort

"I’ll buy them for him. Meanwhile, drive your ass

"Round to my hostelry. I’ll straight be there.

"You’ll not refuse some barter?

"Market-Woman.

"No, not I. Feathers and skins.

"Lorenzo.

"Good, till we meet again.

................................................................................................

"A Letter.

“Zarca, the chieftain of the Zincali, greets

"The King El Zagal. Let the force be sent

"With utmost swiftness to the Pass of Luz.

"A good five hundred added to my bands

"Will master all the garrison: the town

"Is half with us, and will not lift an arm

"Save on our side. My scouts have found a way

"Where once we thought the fortress most secure:

"Spying a man upon the height, they traced,

"By keen conjecture piecing broken sight,

"His downward path, and found its issue.

"There A file of us can mount, surprise the fort

"And give the signal to our friends within

"To ope the gates for our confederate bands,

"Who will lie eastward ambushed by the rocks,

"Waiting the night. Enough; give me command,

"Bedmár is yours. Chief Zarca will redeem

"His pledge of highest service to the Moor:

"Let the Moor too be faithful and repay

"The Gypsy with the furtherance he needs

"To lead his people over Bahr el Scham

"And plant them on the shore of Africa.

"So may the King El Zagal live as one

"Who, trusting Allah will be true to him,

"Maketh himself as Allah true to friends.”"

................................................................................................

................................................

October 06, 2021 - October 07, 2021.

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................
................................................................................................

Book III.

................................................................................................

George Eliot begins with a description of the journey into Moorish controlled parts of Spain, but errs when she describes gypsy lives, in saying "little swarthy tents Such as of old perhaps on Asian plains,"!

Asian plains? Tents are common to all nomadic life, which naturally includes shepherds of central Asia, but they characterise mainly Arab and Mongolian landscapes - and, contiguously, Siberian and Lapland nomadic life. Asia is far from dominated by plains, or by tents. It isn't only Himaalayan ranges that belong to Asia, but many, many more. And architecture such as that of India has boggled minds of all invaders, who sought chiefly to destroy it and wipe out all possible signs thereof, so as to lie about it and insist that it was they who brought building to India.

George Eliot moreover, consciously or otherwise, goes with the biblical, abrahmic, culminating in islamic prejudice about soul and spirit being exclusively male, while females contributing only the body of progeny, in saying "father’s light Flashing in coal-black eyes, the mother’s blood With bounteous elements feeding their young limbs."! Shouldn't she have known better? What with being not only not brought up as a Muslim- and thereby escaping being taught she had no soul - she was herself, not only an intediligent woman, but an intellectual one; did she believe she'd received everything only from her male ancestry, while females gave only body? Did she believe she'd give nothing of her mind, spirit and soul, to her children? Did she really buy into this flesh and blood oven theory of womanhood?

An interesting detail, is that a poem titled "Roses", included in the Delphi collection of complete works of George Eliot, is an excerpt from Book III.

................................................................................................

"Quit now the town, and with a journeying dream

"Swift as the wings of sound yet seeming slow

"Through multitudinous compression of stored sense

"And spiritual space, see walls and towers

"Lie in the silent whiteness of a trance,

"Giving no sign of that warm life within

"That moves and murmurs through their hidden heart.

"Pass o’er the mountain, wind in sombre shade,

"Then wind into the light and see the town

"Shrunk to white crust upon the darker rock.

"Turn east and south, descend, then rise again

"’Mid smaller mountains ebbing towards the plain:

"Scent the fresh breath of the height-loving herbs

"That, trodden by the pretty parted hoofs

"Of nimble goats, sigh at the innocent bruise,

"And with a mingled difference exquisite

"Pour a sweet burden on the buoyant air.

"Pause now and be all ear. Far from the south,

"Seeking the listening silence of the heights,

"Comes a slow-dying sound,—the Moslems’ call

"To prayer in afternoon. Bright in the sun

"Like tall white sails on a green shadowy sea

"Stand Moorish watch-towers: ‘neath that eastern sky

"Couches unseen the strength of Moorish Baza;

"Where the meridian bends lies Guadix, hold

"Of brave El Zagal. This is Moorish land,

"Where Allah lives unconquered in dark breasts

"And blesses still the many-nourishing earth

"With dark-armed industry. See from the steep

"The scattered olives hurry in grey throngs

"Down towards the valley, where the little stream

"Parts a green hollow ’twixt the gentler slopes;

"And in that hollow, dwellings: not white homes

"Of building Moors, but little swarthy tents

"Such as of old perhaps on Asian plains,

"Or wending westward past the Caucasus,

"Our fathers raised to rest in."

....

"These are the brood of Zarca’s Gypsy tribe;

"Most like an earth-born race bred by the Sun

"On some rich tropic soil, the father’s light

"Flashing in coal-black eyes, the mother’s blood

"With bounteous elements feeding their young limbs.

"The stalwart men and youths are at the wars

"Following their chief, all save a trusty band

"Who keep strict watch along the northern heights."

................................................................................................

"Hinda.

"Queen, a branch of roses,— So sweet, you’ll love to smell them.

"’T was the last. I climbed the bank to get it before Tralla,

"And slipped and scratched my arm.

"But I don’t mind. You love the roses,—so do I.

"I wish The sky would rain down roses, as they rain

"From off the shaken bush. Why will it not?

"Then all the valley would be pink and white

"And soft to tread on. They would fall as light

"As feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be

"Like sleeping and yet waking, all at once!

"Over the sea, Queen, where we soon shall go,

"Will it rain roses?

"Fedalma.

"No, my prattler, no!

"It never will rain roses: when we want

"To have more roses we must plant more trees.

"But you want nothing, little one,—the world

"Just suits you as it suits the tawny squirrels.

"Come, you want nothing.

"Hinda.

"Yes, I want more berries,—

"Red ones,—to wind about my neck and arms

"When I am married,—on my ankles too

"I want to wind red berries, and on my head.

"Fedalma.

"Who is it you are fond of? Tell me, now.

"Hinda.

"O Queen, yon know! It could be no one else

"But Ismaël. He catches birds,—no end!

"Knows where the speckled fish are, scales the rocks,

"And sings and dances with me when I like.

"How should I marry and not marry him?

"Fedalma.

"Should you have loved him, had he been a Moor,

"Or white Castilian?

"Hinda

"(starting to her feet, then kneeling again).

"Are you angry, Queen?

"Say why you will think shame of your poor Hinda?

"She’d sooner be a rat and hang on thorns

"To parch until the wind had scattered her,

"Than be an outcast, spit at by her tribe.

"Fedalma.

"Hinda, I know you are a good Zincala.

"But would you part from Ismaël? leave him now

"If your chief bade you,—said it was for good

"To all your tribe that you must part from him?

"Hinda

"(giving a sharp cry). Ah, will he say so?

"Fedalma

"(almost fierce in her earnestness). Nay, child, answer me.

"Could you leave Ismaël? get into a boat

"And see the waters widen ’twixt you two

"Till all was water and you saw him not,

"And knew that you would never see him more?

"If ’t was your chiefs command, and if he said

"Your tribe would all be slaughtered, die of plague.

"Of famine,—madly drink each other’s blood….

"Hinda

"(trembling). O Queen, if it is so, tell Ismaël.

"Fedalma.

"You would obey, then? part from him for ever?

"Hinda.

"How could we live else? With our brethren lost?—

"No marriage feast? The day would turn to dark.

"Zincala cannot live without their tribe.

"I must obey! Poor Ismaël—poor Hinda!

"But will it ever be so cold and dark?

"O, I would sit upon the rocks and cry,

"And cry so long that I could cry no more:

"Then I should go to sleep.

"Fedalma.

"No, Hinda. no!

"Thou never shalt be called to part from him.

"I will have berries for thee, red and black,

"And I will be so glad to see thee glad,

"That earth will seem to hold enough of joy

"To outweigh all the pangs of those who part.

"Be comforted, bright eyes. See, I will tie

"These roses in a crown, for thee to wear."

................................................................................................

"Fedalma (alone).

"She has the strength I lack. Within her world

"The dial has not stirred since first she woke:

"No changing light has made the shadows die,

"And taught her trusting soul sad difference.

"For her, good, right, and law are all summed up

"In what is possible; life is one web

"Where love, joy, kindred, and obedience

"Lie fast and even, in one warp and woof

"With thirst and drinking, hunger, food, and sleep.

"She knows no struggles, sees no double path:

"Her fate is freedom, for her will is one

"With the Zincalo’s law, the only law

"She ever knew. For me—O, I have fire within,

"But on my will there falls the chilling snow

"Of thoughts that come as subtly as soft flakes,

"Yet press at last with hard and icy weight.

"I could be firm, could give myself the wrench

"And walk erect, hiding my life-long wound,

"If I but saw the fruit of all my pain

"With that strong vision which commands the soul,

"And makes great awe the monarch of desire.

"But now I totter, seeing no far goal:

"I tread the rocky pass, and pause and grasp,

"Guided by flashes. When my father comes,

"And breathes into my soul his generous hope,—

"By his own greatness making life seem great,

"As the clear heavens bring sublimity.

"And show earth larger, spanned by that blue vast,—

"Resolve is strong: I can embrace my sorrow,

"Nor nicely weigh the fruit; possessed with need

"Solely to do the noblest, though it failed,—

"Though lava streamed upon my breathing deed

"And buried it in night and barrenness.

"But soon the glow dies out, the warriors music

"That vibrated as strength through all my limbs

"Is heard no longer; over the wide scene

"There’s naught but chill grey silence, or the hum

"And fitful discord of a vulgar world.

"Then I sink helpless,—sink into the arms

"Of all sweet memories, and dream of bliss:

"See looks that penetrate like tones; hear tones

"That flash looks with them. Even now I feel

"Soft airs enwrap me, as if yearning rays

"Of some far presence touched me with their warmth

"And brought a tender murmuring

"[While she mused, A figure came from out the olive trees

"That bent close-whispering ’twixt the parted hills

"Beyond the crescent of thick cactus: paused

"At sight of her; then slowly forward moved

"With careful footsteps, saying in softest tones, “Fedalma!”

"Fearing lest fancy had enslaved her sense,

"She quivered, rose, but turned not.

"Soon again: “Fedalma, it is Silva!” Then she turned.

"He, with bared head and arms entreating, beamed

"Like morning on her. Vision held her still

"One moment, then with gliding motion swift,

"Inevitable as the melting stream’s,

"She found her rest within his circling arms.]

"Fedalma.

"O love, you are living, and believe in me!

"Don Silva.

"Once more we are together. Wishing dies,— Stifled with bliss.

"Fedalma.

"You did not hate me, then,—

"Think me an ingrate,—think my love was small

"That I forsook you?

"Don Silva.

"Dear, I trusted you

"As holy men trust God. You could do naught

"That was not pure and loving,—though the deed

"Might pierce me unto death. You had less trust,

"Since you suspected mine. ’T was wicked doubt.

"Fedalma.

"Nay, when I saw you hating me the blame

"Seemed in my lot alone,—the poor Zincala’s,—her

"On whom you lavished all your wealth of love

"As price of naught but sorrow. Then I said,

"“’T is better so. He will be Happier!”

"But soon that thought, struggling to be a hope,

"Would end in tears.

"Don Silva.

"It was a cruel thought. Happier! True misery is not begun

"Until I cease to love thee."

................................................................................................

"Fedalma

(retreating a little, but keeping his hand).

"Silva, if now between us came a sword,

"Severed my arm, and left our two hands clasped.

"This poor maimed arm would feel the clasp till death.

"What parts us is a sword….

"(Zarca has been advancing in the background. He has drawn his sword and now thrusts the naked blade between them. Silva lets go Fedalma’s hand, and grasps his sword. Fedalma, startled at first, stands firmly, as if prepared to interpose between her Father and the Duke.)

"Zarca.

"Ay, ’t is a sword

"That parts the Spaniard and the Zincala:

"A sword that was baptised in Christian blood,

"When once a band, cloaking with Spanish law

"Their brutal rapine, would have butchered us,

"And then outraged our women.

(Resting the point of his sword on the ground.)

"My lord Duke, I was a guest within your fortress once

"Against my will; had entertainment too,—

"Much like a galley-slave’s. Pray, have you sought

"The poor Zincalo’s camp, to find a fit return

"For that Castilian courtesy? or rather

"To make amends for all our prisoned toil

"By this great honor of your unasked presence?

"Don Silva.

"Chief I have brought no scorn to meet your scorn.

"I came because love urged me,—that deep love

"I bear to her whom you call daughter,—her W

"hom I reclaim as my betrothed bride.

"Zarca.

"Doubtless yon bring for final argument

"Your men-at-arms who will escort your bride?

"Don Silva.

"I came alone. The only force I bring

"Is tenderness. Nay, I will trust besides

"In all the pleadings of a father’s care

"To wed his daughter as her nurture bids.

"And for your tribe,—whatever purposed good

"Your thoughts may cherish, I will make secure

"With the strong surety of a noble’s power:

"My wealth shall be your treasury.

"Zarca

"(with irony).

"My thanks! To me you offer liberal price; for her

"Your love’s beseeching will be force supreme.

"She will go with you as a willing slave,

"Will give a word of parting to her father,

"Wave farewells to her tribe, then turn and say:

"“Now, my lord, I am nothing but your bride;

"I am quite culled, have neither root nor trunk,

"Now wear me with your plume!”

"Don Silva.

"Yours is the wrong

"Feigning in me one thought of her below

"The highest homage. I would make my rank

"The pedestal of her worth; a noble’s sword,

"A noble’s honor, her defence; his love

"The life-long sanctuary of her womanhood.

"Zarca.

"I tell you, were you King of Aragon,

"And won my daughter’s hand, your higher rank

"Would blacken her dishonor. ’T were excuse

"If you were beggared, homeless, spit upon,

"And so made even with her people’s lot;

"For then she would be lured by want, not wealth,

"To be a wife amongst an alien race

"To whom her tribe owes curses.

"Don Silva.

"Such blind hate Is fit for beasts of prey, but not for men.

"My hostile acts against you, should but count

"As ignorant strokes against a friend unknown;

"And for the wrongs inflicted on your tribe

"By Spanish edicts or the cruelty

"Of Spanish vassals, am I criminal?

"Love comes to cancel all ancestral hate,

"Subdues all heritage, proves that in mankind

"There is a union deeper than division.

"Zarca.

"Ay, Such love is common: I have seen it oft,—

"Seen many women rend the sacred ties

"That bind them in high fellowship with men,

"Making them mothers of a people’s virtue:

"Seen them so levelled to a handsome steed

"That yesterday was Moorish property,

"To-day is Christian,—wears new-fashioned gear

"Neighs to new feeders, and will prance alike

"Under all banners, so the banner be

"A master’s who caresses. Such light change

"You call conversion; but we Zincali call

"Conversion infamy. Our people’s faith

"Is faithfulness; not the rote-learned belief

"That we are heaven’s highest favorites,

"But the resolve that, being most forsaken

"Among the sons of men, we will be true

"Each to the other, and our common lot.

"You Christians burn men for their heresy:

"Our vilest heretic is that Zincala

"Who, choosing ease, forsakes her people’s woes.

"The dowry of my daughter is to be

"Chief woman of her tribe, and rescue it.

"A bride with such a dowrv has no match

"Among the subjects of that Catholic Queen

"Who would have Gypsies swept into the sea

"Or else would have them gibbeted.

"Don Silva.

"And you, Fedalma’s father ,—you who claim the dues

"Of fatherhood,—will offer up her youth

"To mere grim idols of your fantasy!

"Worse than all Pagans, with no oracle

"To bid you, no sure good to win,

"Will sacrifice your daughter,—to no god,

"But to a hungry fire within your soul,

"Mad hopes, blind hate, that like possessing fiends

"Shriek at a name! This sweetest virgin, reared

"As garden flowers, to give the sordid world

"Glimpses of perfectness, you snatch and thrust

"On dreary wilds; in visions mad, proclaim

"Semiramis of Gypsy wanderers;

"Doom, with a broken arrow in her heart,

"To wait for death ’mid squalid savages:

"For what? You would be savior of your tribe;

"So said Fedalma’s letter; rather say,

"You have the will to save by ruling men.

"But first to rule; and with that flinty will

"You cut your way, though the first cut you give

"Gash your child’s bosom.

"(While Silva has been speaking, with growing passion, Fedalma has placed herself between him and her father.)

"Zarca

"(with calm irony).

"You are loud, my lord!

"You only are the reasonable man;

"You have a heart, I none. Fedalma’s’ good

"Is what you see, you care for; while I seek

"No good, not even my own, urged on by naught

"But hellish hunger, which must still be fed

"Though in the feeding it I suffer throes.

"Fume at your own opinion, as you will:

"I speak not now to you, but to my daughter.

"If she still calls it good to mate with you,

"To be a Spanish duchess, kneel at court,

"And hope her beauty is excuse to men

"When women whisper, “She was a Zincala”;

"If she still calls it good to take a lot

"That measures joy for her as she forgets

"Her kindred and her kindred’s misery,

"Nor feel the softness of her downy couch

"Marred by remembrance that she once forsook

"The place that she was born to,—let her go!

"If life for her still lies in alien love,

"That forces her to shut her soul from truth

"As men in shameful pleasures shut out day;

"And death, for her, is to do rarest deeds,

"Which, even failing, leave new faith to men,

"The faith in human hearts,—then, let her go!

"She is my only offspring; in her veins

"She bears the blood her tribe has trusted in;

"Her heritage is their obedience,

"And if I died, she might still lead them forth

"To plant the race her lover now reviles

"Where they may make a nation, and may rise

"To grander manhood than his race can show;

"Then live a goddess, sanctifying oaths,

"Enforcing right, and ruling consciences,

"By law deep-graven in exalting deeds,

"Through the long ages of her people’s life.

"If she can leave that lot for silken shame,

"For kisses honeyed by oblivion,—

"The bliss of drunkards or the blank of fools,—

"Then let her go! You Spanish Catholics,

"When you are cruel, base, and treacherous,

"For ends not pious, tender gifts to God,

"And for men’s wounds offer much oil to churches:

"We have no altars for such healing gifts

"As soothe the heavens for outrage done on earth.

"We have no priesthood and no creed to teach

"That the Zincala who might save her race

"And yet abandons it, may cleanse that blot,

"And mend the curse her life has been to men,

"By saving her own soul. Her one base choice

"Is wrong unchangeable, is poison shed

"Where men must drink, shed by her poisoning will.

"Now choose, Fedalma!

"[But her choice was made.

"Slowly, while yet her father spoke, she moved

"From where oblique with deprecating arms

"She stood between the two who swayed her heart:

"Slowly she moved to choose sublimer pain;

"Yearning, yet shrinking; wrought upon by awe,

"Her own brief life seeming a little isle

"Remote through visions of a wider world

"With fates close-crowded; firm to slay her joy

"That cut her heart with smiles beneath the knife,

"Like a sweet babe foredoomed by prophecy.

"She stood apart, yet near her father: stood

"Hand clutching hand, her limbs all tense with will

"That strove against her anguish, eyes that seemed a soul

"Yearning in death towards him she loved and left.

"He faced her, pale with passion and a will

"Fierce to resist whatever might seem strong

"And ask him to submit: he saw one end,—

"He must be conqueror; monarch of his lot

"And not its tributary. But she spoke

"Tenderly, pleadingly.]

"Fedalma.

"My lord, farewell!

"’T was well we met once more; now we must part.

"I think we had the chief of all love’s joys

"Only in knowing that we loved each other.

"Silva.

"I thought we loved with love that clings till death,

"Clings as brute mothers bleeding to their young,

"Still sheltering, clutching it, though it were dead;

"Taking the death-wound sooner than divide.

"I thought we loved so.

"Fedalma.

"Silva, it is fate.

"Great Fate has made me heiress of this woe.

"You must forgive Fedalma all her debt:

"She is quite beggared: if she gave herself,

"’T would be a self corrupt with stifled thoughts

"Of a forsaken better. It is truth

"My father speaks: the Spanish noble’s wife

"Would be false Zincala. I will bear

"The heavy trust of my inheritance.

"See, ’t was my people’s life that throbbed in me;

"An unknown need stirred darkly in my soul,

"And made me restless even in my bliss.

"O, all my bliss was in our love; but now

"I may not taste it: some deep energy

"Compels me to choose hunger.

"Dear, farewell! I must go with my people.

"[She stretched forth

"Her tender hands, that oft had lain in his,

"The hands he knew so well, that sight of them

"Seemed like their touch. But he stood still as death;

"Locked motionless by forces opposite:

"His frustrate hopes still battled with despair;

"His will was prisoner to the double grasp

"Of rage and hesitancy. All the travelled way

"Behind him, he had trodden confident,

"Ruling munificently in his thought

"This Gypsy father. Now the father stood

"Present and silent and unchangeable

"As a celestial portent. Backward lay

"The traversed road, the town’s forsaken wall,

"The risk, the daring; all around him now

"Was obstacle, save where the rising flood

"Of love close pressed by anguish of denial

"Was sweeping him resistless; save where she

"Gazing stretched forth her tender hands, that hurt

"Like parting kisses. Then at last he spoke.]

"Don Silva.

"No, I can never take those hands in mine,

"Then let them go for ever!

"Fedalma.

"It must be.

"We may not make this world a paradise

"By walking it together hand in hand,

"With eyes that meeting feed a double strength.

"We must be only joined by pains divine

"Of spirits blent in mutual memories.

"Silva, our joy is dead.

"Don Silva.

"But love still lives,

"And has a safer guard in wretchedness.

"Fedalma, women know no perfect love:

"Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong;

"Man clings because the being whom he loves

"Is weak and needs him. I can never turn

"And leave you to your difficult wandering;

"Know that you tread the desert, bear the storm,

"Shed tears, see terrors, faint with weariness,

"Yet live away from you, I should feel naught

"But your imagined pains: in my own steps

"See your feet bleeding, taste your silent tears,

"And feel no presence but your loneliness.

"No, I will never leave you!

"Zarca.

"My lord Duke, I have been patient, given room for speech,

"Bent not to move my daughter by command,

"Save that of her own faithfulness. But now,

"All further words are idle elegies

"Unfitting times of action. You are here

"With the safe-conduct of that trust you showed

"Coming alone to the Zincolo camp.

"I would fain meet all trust with courtesy

"As well as honor; but my utmost power

"Is to afford you Gypsy guard to-night

"Within the tents that keep the northward lines,

"And for the morrow, escort on your way

"Back to the Moorish bounds.

"Don Silva.

"What if my words

"Were meant for deeds, decisive as a leap

"Into the current? It is not my wont

"To utter hollow words, and speak resolves

"Like verses bandied in a madrigal.

"I spoke in action first: I faced all risks

"To find Fedalma. Action speaks again

"When I, a Spanish noble, here declare

"That I abide with her, adopt her lot,

"Claiming alone fulfilment of her vows

"As my betrothed wife.

"Fedalma

(wresting herself from him and standing opposite with a look of terror).

"Nay, Silva, nay!

"You could not live so; spring from your high place….

"Don Silva.

"Yes, I have said it. And you, chief, are bound

"By her strict vows, no stronger fealty

"Being left to cancel them."

"Zarca.

"Strong words, my lord!

"Sounds fatal as the hammer-strokes that shape

"The glowing metal: they must shape your life.

"That you will claim my daughter is to say

"That you will leave your Spanish dignities,

"Your home, your wealth, your people, to become

"A true Zincalo: share your wanderings,

"And be a match meet for my daughter’s dower

"By living for her tribe; take the deep oath

"That binds you to us; rest within our camp,

"Show yourself no more in the Spanish ranks,

"And keep my orders. See, my lord, you lock

"A chain of many links,—a heavy chain.

"Don Silva.

"I have but one resolve: let the rest follow.

"What is my rank? To-morrow it will be filled

"By one who eyes it like a carrion bird,

"Waiting for death. I shall be no more missed

"Than waves are missed that leaping on the rock

"Find there a bed and rest? Life’s a vast sea

"That does its mighty errand without fail,

"Panting in unchanged strength though waves are changing.

"And I have said it. She shall be my people,

"And where she gives her life I will give mine.

"She shall not live alone, nor die alone.

"I will elect my deeds, and be the liege,

"Not of my birth, but of that good alone

"I have discerned and chosen.

"Zarca.

"Our poor faith

"Allows not rightful choice, save of the right

"Our birth has made for us. And you, my lord,

"Can still defer your choice, for some day’s space.

"I march perforce to-night; you, if you will,

"Under Zincalo guard, can keep the heights

"With silent Time that slowly opes the scroll

"Of change inevitable; can reserve your oath

"Till my accomplished task leave me at large

"To see you keep your purpose or renounce it.

"Don Silva.

"Chief, do I hear amiss, or does your speech

"Ring with a doubleness which I had held

"Most alien to you? You would put me off,

"And cloak evasion with allowance?

"No! We will complete our pledges.

"I will take That oath which binds not me alone, but you,

"To join my life for ever with Fedalma’s.

"Zarca. Enough. I wrangle not,—time presses.

"But the oath Will leave you that same post upon the heights;

"Pledged to remain there while my absence lasts.

"You are agreed, my lord? Don Silva. Agreed to all.

"Zarca.

"Then I will give the summons to our camp.

"We will adopt you as a brother now,

"In the Zincalo’s fashion.

"[Exit Zarca. (Silva takes Fedalma’s hands.)

"Fedalma.

"O my lord! 1 think the earth is trembling: naught is firm.

"Some terror chills me with a shadowy grasp.

"Am I about to wake, or do you breathe

"Here in this valley? Did the outer air

"Vibrate to fatal words, or did they shake

"Only my dreaming soul? You a Zincalo?

"Don Silva.

"Is then your love too faint to raise belief Up to that height?

"Fedalma.

"Silva, had you but said

"That you would die,—that were an easy task

"For you who oft have fronted death in war.

"But so to live for me,—you, used to rule,—

"You could not breathe the air my father breathes:

"His presence is subjection. Go, my lord!

"Fly, while there yet is time. Wait not to speak.

"I will declare that I refused your love,—

"Would keep no vows to you

"Don Silva.

"It is too late.

"You shall not thrust me back to seek a good

"Apart from you. And what good? Why, to face

"Your absence,—all the want that drove me forth

"To work the will of a more tyrannous friend

"Than any uncowled father. Life at least

"Gives choice of ills; forces me to defy,

"But shall not force me to a weak defiance.

"The power that threatened you, to master me,

"That scorches like a cave-hid dragon’s breath,

"Sure of its victory in spite of hate,

"Is what I last will bend to,—most defy.

"Your father has a chieftain’s ends, befitting

"A soldier’s eye and arm: were he as strong

"As the Moors’ prophet, yet the prophet too

"Had younger captains of illustrious fame

"Among the infidels. Let him command,

"For when your father speaks, I shall hear you.

"Life were no gain if you were lost to me:

"I would straight go and seek the Moorish walls,

"Challenge their bravest, and embrace swift death.

"The Glorious Mother and her pitying

"Son Are not Inquisitors, else their heaven were hell.

"Perhaps they hate their cruel worshippers,

"And let them feed on lies. I’ll rather trust

"They love you and have sent me to defend you.

"Fedalma.

"I made my creed so, just to suit my mood

"And smooth all hardship, till my father came

"And taught my soul by ruling it. Since then

"I cannot weave a dreaming happy creed

"Where our love’s happiness is not accursed.

"My father shook my soul awake. And you,—

"What the Zincala may not quit for you,

"I cannot joy that you should quit for her.

"Don Silva.

"O, Spanish men are not a petty band

"Where one deserter makes a fatal breach.

"Men, even nobles, are more plenteous

"Than steeds and armor; and my weapons left

"Will find new hands to wield them. Arrogance

"Makes itself champion of mankind, and holds

"God’s purpose maimed for one hidalgo lost.

"See where your father comes and brings a crowd

"Of witnesses to hear my oath of love;

"The low red sun glows on them like a fire;

"This seems a valley in some strange new world,

"Where we have found each other, my Fedalma."

................................................................................................

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October 07, 2021 - October 07, 2021.

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................................................................................................

Book IV.

................................................................................................

"Now twice the day bad sunk from off the hills

"While Silva kept his watch there, with the band

"Of strong Zincali. When the sun was high

"He slept, then, waking, strained impatient eyes

"To catch the promise of some moving form

"That might be Juan,—Juan who went and came

"To soothe two hearts, and claimed naught for his own:

"Friend more divine than all divinities,

"Quenching his human thirst in others’ joy."

....

"But the third day, though Silva southward gazed

"Till all the shadows slanted towards him, gazed

"Till all the shadows died, no Juan came.

"Now in his stead came loneliness, and thought

"Inexorable, fastening with firm chain

"What is to what hath been. Now awful Night,

"Ancestral mystery of mysteries, came down

"Past all the generations of the stars,

"And visited his soul with touch more close

"Than when he kept that younger, briefer watch

"Under the church’s roof beside his arms,

"And won his knighthood."

....

"Thought played him double; seemed to wear the yoke

"Of sovereign passion in the noon-day height

"Of passion’s prevalence; but served anon

"As tribune to the larger soul which brought

"Loud-mingled cries from every human need

"That ages had instructed into life. He could not grasp

"Night’s black blank mystery

"And wear it for a spiritual garb

"Creed-proof: he shuddered at its passionless touch

"On solitary souls, the universe

"Looks down inhospitable; the human heart

"Finds nowhere shelter but in human kind."

....

"Now the former life

"Of close-linked fellowship, the life that made

"His full-formed self, as the impregnant sap

"Of years successive frames the full-branched tree,—

"Was present in one whole; and that great trust

"His deed had broken turned reproach on him

"From faces of all witnesses who heard

"His uttered pledges; saw him take high place

"Centring reliance; use rich privilege

"That bound him like a victim-nourished god

"To bless; assume the Cross and take his knightly oath

"Mature, deliberate: faces human all,

"And some divine as well as human: His

"Who hung supreme, the suffering Man divine

"Above the altar; Hers, the Mother pure

"Whose glance informed his masculine tenderness

"With deepest reverence; the Archangel armed,

"Trampling man’s enemy: all heroic forms

"That fill the world of faith with voices, hearts,

"And high companionship, to Silva now

"Made but one inward and insistent world

"With faces of his peers, with court and hall

"And deference, and reverent vassalage

"And filial pieties,—one current strong,

"The warmly mingled life-blood of his mind,

"Sustaining him even when he idly played

"With rules, beliefs, charges, and ceremonies

"As arbitrary fooling. Such revenge

"Is wrought by the long travail of mankind

"On him who scorns it, and would shape his life

"Without obedience.

"But his warrior’s pride

"Would take no wounds save on the breast.

"He faced The fatal crowd: ‘“I never shall repent!

"If I have sinned my sin was made for me

"By men’s perverseness. There’s no blameless life

"Save for the passionless, no sanctities

"But have the selfsame roof and props with crime,

"Or have their roots close interlaced with vileness.

"If I had loved her less, been more a craven,

"I had kept my place and had the easy praise

"Of a true Spanish noble. But I loved,

"And, loving, dared,—not Death the warrior

"But Infamy that binds and strips and holds

"The brand and lash. I have dared all for her.

"She was my good,—what other men call heaven.

"And for the sake of it bear penances;

"Nay, some of old were baited, tortured, flayed

"To win their heaven. Heaven was their good,

"She, mine. And I have braved for her all fires

"Certain or threatened; for I go away

"Beyond the reach of expiation,—far away

"From sacramental blessing. Does God bless

"No outlaw? Shut his absolution fast In human breath?

"Is there no God for me Save Him whose cross

"I have forsaken?—Well, I am forever exiled,—but with her."

................................................................................................

"With these new comrades of his future,—he

"Who had been wont to have his wishes feared

"And guessed at as a hidden law for men.

"Even the passive silence of the night.

"That left these howlers mastery, even the moon,

"Rising and staring with a helpless face;

"Angered him. He was ready now to fly

"At some loud throat, and give the signal so

"For butchery of himself. But suddenly

"The sounds that travelled towards no foreseen close

"Were torn right off and fringed into the night;

"Sharp Gypsy ears had caught the onward strain

"Of kindred voices joining in the chant.’

"All started to their feet and mustered close,

"Auguring long-waited summons. It was come:

"The summons to set forth and join their chief.

"Fedalma had been called already, and was gone

"Under safe escort, Juan following her:

"The camp—the women, children, and old men—

"Were moving slowly southward on the way

"To Almeria. Silva learned no more.

"He marched perforce; what other goal was his

"Than where Fedalma was? And so he marched

"Through the dim passes and o’er rising hills,

"Not knowing whither, till the morning came."

................................................................................................

"Zarca.

"Welcome, Doctor; see

"With that small task I did but beckon you

"To graver work. You know these corpses?

"Sephardo.

"Yes. I would they were not corpses. Storms will lay

"The fairest trees and leave the withered stumps.

"This Alvar and the Duke were of one age,

"And very loving friends. I minded not

"The sight of Don Diego’s corpse, for death

"Gave him some gentleness, and had he lived

"I had still hated him. But this young Alvar

"Was doubly noble, as a gem that holds

"Rare virtues in its lustre, and his death

"Will pierce Don Silva with a poisoned dart.

"This fair and curly youth was Arias,

"A son of the Pachecos; this dark face—

"Zarca.

"Enough! you know their names. I had divined

"That they were near the Duke, most like had served

"My daughter, were her friends. So rescued them

"From being flung upon the heap of slain.

"Beseech you, Doctor, if you owe me aught

"As having served your people, take the pains

"To see these bodied buried decently.

"And let their names be writ above their graves,

"As those of brave young Spaniards who died well.

"I needs must bear this womanhood in my heart,—

"Bearing my daughter there. For once she prayed,—

"’T was at our parting,—“When you see fair hair

"Be pitiful.” And I am forced to look

"On fair heads living and be pitiless.

"Your service, Doctor, will be done to her.

"Sephardo.

"A service doubly dear. For these young dead,

"And one less happy Spaniard who still lives,

"Are offering which I wrenched from out my heart,

"Constraint by cries of Israel: while my hands

"Rendered the victims at command, my eyes

"Closed themselves vainly, as if vision lay

"Through those poor loopholes only. I will go

"And see the graves dug by some cypresses.

"Zarca. Meanwhile the bodies shall rest here.

"Farewell.

"(Exit Sephardo.)

"Nay, ’t is no mockery. She keeps me so

"From hardening with the hardness of my acts.

"This Spaniard shrouded in her love,—I would

"He lay here too that I might pity him.."

................................................................................................

"Don Silva.

"Chief, you are treacherous, cruel, devilish,—

"Relentless as a curse that once let loose

"From lips of’ wrath, lives bodiless to destroy,

"And darkly traps a man in nets of guilt

"Which could not weave themselves in open day

"Before his eyes. ‘O, it was bitter wrong

"To hold this knowledge locked within your mind,

"To stand with waking eyes in broadest light,

"And see me, dreaming, shed my kindred’s blood.

"’T is’ horrible that men with hearts and hands

"Should smile in silence like the firmament

"And see a fellow-mortal draw a lot

"On which themselves have written agony!

"Such injury has no redress, no healing

"Save what may lie in stemming further ill.

"Poor balm for maiming! Yet I come to claim it.

"Zarca.

"First prove your wrongs, and I will hear your claim.

"Mind, you are not commander of Bedmár,

"Nor duke, nor knight, nor anything for me,

"Save one Zincalo, one of my subject tribe,

"Over whose deeds my will is absolute.

"You chose that lot, and would have railed at me

"Had I refused it you: I warned you first

"What oaths you had to take …

"Don Silva.

"You never warned me

"That you had linked yourself with Moorish men

"To take this town and fortress of Bedmár,—

"Slay my near kinsman, him who held my place,

"Our house’s heir and guardian,—slay my friend, . .

"My chosen brother,—desecrate the church

"Where once my mother held me in her arms, .

"Making the holy chrism holier

"With tears of joy that fell upon my brow!

"You never warned….

"Zarca.

"I warned you of your oath.

"You shrank not, we’re resolved, were sure your place

"Would never miss you, and you had your will.

"I am no priest, and keep no consciences:

"I keep my own place and my own command.

"Don Silva.

"I said my place would never miss me—yes!

"A thousand Spaniards died on that same day

"And were not missed; their garments clothed the backs

"That else were bear

"Zarca.

"But you were just the one

"Above the thousand, had you known the die

"That fate was throwing then.

"Don Silva.

"You knew it,—you!

"With fiendish knowledge, smiling at the end.

"You knew what snares had made my flying steps

"Murderous; you let me lock my soul with oaths

"Which your acts made a hellish sacrament.

"I say, you knew this as a fiend would know it,

"And let me damn myself.

"Zarca.

"The deed was done

"Before you took your oath, or reached our camp,—

"Done when you slipped in secret from the post

"’T was yours to keep, and not to meditate

"If others might not fill it. For your oath,

"What man is he who brandishes a sword

"In darkness, kills his friends, and rages then

"Against the night that kept him ignorant?

"Should I, for one unstable Spaniard, quit

"My steadfast ends as father and as chief;

"Renounce my daughter and my people’s hope,

"Lest a deserter should be made ashamed?

"Don Silva.

"Your daughter,—O great God! I vent but madness.

"The past will never change. I come to stem

"Harm that may yet be hindered. Chief—this stake—

"Tell me who is to die! Are you not bound

"Yourself to him you took in fellowship?

"The town is yours; let me but save the blood

"That still is warm in men who were my….

"Zarca.

"Peace! They bring the prisoner"

....

"The prisoner was Father Isidor:

"The man whom once he fiercely had accused

"As author of his misdeeds,—whose designs

"Had forced him into fatal secrecy.

"The imperious and inexorable Will

"Was yoked, and he who had been pitiless

"To Silva’s love, was led to pitiless death.

"O hateful victory of blind wishes,—prayers

"Which hell had overheard and swift fulfilled!

"The triumph was a torture, turning all

"The strength of passion into strength of pain.

"Remorse was born within him, that dire birth

"Which robs all else of nurture,—cancerous,

"Forcing each pulse to feed its anguish, changing

"All sweetest residues of a healthy life

"To fibrous clutches of slow misery.

"Silva had but rebelled,—he was not free;

"And all the subtle cords that bound his soul

"Were tightened by the strain of one rash leap

"Made in defiance. He accused no more,

"But dumbly shrank before accusing throngs

"Of thoughts, the impetuous recurrent rush

"Of all his past-created, unchanged self."

................................................................................................

"The young bright morning cast athwart white walls

"Her shadows blue, and with their clear-cut line,

"Mildly inexorable as the dial-hand’s

"Measured the shrinking future of an hour

"Which held a. shrinking hope. And all the while

"The silent beat of time in each man’s soul

"Made aching pulses. But the cry, “She comes!”

"Parted the crowd like waters: and she came.

"Swiftly as once before, inspired with joy,

"She flashed across the space and made new light,

"Glowing upon the glow of evening,

"So swiftly now she came, inspired with woe,

"Strong with the strength of all her father’s pain,

"Thrilling her as with fire of rage divine

"And battling energy. She knew,—saw all:

"The stake with Silva bound,—her father pierced,—

"To this she had been born: the second time

"Her father called her to the task of life.

"She knelt beside him. Then he raised himself,

"And on her face there flashed from his the light

"As of a star that waned and flames anew

"In mighty dissolution: ’t was the flame

"Of a surviving trust, in agony.

"He spoke the parting prayer that was command,

"Must sway her will, and reign invisibly.]

"Zarca.

"My daughter, you have promised,—you will live

"To save our people. In my garments here

"I carry written pledges from the Moor:

"He will keep faith in Spain and Africa.

"Your weakness may be stronger than my strength,

"Winning more love. I cannot tell the end.

"I held my people’s good within my breast.

"Behold, now, I deliver it to you.

"See, it still breathes unstrangled,—if it dies,

"Let not your failing will be murderer.

"Rise, And tell our people now I wait in pain,—

"I cannot die until I hear them say

"They will obey you."

....

"Zarca.

"Let loose the Spaniard! give him back his sword;

"He cannot move to any vengeance more,—

"His soul is locked ’twixt two opposing crimes.

"I charge you let him go unharmed and free

"Now through your midst"

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October 07, 2021 - October 08, 2021.

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................................................................................................

Book V.

................................................................................................

"The eastward rooks of Almeria’s bay

"Answer long farewells of the travelling sun

"With softest glow as from an inward pulse

"Changing and flushing: all the Moorish ships

"Seem conscious too, and shoot out sudden shadows;

"Their black hulls snatch a glory, and their sails

"Show variegated radiance, gently stirred

"Like broad wings poised."

....

"Motionless she stood,

"Black-crowned with wreaths of many-shadowed hair;

"Black-robed, but bearing wide upon her breast

"Her father’s golden necklace and his badge.

"Her limbs were motionless but in her eyes

"And in her breathing lip’s soft tremulous curve

"Was intense motion as of prisoned fire

"Escaping subtly in outleaping thought.

"She watches anxiously, and yet she dreams:

"The busy moments now expand, now shrink

"To narrowing swarms within the refluent space

"Of changeful consciousness. For in her thought

"Already she has left the fading shore,

"Sails with her people, seeks an unknown land,

"And bears the burning length of of weary days

"That parching fall upon her father’s hope,

"Which she must plant and see it wither only,—

"Wither and die. She saw the end begun.

"Zincali hearts were not unfaithful: she

"Was centre to the savage loyalty

"Which vowed obedience to Zarca dead.

"But soon their natures missed the constant stress

"Of his command, that, while it fired, restrained

"By urgency supreme, and left no play

"To fickle impulse scattering desire.

"They loved their Queen, trusted in Zarca’s child,

"Would bear her o’er the desert on their arms

"And think the weight a gladsome victory;

"But that great force which knit them into one,

"The invisible passion of her father’s soul,

"That wrought them visibly into its will,

"And would have bound their lives with permanence,

"Was gone."

....

"In a little while, the tribe

"That was to be the ensign of the race,

"And draw it into conscious union,

"Itself would break in small and scattered bands

"That, living on scant prey, would still disperse

"And propagate forgetfulness. Brief years,

"And that great purpose fed with vital fire

"That might have glowed for half a century,

"Subduing, quickening, shaping, like a sun,—

"Would be a faint tradition, flickering low

"In dying memories, fringing with dim light

"The nearer dark.

"Far, far the future stretched

"Beyond the busy present on the quay,

"Far her straight path beyond it. Yet she watched

"To mark the growing hour, and yet in dream

"Alternate she beheld another track,

"And felt herself unseen pursuing it

"Close to a wanderer, who with haggard gaze

"Looked out on loneliness. The backward years—

"O she would not forget them—would not drink

"Of waters that brought rest, while he far off

"Remembered “Father, I renounced the joy,—

"You must forgive the sorrow.”

"So she stood,

"Her struggling life compressed into that hour,

"Yearning, resolving, conquering; though she seemed

Still as a tutelary image sent

"To guard her people and to be the strength

"Of some rock citadel."

"But emerging now

"From eastward fringing lines of idling men

"Quick Juan lightly sought the upward steps

"Behind Fedalma, and two paces off,

"With head uncovered, said in gentle tones,

"“Lady Fedalma!”—(Juan’s password now

"Used by no other,) and Fedalma turned,

"Knowing who sought her. He advanced a step,

"And meeting straight her large calm questioning gaze,

"Warned her of some grave purport by a face

"That told of trouble. Lower still he spoke."

"Juan.

"Look from me, lady, towards a moving form

"That quits the crowd and seeks the lonelier strand,—

"A tall and gray-clad pilgrim….

"[Solemnly His low tones fell on her, as if she passed

"Into religious dimness among tombs

"And trod on names in everlasting rest.

"Lingeringly she looked, and then with with voice

"Deep and yet soft, like notes from some long chord

"Responsive to thrilled air, said:]"

"Fedalma.

"It is he!

"[Juan kept silence for a little space,

"With reverent caution, lest his lighter grief

"Might seem a wanton touch upon her pain.

"But time was urging him with visible flight,

"Changing the shadows: he must, utter all.]

"Juan.

"That man was young when last I pressed his hand,—

"In that dread moment when he left Bedmár.

"He has aged since: the week has made him gray.

"And yet I knew him,—knew the white-streaked hair

"Before I saw his face, as I should know

"The tear-dimmed writing of a friend. See now,—

"Does he not linger,—pause?—perhaps except….

"[Juan plead timidly: Fedalma’s eyes

"Flashed; and through all her frame there ran the shock

"Of some sharp-wounding joy, like his who hastes

"And dreads to come too late, and comes in time

"To press a loved hand dying. She was mute

"And made no gesture: all her being paused

"In resolution, as some leonine wave

"That makes a moment’s silence ere it leaps.]

"Juan.

"He came from Cathagena, in a boat

"Too slight for safety; yon small two-oared boat

"Below the rock; the fisher-boy within

"Awaits his signal. But the pilgrim waits….

"Fedalma.

"Yes, I will go!—Father, I owe him this,

"For loving he made all his misery.

"And we will look once more,—will say farewell

"As in a solemn rite to strengthen us

"For our eternal parting. Juan, stay

"Here in my place, to warn me were there need.

"And, Hinda, follow me!"

................................................................................................

"[He did not say “Farewell.”

"But neither knew that he was silent. She,

"For one long moment, moved not. They knew naught

"Save that they parted.; for their mutual gaze

"As with their soul’s full speech forbade their hands

"To seek each other,—those oft-clasping hands

"Which had a memory of their own, and went."

................................................................................................

"It was night

"Before the ships weighed anchor and gave sail:

"Fresh Night emergent in her clearness, lit

"By the large crescent moon, with Hesperus,

"And those great stars that lead the eager host.

"Fedalma stood and watched the little bark

"Lying jet-black upon moon-whitened waves.

"Silva was standing too. He too divined

"A steadfast form that held him with its thought,

"And eyes that sought him vanishing: he saw

"The waters widen slowly, till at last

"Straining he gazed, and knew not if he gazed

"On aught but blackness overhung by stars. ]"

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October 05, 2021 - October 08, 2021.

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The Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems (1874)

................................................................................................

The Legend of Jubal

................................................................................................

When one has finished, one grows aware of the story George Eliot wished to tell (- that of the worshipped son of God who, if he were to return, could very well find himself not only ignored, but very likely persecuted, again, by the very ones who swear faith and call themselves in his name; of Europe that, seemingly converted to a creed of brotherhood and kindness, of meek inheriting heaven and of doing unto others as you would have them do into you, yet follows hypocrisy of paying obeisance to the creed, weekly, and goes to war for looting others lands -) yet finds the conflict in herself too great, having been outspoken about pride of an ancestry of invaders, and of righteousness of England in punishing India and China for resisting the domination of England - and so she dared not, but instead tells here the story of Jubal who discovered music and gave this great gift to humanity.

She combines it with his sojourn to find greatest mountains South, and having discovered great ocean thereafter, returning home, only to be beaten in his own name.

Which is the greater story, that of followers of a God assaulting him if he appears? Or the sojourner who cannot return home to recognition and love and peace, but is assaulted and humiliated instead?

................................................................................................

Interesting, that usually there's a pretence in abrahmic faiths about non existence of Gods, other than one admitted and demanded faith to; but in history and mythology of Greece, Rome, Egypt and even of West Asia, other Gods are not only mentioned, they are well described and characterised.

George Eliot begins with mention of them, and quickly covers up with ascribing them only to imagination of Cain, but bible itself is a matter of faith according to church dogma and not admitted as history of the region; and yet, she then goes on to indicate Cain possibly going yo India.

This last is merely another infliction of contempt on India, of course, by someone of colonial empire rulers; India has very rich treasure of knowledge, branded mythology by West, but since much proven true history by science of West - including, for example, history of rising of Himaalayan ranges from ocean, and too, evolution theory that parallels Dashaavataara of India's traditional lore.

But India has no memory, no tradition of any tale, whatsoever, of even a Cain (or anyone arriving from West across what was prehistorically an ocean - hence the name, Sindhu, literally meaning ocean, for the river called Indus by west), much less of a whole Aaryan race that is foundation of civilisation of India. Tradition of India reaches prehistory of Indian subcontinent, and has no whiff of arriving from across Sindhu. It has, instead, memories of Himaalayan ranges rising out of the ocean, and of Gangaa being brought down to earth by efforts of a single man, Bhagieratha.

So Cain going East, of Eden - presumably from West Asia - might have reached, say, western borders of the region known as Central Asia.

................................................................................................

It isn't just that George Eliot- daughter of a clergyman - mentions other Gods, before covering it up as his lack of doubt in their existence, and seeing them mirrored there - so church could easily brand it all as thinking of a fallen one who murdered hus brother, even though history really point at flesh consumers and monotheist conversionists as perpetrators of massacres on humongous scale, not vegetarians of a happy land inhabited by Gods.

It also that the author says, "When Cain was driven from Jehovah’s land ", so, not only he did not leave of his own volition, not only he was ordered to leave, but was "driven out"; what's more, "driven from Jehovah’s land", and "He wandered eastward, seeking some far strand, Ruled by kind gods who asked no offerings"! So concept within Eden is of a god who "owns" that land, whik e others are "ruled" by other Gods; moreover, the owner of Eden asked for offerings, which, Cain hoped, those other Gods elsewhere were kind enough not to ask!

And yet, church fraudulently demands exclusive faith in one who so demands, and more, denial of all others, not denial of offerings, but of their very existence!

"When Cain was driven from Jehovah’s land

"He wandered eastward, seeking some far strand

"Ruled by kind gods who asked no offerings

"Save pure field-fruits, as aromatic things,

"To feed the subtler sense of frames divine

"That lived on fragrance for their food and wine:

"Wild joyous gods, who winked at faults and folly,

"And could be pitiful and melancholy.

"He never had a doubt that such gods were;

"He looked within, and saw them mirrored there.

"Some think he came at last to Tartary,

"And some to Ind; but, howsoe’er it be,

"His staff he planted where sweet waters ran,

"And in that home of Cain the Arts began."

................................................................................................

Beautiful content and beautifully flow the verses -

"Man’s life was spacious in the early world:

"It paused, like some slow ship with sail unfurled

"Waiting in seas by scarce a wavelet curled;

"Beheld the slow star-paces of the skies,

"And grew from strength to strength through centuries;

"Saw infant trees fill out their giant limbs,

"And heard a thousand times the sweet birds’ marriage hymns."

................................................................................................

And it reverts to memory of terror -

"In Cain’s young city none had heard of

"Death Save him, the founder; and it was his faith

"That here, away from harsh Jehovah’s law,

"Man was immortal, since no halt or flaw

"In Cain’s own frame betrayed six hundred years,

"But dark as pines that autumn never sears

"His locks thronged backward as he ran, his frame

"Rose like the orbed sun each morn the same,

"Lake-mirrored to his gaze; and that red brand,

"The scorching impress of Jehovah’s hand,

"Was still clear-edged to his unwearied eye,

"Its secret firm in time-fraught memory."

................................................................................................

Here's a clue to location of Eden-

"He said, “My happy offspring shall not know

"That the red life from out a man may flow

"When smitten by his brother.” True, his race

"Bore each one stamped upon his new-born face

"A copy of the brand no whit less clear;

"But every mother held that little copy dear.

"Thus generations in glad idlesse throve,

"Nor hunted prey, nor with each other strove;

"For clearest springs were plenteous in the land,

"And gourds for cups; the ripe fruits sought the hand,

"Bending the laden boughs with fragrant gold;

"And for their roofs and garments wealth untold

"Lay everywhere in grasses and broad leaves:

"They labored gently, as a maid who weaves

"Her hair in mimic mats, and pauses oft

"And strokes across her hand the tresses soft,

"Then peeps to watch the poised butterfly,

"Or little burthened ants that homeward hie."

That "maid who weaves Her hair in mimic mats" evokes Africa, where braiding of hair isn't the simple one or two braids the rest of the world is content with; so if thus is the subconscious memory, Eden must gave been therein, or an island off African coast, if not Africa itself. The continent still bears innocence of an Eden with species wild abounding and humans living in harmony, except where spoiled by colonial rulers from Europe, and their heritage.

Recent discoveries under ocean speak of another continent off East coast of Africa, now mostly submerged, that smaller islands of Seychelles and Madagascar and so on are a clue to; and Tamil lore speaks of a continent (that they originated from, migrating to India some time as continents travelled, submerged, and more?), named Kumaarikhanda. Was this Eden?

................................................................................................

Then it changes, and again, there's the motif of connection of an angry god of Cain's past land, evoked by death that was unknown to his descendents, bringing memories of a curse!

"Time was but leisure to their lingering thought,

"There was no’ need for haste to finish aught;

"But sweet beginnings were repeated still

"Like infant babblings that no task fulfil;

"For love, that loved not change, constrained the simple will.

"Till, hurling stones in mere athletic joy,

"Strong Lamech struck and killed his fairest boy,

"And tried to wake him with the tenderest cries,

"And fetched and held before the glazed eyes

"The things they best had loved to look upon;

"But never glance or smile or sigh he won.

"The generations stood around those twain

"Helplessly gazing, till their father

"Cain Parted the press, and said, “He will not wake;

"This is the endless sleep, and we must make

"A bed deep down for him beneath the sod;

"For know, my sons, there is a mighty God

"Angry with all man’s race, but most with me."

This is the memory carried by Cain, of "a mighty God, Angry with all man’s race, but most with me." Nothing godly about this one, unless he's merely one of the Gods, and not one of the greater ones.

................................................................................................

And more - it isn't merely memory, or fear, but a certainty, of persecution, and of wrath, but more, of extermination -

"I fled from out His land in vain!—’tis

"He Who came and slew the lad; for

"He has found This home of ours, and we shall all be bound

"By the harsh bands of His most cruel will,

"Which any moment may some dear one kill.

"Nay, though we live for countless moons, at last

"We and all ours shall die like summers past.

"This is Jehovah’s will, and He is strong;

"I thought the way I travelled was too long

"For Him to follow me: my thought was vain!

"He walks unseen, but leaves a track of pain,

"Pale Death His footprint is, and He will come again!”"

What is mirrored here seems far more a memory of a persecution of a race, that has gone on for well over centuries before two millennia that they were driven from their homeland. So one wonders, did George Eliot write this based on bible, and therefore was the twentieth century culminating in genocide something that mirrored a past memory that's recorded in the bible, with what's called a god only a mighty and terrible Lord of a land?

The flight of Cain from Eden, is that really the migration East that's visible in the obvious connection between populations of Africa, Australia, Fiji, Andaman and Nicobar, and , not all, but a large section of, Tamil people of India?

................................................................................................

"And a new spirit from that hour came o’er

"The race of Cain: soft idlesse was no more,

"But even the sunshine had a heart of care,

"Smiling with hidden dread-a mother fair

"Who folding to her breast a dying child

"Beams with feigned joy that but makes sadness mild.

"Death was now lord of Life, and at his word

"Time, vague as air before, new terrors stirred,

"With measured wing now audibly arose

"Throbbing through all things to some unknown close."

................................................................................................

"Now glad Content by clutching Haste was torn,

"And Work grew eager, and Device was born.

"It seemed the light was never loved before,

"Now each man said, “Twill go and come no more.”

"No budding branch, no pebble from the brook,

"No form, no shadow, but new dearness took

"From the one thought that life must have an end;

"And the last parting now began to send

"Diffusive dread through love and wedded bliss,

"Thrilling them into finer tenderness.

"Then Memory disclosed her face divine,

"That like the calm nocturnal lights doth shine

"Within the soul, and shows the sacred graves,

"And shows the presence that no sunlight craves,

"No space, no warmth, but moves among them all;

"Gone and yet here, and coming at each call,

"With ready voice and eyes that understand,

"And lips that ask a kiss, and dear responsive hand.

"Such granite as the plunging torrent wears

"And roaring rolls around through countless years.

"But strength that still on movement must be fed,

"Inspiring thought of change, devices bred,

"And urged his mind through earth and air to rove

"For force that he could conquer if he strove,

"For lurking forms that might new tasks fulfil

"And yield unwilling to his stronger-will."

................................................................................................

George Eliot describes each brother by turn - Jabal the shepherd with magic handling of all animals, till he reared canines domesticated from wild wolves, and Tubal-Cain the handler of tools who crafted things from earth.

"Such Tubal-Cain. But Jubal had a frame

"Fashioned to finer senses, which became

"A yearning for some hidden soul of things,

"Some outward touch complete on inner springs

"That vaguely moving bred a lonely pain,

"A want that did but stronger grow with gain

"Of all good else, as spirits might be sad

"For lack of speech to tell us they are glad."

....

"Jubal, too, watched the hammer, till his eyes,

"No longer following its fall or rise,

"Seemed glad with something that they could not see,

"But only listened to—some melody,

"Wherein dumb longings inward speech had found,

"Won from the common store of struggling sound.

"Then, as the metal shapes more various grew,

"And, hurled upon each other, resonance drew,

"Each gave new tones, the revelations dim

"Of some external soul that spoke for him:

"The hollow vessel’s clang, the clash, the boom,

"Like light that makes wide spiritual room

"And skyey spaces in the spaceless thought,

"To Jubal such enlarged passion brought,

"That love, hope, rage, and all experience,

"Were fused in vaster being, fetching thence

"Concords and discords, cadences and cries

"That seemed from some world-shrouded soul to rise,

"Some rapture more intense, some mightier rage,

"Some living sea that burst the bounds of man’s brief age."

Story of Jubal is that of discovery of an inner realm, that of music, as told by George Eliot.

"Then with such blissful trouble and glad care

"For growth. within unborn as mothers bear,

"To the far woods he wandered, listening,

"And heard the birds their little stories sing

"In notes whose rise and fall seem melted speech—

"Melted with tears, smiles, glances—that can reach

"More quickly through our frame’s deep-winding night,

"And without thought raise thought’s best fruit, delight.

"Pondering, he sought his home again and heard

"The fluctuant changes of the spoken word:

"The deep remonstrance and the argued want,

"Insistent first in close monotonous chant,

"Next leaping upward to defiant stand

"Or downward beating like the resolute hand;

"The mother’s call, the children’s answering cry,

"The laugh’s light cataract tumbling from on high;

"The suasive repetitions Jabal taught,

"That timid browsing cattle homeward brought:

"The clear-winged fugue of echoes vanishing;

"And through them all the hammer’s rhythmic ring.

"Jubal sat lonely, all around was dim,

"Yet his face glowed with light revealed to him:

"For as the delicate stream of odor wakes

"The thought-wed sentience, and some image makes

"From out the mingled fragments of the past,

"Finely compact in wholeness that will last,

"So streamed as from the body of each sound

"Subtler pulsations, swift as warmth, which found

"All prisoned germs and all their powers unbound,

"Till thought self-luminous flamed from memory,

"And in creative vision wandered free.

"Then Jubal, standing, rapturous arms upraised,

"And on the dark with eager eyes he gazed,

"As had some manifested god been there."

"Such patience have the heroes who begin,

"Sailing the first toward lands which others win.

"Jubal must dare as great beginners dare,

"Strike form’s first way in matter rude and bare,

"And, yearning vaguely toward the plenteous choir

"Of the world’s harvest, make one poor small lyre.

"He made it, and from out its measured frame

"Drew the harmonic soul, whose answers came

"With guidance sweet and lessons of delight

"Teaching to ear and hand the blissful Right,

"Where strictest law is gladness to-the sense,

"And all desire bends toward obedience.

"Then Jubal poured his triumph in a song—

"The rapturous word that rapturous notes prolong

"As radiance streams from smallest things that burn,

"Or thought of loving into love doth turn.

"And still his lyre gave companionship

"In sense-taught concert as of lip with lip."

................................................................................................

Here shows bias of West, again - literally, for West. This is strange, considering Nordic latitudes hunger for the light and warmth they need, and it's brought by sun sun that rises East- but this glory of West viewed each evening, however beautiful, only brings the dreaded darkness and cold, especially dreadful for the dark Nordic latitudes.

"He who had lived through twice three centuries,

"Whose months monotonous, like trees on trees

"In hoary forests, stretched a backward maze,

"Dreamed himself dimly through the travelled days

"Till in clear light he paused, and felt the sun

"That warmed him when he was a little one;

"Knew that true heaven, the recovered past,

"The dear small Known amid the Unknown vast,

"And in that heaven wept. But younger limbs

"Thrilled toward the future, that bright land which swims

"In western glory, isles and streams and bays,

"Where hidden pleasures float in golden haze."

No, it's not primitive natural instinct, this glorification of West - it has to be about a prehistoric migration East and a nostalgic memory if West, thus recounted in Cain being driven East of Eden.

................................................................................................

"The sun had sunk, but music still was there,

"And when this ceased, still triumph filled the air:

"It seemed the stars were shining with delight

"And that no night was ever like this night."

"“Hearing myself,” he said, “I hems in my life,

"And I will get me to some far-off land,

"Where higher mountains under heaven stand

"And touch the blue at rising of the stars,

"Whose song they hear where no rough mingling mars

"The great clear voices. Such lands there must be,

"Where varying forms make varying symphony

"Where other thunders roll amid the hills,

"Some mightier wind a mightier forest fills

"With other strains through other-shapen boughs;

"Where bees and birds and beasts that hunt or browse

"Will teach me songs I know not. Listening there,

"My life shall grow like trees both tall and fair

"That rise and spread and bloom toward fuller fruit each year.”

"He took a raft, and travelled with the stream

"Southward for many a league, till he might deem

"He saw at last the pillars of the sky,

"Beholding mountains whose white majesty

"Rushed through him as new awe, and made new song

"That swept with fuller wave the chords along,

"Weighting his voice with deep religious chime,.

"The iteration of slow chant sublime.

"It was the region long inhabited

"By all the race of Seth; and Jubal said,

"“Here have I found my thirsty soul’s desire,

"Eastward the hills touch heaven, and evening’s fire

"Flames through deep waters, I will take my rest,

"And feed anew from my great mother’s breast,

"The sky-clasped Earth, whose voices nurture me

"As the flowers’ sweetness doth the honey-bee.”

"He lingered wandering for many an age,

"And, sowing music, made high heritage

"For generations far beyond the Flood

"For the poor late-begotten human brood

"Born to life’s weary brevity and perilous good.

"And ever as he travelled he would climb

"The farthest mountain, yet the heavenly chime,

"The mighty tolling of the far-off spheres

"Beating their pathway, never touched his ears.

"But wheresoe’er he rose, the heavens rose,

"And the far-gazing mountain could disclose

"Nought but a wider earth; until one height

"Showed him the ocean stretched in liquid light,

"And he could hear its multitudinous roar,

"Its plunge and hiss upon the pebbled shore:

"Then Jubal silent sat, and touched his lyre no more.

"He thought, “The world is great, but I am weak,

"And where the sky bends is no solid peak

"To give me footing, but instead, this main

"Like myriad maddened horses thundering o’er the plain."

................................................................................................

"The way was weary. Many a date-palm grew,

"And shook out clustered gold against the blue,

"While Jubal, guided by the steadfast spheres,

"Sought the dear home of those first eager years,

"When, with fresh vision fed, the fuller will

"Took living outward shape in pliant skill;

"For still he hoped to find the former things,

"And the warm gladness recognition brings.

"His footsteps erred among the mazy woods

"And long illusive sameness of the floods,

"Winding and wandering. Through far regions, strange

"With Gentile homes and faces, did he range,

"And left his music in their memory,

"And left at last, when nought besides would free

"His homeward steps from clinging hands and cries,

"The ancient lyre. And now in ignorant eyes

"No sign remained of Jubal, Lamech’s son,

"That mortal frame wherein was first begun

"The immortal life of song. His withered brow

"Pressed over eyes that held no lightning now,

"His locks streamed whiteness on the hurrying air,

"The unresting soul had worn itself quite bare

"Of beauteous token, as the outworn might

"Of oaks slow dying, gaunt in summer’s light.

"His full deep voice toward thinnest treble ran:

"He was the rune-writ story of a man."

"And so at last he neared the well-known land,

"Could see the hills in ancient order stand

"With friendly faces whose familiar gaze

"Looked through the sunshine of his childish days;

"Knew the deep-shadowed folds of hanging woods,

"And seemed to see the selfsame insect broods

"Whirling and quivering o’er the flowers—to hear

"The selfsame cuckoo making distance near.

"Yea, the dear Earth, with mother’s constancy,

"Met and embraced him, and said, “Thou art he!

"This was thy cradle, here my breast was thine,

"Where feeding, thou didst all thy life intwine

"With my skly-wedded life in heritage divine.”"

................................................................................................

"The word was “Jubal!”.. “Jubal” filled the air,

"And seemed to ride aloft, a spirit there,

"Creator of the choir, the full-fraught strain

"That grateful rolled itself to him again.

"The aged man adust upon the bank—

"Whom no eye saw—at first with rapture drank

"The bliss of music, then, with swelling heart,

"Felt, this was his own being’s greater part,

"The universal joy once born in him."

................................................................................................

"His voice’s penury of tones long spent,

"He felt not; all his being leaped in flame

"To meet his kindred as they onward came

"Slackening and wheeling toward the temple’s face:

"He rushed before them to the glittering space,

"And, with a strength that was but strong desire,

"Cried, “I am Jubal, I! . . . I made the lyre!”"

"The tones amid a lake of silence fell

"Broken and strained, as if a feeble bell

"Had tuneless pealed the triumph of a land

"To listening crowds in expectation spanned.

"Sudden came showers of laughter on that lake;

"They spread along the train from front to wake

"In one great storm of merriment, while he

"Shrank doubting whether he could Jubal be,

"And not a dream of Jubal, whose rich vein

"Of passionate music came with that dream-pain,

"Wherein the sense slips off from each loved thing,

"And all appearance is mere vanishing."

....

"Two rushed upon him: two, the most devout

"In honor of great Jubal, thrust him out,

"And beat him with their flutes. ’Twas little need;

"He strove not, cried not, but with tottering speed,

"As if the scorn and howls were driving wind

"That urged his body, serving so the mind

"Which could but shrink and yearn, he sought the screen

"Of thorny thickets, and there fell unseen.

"The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky,

"While Jubal lonely laid him down to die.

"He said within his soul, “This is the end:

"O’er all the earth to where the heavens bend

"And hem men’s travel, I have breathed my soul:

"I lie here now the remnant of that whole,

"The embers of a life, a lonely pain;

"As far-off rivers to my thirst were vain,

"So of my mighty years nought comes to me again."

................................................................................................

"Because thou shinest in man’s soul, a god,

"Who found and gave new passion and new joy

"That nought but Earth’s destruction can destroy.

"Thy gifts to give was thine of men alone:

"’Twas but in giving that thou couldst atone

"For too much wealth amid their poverty.”—"

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October 05, 2021 - October 05, 2021.

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Other Poems

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Agatha.

Armgart. : I. II. III. IV. V.

How Lisa Loved the King.

A Minor Prophet.

Brother and Sister.

Stradivarius.

A College Breakfast-Party.

Two Lovers.

Self and Life.

“Sweet Endings Come and Go, Love.”

The Death of Moses.

Arion.

“O May I Join the Choir Invisible.”

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Agatha,

................................................................................................

This poem would be sweet for anyone familiar with the region, and as reverent about catholicism as needed. Or one could just enjoy the local colour provided.

Did George Eliot write this when visiting the region?

................................................................................................

"Come with me to the mountain, not where rocks

"Soar harsh above the troops of hurrying pines,

"But where the earth spreads soft and rounded breasts

"To feed her children; where the generous hills

"Lift a green isle betwixt the sky and plain

"To keep some Old World things aloof from change."

Is she talking of hills when she says mountains? She speaks of earth spreading soft and hills being a green isle, but mountains are so labeled or defined only above a certain height, and in Nordic latitudes, that's alpine, unless it's in U.K. warmed by the gulf stream. Or tropics, where alpine scenery is at a far higher altitude than in Europe.

But the next few lines clear up one part- the location isn't tropical.

"Here too ’t is hill and hollow: new-born streams

"With sweet enforcement, joyously compelled

"Like laughing children, hurry down the steeps,

"And make a dimpled chase athwart the stones;

"Pine woods are black upon the heights, the slopes

"Are green with pasture, and the bearded corn

"Fringes the blue above the sudden ridge:

"A little world whose round horizon cuts

"This isle of hills with heaven for a sea,"

So, pines, and sea, in close proximity. And then she writes -

"Save in clear moments when south westward gleams

"France by the Rhine, melting anon to haze."

There are mountains where France can be seen westward across Rhine, but close to sea? That should be easily located!

Here is the heart of George Eliot that never left her breeding, as a clergyman's daughter, behind, even though her intellectual growth did so - so she was distanced from her family, not just father who partially reconciled upon her acceptance of his condition of outward compliance, but siblings too.

"The monks of old chose here their still retreat,

"And called it by the Blessed Virgin’s name,

"Sancta Maria, which the peasant’s tongue,

"Speaking from out the parent’s heart that turns

"All loved things into little things, has made

"Sanct Margen—Holy little Mary, dear

"As all the sweet home things she smiles upon,

"The children and the cows, the apple-trees,

"The cart, the plough, all named with that caress

"Which feigns them little, easy to be held,

"Familiar to the eyes and hand and heart.

"What though a Queen? She puts her crown away

"And with her little Boy wears common clothes,

"Caring for common wants, remembering

"That day when good Saint Joseph left his work

"To marry her with humble trust sublime."

When they thus wax poetic, do they not realise that it was West Asia, where the persona of two millennia past whom they worship, lived - if it were indeed history and not stories made up about them by church for power - and they had lived among orange groves and pines of a warm desert of Asia, with dark eyed and dark haired people, not Apple orchards with blue eyed, blond children frolicking?

"The monks are gone, their shadows fall no more

"Tall-frocked and cowled athwart the evening fields

"At milking-time; their silent corridors

"Are turned to homes of bare-armed, aproned men,

"Who toil for wife and children. But the bells,

"Pealing on high from two quaint convent towers,

"Still ring the Catholic signals, summoning

"To grave remembrance of the larger life

"That bears our own, like perishable fruit

"Upon its heaven-wide branches. ... "

Spiritual life, perishable fruit? What was she thinking? Spiritual life, persons devoted to it, aren't they all far more akin to the non-deciduous evergreens that grow taller than all else around, survive alpine heights, and live long unless cut down by humans or struck by calamities such as lightening or meteors? Fruits and perishable vegetation is of earthly life, delighting in flowering and scents, fruits and seeds, all symbolising youth, change of life that parallels change if seasons, reproduction.

"At their sound

"The shepherd boy far off upon the hill,

"The workers with the saw and at the forge,

"The triple generation round the hearth—

"Grandames and mothers and the flute-voiced girls—

"Fall on their knees, and send forth prayerful cries

"To the kind Mother with the little Boy,

"Who pleads for helpless men against the storm,

"Lightning and plagues and all terrific shapes Of power supreme."

The last two lines explain much about the superstition imposed by Rome being accepted by those then powerless against much, but George Eliot did live in Germany, did she never hear about maultascen and how they were invented, even if she never lived in Switzerland and so never heard of history of cheese, of second milking, or more along the line?

................................................................................................

And now, for the not so generic -

"Within the prettiest hollow of these hills,

"Just as you enter it, upon the slope

"Stands a low cottage neighboured cheerily

"By running water, which, at farthest end

"Of the same hollow, turns a heavy mill,

"And feeds the pasture for the miller’s cows,

"Blanchi and Nageli, Veilchen and the rest,

"Matrons with faces as Griselda mild,

"Coming at call. And on the farthest height

"A little tower looks out above the pines

"Where mounting you will find a sanctuary

"Open and still; without, the silent crowd

"Of heaven-planted, incense-mingling flowers;

"Within, the altar where the Mother sits

"’Mid votive tablets hung from far-off years

"By peasants succored in the peril of fire,

"Fever, or floods who thought that Mary’s love,

"Willing but not omnipotent, had stood

"Between their lives and that dread power which slew

"Their neighbor at their side. The chapel bell

"Will melt to gentlest music ere it reach

"That cottage on the slope, whose garden gate

"Has caught the rose-tree boughs and stands ajar;

"So does the door, to let the sunbeams in;

"For in the slanting sunbeams angels come

"And visit Agatha who dwells within—

"Old Agatha, whose cousins Kate and Nell

"Are housed by her in Love and Duty’s name,

"They being feeble, with small withered wits,

"And she believing that the higher gift

"Was given to be shared. So Agatha

"Shares her one room, all neat on afternoons,

"As if same memory were sacred there

"And everything within the-four low waIls

"An honored relic."

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Here's far more of quintessential George Eliot -

"One long summer’s day

"An angel entered at the rose-hung gate,

"With skirts pale blue, a brow to quench the pearl,

"Hair soft and blonde as infants’, plenteous

"As hers who made the wavy lengths once speak

"The grateful worship of a rescued soul.

"The angel paused before the open door

"To give good day. “Come in,” said Agatha.

"I followed close, and watched and listened there.

"The angel was a lady, noble, young,

"Taught in all the seemliness that fits the court,

"All lore that shapes the mind to delicate use,

"Yet quiet, lowly, as a meek white dove

"That with its presence teaches gentleness.

"Men called her Countess Linda; little girls

"In Freiburg town, orphans whom she caressed,

"Said Mamma Linda: yet her years were few,

"Her outward beauties all in budding time,

"Her virtues the aroma of the plant

"That dwells in all its being, root, stem, leaf.

"And waits not ripeness."

Oh, Freiburg!

That's nowhere close to ocean, though!

But notice how angels of George Eliot always gave red-gold or blond hair, and of course a higher breeding, even though they don't escape travails, but only must deal with them as best as they possibly could - Dorothea, Romola, even Gwendolyn - while the lesser mortal have blue eyes - Tessa, Rosamond - and the exalted virtuous have dark eyes and hair, shared by the not so exalted - Mirah, Lisa?

................................................................................................

Turns out, Countess Linda is visiting from Freiburg, for reasons not explained.

"Fair Countess Linda sat upon the bench,

"Close fronting the old knitter, and they talked

"With sweet antiphony of young and old.

"Agatha.

"You like our valley, lady? I am glad

"You thought it well to come again. But rest—

"The walk is long from Master Michael’s inn.

"Countess Linda.

"Yes, but no walk is prettier.

"Agatha.

"It is true:

"There lacks no blessing here, the waters all

"Have virtues like the garments of the Lord,

"And heal much sickness; then, the crops and cows

"Flourish past speaking, and the garden flowers,

"Pink, blue, and purple, ’t is a joy to see

"How they yield honey for the singing bees.

"I would the whole world were as good a home.

"Countess Linda.

"And you are well off, Agatha?—your friends

"Left you a certain bread: is it not so?

"Agatha.

"Not so at all, dear lady. I had naught,

"Was a poor orphan; but I came to tend

"Here in this house, an old afflicted pair,

"Who wore out slowly; and the last who died,

"Full thirty years ago, left me this roof

"And all the household stuff. It was great wealth;

"And so I had a home for Kate and Nell.

"Countess Linda.

"But how, then, have you earned your daily bread

"These thirty years?

"Agatha.

"O, that is easy earning.

"We help the neighbors, and our bit and sup.

"Is never failing; they have work for us

"In house and field, all sorts of odds and ends,

"Patching and mending, turning o’er the hay,

"Holding sick children,—there is always work;

"And they are very good,—the neighbors are:

"Weigh not our bits of work with weight and scale,

"But glad themselves with giving us good shares

"Of meat and drink; and in the big farm-house

"When cloth comes home from weaving, the good wife

"Cuts me a piece,—this very gown,—and says:

"“Here, Agatha, you old maid, you have time

"To pray for Hans who is gone soldiering:

"The saints might help him, and they have much to do,

"’T were well they were besought to think of him.”

"She spoke half jesting, but I pray,

"I pray For poor young Hans. I take it much to heart

"That other people are worse off than I,—

"I ease my soul with praying for them all.

"Countess Linda.

"That is your way of singing, Agatha;

"Just as the nightingales pour forth sad songs,

"And when they reach men’s ears they make men’s hearts

"Feel the more kindly."

................................................................................................

"Countess Linda.

"When you go southward in your pilgrimage,

"Come to see me in Freiburg, Agatha.

"Where you have friends you should not go to inns.

"Agatha.

"Yes, I will gladly come to see you, lady.

"And you will give me sweet hay for a bed,

"And in the morning I shall wake betimes

"And start when all the birds begin to sing.

"Countess Linda.

"You wear your smart clothes on the pilgrimage,

"Such pretty clothes as all the women here

"Keep by them for their best: a velvet cap

"And collar golden-broidered? They look well

"On old and young alike,

"Agatha.

"Nay, I have none,—

"Never had better clothes than those you see.

"Good clothes are pretty, but one sees them best

"When others wear them, and I somehow thought

"’T was not worth while. I had so many things

"More than some neighbors, I was partly shy

"Of wearing better clothes than they, and now

"I am so old and custom is so strong

"’T would hurt me sore to put on finery.

"Countess Linda.

"Your gray hair is a crown, dear Agatha.

"Shake hands; good-by. The sun is going down

"And I must see the glory from the hill."

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October 04, 2021 - October 04, 2021.

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Armgart

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An idle curiosity to begin with - prompted by the startling realisation that Armgart is supposed to be a name of a young woman, not a castle or village or a post in military! Apart from the fact that one never heard of it, despite being familiar with Germany after residence of years and several visits - Hildegard, yes, but Armgart, no - one has to wonder why George Eliot picks these weird names for her characters. Casaubon, Bulstrode, Lydgate, and now Armgart?!

But coming to the soul and substance of this play in verse, one has to wonder if Ingmar Bergman conceived his Autumn Sonata inspired by this. The dialogue in scene two, between the Graf and Armgart, seem to have inspired the tacit condemnation, almost crucifixion that Bergman had the senior woman go through, confronted by her daughter.

I recall the argument between three students after watching the film, where two argued and one stayed quiet, able to comprehend other two. The younger male repeated his plea about the film being good because it was artistic; the young woman, older than other two, denounced it for the treatment of any woman with a superlative capability, as a bad wife and mother who neglects a home, husband and children.

In a country where a mom calling is a joke, understood in the sense of her being a bore tolerated reluctantly by the males, there is no winning for any females - there's only the ever racing for popularity until one is "pinned", can flash a ring - bigger the stone, better, even if the guy is idiot insufferable - and and proceeds post a white wedding to a career of housekeeping, children, and keeping oneself in latest fadhion, always fearing the straying of glances of the male owner.

And if she does dare to excel at anything - other than Apple pies, of course - she must, at all costs, be stopped; girls are told - not only in U.S., but Europe too - that science is unfeminine, one can't be good at it if one is not a dyke, and final word, one won't be 'popular', i.e., won't find a mate; next, there's harassment of every kind, by male colleagues and female sisterhood left behind, to bend one to their will, in every way possible, with lies if necessary.

Final condemnation is in the form it takes in this play, of course, in scene three - adapted in some form or another in most films and t.v. serials of U.S. and even Indian films - whereby a successful woman is depicted either as a terrible person, or merely ambitious but incapable, crashing in her career, and of course, weeping!

Yes, careers can and do fail; but it's only made into a moral lesson inflicted on females; males can crash and fail too, but are depicted - if not just to turn round and succeed, to be applauded - with sympathy, and often enough to be seen as victims of some woman's fault, if not worse.

Some of the Indian adaptations of Autumn Sonata - one in Hindi, and before that, Unique April in Bengali - are better, in softening the condemnation if any, to a personal grievance by the daughter(s), with the maternal response in the latter bonding the two, and in the former, a discussion in the former awakening the daughter in to understanding, with the mother niw abke to accept responsibility and care of the younger daughter, freeing the elder to her own life.

George Eliot here avoids the condemnation, but scene three has the confrontation between the two women - which Ingmar Bergman turned into accusation spree by daughter against mother - much more real, sympathetic, and focused on a crash suffered by one flying high, rather than heaping on her sins of omission, of not having been perfect in caring for everyone around. George Eliot, to begin with, has her refrain from marrying, and giving up the security of being a Grafina, rather than give up a career - while Ingmar Bergman turned it into a saga about a wife (of an accountant and a mother of two daughters) and a brilliant concert pianist who neglects the home, husband and children, throughout life.

Armgart ends well, with the Graf going to India, leaving the question about a future together postponed, while Armgart decides to rake up teaching as her own teacher did to devote himself to her talent, and going to Freiburg for the purpose. Author explains it for the play, but what was George Eliot's fascination for Freiburg, used in two of the poems, Agatha and Armgart, in this collection, The Legend of Jubal?

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October 04, 2021 - October 04, 2021.

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How Lisa Loved the King,

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Really sweet story, and for another rare instance, told sweetly by George Eliot, whose lines flow much better than her norm.

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"Six hundred years ago, in Dante’s time,

"Before his cheek was furrowed by deep rhyme;

"When Europe, fed afresh from Eastern story,

"Was like a garden tangled with the glory

"Of flowers hand-planted and of flowers air-sown,

"Climbing and trailing, budding and full-blown,

"Where purple bells are tossed amid pink stars,"

....

"Six hundred years ago, Palermo town Kept holiday.

"A deed of great renown, A high revenge, had freed it from the yoke

"Of hated Frenchmen; and from Calpe’s rock

"To where the Bosporus caught the earlier sun,

"’Twas told that Pedro, King of Aragon,

"Was welcomed master of all Sicily,—

"A royal knight, supreme as kings should be

"In strength and gentleness that make high chivalry.

"Spain was the favorite home of knightly grace,

"Where generous men rode steeds of generous race;

"Both Spanish, yet half Arab; both inspired

"By mutual spirit, that each motion fired

"With beauteous response, like minstrelsy

"Afresh fulfilling fresh expectancy."

....

"And in all eyes King Pedro was the king

"Of cavaliers; as in a full-gemmed ring

"The largest ruby, or as that bright star

"Whose shining shows us where the Hyads are.

"His the best genet, and he sat it best;

"His weapon, whether tilting or in rest,

"Was worthiest watching; and his face, once seen,

"Gave to the promise of his royal mien

"Such rich fulfilment as the opened eyes

"Of a loved sleeper, or the long-watched rise

"Of vernal day, whose joy o’er stream and meadow flies."

....

"Whose passion is but worship of that Best

"Taught by the many-mingled creed of each young breast?

"’Twas gentle Lisa, of no noble line,

"Child of Bernardo, a rich Florentine,

"Who from his merchant-city hither came

"To trade in drugs; yet kept an honest fame,

"And had the virtue not to try and sell

"Drugs that had none. He loved his riches well,

"But loved them chiefly for his Lisa’s sake,

"Whom with a father’s care he sought to make

"The bride of some true honorable man,—

"Of Perdicone (so the rumor ran),

"Whose birth was higher than his fortunes were,

"For still your trader likes a mixture fair

"Of blood that hurries to some higher strain

"Than reckoning money’s loss and money’s gain.

"And of such mixture good may surely come:

"Lord’s scions so may learn to cast a sum,

"A trader’s grandson bear a well-set head,

"And have less conscious manners, better bred;

"Nor, when he tries to be polite, be rude instead.

"’Twas Perdicone’s friends made overtures

"To good Bernardo; so one dame assures

"Her neighbor dame, who notices the youth

"Fixing his eyes on Lisa; and, in truth,

"Eyes that could see her on this summer day

"Might find it hard to turn another way.

"She had a pensive beauty, yet not sad;

"Rather like minor cadences that glad

"The hearts of little birds amid spring boughs:

"And oft the trumpet or the joust would rouse

"Pulses that gave her cheek a finer glow,

"Parting her lips that seemed a mimic bow

"By chiselling Love for play in coral wrought,

"Then quickened by him with the passionate thought,

"The soul that trembled in the lustrous night

"Of slow long eyes. Her body was so slight,

"It seemed she could have floated in the sky,

"And with the angelic choir made symphony;

"But in her cheek’s rich tinge, and in the dark

"Of darkest hair and eyes, she bore a mark

"Of kinship to her generous mother-earth,

"The fervid land that gives the plumy palm-trees birth.

"She saw not Perdicone; her young mind

"Dreamed not that any man had ever pined

"For such a little simple maid as she:

"She had but dreamed how heavenly it would be

"To love some hero noble, beauteous, great,

"Who would live stories worthy to narrate,"

....

"Who conquered every thing beneath the sun,

"And somehow, some time, died at Babylon

"Fighting the Moors. For heroes all were good

"And fair as that archangel who withstood

"The Evil One, the author of all wrong,—

"That Evil One who made the French so strong;

"And now the flower of heroes must he be

"Who drove those tyrants from dear Sicily,

"So that her maids might walk to vespers tranquilly.

"Young Lisa saw this hero in the king;

"And as wood-lilies that sweet odors bring

"Might dream the light that opes their modest eyne

"Was lily-odored; and as rites divine,

"Round turf-laid altars, or ’neath roofs of stone,

"Draw sanctity from out the heart alone

"That loves and worships: so the miniature

"Perplexed of her soul’s world, all virgin pure,

"Filled with heroic virtues that bright form,

"Raona’s royalty, the finished norm

"Of horsemanship, the half of chivalry;

"For how could generous men avengers be,

"Save as God’s messengers on coursers fleet?—

"These, scouring earth, made Spain with Syria meet

"In one self-world where the same right had sway,

"And good must grow as grew the blessed day.

"No more: great Love his essence had endued

"With Pedro’s form, and, entering, subdued

"The soul of Lisa, fervid and intense,

"Proud in its choice of proud obedience

"To hardship glorified by perfect reverence.

"Sweet Lisa homeward carried that dire guest,

"And in her chamber, through the hours of rest,

"The darkness was alight for her with sheen

"Of arms, and plumèd helm; and bright between

"Their commoner gloss, like the pure living spring

"’Twixt porphyry lips, or living bird’s bright wing

"’Twixt golden wires, the glances of the king

"Flashed on her soul, and waked vibrations there

"Of known delights love-mixed to new and rare:

"The impalpable dream was turned to breathing flesh,

"Chill thought of summer to the warm close mesh

"Of sunbeams held between the citron-leaves,

"Clothing her life of life. Oh! she believes

"That she could be content if he but knew

"(Her poor small self could claim no other due)

"How Lisa’s lowly love had highest reach

"Of wingèd passion, whereto wingèd speech

"Would be scorched remnants left by mounting flame."

....

"She watched all day that she might see him pass

"With knights and ladies; but she said, “Alas!

"Though he should see me, it were all as one

"He saw a pigeon sitting on the stone

"Of wall or balcony: some colored spot

"His eye just sees, his mind regardeth not.

"I have no music-touch that could bring nigh

"My love to his soul’s hearing. I shall die,

"And he will never know who Lisa was,—

"The trader’s child, whose soaring spirit rose

"As hedge-born aloe-flowers that rarest years disclose.

"“For were I now a fair deep-breasted queen

"A-horseback, with blonde hair, and tunic green,

"Gold-bordered, like Costanza, I should need

"No change within to make me queenly there:

"For they the royal-hearted women are

"Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace;

"For needy suffering lives in lowliest place,

"Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile,

"The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile.

"My love is such, it cannot choose but soar

"Up to the highest; yet forevermore,

"Though I were happy, throned beside the king,

"I should be tender to each little thing

"With hurt warm breast, that had no speech to tell

"Its inward pang; and I would soothe it well

"With tender touch, and with a low soft moan

"For company: my dumb love-pang is lone,

"Prisoned as topaz-beam within a rough-garbed stone.”

"So, inward-wailing, Lisa passed her days.

"Each night the August moon with changing phase

"Looked broader, harder, on her unchanged pain;

"Each noon the heat lay heavier again

"On her despair, until her body frail

"Shrank like the snow that watchers in the vale

"See narrowed on the height each summer morn;

"While her dark glance burnt larger, more forlorn,"

................................................................................................

"Father and mother saw with sad dismay

"The meaning of their riches melt away;

"For without Lisa what would sequins buy?

"What wish were left if Lisa were to die?

"Through her they cared for summers still to come,

"Else they would be as ghosts without a home

"In any flesh that could feel glad desire.

"They pay the best physicians, never tire

"Of seeking what will soothe her, promising

"That aught she longed for, though it were a thing

"Hard to be come at as the Indian snow,

"Or roses that on Alpine summits blow,

"It should be hers. She answers with low voice,

"She longs for death alone—death is her choice;

"Death is the king who never did think scorn,

"But rescues every meanest soul to sorrow born."

................................................................................................

"“What is it, Lisa?”—“Father, I would see

"Minuccio, the great singer; bring him me.”

"For always, night and day, her unstilled thought,

"Wandering all o’er its little world, had sought

"How she could reach, by some soft pleading touch,

"King Pedro’s soul, that she who loved so much,"

....

"Minuccio, entreated, gladly came.

"(He was a singer of most gentle fame,

"A noble, kindly spirit, not elate

"That he was famous, but that song was great;

"Would sing as finely to this suffering child

"As at the court where princes on him smiled.)

"Gently he entered and sat down by her,

"Asking what sort of strain she would prefer,—

"The voice alone, or voice with viol wed;

"Then, when she chose the last, he preluded

"With magic hand, that summoned from the strings

"Ærial spirits, rare yet palpable wings

"That fanned the pulses of his listener,

"And waked each sleeping sense with blissful stir.

"Her cheek already showed a slow, faint blush;

"But soon the voice, in pure, full, liquid rush,

"Made all the passion, that till now she felt,

"Seem but as cooler waters that in warmer melt.

"Finished the song, she prayed to be alone

"With kind Minuccio; for her faith had grown

"To trust him as if missioned like a priest

"With some high grace, that, when his singing ceased,

"Still made him wiser, more magnanimous,

"Than common men who had no genius.

"So, laying her small hand within his palm,

"She told him how that secret, glorious harm

"Of loftiest loving had befallen her;

"That death, her only hope, most bitter were,

"If, when she died, her love must perish too

"As songs unsung, and thoughts unspoken do,

"Which else might live within another breast."

....

"He sought a poet-friend, a Siennese,

"And “Mico, mine,” he said, “full oft to please

"Thy whim of sadness I have sung thee strains

"To make thee weep in verse: now pay my pains,

"And write me a canzòn divinely sad,

"Sinlessly passionate, and meekly mad

"With young despair, speaking a maiden’s heart

"Of fifteen summers, who would fain depart

"From ripening life’s new-urgent mystery,—

"Love-choice of one too high her love to be,—

"But cannot yield her breath till she has poured

"Her strength away in this hot-bleeding word,

"Telling the secret of her soul to her soul’s lord.”

"Said Mico, “Nay, that thought is poesy,

"I need but listen as it sings to me.

"Come thou again to-morrow.” The third day,

"When linked notes had perfected the lay,

"Minuccio had his summons to the court,

"To make, as he was wont, the moments short

"Of ceremonious dinner to the king.

"This was the time when he had meant to bring

"Melodious message of young Lisa’s love;

"He waited till the air had ceased to move

"To ringing silver, till Falernian wine

"Made quickened sense with quietude combine;

"And then with passionate descant made each ear incline."

.....

"Love, thou didst see me, light as morning’s breath,

"Roaming a garden in a joyous error,

"Laughing at chases vain, a happy child,

"Till of thy countenance the alluring terror

"In majesty from out the blossoms smiled,"

....

"Tell him, O Love, I am a lowly maid,

"No more than any little knot of thyme

"That he with careless foot may often tread;

"Yet lowest fragrance oft will mount sublime

"And cleave to things most high and hallowèd,

"As doth the fragrance of my life’s springtime,

"My lowly love, that, soaring, seeks to climb

"Within his thought, and make a gentle bliss,

"More blissful than if mine, in being his:

"So shall I live in him, and rest in Death."

"The strain was new. It seemed a pleading cry,

"And yet a rounded, perfect melody,

"Making grief beauteous as the tear-filled eyes

"Of little child at little miseries.

"Trembling at first, then swelling as it rose,

"Like rising light that broad and broader grows,

"It filled the hall, and so possessed the air,

"That not one living, breathing soul was there,

"Though dullest, slowest, but was quivering

"In Music’s grasp, and forced to hear her sing.

"But most such sweet compulsion took the mood

"Of Pedro (tired of doing what he would)."

....

"He called Minuccio, and bade him tell

"What poet of the day had writ so well;

"For, though they came behind all former rhymes,

"The verses were not bad for these poor times.

"“Monsignor, they are only three days old,”

"Minuccio said; “but it must not be told

"How this song grew, save to your royal ear.”

"Eager, the king withdrew where none was near,

"And gave close audience to Minuccio,

"Who meetly told that love-tale meet to know."

....

"He answered without pause, “So sweet a maid,

"In Nature’s own insignia arrayed,

"Though she were come of unmixed trading blood

"That sold and bartered ever since the flood,

"Would have the self-contained and single worth

"Of radiant jewels born in darksome earth.

"Raona were a shame to Sicily,

"Letting such love and tears unhonored be:

"Hasten, Minuccio, tell her that the king

"To-day will surely visit her when vespers ring.”

"Joyful, Minuccio bore the joyous word,

"And told at full, while none but Lisa heard,"

................................................................................................

"She listened till the draughts of pure content

"Through all her limbs like some new being went—

"Life, not recovered, but untried before,

"From out the growing world’s unmeasured store

"Of fuller, better, more divinely mixed."

....

"She asked to have her soft white robe and band

"And coral ornaments; and with her hand

"She gave her long dark locks a backward fall,

"Then looked intently in a mirror small,

"And feared her face might, perhaps, displease the king:

"“In truth,” she said, “I am a tiny thing:

"I was too bold to tell what could such visit bring.”

"Meanwhile the king, revolving in his thought

"That innocent passion, was more deeply wrought

"To chivalrous pity; and at vesper-bell,

"With careless mien which hid his purpose well,

"Went forth on horseback, and, as if by chance

"Passing Bernardo’s house, he paused to glance

"At the fine garden of this wealthy man,

"This Tuscan trader turned Palermitan;

"But, presently dismounting, chose to walk

"Amid the trellises, in gracious talk

"With this same trader, deigning even to ask

"If he had yet fulfilled the father’s task

"Of marrying that daughter, whose young charms

"Himself, betwixt the passages of arms,

"Noted admiringly. “Monsignor, no,

"She is not married: that were little woe,

"Since she has counted barely fifteen years;

"But all such hopes of late have turned to fears;

"She droops and fades, though, for a space quite brief,—

"Scarce three hours past,—she finds some strange relief.”

................................................................................................

"And that same day, ere the sun lay too warm

"On southern terraces, a messenger

"Informed Bernardo that the royal pair

"Would straightway visit him, and celebrate

"Their gladness at his daughter’s happier state,

"Which they were fain to see. Soon came the king

"On horseback, with his barons, heralding

"The advent of the queen in courtly state;

"And all, descending at the garden gate,

"Streamed with their feathers, velvet, and brocade,

"Through the pleached alleys, till they, pausing, made

"A lake of splendor ’mid the aloes gray;

"When, meekly facing all their proud array,

"The white-robed Lisa with her parents stood,

"As some white dove before the gorgeous brood

"Of dapple-breasted birds born by the Colchian flood.

"The king and queen, by gracious looks and speech,

"Encourage her, and thus their courtiers teach

"How, this fair morning, they may courtliest be,

"By making Lisa pass it happily.

"And soon the ladies and the barons all

"Draw her by turns, as at a festival

"Made for her sake, to easy, gay discourse,

"And compliment with looks and smiles enforce;

"A joyous hum is heard the gardens round;

"Soon there is Spanish dancing, and the sound

"Of minstrel’s song, and autumn fruits are pluckt;

"Till mindfully the king and queen conduct

"Lisa apart to where a trellised shade

"Made pleasant resting. Then King Pedro said,—

"“Excellent maiden, that rich gift of love

"Your heart hath made us hath a worth above

"All royal treasures, nor is fitly met

"Save when the grateful memory of deep debt

"Lies still behind the outward honors done:

"And as a sign that no oblivion

"Shall overflood that faithful memory,

"We while we live your cavalier will be;"

....

"But there still rests the outward honor meet

"To mark your worthiness; and we entreat

"That you will turn your ear to proffered vows

"Of one who loves you, and would be your spouse

"We must not wrong yourself and Sicily

"By letting all your blooming years pass by

"Unmated: you will give the world its due

"From beauteous maiden, and become a matron true.”

"Then Lisa, wrapt in virgin wonderment

"At her ambitious love’s complete content,

"Which left no further good for her to seek

"Than love’s obedience, said, with accent meek,—

"“Monsignor, I know well that were it known

"To all the world how high my love had flown,

"There would be few who would not deem me mad,

"Or say my mind the falsest image had

"Of my condition and your loftiness.

"But Heaven has seen that for no moment’s space

"Have I forgotten you to be the king,

"Or me myself to be a lowly thing—

"A little lark, enamoured of the sky,

"That soared to sing, to break its breast, and die.

"But, as you better know than I, the heart

"In choosing chooseth not its own desert,

"But that great merit which attracteth it:

"’Tis law, I struggled, but I must submit,

"And having seen a worth all worth above,

"I loved you, love you, and shall always love."

"But that doth mean, my will is ever yours,

"Not only when your will my good insures,

"But if it wrought me what the world calls harm:

"Fire, wounds, would wear from your dear will a charm.

"That you will be my knight is full content,

"And for that kiss,—I pray, first, for the queen’s consent.”

"Her answer, given with such firm gentleness,

"Pleased the queen well, and made her hold no less

"Of Lisa’s merit than the king had held.

"And so, all cloudy threats of grief dispelled,

"There was betrothal made that very morn

"’Twixt Perdicone, youthful, brave, well-born,

"And Lisa whom he loved; she loving well

"The lot that from obedience befell.

"The queen a rare betrothal ring on each

"Bestowed, and other gems, with gracious speech.

"And, that no joy might lack, the king, who knew

"The youth was poor, gave him rich Ceffalù

"And Cataletta,—large and fruitful lands,—

"Adding much promise when he joined their hands.

"At last he said to Lisa, with an air

"Gallant yet noble, “Now we claim our share

"From your sweet love, a share which is not small;

"For in the sacrament one crumb is all.”

"Then, taking her small face his hands between,

"He kissed her on the brow with kiss serene,—

"Fit seal to that pure vision her young soul had seen.

"And many witnessed that King Pedro kept

"His royal promise. Perdicone stept

"To many honors honorably won,

"Living with Lisa in true union.

"Throughout his life, the king still took delight

"To call himself fair Lisa’s faithful knight;

"And never wore in field or tournament

"A scarf or emblem, save by Lisa sent.

"Such deeds made subjects loyal in that land;

"They joyed that one so worthy to command,

"So chivalrous and gentle, had become

"The king of Sicily, and filled the room

"Of Frenchmen, who abused the Church’s trust,

"Till, in a righteous vengeance on their lust,

"Messina rose, with God, and with the dagger’s thrust."

................................................................................................

................................................

October 03, 2021 - October 03, 2021.

Purchased January 21, 2021.

Kindle Edition, 58 pages

Published March 24th 2011

(first published 1869)

Original Title

How Lisa Loved The King

ASIN:- B004TRGU5E

................................................

................................................................................................

A Minor Prophet

................................................................................................

Where and how would George Eliot even hear of a vegetarian?

................................................................................................

One doesn't know if George Eliot is trying to be outlandish, satirical, or just trying to write humour, but it isn't funny in the opening line.

"I have a friend, a vegetarian seer,

"By name Elias Baptist Butterworth,

A harmless, bland, disinterested man,

"Whose ancestors in Cromwell’s day believed

"The Second Advent certain in five years,

"But when King Charles the Second came instead,

"Revised their date and sought another world:

"I mean—not heaven but—America.

"A fervid stock, whose generous hope embraced

"The fortunes of mankind, not stopping short

"At rise of leather, or the fall of gold,

"Nor listening to the voices of the time

"As housewives listen to a cackling hen,

"With wonder whether she has laid her egg

"On their own nest-egg. Still they did insist

"Somewhat too wearisomely on the joys

"Of their Millennium, when coats and hats

"Would all be of one pattern, books and songs

"All fit for Sundays, and the casual talk

"As good as sermons preached extempore."

Nowhere could a European have even heard of anyone vegetarian, except in India, during the lifetime of George Eliot or before - it's Beatles who made India and yoga fashionable, and until then attitude towards India varied from fraud a la Macaulay to contempt a la most racist colonial invaders to reverence a la some evolved souls including a few of the great German authors - so her opening line is nothing but contempt of an ignorant racist for an ancient culture far more evolved, and rich in treasure of knowledge, than she and her nation could have imagined. And until central heating, hot water and greater ease of shipping came in, which wasn't until middle of twentieth century, a vegetarian diet wasn't possible in Europe; it would have been very difficult in most parts of U.S., too.

................................................................................................

And she continues ridiculing things far beyond grasp of most of West-

"So the Thought-atmosphere is everywhere:

"High truths that glimmered under other names

"To ancient sages, whence good scholarship

"Applied to Eleusinian mysteries—

"The Vedas—Tripitaka—Vendidad—

"Might furnish weaker proof for weaker minds

"That Thought was rapping in the hoary past,

"And might have edified the Greeks by raps

"At the greater Dionysia, if their ears

"Had not been filled with Sophoclean verse.

"And when all Earth is vegetarian—

"When, lacking butchers, quadrupeds die out,

"And less Thought-atmosphere is reabsorbed

"By nerves of insects parasitical,

"Those higher truths, seized now by higher minds

"But not expressed (the insects hindering),

"Will either flash out into eloquence,

"Or better still, be comprehensible

"By rappings simply, without need of roots."

................................................................................................

Funny how things reverse, and what she thought once funny has now come to be dead serious, but in a very different way.

"’T is on this theme—the vegetarian world—

"That good Elias willingly expands:

"He loves to tell in mildly nasal tones

"And vowels stretched to suit the widest views,

"The future fortunes of our infant Earth—

"When it will be too full of human kind

"To have the room for wilder animals.

"Saith he, Sahara will be populous

"With families of gentlemen retired

"From commerce in more Central Africa,

"Who order coolness as we order coal,

"And have a lobe anterior strong enough

"To think away the sand-storms. Science thus

"Will leave no spot on this terraqueous globe

"Unfit to be inhabited by man,

"The chief of animals: all meaner brutes

"Will have been smoked or elbowed out of life."

Well, ordering cool in Sahara isn't that different from routinely air conditioned homes, offices and cars, across Southern U.S.- especially Texas. And feeding humans, environmental science tells us, will be better and cheaper with a more vegetarian diet, if not completely vegetarian one. Meat industry is laying oceans waste, apart from other concerns.

"No lions then shall lap Caffrarian pools,

"Or shake the Atlas with their midnight roar:

"Even the slow, slime-loving crocodile,

"The last of animals to take a hint,

"Will then retire forever from a scene

"Where public feeling strongly sets against him.

"Fishes may lead carnivorous lives obscure,"

Well, several species have gone extinct, beginning during era of colonial expansion, from Dodo onwards; concern about this turned matters around for whales, but thanks to British, lions of India are in fact on verge of extinction.

................................................................................................

"Imagination in that distant age,

"Aiming at fiction called historical,

"Will vainly try to reconstruct the times

"When it was man’s preposterous delight

"To sit astride live horses, which consumed

"Materials for incalculable cakes;

"When there were milkmaids who drew milk from cows

"With udders kept abnormal for that end

"Since the rude mythopoeic period

"Of Aryan dairymen who did not blush

"To call their milkmaid and their daughter one—

"Helplessly gazing at the Milky Way,

"Nor dreaming of the astral cocoa-nuts

"Quite at the service of posterity."

Well, it isn't quite fable yet, but it's almost there. Riding horses is far more expensive than driving, especially in U.S.; dairies In most of industrial world use machines for milking. And what she meant by astral cocoa-nuts, who knows!

"By dint of diet vegetarian

"All will be harmony of hue and line,

"Bodies and minds all perfect, limbs well-turned,

"And talk quite free from aught erroneous.

"Thus far Elias in his seer’s mantle:

"But at this climax in his prophecy

"My sinking spirits, fearing to be swamped,

"Urge me to speak.

“High prospects, these, my friend,

"Setting the weak carnivorous brain astretch;

"We will resume the thread another day.”

"“To-morrow,” cries Ellas, “at this hour?”

"“No, not to-morrow—I shall have a cold—

"At least I feel some soreness—this endemic—

"Good-by.”"

After this, George Eliot's verses flow.

"For purest pity is the eye of love

"Melting at sight of sorrow; and to grieve

"Because it sees no sorrow, shows a love

"Warped from its truer nature, turned to love

"Of merest habit, like the miser’s greed.

"But I am Colin still: my prejudice

"Is for the flavour of my daily food.

"Not that I doubt the world is growing still

"As once it grew from Chaos and from Night;

"Or have a soul too shrunken for the hope

"Which dawned in human breasts, a double morn,

"With earliest watchings of the rising light

"Chasing the darkness; and through many an age

"Has raised the vision of a future time

"That stands an Angel with a face all mild

"Spearing the demon. I too rest in faith

"That man’s perfection is the crowning flower,

"Toward which the urgent sap in life’s great tree

"Is pressing—seen in puny blossoms now,

"But in the world’s great morrows to expand

"With broadest petal and with deepest glow."

................................................................................................

"Yet, see the patched and plodding citizen

"Waiting upon the pavement with the throng

"While some victorious world-hero makes

"Triumphal entry, and the peal of shouts

"And flush of faces ‘neath uplifted hats

"Run like a storm of joy along the streets!

"He says, “God bless him!” almost with a sob,

"As the great hero passes; he is glad

"The world holds mighty men and mighty deeds;

"The music stirs his pulses like strong wine,

"The moving splendour touches him with awe—

"’T is glory shed around the common weal,

"And he will pay his tribute willingly,

"Though with the pennies earned by sordid toil.

"Perhaps the hero’s deeds have helped to bring

"A time when every honest citizen

"Shall wear a coat unpatched. And yet he feels

"More easy fellowship with neighbours there

"Who look on too; and he will soon relapse

"From noticing the banners and the steeds

"To think with pleasure there is just one bun

"Left in his pocket, that may serve to tempt

"The wide-eyed lad, whose weight is all too much

"For that young mother’s arms: and then he falls

"To dreamy picturing of sunny days

"When he himself was a small big-cheeked lad

"In some far village where no heroes came,

"And stood a listener ’twixt his father’s legs

"In the warm fire-light while the old folk talked

"And shook their heads and looked upon the floor;

"And he was puzzled, thinking life was fine—

"The bread and cheese so nice all through the year

"And Christmas sure to come! Oh that good time!

"He, could he choose, would have those days again

"And see the dear old-fashioned things once more.

"But soon the wheels and drums have all passed by

"And tramping feet are heard like sudden rain:

"The quiet startles our good citizen;

"He feels the child upon his arms, and knows

"He is with the people making holiday

"Because of hopes for better days to come.

"But Hope to him was like the brilliant west

"Telling of sunrise in a world unknown.

"And from that dazzling curtain of bright hues

"He turned to the familiar face of fields

"Lying all clear in the calm morning land.

"Maybe ’t is wiser not to fix a lens

"Too scrutinizing on the glorious times

"When Barbarossa shall arise and shake

"His mountain, good King Arthur come again.

"And all the heroes of such giant soul

"That, living once to cheer mankind with hope,

"They had to sleep until the time was ripe

"For greater deeds to match their greater thought.

"Yet no! the earth yields nothing more Divine

"Than high prophetic vision—than the Seer

"Who fasting from man’s meaner joy beholds

"The paths of beauteous order, and constructs

"A fairer type to shame our low content.

"But prophecy is like potential sound

"Which turned to music seems a voice sublime

"From out the soul of light; but turns to noise

"In scrannel pipes, and makes all ears averse."

................................................................................................

"Presentiment of better things on earth

"Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls

"To admiration, self-renouncing love,

"Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one,—

"Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night

"We hear the roll and dash of waves that break

"Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide,

"Which rises to the level of the cliff

"Because the wide Atlantic rolls behind,

"Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs."

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October 04, 2021 - October 04, 2021.

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................................................................................................

Brother and Sister

................................................................................................

Even right at the beginning, one cannot help marvelling about how much better these verses are, compared to most of her work, poetry or prose - for once, she's writing from her heart, not caring about impressing anyone, and her verses flow so very smooth, as a brook would in a bed of its own, undisturbed!

"I cannot choose but think upon the time

"When our two lives grew like two buds that kiss

"At lightest thrill from the bee’s swinging chime,

"Because the one so near the other is.

"He was the elder and a little man

"Of forty inches, bound to show no dread,

"And I the girl that puppy-like now ran,

"Now lagged behind my brother’s larger tread.

"I held him wise, and when he talked to me

"Of snakes and birds, and which God loved the best,

"I thought his knowledge marked the boundary

"Where men grew blind, though angels knew the rest.

"If he said Hush! I tried to hold my breath;

"Wherever he said Come! I stepped in faith."

................................................................................................

"Long years have left their writing on my brow,

"But yet the freshness and the dew-fed beam

"Of those young mornings are about me now,

"When we two wandered toward the far-off stream

"With rod and line. Our basket held a store

"Baked for us only, and I thought with joy

"That I should have my share, though he had more,

"Because he was the elder and a boy.

"The firmaments of daisies since to me

"Have had those mornings in their opening eyes,

"The bunchèd cowslip’s pale transparency

"Carries that sunshine of sweet memories,

"And wild-rose branches take their finest scent

"From those blest hours of infantine content."

................................................................................................

"Our mother bade us keep the trodden ways,

"Stroked down my tippet, set my brother’s frill,

"Then with the benediction of her gaze

"Clung to us lessening, and pursued us still

"Across the homestead to the rookery elms,

"Whose tall old trunks had each a grassy mound,

"So rich for us, we counted them as realms

"With varied products: here were earth-nuts found,

"And here the Lady-fingers in deep shade;

"Here sloping toward the Moat the rushes grew,

"The large to split for pith, the small to braid;

"While over all the dark rooks cawing flew,

"And made a happy strange solemnity,

"A deep-toned chant from life unknown to me."

................................................................................................

"Our meadow-path had memorable spots:

"One where it bridged a tiny rivulet,

"Deep hid by tangled blue Forget-me-nots;

"And all along the waving grasses met

"My little palm, or nodded to my cheek,

"When flowers with upturned faces gazing drew

"My wonder downward, seeming all to speak

"With eyes of souls that dumbly heard and knew.

"Then came the copse, where wild things rushed unseen,

"And black-scathed grass betrayed the past abode

"Of mystic gypsies, who still lurked between

"Me and each hidden distance of the road.

"A gypsy once had startled me at play,

"Blotting with her dark smile my sunny day."

................................................................................................

Here she's suddenly old, wise, especially at the ending line of this verse.

"Thus rambling we were schooled in deepest lore,

"And learned the meanings that give words a soul,

"The fear, the love, the primal passionate store,

"Whose shaping impulses make manhood whole.

"Those hours were seed to all my after good;

"My infant gladness, through eye, ear, and touch,

"Took easily as warmth a various food

"To nourish the sweet skill of loving much.

"For who in age shall roam the earth and find

"Reasons for loving that will strike out love

"With sudden rod from the hard year-pressed mind?

"Were reasons sown as thick as stars above,

"’Tis love must see them, as the eye sees light:

"Day is but Number to the darkened sight."

................................................................................................

What a serene portrayal here, bringing her depiction alive along with ones own hours of youth, however little the two had in common.

"Our brown canal was endless to my thought;

"And on its banks I sat in dreamy peace,

"Unknowing how the good I loved was wrought,

"Untroubled by the fear that it would cease.

"Slowly the barges floated into view

"Rounding a grassy hill to me sublime

"With some Unknown beyond it, whither flew

"The parting cuckoo toward a fresh spring time.

"The wide-arched bridge, the scented elder-flowers,

"The wondrous watery rings that died too soon,

"The echoes of the quarry, the still hours

"With white robe sweeping-on the shadeless noon,

"Were but my growing self, are part of me,

"My present Past, my root of piety."

................................................................................................

And here, a moment of young years captured, where vision of a child suddenly widens to a vast, taking in universe, for ever remembered.

"Those long days measured by my little feet

"Had chronicles which yield me many a text;

"Where irony still finds an image meet

"Of full-grown judgments in this world perplext.

"One day my brother left me in high charge,

"To mind the rod, while he went seeking bait,

"And bade me, when I saw a nearing barge,

"Snatch out the line lest he should come too late.

"Proud of the task, I watched with all my might

"For one whole minute, till my eyes grew wide,

"Till sky and earth took on a strange new light

"And seemed a dream-world floating on some tide—

"A fair pavilioned boat for me alone

"Bearing me onward through the vast unknown."

................................................................................................

Typical, of sisters who grow up with a brother slightly older. The last line, again, is from that vast vision capturing the child of one's past being, and widening view to the universal.

"His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy

"Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame;

"My doll seemed lifeless and no girlish toy

"Had any reason when my brother came.

"I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling

"Cut the ringed stem and make the apple drop,

"Or watched him winding close the spiral string

"That looped the orbits of the humming top.

"Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought

"Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil;

"My aëry-picturing fantasy was taught

"Subjection to the harder, truer skill

"That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line,

"And by What is, What will be to define."

................................................................................................

"School parted us; we never found again

"That childish world where our two spirits mingled

"Like scents from varying roses that remain

"One sweetness, nor can evermore be singled.

"Yet the twin habit of that early time

"Lingered for long about the heart and tongue:

"We had been natives of one happy clime

"And its dear accent to our utterance clung.

"Till the dire years whose awful name is

"Change Had grasped our souls still yearning in divorce,

"And pitiless shaped them in two forms that range

"Two elements which sever their life’s course.

"But were another childhood-world my share,

"I would be born a little sister there.”"

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October 04, 2021 - October 04, 2021.

Kindle Edition, 11 pages

Published October 15th 2014

by The Perfect Library

ASIN:- B00OL0RAMQ

................................................

................................................................................................

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4271768989

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Stradivarius.

................................................................................................

STRADIVARIUS.

................................................................................................

The two separate poems, STRADIVARIUS and GOD NEEDS ANTONIO, have the same thene; it isn't clear if George Eliot was unsatisfied with an earlier version, and wrote the other. Neither is as belaboured as most of her work, they both flow well, although the concept is of a dialogue between two very different artistes of which one is much less known. West, though, might not label Stradivarius an artist. Still, it's a poem where honesty of one's application to ones vocation is lauded as highest spiritual, and as such, it's more India in spirit than abrahmic or West.

In a later generation, Galsworthy wrote eulogies to this unity, between an artist or craftsman, and his work, where the man or woman gives one's best to the work; his short story about a poor bootmaker, unknown but for those using his boots, was a eulogy to the worker and to the era, as was the piece about old hansom cabs. But his Man of Property (titled so later after the first title - Forsyte Saga, later extended to Forsyte Chronicles - was extended to the series of books) was a subtle eulogy to the highest offered by the poor young architect to his work, forever immortalised subtly by the tale, the saga.

"Your soul was lifted by the wings to-day

"Hearing the master of the violin:

"You praised him, praised the great Sebastian too

"Who made that fine Chaconne; but did you think

"Of old Antonio Stradivari ?—him

"Who a good century and half ago

"Put his true work in that brown instrument

"And by the nice adjustment of its frame

"Gave it responsive life, continuous

"With the master’s finger-tips and perfected

"Like them by delicate rectitude of use.

"Not Bach alone, helped by fine precedent

"Of genius alone before, nor Joachim

"Who holds the strain afresh incorporate

"By inward hearing and notation strict

"Of nerve and muscle, made our joy to-day:

"Another soul was living in the air

"And swaying it to true deliverance

"Of high invention and responsive skill:—

"That plain white-aproned man who stood at work

"Patient and accurate full fourscore years,

"Cherished his sight and touch by temperance,

"And since keen sense is love of perfectness

"Made perfect violins, the needed paths

"For inspiration and high mastery.

"No simpler man than he: he never cried,

"“Why was I born to this monotonous task

"Of making violins ?” or flung them down

"To suit with hurling act a well-hurled curse

"At labour on such perishable stuff.

"Hence neighbours in Cremona held him dull,

"Called him a slave, a mill-horse, a machine,

"Begged him to tell his motives or to lend

"A few gold pieces to a loftier mind.

"Yet he had pithy words full fed by fact;

"For fact, well-trusted, reasons and persuades,

"Is gnomic, cutting, or ironical,

"Draws tears, or is a tocsin to arouse—

"Can hold all figures of the orator

"In one plain sentence; has her pauses too—

"Eloquent silence at the chasm abrupt

"Where knowledge ceases. Thus Antonio

"Made answers as Fact willed, and made them strong"

"“I like the gold—well, yes—but not for meals.

"And as my stomach, so my eye and hand,

"And inward sense that works along with both,

"Have hunger that can never feed on coin.

"Who draws a line and satisfies his soul,

"Making it crooked where it should be straight? An idiot with an oyster-shell may draw

"His lines along the sand, all wavering,

"Fixing no point or pathway to a point;

"An idiot one remove may choose his line,

"Straggle and be content; but God be praised,

"Antonio Stradivari has an eye

"That winces at false work and loves the true,

"With hand and arm that play upon the tool

"As willingly as any singing bird

"Sets him to sing his morning roundelay,

"Because he likes to sing and likes the song.”"

"“’Twere purgatory here to make them ill;

"And for my fame—when any master holds

"’Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine,

"He will be glad that Stradivari lived,

"The masters only know whose work is good:

"They will choose mine, and while God gives them skill

"I give them instruments to play upon,

"God choosing me to help Him.”"

"“Why, many hold Giuseppi’s violins

"As good as thine.”

"“May be: they are different.

"His quality declines: he spoils his hand

"With over-drinking. But were his the best,

"He could not work for two. My work is mine,

"And, heresy or not, if my hand slacked

"I should rob God—since He is fullest good—

"Leaving a blank instead of violins.

"I say, not God Himself can make man’s best

"Without best men to help Him. I am one best

"Here in Cremona, using sunlight well

"To fashion finest maple till it serves

"More cunningly than throats, for harmony.

"’Tis rare delight: I would not change my skill

"To be the Emperor with bungling hands,

"And lose my work, which comes as natural

"As self at waking.”

"“Thou art little more

"Than a deft potter’s wheel, Antonio;

"Turning out work by mere necessity

"And lack of varied function. Higher arts

"Subsist on freedom—eccentricity—

"Uncounted aspirations—influence

"That comes with drinking, gambling, talk turned wild,

"Then moody misery and lack of food—

"With every dithyrambic fine excess:

"These make at last a storm which flashes out

"In lightning revelations. Steady work

"Turns genius to a loom; the soul must lie

"Like grapes beneath the sun till ripeness comes

"And mellow vintage. I could paint you now

"The finest Crucifixion; yesternight

"Returning home I saw it on a sky

"Blue-black, thick-starred.

"I want two louis d’ors

"To buy the canvas and the costly blues—

"Trust me for a fortnight.”

"“Where are those last two

"I lent thee for thy Judith?—her thou saw’st

"In saffron gown, with Holofernes’ head

"And beauty all complete ?”

"“She is but sketched:

"I lack the proper model—and the mood.

"A great idea is an eagle’s egg,

"Craves time for hatching; while the eagle sits

"Feed her.”

"“If thou wilt call thy pictures eggs

"I call the hatching, Work. ’Tis God gives skill,

"But not without men’s hands; He could not make

"Antonio Stradivari’s violins

"Without Antonio. Get thee to thy easel.”"

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October 01, 2021 - October 02, 2021.

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................................................................................................

A College Breakfast-Party.

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

A COLLEGE BREAKFAST-PARTY

................................................................................................

The idea is certainly amusing, Hamlet and Horatio and others at a college breakfast. Anybody else would mark a hilarious skit, whether prose or verse. George Eliot makes it a long discussion of philosophy, eighteen pages long, daunting enough to anyone unfamiliar with her long, twisted, convoluted sentences that can only get more difficult. To those finished with her prose and also with a massive heart attack in midst thereof, it requires extra courage to proceed. But kindle has mistakenly branded all those collections of her works "read", and attempt to undo that has resulted in listing one - Delphi - as not to be counted, but still read! So one is going to plod through and delay pleasure of reading other, lighter stuff.

Characters here may borrow their names from literature, but one may wonder if this group discussing philosophy at breakfast was modeled on her own groups, either friends and visitors at home of the Bray family, or later that of the Lewes family.

Hamlet's dialogue after departure of the priest pinpoints precisely what's wrong with church, if the priest's own didn't make it clear already - it's the imposition of church ordering faith as alternative to thought, and the only choice when faced with mystery.

................................................................................................

"Young Hamlet, not the hesitating Dane,

"But one named after him, who lately strove

"For honours at our English Wittenberg,—

"Blonde, metaphysical, and sensuous,

"Questioning all things and yet half convinced

"Credulity were better; held inert

"’Twixt fascinations of all opposites,

"And half suspecting that the mightiest soul

"(Perhaps his own?) was union of extremes,

"Having no choice but choice of everything:

"As, drinking deep to-day for love of wine,

And here's the racist, ignorant author, familiar from the last offering in Impressions of Theophrastus Such -

"To-morrow half a Brahmin, scorning life

"As mere illusion, yearning for that

"True Which has no qualities; another day

"Finding the fount of grace in sacraments.

"And purest reflex of the light divine

"In gem-bossed pyx and broidered chasuble,

She's mixing what little she's heard about India - from likes of Macaulay who were derisive and contemptuous as colonising invaders would be to those they looted, just as males are towards females not protected by males more powerful - but without thinking, with concepts from abrahmic faiths, and making a Complete mess, of course! Fortunately that is that, and she proceeds with what she knows -

"Resolved to wear no stockings and to fast

"With arms extended, waiting ecstasy;

"But getting cramps instead, and needing change,

"A would-be pagan next:

"Young Hamlet sat

"A guest with five of somewhat riper age

"At breakfast with Horatio, a friend

"With few opinions, but of faithful heart,

"Quick to detect the fibrous spreading roots

"Of character that feed men’s theories,

"Yet cloaking weaknesses with charity

"And ready in all service save rebuke."

"With ebb of breakfast and the cider-cup

"Came high debate: the others seated there

"Were Osric, spinner of fine sentences,

"A delicate insect creeping over life

"Feeding on molecules of floral breath,

"And weaving gossamer to trap the sun;

"Laertes ardent, rash, and radical;

"Discursive Rosencranz, grave Guildenstern,

"And he for whom the social meal was made—

"The polished priest, a tolerant listener,

"Disposed to give a hearing to the lost,

"And breakfast with them ere they went below.

"From alpine metaphysic glaciers first

"The talk sprang copious; the themes were old,

"But so is human breath, so infant eyes,

"The daily nurslings of creative light.

"Small words held mighty meanings:

"Matter, Force, Self, Not-self,

"Being, Seeming, Space and Time—

"Plebeian toilers on the dusty road

"Of daily traffic, turned to Genii

"And cloudy giants darkening sun and moon.

"Creation was reversed in human talk:

"None said, “Let Darkness be,” but Darkness was;

"And in it weltered with Teutonic ease,

"An argumentative Leviathan,

"Blowing cascades from out his element,

"The thunderous Rosencranz, till

"“Truce, I beg!”

"Said Osric, with nice accent. “I abhor

"That battling of the ghosts, that strife of terms

"For utmost lack of colour, form, and breath.

"That tasteless squabbling called

"Philosophy As if a blue-winged butterfly afloat

"For just three days above the Italian fields,

"Poising in sunshine, fluttering toward its bride,

"Should fast and speculate, considering

"What were if it were not?” or what now is

"Instead of that which seems to be itself?

"Its deepest wisdom surely were to be

"A sipping, marrying, blue-winged butterfly;

"Since utmost speculation on itself

"Were but a three days’ living of worse sort—

"A bruising struggle all within the bounds

"Of butterfly existence.”

"“I protest,”

"Burst in Laertes, “against arguments

"That start with calling me a butterfly,

"A bubble, spark, or other metaphor

"Which carries your conclusions as a phrase

"In quibbling law will carry property."

................................................................................................

"Why, rhetoric brings within your easy reach

"Conclusions worthy of—a butterfly.

"The universe, I hold, is no charade,

"No acted pun unriddled by a word,

"Nor pain a decimal diminishing

"With hocus-pocus of a dot or nought.

"For those who know it, pain is solely pain:

"Not any letters of the alphabet

"Wrought syllogistically pattern-wise,

"Nor any cluster of fine images,

"Nor any missing of their figured dance

"By blundering molecules. Analysis

"May show you the right physic for the ill,

"Teaching the molecules to find their dance,

"Instead of sipping at the heart of flowers.

"But spare me your analogies, that hold

"Such insight as the figure of a crow

"And bar of music put to signify A crowbar.”

................................................................................................

"Said the Priest, “There I agree—"

....

"I—nay, the Church objects nought, is content:

"Reason has reached its utmost negative,

"Physic and metaphysic meet in the inane

"And backward shrink to intense prejudice,

"Making their absolute and homogene

"A loaded relative, a choice to be

"Whatever is—supposed, a What is not."

................................................................................................

"Though fed and clad by dissoluble waves

"Has antecedent quality, and rules

"By veto or consent the strife of thought,

"Making arbitrament that we call faith.”"

................................................................................................

"Laertes granting, I will put your case

"In analogic form: the doctors hold

"Hunger which gives no relish—save caprice

"That tasting venison fancies mellow pears—

"A symptom of disorder, and prescribe

"Strict discipline. Were I physician here

"I would prescribe that exercise of soul

"Which lies in full obedience: you ask,

"Obedience to what? The answer lies

"Within the word itself; for how obey

"What has no rule, asserts no absolute claim?

"Take inclination, taste—why that is you,

"No rule above you. Science, reasoning

"On nature’s order—they exist and move

"Solely by disputation, hold no pledge

"Of final consequence, but push the swing

"Where Epicurus and the Stoic sit

"In endless see-saw. One authority,

"And only one, says simply this.

"Obey: Place yourself in that current (test it so!)

"Of spiritual order where at least

"Lies promise of a high communion,"

"A Head informing members, Life that breathes

"With gift of forces over and above

"The plus of arithmetic interchange.

"‘The Church too has a body,’ you object,

"‘Can be dissected, put beneath the lens

"And shown the merest continuity

"Of all existence else beneath the sun.’

"I grant you; but the lens will not disprove

"A presence which eludes it. Take your wit,

"Your highest passion, widest-reaching thought:

"Show their conditions if you will or can,

"But though you saw the final atom-dance

"Making each molecule that stands for sign

"Of love being present, where is still your love?

"How measure that, how certify its weight?

"And so I say, the body of the Church

"Carries a Presence, promises and gifts

"Never disproved—whose argument is found

"In lasting failure of the search elsewhere

"For what it holds to satisfy man’s need.

"But I grow lengthy: my excuse must be

"Your question, Hamlet, which has probed right through

"To the pith of our belief. And I have robbed

"Myself of pleasure as a listener.

"’T is noon, I see; and my appointment stands

"For half-past twelve with Voltimand. Good-by.”"

"Brief parting, brief regret—sincere, but quenched

"In fumes of best Havana, which consoles

"For lack of other certitude. Then said,

"Mildly sarcastic, quiet Guildenstern:

"“I marvel how the Father gave new charm

"To weak conclusions: I was half convinced

"The poorest reasoner made the finest man,

"And held his logic lovelier for its limp.”"

"“I fain would hear,” said Hamlet, “how you find

"A stronger footing than the Father gave.

"How base your self-resistance save on faith

"In some invisible Order, higher Right

"Than changing impulse. What does Reason bid?

"To take a fullest rationality

"What offers best solution: so the Church.

"Science, detecting hydrogen aflame

"Outside our firmament, leaves mystery

"Whole and untouched beyond; nay, in our blood

"And in the potent atoms of each germ

"The Secret lives—envelops, penetrates

"Whatever sense perceives or thought divines.

"Science, whose soul is explanation, halts

"With hostile front at mystery. The Church

"Takes mystery as her empire, brings its wealth

"Of possibility to fill the void

"’Twixt contradictions—warrants so a faith

"Defying sense and all its ruthless train

"Of arrogant ‘Therefores.’ Science with her lens

"Dissolves the Forms that made the other half

"Of all our love, which thenceforth widowed lives

"To gaze with maniac stare at what is not.

"The Church explains not, governs—feeds resolve

"By vision fraught with heart-experience

"And human yearning.”"

"“Ay,” said Guildenstern,

"With friendly nod, “the Father, I can see,

"Has caught you up in his air-chariot.

"His thought takes rainbow-bridges, out of reach

"By solid obstacles, evaporates

"The coarse and common into subtilties.

"Insists that what is real in the Church

"Is something out of evidence, and begs

"(Just in parenthesis) you’ll never mind

"What stares you in the face and bruises you.

"Why, by his method I could justify

"Each superstition and each tyranny

"That ever rode upon the back of man,

"Pretending fitness for his sole defence

"Against life’s evil. How can aught subsist

"That holds no theory of gain or good?

"Despots with terror in their red right hand

"Must argue good to helpers and themselves,

"Must let submission hold a core of gain

"To make their slaves choose life.

"Their theory, Abstracting inconvenience of racks,

"Whip-lashes, dragonnades and all things coarse

"Inherent in the fact or concrete mass,

"Presents the pure idea—utmost good

"Secured by Order only to be found

"In strict subordination, hierarchy

"Of forces where, by nature’s law, the strong

"Has rightful empire, rule of weaker proved

"Mere dissolution. What can you object?

"The Inquisition—if you turn away

"From narrow notice how the scent of gold

"Has guided sense of damning heresy—

"The Inquisition is sublime, is love

"Hindering the spread of poison in men’s souls:

"The flames are nothing: only smaller pain

"Te hinder greater, or the pain of one

"To save the many, such as throbs at heart

"Of every system born into the world.

"So of the Church as high communion

"Of Head with members, fount of spirit force

"Beyond the calculus, and carrying proof

"In her sole power to satisfy man’s need:

"That seems ideal truth as clear as lines

"That, necessary though invisible, trace

"The balance of the planets and the sun—

"Until I find a hitch in that last claim."

....

"I argue not against yon. Who can prove

"Wit to be witty when the deeper ground

"Dullness intuitive declares wit dull?

"If life is worthless to you—why, it is."

....

"I am no optimist whose fate must hang

"On hard pretence that pain is beautiful

"And agony explained for men at ease

"By virtue’s exercise in pitying it.

"But this I hold: that he who takes one gift

"Made for him by the hopeful work of man,

"Who tastes sweet bread, walks where he will unarmed,

"His shield and warrant the invisible law,

"Who owns a hearth and household charities,

"Who clothes his body and his sentient soul

"With skill and thoughts of men, and yet denies

"A human good worth toiling for, is cursed

"With worse negation than the poet feigned

"In Mephistopheles. The Devil spins

"His wire-drawn argument against all good

"With sense of brimstone as his private lot,

"And never drew a solace from the Earth.”"

"Laertes fuming paused, and Guildenstern

"Took up with cooler skill the fusillade:

"“I meet your deadliest challenge, Rosencranz—"

....

"Do Boards and dirty-handed millionaires

"Govern the planetary system?—sway

"The pressure of the Universe?—decide

"That man henceforth shall retrogress to ape,

"Emptied of every sympathetic thrill

"The All has wrought up in him? dam up henceforth

"The flood of human claims as private force

"To turn their wheels and make a private hell

"For fish-pond to their mercantile domain?

"What are they but a parasitic growth

"On the vast real and ideal world

"Of man and nature blent in one divine?

"Why, take your closing dirge—say evil grows

"And good is dwindling; science mere decay,

"Mere dissolution of ideal wholes

"Which through the ages past alone have made

"The earth and firmament of human faith;

"Say, the small arc of Being we call man

"Is near its mergence, what seems growing life

"Nought but a hurrying change toward lower types,

"The ready rankness of degeneracy.

"Well, they who mourn for the world’s dying good

"May take their common sorrows for a rock,

"On it erect religion and a church,

"A worship, rites, and passionate piety—

"The worship of the Rest though crucified

"And God-forsaken in its dying pangs;

"The sacramental rites of fellowship

"In common woe; visions that purify

"Through admiration and despairing love

"Which keep their spiritual life intact

"Beneath the murderous clutches of disproof

"And feed a martyr-strength.”

"“Religion high!”

"(Rosencranz here) “but with communicants

"Few as the cedars upon Lebanon—

"A child might count them.

"What the world demands

"Is faith coercive of the multitude.”

"“Tush, Guildenstern, you granted him too much,”

"Burst in Laertes; “I will never grant

"One inch of law to feeble blasphemies

"Which hold no higher ratio to life—

"Full vigorous human life that peopled earth

"And wrought and fought and loved and bravely died—

"Than the sick morning glooms of debauchees."

................................................................................................

"Each now said “Good-by.”

"Such breakfast, such beginning of the day

"Is more than half the whole. The sun was hot

"On southward branches of the meadow elms,

"The shadows slowly farther crept and veered

"Like changing memories, and

"Hamlet strolled Alone and dubious on the empurpled path

"Between the waving grasses of new June

"Close by the stream where well-compacted boats

"Were moored or moving with a lazy creak

"To the soft dip of oars. All sounds were light

"As tiny silver bells upon the robes

"Of hovering silence. Birds made twitterings

"That seemed but Silence self o’erfull of love.

’T was invitation all to sweet repose;

"And Hamlet, drowsy with the mingled draughts

"Of cider and conflicting sentiments,

"Chose a green couch and watched with half-closed eyes

"The meadow-road, the stream and dreamy lights,

"Until they merged themselves in sequence strange

"With undulating ether, time, the soul,

"The will supreme, the individual claim,

"The social Ought, the lyrist’s liberty,

"Democritus, Pythagoras, in talk

"With Anselm, Darwin, Comte, and Schopenhauer,

"The poets rising slow from out their tombs

"Summoned as arbiters—that border-world

"Of dozing, ere the sense is fully locked.

"And then he dreamed a dream so luminous

"He woke (he says) convinced; but what it taught

"Withholds as yet. Perhaps those graver shades

"Admonished him that visions told in haste

"Part with their virtues to the squandering lips

"And leave the soul in wider emptiness."

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................................................

October 02, 2021 - October 03, 2021.

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................................................................................................

Two Lovers.

................................................................................................

TWO LOVERS

................................................................................................

George Eliot paints a life of togetherness of two lovers, wedding, home, children and then alone together in old age. But again, it's laboured. She lacks the facility of ease, and the words aren't in a flow through her as much as gathered and nailed together to construct a verse.

"Two wedded from the portal stept:

The bells made happy carolings,

"The air was soft as fanning wings,

"White petals on the pathway slept.

"O pure-eyed bride!

"O tender pride!"

White petals "slept" on their path, not strewn?

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October 01, 2021 - October 01, 2021.

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................................................................................................

Self and Life.

................................................................................................

Could have been better, for it does have flashes - but, over and over, George Eliot returns to plodding instead of flight.

"Self.

"Changeful comrade, Life of mine,

"Before we two must part,

" I will tell thee, thou shalt say,

"What thou hast been and art.

"Ere I lose my hold of thee

"Justify thyself to me."

And her first, instinctive, response is all too right, completely good.

"Life.

I was thy warmth upon thy mother’s knee

"When light and love within her eyes were one;

"We laughed together by the laurel-tree,"

....

"Where the trellised woodbines grew,

"And all the summer afternoon

"Mystic gladness o’er thee threw.

"Was it person? Was it thing?

"Was it touch or whispering?

"It was bliss and it was I:

"Bliss was what thou knew’st me by."

But then she has to digress; for formality of her philosophy? She returns, though, over and over, to good and correct response.

"Life.

"But all thy anguish and thy discontent

"Was growth of mine, the elemental strife

"Toward feeling manifold with vision blent

"To wider thought: I was no vulgar life"

....

"Life.

"But then I brought a love that wrote within

"The law of gratitude, and made thy heart

"Beat to the heavenly tune of seraphin

"Whose only joy in having is, to impart:"

....

"Self.

"Yea, I embrace thee, changeful Life!

"Far-sent, unchosen mate!

"Self and thou, no more at strife,

"Shall wed in hallowed state.

"Willing spousals now shall prove

"Life is justified by love."

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October 02, 2021 - October 02, 2021.

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................................................................................................

“Sweet Endings Come and Go, Love.”

................................................................................................
................................................................................................

SWEET ENDINGS COME AND GO, LOVE

................................................................................................

A theme not unfamiliar, about evening of life together.

"Sweet evenings come and go, love,

"They came and went of yore:

"This evening of our life, love,

"Shall go and come no more.

"When we have passed away, love,

"All things will keep their name;

"But yet no life on earth, love,

"With ours will be the same.

"The daisies will be there, love,

"The stars in heaven will shine:

"I shall not feel thy wish, love,

"Nor thou my hand in thine.

But the last one is unclear.

"A better time will come, love,

"And better souls be born:

"I would not be the best, love,

"To leave thee now forlorn."

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October 01, 2021 - October 01, 2021.

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The Death of Moses.

................................................................................................

THE DEATH OF MOSES.

................................................................................................

Suddenly, here, George Eliot is home, and her language easy, her verse flows.

"Moses, who spake with God as with his friend,

"And ruled his people with the twofold power

"Of wisdom that can dare and still be meek,

"Was writing his last word, the sacred name

"Unutterable. of that Eternal Will ... "

Here's a huge, major characteristic chasm between abrahmic vs India - naming, calling God - in any form of ones choice or preference, or without; any God or Godess oe The ultimate Divine - is not only permitted, name utterable, but is done so any time, by anyone, and children named after too, routinely. Concept of fear of god doesn't exist, it's ridiculous to India unaffected by invaders conversion drives over a millennium and half; and God, whether image or thought, may inspire reverence, but it is just as often Love. Fear is from ones own deeds, ones own possible turning to wrong; but Gods aren't stooping to meeting out punishment, they are at most amused, as might be a parent at a baby.

"Which was and is and evermore shall be.

"Yet was his task not finished, for the flock

"Needed its shepherd and the life-taught sage

"Leaves no successor; but to chosen men,

"The rescuers and guides of Israel,

"A death was given called the Death of Grace,

"Which freed them. from the burden of the flesh

"But left them rulers of the multitude

"And loved companions of the lonely. This

"Was God’s last gift to Moses, this the hour

"When soul must part from self and be but soul."

Now, George Eliot is at once gentle, loving, maternal - but racist.

"God spake to Gabriel, the messenger

"Of mildest death that draws the parting life

"Gently, as when a little rosy child

"Lifts up its lips from off the bowl of milk

"And so draws forth a curl that dipped its gold

And then, she's back to being earthbound, making an Archangel sound like a human!

"In the soft white—thus Gabriel draws the soul.

"“Go bring the soul of Moses unto me!”

"And the awe-stricken ung’el answered, “Lord,

"How shall I dare to take his life who lives

"Sole of his kind, not to be likened once

"In all the generations of the earth?”"

For heaven's sake! It's a conversation between an archangel and his boss, not a kings minion fearing separation of a great man's body from soul!

And she repeats it too, with other archangel.

"Then God called Michael, him of pensive brow

"Snow-vest and flaming sword, who knows and acts:

"“Go bring the spirit of Moses unto me!”

"But Michael with such grief as angels feel,

"Loving the mortals whom they succour, pled:

“Almighty, spare me; it was I who taught

"Thy servant Moses; he is part of me

"As I of thy deep secrets, knowing them.”

"Then God called Zamael, the terrible,

"The angel of fierce death, of agony

"That comes in battle and in pestilence

"Remorseless, sudden or with lingering throes.

"And Zamael, his raiment and broad wings

"Blood-tinctured, the dark lustre of his eyes

"Shrouding the red, fell like the gathering night

"Before the prophet. But that radiance

"Won from the heavenly presence in the mount

"Gleamed on the prophet’s brow and dazzling pierced

"Its conscious opposite: the angel turned

"His murky gaze aloof and inly said:

"“An angel this, deathless to angel’s stroke.”"

Greeks knew better, informing us that those loved by Gods die young! India of course knew better - for example, amongst the heavenly creatures, who are sent to earth as humans, for a sin committed up there, those who live longer do so to expiate their sins and work out their repentance before retuning back above.

The poem, though, proceeds in the strain, imposing human thought and emotion on creatures of non physical material, instead of opening a human consciousness to Light.

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October 02, 2021 - October 02, 2021.

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................................................................................................

Arion.

................................................................................................

Arion.

................................................................................................

Amazing, and yet, as always, George Eliot must choose tragic for the brilliant, the good!

"Arion, whose melodic soul

"Taught the dithyramb to roll

"Like forest fires, and sing

"Olympian suffering,

"Had carried his diviner lore

"From Corinth to the sister shore

"Where Greece could largelier be,

"Branching o’er Italy.

"Then weighted with his glorious name

"And bags of gold, aboard he came

"’Mid harsh seafaring men

"To Corinth bound again.

"The sailors eyed the bags and thought:

"“The gold is good, the man is naught—

"And who shall track the wave

"That opens for his grave?”

"With brawny arms and cruel eyes

"They press around him where he lies

"In sleep beside his lyre,

"Hearing the Muses quire,

"He waked and saw this wolf-faced Death

"Breaking the dream that filled his breath

"With inspiration strong

"Of yet unchanted song.

"“Take, take my gold and let me live!”

"He prayed, as kings do when they give

"Their all with royal will,

"Holding born kingship still.

"To rob the living they refuse,

"One death or other he must choose,

"Either the watery pall

"Or wounds and burial.

"“My solemn robe then let me don,

"Give me high space to stand upon,

"That dying I may pour

"A song unsung before.”

"It pleased them well to grant this prayer,

"To hear for naught how it might fare .

"With men who paid their gold

"For what a poet sold.

"In flowing stole, his eyes aglow

"With inward fire, he neared the prow

"And took his god-like stand,

"The cithara in hand.

"The wolfish men all shrank aloof,

"And feared this singer might be proof

"Against their murderous power,

"After his lyric hour.

But he, in liberty of song,

"Fearless of death or other wrong,

"With full spondaic toll

"Poured forth his mighty soul:

"Poured forth the strain his dream had taught,

A nome with lofty passion fraught

"Such as makes battles won

"On fields of Marathon.

"The last long vowels trembled then

"As awe within those wolfish men:

"They said, with mutual stare,

"Some god was present there.

"But lo! Arion leaped on high,

"Ready, his descant done, to die

"Not asking, “Is it well?”

"Like a pierced eagle fell."

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................................................

October 02, 2021 - October 02, 2021.

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................................................................................................

“O May I Join the Choir Invisible.”

................................................................................................

O MAY I JOIN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE!

................................................................................................

She begins well,

"O may I join the choir invisible

"Of those immortal dead who live again

"In minds made better by their presence; live

"In pulses stirred to generosity,

"In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn

"Of miserable aims that end with self,

"In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,

"And with their mild persistence urge men’s minds

"To vaster issues."

- but then gets belaboured after the first stanza.

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October 01, 2021 - October 01, 2021.

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October 01, 2021 - October 05, 2021.

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Miscellaneous Poems

by George Eliot.

................................................................................................

Contents

................................................................................................

On Being Called a Saint.

Farewell.

Sonnet.

Question and Answer.

“’Mid my Gold-Brown Curls.”

“’Mid the Rich Store.”

“As Tu Va la Lune se Lever.”

In A London Drawing Room.

Arms! To Arms!

Ex Oriente Lux.

In the South.

Will Ladislaw’s Song.

Erinna.

“I Grant you Ample Leave.”

Mordecai’s Hebrew Verses.

Count that Day Lost.

................................................................................................

On Being Called a Saint.

................................................................................................

It's not written for a readership as much as for herself, most of it. This becomes clear within a few lines of the opening poem.

................................................................................................

It's not written for a readership as much as for herself, most of it. This becomes clear within a few lines of the opening lines.

"A Saint! O would that I could claim

"The privileg’d, the honour’d name

"And confidently take my stand

"Though lowest in the saintly band!

"Would though it were in scorn applied

"That term the test of truth could bide

"The kingly salutations given

"In mockery to the King of Heaven."

Her religious fervour isn't unfamiliar after one has read Romola and Daniel Deronda. Still, it's quite startling when she writes -

"Oh for an interest in that name

"When hell shall ope its jaws of flame

"And sinners to their doom be hurl’d

"While scorned saints ‘shall judge this world.’"

One thought she disdained those - such as the evangelical Cummins who she wrote critically of - who were gung ho about precisely this enthusiasm!

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September 29, 2021 - September 29, 2021.

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................................................................................................

Farewell.

................................................................................................

Was this one of her last poems? From being only second in this collection, it woukdnt seem so. But when she writes

"Thou sun, to whose parental beam

"I owe All that has gladden’d me while here below—

"Moon, stars, and covenant confirming bow,

"Farewell!

"Ye verdant meads, fair blossoms, stately trees,

"Sweet song of birds, and soothing hum of bees—

"Refreshing odours, wafted on the breeze,

"Farewell! "

It definitely isn't about saying goodnight, or a journey she expects to return from, however hazardous journeys were in her days.

Its pretty, no doubt. And touching.

"Books that have been to me as chest of gold,

"Which, miser like, I secretly have told,

"And for them love, health, friendship, peace have sold,

"Farewell! "

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September 29, 2021 - September 29, 2021.

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................................................................................................

Sonnet.

................................................................................................

Tad mysterious.

"If, haply, conscious of the present scene,

"I’ve marked before me some untraversed spot

"The setting sunbeams had foresaken not,

"Whose turf appeared more velvet-like and green

"Than that I walked and fitter for repose:

"But ever, at the wished-for place arrived,

"I’ve found it of those seeming charms deprived

"Which from the mellowing power of distance rose:

"To my poor thought, an apt though simple trope

"Of life’s dull path and earth’s deceitful hope"

Unless it's about passage of time, and inability to return.

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September 29, 2021 - September 29, 2021.

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................................................................................................

Question and Answer.

................................................................................................

Religious more than essence of experience of life, one suspects, when she goes -

"“Where blooms, O my Father, a thornless rose?”

"“That can I not tell thee, my child;

"Not one on the bosom of earth e’er grows,

"But wounds whom its charms have beguiled.”

"“Would I’d a rose on my bosom to lie!

"But I shrink from the piercing thorn;

"I long, but dare not its point defy,

"I long, and I gaze forlorn.”

"“Not so, O my child, round the stem again

"Thy resolute fingers entwine---

"Forego not the joy for its sister pain,

"Let the rose, the sweet rose, be thine!”"

After all, being a clergyman's daughter and later married to someone in trade, middle class at all times, her life couldn't be said to have been of strife against poverty, exactly, much less of battling against odds such as those faced by Irish, or other colonial subjects, or even the settlers in the new world who built log cabins and did everything else depending on no workers as such.

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September 29, 2021 - September 29, 2021.

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................................................................................................

“’Mid my Gold-Brown Curls.”

................................................................................................

It's a rare admission of vanity from George Eliot!

"’Mid my gold-brown curls

"There twined a silver hair:

"I plucked it idly out

"And scarcely knew ’twas there.

"Coiled in my velvet sleeve it lay

"And like a serpent hissed:

"“Me thou canst pluck & fling away,

"One hair is lightly missed;

"But how on that near day

"When all the wintry army muster in array?”"

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September 29, 2021 - September 29, 2021.

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“’Mid the Rich Store.”

................................................................................................

"So man His miniature resemblance gives

"To matter’s every form a speaking soul,"

She stops at the border of spiritual, unwilling to leave her bringing up behind, like an earthbound spirit afraid of flight and chained to its cage.

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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“As Tu Va la Lune se Lever.”

................................................................................................

"Have you seen the moon rise in an azure sky without a veil?" Begins this, and goes on to attempt a spiritual connection - but, alas, not freely, but only within framework of her background of restrictions by church!

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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In A London Drawing Room.

................................................................................................

Facts of her description are not in dispute, but the overall effect is of a dull, dismal place.

"The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke.

"For view there are the houses opposite

"Cutting the sky with one long line of wall

"Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch

"Monotony of surface & of form

"Without a break to hang a guess upon.

"No bird can make a shadow as it flies,

"For all is shadow, as in ways o’erhung

"By thickest canvass, where the golden rays

"Are clothed in hemp. ... "

So far, it's dismal enough. But next, it's as if she's made up her mind to paint it negative.

"No figure lingering

"Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye

"Or rest a little on the lap of life.

"All hurry on & look upon the ground,

"Or glance unmarking at the passers by ... "

We've all experienced the loneliness resulting from being in a strange place, especially a city that is in a hurry. But it's the city that is friendlier, too, than the small village that ignores strangers who are clearly waiting, politely, for a glance, a greeting before they can ask for an address and be on the way!

But she gets worse.

"The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages

"All closed, in multiplied identity. ... "

Why wouldn't the carriages be closed, what with dust flying to splash as it's driven? It isn't a stroll of a summer's afternoon in the cold Nordic latitudes.

"The world seems one huge prison-house & court

"Where men are punished at the slightest cost,

"With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy."

One moment, isn't the title A London Drawing Room? Not a lonely waiting at a bus stop?

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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Arms! To Arms!

................................................................................................

It's mystifying when one reads

" ... But at last the watchman posted

"Darkly like the stars at noon ... "

One doesa double take - what? Watchman, like stars at noon? Is he invisible? Or did George Eliot see stars at noon, does anyone, except during an eclipse? Is it ever that dark below arctic circle latitudes?

But then it becomes clearer- she's being racist.

"Now the gates of morn are open

"And the Christians ope their gates;

"Meet the Moor at half a league thence,

"Clashing weapons, clashing hates."

Incidentally, it's those that live in the Nordic darkness that have no chance of allowing nature's heat to affect their skins, and so nature brings them out of wombs and keeps them at the rare level; as opposed to the tanned members of the same who move to, say, California.

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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Ex Oriente Lux.

................................................................................................

When she sees Asia as East, close to Sun at first dawn -

"When first the earth broke from her parent ring

"Trembling an instant ere her separate life

"Had found the unfailing pulse of night and day,

"Her inner half that met the effusive Sun

"Had earlier largesse of his rays and thrilled

"To the celestial music of the dawn

"While yet the western half was cold and sad,

"Shivering beneath the whisper of the stars.

"So Asia was the earliest home of light:

"The little seeds first germinated there,

"Birds first made bridals, and the year first knew Autumnal ripeness.

"Ever wandering sound

"That dumbly throbbed within the homeless vast

"Took sweet imprisonment in song and speech—

"Like light more beauteous for shattering,

"Parted melodious in the trembling throat

"Of the first matin bird; made utterance

"From the full-rounded lips of that young race

"Who moved by the omnipresent Energy

"Dividing towards sublimer union,

"Clove sense & image subtilly in twain,

"Then wedded them, till heavenly

"Thought was born."

is she aware that Asia isn't just West Asia, that Asia includes the India and China that she wrote disdainfully of as "punished by England" for daring to oppose British domination?

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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In the South.

................................................................................................

If poet goes on a vacation in autumn sojourning South where its palms and ocean - Mediterranean? - then obviously, as happy as she's to paint olives and apples,

"O gentle brightness of late Autumn morns!

"The dear Earth like a patient matron left

"By all she loved and reared, still smiles and loves.

"The fields low-shorn gleam with a paler gold,

"The olives stretch their shadows; on the vines

"Forgotten bunches breathe out mellowness,

"And little apples poised upon their stems

"Laugh sparkling high above the mounting sun.

"Each delicate blade and bossy arching leaf

"Is silvered with the dew; the plough overturns

"The redolent earth, and with slow-broadening belt

"Of furrowed brownness, makes mute prophecy.

"The far off rocks take breathing colours, bathed

"In the aërial ocean of clear blue;

"The palm soars in the silence, and the towers

"And scattered villages seem still to sleep

"In happy morning dreams."

- she's missing Autumn glory!

Try New England!

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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Will Ladislaw’s Song.

................................................................................................

Frugal, indeed!

"O me, O me, what frugal cheer

"My love doth feed upon!

"A touch, a ray, that is not here,

"A shadow that is gone:

"A dream of breath that might be near,

"An inly-echoed tone,

"The thought that one may think me dear,

"The place where one was known,

"The tremor of a banished fear,

"An ill that was not done—

"O me, O me, what frugal cheer

"My love doth feed upon!"

George Eliot's prose in Middlemarch was much more poetic in portraying Will and Dorothea, individually and in their relationship.

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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Erinna.

................................................................................................

"“Erinna died in early youth when chained by her mother to the spinning-wheel. She had as yet known the charm of existence in imagination alone. Her poem called ‘The Spindle—Ηλακάτη—containing only 300 hexameter verses, in which she probably expressed the restless & aspiring thoughts which crowded on her youthful mind as she pursued her monotonous work, has been deemed by many of the ancients of such high poetic merit as to entitle it to a place beside the epics of Homer.” Muller, Hist. Gr. Lit} Four lines of the ηλακάτη are extant. The dialect is a mixture of Doric and Æolic spoken at Rhodes where Erinna was born; the date about B.C. 612:"

First few verses make one wonder if these are by Erinna, but then it's clear they are about her, by George Eliot.

"’Twas in the isle that Helios saw

"Uprising from the sea a flower-tressed bride

"To meet his kisses—Rhodes, the filial pride

"Of god-taught craftsmen who gave Art its law:

"She held the spindle as she sat,

"Erinna with the thick-coiled mat

"Of raven hair and deepest agate eyes,

"Gazing with a sad surprise

"At surging visions of her destiny

"To spin the byssus drearily

"In insect labour, while the throng

"Of gods and men wrought deeds that poets wrought in song."

And yet, has much changed, for an average woman, even one of middle class? Whatever her achievements, whatever vast space her mind, however vast soul, her being on earth is still subject to being asked if she spends her time housekeeping.

If she's lucky!

"Hark, the passion in her eyes

"Changes to melodic cries

"Lone she pours her lonely pain.

"Song unheard is not in vain:

"The god within us plies

"His shaping power and moulds in speech

"Harmonious a statue of our sorrow,

"Till suffering turn beholding and we borrow,

"Gazing on Self apart, the wider reach

"Of solemn souls that contemplate

"And slay with full-beamed thought the darkling

"Dragon Hate."

Else, it isn't asking, it's being told, "if you aren't "working ", you must be a housekeeper!"!

And yet

"But Pallas, thou dost choose and bless

"The nobler cause, thy maiden height

"And terrible beauty marshalling the fight

"Inspire weak limbs with stedfastness.

"Thy virgin breast uplifts

"The direful aegis, but thy hand

"Wielded its weapon with benign command

"In rivalry of highest gifts

"With strong Poseidon whose earth-shaking roll

"Matched not the delicate tremors of thy spear

"Piercing Athenian land and drawing thence

"With conquering beneficence

"Thy subtly chosen dole

"The sacred olive fraught with light and plenteous cheer.

"What, though thou pliest the distaff and the loom?

"Counsel is thine, to sway the doubtful doom

"Of cities with a leaguer at their gate;

"Thine the device that snares the hulk elate

"Of purblind force and saves the hero or the State."

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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“I Grant you Ample Leave.”

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On verge of spiritual discovery, she steps back!

"“I grant you ample leave To use the hoary formula ‘I am’

"Naming the emptiness where thought is not;

"But fill the void with definition, ‘I’

"Will be no more a datum than the words

"You link false inference with, the ‘Since’ & ‘so’

"That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl.

"Resolve your ‘Ego’, it is all one web

"With vibrant ether clotted into worlds:

"Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’

"Turns nought but object, melts to molecules,

"Is stripped from naked Being with the rest

"Of those rag-garments named the Universe.

"Or if, in strife to keep your ‘Ego’ strong

"You make it weaver of the etherial light,

"Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time—

"Why, still ’tis Being looking from the dark,

"The core, the centre of your consciousness,

"That notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure, pain,

"What are they but a shifting otherness,

"Phantasmal flux of moments?—”"

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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Mordecai’s Hebrew Verses.

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George Eliot's image of Judaism has no joy in it, no space for love; it's all sombre, denying love, laughter. And this, root of her own upbringing, defines spirituality for her, whereas one sees Fiddler On The Roof for another, joyous view of life thats jewish life through millennia, despite all the striving against poverty and much, much more! What isn't joy, cheer, is all forced and inflicted - from outsiders.

"“Away from me the garment of forgetfulness,

"Withering the heart;

"The oil and wine from presses of the Goyim,

"Poisoned with scorn.

"Solitude is on the sides of Mount Nebo,

"In its heart a tomb:

"There the buried ark and golden cherubim

"Make hidden light:

"There the solemn faces gaze unchanged,

"The wings are spread unbroken:

"Shut beneath in silent awful speech

"The Law lies graven.

"Solitude and darkness are my covering,

"And my heart a tomb;

"Smite and shatter it, O Gabriel!

"Shatter it as the clay of the founder

"Around the golden image.”"

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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Count that Day Lost.

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Simple!

"If you sit down at set of sun

"And count the acts that you have done,

"And, counting, find

"One self-denying deed, one word

"That eased the heart of him who heard,

"One glance most kind

"That fell like sunshine where it went—

"Then you may count that day well spent.

"But if, through all the livelong day,

"You’ve cheered no heart, by yea or nay—

"If, through it all

"You’ve nothing done that you can trace

"That brought the sunshine to one face—

"No act most small

"That helped some soul and nothing cost—

"Then count that day as worse than lost."

And yet - if one does a reckoning, then it wasn't a good deed, it was an attempt to earn a good deed!

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September 30, 2021 - September 30, 2021.

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September 29, 2021 - October 08, 2021.

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The Criticism

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GEORGE ELIOT - Views and Reviews,

by William Ernest Henley

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This seems to be a collection of excerpts, from several places, of views and reviews of George Eliot, collected or written by William Ernest Henley. The whole chapter is small enough to quote, all of it, verbatim. What is interesting is that, unlike various such quotes seen before this, and the almost homage level book by Cooke, this collection of views and reviews is not only mostly negative, but bitingly so.

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"The Ideal.

"It was thought that with George Eliot the Novel-with-a-Purpose had really come to be an adequate instrument for the regeneration of humanity. It was understood that Passion only survived to point a moral or provide the materials of an awful tale, while Duty, Kinship, Faith, were so far paramount as to govern Destiny and mould the world. A vague, decided flavour of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was felt to pervade the moral universe, a chill but seemly halo of Golden Age was seen to play soberly about things in general. And it was with confidence anticipated that those perfect days were on the march when men and women would propose — (from the austerest motives) — by the aid of scientific terminology."

If that isn't bitingly sarcastic, what is? But wonder why. Is it because her intellect, her learning frightened males - not because one woman could, but because, just imagine, what if every woman could? Worse, what if they insisted their right to do so, and desired? Who'd then be convenient for males to use for- not only one, but most purposes? There was not just housekeeping, but objects targeted with various needs, such as lust, or ridicule, contempt, disdain, rage, ....

This was the era before Mme. Curie destroyed the almost biblical myth about women lacking material in the top floor, and just because some males questioned reality of her having done anything at all to deserve her share of the Nobel prize (they really thought a husband, however loving, would share credit for a humongous scientific discovery, like sharing a cup of coffee? And then offer her half of his Nobel prize, instead of a bouquet of roses, as a proof of love? And that a woman would prefer this as proof of love, instead of roses and diamonds and chocolates?) - Mme Curie went ahead and got her own second Nobel prize, after his having passed away in an accident, so nobody coukd accuse her of having stolen hus credit. What's more, this is the only family so far to have five Nobel prizes between four members, if one includes a son-in-law; else, it's four Nobel prizes in the family between three members out of four.

So George Eliot doesn't surprise one by being intelligent despite being a woman, after one has grown up knowing about discovery of radium. She surprises one only pleasantly, very often, as one reads her works, with flashes of her intellectual abilities.

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"The Real.

"To the Sceptic — (an apostate, and an undoubted male) — another view was preferable. He held that George Eliot had carried what he called the ‘Death’s-Head Style’ of art a trifle too far. He read her books in much the same spirit and to much the same purpose that he went to the gymnasium and diverted himself with parallel bars. He detested her technology; her sententiousness revolted while it amused him; and when she put away her puppets and talked of them learnedly and with understanding — instead of letting them explain themselves, as several great novelists have been content to do — he recalled how Wisdom crieth out in the street and no man regardeth her, and perceived that in this case the fault was Wisdom’s own. He accepted with the humility of ignorance, and something of the learner’s gratitude, her woman generally, from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet. But his sense of sex was strong enough to make him deny the possibility in any stage of being of nearly all the governesses in revolt it pleased her to put forward as men; for with very few exceptions he knew they were heroes of the divided skirt. To him Deronda was an incarnation of woman’s rights; Tito an ‘improper female in breeches’; Silas Marner a good, perplexed old maid, of the kind of whom it is said that they have ‘had a disappointment.’ And Lydgate alone had aught of the true male principle about him."

What did Daniel Deronda ever do that a member of clergy would not? He heard her problems, most of the time, counselled her, and married someone else, in case his manhood is in doubt.

If that certifies all members priesthood, of every church, as "heroes of the divided skirt", how does anyone explain the scandulous conduct of a huge number of them over decades, probably centuries, raping small boys, apart from nuns? Church covers it up, mostly protecting perpetrators rather than victims, latter being threatened and punished in every way possible just so they not only shut up but also cooperate further, with the offenders.

What did Daniel Deronda ever do that a decent, non predatory member of clergy would not? He heard her problems, most of the time, counselled her, and married someone else, in case his manhood is in doubt. Or does this critic expect every man to defile every woman he sees? Or was it precisely his non predatory behaviour that certifies him in the mind of this critic as "heroes of the divided skirt"?

Taliban much?

Have these critics not seen men so very like those in Middlemarch - dozens, arent there? - such as Casaubon (oh, just look at faculties of not top universities of U.S., there are some), or Dorothea's uncle, or Celia's husband, or Bulstrode, or the low life blackmailer whose death causes aspersions on Lydgate?

And wonder why this critic thought Lydgate was the only genuine male? Most men are far less chivalrous with women, including their wives; most can help ruining their lives quite well, and ruin others instead, chiefly those with much less power - including any females they have power over.

Silas Marner is rare. Granted.

Tito, not so much. He's so ordinary, so common among males, there's only his history that's unique. Most Titos of this world are brought up lovingly by their mom's, and have a dad who aren't dominating enough, or fail to impress the boy with values while growing up, and instead let him grow up with an exaggerated esteem for his own worth, while at the same time imparting him not wisdom but skills of getting along with ladder climbing via honey and usefulness offered to those who'd help you climb those rungs.

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"Appreciations.

"Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is a handful about George Eliot. It has been said of her books — (‘on several occasions’) — that ‘it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels’; that, ‘while less romantic than Euclid’s Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improving reading’; and that ‘they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.’ Herself, too, has been variously described: as ‘An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery’; as ‘George Sand plus Science and minus Sex’; as ‘Pallas with prejudices and a corset’; as ‘the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.’ The comparison of her admirable talent to ‘not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello’ seems suggestive and is not unkind."

Misogynistic.

Quite comparable, in the level of misogyny, with the propaganda, almost campaign, during 1970s- 1980s, in U.S., about inability of female brain to "do math", even as post graduate classes in India major cities had an even division (without reservations) between male and female students, and at some of the top research institutions (- not in West, of course-) females were in not very insignificant numbers, at younger levels, but senior enough for us beginners.

It's the damned-either-way gas chamber route that abrahmic faiths of non-stone-pelting variety reserve for females - brand women as trivial because they are soft, or maternal, or not uninterested in marrying, dressing up, et al; scream and brand them unfeminine if they do not hide their intelligence, actually dare to be doctors or lawyers or scientists, or anything non trivial or something males aren't supposed to be unable to do; thwart them in any way possible from any life that involves survival without going into slavery of one kind or other, preferably between three of the oldest routes.

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October 12, 2021 - October 12, 2021.

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The Criticism

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GEORGE ELIOT - My Literary Passions

by William Dean Howells

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The piece titled GEORGE ELIOT - My Literary Passions by William Dean Howells in the index, and on the page (in the Delphi collection of Complete Works of George Eliot) before the piece, is - on the page - titled "XXVI. GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE", and seems to be a chapter from a book, included because he - Howells - mentions George Eliot.

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Howells begins with a very charming portrayal of Columbus, presumably Ohio, to introduce the topic.

"It was an evening paper, and I had nearly as much time for reading and study as I had at home. But now society began to claim a share of this leisure, which I by no means begrudged it. Society was very charming in Columbus then, with a pretty constant round of dances and suppers, and an easy cordiality, which I dare say young people still find in it everywhere. I met a great many cultivated people, chiefly young ladies, and there were several houses where we young fellows went and came almost as freely as if they were our own. There we had music and cards, and talk about books, and life appeared to me richly worth living; if any one had said this was not the best planet in the universe I should have called him a pessimist, or at least thought him so, for we had not the word in those days. A world in which all those pretty and gracious women dwelt, among the figures of the waltz and the lancers, with chat between about the last instalment of ‘The Newcomes,’ was good enough world for me; I was only afraid it was too good. There were, of course, some girls who did not read, but few openly professed indifference to literature, and there was much lending of books back and forth, and much debate of them. That was the day when ‘Adam Bede’ was a new book, and in this I had my first knowledge of that great intellect for which I had no passion, indeed, but always the deepest respect, the highest honor; and which has from time to time profoundly influenced me by its ethics."

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Rest of the chapter, another page and a quarter, is about the other authors mentioned in the title, who he loved and revered more. His personal fascination seems to be with punishment for a young woman for being, at most, an equal partner in an event where the other, responsible in reality for more than his half, goes scot free unless he comes forth to admit responsibility.

Even in 1980s this attitude had not changed much, as we learned when visiting Washington D.C., where we had stayed at a bed-and-breakfast run by a Mennonite family or institution; a fellow guest, a woman, spoke about disapproval of behaviour of the then young women. When pointed out that the said girls didn't get pregnant all by themselves, she agreed, but didn't see that it was unjust to penalise them solely while letting the male responsible scot free.

If pregnancy is the crime, then all of life other than birds and reptiles and bees is not only guilty of it but has life due yo it, and as such, whoever disapproved of this crime ought to feel free to pay for it, by ending it simply - the Jain way. Just stop eating, period. Pretend it's Lent, or whatever name suits your particular branch of abrahmic religion, and the fast isn't to be a pretence but real, for forty days. Then extend it to another forty. And another. Stop penalizing the young female with an eyebrow lifted or gossip, if she's missing the ring on the finger telling you the coming life is sanctioned. After all, nobody can ever prove anybody's parenthood by scientific tests to 100% satisfaction of general public - if you cant take the word of a mother, what proof does anyone have that a lab test isn't giving a false answer? - and so the ring merely says " space rented, babies sold".

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October 12, 2021 - October 12, 2021.

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The Criticism

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The Ethics Of George Eliot's Works,

by John Crombie Brown.

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As one begins reading its very moving to know about the author striving to write, dictate, and finish this work, dying only two days later.

Until one begins to read it further. It's perplexing at first, why he goes on like a missionary attempting to convert, or a bishop of Rome thundering at Galileo, with an insistence about crose being the only possibility of salvation and the church, no matter how corrupt, the only way. Is the church supposed to own his divine? Surely the idea is not that his god is imprisoned by church, so the world us blackmailed to hand over souls?

Then one reads of his approval of inquisition.

Anyone who approved of any form of slavery, of power of a human or an institution over another, isn't of interest as a mind or soul- and one flavours to finish the book, only because one has begun, which was only because it was part of a complete collection of works of George Eliot.

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Most touching.

"PREFACE."

"The greater part of the following Essay was written several years ago. It was too long for any of the periodicals to which the author had been in the habit of occasionally contributing, and no thought was then entertained of publishing it in a separate form. One day, however, during his last illness, the talk happened to turn on George Eliot’s Works, and he mentioned his long-forgotten paper. One of the friends then present—a competent critic and high literary authority—expressed a wish to see it, and his opinion was so favourable that its publication was determined on. The author then proposed to complete his work by taking up ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Deronda’; and if any trace of failing vigour is discernible in these latter pages, the reader will bear in mind that the greater portion of them was composed when the author was rapidly sinking under a painful disease, and that the concluding paragraphs were dictated to his daughter after the power of writing had failed him, only five days before his death."

Most touching, that this is what someone chose to do, knowing his end is close! It wasn't even an artist finishing his own work, but merely a critic - and however important the critique, it doesn't compare with last moments of life. Not when one knows it to be so.

"PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION."

"It is a source of great gratification to the friends of the author that his little volume has already been so well received that the second edition has been out of print for some time. In now publishing a third, they have been influenced by two considerations—the continued demand for the book, and the favourable opinion expressed of it by “George Eliot” herself, which, since her lamented death, delicacy no longer forbids them to make public.

"In a letter to her friend and publisher, the late Mr. John Blackwood, received soon after the appearance of the first edition, she writes, with reference to certain passages: “They seemed to me more penetrating and finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printed comments on my own writings.” Again, in a letter to a friend of the author, she says: “When I read the volume in the summer, I felt as if I had been deprived of something that should have fallen to my share in never having made his personal acquaintance. And it would have been a great benefit—a great stimulus to me to have known some years earlier that my work was being sanctioned by the sympathy of a mind endowed with so much insight and delicate sensibility. It is difficult for me to speak of what others may regard as an excessive estimate of my own work, but I will venture to mention the keen perception shown in the note on page 29, as something that gave me peculiar satisfaction.”

"Once more. In an article in the ‘Contemporary Review’ of last month, on “The Moral Influence of George Eliot,” by “One who knew her,” the writer says: “It happens that the only criticism which we have heard mentioned as giving her pleasure, was a little posthumous volume published by Messrs Blackwood.”

"With such testimony in its favour, it is hoped a third edition will not be thought uncalled for.

"March 1881."

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" ... The older Theosophies and Philosophies—Gymnosophist and Cynic, Chaldaic and Pythagorean, Epicurean and Stoic, Platonist and Eclectic—were all attempts to embody it in teaching, and to carry it out in life. They saw, indeed, but imperfectly, and their expressions of the truth are all one-sided and inadequate. But they did see, in direct antagonism alike to the popular view and to the natural instinct of the animal man, that what is ordinarily called happiness does not represent the highest capability in humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations; and that in degree as it is consciously made so, life becomes animalised and degraded. ... "

Greek vs U.S. post WWII?

" ... The whole scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all the stern simplicity of its awful Theism, where the Divine is fundamentally and emphatically represented as the Omnipotent and the Avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his individual happiness—the so-called saving of his own soul—becomes the aim and aspiration of his life. In one sense the Jew of Moses had no individual as apart from a national existence. The secret sin of Achan, the vaunting pride of David, call forth less individual than national calamity."

Here's the authors declaration of his identity.

"By every act He did, every word He spoke, and every pain He bore, He put away from Him happiness as the aim and end of man. He reduced it to its true position of a possible accessory and issue of man’s highest fulfilment of life—an issue, the contemplation of which might be of some avail as the being first awoke to its nobler capabilities, but which, the more the life went on towards realisation, passed the more away from conscious regard.

"Thenceforth the Cross, as the typical representation of this truth, became a recognised power on the earth. Thenceforth every great teacher of humanity within the pale of nominal Christendom, whatever his apparent tenets or formal creed, has been, in degree as he was great and true, explicitly or implicitly the expounder of this truth; every great and worthy life, in degree as it assimilated to that ideal life, has been the practical embodiment of it. “Endure hardness,” said one of its greatest apostles and martyrs, “as good soldiers of Christ.” And to the endurance of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to which what we ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to the abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end—to this the world of Christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its Head and trample on His cross."

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Most of it from here on for several pages, is conversionist diatribe.

" ... One of the sternest and most consistent of Calvinistic theologians, Jonathan Edwards, in one of his works expresses his willingness to be damned for the glory of God, and to rejoice in his own damnation: with a strange, almost incredible, obliquity of moral and spiritual insight failing to perceive that in thus losing himself in the infinite of holy Love lies the very essence of human blessedness, that this and this alone is in very truth his “eternal life.”"

He goes on, naming various authors and their works.

"Those who read works of fiction merely for amusement, may be surprised that it should be thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying to us the deepest practical truth of Christianity—that the highest life of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the Cross; and that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends inevitably to degrade and enslave him. Even those who read novels more thoughtfully, who recognise in them a great moral force acting for good or evil on the age, may be startled to find George Eliot put forward as the representative of this higher-toned fiction, and as entitled to take place beside any of those we have named for the depth and force, the consistency and persistence, with which she has laboured to set before us the Christian, and therefore the only exhaustively true, ideal of life."

The author now proceeds to exalt various works of George Eliot, as examples of his own religious ideal.

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Here's the arrogance of a conversionist -

" ... Only in the earlier dawn of this higher life of the soul, either in the race or in the individual man; only in the days of the Isaacs and Jacobs of our young humanity, though not with the Abrahams, the Moses’, or the Joshuas even then; only when the soul first begins to apprehend that its true relation to God is to be realised only through the Cross—is there conscience and habitual “respect unto the recompense” of any reward."

Authir now picks, one after another, various works of George Eliot, beginning with adam Bede.

"In ‘Adam Bede,’ the first of George Eliot’s more elaborate works, the illustrations of the great moral purpose we have assigned to her are so numerous and varied, that it is not easy to select from among them. On the one hand, Dinah Morris—one of the most exquisitely serene and beautiful creations of fiction—and Seth and Adam Bede present to us, variously modified, the aspect of that life which is aiming toward the highest good. On the other hand, Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty Sorrel—poor little vain and shallow-hearted Hetty—bring before us the meanness, the debasement, and, if unarrested, the spiritual and remediless death inevitably associated with and accruing from that “self-pleasing” which, under one form or other, is the essence of all evil and sin. Of these, Arthur Donnithorne and Adam Bede seem to us the two who are most sharply and subtilely contrasted; and to these we shall confine our remarks."

Would he remark on how, nevertheless, it was the young poor girl, not the rich landlord, who suffered for his having taken advantage of her hopes, her youth, her fascination with his persona? Doubt it. Punishing women is easy, as murdering slaves was, and only slavery is on its way out, not victimisation of weak by not so weak.

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"Arthur, too, is suddenly called to confront the misery and ruin he has wrought; but in him, self then loses its ascendancy. There is no attempt to plead that he was the tempted as much as the tempter; and no care now as to what others shall think or say about him. All thought is for the wretched Hetty; and all energy is concentrated on the one present object, of arresting so far as it can be arrested the irremediable loss to her. The wrong stands up before him in its own nakedness as a wrong. This is repentance; and with repentance restoration becomes possible and begins."

So while Hetty is legally executed, because being too young and too poor and not married, she couldn't keep her baby alive as she walked through forest in cold - Arthur is not only legally scot free and socially blameless, but free to rise to Christian heaven because he repented? Did Hetty have that choice, of redeeming her life, even? Enclosing half humanity like sheep, and butcher a frolicking lamb for being out in cold, is religion?

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"Adam Bede contrasts at nearly every point with Arthur Donnithorne. Lovable is nearly the last epithet we think of applying to him. Hard almost to cruelty toward his sinning father; hard almost to contemptuousness toward his fond, foolish mother; bitterly hard toward his young master and friend, on the first suspicion of personal wrong; savagely vindictive, long and fiercely unforgiving, when he knows that wrong accomplished;—these may well seem things irreconcilable with any true fulfilment of that Christian life whose great law is love. Yet, examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly associated with the larger fulness of that life. They are born of the same spirit which said of old, “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep “law of resentment” which modern sentimentalism has all but expunged from the Christian code. The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life. It subsists in and springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the realities of existence. Even Seth can be more tolerant than Adam, because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this may ever be, the result of temperament; while in Adam whatever has been attained has been won through inward struggle and self-conquest."

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"‘Silas Marner,’ though carefully finished, is of slighter character than any of the author’s later works, and does not require lengthened notice. ... "

This guy, the author, really isn't happy unless there's misery and death all around, is he! Silas Marner is the only work of George Eliot where a reader might be on the whole not disappointed quite as much, although there could, should, have been a better solution, such as the squire not only giving the daughter her rights, but also giving Silas Marner his, for being wronged by the brother, and for having been a wonderful father to his daughter. But no, the author - John Crombie Brown - is disappointed it's not all around disaster like other works of George Eliot.

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Suddenly Brown surprises us with his perception, speaking of a character no other critic talks of, but one that takes a reader's sympathy and more.

"Harold, we believe, is not a general favourite with the modern public, any more than he was with his own contemporaries. He has none of those lovablenesses which make Arthur Donnithorne so attractive; and at first sight nothing of that uncompromising sense of right which characterises Adam Bede. He comes before us apparently no more than a clearheaded, hard, shrewd, successful man of the world, greatly alive to his own interests and importance, and with no particular principles to boast of.

"How does it come that this man, when over and over again, in great things and in small, two paths lie before him to choose, always chooses the truer and better of the two? When Felix attempts to interfere in the conduct of his election, even while resenting the interference as impertinent, he sets himself honestly to attempt to arrest the wrong. He buys Christian’s secret; but it is to reveal it to her whom it enables, if so she shall choose, to dislodge himself from the position which has been the great object of his desires and efforts. By simply allowing the trial and sentence of Felix to take their course, he would, to all appearance, strengthen the possibility that by marriage to Esther his position shall be maintained, with the further joy of having that “white new-winged dove” thenceforth by his side. He comes forward as witness on behalf of Felix, and gives his evidence fairly, truly, and in such guise as makes it tell most favourably for the accused, and at the same time against himself; and, last and most touching of all, it is after he knows the full depth of the humiliation in which his mother’s sin has for life involved him, that his first exhibition of tenderness, sympathy, and confidence towards that poor stricken heart and blighted life comes forth. How comes it that this “well-tanned man of the world” thus always chooses the higher and more difficult right; and does this in no excitement or enthusiasm, but coolly, calculatingly, with clear forecasting of all the consequences, and fairly entitled to assume that these shall be to his own peril or detriment?"

" ... There is an inherent strength and manliness in Harold Transome to which Arthur Donnithorne or Godfrey Cass can never attain."

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"Few things in the literary history of the age are more puzzling than the reception given to ‘Romola’ by a novel-devouring public. That the lovers of mere sensationalism should not have appreciated it, was to be fully expected. But to probably the majority of readers, even of average intelligence and capability, it was, and still is, nothing but a weariness. With the more thoughtful, on the other hand, it took at once its rightful place, not merely as by far the finest and highest of all the author’s works, but as perhaps the greatest and most perfect work of fiction of its class ever till then produced."

Very surprising, both. What's more sensational than Romola? As to that praise, well, if one likes that sort of stuff!

"One of the most touching manifestations in this most touching of all records of feminine nobleness and suffering, is the story of her relations to Tessa. It would seem as if in that large heart jealousy, the reaching self-love of love, could find no place. Her discovery of the relation in which Tessa stands to Tito awakens first that saddest of all sad hopes in one like Romola, that through the contadina she may be released from the marriage-bond that so galls and darkens her life. When that hope is gone, no thought of Tessa as a successful rival presents itself. She thinks of her only as another victim of Tito’s wrong-doing—as a weak, simple, helpless child, innocent of all conscious fault, to be shielded and cared for in the hour of need."

Brown doesn't get it. Romola wasn't emotionally involved any more with Tito, had only contempt for him, perhaps never did have any respect for him because he hadn't earned it, so there was no possessive instinct, much less jealousy or loss. Besides, she'd forsaken him, even though she returned home, and Tessa's actual relationship began only after that. Tito had loved, wanted, revered Romola, and wouldn't have touched Tessa if he hadn't lost Romola. It isn't about Romola's spirituality, it's about her never having experienced being possessed by love within. But then, which heroine of George Eliot was?

" ... “The cause of my party,” says Savonarola, “is the cause of God’s kingdom.” “I do not believe it,” is the reply of Romola’s “passionate repugnance.” “God’s kingdom is something wider, else let me stand without it with the beings that I love.” These words tell us the secret of Savonarola’s gathering weakness and of Romola’s strength. Self, under the subtle form of identifying truth and right with his own party—with his own personal judgment of the cause and the course of right—has so far led him astray from the straight onward path. Right, in its clear, calm, direct simplicity, has become to her supreme above what is commonly called salvation itself."

No, it's George Eliot who lacked courage to indict church for inquisition, and so the work is a horrible travesty of what it ought to have been, in depicting Florence and Savonarola; so might someone writing before council of Nicea have written about crucifixion as a proof of fall of the leader, glorifying Roman empire as just; George Eliot lacks courage to investigate occult phenomenon, to seek to understand Savonarola, and hence keeps herself safe from denouncing a powerful institution that ran rampant burning every opposition, every sign of greatness at stake.

As for Brown, he states over and over again that church is right despite all wrongs and corruptions. So might a German have spoken during pre WWII years about his nation's government, and often still would if they thought it safe. And so indeed did George Eliot write about British empire running amok looting and killing people of other lands.

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"It is another agency than Savonarola’s now that brings her back once more to take up the full burden of her cross. She goes forth not knowing or heeding whither she goes, “drifting away” unconscious before wind and wave. These bear her into the midst of terror, suffering, and death; and there, in self-devotedness to others, in patient ministrations of love amid poverty, ignorance, and superstition, the noble spirit rights itself once more, the weary fainting heart regains its quiet steadfastness. She knows once more that no amount of wrong-doing can dissolve the bond uniting her to Tito; that no degree of pain may lawfully drive her forth from that sphere of doing and suffering which is hers. She returns, not in joy or hope, but in that which is deeper than all joy and hope—in love; the one thought revealed to us being that it may be her blessedness to stand by him whose baseness drove her away when suffering and loss have come upon him. ... "

Wrong again. Romola isn't returning to love, or for love, and Tito has nothing to do with it. Florence is where her home is, which is what she returned to, not love or marriage. Tito lives in the house, and has some legal rights, but is gentleman enough not to demand or force her. If he left, she would be neither devastated nor follow.

But it's clear why the plague interlude was inserted - it's simply that George Eliot lacked courage to depict the struggle of Savonarola, and how, from pinnacle of strength, he was brought down to being burnt at stake. Whether showing the political machinations of the church, or understanding the occult forces, it would have taken an inner journey of consciousness that would need courage in being institutionally independent of church. This George Eliot lacked.

If she had, ironically enough, she might have understood the figure Brown repeatedly refers to as the reason church must be followed "because it's only through church" that he can gave access to his object of worship, as if it were a physical object, such as a specific stone!

Or does he mean it in the sense of having to enter a cave filled with snakes because that's the only spot he can find salvation?

Anyway, if she'd understood Savonarola and his struggle and why he lost, perhaps she'd have understood why someone crucified cried out "why hast thou forsaken me?", if that story gas any truth to it.

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" ... Tito is gone to his place: and his baseness shall vex her no more with antagonistic duties and a divided life. There is no joy, no expressed sense of relief and release; no reproach of him other than that implied one which springs out of the necessities of her being, the putting away from her, quietly and unobtrusively, the material gains of his treasons. The poor innocent wrong-doer, Tessa, is sought for, rescued, and cared for; and is never allowed to know the foul wrong to her rescuer of which she has been made the unconscious instrument. Even to her the language is that “Naldo will return no more, not because he is cruel, but because he is dead.”"

What "antagonistic duties and a divided life"? George Eliot has clearly given to understand that Tito sensitive enough and treating Romola with respect, no longer expected intimacy of marital relations. Being officially his widow isn't going to wash off stains of his past conduct, if any.

And as for Brown referring to Tessa as "poor innocent wrong-doer, Tessa", what could be more disgusting? George Eliot has been most meticulous in portraying how Tessa came to believe she was married, how she never learned she wasn't, and more; f anything, she was not merely innocent, she was wronged, much as Brown might if he'd been sold stolen goods. But no, of course he has to brand her, because she's a woman. Would he brand a man who turned out tricked by his wife never having told him if a previous marriage? Not likely.

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"The one purer feeling in that corrupt heart — his love for Romola — is almost from the first tainted by the same selfishness. From the first he recognises that his relation to her will give him a certain position in the city; and he feels that with his ready tact and Greek suppleness this is all that is needed to secure his further advancement. The vital antagonism between his nature and hers bars the possibility of his foreseeing how her truthfulness, nobleness, and purity shall become the thorn in his ease-loving life."

There's that racism again, a English contempt for Greek! Ease loving? Did he not read the book, or does he just ignore the hardships of the orphan boy till he arrived in Florence? And caste feeling too, in this contempt for Tito, as one without a noble father! Moreover, why this ignoring, nit resoecting, the love Tito had for Romola? Or does ge deserve such contempt only due to marrying a daughter of what is impoverished gentry, despite being orphan- unless the contempt is based really on race, and Greek are seen as lesser than Italian?

" ... Long before the end comes, we feel that Tito Melema is a lost soul; that for him and in him there is no place for repentance; that to him we may without any uncharity apply the most fearful words human language has ever embodied; — he has sinned the “sin which cannot be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”"

It's nothing of the sort. Would brown dare condemn Henry the VIIIth for all the debauchery, murders, and more? No, Tito is easy to condemn falsely, because he's an orphan and a stranger,from another land, succeeding due to his wits and personality, despite lacking being backed by a wealthy or aristocratic father and property. Its the same reason he is betrayed, and killed. He's an average man, nothing more, apart from looks and wits and the amiability he had to acquire to survive despite being an orphan. Amongst the men he's mixing with, there are many just as self loving - who isn't! - and lacking his wits, but owning property and of known genealogy, and hence not considered sinners.

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"Few of the great figures which stand up amid the dimness of medieval history are more perplexing to historian and biographer than Savonarola. On a first glance we seem shut up to one or other of two alternatives — regarding him as an apostle and martyr, or as a charlatan. And even more careful examination leaves in his character and life anomalies so extraordinary, contradictions so inextricable, that most historians have fallen back on the hypothesis of partial insanity — the insanity born of an honest and upright but extravagant fanaticism — as the only one adequate to explain the mystery. ... "

What choice did they have? Unlike Luther, Calvin, or Henry the VIII th, Savonarola was burnt at stake, and unlike Jean D'Arc, never restored to sainthood; so without sanction from church West dare not recognise his greatness, and really proceed to place him where he belonged, somewhere amongst those, recognised by church or otherwise, of occult power used for good - including perhaps one they worship, if that story isn't an outright lie. But certainly with Jean D'Arc, Bernadette and other similar ones.

"The great Monk-prophet comes upon the scene a new “voice crying in the wilderness”of selfishness and wrong around him —an impassioned witness that “there is a God that judgeth in the earth,”protesting by speech and by life against the self-seeking and self-pleasing he sees on every side. To the putting down of this, to the living his own life, to the rousing all men to live theirs, not to pleasure, but to God; merging all private interests in the public good, and that the best good; looking each one not to his own pleasures, ambition, or ease, but to that which shall best advance a reign of truth, justice, and love on earth, —to this end he has consecrated himself and all his powers. The path thus chosen is for himself a hard one; circumstanced as our humanity is, it never has been otherwise —never shall be so while these heavens and this earth remain. Mere personal self-denials, mere turning away from the outward pomps and vanities of the world, lie very lightly on a nature like Savonarola’s, and such things scarcely enter into the pain and hardness of his chosen lot. It is the opposition, —active, in the intrigues and machinations of enemies both in Church and State —passive, in the dull cold hearts that respond so feebly and fitfully to his appeals; it is the constant wearing bitterness of hope deferred, the frequent still sterner bitterness of direct disappointment, —it is things like these that make his cross so heavy to bear. ... "

Whether Brown, George Eliot or any other in West, they dare not acknowledge his truth, and hence dare not face it, without church sanction; if they did, they'd face opposition from church, as well as from science and rationalist, materialistic communities. What choice have they but picture him as a do-gooder who failed politically by opposing church? The power he had over people wasn't oratory, and the reason his figure stands tall despite being victim of church, isn't trivial.

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Brown quotes beautiful lines from end of The Spanish Gypsy -

"“Straining he gazed, and knew not if he gazed

"On aught but blackness overhung with stars”—"

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" ... as we have passed without notice the powerful embodiment in Father Isidor of whatever was true and earnest in the Inquisition, ... "

Seriously, Brown says "true and earnest in the Inquisition"?????

As in seeking to terrorise the populace into complete submission, with no right to inquiry, much less knowledge?

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"In the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many of her readers is and will remain the most fascinating —‘Middlemarch’— George Eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however, every figure, to the least important that appears, is — not sketched or outlined, but — filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness and precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone. Quote but a few words from any one of the speakers, and we know in a moment who that speaker is. And each is the type or representative of a class; we have no monsters or unnatural creations among them. To a certain extent all are idealised for good or for evil, — it cannot be otherwise in fiction without its ceasing to be fiction; but the essential elements of character and life in all are not peculiar to them, but broad and universal as our humanity itself. Dorothea and her sister, Mr Brooke and Sir James Chettam, Rosamond Vincy and her brother, Mr Vincy and his wife, Casaubon and Lydgate, Farebrother and Ladislaw, Mary Garth and her parents, Bulstrode and Raffles, even Drs Sprague and Minchin, old Featherstone and his kindred — all are but representative men and women, with whose prototypes every reader, if gifted with the subtle power of penetration and analysis of George Eliot, might claim personal acquaintance."

"Jealousy, in some degree, presupposes love; love not wholly absorbed in self, but capable to some extent of going forth from our own mean and sordid self-inclusion in sympathetic relation, dependence, and aid, towards another existence. In Mr Casaubon there is no capability, no possibility of this. What in him wears the aspect of jealousy is simply and solely self-love, callous irritation, that any one should —not stand above, but —approach himself in importance with the woman he has purchased as a kind of superior slave. For long her guileless innocence and purity, her utter inability to conceive such a feeling, leaves her only in doubt and perplexity before it; long after it has first betrayed itself, she reveals this incapability in the fullest extent, and in the way most intensely irritating to her husband’s self-love —by her simple-hearted proposal that whatever of his property would devolve on her should be shared with Ladislaw. Then it is that Casaubon is roused to inflict on her the last long and bitter anguish; to lay on her for life —had not death intervened —the cold, soul-benumbing, life contracting clutch of “the Dead Hand.” ... The agonised assent is to be given; but it falls on the ear of the dead."

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And heres exposed, again, the limited, narrow and ignorant mind of a racist, unfamiliar with any other philosophy or thought except that imposed by church, at pains of subjection to inquisition and burning at stake, for centuries.

" ... But it is not from these, or such as these, that the highest and noblest, the purest and most penetrative, the most extended and enduring teaching and elevation of the world has come. That has come emphatically from Him whose self-chosen name, “the Son of Man,” designates Him the ideal of humanity on earth; Him who is at once the “Lamb of God” and “the Lion of the tribe of Judah,” the “Good Shepherd,” and the stern and fearless but ever-righteous Judge — the concentration of all tender and holy love, and of divinest scorn of, and revulsion from, everything mean and false in humanity; Him who for the repentant sinner has no harsher word of rebuke than “Go and sin no more,” and who over the self-righteous, self-wrapt, all-despising Pharisees thundered back, to His own ultimate destruction, His terrible “Woe unto you hypocrites.” ... "

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"In wonderfully drawn and finished yet never obtruded contrast to this beautiful creation comes before us Rosamond Vincy. Outwardly even more characterised by every personal charm, save that one living and crowning charm which outshines from the soul within; to the eye, therefore — such eyes as can penetrate no deeper than the surface — prettier, more graceful, more accomplished and fascinating, than Dorothea Brooke; — it is difficult to conceive a more utterly unlovable example of womanhood, whether as maiden or wife. ... "

Goodness, this guy is stupid! Doesn't he realise he's reacting to a finished portrait of a lifetime of the character in the book, dissected and exposed thoroughly by George Eliot? And that average women and men are just precisely of this nature, Rosamond Vincy of Middlemarch, and Tito Melema of Romola, but without their charm or beauty, and in case of Tito, his wits, amiability, and innate gentlemanliness in refraining from asserting his rights, his will, or anything of himself over his wife, who has been his love?

" ... The fundamental character of her entire home relations is, on her first appearance, drawn by a single delicate touch — her objecting to her brother’s red herring, or rather to its presence after she enters the room, because its odour jars on her sense of pseudo-refinement. ... "

Is this expectations from women as merely creatures born to slavery, or would he have tolerated members of his household come into his presence - say, in his study - reeking of liquor and onions?

" ... In her relation to her husband there is not from first to last one shadow of anything that can be called love, no approach to sympathy or harmony of life. She looks on him solely as a means for removing herself to what she considers a higher social circle, securing to her greater ease, freedom, and luxury of daily life, and ultimately withdrawing her to a wider sphere of petty and selfish enjoyment. Seeking these ends, she resorts to every mean device of deceit and concealment. Utterly callous and impenetrable to his feelings, to every manlier instinct within him, as she is utterly insensible of, and indeed incapable of, entering into his higher and wider professional aims, she not only ignores these, but in her dull and hard insensibility runs counter to, and tramples on them all."

Again, Brown is judging from the final point, and unfairly. She is merely normal, average young woman, bestowed with beauty of a very high degree, with very little education or other opening of inner being; she wishes a life at least at the level she's used to having, and a man she can look up to; that's neither abnormal nor criminal. She's unfortunate in meeting, and not only wanting, but getting, someone far higher in his aspirations, capabilities and aim, and not so much in his financial strength, acumen or aims. She would be, and is, quite happy when he accepts life of an average doctor treating rich patients, and has no clue it caused him to die within. She's no villain; it's misfortune for them both to not have realised, due to neither having made clear what each expected, how very unsuitable they were. Most peopl,e when courting, don't do so. Tragedies such as this are avoided only because mist people are average. Rosamond was quite happy with her second husband, an average man.

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" ... Anon comes his marriage to Rosamond Vincy, — a marriage prompted by no true affection, but solely by the fascination of her prettiness, her external grace and accomplishments. ... "

How many people can afford to wait to find, and ascertain, "true affection", even if it was as obvious as an object sold in a grocery shop, all labeled clearly? When a young man must find and propose, and a young woman wait to be asked and decide about acceptan9or rejection every time, without a clue about alternatives, they do their best in the blind poker game.

" ... and at last in the all but universal estimation of his fellows, and nearly in his own, in the hope of temporary relief he becomes accessory to murder. ... "

It could only be called murder if it was a deliberate act committed with full knowledge of a certain end; it wasn't even an assault, but a refraining from care required, and that was not committed by Lydgate, but Bulstrode whom Lydgate had informed about possible results of such action. That the village assumed it was murdered with collusion by doctor, wasn't because it was so, but because it seemed likely under the circumstances, whereby the death of a blackmailer suited Bulstrode and his benevolence was needed by Lydgate.

Brown never opened his eyes, even to the very explicit and extensive writing of George Eliot, much less to other, deeper realities, but inferred whatever suitable from anything.

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"There now only remains the last yet published, and in the estimation of many, the greatest, of George Eliot’s works —‘Daniel Deronda.’ ... "

And here's antisemitism of West, without any suspicion that it is far from holy or righteous.

" Before, however, proceeding to detailed examination of this remarkable work, it seems necessary to draw attention to one objection which has been urged against it — the prominent introduction of the Jewish element into its scheme. Such objection could scarcely have been put forward by any one who considers what the Jew has been in the past — what an enormous factor 2his past and present have been and are, in the development and progress of our highest civilisation. Historically, we first meet him coming forth from the Arabian desert, a rude unlettered herdsman, in intelligence, cultivation, and morality far below the tribes among whom he is thrown. ... "

Was brown unaware of just how very uncivilised Europe was, while Asia and Egypt were far more advanced?

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And more of ignorant racism from those of low intelligence -

" ... To the Psalms so-called of David, the glorious outbursts of sacred song in their mythico-historical books, as in Isaiah and some of the minor prophets, the finest of the Vedic or Orphic hymns or the Homeric ballads are cold and spiritless. ... "

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"Eighteen centuries have passed since they became a people, “scattered and peeled,” their “holy and beautiful house” a ruin, their capital a desolation, their land proscribed to the exile’s foot. During these centuries deluge after deluge of so-called barbarians has swept over Asia and Europe: Hun and Tartar, Alan and Goth, Suev and Vandal, — we attach certain vague meanings to the names, but can the most learned scholar identify one individual of the true unmingled blood? All have disappeared, merged in 5the race they overran, in the kingdoms they conquered and devastated. The Jew alone, through these centuries, has remained the Jew: proscribed, persecuted, hunted as never was tiger or wolf, he is as vividly defined, as unchangeably national, as when he stood alone, everywhere without and beyond the despised and hated Gentile. And this intense and conservative nationality springs essentially out of the central conception of Judaism, “God is one.”

And here's more racism from Brown, with more abuse of others based in hatred, ignorance and the power play that was inquisition.

"Through those long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism (in its grossest forms all around), the Jew stood up in unfaltering protest against all."

Presumably that includes, not only Asia and Africa, Egypt and India and China and Japan, but Greece and Rome, Germany and France, Celts and Druids?

" ... Persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in every form, were of no avail. On the gibbet, on the rack, amid the flames, his last words embodied the central confession of Judaism, “O Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord.” Christianity, the appointed custodier of the still more central truth, “God is love,” had to all appearance failed of its mission; had not only merged its higher message in a theistic presentation, dark and terroristic as that of Judaism at its dawn, but had absorbed into 6its scheme, under other names, the gods many who swarm all around it; till nowhere and never, save by some soul upborne by its own fervour above these dense fogs and mists, could individual man meet his God face to face, and realise that higher life of the soul which is His free gift to all who seek it. Between this heathenised Christianity and Judaism, the contrast was the sharpest, the contest the most embittered and unvarying. Elsewhere we hear of times of toleration and indulgence even for the hunted Monotheist, — in medieval Christendom, never. ... "

An honest admission there, but for omission of specific names blanked under that "Elsewhere" - it was only in India and China that Jews were not persecuted, and only in India they survived with their identity, worship and religious tradition intact. In China they got absorbed, unlike anywhere else. One of the first resolutions in the Knesset of Israel was to thank India.

More ignorance from Brown, even as he admits to some facts -

" ... The Inquisition plied its rack for the Jews with a more fiendish zeal than even for the hated Morisco. The mob held him responsible for plague and famine; and kings and nobles hounded the mob on to indiscriminate massacre. The Jew lived on through it all, —lived, multiplied, and prospered, and became more and more emphatically the Jew. Is it too much to say that in the West in particular, where this contrast and contest were keenest, Judaism was, during these long ages of terror and darkness, the great conservator of the vital truth of the Divine unity, under whatever forms science or philosophy may now attempt to define this; and in being so, became the conservator of that thought, without the vivifying power of which, howsoever imperfectly apprehended, all human advance is impossible? ... "

Next sends a shiver.

" ... Is it exaggerating the importance of the Jew and his intense nationality, based on such a truth, to say that, but for his presence, “scattered and 7peeled,” among all nations, the Europe we now know could not have been? And this indestructible nationality, for whose existence miracle has been called into account — has it no significance in the future equal to what it has had in the past? There seems an impression that the Jew is being absorbed by other races. We hear much of relaxing Judaisms; of rituals and beliefs assimilating to those around them; of peculiarities being laid aside, that have withstood the wear and tear of centuries. The inference is sought to be drawn that the Jew is beginning to feel his isolation, and to sink his own national life amid that among which he dwells. ... "

Well, antisemitism of Europe did remain strong, not allowing Jews to assimilate almost anywhere throughout Europe, except - it was said - Germany; and then the nazis took care of that. But the doctrine - not antisemitism, but racial superiority - that nazism was based on, was itself from England! The very beginning of William Shirer's most famous work, Rise And Fall of The Third Reich, surprises as with thus information, of English worship of German superiority over all humanity!

" ... But it seems the reverse of strange that a genius like George Eliot’s should have been powerfully attracted by this problem; and that, in one of her noblest works, she should have very prominently addressed herself to at least a partial solution of it. ... "

Indeed, George Eliot does seem strongly against any assimilation of Jews in ambient society, even as a separate group, and she's not too subtly indicated an aversion to interfaith, interracial marriage, especially in this work.

Throughout the book Daniel Deronda shadows Gwendolyn, not stalking but always there, but he must abandon her just when she needed him most, and that's more than once; the last and final time, knowingly so. It's all very well justifying it by claiming he loved Mirah, but throughout the work it only comes across as charity to Mirah when he helps her, unlike his bond with Gwendolyn that's based on the same fascination and domination that's depicted between Felix Holt and Esther.

Incidentally the common factor in both is the not happy ending - somehow one has been led to see the growing love of Harold Transome for Esther, and to will it to succeed, to a flowering of the family, estate, land and more, just as one has been led to expect a final admission of love between Gwendolyn and Daniel, and a happy ending. But no, there's an incredible violent break, and off they go to mate elsewhere. And this is true, too, of The Spanish Gypsy. Their love has been proclaimed and asserted, but they are required to sacrifice their lives and love to this racial war that was glorified, and he made to be ashamed of loving a Gypsy, she made to leave Europe with her people!

It's a tragedy, not a sacrifice to a "higher ideal" as Brown proclaims. But then, he dies say Gypsy is a "degraded" race, believing his own is superior.

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"Grandcourt is portrayed before us in more massive and simple proportions as a type of concentrated selfishness. We dare not despise him, we cannot loathe him — we stand bowed and awe-stricken before him. He never for a moment falls from that calm dignity of pride and self-isolation — never for a moment softens into respect for anything without himself. Without a moment’s exception he is ever consistent, imperturbable in his self-containedness, ruthlessly crushing all things from dog to wife, under his calm, cold, slighting contempt. He stands up before us, not so much indomitable as simply unassailable. We cannot conceive the boldest approaching or encroaching on him — all equally shiver and quail before that embodiment of the devil as represented by human self-love."

Brown quails before the imaginary character of a wealthy aristocrat with power who'd disdain looking at the likes of Brown, while he feels free to abuse the not so wealthy females such as Rosamond and Tessa!

Casteism and misogyny, fitting companions to racism.

But in truth, while there was nothing unwomanly about Rosamond and no wrong had been committed by Tessa, it's Grandcourt who's less than a man at every step. He didn't stay away fromwife of a man of a lesser position, he didn't insist on their divorce before mating with her, he didn't marry her when she was a widow, and he didn't protect Gwendolyn, knowing she'd be not safe from the mother of his son; he proposed to Gwendolyn telling her he knew she was financially ruined and he'd provide for her family, he married her with not love but intentions to crush her, and did so.

Brown admires this male without heart or soul, with intentions of dominating only the weak, of course. He'd have worshipped nazis.

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"Fain would we linger over the Jewish girl, Mirah. She has been spoken of as characterless; to us it seems as if few characters of more exquisite loveliness 2have ever been portrayed. From her first appearance robed in her meek despair, through all her subsequent relations with Deronda, her brother, and Gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the same tender meekness, the same full acceptance of the life of a Jewess as — in harmony with the life of her race — one of “sufferance.” ... "

Did Brown miss the part where she's far from meek when question of relationship between Daniel Deronda and Gwendolyn comes up? More than once, and ferocious enough to surprise her benefactors.

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"We have throughout had no intention of dealing 4with George Eliot merely as the artist; but if we have succeeded in showing this unity of moral purpose and aim as pervading all her works, as giving rise to their variety by reason of the varieties and modifications it necessitates in order to its full illustration, and as ministered to, directly or indirectly, by all the accessory characters and incidents of these creations, — the question naturally arises, whether this does not constitute her an artist of the highest possible order.

"But the true worth of George Eliot’s works rests, we think, on higher grounds than any mere perfection of artistic finish; on this ground, specially, that among all our fictionists she stands out as the deepest, broadest, and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics of Christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true doctrine of the Cross, that we are born and should live to something higher than the love of happiness; the most subtle and profound commentator on the solemn words, “He that loveth his soul shall lose it: he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal.”"

According to people who knew her, she'd given up religion, so far as to be estranged from her family; but it's obvious why she did not do well as an author, despite all her intellect and learning, which is not enough to be an artist. Not only she lacked the flow of a creative artist, but this whole shebang of moral lessons delivered with a hammer through her work simply killed it as far as reading public was concerned, and restricted her readership to professional students of literature on the whole, unlike her superlative contemporaries.

Quinine tablets might be the necessary prescribed medicine to swallow if you have malaria, but nobody goes around ordering them for dessert for fun; and even as medicine, they have to be possible to swallow somehow, not raw chunks of bitter. She's left behind for the same reason likes of Brown are limited to bible belt of U.S..

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October 12, 2021 - October 13, 2021.

The Ethics of George Eliot's Works

by John Crombie Brown

Kindle Edition

Published December 17th 2019

(first published September 27th 2015)

ASIN:- B082VK4CH9

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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4285817595

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The Translations

THE LIFE OF JESUS CRITICALLY EXAMINED BY DR. DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY BY LUDWIG ANDREAS FEUERBACH

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THE LIFE OF JESUS CRITICALLY EXAMINED

BY DR. DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS

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The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

by Dr. David Friedrich Strauss

by David Friedrich Strauss, George Eliot (Translator).

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It's one of those instances when a very negative review reassures one that the book might not be so bad after all, and one begins to read; within a paragraph one begins to suspect it was worth the effort, and notices that the comment by a critic, quoted in a life of George Eliot, about the translation being excellent quality in every way, must be true - although when one read that, one feared coming across the infamous, over two page long, German sentences that change the whole meaning completely as one turns the page, due to a split verb.

It's not that everything is perfect - far from it. For example, he begins with what seems like an intelligent, erudite discourse on religion - he specifically uses that word, not the one that would identity his own - but as one reads, it's obvious that he's thinking of one he's familiar with, namely, his own, and those close to it, all within the perimeter of abrahmic faiths.

If and when he does refer specifically to one outside this, which he does often enough though not at the very outset, there are words used that in Western culture considered pejorative, such as heathen, pagan, pantheistic, although they are not literally so (- similarly the word grotesque, literally referring to grottoes where Europe worship of mother Goddesses were conducted, isn't pejorative literally, but has been reduced to that via church attitude and domination).

It becomes obvious, immediately at the beginning, that the author knows little about religions other than his own. For example, the author says, in the introduction -

" ... Otherwise, we might very likely find the miracles in the life of Moses, Elias, or Jesus, the Theophany and Angelophany of the Old and New Testament, just as incredible as the fables of Jupiter, Hercules, or Bacchus: presuppose the divinity or divine descent of these individuals, and their actions and fate become as credible as those of the biblical personages with the like presupposition. Yet not quite so, it may be returned. Vishnu appearing in his three first avatars as a fish, a tortoise, and a boar; Saturn devouring his children; Jupiter turning himself into a bull, a swan, etc.—these are incredibilities of quite another kind from Jehovah appearing to Abraham in a human form under the terebinth tree, or to Moses in the burning bush. ... "

On the contrary, the burning bush is not impressive as indication of a God, although not incredible enough to declare it impossible; and the peculiar insistence on virgin birth by Rome - one can quite ordinarily hear a nun declaring that "she was special , not like other women" with great scorn at all other women, not realising how fisgusting she sounds for this disdain against all women contained in the implication that one woman hapoened to be a virgin mother unlike others, and implying that all others are thereby low; this disdain isnt extended to males, one notices!

But, above all, hasn't science - specifically, evolution - proved India right, even though those that see its superiority over biblical story dont necessarily have to "have faith" in any God of India (nobody asked anyone to have such a faith!), but, after all, if there is life and existence and evolution, while one is quite free to think there's only material as dead as mud coming suddenly alive, if one chooses to wonder what is behind - as one looks behind atoms and finds quarks - it's not important that the name given in India is Vishnu, but it's impressive that India knew of evolution.

And wouldn't you think that someone so aware of science as this author, and the translator George Eliot, would realise, being aware of evolution - and not dead set against it all as the bibke belt is - that India's treasure of knowledge, despite the racist label of mythology by West, has far more a vast core of truth that the history of West Asia worshipped by abrahmic faiths?

" ... This extravagant love of the marvellous is the character of the heathen mythology. A similar accusation might indeed be brought against many parts of the Bible, such as the tales of Balaam, Joshua, and Samson; but still it is here less glaring, and does not form as in the Indian religion and in certain parts of the Grecian, the prevailing character. What however does this prove? Only that the biblical history might be true, sooner than the Indian or Grecian fables; not in the least that on this account it must be true, and can contain nothing fictitious."

Was he kidding? Or did his instinct of self preservation make him forget, temporarily, the insistence by church on virgin conception, without a human male parent, of his object of worship?

And if this was to be explained by science, it can't be assumed a never before or after occurrence, destroying the very basis of worship - since, surely, it can't be without such imposition of belief at pain of a burning at stake, that one could rationally conclude a unique supreme divinity due to a few miracles?

Why, the so called rope trick of India, so disdained by west - chiefly England - and used to brand India as something low, sounds far more miraculous than turning water into wine, even if one believes that latter - while the reports of having seen the rope trick are by the earlier English in India who reported having eye witnessed the events, and not uniquely either.

And yet, there was no report of those performing having been worshipped by anyone in India. Who's the more gullible here?

"“But the subjects of the heathen mythology are for the most part such, as to convince us beforehand that they are mere inventions: those of the Bible such as at once to establish their own reality. A Brahma, an Ormusd, a Jupiter, without doubt never existed; but there still is a God, a Christ, and there have been an Adam, a Noah, an Abraham, a Moses.” ... "

Again, a combination of racism, hubris, and ignorance. That it matches, in proportion today, the same qualities in flatearthers, or bible belt deniers of evolution, shouldn't be surprising - after all, bible belt may be related more to confederate South than to the states of German migration, but the two aren't isolated, nor were in eighteenth century or any other time ssuch qualities restricted to Germany.

Incidentally there are other mistakes in the book, but it's difficult to correct Ormusd - is it as simple as Ormud? Autocorrect allows the latter, but it's not a foolproof guide.

" ... Whether an Adam or a Noah, however, were such as they are represented, has already been doubted, and may still be doubted. Just so, on the other side, there may have been something historical about Hercules, Theseus, Achilles, and other heroes of Grecian story. Here, again, we come to the decision that the biblical history might be true sooner than the heathen mythology, but is not necessarily so. ... "

Good thinking. But then retraction -

" ... This decision however, together with the two distinctions already made, brings us to an important observation. How do the Grecian divinities approve themselves immediately to us as non-existing beings, if not because things are ascribed to them which we cannot reconcile with our idea of the divine? whilst the God of the Bible is a reality to us just in so far as he corresponds with the idea we have formed of him in our own minds. Besides the contradiction to our notion of the divine involved in the plurality of heathen gods, and the intimate description of their motives and actions, we are at once revolted to find that the gods themselves have a history; that they are born, grow up, marry, have children, work out their purposes, suffer difficulties and weariness, conquer and are conquered. It is irreconcileable with our idea of the Absolute to suppose it subjected to time and change, to [77]opposition and suffering; and therefore where we meet with a narrative in which these are attributed to a divine being, by this test we recognize it as unhistorical or mythical."

How, he asks repeatedly, and presumes reasonability is the answer; nothing of the sort, which is obvious to anyone not brought up quivering in fright before church authority. Not reasonability of one set of stories against another, its quite contrary, in fact. It's all due to a very limited theory and a fable covering up a real story, not only fed for millennia by church, but imposed fiercely, at pain of being burnt at stake of those not cowering under it, that's how.

" ... It is obvious to every one, that there is something quite different in the Old Testament declarations, that God made an alliance with Noah, and Abraham, led his people out of Egypt, gave them laws, brought them into the promised land, raised up for them judges, kings, and prophets, and punished them at last for their disobedience by exile;—from the tales concerning Jupiter, that he was born of Rhea in Crete, and hidden from his father Saturn in a cave; that afterwards he made war upon his father, freed the Uranides, and with their help and that of the lightning with which they furnished him, overcame the rebellious Titans, and at last divided the world amongst his brothers and children. ... "

That latter part sounds very like stories fashioned after astronomical observations, even though telescopes hadn't been yet invented and so satellites of planets (other than earth, but then it was the Moon, not earth, considered a planet then) were unknown, so the children part sounds invented too; yet, when when occupation of a celestial body occurs, so does that of its satellites, or most of them, at least; so it'd be interesting if they really did know about the satellites.

" ... The essential difference between the two representations is, that in the latter, the Deity himself is the subject of progression, becomes another being at the end of the process from what he was at the beginning, something being effected in himself and for his own sake: whilst in the former, change takes place only on the side of the world; God remains fixed in his own identity as the I AM, and the temporal is only a superficial reflection cast back upon his acting energy by that course of mundane events which he both originated and guides. ... "

That difference, Strauss forgets, goes with another - an assumption of the said Deity being, not only supreme, but unique, and moreover, there being nothing else; a parallel would be, for example, the whole of earth a tropical garden with the exception of a single point, say the North pole, as per the former view; while the latter has at least a few gradations along with those of earth latitudes, if not all, and other differences of topography.

And yet, that assumption of exclusion and uniqueness is just that - an assumption, not even from conception thereof but in fact from choice. Those that so proclaimed this exclusive unique one to be the only one did in fact know of other Gods, and their names as well, of not only greek, Roman and Egyptian pantheons but more - there were not only Jupiter and Ra, Apollo and Diana, but Bacchus and Moloch and many more; of which, suddenly, one was picked out - Jehovah - and proclimed not merely supreme, not merely unique, but wiping out all others as non existent, and this was imposed so strongly that inquisition is merely a reasonably seeming logical result, pretty much like holocaust was the logical result of the antisemitism taught by church for centuries.

" ... In the heathen mythology the gods have a history: in the Old Testament, God himself has none, but only his people: and if the proper meaning of mythology be the history of gods, then the Hebrew religion has no mythology."

Or perhaps there was history, but it was suppressed, after Jehovah was selected to be all-in-all, and others not only discarded but prohibited?

Here's an amusing fact - the word Jehovah isn't that far a sound from Ava, and the difference being vowels, which aren't written in Hebrew or scripts of its derivative languages, perhaps it was the primeval Mother, Eve, who was elevated to the ultimate status?

After all, fear of God (unknown in India of Indian origin) is a concept that belongs to West including West Asia (and hence only known to those of India that carry on the cultures of invaders, via heritage of ancestry or conversion), and the very word "hauwwa" in North India signifies something feared unrealistically; but "awwaa" in South India literally means mother, and neither word is of origin in any Indian language, but are obviously both from the same source and are in fact related to Eve; the different connotations signifying the differences of how the foreign faith entered the region. In North it was brutality of invasions, massacres and conversions at point of swords; in South it was traders and migrants, refugees even, including the grandsons of the prophet (whom refuge was given by king in Gujarat, who defended them at cost of his own life, before the mercenary bin kasim succeeded in his purpose; Gujarat isn't technically counted as South, but s closer in many ways to South culturally).

It would be amusing if the word Jehovah were in fact a transformation or derivative of Eve, amusing because abrahmic cultures and faiths are so highly misogynistic.

" ... Thus according to the above accepted notion of the mythus, the New Testament has more of a mythical character than the Old. ... "

There is more to the mouth character thereof - it wasn't just that such a messiah has been and is still expected in Judaism, with some characteristics clearly predicted, but also that the story of Jesus as told by church is very akin in various parts to several different, much older, stories from various parts, near or further. (When pointed out, church is quoted to have said that devil in past borrows from god of future and plants the story!)

"It is certainly difficult to conceive, how narratives which thus speak of imagination as reality can have been formed without intentional deceit, and believed without unexampled credulity; ... "

An atheist labelling it as imagination - not a particular religion and it's story, nor all others except one, but all of them, and very concept of anything not subject to physical senses or reason - reminds one of the story -(wish one could recall or source the title and authir) of the man who stumbled into a self sufficient valley in course of his travels where not only everyone else except him were blind, but had no concept of sight; and after honouring him initially, were seriously alarmed at his "delusion" as they thought it, until a decision was taken to operate on him; the story ends in a fortunate escape he managed.

But really, is there a difference of more than one step, or two different sides of the same coin, between atheism and monotheism? No. For both merely holds not only one's own assertion true and supreme, but all other possibilities beneath contempt. And yet neither can prove their assertion in any possible scientific or logical manner.

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"If, in addition to this, we accept the statement of Luke (i. 26 and iii. 23), that Jesus, being only half a year younger than John, was about in his thirtieth year at his appearance, we must suppose that John was in his twentieth year when he began his ministry. ... "

"The result then of our critique on the chronological data Luke iii. 1, 2, comp. 23 and i. 26, is this: if Jesus, as Luke seems to understand, appeared in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, the appearance of John occurred, not in the same year, but earlier; and if Jesus was in his thirtieth year when he began his ministry, the Baptist, so much his predecessor, could hardly be but six months his senior."

But the age gap confirmed as a consequence of the visit by Mary to Elizabeth scene, amounts to the years of disciplehood of Jesus to John, doesn't It?

The factor here is the gap of years between his disciplehood to John and his own beginning of rabbinic position, and those are the years that he travelled to India, it has been conjectured - apart from returning there after his resurrection - where he learned yoga, whereby the resurrection; whether this whole conjecture arose during twentieth century due to West beginning to know about yoga, or whether it was also because of the village in Kashmir that claims he lived his life out there and they have his grave, is anybody's guess; but it's also that his name and epithet are clearly deformations, respectively, of Isha and Krishna; and if he did learn yoga in India for years, that explains most of the rest, especially the resurrection.

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"The connection and intercourse of the two families, as described by Luke, would render it impossible for John not to be early informed how solemnly Jesus had been announced as the Messiah, before and at his birth; he could not therefore say at a later period that, prior to the sign from heaven, he had not known, but only that he had not believed, the story of former wonders, one of which relates to himself.30 It being thus unavoidable to acknowledge that by the above declaration in the fourth Gospel, the Baptist is excluded, not only from a knowledge of the Messiahship of Jesus, but also from a personal acquaintance with him; it has been attempted to reconcile the first chapter of Luke with this ignorance, by appealing to the distance of residence between the two families, as a preventive to the continuance of their intercourse.31 But if the journey from Nazareth to the hill country of Judea was not too formidable for the betrothed Mary, how could it be so for the two sons when ripening to maturity?"

Not only at the outset, but increasingly, a factor that comes to fore is the paucity in church variety of monotheism.

"Let it be granted that the fourth Gospel excludes an acquaintance with the [218]Messiahship only of Jesus, and that the third presupposes an acquaintance with his person only, on the part of John; still the contradiction is not removed. For in Matthew, John, when required to baptize Jesus, addresses him as if he knew him, not generally and personally alone, but specially, in his character of Messiah. It is true that the words: I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? (iii. 14), have been interpreted, in the true spirit of harmonizing, as referring to the general superior excellence of Jesus, and not to his Messiahship.33 But the right to undertake the baptism which was to prepare the way for the Messiah’s kingdom, was not to be obtained by moral superiority in general, but was conferred by a special call, such as John himself had received, and such as could belong only to a prophet, or to the Messiah and his Forerunner (John i. 19 ff.). If then John attributed to Jesus authority to baptize, he must have regarded him not merely as an excellent man, but as indubitably a prophet, nay, since he held him worthy to baptize himself, as his own superior: that is, since John conceived himself to be the Messiah’s Forerunner, no other than the Messiah himself. Add to this, that Matthew had just cited a discourse of the Baptist, in which he ascribes to the coming Messiah a baptism more powerful than his own; how then can we understand his subsequent language towards Jesus otherwise than thus: “Of what use is my water baptism to thee, O Messiah? Far more do I need thy baptism of the Spirit!”"

Paucity of great souls, obviously. Not only all women are barred as possibly Divine, but even amongst males, there is only one at an elevated position unique above all, unlike many other religions. Judaism admits more than one great man, so does the abrahmic religion that followed that of Rome after a few centuries. It's true that Buddhism has only one, but then, as per culture of its birth, has a richer pantheon. And India, of course, has so rich a treasure, not only far from lacking in numerous male descents of Divine, but women too, and frequently, even simultaneous ones, who have been known to have possibly met.

It's not that such complexity of Divine descent is unknown to West, or unique to India; it's just that the blindness of church in firmly clouding its eyes and mind has impoverished all those under its power, whether they follow the church in faith consciously or otherwise; for the residue, of subconscious memories of inquisition, that is psychologically terrorising, leaves only a two way path, either follow church in complete obedience, or deny even existence of all but material, and attempt to fit even mind and life as chemical phenomenon, as the circle of intellectuals, surrounding George Eliot, did.

Over and over, Strauss misses the opportunity to suspect who might be responsible for the discrepancies, to the extent of major outright fabrication and lies.

"The contradiction cannot be cleared away; we must therefore, if we would not lay the burthen of intentional deception on the agents, let the narrators bear the blame; and there will be the less hindrance to our doing so, the more obvious it is how one or both of them might be led into an erroneous statement. ... "

There he missed a possibility.

" ... There is in the present case no obstacle to the reconciliation of Matthew with the fourth evangelist, farther than the words by which the Baptist seeks to deter Jesus from receiving baptism; words which, if uttered before the occurrence of anything supernatural, presuppose a knowledge of Jesus in his character of Messiah. Now the Gospel of the Hebrews, according to Epiphanius, places the entreaty of John that Jesus would baptize him, as a sequel to the sign from heaven;35 and this account has been recently regarded as the original one, abridged by the writer of our first Gospel, who, for the sake of effect, made the refusal and confession of the Baptist coincident with the first approach of Jesus. ... "

And now again, due chiefly to attitude towards Jewish sources, imposed painstakingly by church through centuries culminating in inquisition.

" ... But that we have not in the Gospel of the Hebrews the original form of the narrative, is sufficiently proved by its very tedious repetition of the heavenly voice and the diffuse style of the whole. ... "

Are those "tedious repetition" really different from the material approved and imposed by church, except for the successful transformation of Rome into church, and inquisition burning all free thinkers and questers of any knowledge, at stake, for centuries, after the crucifixion of one they now claim to worship, and seek to impose their power in the name of, over the world?

" ... It is rather a very traditional record, and the insertion of John’s refusal after the sign and voice from heaven, was not made with the view of avoiding a contradiction of the fourth Gospel, which cannot be supposed to have been recognized in the circle of the Ebionite Christians, but from the very motive erroneously attributed to Matthew in his alleged transposition, [219]namely, to give greater effect to the scene. ... "

There Strauss misses another opportunity, of seeing that perhaps the early Ebionite Christians - who quite likely those that accompanied Jesus on jis way bavk from, if not to and from India - were more correct than what he calls orthodox view; they are likely to have known him, just by sharing his timeline even if they did not share his journey, and gor thst reason precisely were opposed by church, after crucifixion, as method to be rid of opposition to Rome, was behind.

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"But chiefly the character and entire demeanour of the Baptist render it impossible to believe that he placed himself on that footing with Jesus, described by the fourth evangelist. How could the man of the wilderness, the stern ascetic, who fed on locusts and wild honey, and prescribed severe fasts to his disciples, the gloomy, threatening preacher of repentance, animated with the spirit of Elias—how could he form a friendship with Jesus, in every thing his opposite? He must assuredly, with his disciples, have stumbled at the liberal manners of Jesus, and have been hindered by them from recognizing him as the Messiah. Nothing is more unbending than ascetic prejudice; he who, like the Baptist, esteems it piety to fast and mortify the body, will never assign a high grade in things divine to him who disregards such asceticism. A mind with narrow views can never comprehend one whose vision takes a wider range, although the latter may know how to do justice to its inferior; hence Jesus could value and sanction John in his proper place, but the Baptist could never give the precedence to Jesus, as he is reported to have done in the fourth gospel. ... "

And this is a small indication about why the West, the abrahmic, fails to see treasure of knowledge of culture and tradition of ancient India, where much seems to exist without mutual contradiction side by side. This argument by Strauss is akin to theorizing that mars is hot and Venus is cool, and wondering how on earth both can coexist; reality of mars and Venus being quite opposite!

Why assume that ascetic is lesser, and incapable of comprehending the non ascetic?

And yet, those that hold with the orthodox church of Rome views are precisely the ones horrified at the thought that Jesus might have, after all, had the normal life of a traditional Jewish rabbi, who was not merely expected but obliged to marry and have children.

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Still, what with inquisition squashing all thought and freedom of thought, with burning of dissenting or even knowledge seeking perms at stake, it's quite impressive that so much thought and discussion did take place in that time.

This book was written, and translated into English by George Eliot, well over a century ago. Since then much more has come to light on the subject, and even more, the world has changed much more, chiefly due to advances in various sciences - from medicine to aviation to nuclear science to artificial intelligence - but also, not a small amount, due to other factors, for example collapses of European monarchies during and post WWI, dissolution of most colonial empires post WWII, and more along the line.

So reading this is chiefly academic, unless either one is young, or brought up in an environment kept out of all advances of past two centuries with a religion demanding faith.

One might read it for an interest in the subject, or in the views and understanding thereof as it changed during the era when it was written- or, as in my case, because one had been reading through a complete collection of works of George Eliot.

In latter case, unless it was a professional review to be written and one had read the original and was able to appreciate the quality of her translation, or one was interested in what the authir said here on the subject, there is little reason to go through the whole tome. The extensive introduction gives a good idea of the level of the discourse.

And having had a surgery post a massive heart attack, one may wish to go on to other reading to be finished.

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CONTENTS.

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INTRODUCTION.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MYTHICAL POINT OF VIEW IN RELATION TO THE GOSPEL HISTORIES.

PAGE

§ 1. Inevitable rise of different modes of explaining sacred histories

2. Different explanations of sacred legends among the Greeks

3. Allegorical interpretations among the Hebrews. Philo

4. Allegorical interpretations among the Christians. Origen

5. Transition to more modern times. Deists and Naturalists of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist

6. Natural mode of explanation adopted by the Rationalists. Eichhorn. Paulus

7. Moral interpretation of Kant

8. Rise of the mythical mode of interpreting the sacred history, in reference first to the Old Testament

9. The mythical mode of interpretation in reference to the New Testament

10. The notion of the mythus in its application to sacred histories not clearly apprehended by theologians

11. The application of the notion of the mythus too circumscribed

12. Opposition to the mythical view of the Gospel history

13. The possibility of the existence of mythi in the New Testament considered in reference to external evidences

14. The possibility of mythi in the New Testament considered on internal grounds

15. Definition of the evangelical mythus, and its distinctive characteristics

16. Criteria by which to distinguish the unhistorical in the Gospel narrative

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FIRST PART.

HISTORY OF THE BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD OF JESUS.

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CHAPTER I.

ANNUNCIATION AND BIRTH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.

§ 17. Account given by Luke. Immediate supernatural character of the representation

18. Natural explanation of the narrative

19. Mythical view of the narrative in its different stages

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CHAPTER II.

DAVIDICAL DESCENT OF JESUS, ACCORDING TO THE GENEALOGICAL TABLES OF MATTHEW AND LUKE.

§ 20. The two genealogies of Jesus considered separately and irrespectively of one another

21. Comparison of the two genealogies. Attempt to reconcile their contradictions

22. The genealogies unhistorical

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CHAPTER III.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS.—ITS SUPERNATURAL CHARACTER.—VISIT OF MARY TO ELIZABETH.

§ 23. Sketch of the different canonical and apocryphal accounts

24. Disagreements of the canonical gospels in relation to the form of the annunciation

25. Import of the angel’s message. Fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah

26. Jesus begotten of the Holy Ghost. Criticism of the orthodox opinion

27. Retrospect of the genealogies

28. Natural explanation of the history of the conception

29. History of the conception of Jesus viewed as a mythus

30. Relation of Joseph to Mary. Brothers of Jesus

31. Visit of Mary to Elizabeth

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CHAPTER IV.

BIRTH AND EARLIEST EVENTS OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

§ 32. The census

33. Particular circumstances of the birth of Jesus. The circumcision

34. The Magi and their star. The flight into Egypt, and the murder of the children in Bethlehem. Criticism of the supranaturalistic view

35. Attempts at a natural explanation of the history of the Magi. Transition to the mythical explanation

36. The purely mythical explanation of the narrative concerning the Magi, and of the events with which it is connected

37. Chronological relation between the visit of the Magi, together with the flight into Egypt, and the presentation in the temple recorded by Luke

38. The presentation of Jesus in the temple

39. Retrospect. Difference between Matthew and Luke as to the original residence of the parents of Jesus

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CHAPTER V.

THE FIRST VISIT TO THE TEMPLE, AND THE EDUCATION OF JESUS.

§ 40. Jesus, when twelve years old, in the temple

41. This narrative also mythical

42. On the external life of Jesus up to the time of his public appearance

43. The intellectual development of Jesus

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SECOND PART.

HISTORY OF THE PUBLIC LIFE OF JESUS.

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CHAPTER I.

RELATIONS BETWEEN JESUS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST.

§ 44. Chronological relations between John and Jesus

45. Appearance and design of the Baptist. His personal relations with Jesus

46. Was Jesus acknowledged by John as the Messiah? and in what sense?

47. Opinion of the evangelists and of Jesus concerning the Baptist, with his own judgment of himself. Result of the inquiry into the relationship between these two individuals

48. The execution of John the Baptist

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CHAPTER II.

BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION OF JESUS.

§ 49. Why did Jesus receive baptism from John?

50. The scene at the baptism of Jesus considered as supernatural, and as natural

51. An attempt at a criticism and mythical interpretation of the narratives

52. Relation of the supernatural at the baptism of Jesus to the supernatural in his conception

53. Place and time of the temptation of Jesus. Divergencies of the evangelists on this subject

54. The history of the temptation conceived in the sense of the evangelists

55. The temptation considered as a natural occurrence either internal or external; and also as a parable

56. The history of the temptation as a mythus

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CHAPTER III.

LOCALITY AND CHRONOLOGY OF THE PUBLIC LIFE OF JESUS.

§ 57. Difference between the synoptical writers and John, as to the customary scene of the ministry of Jesus

58. The residence of Jesus at Capernaum

59. Divergencies of the Evangelists as to the chronology of the life of Jesus. Duration of his public ministry

60. The attempts at a chronological arrangement of the particular events in the public life of Jesus

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CHAPTER IV.

JESUS AS THE MESSIAH.

§ 61. Jesus, the Son of Man

62. How soon did Jesus conceive himself to be the Messiah, and find recognition as such from others?

63. Jesus, the Son of God

64. The divine mission and authority of Jesus. His pre-existence

65. The messianic plan of Jesus. Indications of a political element

66. Data for the pure spirituality of the messianic plan of Jesus. Balance

67. The relation of Jesus to the Mosaic law

68. Scope of the messianic plan of Jesus. Relation to the Gentiles

69. Relation of the messianic plan of Jesus to the Samaritans. His interview with the woman of Samaria

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CHAPTER V.

THE DISCIPLES OF JESUS.

§ 70. Calling of the first companions of Jesus. Difference between the first two Evangelists and the fourth

71. Peter’s draught of fishes

72. Calling of Matthew. Connexion of Jesus with the publicans

73. The twelve apostles

74. The twelve considered individually. The three or four most confidential disciples of Jesus

75. The rest of the twelve, and the seventy disciples

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CHAPTER VI.

THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE THREE FIRST GOSPELS.

§ 76. The Sermon on the Mount

77. Instructions to the twelve. Lamentations over the Galilean cities. Joy over the calling of the simple

78. The parables

79. Miscellaneous instructions and controversies of Jesus

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CHAPTER VII.

DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

§ 80. Conversation of Jesus with Nicodemus

81. The discourses of Jesus, John v.–xii.

82. Isolated maxims of Jesus, common to the fourth gospel and the synoptical ones

83. The modern discussions on the authenticity of the discourses in the Gospel of John. Result

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CHAPTER VIII.

EVENTS IN THE PUBLIC LIFE OF JESUS, EXCLUSIVE OF THE MIRACLES.

§ 84. General comparison of the manner of narration that distinguishes the several Evangelists

85. Isolated groups of anecdotes. Imputation of a league with Beelzebub, and demand of a sign

86. Visit of the mother and brethren of Jesus. The woman who pronounces the mother of Jesus blessed

87. Contentions for pre-eminence among the disciples. The love of Jesus for children

88. The purification of the temple

89. Narratives of the anointing of Jesus by a woman

90. The narratives of the woman taken in adultery, and of Mary and Martha

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CHAPTER IX.

MIRACLES OF JESUS.

§ 91. Jesus considered as a worker of miracles

92. The demoniacs, considered generally

93. Cases of the expulsion of demons by Jesus, considered singly

94. Cures of lepers

95. Cures of the blind

96. Cures of paralytics. Did Jesus regard diseases as punishments?

§ 97. Involuntary cures

98. Cures at a distance

99. Cures on the sabbath

100. Resuscitations of the dead

101. Anecdotes having relation to the sea

102. The miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes

103. Jesus turns water into wine

104. Jesus curses a barren fig-tree

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CHAPTER X.

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF JESUS, AND HIS LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM.

§ 105. The transfiguration of Jesus considered as a miraculous external event

106. The natural explanation of the narrative in various forms

107. The history of the transfiguration considered as a mythus

108. Diverging accounts concerning the last journey of Jesus to Jerusalem

109. Divergencies of the gospels, in relation to the point from which Jesus made his entrance into Jerusalem

110. More particular circumstances of the entrance. Its object and historical reality

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THIRD PART.

HISTORY OF THE PASSION, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

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CHAPTER I.

RELATION OF JESUS TO THE IDEA OF A SUFFERING AND DYING MESSIAH; HIS DISCOURSES ON HIS DEATH, RESURRECTION, AND SECOND ADVENT.

§ 111. Did Jesus in precise terms predict his passion and death?

112. The predictions of Jesus concerning his death in general; their relation to the Jewish idea of the Messiah; declarations of Jesus concerning the object and effects of his death

113. Precise declarations of Jesus concerning his future resurrection

114. Figurative discourses, in which Jesus is supposed to have announced his resurrection

115. The discourses of Jesus on his second advent. Criticism of the different interpretations

116. Origin of the discourses on the second advent

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...............................................................................................

CHAPTER II. MACHINATIONS OF THE ENEMIES OF JESUS; TREACHERY OF JUDAS; LAST SUPPER WITH THE DISCIPLES.

§ 117. Development of the relation of Jesus to his enemies

118. Jesus and his betrayer

119. Different opinions concerning the character of Judas, and the motives of his treachery

120. Preparation for the passover

121. Divergent statements respecting the time of the last supper

122. Divergencies in relation to the occurrences at the last meal of Jesus

123. Announcement of the betrayal and the denial

124. The institution of the Lord’s supper

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CHAPTER III.

RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION, AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.

§ 125. Agony of Jesus in the garden

126. Relation of the fourth gospel to the events in Gethsemane. The farewell discourses in John, and the scene following the announcement of the Greeks

127. Arrest of Jesus

128. Examination of Jesus before the high priest

129. The denial by Peter

130. The death of the betrayer

131. Jesus before Pilate and Herod

132. The crucifixion

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CHAPTER IV.

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

§ 133. Prodigies attendant on the death of Jesus

134. The wound by a spear in the side of Jesus

135. Burial of Jesus

136. The watch at the grave of Jesus

137. First tidings of the resurrection

138. Appearances of the risen Jesus in Galilee and in Judea, including those mentioned by Paul and by apocryphal writings

139. Quality of the body and life of Jesus after the resurrection

140. Debates concerning the reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus

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CHAPTER V.

THE ASCENSION.

§ 141. The last commands and promises of Jesus

142. The so-called ascension considered as a supernatural and as a natural event

143. Insufficiency of the narratives of the ascension. Mythical conception of those narratives

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CONCLUDING DISSERTATION.

THE DOGMATIC IMPORT OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

§ 144. Necessary transition from criticism to dogma

145. The Christology of the orthodox system

146. Objections to the Christology of the church

147. The Christology of rationalism

148. The eclectic Christology of Schleiermacher

149. Christology interpreted symbolically. Kant. De Wette

150. The speculative Christology

151. Last dilemma

152. Relation of the critical and speculative theology to the church

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Review

................................................................................................

INTRODUCTION.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MYTHICAL POINT OF VIEW IN RELATION TO THE GOSPEL HISTORIES.

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1. INEVITABLE RISE OF DIFFERENT MODES OF EXPLAINING SACRED HISTORIES

"Wherever a religion, resting upon written records, prolongs and extends the sphere of its dominion, accompanying its votaries through the varied and progressive stages of mental cultivation, a discrepancy between the representations of those ancient records, referred to as sacred, and the notions of more advanced periods of mental development, will inevitably sooner or later arise. In the first instance this disagreement is felt in reference only to the unessential—the external form: the expressions and delineations are seen to be inappropriate; but by degrees it manifests itself also in regard to that which is essential: the fundamental ideas and opinions in these early writings fail to be commensurate with a more advanced civilisation. As long as this discrepancy is either not in itself so considerable, or else is not so universally discerned and acknowledged, as to lead to a complete renunciation of these Scriptures as of sacred authority, so long will a system of reconciliation by means of interpretation be adopted and pursued by those who have a more or less distinct consciousness of the existing incongruity."

And one realises that Strauss, like most of West, equates religion with that of his own bringing up, church, and at most extends the notion to other churches, or at the extreme, to abrahmic ones; he hasn't given a thought to existence of any other, and has assumed it doesn't matter, no other could be worth it - teachings of church have imprinted that much, carefully.

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2. DIFFERENT EXPLANATIONS OF SACRED LEGENDS AMONG THE GREEKS

" ... At an early period the rigid philosophy of the Greeks, and under its influence even some of the Greek poets, recognized the impossibility of ascribing to Deity manifestations so grossly human, so immediate, and so barbarous, as those exhibited and represented as divine in the wild conflicts of Hesiod’s Theogony, and in the domestic occupations and trivial pursuits of the Homeric deities. Hence arose the quarrel of Plato, and prior to him of Pindar, with Homer;2 hence the cause which induced Anaxagoras, to whom the invention of the allegorical mode of interpretation is ascribed, to apply the Homeric delineations to virtue and to justice;3 hence it was that the Stoics understood the Theogony of Hesiod as relating to the action of the elements, which, according to their notions, constituted, in their highest union, the divine nature. ... "

"On the other hand, the more popular and sophistical culture of another class of thinkers led them to opposite conclusions. Though, in their estimation, every semblance of the divine had evaporated from these histories; though they were convinced that the proceedings ascribed to the gods were not godlike, still they did not abandon the historical sense of these narratives. [41]With Evemerus5 they transformed the subjects of these histories from gods to men, to heroes and sages of antiquity, kings and tyrants, who, through deeds of might and valour, had acquired divine honours. Some indeed went still further, and, with Polybius,6 considered the whole system of heathen theology as a fable, invented by the founders of states to awe the people into subjection."

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3. ALLEGORICAL INTERPRETATIONS AMONG THE HEBREWS.—PHILO

" ... many ingenious attempts were made to interpret the Old Testament so as to remove offensive literalities, supply deficiencies, and introduce the notions of a later age. Examples of this system of interpretation occur in the writings of the Rabbins, and even in the New Testament;7 but it was at that place where the Jewish mind came into contact with Greek civilization, and under its influence was carried beyond the limits of its own national culture—namely at Alexandria—that the allegorical mode of interpretation was first consistently applied to the whole body of historical narrative in the Old Testament. Many had prepared the way, but it was Philo who first fully developed the doctrine of both a common and a deeper sense of the Holy Scriptures. He was by no means inclined to cast away the former, but generally placed the two together, side by side, and even declared himself opposed to those who, everywhere and without necessity, sacrificed the literal to the higher signification. ... "

"The fact that the Jews, whilst they adopted this mode of explaining the Old Testament, (which, in order to save the purity of the intrinsic signification, often sacrificed the historical form), were never led into the opposite system of Evemerus (which preserved the historical form by divesting the history of the divine, and reducing it to a record of mere human events), is to be ascribed to the tenacity with which that people ever adhered to the supernatural point of view. The latter mode of interpretation was first brought to bear upon the Old Testament by the Christians."

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4. ALLEGORICAL INTERPRETATIONS AMONG THE CHRISTIANS.—ORIGEN

Author tells about Origen of Alexandria interpretation of much that seemed mythical or unbelievable, as designed to fix attention on spirit rather than literal meaning, giving example of Trojan records.

"But if his own prepossessions in favour of the supernatural, and his fear of giving offence to the orthodox church, combined to hinder him from making a wider application of the allegorical mode of interpretation to the Old Testament, the same causes operated still more powerfully in relation to the New Testament; so that when we further inquire of which of the gospel histories in particular did Origen reject the historical meaning, in order to hold fast a truth worthy of God? the instances will prove to be meagre in the extreme. For when he says, in illustration of the above-mentioned passage, that amongst other things, it is not to be understood literally that Satan showed to Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth from a mountain, because this is impossible to the bodily eye; he here gives not a strictly allegorical interpretation, but merely a different turn to the literal sense, which, according to him, relates not to an external fact, but to the internal fact of a vision. Again, even where the text offers a tempting opportunity of sacrificing the literal to the spiritual meaning, as, for example, the cursing of the fig-tree,20 Origen does not speak out freely. He is most explicit when speaking of the expulsion of the buyers and sellers from the temple; he characterizes the conduct of Jesus, according to the literal interpretation, as assuming and seditious.21 He moreover expressly remarks that the Scriptures contain many more historical than merely scriptural truths."

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5. TRANSITION TO MORE MODERN TIMES.—DEISTS AND NATURALISTS OF THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES.—THE WOLFENBÜTTEL FRAGMENTIST.

"Thus was developed one of those forms of interpretation to which the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, in common with all other religious records, in relation to their historical contents, became necessarily subjected; that, namely, which recognizes in them the divine, but denies it to have actually manifested itself in so immediate a manner. The other principal mode of interpretation, which, to a certain extent, acknowledges the course of events to have been historically true, but assigns it to a human and not a divine origin, was developed amongst the enemies of Christianity by a Celsus, a Porphyry, and a Julian. They indeed rejected much of the history as altogether fabulous; but they admitted many of the incidents related of Moses, Jesus, and others, to be historical facts: these facts were however considered by them as originating from common motives; and they attributed their apparently supernatural character either to gross fraud or impious sorcery."

" ... As however with the christianizing of the Roman empire, and the overthrow of the chief heresies, ..."

That was a fraud perpetrated by the church; Constantine had no intention of converting, and intended the one God to be the deity of Rome, Sun. Church did fraud of sprinkling water at his death and calling it conversion. Wiping out dissent and giving it a bad name was the reality of "overthrow of the chief heresies", but the discovery mid twentieth century of some of the lost gospels has brought much of the fraud by church of Rome to light.

" ... —the world, during the tedious centuries of the middle ages, was satisfied with Christianity, both in form and in substance. Almost all traces of these modes of interpretation which presuppose a discrepancy between the culture of a nation, or of the world, and religion, in consequence disappeared. The reformation effected the first breach in the solid structure of the faith of the church. It was the first vital expression of a culture, which had now in the heart of Christendom itself, as formerly in relation to Paganism and Judaism, acquired strength and independence sufficient to create a reaction against the [45]soil of its birth, the prevailing religion. ... "

Satisfied? Why were people burnt at stake by hundreds, or was it all earlier version of "final solution"? No, church imposed consent and silence by power play, and pretended satisfaction.

"Similar deistical objections against the Bible, and the divine character of its history, were propagated in Germany chiefly by an anonymous author (Reimarus) whose manuscripts were discovered by Lessing in the Wolfenbüttel library. Some portions of these manuscripts, called the “Wolfenbüttel Fragments,” were published by Lessing in 1774. They consist of Essays, one of which treats of the many arguments which may be urged against revealed religion in general; the others relate partly to the Old and partly to the New Testament. ... The Fragmentist is as little disposed to admit the divinity of the New Testament histories. He considers the aim of Jesus to have been political; and his connexion with John the Baptist a preconcerted arrangement, by which the one party should recommend the other to the people. He views the death of Jesus as an event by no means foreseen by himself, but which frustrated all his plans; a catastrophe which his disciples knew not how else to repair than by the fraudulent pretence that Jesus was risen from the dead, and by an artful alteration of his doctrines32."

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6. NATURAL MODE OF EXPLANATION ADOPTED BY THE RATIONALISTS.—EICHHORN.—PAULUS

" ... The sages of antiquity lived in continual communion with superior intelligences. Whilst these representations (such is Eichhorn’s statement of the matter) are always, in reference to the Hebrew records, understood verbally and literally, it has hitherto been customary to explain similar representations in the pagan histories, by presupposing either deception and gross falsehood, or the misinterpretation and corruption of tradition. But Eichhorn thinks justice evidently requires that Hebrew and pagan history should be treated in the same way; so that intercourse with celestial beings during a state of infancy, must either be accorded to all nations, pagan and Hebrew, or equally denied to all. ... "

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7. MORAL INTERPRETATION OF KANT.

" ... He moreover attributed these ideas wrought into the biblical text, not to the Divine Spirit, but to its philosophical interpreters, or in a deeper sense, to the moral condition of the authors of the book themselves. This opinion Kant37 bases upon the fact, that in all religions old and new which are partly comprised in sacred books, intelligent and well-meaning teachers of the people have continued to explain them, until they have brought their actual contents into agreement with the universal principles of morality. Thus did the moral philosophers amongst the Greeks and Romans with their fabulous legends; till at last they explained the grossest polytheism as mere symbolical representations of the attributes of the one divine Being, and gave a mystical sense to the many vicious actions of their gods, and to the wildest dreams of their poets, in order to bring the popular faith, which it was not expedient to destroy, into agreement with the doctrines of morality. ... "

So far so good. But then,

" ... Thus the Mahometans gave a spiritual meaning to the sensual descriptions of their paradise, and thus the Hindoos, or at least the more enlightened part of them, interpreted their Vedas. ... "

First part, perhaps; latter part, neither Kant nor most of his fellow Westerners have a clue, other than their prejudice when looking at India, Indians, or civilisation of India, and falling to realise their own profound ignorance, both of India and compared to Indian treasure of knowledge from antiquity.

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8. RISE OF THE MYTHICAL MODE OF INTERPRETING THE SACRED HISTORY, IN REFERENCE FIRST TO THE OLD TESTAMENT.

" ... The earliest records of all nations are, in the opinion of Bauer, mythical: why should the writings of the Hebrews form a solitary exception?—whereas in point of fact a cursory glance at their sacred books proves that they also contain mythical elements. A narrative he explains, after Gabler and Schelling, to be recognizable as mythus, first, when it proceeds from an age in which no written records existed, but in which facts were transmitted through the medium of oral tradition alone; secondly, when it presents an historical account of events which are either absolutely or relatively beyond the reach of experience, such as occurrences connected with the spiritual world, and incidents to which, from the nature of the circumstances, no one could have been witness; or thirdly, when it deals in the marvellous and is couched in symbolical language. ... "

"To classify the biblical mythi according to these several distinctions is a difficult task, since the mythus which is purely symbolical wears the semblance of history equally with the mythus which represents an actual occurrence. ... "

They ascribe difficulties other than the real, the true one, to separate myth from fact in their own faith and roots thereof - truth is, they cannot be free of the grip of terror, laid early in bringing up, by an institution that burnt dissenters at stake for centuries, promising this to be the eternal future for even silent dissent, or questioning.

" ... The first essential is, they say, to determine whether the narrative have a distinct object, and what that object is. Where no object, for the sake of which the legend might have been invented, is discoverable, every one would pronounce the mythus to be historical. But if all the principal circumstances of the narrative concur to symbolize a particular truth, this undoubtedly was the object of the narrative, and the mythus is philosophical. The blending of the historical and philosophical mythus is particularly to be recognised when we can detect in the narrative an attempt to derive events from their causes. ... "

This definitely fits most of teachings of later abrahmic traditions, but does not even come close to any of what is labelled mythical by West of India's traditional knowledge, such as Himaalayan ranges rising out of the ocean.

" ... When the narrative is so wonderful on the one hand as to exclude the possibility of its being a detail of facts, and when on the other it discovers no attempt to symbolize a particular thought, it may be suspected that the entire narrative owes its birth to the imagination of the poet. ... "

Being wonderful does not necessarily amount to excluding facts, nor does "no attempt to symbolize a particular thought" amount to poetic imagination.

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9. THE MYTHICAL MODE OF INTERPRETATION IN REFERENCE TO THE NEW TESTAMENT.

"The chief difficulty which opposed the transference of the mythical point of view from the Old Testament to the New, was this:—it was customary to look for mythi in the fabulous primitive ages only, in which no written records of events as yet existed; whereas, in the time of Jesus, the mythical age had long since passed away, and writing had become common among the Jews. ..."

Never occurred to them that church of Rome lied? Which in fact is what did happen, from Nicea onwards if not always, and facts were suppressed - hence inquisition? - while lies were propagated for power.

" ... That at that time written documents on other subjects existed, proves nothing, [58]whilst it can be shown that for a long period there was no written account of the life of Jesus, and particularly of his infancy. ... "

Gospels were in fact "cleansed" during Nicea - inconvenient ones suppressed and destroyed, suitable accounts written and propagated. Likelihood of the officials being true where they contradict those found preserved in desert circa mid twentieth century is not high.

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10. THE NOTION OF THE MYTHUS IN ITS APPLICATION TO SACRED HISTORIES NOT CLEARLY APPREHENDED BY THEOLOGIANS.

" ... With respect to other miracles Kaiser is of opinion that the mythical interpretation is to be preferred; he, however, grants a much larger space to historical, than to philosophical mythi. He considers most of the miracles in the Old and New Testament real occurrences mythically embellished: such as the narrative of the piece of money in the fish’s mouth; and of the changing of water into wine: which latter history he supposes to have originated from a friendly jest on the part of Jesus. Few only of the miracles are recognised by this critic as pure poetry embodying Jewish ideas; as the miraculous birth of Jesus, and the murder of the innocents."

If the gospels were written, ordered, cleansed or trimmed, with large proportion destroyed or intended to be destroyed and believed by church to be successfully destroyed - it's neither poetry nor Jewish, but purely church of Rome and its propaganda in quest of power play.

" ... Ullmann is moreover of opinion, and Bretschneider and others agree with him, that independently of the repulsion [62]and confusion which must inevitably be caused by the application of the term mythus to that which is Christian—a term originally conceived in relation to a religion of a totally different character—it were more suitable, in connexion with the primitive Christian records, to speak only of Gospel legend, (Sage) and the legendary element."

There comes racism, differentiating labels- theirs class, other's caste; theirs faith, other's superstition; theirs legends, other's myth!

"George on the contrary has recently attempted not only more accurately to define the notions of the mythus and of the legend, but likewise to demonstrate that the gospel narratives are mythical rather than legendary. Speaking generally, we should say, that he restricts the term mythus to what had previously been distinguished as philosophical mythi; and that he applies the name legend to what had hitherto been denominated historical mythi. He handles the two notions as the antipodes of each other; and grasps them with a precision by which the notion of the mythus has unquestionably gained. According to George, mythus is the creation of a fact out of an idea: legend the seeing of an idea in a fact, or arising out of it. ... "

Now, if the history of the life of Jesus be of mythical formation, inasmuch as it embodies the vivid impression of the original idea which the first christian community had of their founder, this history, though unhistorical in its form, is nevertheless a faithful representation of the idea of the Christ. If instead of this, the history be legendary—if the actual external facts are given in a distorted and often magnified form—are represented in a false light and embody a false idea,—then, on the contrary, the real tenour of the life of Jesus is lost to us. So that, according to George, the recognition of the mythical element in the Gospels is far less [63]prejudicial to the true interests of the Christian faith than the recognition of the legendary element.65

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11. THE APPLICATION OF THE NOTION OF THE MYTHUS TOO CIRCUMSCRIBED.

"As Eichhorn recognized a genuine mythus only on the very threshold of the Old Testament history, and thought himself obliged to explain all that followed in a natural manner; as, some time later, other portions of the Old Testament were allowed to be mythical, whilst nothing of the kind might be suspected in the New; so, when the mythus was once admitted into the New Testament, it was here again long detained at the threshold, namely, the history of the infancy of Jesus, every farther advance being contested. ... "

" ... Much also that is narrated had no historical foundation, but originated entirely from the notions of the age, and from the Old Testament predictions—that a virgin should conceive—for example. ... "

The original account says "young woman", translated incorrectlyin the final Latin as "virgin". It was made dogma due to its improbability, at the very least, so as to emphasise the miracle angle.

"This confused point of view from which the gospel narrative is regarded as partly historical and partly mythical owes its origin, according to him, to those theologians who neither give up the history, nor are able to satisfy themselves with its clear results, but who think to unite both parties by this middle course—a vain endeavour which the rigid supranaturalist pronounces heretical, and the rationalist derides. The attempt of these reconcilers, remarks our author, to explain as intelligible everything which is not impossible, lays them open to all the charges so justly brought against the natural interpretation; whilst the admission of the existence of mythi in the New Testament subjects them to the direct reproach of being inconsequent: the severest censure which can be passed upon a scholar. Besides, the proceeding of these Eclectics is most arbitrary, since they decide respecting what belongs to the history and what to the mythus almost entirely upon subjective grounds. Such distinctions [65]are equally foreign to the evangelists, to logical reasoning, and to historical criticism. In consistency with these opinions, this writer applies the notion of the mythus to the entire history of the life of Jesus; recognizes mythi or mythical embellishments in every portion, and ranges under the category of mythus not merely the miraculous occurrences during the infancy of Jesus, but those also of his public life; not merely miracles operated on Jesus, but those wrought by him.

"The most extended application of the notion of the philosophical or dogmatical mythus to the Gospel histories which has yet been made, was published in 1799 in an anonymous work concerning Revelation and Mythology. The writer contends that the whole life of Jesus, all that he should and would do, had an ideal existence in the Jewish mind long prior to his birth. Jesus as an individual was not actually such as according to Jewish anticipations he should have been. Not even that, in which all the records which recount his actions agree, is absolutely matter of fact. A popular idea of the life of Jesus grew out of various popular contributions, and from this source our written Gospels were first derived. A reviewer objects that this author appears to suppose a still smaller portion of the historical element in the gospels than actually exists. It would, he remarks, have been wiser to have been guided by a sober criticism of details, than by a sweeping scepticism."

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12. OPPOSITION TO THE MYTHICAL VIEW OF THE GOSPEL HISTORY.

" ... Hess was by no means the last orthodox theologian who pretended to combat the mythical view with such weapons. He contends, 1st, that mythi are to be understood figuratively; now the sacred historians intended their writings to be understood literally: consequently they do not relate mythi. 2ndly, Mythology is something heathenish; the Bible is a christian book; consequently it contains no mythology. ... Certainly nothing could be worse than Eichhorn’s natural explanation of the fall. In considering the tree of knowledge as a poisonous plant, he at once destroyed the intrinsic value and inherent meaning of the history; of this he afterwards became fully sensible, and in his subsequent mythical interpretation, he recognized in the narrative the incorporation of a worthy and elevated conception. Hess however declared himself more content with Eichhorn’s original explanation, and defended it against his later mythical interpretation. So true is it that supranaturalism clings with childlike fondness to the empty husk of historical semblance, though void of divine significance, and estimates it higher than the most valuable kernel divested of its variegated covering."

"Heydenreich has lately written a work expressly on the inadmissibility of the mythical interpretation of the historical portions of the New Testament. ... "

Written records can be ordered to suit, as indeed were in this case; and their multiplicity is no guarantee either, since it can be ordered too.

" ... He also examines the character of the gospel representations, and decides, in reference to their form, that narratives at once so natural and simple, so complete and exact, could be expected only from eye-witnesses, or those connected with them; and, with respect to their contents, that those representations which are in their nature miraculous are so worthy of God, that nothing short of an abhorrence of miracles could occasion a doubt as to their historical truth. ... "

Tautological. One who is imposed with a view of what is God would say that an account is true because it fits the notion, fails to recognise that the agency that had the account written to order is the agency that imposed the view.

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13. THE POSSIBILITY OF THE EXISTENCE OF MYTHI IN THE NEW TESTAMENT CONSIDERED IN REFERENCE TO THE EXTERNAL EVIDENCES.

"The assertion that the Bible contains mythi is, it is true, directly opposed to the convictions of the believing christian. For if his religious view be circumscribed within the limits of his own community, he knows no reason why the things recorded in the sacred books should not literally have taken place; no doubt occurs to him, no reflection disturbs him. But, let his horizon be so far widened as to allow him to contemplate his own religion in relation to other religions, and to draw a comparison between them, the conclusion to which he then comes is that the histories related by the heathens of their deities, and by the Mussulman of his prophet, are so many fictions, whilst the accounts of God’s actions, of Christ and other Godlike men contained in the Bible are, on the contrary, true. Such is the general notion expressed in the theological position: that which distinguishes Christianity from the heathen religions is this, they are mythical, it is historical.

"But this position, thus stated without further definition and proof, is merely the product of the limitation of the individual to that form of belief in which he has been educated, which renders the mind incapable of embracing any but the affirmative view in relation to its own creed, any but the negative in reference to every other—a prejudice devoid of real worth, and which cannot exist in conjunction with an extensive knowledge of history. ... "

"But this alleged ocular testimony, or proximity in point of time of the sacred historians to the events recorded, is mere assumption, an assumption originating from the titles which the biblical books bear in our Canon. ... "

"We learn from the works of Irenæus, of Clemens Alexandrinus, and of Tertullian, that at the end of the second century after Christ our four Gospels were recognized by the orthodox church as the writings of the Apostles and the disciples of the Apostles; and were separated from many other similar productions as authentic records of the life of Jesus. ... "

" ... the manuscript, of which he speaks, cannot be absolutely identical with our Gospel; for, according to the statement given by Papias, Matthew wrote in the Hebrew language; and it is a mere assumption of the christian fathers that our Greek Matthew is a translation of the original Hebrew Gospel80. ... "

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14. THE POSSIBILITY OF MYTHI IN THE NEW TESTAMENT CONSIDERED ON INTERNAL GROUNDS.

"Seeing from what has already been said that the external testimony respecting the composition of our Gospels, far from forcing upon us the conclusion that they proceeded from eye-witnesses or well-informed contemporaries, leaves the decision to be determined wholly by internal grounds of evidence, that is, by the nature of the Gospel narratives themselves ... "

That question is now far wider open, and scarcely interesting - those whose faith holds despite revelations regarding the then suppressed and destroyed other gospels, of which some were discovered circa mid twentieth century, and of facts about council of Nicea and how that turns matters around for convenience, are merely outraged by any other attitude than that of a blind faith towards their own particular branch of their own specific - of course, abrahmic - religion; and rest, mostly, are likely to hold this question of little importance, in view of various advances in science, from geology to astrophysics to evolution and more.

"Israelites on their departure out of Egypt to purloin vessels of gold, are scarcely less revolting to an enlightened moral feeling, than the thefts of the Grecian Hermes. ... "

Typical of those that respect only the victor, dominator, invader, looters, slaveowner, male - and regard any action by anyone looted, enslaved, raped, as outrageous, labelling the outrage moral!

" ... for though every story relating to God which is immoral is necessarily fictitious, even the most moral is not necessarily true."

The latter part is a good realisation, halfway - for a logical next step would be to realise that the whole story might be fictional, or at the very least, a fraudulent twist or two given to the real history - of a born king of Jews protesting against Roman occupation and subjection of his people by Rome - by Rome, after appropriating the legend, for keeping power of Rome. Hence, of course, the insistence on faith, exclusion of all other, and burning at stake of not only dissenters but all seekers of knowledge of any field, in effect cornering all knowledge.

" ... for though every story relating to God which is immoral is necessarily fictitious, even the most moral is not necessarily true."

So the latter part is a good realisation, halfway - but the first is sheer hubris, a mere mortal or an agency thereof such as an institution, assuming they can decide and declare what Divine can or cannot be or do. And the hubris, the arrogance continues next in -

"“But that which is incredible and inconceivable forms the staple of the heathen fables; whilst in the biblical history, if we only presuppose the immediate intervention of the Deity, there is nothing of the kind.” ... "

If anything, shouldn't it be obvious that the incredible, the inconceivable is precisely what indicates an agency not of material origin?

" ... Exactly, if this be presupposed. Otherwise, we might very likely find the miracles in the life of Moses, Elias, or Jesus, the Theophany and Angelophany of the Old and New Testament, just as incredible as the fables of Jupiter, Hercules, or Bacchus: presuppose the divinity or divine descent of these individuals, and their actions and fate become as credible as those of the biblical personages with the like presupposition. Yet not quite so, it may be returned. Vishnu appearing in his three first avatars as a fish, a tortoise, and a boar; Saturn devouring his children; Jupiter turning himself into a bull, a swan, etc.—these are incredibilities of quite another kind from Jehovah appearing to Abraham in a human form under the terebinth tree, or to Moses in the burning bush. ... "

On the contrary, the burning bush is not impressive as indication of a God, although not incredible enough to declare it impossible; and the peculiar insistence on virgin birth by Rome - one can quite ordinarily hear a nun declaring that "she was special, not like other women" with great scorn at all other women, not realising how fisgusting she sounds for this disdain against all women contained in the implication that one woman hapoened to be a virgin mother unlike others, and implying that all others are thereby low; this disdain isnt extended to males, one notices!

Was he kidding? Or did his instinct of self preservation make him forget, temporarily, the insistence by church on virgin conception, without a human male parent, of his object of worship?

And yet, there was no report of those performing having been worshipped by anyone in India. Who's the more gullible here?

Incidentally there are other mistakes in the book, but it's difficult to correct Ormusd - is it as simple as Ormud? Autocorrect allows the latter, but it's not a foolproof guide.

Good thinking. But then retraction -

Or perhaps there was history, but it was suppressed, after Jehovah was selected to be all-in-all, and others not only discarded but prohibited?

It would be amusing if the word Jehovah were in fact a transformation or derivative of Eve, amusing because abrahmic cultures and faiths are so highly misogynistic.

" ... Thus according to the above accepted notion of the mythus, the New Testament has more of a mythical character than the Old. ... "

"It is certainly difficult to conceive, how narratives which thus speak of imagination as reality can have been formed without intentional deceit, and believed without unexampled credulity; ... "

Strauss quotes an argument (regarding Greek mythology) by Miller , that is so obviously flawed in multiple ways, it would be tiresome to put it all down; one is surprised Strauss didn't see it, but then, he was probably labouring to save himself from seeing bible -especially that part propagated by church - as a story dressed up with fraud, to save himself from not only excommunication but also from serious psychological dangers.

" ... Müller then refers to the Grecian mythus of Apollo and Marsyas ..."

Strauss quotes the whole story, and Müller's reasoning -

" ... “It was customary to celebrate the festivals of Apollo with playing on the lyre, and it was necessary to piety, that the god himself should be regarded as its author. In Phrygia, on the contrary, the national music was the flute, which was similarly derived from a demon of their own, named Marsyas. The ancient Grecians perceived that the tones of these two instruments were essentially opposed: the harsh shrill piping of the flute must be hateful to Apollo, and therefore Marsyas his enemy. ... "

Strauss quotes the whole story, and Müller's reasoning; the latter pivots on Grecians finding tones of flute harsh; it's unclear why they would, even if they used lyre, and use of more than one instrument in music is surely not impossible in a culture? Unless, of course, it was Müller himself who was so prejudiced against the flute, and reasoned it out thus.

"The popular traditions, being orally transmitted and not restricted by any written document, were open to receive every new addition, and thus grew in the course of long centuries to the form in which we now find them. (How far this applies to a great part of the New Testament mythi, will be shown hereafter.) ... "

As to the former, there's no reason copies of written documents could not be further extensions, or those who copied ancient documents could not be original thinkers and poets themselves who were inspired to further the precious work; and, too, whole new mythology could be made up about historic events and persona, as we saw evolving during Nazi regime in Germany around the leader thereof; but as to the latter, Oh, goody!

"It is not however easy to draw a line of distinction between intentional and unintentional fiction. ... "

Until one gets to church revamping history, circa third century, to invent the mythology about its figure on cross to be worshipped, having some gospels cleansed or rewritten to suit, while others were suppressed, ordered and presumes destroyed, all in quest of survival of the institution at expense of truth, and incidentally of Jews, who until then church was allied with, against the Roman empire that suppressed both; thenceforth they were blamed fraudulently for things happening under Roman occupation of Judea and Israel, and during subjection of Jewsby Rome. This turnabout was intentional fraud, forever branding a whole race and culture, leading to genocides, all in quest of power.

" ... Most of the mythical narratives which have come down to us from antiquity, such as the Trojan, and the Mosaic series of legends, are presented to us in this elaborated form. ... "

Funny how long the assumption of Trojan war being a myth persisted! Until another German - with U.S. citizenship - proved otherwise.

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15. DEFINITION OF THE EVANGELICAL MYTHUS AND ITS DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS.

"It is to the various forms of the unhistorical in the Gospels that this enumeration exclusively refers: it does not involve the renunciation of the historical which they may likewise contain."

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16. CRITERIA BY WHICH TO DISTINGUISH THE UNHISTORICAL IN THE GOSPEL NARRATIVE.

Strauss discusses various criteria to determine historical vs mythical.

" ... If therefore we are told of a celebrated individual that he attracted already at his birth and during his childhood that attention which he excited in his manhood; that his followers at a single glance recognized him as being all that he actually was; if the transition from the deepest despondency to the most ardent enthusiasm after his death is represented as the work of a single hour; we must feel more than doubtful whether it is a real history which lies before us. ... "

By this criterion, books of his own upbringing faith fail; while those of India hold well, and better. Of various Gods and Goddesses, those whose childhood is depicted were seen and loved as children, even if extraordinary. Their personalities grew, and the recognition did accordingly, recognition of Divinity being later in the course rather than at birth or before.

"An account which shall be regarded as historically valid, must neither be inconsistent with itself, nor in contradiction with other accounts. The most decided case falling under this rule, amounting to a positive contradiction, is when one account affirms what another denies.

"Thus, one gospel represents the first appearance of Jesus in Galilee as subsequent to the imprisonment of John the Baptist, whilst another Gospel remarks, long after Jesus had preached both in Galilee and in Judea, that “John was not yet cast into prison.”"

This criteria completely destroys authenticity of the officially approved gospels, after, of those suppressed and presumably destroyed, some were discovered hidden in desert and thereby well preserved; and of their authenticity, there were no doubts possible on any criteria except that of their being not only not in accord with, but in fact quite contrary to, the official version.

"It may here be asked: is it to be regarded as a contradiction if one account is wholly silent respecting a circumstance mentioned by another? In itself, apart from all other considerations, the argumentum ex silentio is of no weight; but it is certainly to be accounted of moment when, at the same time, it may be shown that had the author known the circumstance he could not have failed to mention it, and also that he must have known it had it actually occurred."

"If the form be poetical, if the actors converse in hymns, and in a more diffuse and elevated strain than might be expected from their training and situations, such discourses, at all events, are not to be regarded as historical. The absence of these marks of the unhistorical do not however prove the historical validity of the narration, since the mythus often wears the most simple and apparently historical form: in which case the proof lies in the substance."

This presumes poetical speech being unnatural, which may be true of Europe and West asia; assuming that it's a universal law, is going too far. Conversing in verse sounds most natural in some languages.

"If the contents of a narrative strikingly accords with certain ideas existing and prevailing within the circle from which the narrative proceeded, which ideas themselves seem to be the product of preconceived opinions rather than of practical experience, it is more or less probable, according to circumstances, that such a narrative is of mythical origin. The knowledge of the fact, that the Jews were fond of representing their great men as the children of parents who had long been childless, cannot but make us doubtful of the historical truth of the statement that this was the case with John the Baptist; knowing also that the Jews saw predictions everywhere in the writings of their prophets and poets, and discovered types of the Messiah in all the lives of holy men recorded in their Scriptures; when we find details in the life of Jesus evidently sketched after the pattern of these prophecies and prototypes, we cannot but suspect that they are rather mythical than historical."

Predictions or prophesies aren't false by definitions, but fitting those existing, especially detailed ones, to a person and his life, is a step further; however, in this Strauss is seeing the myth character of gospels as responsibility of the Jewish, companions and disciples, rather than suspecting the reality, that of church of Rome having falsified, gotten tailored accounts written to order three centuries later, and suppressed others.

"Yet each of these tests, on the one hand, and each narrative on the other, considered apart, will rarely prove more than the possible or probable unhistorical character of the record. The concurrence of several such indications, is necessary to bring about a more definite result. The accounts of the visit of the Magi, and of the murder of the innocents at Bethlehem, harmonize remarkably with the Jewish Messianic notion, built upon the prophecy of Balaam, respecting the star which should come out of Jacob; and with the history of the sanguinary command of Pharaoh. Still this would not alone suffice to stamp the narratives as mythical. But we have also the corroborative facts that the described appearance of the star is contrary to the physical, [90]the alleged conduct of Herod to the psychological laws; that Josephus, who gives in other respects so circumstantial an account of Herod, agrees with all other historical authorities in being silent concerning the Bethlehem massacre; and that the visit of the Magi together with the flight into Egypt related in the one Gospel, and the presentation in the temple related in another Gospel, mutually exclude one another. ... "

Herod ordering all babies born at the time killed may or may not be true; but it follows far older legends, beginning with a similarity with the story of Krishna, and other stories of origin of regions between India and West Asia.

Strauss discusses Angel visiting Mary to inform her regarding birth of messiah; the research and arguments, in the discussion regarding this expectation, from a much later work of research - Holy Blood, Holy Grail - is far more convincing.

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FIRST PART.

HISTORY OF THE BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD OF JESUS.

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CHAPTER I.

ANNUNCIATION AND BIRTH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.

§ 17. Account given by Luke. Immediate supernatural character of the representation

18. Natural explanation of the narrative

19. Mythical view of the narrative in its different stages

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§ 17. ACCOUNT GIVEN BY LUKE.1 IMMEDIATE, SUPERNATURAL CHARACTER OF THE REPRESENTATION.

Strauss discusses Gabriel informing Zachariah and the latter being struck dumb in response to questioning, seemingly not in accord with conduct appropriate to a celestial being; he discusses also the name and more.

Regarding the first part, if the exact age of the couple is not mentioned, it might be as little as thirty; even as late as circa turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Jane Austen considered a man old at only thirty five, in Sense and Sensibility. This was appropriate in the era when nature aged people fast, and marriage and reproduction began in early teens. Juliet was only thirteen when secretly married in church, just after one meeting, before consummation of her marriage immediately, and her groom only fourteen.

Regarding the inappropriate nature of an angel getting angry and striking Zachariah dumb, one may correct it with two points to recall. One, Judaic thought seems far too fond of God being angry, so an angel doing so isn't contradictory; and it might have been a man stricken dumb at the shock of the news, or the very idea, interpreted it as the angel doing it to him. This seems even mire naturally in accord when Strauss discusses the very different consequences of similar announcement and doubt in case of Abraham.

Second, church has imposed a view of celestial beings far too one sided, and other views such as Judaic, Greek, Egyptian et al, might not necessarily be wrong or false or incorrect, just by being not in accord with those of Rome post third century.

This is even more so when the author points out that Jehovah was not angry with Abraham who was equally incredulous about being informed similarly about a son -

" ... we must agree with Paulus that such inconsistency certainly cannot belong to the conduct of God or of a celestical being, but merely to the Jewish representation of them."

It's almost as if German mind expects celestial beings to function like clockwork gadgets! But not even mechanical objects work so perfectly always, if they are more than concepts; such perfection is only within mathematics.

And for that matter, if one must object to anything on basis of arbitrary behaviour and resulting injustice, that occurs more than once at the outset - not being told why the apple must not be touched (without being told "no matter what anybody else tells you"), and then thrown out of eden, is bad enough; but rejecting the offerings of a farmer in favour of a hunted animal, thats gross!

Or did Abel offer a pet for Jehovah, instead of food? In which case, it wasn't his to offer - all life, after all, belongs to nature, it's parents, and to Divine!

Coming back to Zachariah, perhaps he was struck dumb not literally but in a disbelieving shock of surprise psychologically, and found it safer to say nothing until the prediction came true! And put it on an angel.

" ... Bauer insists that wherever angels appear, both in the New Testament and in the Old, the narrative is mythical. † Even admitting the existence of angels, we cannot suppose them capable of manifesting themselves to human beings, since they belong to the invisible worldd, and spiritual existences are not cognizable by the organs of sense; so that it is always advisable to refer their pretended apparitions to the imagination. ... "

First part, fair enough. But if second part were true, what about Bernadette of Lourdes? Assuming she imagined, why couldn't everyone else? Whether imagination or lie, her sainthood being sanctioned by Vatican then condemns that institution to a status of one lying for profit, making all conferred sainthood fraud.

" ... It is also remarkable that in the old world these celestial beings show themselves active upon the smallest occasions, whilst in modern times they remain idle even during the most important occurrences. ... "

That argument reminds one of some women commenting, when hearing of a woman having been harassed or assaulted, to the effect that they themselves had never had such an experience - implying either doubt at veracity of the victim, or an implication about the victim in reality having been a provocateur who deserved the resulting harrassment. One may never have seen a rainbow in a desert, or an iceberg or aurora in tropical lands, or seen Himaalayan landscapes, but they exist. The flatearthers have declared Australia to be a non-existent object, at a flatearther conference in U.K., and refuse to believe that if one travels South along Atlantic, and another stays put, the two end up upside down with respect to one another; that's the kind of finite logic that is used when one claims reason and five senses to be base of all possible knowledge perceived and inferred.

Ghosts, incidentally, are reported at several places in U.K., chiefly but not exclusively in old castles. Perhaps reporting and admitting of such things takes courage, especially when result might be persecution by church and ridicule by society.

"If it were indeed true, that John was from the first distinctly and miraculously announced as the forerunner of the Messiah, it is inconceivable that he should have had no acquaintance with Jesus prior to his baptism; and that, even subsequent to that event, he should have felt perplexed concerning his Messiahship. (John i., 30 ; Matth. xi., 2.*)

"Consequently the negative conclusion of the rationalistic criticism and controversy must, we think, be admitted, namely, that tho birth of the Baptist could not have been preceded and attended by these supernatural occurrences."

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18. NATURAL EXPLANATION OF THE NARRATIVE.

Author discusses various possibilities and explanations offered by Paulus and others, including psychological, lightening, incense, etc., all refuted and deemed unsatisfactory or impossible.

" ... Is biblical history to be judged by one set of laws, and profane history by another? ... "

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19. MYTHICAL VIEW OF THE NARRATIVE IN ITS DIFFERENT STAGES.

"The above exposition of the necessity, and lastly, of the possibility of doubting the historical fidelity of the gospel narrative, has led many theologians to explain the account of the birth of the Baptist as a poetical composition; suggested by the importance attributed by the Christians to the forerunner of Jesus, and by the recollection of some of the Old Testament histories, in which the births of Ishmael, Isaac, Samuel, and especially of Samson, are related to have been similarly announced. Still the matter was not allowed to be altogether invented. It may have been historically true that Zacharias and Elizabeth lived long without offspring; that, on one occasion whilst in the temple, the old man’s tongue was suddenly paralyzed; but that soon afterwards his aged wife bore him a son, and he, in his joy at the event, recovered the power of speech. At that time, but still more when John became a remarkable man, the history excited attention, and out of it the existing legend grew."

Simple.

" ... But by taking away the angelic apparition, the sudden infliction and as sudden removal of the dumbness loses its only adequate supernatural cause, so that all difficulties which beset the natural interpretation remain in full force: a dilemma into which these theologians are, most unnecessarily, brought by their own inconsequence; for the moment we enter upon mythical ground, all obligation to hold fast the assumed historical fidelity of the account ceases to exist. Besides, that which they propose to retain as historical fact, namely, the long barrenness of the parents of the Baptist, is so strictly in harmony with the spirit and character of Hebrew legendary poetry, that of this incident the mythical origin is least to be mistaken. How confused has this misapprehension made, for example, the reasoning of Bauer! It was a prevailing opinion, says he, consonant with Jewish ideas, that all children born of aged parents, who had previously been childless, became distinguished personages. John was the child of aged parents, and became a notable preacher of repentance; consequently it was thought justifiable to infer that his birth was predicted by an angel. What an illogical conclusion! for which he has no other ground than the assumption that John was the son of aged parents. Let this be made a settled point, and the conclusion follows without difficulty. It was readily believed, he proceeds, of remarkable men that they were born of aged parents, and that their birth, no longer in the ordinary course of nature to be expected, was announced [105]by a heavenly messenger43; John was a great man and a prophet; consequently, the legend represented him to have been born of an aged couple, and his birth to have been proclaimed by an angel."

" ... Gabler has treated it as a pure philosophical, or dogmatical mythus.44 Horst likewise considers it, and indeed the entire two first chapters of Luke, of which it forms a part, as an ingenious fiction, in which the birth of the Messiah, together with that of his precursor, and the predictions concerning the character and ministry of the latter, framed after the event, are set forth; it being precisely the loquacious circumstantiality of the narration which betrays the poet. ... "

" ... the origin of this incident also will be found in the legend, and not in historical fact."

"So that we stand here upon purely mythical-poetical ground; the only historical reality which we can hold fast as positive matter of fact being this:—the impression made by John the Baptist, by virtue of his ministry and his relation to Jesus, was so powerful as to lead to the subsequent glorification of his birth in connection with the birth of the Messiah in the Christian legend."

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October 16, 2021 - October 16, 2021.

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CHAPTER II.

DAVIDICAL DESCENT OF JESUS, ACCORDING TO THE GENEALOGICAL TABLES OF MATTHEW AND LUKE.

§ 20. The two genealogies of Jesus considered separately and irrespectively of one another

21. Comparison of the two genealogies. Attempt to reconcile their contradictions

22. The genealogies unhistorical

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20. THE TWO GENEALOGIES OF JESUS CONSIDERED SEPARATELY AND IRRESPECTIVELY OF ONE ANOTHER.

"IN the history of the birth of the Baptist, we had the single account of Luke; but regarding the genealogical descent of Jesus we have also that of Matthew; so that in this case the mutual control of two narrators in some respects multiplies, whilst in others it lightens, our critical labour. It is indeed true that the authenticity of the two first chapters of Matthew, which contain the history of the birth and childhood of Jesus, as well as that of the parallel section of Luke, has been questioned: but as in both cases the question has originated merely in a prejudiced view of the subject, the doubt has been silenced by a decisive refutation.

"Each of these two gospels contains a genealogical table designed to exhibit the Davidical descent of Jesus, the Messiah. ... "

Rest of this section deals mostly with discrepancies of numbers of names in the genealogy.

"From Abraham to David, where the first division presented itself, having found fourteen members, he seems to have wished that those of the following divisions should correspond in number. In the whole remaining series the Babylonish exile offered itself as the natural point of separation. But as the second division from David to the exile gave him four supernumerary members, therefore he omitted four of the names. For what reason these particular four were chosen would be difficult to determine, at least for the three last mentioned.

"The cause of the compiler’s laying so much stress on the threefold equal numbers, may have been simply, that by this adoption of the Oriental custom of division into equal sections, the genealogy might be more easily committed to memory:10 but with this motive a mystical idea was probably combined. The question arises whether this is to be sought in the number which is thrice repeated, or whether it consists in the threefold repetition? Fourteen is the double of the sacred number seven; but it is improbable that it was selected for this reason, because otherwise the seven would scarcely have been so completely lost sight of in the fourteen. Still more improbable is the conjecture of Olshausen, that the number fourteen was specially chosen as being the numeric value of the name of David; for puerilities of this kind, appropriate to the rabbinical gematria, are to be found in no other part of the Gospels. It is more likely that the object of the genealogists consisted merely in the repetition of an equal number by retaining the fourteen which had first accidentally presented itself: since it was a notion of the Jews that signal divine visitations, whether of prosperity or adversity, recurred at regular periodical intervals. Thus, as fourteen generations had intervened between Abraham, the founder of the holy people, and David the king after God’s own heart, so fourteen generations must intervene between the re-establishment of the kingdom and the coming of the son of David, the Messiah. The most ancient genealogies in Genesis exhibit the very same uniformity. As according to the βὶβλος γενέσεως ἀνθρώπων, cap. v., from Adam the first, to Noah the second, father of men, were ten generations: so from Noah, or rather from his son, the tenth is Abraham the father of the faithful."

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21. COMPARISON OF THE TWO GENEALOGIES—ATTEMPT TO RECONCILE THEIR CONTRADICTIONS.

"If we compare the genealogies of Matthew and Luke together, we become aware of still more striking discrepancies. Some of these differences indeed are unimportant, as the opposite direction of the two tables, the line of Matthew descending from Abraham to Jesus, that of Luke ascending from Jesus to his ancestors. Also the greater extent of the line of Luke; Matthew deriving it no further than from Abraham, while Luke (perhaps lengthening some existing document in order to make it more consonant with the universalism of the doctrines of Paul)15 carries it back to Adam and to God himself. More important is the considerable difference in the number of generations for equal periods, Luke having 41 between David and Jesus, whilst Matthew has only 26. The main difficulty, however, lies in this: that in some parts of the genealogy, in Luke totally different individuals are made the ancestors of Jesus from those of Matthew. It is true, both writers agree in deriving the lineage of Jesus through Joseph from David and Abraham, and that the names of the individual members of the series correspond from Abraham to David, as well as two of the names in the subsequent portion; those of Salathiel and Zorobabel. But the difficulty becomes desperate when we find that, with these two exceptions about midway, the whole of the names from David to the foster-father of Jesus are totally different in Matthew and [113]in Luke. ... "

Here the seeming impartial discourse suddenly slips in a chief article of faith amounting to attempted conversion of the unsuspecting reader in the very obvious "foster-father" instead of father!

You can't have it both ways, whether Strauss or gospels - if you believe no human father for the guy, drop the genealogical discourse, and if you believe in the virgin birth theory for imposing the supposed purity of the young woman, try explaining why she had to have other children.

" ... But, besides the fact, which we shall show hereafter, that the genealogy of Luke can with difficulty be proved to be the work of the author of that Gospel:—in which case the little acquaintance of Luke with [114]Jewish customs ceases to afford any clue to the meaning of this genealogy;—it is also to be objected, that the genealogist of the first Gospel could not have written his ἐγέννησε thus without any addition, if he was thinking of a mere legal paternity. Wherefore these two views of the genealogical relationship are equally difficult."

Now Strauss considers another point also coming close to one mentioned by author of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

"It has been thought by later critics that the knot may be loosed in a much easier way, by supposing that in one Gospel we have the genealogy of Joseph, in the other that of Mary, in which case there would be no contradiction in the disagreement:22 to which they are pleased to add the assumption that Mary was an heiress.23 The opinion that Mary was of the race of David as well as Joseph has been long held. Following indeed the idea, that the Messiah, as a second Melchizedec, ought to unite in his person the priestly with the kingly dignity,24 and guided by the relationship of Mary with Elizabeth, who was a daughter of Aaron (Luke i. 36); already in early times it was not only held by many that the races of Judah and Levi were blended in the family of Joseph;25 but also the opinion was not rare that Jesus, deriving his royal lineage from Joseph, descended also from the priestly race through Mary.26 The opinion of Mary’s descent from David, soon however became the more prevailing. Many apocryphal writers clearly state this opinion,27 as well as Justin Martyr, whose expression, that the virgin was of the race of David, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, may be considered an indication that he applied to Mary one of our genealogies, which are both traced back to Abraham through David."

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22. THE GENEALOGIES UNHISTORICAL.

"Besides the genealogy of Luke is less liable than that of Matthew to the suspicion of having been written with a design to glorify Jesus, since it contents itself with ascribing to Jesus a descent from David, without tracing that descent through the royal line. On the other hand, however, it is more improbable that the genealogy of the comparatively insignificant family of Nathan should have been preserved, than that of the royal branch. Added to which, the frequent recurrence of the same names is, as justly remarked by Hoffmann, an indication that the genealogy of Luke is fictitious.

"In fact then neither table has any advantage over the other. If the one is unhistorical, so also is the other, since it is very improbable that the genealogy of an obscure family like that of Joseph, extending through so long a series of generations, should have been preserved during all the confusion of the exile, and the disturbed period that followed. Yet, it may be said, although we recognise in both, so far as they are not copied from the Old Testament, and unrestrained play of the imagination, or arbitrary applications of other genealogies to Jesus,—we may still retain as an historical basis that Jesus descended from David, and that only the intermediate members of the line of descent were variously filled up by different writers. But the one event on which this historical basis is mainly supported, namely, the journey of the parents of Jesus to Bethlehem in order to be taxed, so far from sufficing to prove them to be of the house and lineage of David, is itself, as we shall presently show, by no means established as matter of history. Of more weight is the other ground, namely, that Jesus is universally represented in the New Testament, without any contradiction from his adversaries, as the descendant of David. Yet even the phrase ὑιὸς Δαβὶδ is a predicate that may naturally have been applied to Jesus, not on historical, but on dogmatical grounds. According to the prophecies, the Messiah could only spring from David. When therefore a Galilean, whose lineage was utterly unknown, and of whom consequently no one could prove that he was not descended from David, had acquired the [118]reputation of being the Messiah; what more natural than that tradition should under different forms have early ascribed to him a Davidical descent, and that genealogical tables, corresponding with this tradition, should have been formed? which, however, as they were constructed upon no certain data, would necessarily exhibit such differences and contradictions as we find actually existing between the genealogies in Matthew and in Luke.

"If, in conclusion, it be asked, what historical result is to be deduced from these genealogies? we reply: a conviction (arrived at also from other sources), that Jesus, either in his own person or through his disciples, acting upon minds strongly imbued with Jewish notions and expectations, left among his followers so firm a conviction of his Messiahship, that they did not hesitate to attribute to him the prophetical characteristic of Davidical descent, and more than one pen was put in action, in order, by means of a genealogy which should authenticate that descent, to justify his recognition as the Messiah.

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October 17, 2021 - October 17, 2021.

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CHAPTER III.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS.—ITS SUPERNATURAL CHARACTER.—VISIT OF MARY TO ELIZABETH.

§ 23. Sketch of the different canonical and apocryphal accounts

24. Disagreements of the canonical gospels in relation to the form of the annunciation

25. Import of the angel’s message. Fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah

26. Jesus begotten of the Holy Ghost. Criticism of the orthodox opinion

27. Retrospect of the genealogies

28. Natural explanation of the history of the conception

29. History of the conception of Jesus viewed as a mythus

30. Relation of Joseph to Mary. Brothers of Jesus

31. Visit of Mary to Elizabeth

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23. SKETCH OF THE DIFFERENT CANONICAL AND APOCRYPHAL ACCOUNTS.

"There is a striking gradation in the different representations of the conception and birth of Jesus given in the canonical and in the apocryphal Gospels. They exhibit the various steps, from a simple statement of a natural occurrence, to a minute and miraculously embellished history, in which the event is traced back to its very earliest date. Mark and John presuppose the fact of the birth of Jesus, and content themselves with the incidental mention of Mary as the mother (Mark vi. 3), and of Joseph as the father of Jesus (John i. 46). Matthew and Luke go further back, since they state the particular circumstances attending the conception as well as the birth of the Messiah. But of these two evangelists Luke mounts a step higher than Matthew. According to the latter Mary, the betrothed of Joseph, being found with child, Joseph is offended, and determines to put her away; but the angel of the Lord visits him in a dream, and assures him of the divine origin and exalted destiny of Mary’s offspring; the result of which is that Joseph takes unto him his wife: but knows her not till she has brought forth her first-born son. (Matt. i. 18–25.) Here the pregnancy is discovered in the first place, and then afterwards justified by the angel; but in Luke the pregnancy is prefaced and announced by a celestial apparition. The same Gabriel, who had predicted the birth of John to Zacharias, appears to Mary, the betrothed of Joseph, and tells her that she shall conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost; whereupon the destined mother of the Messiah pays a visit full of holy import to the already pregnant mother of his forerunner; upon which occasion both Mary and Elizabeth pour forth their emotions to one another in the form of a hymn (Luke i. 26–56). Matthew and Luke are content to presuppose the connexion between Mary and Joseph; but the apocryphal Gospels, the Protevangelium Jacobi, and the Evangelium de Nativitate Mariae,1 (books with the contents of which the Fathers partially agree,) seek to represent the origin of this connexion; indeed they go back to the birth of Mary, and describe it to have been preceded, equally with that of the Messiah and the Baptist, by a divine annunciation. As the description of the birth of John in Luke is principally borrowed from the Old Testament accounts of Samuel and of Samson, so this history of the birth of Mary is an imitation of the history in Luke, and of the Old Testament histories."

It gets highly entertaining in this part, partly because it's such a mixture of normal and then sudden strange insertions of considered poetic or more.

"Joachim, so says the apocryphal narrative, and Anna (the name of Samuel’s [120]mother2) are unhappy on account of their long childless marriage (as were the parents of the Baptist); when an angel appears to them both (so in the history of Samson) at different places, and promises them a child, who shall be the mother of God, and commands that this child shall live the life of a Nazarite (like the Baptist). In early childhood Mary is brought by her parents to the temple (like Samuel); where she continues till her twelfth year, visited and fed by angels and honoured by divine visions. Arrived at womanhood she is to quit the temple, her future provision and destiny being revealed by the oracle to the high priest. In conformity with the prophecy of Isaiah xi. 1 f.: egredietur virga de radice Jesse, et flos de radice ejus ascendet, et requiescet super eum spiritus Domini; this oracle commanded, according to one Gospel,3 that all the unmarried men of the house of David,—according to the other,4 that all the widowers among the people,—should bring their rods, and that he on whose rod a sign should appear (like the rod of Aaron, Numb. xvii.), namely the sign predicted in the prophecy, should take Mary unto himself. This sign was manifested upon Joseph’s rod; for, in exact accordance with the oracle, it put forth a blossom and a dove lighted upon it.5 The apocryphal Gospels and the Fathers agree in representing Joseph as an old man;6 but the narrative is somewhat differently told in the two apocryphal Gospels. According to the Evang. de nativ. Mariae, notwithstanding Mary’s alleged vow of chastity, and the refusal of Joseph on account of his great age, betrothment took place at the command of the priest, and subsequently a marriage—(which marriage, however, the author evidently means to represents also as chaste). According to the Protevang. Jacobi, on the contrary, neither betrothment nor marriage are mentioned, but Joseph is regarded merely as the chosen protector of the young virgin,7 and Joseph on the journey to Bethlehem doubts whether he shall describe his charge as his wife or as his daughter; fearing to bring ridicule upon himself, on account of his age, if he called her his wife. Again, where in Matthew Mary is called ἡ γυνὴ of Joseph, the apocryphal Gospel carefully designates her merely as ἡ παῖς, and even avoids using the term παραλαβεῖν or substitutes διαφυλάξαι with which many of the Fathers concur.8 In the Protevangelium it is further related that Mary, having been received into Joseph’s house, was charged, together with other young women, with the fabrication of the veil for the temple, and that it fell to her lot to spin the true purple.—But whilst Joseph was absent on business Mary was visited by an angel, and Joseph on his return found her with child and called her to account, not as a husband, but as the guardian of her honour. Mary, however, had forgotten the words of the angel and protested her ignorance of the cause of her pregnancy. Joseph was perplexed and determined to remove her secretly from under his protection; but an angel appeared to him in a dream and reassured him by his explanation. The matter was then brought before the priest, and both [121]Joseph and Mary being charged with incontinence were condemned to drink the “bitter water,”9 ὕδωρ τῆς ἐλένξεως, but as they remained uninjured by it, they were declared innocent. Then follows the account of the taxing and of the birth of Jesus."

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24. DISAGREEMENTS OF THE CANONICAL GOSPELS IN RELATION TO THE FORM OF THE ANNUNCIATION.

"After the foregoing general sketch, we now proceed to examine the external circumstances which, according to our Gospels, attended the first communication of the future birth of Jesus to Mary and Joseph. Leaving out of sight, for the present, the special import of the annunciation, namely, that Jesus should be supernaturally begotten of the Holy Ghost, we shall, in the first place, consider merely the form of the announcement; by whom, when, and in what manner it was made."

The author next counts out the various differences between accounts of Luke and Matthew. He then describes how most authorities blend the two accounts as parts of the same, since they take it as history.

"But this arrangement of the incidents is, as Schleiermacher has already remarked, full of difficulty14; and it seems that what is related by one Evangelist is not only not presupposed, but excluded, by the other. For, in the first place, the conduct of the angel who appears to Joseph is not easily explained, if the same or another angel had previously appeared to Mary. The angel (in Matthew) speaks altogether as if his communication were the first in this affair: he neither refers to the message previously received by Mary, nor reproaches Joseph because he had not believed it; but more than all, the informing Joseph of the name of the expected child, and the giving him a full detail of the reasons why he should be so called, (Matt. i. 21) would have been wholly superfluous had the angel (according to Luke i. 34) already indicated this name to Mary."

As realised now by west, the name Yeshu or Isa or Yeshus are all deformations of the Sanskrit epithet Ishas (or equivalently in Sanskrit Ishah), for Lord or Deity; thought has been for several decades that he had travelled to India during the years missing from his official story, acquired knowledge from India, including of yoga (hence resurrection), and returned to India thereafter, living his life out; in Kashmir a village claims to have been where he lived, and claims to have his tomb. While there is divided opinion regarding the travel post resurrection, there is no outright refusal of that prior by authorities, and obviously the name IS a deformation of the Sanskrit word.

Author discusses the unusual behaviour of the young woman in not informing her betrothed of the Angela's visit announcing the coming event, and discusses the various defences offered by various authorities.

" ... Olshausen concurs, and adds his favourite general remark, that in relation to events so extraordinary the measure of the ordinary occurrences of the world is not applicable: a category under which, in this instance, the highly essential considerations of delicacy and propriety are included."

Shouldn't that be the tautological statement that renders unnecessary any discussion or thinking about the whole matter in toto, wiping out all thinking and leaving only an obedient acceptance of church proclamations? Or are there matters allowed to be ordinary enough regarding any part of the story?

"Since then, to suppose that the two accounts are parallel, and complete one another, leads unavoidably to results inconsistent with the sense of the Gospels, in so far as they evidently meant to represent the characters of Joseph and Mary as free from blemish; the supposition cannot be admitted, but the accounts mutually exclude each other. An angel did not appear, first to Mary, and also afterwards to Joseph; he can only have appeared either to the one or to the other. Consequently, it is only the one or the other relation which can be regarded as historical. And here different considerations would conduct to opposite decisions. The history in Matthew might appear the more probable from the rationalistic point of view, because it is more easy to interpret naturally an apparition in a dream; whilst that in [125]Luke might be preferred by the supranaturalist, because the manner in which the suspicion cast upon the holy virgin is refuted is more worthy of God. But in fact, a nearer examination proves, that neither has any essential claim to be advanced before the other. ... every criterion which might determine the adoption of the one, and the rejection of the other, disappears; and we find ourselves, in reference to both accounts, driven back by necessity to the mythical view."

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25. IMPORT OF THE ANGEL’S MESSAGE--FULFILLMENT OF THE PROPHECY OF ISAIAH.

Author discusses the matter and phraseology of the announcement to Mary.

" ... This Jewish language reflects in addition a new light upon the question of the historic validity of the angelic apparition; for we must agree with Schleiermacher that the real angel Gabriel would hardly have proclaimed the advent of the Messiah in a phraseology so strictly Jewish:24 for which reason we are inclined to coincide with this theologian, and to ascribe this particular portion of the history, as also that which precedes and relates to the Baptist, to one and the same Jewish-christian author. ... "

It IS part of Jewish history, after all, birth of a king of Jews who was later accorded quite another mission, and suitable character, by church when separating from Jewish contacts in order to unite with Rome, for survival.

" ... As a confirmatory sign that a matter of this kind is nowise impossible to God, Mary is [127]referred to that which had occurred to her relative Elizabeth; whereupon she resigns herself in faith to the divine determination respecting her."

Would that reassurance include a similarity of a virgin birth, that is, John too having an earthly male parent only in name?

" ... Next is subjoined by the angel, or more probably by the narrator, an oracle from the Old Testament, introduced by the often recurring phrase, all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet [v. 22]. It is the prophecy from Isaiah (chap. vii. 14) which the conception of Jesus after this manner should accomplish: namely, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel—God-with-us."

"Many theologians of the present day are sufficiently impartial to admit, with regard to the Old Testament, in opposition to the ancient orthodox interpretation, that many of the prophecies originally referred to near events; but they are not sufficiently rash, with regard to the New Testament, to side with the rationalistic commentators, and to deny the decidedly Messianic application which the New Testament writers make of these prophecies; they are still too prejudiced to allow, that here and there the New Testament has falsely interpreted the Old. Consequently, they have recourse to the expedient of distinguishing a double sense in the prophecy; the one relating to a near and minor occurrence, the other to a future and more important event; and thus they neither offend against the plain grammatical and historical sense of the Old Testament passage on the one hand, nor distort or deny the signification of the New Testament passage on the other.30 Thus, in the prophecy of Isaiah under consideration, the spirit of prophecy, they contend, had a double intention: to announce a near occurrence, the delivery of the affianced bride of the prophet, and also a distinct event in the far distant future, namely the birth of the Messiah of a virgin. But a double sense so monstrous owes its origin to dogmatic perplexity alone. It has been adopted, as Olshausen himself remarks, in order to avoid the offensive admission that the New Testament writers, and Jesus himself, did not interpret the Old Testament rightly, or, more properly speaking, according to modern principles of exegesis, but explained it after the manner of their own age, which was not the most correct. ... Consequently, with regard to the prophecies brought forward in the New Testament, we may admit, according to circumstances, without further argument, that they are frequently interpreted and applied by the evangelists, in a sense which is totally different from that they originally bore."

"Whether the actual birth of Jesus of a virgin gave rise to this application of the prophecy, or whether this prophecy, interpreted beforehand as referring to the Messiah, originated the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin, remains to be determined."

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26. JESUS BEGOTTEN OF THE HOLY GHOST--CRISTICISM OF THE ORTHODOX OPINION.

"The statement of Matthew and of Luke concerning the mode of Jesus’s conception has, in every age, received the following interpretation by the church; that Jesus was conceived in Mary not by a human father, but by the Holy Ghost. And truly the gospel expressions seem, at first sight, to justify this interpretation; since the words πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν αὐτοὺς (Matt. i. 18) and ἐπεὶ ἄνδρα οὐ γινώσκω (Luke i. 34) preclude the participation of Joseph or any other man in the conception of the child in question. Nevertheless the terms πνεῦμα ἅγιον and δύναμις ὑψίστου do not represent the Holy Ghost in the sense of the church, as the third person in the Godhead, but rather the ‏רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים‎, Spiritus Dei as used in the Old Testament: God in his agency upon the world, and especially upon man. In short the words ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου in Matthew, and πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπὶ σὲ κ.τ.λ. in Luke, express with sufficient clearness that the absence of human agency was supplied—not physically after the manner of heathen representations—but by the divine creative energy."

What "heathen representations", exactly? As in Leda and the swan? Nobody imagines that, in this case; but claim of total absence of a biological and genetic human male parent, and of virginity of the mother, is scientifically untenable; there have been cases of abnormality involving male gene provided within the mother due to her own conception involving an abnormality (an ingested twin brother?), but otherwise, why would it be necessary for divine to require, not only a young woman of purity of spirit, but a virgin never touched by human male until her first childbirth, to have a divine child born? In this case the god of church seems to act like more of a landlord availing first right to a bride of a tenant, a common enough custom in Europe - droit de seigneur!

" ... Nowhere in the New Testament is such an origin ascribed to Jesus, or even distinctly alluded to, except in these two accounts of his infancy in Matthew and in Luke.39 The history of the conception is omitted not only by Mark, but also by John, the supposed author of the fourth Gospel and an alleged inmate with the mother of Jesus subsequent to his death, who therefore would have been the most accurately informed concerning these occurrences. ... The most important consideration therefore is, that no retrospective allusion to this mode of conception occurs throughout the four Gospels; not only neither in John nor in Mark, but also neither in Matthew nor in Luke. Not only does Mary herself designate Joseph simply as the father of Jesus (Luke ii. 48), and the Evangelist speak of both as his parents, γονεῖς (Luke ii. 41),—an appellation which could only have been used in an ulterior sense by one who had just related the miraculous conception,—but all his contemporaries in general, according to our Evangelists, regarded him as a son of Joseph, a fact which was not unfrequently alluded to contemptuously and by way of reproach in his presence (Matt. xiii. 55; Luke iv. 22; John vi. 42), thus affording him an opportunity of making a decisive appeal to his miraculous conception, of which, however, he says not a single word. Should it be answered, that he did not desire to convince respecting the divinity of his person by this external evidence, and that he could have no hope of making an impression by such means on those who were in heart his opponents,—it must also be remembered, that, according to the testimony of the fourth Gospel, his own disciples, though they admitted him to be the son of God, still regarded him as the actual son of Joseph. ... "

"Just as little as in the Gospels, is anything in confirmation of the view of the supernatural conception of Jesus, to be found in the remaining New Testament writings. For when the Apostle Paul speaks of Jesus as made of a woman, γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικὸς (Gal. iv. 4), this expression is not to be understood as an exclusion of paternal participation; since the addition made under the law, γενόμενον ὑπὸ νόμον, clearly shows that he would here indicate (in the form which is frequent in the Old and New Testament, for example Job xiv. 1; Matt. xi. 11) human nature with all its conditions. When Paul (Rom. i. 3, 4 compared with ix. 5) makes Christ according to the flesh, κατὰ σάρκα, descend from David, but declares him to be the son of God according to the Spirit of Holiness, κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης; no one will here identify the antithesis flesh and spirit with the maternal human participation, and the divine energy superseding the paternal participation in the conception of Jesus."

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27. RETROSPECT OF THE GENEALOGIES.

" ... Even the Manichæan Faustus asserted that it is impossible without contradiction to trace the descent of Jesus from David through Joseph, as is done by our two genealogists, and yet assume that Joseph was not the father of Jesus; and Augustine had nothing convincing to answer when he remarked that it was necessary, on account of the superior dignity of the masculine gender, to carry the genealogy of Jesus through Joseph, who was Mary’s husband if not by a natural by a spiritual alliance.41 In modern times also the construction of the genealogical tables in Matthew and in Luke has led many theologians to observe, that these authors considered Jesus as the actual son of Joseph.42 The very design of these tables is to prove Jesus to be of the lineage of David through Joseph; but what do they prove, if indeed Joseph was not the father of Jesus? The assertion that Jesus was the son of David, ὑὸς Δαβὶδ, which in Matthew (i. 1) prefaces the genealogy and announces its object, is altogether annulled by the subsequent denial of his conception by means of the Davidical Joseph. It is impossible, therefore, to think it probable that the genealogy and the history of the birth of Jesus emanate from the same author43; and we must concur with the theologians previously cited, that the genealogies are taken from a different source. Scarcely could it satisfy to oppose the remark, that as Joseph doubtlessly adopted Jesus, the genealogical table of the former became fully valid for the latter. For adoption might indeed suffice to secure to the adopted son the reversion of certain external family rights and inheritances; but such a relationship could in no wise lend a claim to the Messianic dignity, which was attached to the true blood and lineage of David. He, therefore, who had regarded Joseph as nothing more than the adopted father of Jesus, would hardly have given himself the trouble to seek out the Davidical descent of Joseph; but if indeed, besides the established belief that Jesus was the son of God, it still remained important to represent him as the son of David, the pedigree of Mary would have been preferred for this purpose; for, however contrary to custom, the maternal genealogy must have been admitted in a case where a human father did not exist. Least of all is it to be believed, that several authors would have engaged in the compilation of a genealogical table for Jesus which traced his descent through Joseph, so that two different genealogies of this kind are still preserved to us, if a closer relationship between Jesus and Joseph had not been admitted at the time of their composition. ... "

Exactly! And that being the key hurdle where church won't change its position, why not assume it's all a concoction superimposed over the real history of a king of Jews appropriated by Rome for keeping power?

But the author, going against logic, takes great pains to twist to the position that the genealogy has been inserted despite there being no relationship between Joseph and the son of Mary, just to justify the Jewish requirements for messianic position fulfilling the prophesies; this way, they keep their psychological balance by getting out of contradicting the church and coming to realisation that Rome lied for centuries; and, at the same time, they keep the racist, antisemitic disdain for Jewish part of the heritage of the church and it's figure of worship.

"Since, in this way, we discover both the genealogies to be memorials belonging to the time and circle of the primitive church, in which Jesus was still regarded as a naturally begotten man, the sect of the Ebionites cannot fail to occur to us; as we are told concerning them, that they held this view of the person of Christ at this early period. We should therefore have expected, more especially, to have found these genealogies in the old Ebionitish Gospels, of which we have still knowledge, and are not a little surprised to learn that precisely in these Gospels the genealogies were wanting. ... "

"How is the strange phenomenon, that these genealogies are not found among that very sect of Christians who retained the particular opinion upon which they were constructed, to be explained? A modern investigator has advanced the supposition, that the Jewish-christians omitted the genealogical tables from prudential motives, in order not to facilitate or augment the persecution which, under Domitian, and perhaps even earlier, threatened the family of David. But explanations, having no inherent connexion with the subject, derived from circumstances in themselves of doubtful historical validity, are admissible only as a last refuge, when no possible solution of the questionable phenomenon is to be found in the thing itself, as here in the principles of the Ebionitish system."

Is Strauss saying, or implying, that Rome did not persecute Jews while ruling them? That would certainly keep him on the right side of Rome, and the colonial occupation by Rome!

" ... It is well known that they distinguished in the Old Testament a twofold prophecy, male and female, pure and impure, of which the former only promised things heavenly and true, the latter things earthly and delusive; that proceeding from Adam and Abel, this from Eve and Cain; and both constituted an under current through the whole history of the revelation. It was only the pious men from Adam to Joshua whom they acknowledged as true prophets: the later prophets and men of God, among whom David and Solomon are named, were not only not recognized, but abhorred. We even find positive indications that David was an object of their particular aversion. There were many things which created in them a detestation of David (and Solomon). David was a bloody warrior; but to shed blood was, according to the doctrines of these Ebionites, one of the greatest of sins; David was known to have committed adultery, (Solomon to have been a voluptuary); and adultery was even more detested by this sect than murder. David was a performer on stringed instruments; this art, the invention of the Canaanites (Gen. iv. 21), was held by these Ebionites to be a sign of false prophecy; finally, the prophecies announced by David and those connected with him, (and Solomon,) had reference to the kingdoms of this world, of which the Gnosticising Ebionites desired to know nothing. Now the Ebionites who had sprung from common Judaism could not have shared this ground of aversion to the genealogies; since to the orthodox Jew David was an object of the highest veneration."

"Concerning a second point the notices are not so lucid and accordant as they should be; namely, whether it was a further development of the general Ebionitish doctrine concerning the person of the Christ, which led these Ebionites to reject the genealogies. According to Epiphanius, they fully recognized the Gnostic distinction between Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary, and the Christ who descended upon him; and consequently might have been withheld from referring the genealogy to Jesus only perhaps by their abhorrence of David. On the other hand, from the whole tenor of the Clementines, and from one passage in particular, it has recently been inferred, and not without apparent reason, that the author of these writings had himself abandoned the view of a natural conception, and even birth of Jesus; whereby it is yet more manifest that the ground of the rejection of the genealogies by this sect was peculiar to it, and not common to the other Ebionites.

"Moreover positive indications, that the Ebionites who proceeded from Judaism possessed the genealogies, do not entirely fail. Whilst the Ebionites of Epiphanius and of the Clementines called Jesus only Son of God, but rejected the appellation Son of David, as belonging to the common opinion of the Jews60; other Ebionites were censured by the Fathers for recognizing Jesus only as the Son of David, to whom he is traced in the genealogies, and not likewise as the Son of God. ... "

Strauss ends with a remark to the effect that the church authorities did keep the genealogies despite the doctrine. He fails to conclude that it was due their being a fact.

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28. NATURAL EXPLANATION OF THE HISTORY OF THE CONCEPTION.

"In the first place, the account in Matthew seemed susceptible of such an interpretation. Numerous rabbinical passages were cited to demonstrate, that it was consonant with Jewish notions to consider a son of pious parents to be conceived by the divine co-operation, and that he should be called the son of the Holy Spirit, without its being ever imagined that paternal participation was thereby excluded. It was consequently contended, that the section in [138]Matthew represented merely the intention of the angel to inform Joseph, not indeed that Mary had become pregnant in the absence of all human intercourse, but that notwithstanding her pregnancy she was to be regarded as pure, not as one fallen from virtue. ... The first expedient is to interpret Mary’s inquiry of the angel i. 34, thus: Can I who am already betrothed and married give birth to the Messiah, for as the mother of the Messiah I must have no husband? whereupon the angel replies, that God, through his power, could make something distinguished even of the child conceived of her and Joseph."

"If consequently, the difficulty of the natural explanation of the two accounts be equally great, still, with respect to both it must be alike attempted or rejected; and for the consistent Rationalist, a Paulus for example, the latter is the only course. ... Consequently, according to Paulus, the meaning of the angelic announcement is simply this: prior to her union with Joseph, Mary, under the influence of a pure enthusiasm in sacred things on the one hand, and by an human co-operation pleasing to God on the other, became the mother of a child who on account of this holy origin was to be called a son of God."

" ... He begins with Elizabeth, the patriotic and wise daughter of Aaron, as he styles her. She, having conceived the hope that she might give birth to one of God’s prophets, naturally desired moreover that he might be the first of prophets, the forerunner of the Messiah; and that the latter also might speedily be born. Now there was among her own kinsfolk a person suited in every respect for the mother of the Messiah, Mary, a young virgin, a descendant of David; nothing more was needful than to inspire her likewise with such a special hope. Whilst these intimations prepare us to anticipate a cleverly concerted plan on the part of Elizabeth in reference to her young relative, in the which we hope to become initiated; Paulus here suddenly lets [139]fall the curtain, and remarks, that the exact manner in which Mary was convinced that she should become the mother of the Messiah must be left historically undetermined ... It is probable, he thinks, that the angelic messenger visited Mary in the evening or even at night; indeed according to the correct reading of Luke i. 28, which has not the word angel, καὶ εἰσελθὼν πρὸς αὐτὴν εἰπε, without ὁ ἄγγελος, the evangelist here speaks only of some one who had come in. (As if in this case, the participle εἰσελθὼν must not necessarily be accompanied by τὶς; or, in the absence of the pronoun be referred to the subject, the angel Gabriel—ὁ ἄγγελος Γαβριὴλ, v. 26!) Paulus adds: that this visitant was the angel Gabriel was the subsequent suggestion of Mary’s own mind, after she had heard of the vision of Zacharias."

"Gabler, in a review of Paulus’s Commentary67 has fully exposed, with commensurate plainness of speech, the transaction which lies concealed under this explanation. ... "

"The author of the Natural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth is, in this instance, to be considered as the most worthy interpreter of Paulus; for though the former could not, in this part of his work, have made use of Paulus’s Commentary, yet, in exactly the same spirit, he unreservedly avows what the latter carefully veils. He brings into comparison a story in Josephus, according to which, in the very time of Jesus, a Roman knight won the chaste wife of a Roman noble to his wishes, by causing her to be invited by a priest of Isis into the temple of the goddess, under the pretext that the god Anubis desired to embrace her. In innocence and faith, the woman resigned herself, and would perhaps afterwards have believed she had given birth to the child of a god, had not the intriguer, with bitter scorn, soon after discovered to her the true state of the case. It is the opinion of the author that Mary, the betrothed bride of the aged Joseph, was in like manner deceived by some amorous and fanatic young man (in the sequel to the history he represents him to be Joseph of Arimathea), and that she on her part, in perfect innocence, continued to deceive others. It is evident that this interpretation does not differ from the ancient Jewish blasphemy, which we find in Celsus and in the Talmud; that Jesus falsely represented himself as born of a pure virgin, whereas, in fact, he was the offspring of the adultery of Mary with a certain Panthera]"

That, interestingly, is seen as negative, rather than more than common sense and information, on part of Jews - after all, who knew better about Romans and their conduct in Judea and Israel?

"This whole view, of which the culminating point is in the calumny of the Jews, cannot be better judged than in the words of Origen. If, says this author, they wished to substitute something else in the place of the history of the supernatural conception of Jesus, they should at any rate have made it happen in a more probable manner; they ought not, as it were against their will, to admit that Mary knew not Joseph, but they might have denied this feature, and yet have allowed Jesus to have been born of an ordinary human marriage; whereas the forced and extravagant character of their hypothesis betrays its falsehood.71 Is not this as much as to say, that if once some particular features of a marvellous narrative are doubted, it is inconsequent to allow others to remain unquestioned? each part of such an account ought to be subjected to critical examination. The correct view of the narrative before us is to be found, that is indirectly, in Origen. For when at one time he places together, as of the same kind, the miraculous conception of Jesus and the story of Plato’s conception by Apollo (though here, indeed, the meaning is that only ill-disposed persons could doubt such things72), and when at another time he says of the story concerning Plato, that it belongs to those mythi by which it was sought to exhibit the distinguished wisdom and power of great men (but here he does not include the narrative of Jesus’s conception), he in fact states the two premises, namely, the similarity of the two narratives and the mythical character of the one73; from which the inference of the merely mythical worth of the narrative of the conception of Jesus follows; a conclusion which can never indeed have occurred to his own mind."

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29. HISTORY OF THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS VIEWED AS A MYTIIUS.

"If, says Gabler in his review of the Commentary of Paulus, we must relinquish the supernatural origin of Jesus, in order to escape the ridicule of our contemporaries, and if, on the other hand, the natural explanation leads to conclusions not only extravagant, but revolting; the adoption of the mythus, by which all these difficulties are obviated, is to be preferred. In the world of mythology many great men had extraordinary births, and were sons of the gods. Jesus himself spoke of his heavenly origin, and called God his father; besides, his title as Messiah was—Son of God. ... But according to historical truth, Jesus was the offspring of an ordinary marriage, between Joseph and Mary; an explanation which, it has been justly remarked, maintains at once the dignity of Jesus and the respect due to his mother.

"The proneness of the ancient world to represent the great men and benefactors of their race as the sons of the gods, has therefore been referred to, in order to explain the origin of such a mythus. Our theologians have accumulated examples from the Greco-Roman mythology and history. They have cited Hercules, and the Dioscuri; Romulus, and Alexander; but above all Pythagoras,75 and Plato. Of the latter philosopher Jerome speaks in a manner quite applicable to Jesus: sapientiæ principem non aliter arbitrantur, nisi de partu virginis editum."

" ... At all events such an inference must not be too hastily drawn from the expression “sons of God,” found likewise among the Jews, which as applied in the Old Testament to magistrates, (Ps. lxxxii. 6, or to theocratic kings, 2 Sam. vii. 14, Ps. ii. 7,) indicates only a theocratic, and not a physical or metaphysical relation. ... "

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30. RELATION OF JOSEPH TO MARY-BROTHERS OF JESUS.

" ... The opinion that Mary after the birth of Jesus became the wife of Joseph, was early ranked among the heresies,89 and the orthodox Fathers sought every means to escape from it and to combat it. They contended that according to the exegetical interpretation of ἕως οὗ, it sometimes affirmed or denied a thing, not merely up to a certain limit, but beyond that limitation and for ever; and that the words of Matthew οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτὴν ἕως οὗ ἔτεκε κ.τ.λ. excluded a matrimonial connexion between Joseph and Mary for all time. In like manner it was asserted of the term πρωτότοκος, that it did not necessarily include the subsequent birth of other children, but that it merely excluded any previous birth. But in order to banish the thought of a matrimonial connexion between Mary and Joseph, not only grammatically but physiologically, they represented Joseph as a very old man, under whom Mary was placed for control and protection only; and the brothers of Jesus mentioned in the New Testament they regarded as the children of Joseph by a former marriage. But this was not all; soon it was insisted not only that Mary never became the wife of Joseph, but that in giving birth to Jesus she did not lose her virginity. But even the conservation of Mary’s virginity did not long continue to satisfy: perpetual virginity was likewise required on the part of Joseph. It was not enough that he had no connexion with Mary; it was also necessary that his entire life should be one of celibacy. Accordingly, though Epiphanius allows that Joseph had sons by a former marriage, Jerome rejects the supposition as an impious and audacious invention; and from that time the brothers of Jesus were degraded to the rank of cousins."

" ... Had we merely the following passages—Matt. xiii. 55, Mark vi. 3, where the people of Nazareth, astonished at the wisdom of their countryman, in order to mark his well known origin, immediately after having spoken of τέκτων (the carpenter) his father, and his mother Mary, mention by name his ἀδελφοὺς (brothers) James, Joses, Simon, and Judas, together with his sisters whose names are not given100; again Matt. xii. 46, Luke viii. 19, when his mother and his brethren come to Jesus; John ii. 12, where Jesus journeys with his mother and his brethren to Capernaum; Acts i. 14, where they are mentioned in immediate connexion with his mother—if we had these passages only, we could not for a moment hesitate to recognize here real brothers of Jesus at least on the mother’s side, children of Joseph and Mary; not only on account of the proper signification of the word ἀδελφὸς, but also in consequence of its continual conjunction with Mary and Joseph. ... "

Author discusses various names of brothers, apostles, and various repeated names.

"Thus the web of this identification gives way at all points, and we are forced back to the position whence we set out; so that we have again real brothers of Jesus, also two cousins distinct from these brothers, though bearing the same names with two of them, besides some apostles of the same names with both brothers and cousins. ... "

"We have consequently no ground for denying that the mother of Jesus bore her husband several other children besides Jesus, younger, and perhaps also older; the latter, because the representation in the New Testament that Jesus was the first-born may belong no less to the mythus than the representation of the Fathers that he was an only son.

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31. VISIT OF MARY TO ELIZABETH.

" ... There is no trace in the narrative either of any communication preceding Elizabeth’s address, or of interruptions occasioned by farther explanations on the part of Mary. On the contrary, as it is a supernatural revelation which acquaints Mary with the pregnancy of Elizabeth, so also it is to a revelation that Elizabeth’s immediate recognition of Mary, as the chosen mother of the Messiah, is attributed. ... But the record does not represent the thing as if the excitement of the mother were the determining cause of the movement of the child; on the contrary (v. 41), the emotion of the mother follows the movement of the child, and Elizabeth’s own account states, that it was the salutation of Mary (v. 44), not indeed from its particular signification, but merely as the voice of the mother of the Messiah, which produced the movement of the unborn babe: undeniably assuming something supernatural. ... "

" ... But if, indeed, Mary’s hymn is to be understood as the work of the Holy Spirit, it is surprising that a speech emanating immediately from the divine source of inspiration should not be more striking for its originality, but should be so interlarded with reminiscences from the Old Testament, borrowed from the song of praise spoken by the mother of Samuel (1 Sam. ii.) under analogous circumstances.108 Accordingly we must admit that the compilation of this hymn, consisting of recollections from the Old Testament, was put together in a natural way; but allowing its composition to have been perfectly natural, it cannot be ascribed to the artless Mary, but to him who poetically wrought out the tradition in circulation respecting the scene in question."

" ... The view of this narrative given by the anonymous E. F. in Henke’s Magazine109 is, that it does not pourtray events as they actually did occur, but as they might have occurred; that much which the sequel taught of the destiny of their sons was carried back into the speeches of these women, which were also enriched by other features gleaned from tradition; that a true fact however lies at the bottom, namely an actual visit of Mary to Elizabeth, a joyous conversation, and the expression of gratitude to God; all which might have happened solely in virtue of the high importance attached by Orientals to the joys of maternity, even though the two mothers had been at that time ignorant of the destination of their children. This author is of opinion that Mary, when pondering over at a later period the remarkable life of her son, may often have related the happy meeting with her cousin and [151]their mutual expressions of thankfulness to God, and that thus the history gained currency. ... "

Strauss argues that since this visit seems arranged to support the myth, it must be discarded as in historical. Which makes very little sense, since he hasn't discarded virgin birth in clear terms, and that really is the biggest hurdle to the story being completely believable. There is nothing strange or unbelievable in two cousins meeting, or a baby in womb moving at approach, touch or voice of a kin.

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October 17, 2021 - October 18, 2021.

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CHAPTER IV.

BIRTH AND EARLIEST EVENTS OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

§ 32. The census

33. Particular circumstances of the birth of Jesus. The circumcision

34. The Magi and their star. The flight into Egypt, and the murder of the children in Bethlehem. Criticism of the supranaturalistic view

35. Attempts at a natural explanation of the history of the Magi. Transition to the mythical explanation

36. The purely mythical explanation of the narrative concerning the Magi, and of the events with which it is connected

37. Chronological relation between the visit of the Magi, together with the flight into Egypt, and the presentation in the temple recorded by Luke

38. The presentation of Jesus in the temple

39. Retrospect. Difference between Matthew and Luke as to the original residence of the parents of Jesus

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32. THE CENSUS

"With respect to the birth of Jesus, Matthew and Luke agree in representing it as taking place at Bethlehem; but whilst the latter enters into a minute detail of all the attendant circumstances, the former merely mentions the event as it were incidentally, referring to it once in an appended sentence as the sequel to what had gone before (i. 25), and again as a presupposed occurrence (ii. 1). The one Evangelist seems to assume that Bethlehem was the habitual residence of the parents; but according to the other they are led thither by very particular circumstances. ... census, decreed by Augustus at the time when Cyrenius (Quirinus) was governor of Syria, was the occasion of the journey of the parents of Jesus, who usually resided at Nazareth, to Bethlehem where Jesus was born"

But historical research, since, is to the effect that this presumption about their residence in Nazareth is not merely incorrect but not possible; the town came to exist later, and there is another explanation about the assumption.

"Matthew places the birth of Jesus shortly before the death of Herod the Great, whom he represents (ii. 19) as dying during the abode of Jesus in Egypt. Luke says the same indirectly, for when speaking of the announcement of the birth of the Baptist, he refers it to the days of Herod the Great, and he places the birth of Jesus precisely six months later; so that according to Luke, also, Jesus was born, if not, like John, previous to the death of Herod I., shortly after that event. Now, after the death of Herod the country of Judea fell to his son Archelaus (Matt. ii. 22), who, after a reign of something less than ten years, was deposed and banished by Augustus,7 at which time Judea was first constituted a Roman province, and began to be ruled by Roman functionaries.8 Thus the Roman census in question must have been made either under Herod the Great, or at the commencement of the reign of Archelaus. ... Reference has been made ... to the oath of allegiance to Augustus which, according to Josephus, the Jews were forced to take even during the lifetime of Herod.12 From which it is inferred that Augustus, since he had it in contemplation after the death of Herod to restrict the power of his sons, was very likely to have commanded a census in the last years of that prince.13 But it seems more probable that it took place shortly after the death of Herod, from the circumstance that Archelaus went to Rome concerning the matter of succession, and that during his absence the Roman procurator Sabinus occupied Jerusalem, and oppressed the Jews by every possible means."

" ... we can no longer perceive what inducement could have instigated Mary, in her particular situation, to make so long a journey, since, unless we adopt the airy hypothesis of Olshausen and others, that Mary was the heiress of property in Bethlehem, she had nothing to do there.

"The Evangelist, however, knew perfectly well what she had to do there; namely, to fulfil the prophecy of Micah (v. 1), by giving birth, in the city of David, to the Messiah. Now as he set out with the supposition that the habitual abode of the parents of Jesus was Nazareth, so he sought after a lever which should set them in motion towards Bethlehem, at the time of the birth of Jesus. Far and wide nothing presented itself but the celebrated census; he seized it the more unhesitatingly because the obscurity of his own view of the historical relations of that time, veiled from him the many difficulties connected with such a combination. If this be the true history of the statement in Luke, we must agree with K. Ch. L. Schmidt when he says, that to attempt to reconcile the statement of Luke concerning the ἀπογραφὴ with chronology, would be to do the narrator too much honour; he wished to place Mary in Bethlehem, and therefore times and circumstances were to accommodate themselves to his pleasure.

"Thus we have here neither a fixed point for the date of the birth of Jesus, nor an explanation of the occasion which led to his being born precisely at Bethlehem. If then—it may justly be said—no other reason why Jesus should have been born at Bethlehem can be adduced than that given by Luke, we have absolutely no guarantee that Bethlehem was his birth-place."

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33. PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE BIRTH OF JESUS--THE CIRCUMCISION.

" ... Soon, however, whilst still without the city—as appears from the context and the reading of several MSS.—Mary is seized with the pains of child-bearing, and Joseph brings her into a cave situated by the road side, where, veiled by a cloud of light, all nature pausing in celebration of the event, she brings her child into the world, and after her delivery is found, by women called to her assistance, still a virgin.28 The legend of the birth of Jesus in a cave was known to Justin29 and to Origen,30 who, in order to reconcile it with the account in Luke that he was laid in a manger, suppose a manger situated within the cave. Many modern commentators agree with them31; whilst others prefer to consider the cave itself as φάτνη, in the sense of foddering-stall.32 For the birth of Jesus in a cave, Justin appeals to the prophecy in Isaiah xxviii. 16: οὗτος (the righteous) οἰκήσει ἐν ὑψηλῷ σπηλαίῳ πέτρας ἱσχυρᾶς. In like manner, for the statement that on the third day the child Jesus, when brought from the cave into the stable, was worshipped by the oxen and the asses, the Historia de Nativitate Mariae,33 etc. refers to Isaiah i. 3: cognovit bos possessorem suum, et asinus praesepe domini sui. In several apocryphas, between the Magi and the women who assist at the birth, the shepherds are forgotten; but they are mentioned in the Evangelium infantiae arabicum,34 where it says, that when they arrived at the cave, and had kindled a fire of rejoicing, the heavenly host appeared to them."

This being found virgin after childbirth is taking the virgin bit too far!

" ... These shepherds therefore on perceiving, whilst in the fields by night, a luminous appearance in the air—a phenomenon which travellers say is not uncommon in those regions—they interpret it as a divine intimation that the stranger in their foddering-stall is delivered of the Messiah; and as the meteoric light extends and moves to and fro, they take it for a choir of angels chaunting hymns of praise. Returning home they find their anticipations confirmed by the event, and that which at first they merely conjectured to be the sense and interpretation of the phenomenon, they now, after the manner of the East, represent as words actually spoken."

" ... For had not the parents of Jesus been strangers, and had they not come to Bethlehem in company with so large a concourse of strangers as the census might have occasioned, the cause which obliged Mary to accept a stable for her place of [160]delivery would no longer have existed. But, on the other hand, the incident, that Jesus was born in a stable and saluted in the first instance by shepherds, is so completely in accordance with the spirit of the ancient legend, that it is evident the narrative may have been derived purely from this source. Theophylact, in his time, pointed out its true character, when he says: the angels did not appear to the scribes and pharisees of Jerusalem who were full of all malice, but to the shepherds, in the fields, on account of their simplicity and innocence, and because they by their mode of life were the successors of the patriarchs.40 It was in the field by the flocks that Moses was visited by a heavenly apparition (Exod. iii. 1 ff.); and God took David, the forefather of the Messiah, from his sheepfolds (at Bethlehem), to be the shepherd of his people. Psalm lxxviii. 70 (comp. 1 Sam. xvi. 11). The mythi of the ancient world more generally ascribed divine apparitions to countrymen41 and shepherds42; the sons of the gods, and of great men were frequently brought up among shepherds.43 In the same spirit of the ancient legend is the apocryphal invention that Jesus was born in a cave, and we are at once reminded of the cave of Jupiter and of the other gods; even though the misunderstood passage of Isaiah xxxiii. 16 may have been the immediate occasion of this incident.44 Moreover the night, in which the scene is laid,—(unless one refers here to the rabbinical representations, according to which, the deliverance by means of the Messiah, like the deliverance from Egypt, should take place by night45)—forms the obscure background against which the manifested glory of the Lord shone so much the more brilliantly, which, as it is said to have glorified the birth of Moses,46 could not have been absent from that of the Messiah, his exalted antitype."

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34. THE MAGI AND THEIR STAR--THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT AND THE MURDER OF THE CHILDREN IN BETHLEHEM--CRITICISM OF THE SUPRANATURALISTIC VIEW.

" ... The object of both narratives is to describe the solemn introduction of the Messianic infant, the heralding of his birth undertaken by heaven itself, and his first reception among men.53 In both, attention is called to the new-born Messiah by a celestial phenomenon; according to Luke, it is an angel clothed in brightness, according to Matthew, it is a star. As the apparitions are different, so accordingly are the recipients; the angel addresses simple shepherds; the star is discovered by eastern magi, who are able to interpret for themselves the voiceless sign. Both parties are directed to Bethlehem; the shepherds by the words of the angel, the magi by the instructions they obtain in Jerusalem; and both do homage to the infant; the poor shepherds by singing hymns of praise, the magi by costly presents from their native country. But from this point the two narratives begin to diverge widely. In Luke all proceeds happily; the shepherds return with gladness in their hearts, the child experiences no molestation, he is presented in the temple on the appointed day, thrives and grows up in tranquillity. In Matthew, on the contrary, affairs take a tragical turn. The inquiry of the wise [163]men in Jerusalem concerning the new-born King of the Jews, is the occasion of a murderous decree on the part of Herod against the children of Bethlehem, a danger from which the infant Jesus is rescued only by a sudden flight into Egypt, whence he and his parents do not return to the Holy Land till after the death of Herod."

" ... But as we have recognized many indications of the unhistorical character of the announcement by the shepherds given in Luke, the ground is left clear for that of Matthew, which must be judged of according to its inherent credibility."

It has been since noticed, that Chinese records speak of a sudden bright star seen in the direction; knowledge of science, and particularly universe, has grown, and has made people conjecture that it was perhaps a supernova seen at the time.

" ... That eastern magi should have knowledge of a King of the Jews to whom they owed religious homage might indeed excite our surprise; but contenting ourselves here with remarking, that seventy years later an expectation did prevail in the east that a ruler of the world would arise from among the Jewish people, we pass on to a yet more weighty difficulty. ... "

The first part is easily dealt with - the astronomical event was noticed, and perhaps there might have been some thought that it had corresponding earthly event of significance; or perhaps there were people who interpreted the event. The second part is questionable.

" ... According to this narrative it appears, that astrology is right when it asserts that the birth of great men and important revolutions in human affairs are indicated by astral phenomena; an opinion long since consigned to the region of superstition. ... "

That last part is an arrogance based on ignorance, as usual.

" ... If therefore it be unadvisable to admit an extraordinary divine intervention,55 and if the position that in the ordinary course of nature, important occurrences on this earth are attended by changes in the heavenly bodies, be abandoned, the only remaining explanation lies in [164]the supposition of an accidental coincidence. But to appeal to chance is in fact either to say nothing, or to renounce the supranaturalistic point of view. ... "

It is rather amusing that precisely those that oppose astrology, homeopathy, and any non abrahmic faiths, are so weighed down by centuries of imposition of later abrahmic faiths that they are unable to contradict the obvious flaws such as virgin birth and more, without declaring atheism at cost of reason, and yet they cannot see that opposing the particular institutions, their imposition and the flaws in their teachings, do not amount to reputations of either other religions, astrology or homeopathy. And yet, recently, a German scientist fed up with claims of homeopathy, when set out to disprove it scientifically once for all, discovered to great surprise that it held - and had progress of scientific thought as a reward.

Strauss misses the obvious here - it's not whether the star made things happen that matters first, it's whether such an event, which was so noticeable that men arrived from lands far away, did occur; that it was so, is now known, due to Chinese historical records. And thereafter, whether one takes it as signoficator of the birth of someone special, or merely coincidence, is as unimportant in context of universal scheme, as what different medicines comfort you when you have flu. Astrologically, it isn't that a celestial event produces a birth of a particular person predicted - that belongs to prophesies rather in another sphere - but that it relates to events, including childbirth at the time, in general. But if every child born at such a time ended up crucified, it's unknown, at the very least; and so Strauss relating this correlating to astrology rather than Jewish predictions is only due to his writing off all older knowledge because he questions church, even though he's unable to come to obvious conclusions about the latter, and consequently comprehending little.

" ... But if it be once admitted, that God interposed supernaturally to blind the mind of Herod and to suggest to the magi that they should not return to Jerusalem, we are constrained to ask, why did not God in the first instance inspire the magi to shun Jerusalem and proceed directly to Bethlehem, whither Herod’s attention would not then have been so immediately attracted, and thus the disastrous sequel perhaps have been altogether avoided?61 The supranaturalist has no answer to this question but the old-fashioned argument that it was good for the infants to die, because they were thus freed by transient suffering from much misery, and more especially from the danger of sinning against Jesus with the unbelieving Jews; whereas now they had the honour of losing their lives for the sake of Jesus, and thus of ranking as martyrs, and so forth."

Did it ever occur to Strauss that this insistence on acceptance of a faith was peculiar to Rome, and sign of a worldly power?

Strauss discusses the description about magi and the star.

"The magi leave Jerusalem by night, the favourite time for travelling in the east. The star, which they seem to have lost sight of since their departure from home, again appears and goes before them on the road to Bethlehem, until at length it remains stationary over the house that contains the wondrous child and its parents. The way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem lies southward; now the true path of erratic stars is either from west to east, as that of the planets and of some comets, or from east to west, as that of other comets; the orbits of many comets do indeed tend from north to south, but the true motion of all these bodies is so greatly surpassed by their apparent motion [166]from east to west produced by the rotation of the earth on its axis, that it is imperceptible except at considerable intervals. Even the diurnal movement of the heavenly bodies, however, is less obvious on a short journey than the merely optical one, arising from the observer’s own change of place, in consequence of which a star that he sees before him seems, as long as he moves forward, to pass on in the same direction through infinite space; it cannot therefore stand still over a particular house and thus induce a traveller to halt there also; on the contrary, the traveller himself must halt before the star will appear stationary. ... "

It's obvious that the reappearance South immediately suggests a comet, or another body, not within the Kuiper Belt; many smaller planets, or bodies not yet designated planets, have been found in last two to three decades, with orbits not confirming with the main planets and generally with the main disk of the solar system, leading to an expectation of yet another major planet, with an outside orbit - Sedna has an orbit well over 11,000 years, and a few have longer ones - and its orbit is unknown; but the description "bright star may not fit a planet with an outside orbit, unless it's huge, and then it wouldn't come close like a comet does to sun, without causing havoc to all life on earth, and disturbing orbits of every planet known. A nova or supernova on the other hand may appear any place in sky, but be distant in fact, and certainly not travel except with other stars, nor appear stationary above one house.

But occult phenomenon are another story.

Then again, that hovering over a house might be the lie that adds to fablisation of history. In shirt, maybe there were men travelling to see where the star - say comet, or supernova - led them, and inquired, and heard of a child born in David's line; and church had the star standing over the house written in to embellish facts. Strauss doesn't think of this, the obvious, but must junk the star! He has far too much faith in church, even when seemingly questioning every detail of the story - for he invariably keeps swerving away from conclusion about obvious lies by church, and makes blunders such as concluding there was no star.

"In this passage the prophet, speaking in the name of Jehovah, says: When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt. We may venture to attribute, even to the most orthodox expositor, enough clear-sightedness to perceive that the subject of the first half of the sentence is also the object of the second, namely the people of Israel, who here, as elsewhere, (e.g. Exod. iv. 22, Sirach xxxvi. 14), are collectively called the Son of God, and whose past deliverance under Moses out of their Egyptian bondage is the fact referred to: that consequently, the prophet was not contemplating either the Messiah or his sojourn in Egypt. ... "

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35. ATTEMPTS AT A NATURAL EXPLANATION OF THE HISTORY OF THE MAGI-TRANSITION TO THE MYTHICAL EXPLANATION.

"The most remarkable supposition adopted by those who regard ἀστὴρ as a conjunction of planets, is that they hereby obtain a fixed point in accredited history, to which the narrative of Matthew may be attached. According to Kepler’s calculation, corrected by Ideler, there occurred, three years before the death of Herod, in the year of Rome 747, a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign Pisces. The conjunction of these planets is repeated in the above sign, to which astrologers attribute a special relation to Palestine, about every 800 years, ... "

Unless conjunction here is in the sense of almost occupation, not the usual meaning as in their being seen close together, 800 is too long; almost every configuration of the two repeats every sixty years, and their being close happens every fourteen years roughly.

"The difficulties connected with the erroneous interpretations of passages from the Old Testament are, from the natural point of view, eluded by denying that the writers of the New Testament are responsible for the falsity of these interpretations. It is said that the prophecy of Micah is applied to the Messiah and his birth in Bethlehem by the Sanhedrim alone, and that Matthew has not committed himself to their interpretation by one word of approval. But when the evangelist proceeds to narrate how the issue corresponded with the interpretation, he sanctions it by the authoritative seal of fact."

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36. THE PURELY MYTHICAL EXPLANATION OF THE NARRATIVE CONCERNING THE MAGI, AND OF THE EVENTS WITH WHICH IT IS CONNECTED.

" ... The prophecy of Balaam (Num. xxiv. 17), A star shall come out of Jacob, was the cause—not indeed, as the Fathers supposed, that magi actually recognized a newly-kindled star as that of the Messiah, and hence journeyed to Jerusalem—but that legend represented a star to have appeared at the birth of Jesus, and to have been recognized by astrologers as the star of the Messiah. ... "

" ... The future greatness of Mithridates was thought to be prognosticated by the appearance of a comet in the year of his birth, and in that of his accession to the throne93; [174]and a comet observed shortly after the death of Julius Cæsar, was supposed to have a close relation to that event.94 These ideas were not without influence on the Jews; at least we find traces of them in Jewish writings of a later period, in which it is said that a remarkable star appeared at the birth of Abraham.95 When such ideas were afloat, it was easy to imagine that the birth of the Messiah must be announced by a star, especially as, according to the common interpretation of Balaam’s prophecy, a star was there made the symbol of the Messiah. It is certain that the Jewish mind effected this combination; for it is a rabbinical idea that at the time of the Messiah’s birth, a star will appear in the east and remain for a long time visible. ... "

" ... In the time of Jesus it was the general belief that stars were always the forerunners of great events; hence the Jews of that period thought that the birth of the Messiah would necessarily be announced by a star, and this supposition had a specific sanction in Num. xxiv. 17. The early converted Jewish Christians could confirm their faith in Jesus, and justify it in the eyes of others, only by labouring to prove that in him were realized all the attributes lent to the Messiah by the Jewish notions of their age—a proposition that might be urged the more inoffensively and with the less chance of refutation, the more remote lay the age of Jesus, and the more completely the history of his childhood was shrouded in darkness. Hence it soon ceased to be matter of doubt that the anticipated appearance of a star was really coincident with the birth of Jesus.99 This being once presupposed, it followed as a matter of course that the observers of this appearance were eastern magi; first, because none could better interpret the sign than astrologers, and the east was supposed to be the native region of their science; and secondly, because it must have seemed fitting that the Messianic star which had been seen by the spiritual eye of the ancient magus Balaam, should, on its actual appearance be first recognized by the bodily eyes of later magi."

"To represent a murderous decree as having been directed by Herod against Jesus, was the interest of the primitive christian legend. In all times legend has glorified the infancy of great men by persecutions and attempts on their life; the greater the danger that hovered over them, the higher seems their value; the more unexpectedly their deliverance is wrought, the more evident is the esteem in which they are held by heaven. Hence in the history of the childhood of Cyrus in Herodotus, of Romulus in Livy,104 and even later of Augustus in Suetonius,105 we find this trait; neither has the Hebrew legend neglected to assign such a distinction to Moses. ... "

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37. CHRONOLOGICAL RELATION BETWEEN THE VISIT OF THE MAGI, TOGETHER WITH THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT, AND THE PRESENTATION. IN THE TEMPLE RECORDED BY LUKE.

"Thus in any case, they who place the presentation in the temple after the visit of the magi, must also determine to postpone it until after the return from Egypt. But even this arrangement clashes with the evangelical statement; for it requires us to insert, between the birth of Jesus and his presentation in the temple, the following events: the arrival of the magi, the flight into Egypt, the Bethlehem massacre, the death of Herod, and the return of the parents of Jesus out of Egypt—obviously too much to be included in the space of forty days. It must therefore be supposed that the presentation of the child, and the first appearance of the mother in the temple, were procrastinated beyond the time appointed by the law. This expedient, however, runs counter to the narrative of Luke, who expressly says, that the visit to the temple took place at the legal time. But in either case the difficulty is the same; the parents of Jesus could, according to Matthew’s account, as little think of a journey to Jerusalem after their return from Egypt, as immediately previous to their departure thither. For if Joseph, on his return from Egypt, was warned not to enter Judea, because Archelaus was Herod’s successor in that province, he would least of all venture to Jerusalem, the very seat of the redoubted government."

" ... For we are told that Herod’s decree included all the children in Bethlehem up to the age of two years; we must therefore necessarily infer, that even if Herod, to make sure of his object, exceeded the term fixed by the magi, the star had been visible to these astrologers for more than a year. Now the narrator seems to suppose the appearance of the star to have been cotemporary with the birth of Jesus. Viewing the narratives in this order, the parents of Jesus first journeyed from Bethlehem, where the child was born, to Jerusalem, there to present the legal offerings; they next returned to Bethlehem, where (according to Matt. ii. 1 and 5) they were found by the magi; then followed the flight into Egypt, and after the return from thence, the settlement at Nazareth. The first and most urgent question that here suggests itself is this: What had the parents of Jesus to do a second time in Bethlehem, which was not their home, and where their original business connected with the census must surely have been despatched in the space of forty days? ... "

"If, then, the presentation of Jesus in the temple can have taken place neither earlier nor later than the visit of the magi and the flight into Egypt; and if the flight into Egypt can have taken place neither earlier nor later than the presentation in the temple; it is impossible that both these occurrences really happened, and, at the very utmost, only one can be historical."

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38. THE PRESENTATION OF JESUS IN THE TEMPLE.

"The narrative of the presentation of Jesus in the temple (Luke ii. 22) seems, at the first glance, to bear a thoroughly historical stamp. A double law, on the one hand, prescribing to the mother an offering of purification, on the other, requiring the redemption of the first-born son, leads the parents of Jesus to Jerusalem and to the temple. ... "

Strauss discusses contradictions.

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39. RETROSPECT. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MATTHEW AND LUKE AS TO THE ORIGINAL RESIDENCE OF THE PARENTS OP JESUS.

"In the foregoing examinations we have called in question the historical credibility of the Gospel narratives concerning the genealogy, birth, and childhood of Jesus, on two grounds: first, because the narratives taken separately contain much that will not bear an historical interpretation; and secondly, because the parallel narratives of Matthew and Luke exclude each other, so that it is impossible for both to be true, and one must necessarily be false; this imputation however may attach to either, and consequently to both. ... We refer to the divergency that exists between Matthew and Luke, in relation to the original dwelling-place of the parents of Jesus."

Author discusses the different dwelling places of Joseph and Mary, given or assumed in, or inferred from, different sources, and various scholars' interpretations.

" ... Hitherto, however, we have only obtained the negative result, that the evangelical statements, according to which the parents of Jesus lived at first in another place than that in which they subsequently settled, and Jesus was born elsewhere than in the home of his parents, are destitute of any guarantee; we have yet to seek for a positive conclusion by inquiring what was really the place of his birth."

" ... In general, if Jesus were really born in Bethlehem, though but fortuitously (according to Luke’s representation), it is incomprehensible, considering the importance of this fact to the article of his messiahship, that even his own adherents should always call him the Nazarene, instead of opposing to this epithet, pronounced by his opponents with polemical emphasis, the honourable title of the Bethlehemite."

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October 18, 2021 - October 19, 2021.

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CHAPTER V.

THE FIRST VISIT TO THE TEMPLE, AND THE EDUCATION OF JESUS.

§ 40. Jesus, when twelve years old, in the temple

41. This narrative also mythical

42. On the external life of Jesus up to the time of his public appearance

43. The intellectual development of Jesus

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40. JESUS, WHEN TWELVE YEARS OLD, IN THE TEMPLE.

"The Gospel of Matthew passes in silence over the entire period from the return of the parents of Jesus out of Egypt, to the baptism of Jesus by John: and even Luke has nothing to tell us of the long interval between the early childhood of Jesus and his maturity, beyond a single incident—his demeanour on a visit to the temple in his twelfth year. ... "

"In his twelfth year, the period at which, according to Jewish usage, the boy became capable of an independent participation in the sacred rites, the parents of Jesus, as this narrative informs us, took him for the first time to the Passover. At the expiration of the feast, the parents bent their way homewards; that their son was missing gave them no immediate anxiety, because they supposed him to be among their travelling companions, and it was not until after they had accomplished a day’s journey, and in vain sought their son among their kinsfolk and acquaintance, that they turned back to Jerusalem to look for him there. ... "

"Returned to Jerusalem, they find their son on the third day in the temple, doubtless in one of the outer halls, in the midst of an assembly of doctors, engaged in a conversation with them, and exciting universal astonishment. ... "

"The narrative proceeds to tell us how the mother of Jesus reproached her son when she had found him thus, asking him why he had not spared his parents the anguish of their sorrowful search? To this Jesus returns an answer which forms the point of the entire narrative; he asks whether they might not have known that he was to be sought nowhere else than in the house of his Father, in the temple? ... "

" ... The parents of Jesus, or at least Mary, of whom it is repeatedly noticed that she carefully kept in her heart the extraordinary communications concerning her son, ought not to have been in the dark a single moment as [195]to the meaning of his language on this occasion. But even at the presentation in the temple, we are told that the parents of Jesus marvelled at the discourse of Simeon (v. 33), which is merely saying in other words that they did not understand him. And their wonder is not referred to the declaration of Simeon that their boy would be a cause, not only of the rising again, but of the fall of many in Israel, and that a sword would pierce through the heart of his mother (an aspect of his vocation and destiny on which nothing had previously been communicated to the parents of Jesus, and at which therefore they might naturally wonder); for these disclosures are not made by Simeon until after the wonder of the parents, which is caused only by Simeon’s expressions of joy at the sight of the Saviour, who would be the glory of Israel, and a light even to the Gentiles. ... We must therefore draw this conclusion: if the parents of Jesus did not understand these expressions of their son when twelve years old, those earlier communications cannot have happened; or, if the earlier communications really occurred, the subsequent expressions of Jesus cannot have remained incomprehensible to them. ... "

"The twofold form of conclusion, that the mother of Jesus kept all these sayings in her heart (v. 51), and that the boy grew in wisdom and stature, and so forth, we have already recognised as a favourite form of conclusion and transition in the heroic legend of the Hebrews; in particular, that which relates to the growth of the boy is almost verbally parallel with a passage relating to Samuel, as in two former instances similar expressions appeared to have been borrowed from the history of Samson."

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41. THIS NARRATIVE ALSO MYTHICAL.

"According to Jewish custom and opinion, the twelfth year formed an epoch in development to which especial proofs of awakening genius were the rather attached, because in the twelfth year, as with us in the fourteenth, the boy was regarded as having outgrown the period of childhood.25 Accordingly it [197]was believed of Moses that in his twelfth year he left the house of his father, to become an independent organ of the divine revelations. ... "

Wasn't Moses brought up by the daughter of the pharaoh, in the palace of pharaoh, and grew up with Ramses, seen as the next pharaoh until he realised he was a Jew, and chose his people?

Strauss speaks of the Jewish tradition of depicting other great men as having shown their capabilities beginning twelfth year, a Luke's habit of glorifying every stage of Jesus's life. He also discusses other authors who opine that this incident is not as mythified as others.

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42. ON THE EXTERNAL LIFE OF JESUS UP TO THE TIME OF HIS PUBLIC APPEARANCE.

"First, as to his place of residence, all that we learn explicitly is this: that both at the beginning and at the end of this obscure period he dwelt at Nazareth. According to Luke ii. 51, Jesus when twelve years old returned thither with his parents, and according to Matthew iii. 13, Mark i. 9, he, when thirty years old (comp. Luke iii. 23), came from thence to be baptized by John. Thus our evangelists appear to suppose, that Jesus had in the interim resided in Galilee, and, more particularly, in Nazareth. This supposition, however, does not exclude journeys, such as those to the feasts in Jerusalem.

"The employment of Jesus during the years of his boyhood and youth seems, from an intimation in our gospels, to have been determined by the trade of his father, who is there called a τέκτων (Matt. xiii. 55). This Greek word, used to designate the trade of Joseph, is generally understood in the sense of faber [199]lignarius (carpenter); a few only, on mystical grounds, discover in it a faber ferrarius (blacksmith), aurarius (goldsmith), or cæmentarius (mason). ... "

Strauss discusses whether Jesus is considered a carpenter, and what is known about the financial circumstances of the family.

" ... There is only one other particular bearing on the point in question, namely, that Mary presented, as an offering of purification, doves (Luke ii. 24),—according to Lev. xii. 8, the offering of the poor: which certainly proves that the author of this information conceived the parents of Jesus to have been in by no means brilliant circumstances; but what shall assure us that he also was not induced to make this representation by unhistorical motives? ... "

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43. THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS.

"Whether or in what degree Jesus received the learned education of a rabbin, is also left untold in our canonical Gospels. From such passages as Matt. vii. 29, where it is said that Jesus taught not as the scribes, οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς, we can only infer that he did not adopt the method of the doctors of the law, and it does not follow that he had never enjoyed the education of a scribe (γραμματεὺς). On the other hand, not only was Jesus called ῥαββὶ and ῥαββουνὶ by his disciples (Matt. xxvi. 25, 49; Mark ix. 5, xi. 21, xiv. 45; John iv. 31, ix. 2, xi. 8, xx. 16: comp. i. 38, 40, 50), and by supplicating sufferers (Mark x. 5), but even the pharisaic ἄρχων Nicodemus (John iii. 2) did not refuse him this title. We cannot, however, conclude from hence that Jesus had received the scholastic instruction of a rabbin;49 for the salutation Rabbi, as also the privilege of reading in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16 ff.), a particular which has likewise been appealed to, belonged not only to graduated rabbins, but to every teacher who had given actual proof of his qualifications.50 The enemies of Jesus explicitly assert, and he does not contradict them, that he had never learned letters: πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδε μὴ μεμαθηκὼς (John vii. 15); and the Nazarenes are astonished to find so much wisdom in him, whence we infer that he had not to their knowledge been a student. ... Thus the data on our present subject to be found in the Gospels, collectively yield the result that Jesus did not pass formally through a rabbinical school; on the other hand, the consideration that it must have been the interest of the Christian legend to represent Jesus as independent of human teachers, may induce a doubt with respect to these statements in the New Testament, and a conjecture that Jesus may not have been so entirely a stranger to the learned culture of his nation. But from the absence of authentic information we can arrive at no decision on this point."

" ... The Evangelium Thomæ opens with the fifth year of Jesus the story of his miracles,55 and the Arabian Evangelium Infantiæ fills the journey into Egypt with miracles which the mother of Jesus performed by means of the swaddling bands of her infant, and the water in which he was washed.56 Some of the miracles which according to these apocryphal gospels were wrought by Jesus when in his infancy and boyhood, are analogous to those in the New Testament—cures and resuscitations of the dead; others are totally diverse from the ruling type in the canonical Gospels—extremely revolting retributive miracles, by which every one who opposes the boy Jesus in any matter whatever is smitten with lameness, or even with death, or else mere extravagancies, such as the giving of life to sparrows formed out of mud."

So some of the accounts suppressed by church, presumed destroyed, that had in fact survived, were in fact found before twentieth century, and Strauss knew of them, and are those he calls apocryphal?

" ... It is true that in the first centuries of the Christian era, the whole region of spirituality being a supernatural one for heathens as well as Jews, the reproach that Jesus owed his wisdom and seemingly miraculous powers, not to himself or to God, but to a communication from without, could not usually take the form of an assertion that he had acquired natural skill and wisdom in the ordinary way of instruction from others.58 Instead of the natural and the human, the unnatural and the demoniacal were opposed to the divine and the supernatural (comp. Matt xii. 24), and Jesus was accused of working his miracles by the aid of magic acquired in his youth. This charge was the most easily attached to the journey of his parents with him into Egypt, that native land of magic and secret wisdom, and thus we find it both in Celsus and in the Talmud. The former makes a Jew allege against Jesus, amongst other things, that he had entered into service for wages in Egypt, that he had there possessed himself of some magic arts, and on the strength of these had on his return vaunted himself for a God.59 The Talmud gives him a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim as a teacher, makes him journey to Egypt with this companion, and bring magic charms from thence into Palestine. ... "

"In any case, the basis of the intellectual development of Jesus was furnished by the sacred writings of his people, of which the discourses preserved to us in the Gospels attest his zealous and profound study. His Messianic ideas seem to have been formed chiefly on Isaiah and Daniel: spiritual religiousness and elevation above the prejudices of Jewish nationality were impressively shadowed forth in the prophetic writings generally, together with the Psalms."

" ... The concealment of an Essene lodge appeared especially adapted to explain the sudden disappearance of Jesus after the brilliant scenes of his infancy and boyhood, and again after his restoration to life. Besides the forerunner John, the two men on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the angels clothed in white at the grave, and on the Mount of Ascension, were regarded as members of the Essene brotherhood, and many cures of Jesus and the Apostles were referred to the medical traditions of the Essenes. Apart, however, from these fancies of a bygone age, there are really some essential characteristics which seem to speak in favour of an intimate relation between Essenism and Christianity. The most conspicuous as such are the prohibition of oaths, and the community of goods: with the former was connected fidelity, peaceableness, obedience to every constituted authority; with the latter, contempt of riches, and the custom of travelling without provisions. These and other features, such as the sacred meal partaken in common, the rejection of sanguinary sacrifices and of slavery, constitute so strong a resemblance between Essenism and Christianity, that even so early a writer as Eusebius mistook the Therapeutæ, a sect allied to the Essenes, for Christians.65 But there are very essential dissimilarities which must not be overlooked. Leaving out of consideration the contempt of marriage, ὑπεροψία γάμου, since Josephus ascribes it to a part only of the Essenes; the asceticism, the punctilious observance of the Sabbath, the purifications, and other superstitious usages of this sect, their retention of the names of the angels, the mystery which they affected, and their contracted, exclusive devotion [205]to their order, are so foreign, nay so directly opposed to the spirit of Jesus, that, especially as the Essenes are nowhere mentioned in the New Testament, the aid which this sect also contributed to the development of Jesus, must be limited to the uncertain influence which might be exercised over him by occasional intercourse with Essenes."

That latter part that Strauss claims is foreign, is not really - notice the celibacy imposed on priesthood of church of Rome, which no other branch does.

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October 20, 2021 - October 20, 2021.

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SECOND PART.

HISTORY OF THE PUBLIC LIFE OF JESUS.

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CHAPTER I.

RELATIONS BETWEEN JESUS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST.

§ 44. Chronological relations between John and Jesus

45. Appearance and design of the Baptist. His personal relations with Jesus

46. Was Jesus acknowledged by John as the Messiah? and in what sense?

47. Opinion of the evangelists and of Jesus concerning the Baptist, with his own judgment of himself. Result of the inquiry into the relationship between these two individuals

48. The execution of John the Baptist

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44. CHRONOLOGICAL RELATIONS BETWEEN JOHN AND JESUS.

"For the ministry of John the Baptist, mentioned in all the Gospels, the second and fourth evangelists fix no epoch; the first gives us an inexact one; the third, one apparently precise. According to Matt. iii. 1, John appeared as a preacher of repentance, in those days, ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις, that is, if we interpret strictly this reference to the previous narrative, about the time when the parents of Jesus settled at Nazareth, and when Jesus was yet a child. We are told, however, in the context, that Jesus came to John for baptism; hence between the first appearance of the Baptist, which was cotemporary with the childhood of Jesus, and the period at which the latter was baptized, we must intercalate a number of years, during which Jesus might have become sufficiently matured to partake of John’s baptism. But Matthew’s description of the person and work of the Baptist is so concise, the office attributed to him is so little independent, so entirely subservient to that of Jesus, that it was certainly not the intention of the evangelist to assign a long series of years to his single ministry. His meaning incontestably is, that John’s short career early attained its goal in the baptism of Jesus.

"It being thus inadmissible to suppose between the appearance of John and the baptism of Jesus, that is, between verses 12 and 13 of the 3rd chapter of Matthew, the long interval which is in every case indispensable, nothing remains but to insert it between the close of the second and the beginning of the third chapter, namely, between the settlement of the parents of Jesus at Nazareth and the appearance of the Baptist. ... In neither case do we learn from Matthew concerning the time of John’s appearance more than the very vague information, that it took place in the interval between the infancy and manhood of Jesus."

"Luke determines the date of John’s appearance by various synchronisms, placing it in the time of Pilate’s government in Judea; in the sovereignty of Herod (Antipas), of Philip and of Lysanias over the other divisions of Palestine; in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas; and, moreover, precisely in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, which, reckoning from the death of Augustus, corresponds with the year 28–29 of our era ... "

"It is not easy, however, to imagine, in accordance with this statement, that John was by so little the predecessor of Jesus, nor is it without reason that the improbability of his having had so short an agency is maintained. For he had a considerable number of disciples, whom he not only baptized, but taught (Luke xi. 1), and he left behind a party of his peculiar followers (Acts xviii. 25, xix. 3), all which could hardly be the work of a few months. There needed time, it has been observed, for the Baptist to become so well known, that people would undertake a journey to him in the wilderness; there needed time for his doctrine to be comprehended, time for it to gain a footing and establish itself, especially as it clashed with the current Jewish ideas; in a word, the deep and lasting veneration in which John was held by his nation, according to Josephus14 as well as the evangelists, could not have been so hastily won."

"Thus the gospel narrative is an obstacle to the adoption of the two most plausible expedients for the prolongation of John’s ministry, viz., that Jesus presented himself for baptism later, or that his public appearance was retarded longer after his baptism, than has been generally inferred. We are not, however, compelled to renounce either of these suppositions, if we can show that the New Testament writers might have been led to their point of view even without historical grounds. A sufficient motive lies close at hand, and is implied in the foregoing observations. Let the Baptist once be considered, as was the case in the Christian Church (Acts xix. 4), not a person of independent significance, but simply a Forerunner of the Christ; and the imagination would not linger with the mere Precursor, but would hasten forward to the object at which he pointed. Yet more obvious is the interest which primitive Christian tradition must have had in excluding, whatever might have been the fact, any interval between the baptism of Jesus and the beginning of his public course. For to allow that Jesus, by his submission to John’s baptism, declared himself his disciple, and remained in that relation for any length of time, was offensive to the religious sentiment of the new church, which desired a Founder instructed by God, and not by man: another turn, therefore, would soon be given to the facts, and the baptism of Jesus would be held to signify, not his initiation into the school of John, but a consecration to his independent office. Thus the diverging testimony of the evangelists does not preclude our adopting the conclusion to which the nature of the case leads us; viz., that the Baptist had been long labouring, anterior to the appearance of Jesus.

But the age gap confirmed as a consequence of the visit by Mary to Elizabeth scene, amounts to the years of disciplehood of Jesus to John, doesn't It?

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45. APPEARANCE AND DESIGN OF THE BAPTIST-HIS PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH JESUS.

"John, a Nazarite, according to our authorities (Matt. iii. 4, ix. 14, xi. 18; Luke i. 15), and in the opinion of several theologians,17 an Essene, is said by Luke (iii. 2) to have been summoned to his public work by the word of God ῥῆμα Θεοῦ, which came to him in the wilderness. Not possessing the Baptist’s own declaration, we cannot accept as complete the dilemma stated by Paulus,18 when he says, that we know not whether John himself interpreted some external or internal fact as a divine call, or whether he received a summons from another individual; and we must add as a third possibility, that his followers sought to dignify the vocation of their Teacher by an expression which recalls to mind the ancient Prophets."

At some point one has to ask why different responses are accorded to various events and acts, depending on who was inbolved; is it due to subconscious bowing to authority of church, aided by memories of centuries of inquisition that followed subjugation of Jews by Rome ending some time after the supposed crucifixion? Supposed, because research since then doubts the official tale told by Rome.

"While from the account of Luke it appears that the divine call came to John in the wilderness, ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ, but that for the purpose of teaching and baptizing he resorted to the country about Jordan, περίχωρος τοῦ Ἰορδάνου (ver. 3); Matthew (iii. ff.) makes the wilderness of Judea the scene of his labours, as if the Jordan in which he baptized flowed through that wilderness. It is true that, according to Josephus, the Jordan before emptying itself into the Dead Sea traverses a great wilderness, πολλὴν ἐρημίαν,19 but this was not the wilderness of Judea, which lay farther south.20 Hence it has been supposed that Matthew, misled by his application of the prophecy, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ, to John, who issued from the wilderness of Judea, ἔρημος τῆς Ἰουδαίας, placed there his labours as a preacher of repentance and a baptizer, although their true scene was the blooming valley of the Jordan.21 In the course of Luke’s narrative, however, this evangelist ceases to intimate that John forsook the wilderness after receiving his call, for on the occasion of John’s message to Jesus, he makes the latter ask, Whom went ye out into the wilderness to see? Τί ἐξεληλύθατε εἰς τὴν ἔρημον θεάσασθαι (vii. 24). Now as the valley of the Jordan in the vicinity of the Dead Sea was in fact a barren plain, the narrow margin of the river excepted, no greater mistake may belong to Matthew than that of specifying the wilderness as the ἔρημος τῆς Ἰουδαίας; and even that may be explained away by the supposition, either that John, as he alternately preached and baptized, passed from the wilderness of Judea to the borders [215]of the Jordan,22 or that the waste tract through which that river flowed, being a continuation of the wilderness of Judea, retained the same name.

"The baptism of John could scarcely have been derived from the baptism of proselytes,24 for this rite was unquestionably posterior to the rise of Christianity. It was more analogous to the religious lustrations in practice amongst the Jews, especially the Essenes, and was apparently founded chiefly on certain expressions used by several of the prophets in a figurative sense, but afterwards understood literally. According to these expressions, God requires from the Israelitish people, as a condition of their restoration to his favour, a washing and purification from their iniquity, and he promises that he will himself cleanse them with water (Isaiah i. 16, Ez. xxxvi. 25, comp. Jer. ii. 22). Add to this the Jewish notion that the Messiah would not appear with his kingdom until the Israelites repented, and we have the combination necessary for the belief that an ablution, symbolical of conversion and forgiveness of sins, must precede the advent of the Messiah."

"Matthew has not the same addition; but he, with Mark, describes the baptized as confessing their sins, ἐξομολογοὺμενοι τὰς ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν (iii. 6). Josephus, on the other hand, appears in direct contradiction to them, when he gives it as the opinion of the Baptist, that baptism is pleasing to God, not when we ask pardon for some transgressions, but when we purify the body, after having first purified the mind by righteousness ... Moreover, it is possible to reconcile Josephus and the Evangelists, by understanding the words of the former to mean that the baptism of John was intended to effect a purification, not from particular or merely Levitical transgressions, but of the entire man, not immediately and mysteriously through the agency of water, but by means of the moral acts of reformation."

" ... moreover, the appearance of Jesus is made more comprehensible by the supposition, that John had introduced the idea of the proximity of the Messiah’s kingdom. That Josephus should keep back the Messianic aspect of the fact, is in accordance with his general practice, which is explained by the position of his people with respect to the Romans. Besides, in the expression, to assemble for baptism, βαπτισμῷ συνιέναι, in his mention of popular assemblages, συστρέφεσθαι, and in the fear of Antipas lest John should excite a revolt, ἀπόστασις there lies an intimation of precisely such a religious and political movement as the hope of the Messiah was calculated to produce. ... In those times of commotion, John might easily believe that he discerned signs, which certified to him the proximity of the Messiah’s kingdom; the exact degree of its proximity he left undecided.

"According to the Evangelists, the coming of the kingdom of heaven, βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν, was associated by John with a Messianic individual to whom he ascribed, in distinction from his own baptism with water, a baptism with the Holy Ghost and with fire, βαπτίζειν πνεύματι ἁγίῳ καὶ πυρὶ (Matt. iii. 11 parall.), the outpouring of the Holy Spirit being regarded as a leading feature of the Messianic times (Joel ii. 28; Acts ii. 16 ff.). ... By Luke, the previous acquaintance of the two is stated objectively, as an external matter of fact; by Matthew, it is betrayed in the involuntary confession of the astonished Baptist; in the fourth Gospel, on the contrary, their previous unacquaintance is attested subjectively, by his premeditated assertion. It was not, therefore, a very far-fetched idea of the Wolfenbüttel fragmentist, to put down the contradiction to the account of John and Jesus, and to presume that they had in fact long known and consulted each other, but that in public (in order better to play into one another’s hands) they demeaned themselves as if they had hitherto been mutual strangers, and each delivered an unbiassed testimony to the other’s excellence."

Not only at the outset, but increasingly, a factor that comes to fore is the paucity in church variety of monotheism.

Over and over, Strauss misses the opportunity to suspect who might be responsible for the discrepancies, to the extent of major outright fabrication and lies.

There he missed a possibility.

And now again, due chiefly to attitude towards Jewish sources, imposed painstakingly by church through centuries culminating in inquisition.

"All is naturally explained by the consideration, that the important relation between John and Jesus must have been regarded as existing at all times, by reason of that ascription of pre-existence to the essential which is a characteristic of the popular mind. Just as the soul, when considered as an essence, is conceived more or less clearly as pre-existent; so in the popular mind, every relation pregnant with consequences is endowed with pre-existence. Hence the Baptist, who eventually held so significant a relation to Jesus, must have known him from the first, as is indistinctly intimated by Matthew, and more minutely detailed by Luke; according to whom, their mothers knew each other, and the sons themselves were brought together while yet unborn. All this is wanting in the fourth Gospel, the writer of which attributes an opposite assertion to John, simply because in his mind an opposite interest preponderated; for the less Jesus was known to John by whom he was afterwards so extolled, the more weight was thrown on the miraculous scene which arrested the regards of the Baptist—the more clearly was his whole position with respect to Jesus demonstrated to be the effect, not of the natural order of events, but of the immediate agency of God."

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46. WAS JESUS ACKNOWLEDGED BY JOHN AS THE MESSIAH? AND IN WHAT SENSE ?

"To the foregoing question whether Jesus was known to John before the baptism, is attached another, namely, What did John think of Jesus and his Messiahship? The evangelical narratives are unanimous in stating, that before Jesus had presented himself for baptism, John had announced the immediate coming of One to whom he stood in a subordinate relation; and the scene at the baptism of Jesus marked him, beyond mistake, as the personage of whom John was the forerunner. According to Mark and Luke, we must presume that the Baptist gave credence to this sign; according to the fourth Gospel, he expressly attested his belief (i. 34), and moreover uttered words which evince the deepest insight into the higher nature and office of Jesus (i. 29 ff. 36; iii. 27 ff.); according to the first Gospel, he was already convinced of these before the baptism of Jesus. On the other hand, Matthew (xi. 2 ff.) and Luke (vii. 18 ff.) tell us that at a later period, the Baptist, on hearing of the ministry of Jesus, despatched some of his disciples to him with the inquiry, whether he (Jesus) was the promised Messiah, or whether another must be expected.

"The first impression from this is, that the question denoted an uncertainty on the part of the Baptist whether Jesus were really the Messiah; and so it was early understood.37 But such a doubt is in direct contradiction with all the other circumstances reported by the Evangelists. It is justly regarded as [220]psychologically impossible that he whose belief was originated or confirmed by the baptismal sign, which he held to be a divine revelation, and who afterwards pronounced so decidedly on the Messianic call and the superior nature of Jesus, should all at once have become unsteady in his conviction; ... "

It doesn't occur to Strauss that knowledge of soul might not convey photographic image of body or face, and other details of earthly identity, any more than a correspondence between two people who never met can automatically inform each how the other smells, snores, or walks.

" ... Lastly, how could Jesus subsequently (John v. 33 ff.) so confidently appeal to the testimony of the Baptist concerning him, when it was known that John himself was at last perplexed about his Messiahship?"

If, by that time the two had met, then the mutual knowledge of souls must have added to itself the worldly level acquaintance of name, face, personal identities and more; Strauss is thinking in direction opposite, and missing it.

" ... the time which Jesus allowed to escape without publicly manifesting himself as the Messiah, seemed too tedious to John in his imprisonment; he sent therefore to inquire how long Jesus would allow himself to be waited for, how long he would delay winning to himself the better part of the people by a declaration of his Messiahship, and striking a decisive blow against the enemies of his cause—a blow that might even liberate the Baptist from his prison. But if the Baptist, on the strength of his belief that Jesus was the Messiah, hoped and sued for a deliverance, perhaps miraculous, by him from prison, he would not clothe in the language of doubt an entreaty which sprang out of his faith. ... "

It's perplexing why, on one hand Strauss neither refutes the stature of the two nor dares to call church authorities liars, and on the other hand presumes to criticise, not persona authorised by church, but the very fountainhead of the supposed faith, the two supposed great men, the messiah and his forerunner and cousin.

How and why each had doubts when in peril us a function of the mortal body and the human persona, even if the divinity of either is true and not a complete lie; else why would Divine in human body suffer, not only pains and bleeding, but the whole crucifixion, or even being caught by the cohort?

Was, is, divine power short of ability to fly over heads of romans, and selectively paralyse them and force them to hear the divine?

No, it's that church, if it understood anything at all, ever, preferred to mete out only the very least, mixed with huge lies and much ignorance, so as to be able to impose it's power the better, through comparatively ignorant priests who were needed to only know mininal and merey impress and control the populace as agents.

" ... If he still, as formerly, conceived Jesus to be the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ Τεοῦ, ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμοῦ, no thought could occur to him of a blow to be struck by Jesus against his enemies, or in general, of a violent procedure to be crowned by external conquest; rather, the quiet path which Jesus trod must appear to him the right one—the path befitting the destination of the Lamb of God. ... "

This whole concept belongs to primitive cultures that believed in "sacrifice", the idea that one can offer life of an animal or human to please a god, and here was used to cover up guilt of Rome by claiming that divine offered oneself or a son for the purpose, and then extending this sacrifice concept to whole of humanity for ever.

If there were any truth in it, why were animals not covered by the mercy of Divine, why did it remain permissible to slaughter and consume, or throw away if not consumed when slaughter was in huge quantities not required, various fowl and fauna, not to mention sea creatures, so much so very life on earth is in peril? Why not offer another way, sustainable, and prohibit slaughter of life in most cases, including human?

Why allow genocide and with blessings of the supposedly sole agency of god too, as in Vatican helping nazis escape post WWII, including war criminals of a degree one can only be horrified and disgusted with? Or was the genocide, of relatives of a son of god, also sacrifice of lambs, to forgive those perpetrators who were responsible, of that very guilt?

" ... This writer seeks to account for the transient apostacy of the Baptist from the strong faith in which he gave his earlier testimony, by the supposition that a dark hour of doubt had overtaken the man of God in his dismal prison; and he cites instances of men who, persecuted for their Christian faith or other convictions, after having long borne witness to the truth in the face of death, at length yielded to human weakness and recanted. ... "

This is idiotic!

Doesn't Strauss understand that such recantation under duress might be a lie, and might have no value? No, apparently not!

" ... But on a closer examination, he has given a false analogy. Persecuted Christians of the first centuries, and, later, a Berengarius or a Galileo, were false to the convictions for which they were imprisoned, and by abjuring which they hoped to save themselves: the Baptist, to be compared with them, should have retracted his censure of Herod, and not have shaken his testimony in favour of Christ, which had no relation to his imprisonment. ... "

On the contrary, the latter is being honest to his opinion, and wouldn't lie against what he is convinced of, but questions if divine grace and a saviour are really at hand, if his faith in a man being the messiah is correct, if there is a messiah yet; this is but natural of an honest man under the circumstances. And he was executed, too; so it was his doubt that was justified, if one goes by the simplistic logic, and understanding of faith, that is apparent in church teachings and critique by Strauss.

" ... It might then be conceived, that John had indeed been convinced, at a former period, of the Messiahship o£ Jesus; now, however, in his imprisonment, the works of Jesus came no longer to his ears, and imagining him inactive, he was assailed with doubt. But had John been previously satisfied of the Messiahship of Jesus, the mere want of acquaintance with his miracles could not have unhinged his faith. The actual cause of John’s doubt, however, was the report of these miracles;—a state of the case which is irreconcilable with any previous confidence."

No, it was his own travails he questioned, since he believed he did not deserve them. And again, it's most natural.

" ... The Baptist, he thinks, held the popular Jewish notion of the pre-existence of the Messiah, as the subject of the Old Testament theophanies.51 There are traces of this Jewish notion in the writings of Paul (e.g. 1 Cor. x. 4. Col. i. 15 f.) and the rabbins52; and allowing that it was of Alexandrian origin, as Bretschneider argues,53 we may yet ask whether even before the time of Christ, the Alexandrian-judaic theology may not have modified the opinions of the mother country? ... "

Strauss also should have kept in mind that while most of the accounts available to him were sanctioned by church, none, including that of John the Baptist, were likely to have been surviving and independent, especially after inquisition.

"Now if we do not choose to defy the clear rules of grammar, and the sure data of history, for the sake of the visionary dogma of inspiration, we shall rather conclude from the given premises, with the author of the Probabilia, that the Evangelist falsely ascribes the language in question to the Baptist, putting into his mouth a Christology of his own, of which the latter could know nothing. This is no more than Lücke60 confesses, though not quite so frankly, when he says that the reflections of the Evangelist are here more than equally mixed with the discourse of the Baptist, in such a way as to be undistinguishable. In point of fact, however, the reflections of the Evangelist are easily to be recognized; but of the fundamental ideas of the Baptist there is no trace, unless they are sought for with a good will which amounts to prejudice, and to which therefore we make no pretension. If then we have a proof in the passages just considered, that the fourth Evangelist did not hesitate to lend to the Baptist messianic and other ideas which were never his; we may hence conclude retrospectively [226]concerning the passages on which we formerly suspended our decision, that the ideas expressed in them of a suffering and pre-existent Messiah belonged, not to the Baptist, but to the Evangelist."

Strauss questions why John continued baptizing if he believed Jesus was the messiah.

" ... we find the party of John’s disciples still existing in the time of the Apostle Paul (Acts xviii. 24 f., xix. 1 ff.); and, if the Sabæans are to be credited concerning their own history, the sect remains to this day."

This is monotheism carried to such extremes as to make one question why there are any other churches within ten Mike's of the Vatican now, and why the pope wouldn't visit every church once in a year - limiting numbers to one church per large city - and wipe out need of another church priest!

Why assume that ascetic is lesser, and incapable of comprehending the non ascetic?

" ... The instance would be a solitary one, if a man whose life had its influence on the world’s history, had so readily yielded the ascendant, in his own æra, to one who came to eclipse him and render him superfluous. ... "

And this ignorance, that such instances are not unique, again is the effect of racism and other attitudes of West that fail to see truth due to blinkers, quite on par with flatearthers of today who hold conferences in U.K. and declare Australia a conspiracy and non existent in fact!

" ... Such a step is not less difficult for individuals than for nations, and that not from any vice, as egotism or ambition, so that an exception might be presumed (though not without prejudice) in the case of a man like the Baptist; it is a consequence of that blameless limitation which, as we have already remarked, is proper to a low point of view in relation to a higher, and which is all the more obstinately maintained if the inferior individual is, like John, of a coarse, rugged nature. Only from the divine point of view, or from that of an historian, bent on establishing religious doctrines, could such things be spoken, and the fourth Evangelist has in fact put into the mouth of the Baptist the very same thoughts concerning the relation between him and Jesus, that the compiler of the 2nd book of Samuel has communicated, as his own observation, on the corresponding relation between Saul and David. Competent judges have recently acknowledged that there exists a discrepancy between the synoptical gospels and the fourth, the blame of which must be imputed to the latter: and this opinion is confirmed and strengthened by the fact that the fourth Evangelist transforms the Baptist into a totally different character from that in which he appears in the Synoptical gospels and in Josephus; out of a practical preacher he makes a speculative christologist; out of a hard and unbending, a yielding and self-renunciating nature."

Strauss, perhaps West, seems to think of the two as akin to iron and rubber! Human beings are more complex, and grest ones far wider in consciousness, even as normal human sees earth flat and a vista of one's vision limited to a few miles, but truth is far vaster.

Normal humans might, do, show the tendency Strauss speaks of - a farmer, for example, or an ironmonger, most likely couldn't comprehend work done by Strauss, and would think all writers are merely playing with paper because they can afford it (and in West, they'd be right too!), but Newton and a Kepler, an Einstein and a Bohr could certainly see one another's worth, and appreciate one another.

When one transcends from realm of mind to higher, this must be more so.

" ... Jesus had approved himself to a great number of his cotemporaries, as the Messiah announced by John. There was but a step to the notion that the Baptist himself had, under the ἐρχόμενος, understood the individual Jesus,—had himself the τουτέστιν, κ.τ.λ. in his mind; a view which, however unhistorical, would be inviting to the early Christians, in proportion to their wish to sustain the dignity of Jesus by the authority of the Baptist, then very influential in the Jewish world. There was yet another reason, gathered from the Old Testament. The ancestor of the Messiah, David, had likewise in the old Hebrew legend a kind of forerunner in the person of Samuel, who by order from Jehovah anointed him to be king over Israel (1 Sam. xvi.), and afterwards stood in the relation of a witness to his claims. If then it behoved the Messiah to have a forerunner, who, besides, was more closely characterized in the prophecy of Malachi as a second Elias, and if, historically, Jesus was [229]preceded by John, whose baptism as a consecration corresponded to an anointing; the idea was not remote of conforming the relation between John and Jesus to that between Samuel and David."

So, to sum up, John who was senior, had announced a messiah, but not identified him as Jesus, who was among his disciples; Jesus announced himself as the one; and then, when Paul was in prison, expecting perhaps execution, he questioned if Jesus really was the one, and if so, why was he, John, suffering? Most natural, and in fact, a precursor of the supposed "why hast thou forsaken me" cry from Jesus on cross!

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47. OPINION OF THE EVANGELISTS AND JESUS CONCERNING THE BAPTIST, WITH HIS OWN JUDGMENT ON HIMSELF--RESULT OF THE INQUIKY INTO THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THESE TWO

"The abode of the preacher of repentance in the wilderness, his activity in preparing the way for the Messiah, necessarily recalled the passage of Isaiah (xl. 3ff. LXX.): φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν ἐρήμῳ· ἑτοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν Κυρίῳ κ.τ.λ. This passage, which in its original connection related not to the Messiah and his forerunner, but to Jehovah, for whom a way was to be prepared through [231]the wilderness toward Judea, that he might return with his people from exile, is quoted by the first three Evangelists as a prophecy fulfilled by the appearance of the Baptist (Matt. iii. 3; Mark i. 3; Luke iii. 4 ff.). This might be thought a later and Christian application, but there is nothing to controvert the statement of the fourth Evangelist, that the Baptist had himself characterized his destination by those prophetic words."

This implies, before all else, that Jehovah isn't the ultimate Divine but a god amongst many; else talk about his entrance into Judea makes even less sense than that about his people, his anger, and his being a jealous god.

" ... In Luke, and still more decidedly in John, this whole scene is introduced [232]with a design to establish the Messiahship of Jesus, by showing that the Baptist had renounced that dignity, and attributed it to one who should come after him. ... But that the Sanhedrim should send from Jerusalem to John on the banks of the Jordan, for the sake of asking him whether he were the Messiah, seems less natural. Their object could only be what, on a later occasion, it was with respect to Jesus (Matt. xxi. 23 ff.), namely, to challenge the authority of John to baptize, as appears from v. 25. Moreover, from the hostile position which John had taken towards the sects of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matt. iii. 7), to whom the members of the Sanhedrim belonged, they must have prejudged that he was not the Messiah, nor a prophet, and consequently, that he had no right to undertake a βάπτισμα. But in that case, they could not possibly have so put their questions as they are reported to have done in the fourth gospel. In the passage from Mathew above cited, they asked Jesus, quite consistently with their impression that he had no prophetic authority: ἐν ποίᾳ ἐξουσίᾳ ταῦτα ποιεῖς; By what authority doest thou these things? but in John, they question the Baptist precisely as if they pre-supposed him to be the Messiah, and when he, apparently to their consternation, has denied this, they tender him successively the dignities of Elias, and of another prophetic forerunner, as if they earnestly wished him to accept one of these titles. Searching opponents will not thus thrust the highest honours on the man to whom they are inimical;—this is the representation of a narrator who wishes to exhibit the modesty of the man, and his subordination to Jesus, by his rejection of those brilliant titles."

"The judgment of Jesus on the character of John is delivered on two occasions in the synoptical gospels; first after the departure of John’s messengers (Matt xi. 7 ff.); secondly, after the appearance of Elias at the transfiguration (Matt. xvii. 12 ff.), in reply to the question of a disciple. In the fourth gospel, after an appeal to the Baptist’s testimony, Jesus pronounces an eulogium on him in the presence of the Jews (v. 35), after referring, as above remarked, to their sending to John. In this passage he calls the Baptist a burning and a shining light, in whose beams the fickle people were for a season willing to rejoice. In one synoptical passage, he declares John to be the promised Elias; in the other, there are three points to be distinguished. First, with respect to the character and agency of John,—the severity and firmness of his mind, and the pre-eminence which as the messianic forerunner, who with forcible hand had opened the kingdom of heaven, he maintained even over the prophets, are extolled (v. 7–14); secondly, in relation to Jesus and the citizens of the kingdom of heaven, the Baptist, though exalted above all the members of the Old Testament economy, is declared to be in the rear of every one on whom, through Jesus, the new light had arisen (v. 11). We see how Jesus understood this from what follows (v. 18), when we compare it with Matt. ix. 16 f. In the former passage Jesus describes John as μήτε ἐσθίων μήτε πίνων, neither eating nor drinking; and in the latter it is this very asceticism which is said to liken him to the ἱματίοις and ἀσκοῖς παλαιοῖς, the old garments and old bottles, with which the new, introduced by Jesus, will not agree. What else then could it be, in which the Baptist was beneath the children of the kingdom of Jesus, but (in connexion with his non-recognition or only qualified acknowledgment of Jesus as Messiah) the spirit of external observance, which still clung to fasting and similar works, and his gloomy asceticism? And, in truth, freedom from these is the test of transition from a religion of bondage, to one of liberty and spirituality. ... "

And yet, church of Rome has had followers observe Friday's without red meat (which is why Germans invented maulteacher, to hide their consumption of it); and Lent is supposed to be observed, a matter of forty days of ascetic penance; then there are sects in Italy, in close relationship with church of Rome, who indulge in flagallating and more! What with a priesthood supposed to observe celibacy, which they really are unable to and so they victimise children, how much more do they have do to be termed ascetic? Surely wine consumption does not make up for all this, but only makes it worse!

" ... This much seems to be historical: that Jesus, attracted by the fame of the Baptist, put himself under the tuition of that preacher, and that having remained some time among his followers, and been initiated into his ideas of the approaching messianic kingdom, he, after the imprisonment of John, carried on, under certain modifications, the same work, never ceasing, even when he had far surpassed his predecessor, to render him due homage.

"The first addition to this in the Christian legend, was, that John had taken approving notice of Jesus. During his public ministry, it was known that he had only indefinitely referred to one coming after him; but it behoved him, [234]at least in a conjectural way, to point out Jesus personally, as that successor. To this it was thought he might have been moved by the fame of the works of Jesus, which, loud as it was, might even penetrate the walls of his prison. Then was formed Matthew’s narrative of the message from prison; the first modest attempt to make the Baptist a witness for Jesus, and hence clothed in an interrogation, because a categorical testimony was too unprecedented.

"But this late and qualified testimony was not enough. It was a late one, for prior to it there was the baptism which Jesus received from John, and by which he, in a certain degree, placed himself in subordination to the Baptist; hence those scenes in Luke, by which the Baptist was placed, even before his birth, in a subservient relation to Jesus."

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48. THE EXECUTION OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.

" ... According to the unanimous testimony of the synoptical Evangelists and Josephus,80 he was executed, after a protracted imprisonment, by order of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee; and in the New Testament accounts he is said to have been beheaded."

Did Rome ever stop being barbarian, despite claiming being a civilisation superior to rest of the world? Judging by inquisition, and the beating to death that Matteotti received when he spoke in opposition to the then emerging fascism, not until recently, if that. Questionable, going by the sheltering of bishops known to have raped nuns, with throwing the victims out, and protecting the hundreds of paedophile clergymen that is practised by Vatican, with so little hue and cry in media, one would be natural inferring that the world expected no better.

"But Josephus and the Evangelists are at variance as to the cause of his imprisonment and execution. According to the latter, the censure which John had pronounced on the marriage of Herod with his (half) brother’s81 wife, was the cause of his imprisonment, and the revengeful cunning of Herodias, at a court festival, of his death: Josephus gives the fear of disturbances, which was awakened in Herod by the formidable train of the Baptist’s followers, as the cause at once of the imprisonment and the execution. ... "

Strange, that those who disapprove of marriage between a couple related previously by marriage of one to sibling of other, despite the said sibling being no longer alive, nevertheless take it as routine when first cousins marry one another! Isn't a cousin more of a blood relative than someone previouslymarried to a sibling now no longer alive?

" ... Mark’s representation of the relation between Herod and the Baptist differs essentially from that of Matthew. While according to the latter, Herod wished to kill John, but was withheld by his dread of the people, who looked on the Baptist as a prophet (v. 5); according to Mark, it was Herodias who conspired against his life, but could not attain her object, because her husband was in awe of John as a holy man, sometimes heard him gladly, and not seldom followed his counsel (v. 19).86 Here, again, the individualizing characteristic of Mark’s narrative has induced commentators to prefer it to that of Matthew. ... "

Convenient, blaming it on a woman, coming from abrahmic cultures! Or should one blame Rome, not yet so abrahmic?

" ... How near lay the temptation to exalt the Baptist, by representing the prince against whom he had spoken, and by whom he was imprisoned, as feeling bound to venerate him, and only, to his remorse, seduced into giving his death-warrant, by his vindictive wife! It may be added, that the account of Matthew is not inconsistent with the character of Antipas, as gathered from other sources."

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October 20, 2021 - October 21, 2021.

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CHAPTER II.

BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION OF JESUS.

§ 49. Why did Jesus receive baptism from John?

50. The scene at the baptism of Jesus considered as supernatural, and as natural

51. An attempt at a criticism and mythical interpretation of the narratives

52. Relation of the supernatural at the baptism of Jesus to the supernatural in his conception

53. Place and time of the temptation of Jesus. Divergencies of the evangelists on this subject

54. The history of the temptation conceived in the sense of the evangelists

55. The temptation considered as a natural occurrence either internal or external; and also as a parable

56. The history of the temptation as a mythus

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49. WHY DID JESUS RECEIVE BAPTISM FEOM JOHN?

Strauss begins by discussing this in earnest, as if it were about a school teacher sitting in class while a ten year old taught; but even in that context, most geniuses did learn in school, even though often astounded their teachers. One may as well ask why the messiah had to be born the human way, especially since all abrahmic faiths abhor it; but short of an appearance as a fully grown human that nobody saw anywhere before, there is hardly another option for divine to appear in human form.

Strauss is taking forever to conclude, even realise, that Rome wove a story around a real man who was king of Jews and protested yoke of Rome, for which he was executed like his predecessor John, and hundreds of others were, by Rome.

" ... In the Gospel of the Hebrews, adopted by the Nazarenes, Jesus asks his mother and brother, when invited by them to receive John’s baptism, wherein he had sinned, that this baptism was needful for him? and an heretical apocryphal work appears to have attributed to Jesus a confession of his own sins at his baptism."

"The sum of what modern theologians have contributed towards the removal of this difficulty, consists in the application to Jesus of the distinction between what a man is as an individual, and what he is as a member of the community. He needed, say they, no repentance on his own behalf, but, aware of its necessity for all other men, the children of Abraham not [239]excepted, he wished to demonstrate his approval of an institute which confirmed this truth, and hence he submitted to it. But let the reader only take a nearer view of the facts. According to Matt. iii. 6, John appears to have required a confession of sins previous to baptism; such a confession Jesus, presupposing his impeccability, could not deliver without falsehood; if he refused, John would hardly baptize him, for he did not yet believe him to be the Messiah, and from every other Israelite he must have considered a confession of sins indispensable. The non-compliance of Jesus might very probably originate the dispute to which Matthew gives a wholly different character; but certainly, if the refusal of John had such a cause, the matter could scarcely have been adjusted by a mere suffer it to be so now, for no confession being given, the Baptist would not have perceived that all righteousness was fulfilled. Even supposing that a confession was not required of every baptized person, John would not conclude the ceremony of baptism without addressing the neophyte on the subject of repentance. Could Jesus tacitly sanction such an address to himself, when conscious that he needed no regeneration? and would he not, in so doing, perplex the minds which were afterwards to believe in him as the sinless one? ... "

It's almost caste system of West! No one else can get away with it, even new born babies are considered not free of sin by church, and yet here supposed intellectual are debating how the one person could truthfully say he had never sinned!

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50. THE SCENE AT THE BAPTISM OF JESUS CONSIDERED AS SUPERNATURAL AND AS NATURAL.

"At the moment that John had completed his baptism of Jesus, the synoptical gospels tell us that the heavens were opened, the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in the form of a dove, and a voice from heaven designated him the Son of God, in whom the Father was well pleased. The fourth Evangelist (i. 32 ff.) makes the Baptist narrate that he saw the Holy Spirit descend like a dove, and remain on Jesus; but as in the immediate context John says of his baptism, that it was destined for the manifestation of the Messiah, and as the description of the descending dove corresponds almost verbally with the synoptical accounts, it is not to be doubted that the same event is intended. The old and lost Gospels of Justin and the Ebionites give, as concomitants, a heavenly light, and a flame bursting out of the Jordan;6 in the dove and heavenly voice also, they have alterations, hereafter to be [240]noticed. ... "

" ... First, that for the appearance of a divine being on earth, the visible heavens must divide themselves, to allow of his descent from his accustomed seat, is an idea that can have no objective reality, but must be the entirely subjective creation of a time when the dwelling-place of Deity was imagined to be above the vault of heaven. Further, how is it reconcilable with the true idea of the Holy Spirit as the divine, all-pervading Power, that he should move from one place to another, like a finite being, and embody himself in the form of a dove? Finally, that God should utter articulate tones in a national idiom, has been justly held extravagant."

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51. AN ATTEMPT AT A CRITICISM AND MYTHICAL IXTEEPKETATION OF THE NAREATIVES.

" ... From the narrative of John, as the pure source, it is sought to derive the synoptical accounts, as turbid streams. In the former, it is said, there is no opening heaven, no heavenly voice; only the descent of the Spirit is, as had been promised, a divine witness to John that Jesus is the Messiah; but in what manner the Baptist perceived that the Spirit rested on Jesus, he does not tell us, and possibly the only sign may have been the discourse of Jesus."

" ... Usteri, indeed, thinks [243]that the Baptist mentioned the dove, merely as a figure, to denote the gentle, mild spirit which he had observed in Jesus. But had this been all, he would rather have compared Jesus himself to a dove, as on another occasion he did to a lamb, than have suggested the idea of a sensible appearance by the picturesque description, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove. It is therefore not true in relation to the dove, that first in the more remote tradition given by the synoptical writers, what was originally figurative, was received in a literal sense; for in this sense it is understood by John, and if he have the correct account, the Baptist himself must have spoken of a visible dove-like appearance, as Bleek, Neander, and others, acknowledge."

" ... In the Old Testament, and even in the New (Acts ii. 3), fire is the principal symbol of the Holy Spirit; but it by no means follows that other sensible objects were not similarly used. In an important passage of the Old Testament (Gen. i. 2), the Spirit of God is described as hovering (‏מְרַחֶפֶת‎), a word which suggests, as its sensible representation, the movement [245]of a bird, rather than of fire. Thus the expression ‏רָחַף‎, Deut. xxxii. 11, is used of the hovering of a bird over its young. But the imagination could not be satisfied with the general figure of a bird; it must have a specific image, and everything led to the choice of the dove.

"In the East, and especially in Syria, the dove is a sacred bird,22 and it is so for a reason which almost necessitated its association with the Spirit moving on the face of the primitive waters (Gen. i. 2). The brooding dove was a symbol of the quickening warmth of nature;23 it thus perfectly represented the function which, in the Mosaic cosmogony, is ascribed to the Spirit of God,—the calling forth of the world of life from the chaos of the first creation. Moreover, when the earth was a second time covered with water, it is a dove, sent by Noah, which hovers over its waves, and which, by plucking an olive leaf, and at length finally disappearing, announces the renewed possibility of living on the earth. Who then can wonder that in Jewish writings, the Spirit hovering over the primeval waters is expressly compared to a dove,24 and that, apart from the narrative under examination, the dove is taken as a symbol of the Holy Spirit?25 How near to this lay the association of the hovering dove with the Messiah, on whom the dove-like spirit was to descend, is evident, without our having recourse to the Jewish writings, which designate the Spirit hovering over the waters, Gen. i. 2, as the Spirit of the Messiah,26 and also connect with him its emblem, the Noachian dove. ... "

" ... Fritzsche seems not disinclined to the affirmative, for he leaves it undecided whether the first Christians knew historically, or only supposed, in conformity with their messianic expectations, that Jesus was consecrated to his messianic office by John, as his forerunner. This view may be supported by the observation, that in the Jewish expectation, which originated in the history of David, combined with the prophecy of Malachi, there was adequate inducement to assume such a consecration of Jesus by the Baptist, even without historical warrant; and the mention of John’s baptism in relation to Jesus (Acts i. 22), in a narrative, itself traditional, proves nothing to the contrary. Yet, on the other hand, it is to be considered that the baptism of Jesus by John furnishes the most natural basis for an explanation of the messianic project of Jesus. When we have two cotemporaries, of whom one announces the proximity of the Messiah’s kingdom, and the other subsequently assumes the character of Messiah; the conjecture arises, even, without positive information, that they stood in a relation to each other—that the latter owed his idea to the former. If Jesus had the messianic idea excited in him by John, yet, as is natural, only so far that he also looked forward to the advent of the messianic individual, whom he did not, in the first instance, identify with himself; he would most likely submit himself to the baptism of John. This would probably take place without any striking occurrences; and Jesus, in no way announced by it as the Baptist’s superior, might, as above remarked, continue for some time to demean himself as his disciple."

Demean himself????

How does Strauss hop from rational and critical, to suddenly so very virulently, militantly, fanatically, adhering to church insistence about this, as to think a young man demeans himself when he is submitting to a religious ritual he'd no reason not to?

" ... This difference originated partly in the importance which the fourth Evangelist attached to the relation between the Baptist and Jesus, and which required that the criteria of the messianic individual, as well as the proximity of his kingdom, should have been revealed to John at his call to baptize; and it might be partly suggested by the narrative in 1 Sam. xvi., according to which Samuel, being sent by Jehovah to anoint a king selected from the sons of Jesse, is thus admonished by Jehovah on the entrance of David: Arise and anoint him, for this is he (v. 12). The descent of the Spirit, which in David’s case follows his consecration, is, by the fourth Evangelist, made an antecedent sign of the Messiahship of Jesus. [247]"

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52. RELATION OF THE SUPERNATURAL AT THE BAPTISM OF JESUS TO THE SUPERNATURAL IN HIS CONCEPTION.

" ... A consecration to an office, effected by divine co-operation, was ever considered by antiquity as a delegation of divine powers for its fulfilment; hence, in the Old Testament, the kings, as soon as they are anointed, are filled with the spirit of God (1 Sam. x. 6, 10, xvi. 13); and in the New Testament also, the apostles, before entering on their vocation, are furnished with supernatural gifts (Acts ii.). It may, therefore, be beforehand conjectured, that according to the original sense of the Gospels, the consecration of Jesus at his baptism was attended with a supply of higher powers; and this is confirmed by an examination of our narratives. For the synoptical writers all state, that after the baptism, the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness ... "

"The development of these ideas seems to have been the following. When the messianic dignity of Jesus began to be acknowledged among the Jews, it was thought appropriate to connect his coming into possession of the requisite gifts, with the epoch from which he was in some degree known, and which, from the ceremony that marked it, was also best adapted to represent that anointing with the Holy Spirit, expected by the Jews for their Messiah: and from this point of view was formed the legend of the occurrences at the baptism. But as reverence for Jesus was heightened, and men appeared in the Christian church who were acquainted with more exalted messianic ideas, [249]this tardy manifestation of messiahship was no longer sufficient; his relation with the Holy Spirit was referred to his conception: and from this point of view was formed the tradition of the supernatural conception of Jesus. Here too, perhaps, the words of the heavenly voice, which might originally be those of Ps. ii. 7, were altered after Isaiah xlii. 1. For the words, σήμερον γεγέννηκα σε, This day have I begotten thee, were consistent with the notion that Jesus was constituted the Son of God at his baptism; but they were no longer suitable to that occasion, when the opinion had arisen that the origin of his life was an immediate divine act. By this later representation, however, the earlier one was by no means supplanted, but, on the contrary, tradition and her recorders being large-hearted, both narratives—that of the miracles at the baptism, and that of the supernatural conception, or the indwelling of the λόγος in Jesus from the commencement of his life, although, strictly, they exclude each other, went forth peaceably side by side, and so were depicted by our Evangelists, not excepting even the fourth. Just as in the case of the genealogies: the narrative of the imparting of the Spirit at the baptism could not arise after the formation of the idea that Jesus was engendered by the Spirit; but it might be retained as a supplement, because tradition is ever unwilling to renounce any of its acquired treasures."

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53. PLACE AND TIME OF THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS-DIVERGENCIES OF THE EVANGELISTS ON THIS SUBJECT.

"The transition from the baptism to the temptation of Jesus, as it is made by the synoptical writers, is attended with difficulty in relation both to place and time.

"With respect to the former, it strikes us at once, that according to all the synoptical gospels, Jesus after his baptism was led into the wilderness to be tempted, implying that he was not previously in the wilderness, although, according to Matt. iii. 1, John, by whom he was baptized, exercised his ministry there. This apparent contradiction has been exposed by the most recent critic of Matthew’s gospel, for the sake of proving the statement that John baptized in the wilderness to be erroneous.37 But they who cannot resolve to reject this statement on grounds previously laid down, may here avail themselves of the supposition, that John delivered his preliminary discourses in the wilderness of Judea, but resorted to the Jordan for the purpose of baptizing; or, if the banks of the Jordan be reckoned part of that wilderness, of the presumption that the Evangelists can only have intended that the Spirit led Jesus farther into the recesses of the wilderness, but have neglected to state this with precision, because their description of the scene at the baptism had obliterated from their imagination their former designation of the locality of John’s agency."

"But there is, besides, a chronological difficulty: namely, that while, according to the synoptical writers, Jesus, in the plenitude of the Spirit, just communicated to him at the Jordan, betakes himself, in consequence of that communication, for forty days to the wilderness, where the temptation occurs, and then returns into Galilee; John, on the contrary, is silent concerning the temptation, and appears to suppose an interval of a few days only, between the baptism of Jesus and his journey into Galilee; thus allowing no space [250]for a six weeks’ residence in the wilderness. The fourth Evangelist commences his narrative with the testimony which the Baptist delivers to the emissaries of the Sanhedrim (i. 19); the next day (τῇ ἐπαύριον) he makes the Baptist recite the incident which in the synoptical gospels is followed by the baptism (v. 29): again, the next day (τῇ ἐπαύριον) he causes two of his disciples to follow Jesus (v. 35); farther, the next day (τῇ ἐπαύριον, v. 44), as Jesus is on the point of journeying into Galilee, Philip and Nathanael join him; and lastly, on the third day, τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ τρίτῃ (ii. 1), Jesus is at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. ... "

"The period of forty days is assigned by all three of the synoptical writers [251]for the residence of Jesus in the wilderness; but to this agreement is annexed the not inconsiderable discrepancy, that, according to Matthew, the temptation by the devil commences after the lapse of the forty days, while, according to the others, it appears to have been going forward during this time; for the words of Mark (i. 13), he was in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan, ἦν ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ἡμέρας τεσσαράκοντα πειραζόμενος ὑπὸ τοῦ Σατανᾶ, and the similar ones of Luke i. 2, can have no other meaning. Added to this, there is a difference between the two latter evangelists; Mark only placing the temptation generally within the duration of forty days, without naming the particular acts of the tempter, which according to Matthew, were subsequent to the forty days; while Luke mentions both the prolonged temptation (πειράζεσθαι) of the forty days, and the three special temptations (πειρασμοὶ) which followed. ... "

"With respect to the difference between Matthew and Luke in the arrangement of the several temptations, we must equally abide by Schleiermacher’s criticism and verdict, namely, that Matthew’s order seems to be the original, because it is founded on the relative importance of the temptations, which is the main consideration,—the invitation to worship Satan, which is the strongest temptation, being made the final one; whereas the arrangement of Luke looks like a later and not very happy transposition, proceeding from the consideration—alien to the original spirit of the narrative—that Jesus could more readily go with the devil from the wilderness to the adjacent mountain and from thence to Jerusalem, than out of the wilderness to the city and from thence back again to the mountain.49 While the first two Evangelists close their narrative of the temptation with the ministering of angels to Jesus, Luke has a conclusion peculiar to himself, namely, that the devil left Jesus for a season, ἄχρι καιροῦ (v. 13), apparently intimating that the sufferings of Jesus were a farther assault of the devil; an idea not resumed by Luke, but alluded to in John xiv. 30."

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54. THE HISTORY OF THE TEMPTATION CONCEIVED IN THE SENSE OF THE EVANGELISTS.

"The first interpretation that suggests itself on an unprejudiced consideration of the text is this; that Jesus was led by the Divine Spirit received at his baptism into the wilderness, there to undergo a temptation by the devil, who accordingly appeared to him visibly and personally, and in various ways, and at various places to which he was the conductor, prosecuted his purpose of temptation; but meeting with a victorious resistance, he withdrew from Jesus, and angels appeared to minister to him. Such is the simple exegesis of the narrative, but viewed as a history it is encumbered with difficulties."

"The forty days’ fast, too, is singular. One does not understand how Jesus could hunger after six weeks of abstinence from all food without having hungered long before; since in ordinary cases the human frame cannot sustain a week’s deprivation of nourishment. It is true, expositors53 console themselves by calling the forty days a round number, and by supposing that the expression of Matthew, νηστεύσας, and even that of Luke, οὐκ ἔφαγεν οὐδὲν, are not to be taken strictly, and do not denote abstinence from all food, but only from that which is customary, so that the use of roots and herbs is not excluded. On no supposition, however, can so much be subtracted from the forty days as to leave only the duration of a conceivable fast; and that nothing short of entire abstinence from all nourishment was intended by the Evangelists Fritzsche has clearly shown, by pointing out the parallel between the fast of Jesus and that of Moses and Elias, the former of whom is said to have eaten no bread and drunk no water for forty days (Exod. xxxiv. 28; Deut. ix. 9, 18), and the latter to have gone for the same period in the strength of a meal taken before his journey (1 Kings xix. 8). ... "

" ... But it was early found irreconcilable with the dignity of Jesus that the devil should thus exercise a magical power over him, and carry him about in the air;62 an idea which seemed extravagant even to those who tolerated the personal appearance of the devil. ... The well-known question suggested by the last temptation, as to the situation of the mountain, from whose summit may be seen all the kingdoms of the world, has been met by the information that κόσμος here means no more than Palestine, and βασιλείας, its several kingdoms and tetrarchies;64 but this is a scarcely less ludicrous explanation than the one that the devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world on a map! No answer remains but that such a mountain existed only in the ancient idea of the earth as a plain, and in the popular imagination, which can easily stretch a mountain up to heaven, and sharpen an eye to penetrate infinity."

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55. THE TEMPTATION CONSIDERED AS A NATURAL OCCURRENCE EITHER INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL; AND ALSO AS A PARABLE.

"The impossibility of conceiving the sudden removals of Jesus to the temple and the mountain, led some even of the ancient commentators to the opinion, that at least the locality of the second and third temptations was not present to Jesus corporeally and externally, but merely in a vision;65 while some [256]modern ones, to whom the personal appearance of the devil was especially offensive, have supposed that the whole transaction with him passed from beginning to end within the recesses of the soul of Jesus. Herewith they have regarded the forty days’ fast either as a mere internal representation66 (which, however, is a most inadmissible perversion of the plainly historic text: νηστεύσας ἡμέρας τεσσαράκοντα ὕστερον ἐπείνασε, Matt. iv. 2), or as a real fact, in which case the formidable difficulties mentioned in the preceding section remain valid. ... "

"The least invidious expedient is to suppose that the source of our histories of the temptation was some real event in the life of Jesus, so narrated by him to his disciples as to convey no accurate impression of the fact. Tempting thoughts, which intruded themselves into his soul during his residence in the wilderness, or at various seasons, and under various circumstances, but which were immediately quelled by the unimpaired force of his will, were, according to the oriental mode of thought and expression, represented by him as a temptation of the devil; and this figurative narrative was understood literally."

"Such an intention, indeed, is attributed to Jesus by those who hold that the history of the temptation was narrated by him as a parable, but understood literally by his disciples. This opinion is not encumbered with the difficulty of making some real inward experience of Jesus the basis of the history;76 it does not suppose that Jesus himself underwent such temptations, but only that he sought to secure his disciples from them, by impressing on them, as a compendium of messianic and apostolic wisdom, the three following maxims: first to perform no miracle for their own advantage even in the greatest exigency; secondly, never to venture on a chimerical undertaking in the hope of extraordinary divine aid; thirdly, never to enter into fellowship with the wicked, however strong the enticement. ... "

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56. THE IIISTORY OF THE TEMPTATION AS A MYTHUS.

"Satan, the evil being and enemy of mankind, borrowed from the Persian religion, was by the Jews, whose exclusiveness limited all that was good and truly human to the Israelitish people, viewed as the special adversary of their nation, and hence as the lord of the heathen states with whom they were in hostility. The interests of the Jewish people being centred in the Messiah, it followed that Satan was emphatically his adversary; and thus throughout the New Testament we find the idea of Jesus as the Messiah associated with that of Satan as the enemy of his person and cause. Christ having appeared to destroy the works of the devil (1 John iii. 8), the latter seizes every opportunity of sowing tares among the good seed (Matt. xiii. 39), and not only aims, though unsuccessfully, at obtaining the mastery over Jesus himself (John xiv. 30), but continually assails the faithful (Eph. vi. 11; 1 Pet. v. 8). As these attacks of the devil on the pious are nothing else than attempts to get them into his power, that is, to entice them to sin; and as this can only be done by the indirect suggestion or immediate insinuation of evil, seductive thoughts, Satan had the appellation of ὁ πειράζων, the tempter. In the prologue to the book of Job, he seeks to seduce the pious man from God, by the instrumentality of a succession of plagues and misfortunes: while the ensnaring counsel which the serpent gave to the woman was early considered an immediate diabolical suggestion.

"In the more ancient Hebrew theology, the idea was current that temptation (‏נִסָּה‎, LXX. πειράζειν) was an act of God himself, who thus put his favourites, as Abraham (Gen. xxii. 1), and the people of Israel (Exod. xvi. 4, and elsewhere), to the test, or in just anger even instigated men to pernicious deeds. But as soon as the idea of Satan was formed, the office of temptation was transferred to him, and withdrawn from God, with whose absolute goodness it began to be viewed as incompatible (James i. 13). Hence it is Satan, who by his importunity obtains the divine permission to put Job to the severest trial through suffering; hence David’s culpable project of numbering the people, which in the second book of Samuel was traced to the anger of God, is in the later chronicles (1 Chron. xxii. 1) put directly to the account of the [260]devil; and even the well-meant temptation with which, according to Genesis, God visited Abraham, in requiring from him the sacrifice of his son, was in the opinion of the later Jews, undertaken by God at the instigation of Satan.83 Nor was this enough—scenes were imagined in which the devil personally encountered Abraham on his way to the place of sacrifice, and in which he tempted the people of Israel during the absence of Moses."

"If a place were demanded where Satan might probably undertake such a temptation of the Messiah, the wilderness would present itself from more than one quarter. Not only had it been from Azazel (Lev. xvi. 8–10), and Asmodeus (Tobit viii. 3), to the demons ejected by Jesus (Matt. xii. 43), the fearful dwelling-place of the infernal powers: it was also the scene of temptation for the people of Israel, that filius Dei collectivus.87 Added to this, it was the habit of Jesus to retire to solitary places for still meditation and prayer (Matt. xiv. 13; Mark i. 35; Luke vi. 12; John vi. 15); to which after his consecration to the messianic office he would feel more than usually disposed. It is hence possible that, as some theologians88 have supposed, a residence of Jesus in the wilderness after his baptism (though not one of precisely forty days’ duration) served as the historical foundation of our narrative; but even without this connecting thread, both the already noticed choice of place and that of time are to be explained by the consideration, that it seemed consonant with the destiny of the Messiah that, like a second Hercules, he should undergo such a trial on his entrance into mature age and the messianic office.

"But what had the Messiah to do in the wilderness? That the Messiah, the second Saviour, should like his typical predecessor, Moses, on Mount Sinai, submit himself to the holy discipline of fasting, was an idea the more [261]inviting, because it furnished a suitable introduction to the first temptation which presupposed extreme hunger. The type of Moses and that of Elias (1 Kings xix. 8), determined also the duration of this fast in the wilderness, for they too had fasted forty days; moreover, the number forty was held sacred in Hebrew antiquity.89 Above all, the forty days of the temptation of Jesus seem, as Olshausen justly observes, a miniature image of the forty years’ trial in the wilderness, endured by the Israelitish people as a penal emblem of the forty days spent by the spies in the land of Canaan (Num. xiv. 34). For, that in the temptations of Jesus there was a special reference to the temptation of Israel in the wilderness, is shown by the circumstance that all the passages cited by Jesus in opposition to Satan are drawn from the recapitulatory description of the journeyings of the Israelites in Deut. vi. and viii. ... "

"The third temptation which Jesus underwent—to worship the devil—is not apparent among the temptations of God’s ancient people. But one of the [263]most fatal seductions by which the Israelites were led astray in the wilderness was that of idolatry; and the apostle Paul adduces it as admonitory to Christians. Not only is this sin derived immediately from the devil in a passage above quoted;93 but in the later Jewish idea, idolatry was identical with the worship of the devil (Baruch iv. 7; 1 Cor. x. 20). ... "

And yet, they do not recognise that idol worship isn't merely about worship of an image, it's about all objects including what are called holy books - after all they are merely reconstructed wood pulp with squiggles, if images of Gods and Goddesses are to be called idols! Yet mist people comprehend the mindless fury that some fanatics of a faith- and there is more than one faith involved in the latter - get into, when their holy book is considered insulted; such insult can be as drastic as a burning, as little as a word, or as quaint as transport.

Funny, it's India that does not burst into flames when her Gods and Goddesses are insulted by those of abrahmic cultures, whether verbally or far worse; for real faith, it's necessary one knows, absolutely knows, that Gods and Goddesses are way above, and anyone spitting at a midday sun can only soil oneself.

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October 21, 2021 - October 21, 2021.

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CHAPTER III.

LOCALITY AND CHRONOLOGY OF THE PUBLIC LIFE OF JESUS.

§ 57. Difference between the synoptical writers and John, as to the customary scene of the ministry of Jesus

58. The residence of Jesus at Capernaum

59. Divergencies of the Evangelists as to the chronology of the life of Jesus. Duration of his public ministry

60. The attempts at a chronological arrangement of the particular events in the public life of Jesus

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57. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SYNOPTICAL WRITERS AND JOHN, AS TO THE CUSTOMARY SCENE OF THE MINISTRY OF JESUS.

"According to the synoptical writers, Jesus, born indeed at Bethlehem in Judea, but brought up at Nazareth in Galilee, only absented himself from Galilee during the short interval between his baptism and the imprisonment of the Baptist; immediately after which, he returned thither and began his ministry, teaching, healing, calling disciples, so as to traverse all Galilee; using as the centre of his agency, his previous dwelling-place, Nazareth, alternately with Capernaum, on the north-west border of the lake of Tiberias (Matt iv. 12–25 parall.). Mark and Luke have many particulars concerning this ministry in Galilee which are not found in Matthew, and those which they have in common with him are arranged in a different order; but as they all agree in the geographical circuit which they assign to Jesus, the account of the first Evangelist may serve as the basis of our criticism. According to him the incidents narrated took place in Galilee, and partly in Capernaum down to viii. 18, where Jesus crosses the Galilean sea, but is scarcely landed on the east side when he returns to Capernaum. ... The message of the Baptist (chap. xi.) is also received by Jesus in Galilee, at least such appears to be the opinion of the narrator, from his placing in immediate connexion the complaints of Jesus against the Galilean cities. When delivering the parable in chap. xiii. Jesus is by the sea, doubtless that of Galilee, and, as there is mention of his house, οἰκία (v. 1), probably in the vicinity of Capernaum. Next, after having visited his native city Nazareth (xiii. 53) he passes over the sea (xiv. 13), according to Luke (ix. 10), into the country of Bethsaida (Julias); whence, however, after the miracle of the loaves, he speedily returns to the western border (xiv. 34). Jesus then proceeds to the northern extremity of Palestine, on the frontiers of Phœnicia (xv. 21); soon, however, returned to the sea of Galilee (v. 29), he takes ship to the eastern side, in the [265]coast of Magdala (v. 39), but again departs northward into the country of Cæsarea Philippi (xvi. 13), in the vicinity of Lebanon, among the lower ridges of which is to be sought the mount of the transfiguration (xvii. 1). After journeying in Galilee for some time longer with his disciples (xvii. 22), and once more visiting Capernaum (v. 24), he leaves Galilee (xix. 1) to travel (as it is most probably explained)1 through Perea into Judea (a journey which, according to Luke ix. 52, he seems to have made through Samaria); xx. 17, he is on his way to Jerusalem; v. 29, he comes through Jericho; and xxi. 1, is in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, which, v. 10, he enters."

"Thus, according to the synoptical writers, Jesus, from his return after being baptized by John, to his final journey to Jerusalem, never goes beyond the limits of North Palestine, but traverses the countries west and east of the Galilean sea and the upper Jordan, in the dominions of Herod Antipas and Philip, without touching on Samaria to the south, still less Judea, or the country under the immediate administration of the Romans. And within those limits, to be still more precise, it is the land west of the Jordan, and the sea of Tiberias, and therefore Galilee, the province of Antipas, in which Jesus is especially active; only three short excursions on the eastern border of the sea, and two scarcely longer on the northern frontiers of the country, being recorded."

Strauss discusses the itinerary given in the fourth, different from the rest.

"Thus, according to John, Jesus was present at four feasts in Jerusalem, before the final one: was besides once in Bethany, and had been active for a considerable time in Judea and on his journey through Samaria."

One has to wonder, did Rome order the four gospels written with differences, just so that a uniform tale wouldn't raise suspicions, about the ordered writing, and consequent collusion?

"Why, it must be asked, have the synoptical writers been silent on this frequent presence of Jesus in Judea and Jerusalem? Why have they represented the matter, as if Jesus, before his last fatal journey to Jerusalem, had not overstepped the limits of Galilee and Perea? This discrepancy between the synoptical writers and John was long overlooked in the church, and of late it has been thought feasible to deny its existence. ... "

"Expositors must therefore accommodate themselves to the admission of a difference between the synoptical writers and John,4 and those who think it incumbent on them to harmonize the Gospels must take care lest this difference be found a contradiction; which can only be prevented by deducing the discrepancy, not from a disparity between the ideas of the Evangelists as to the sphere of the ministry of Jesus, but from the difference of mental bias under which they severally wrote. ... Such provincial exclusiveness would surely be quite unexampled. Hence others have preferred the supposition that Matthew, writing at Jerusalem, purposely selected from the mass of discourses and actions of Jesus with which he was acquainted, those of which Galilee was the theatre, because they were the least known at Jerusalem, and required narrating more than what had happened within the hearing, and was fresh in the memories of its inhabitants.6 In opposition to this it has been already remarked,7 that there is no proof of Matthew’s gospel being especially intended for the Christians of Judea and Jerusalem: that even assuming this, a reference to the events which had happened in the reader’s own country could not be superfluous: and that, lastly, the like limitation of the ministry of Jesus to Galilee by Mark and Luke cannot be thus accounted for, since these Evangelists obviously did not write for Judea (neither were they Galileans, so that this objection is equally [267]valid against the first explanation); and were not in so servile a relation to Matthew as to have no access to independent information that might give them a more extended horizon. It is curious enough that these two attempts to solve the contradiction between the synoptical writers and John, are themselves in the same predicament of mutual contradiction. For if Matthew has been silent on the incidents in Judea, according to one, on account of his proximity, according to the other, on account of his remoteness, it follows that, two contrary hypotheses being made with equal ease to explain the same fact, both are alike inadequate."

" ... But the Galileans could scarcely have misunderstood Jesus more lamentably than did the Jews from first to last, according to John’s representation, and as in Galilee he had the most undisturbed communion with his disciples, we should rather have conjectured that here would be the scene of his more profound instruction. ... "

Notice how the word Jew or Jewish is always there when it's a difference, or lack of understanding, involved? But if there were others in the audience, it's not known, and if he had perfect disciples of non Jewish sort, that definitely would have been publicicised by churvh; meanwhile they are obfuscating the fact thst his golloeers and disciples, and mourners, too, were Jewish, of course! While his executioners were definitely Roman, from lowest soldiers to highest authority that ordered crucifixions - his own crucifixion being far from unique, and all political opponents being put to death routinely.

"Thus it is impossible to explain why the synoptical writers, if they knew of the earlier visits of Jesus to Jerusalem, should not have mentioned them, and it must be concluded that if John be right, the first three Evangelists knew nothing of an essential part of the earlier ministry of Jesus; if, on the other hand, the latter be right, the author of the fourth gospel, or of the tradition by which he was guided, fabricated a large portion of what he has narrated concerning the ministry of Jesus, or at least assigned to it a false locality."

" .. For example, the synoptical writers, Matthew especially, as often as Jesus leaves Galilee, from the time that he takes up his abode there after the Baptist’s imprisonment, seldom neglect to give a particular reason; such as that he wished to escape from the crowd by a passage across the sea (Matt. viii. 18), or that he withdrew into the wilderness of Perea to avoid the snares of Herod (xiv. 13), or that he retired into the region of Tyre and Sidon on account of the offence taken by the scribes at his preaching (xv. 21): John, on the contrary, generally alleges a special reason why Jesus leaves Judea, and retires into Galilee. Not to contend that his very first journey thither appears to be occasioned solely by the invitation to Cana, his departure again into Galilee after the first passover attended by him in his public character, is expressly accounted for by the ominous attention which the increasing number of his disciples had excited among the Pharisees (iv. 1 ff.). His retirement after the second feast, also, into the country east of the Sea of Tiberias (vi. 1), must be viewed in relation to the ἐζήτουν αὐτὸν οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι ἀποκτεῖναι (v. 18), since immediately after, the Evangelist assigns as a reason for the continuance of Jesus in Galilee, the malignant designs of his enemies, which rendered his abode in Judea perilous to his life (vii. 1). The interval between the Feast of Tabernacles and the Feast of the Dedication seems to have been spent by Jesus in the capital,9 no unpropitious circumstances compelling him to absent himself (x. 22); on the other hand, his journey into Perea (x. 40) and that into Ephraim (xi. 54) are presented as effects of his persecution by the Jews."

There it is, again - the "persecution by the Jews" motif, so branded on minds of Europe by church, not only it resulted in genocides, but Europe never realised it was false information fed for centuries! And yet it should have been obvious.

Also, Strauss speaks of gospels mentioning his having to leave one region for another due to danger to his life. Which, he fails to realise, for a kind, beatific orator, advocating love and mercy, is extremely strange, if not outright unlikely. Such a person would at most be left alone, if not ridiculed - but not attacked.

Unless, of course, he was in fact a political active king of the Jews, and danger was not from Jewish mobs but from Roman spies and generally authority of Rome.

Which has been wiped out and overwritten by Rome after church colluded with Rome for survival, council of Nicea, throwing blame falsely on Jews for everything - which, under the circumstances sounds like a man blaming his mother in law for him having had fourteen children!

"Thus precisely the same relation as that which exists between Matthew and Luke, with respect to the original dwelling-place of the parents of Jesus is found between the first three Evangelists and the fourth, with respect to the principal theatre of his ministry. As, in the former instance, Matthew pre-supposes Bethlehem to be the original place of abode, and Nazareth the one subsequently adopted through fortuitous circumstances, while Luke gives the contrary representation; so in the latter, the entire statement of the synoptical writers turns on the idea that, until his last journey, Galilee was the chosen field of the labours of Jesus, and that he only left it occasionally, from particular motives and for a short time; while that of John, on the contrary, turns on the supposition, that Jesus would have taught solely in Judea and Jerusalem had not prudence sometimes counselled him to retire into the more remote provinces."

Now antisemitism increases perceptible in Strauss's writing.

" ... It has been held inconceivable that Jesus, so long after his assumption of the messianic character, should confine himself to Galilee, instead of taking his stand in Judea and Jerusalem, which, from the higher culture and more extensive foreign intercourse of their population, were a much more suitable field for his labours; but it has been long remarked, on the other hand, that Jesus could find easier access to the simple and energetic minds of Galilee, less fettered by priestcraft and Pharisaism, and therefore acted judiciously in obtaining a firm footing there by a protracted ministry, before he ventured to Jerusalem, where, in the centre of priestly and Pharisaic domination, he must expect stronger opposition."

It isn't just that he holds on to church line of Jewish opposition firmly, never bringing in any thought about who ruled and executed him; it's also that he identifies higher culture with regions of non Jewish residents in lands of Jews, a typical bias by cultures that invade, colonise and loot others - typically, European. They do fail to realise, don't they, that such logic makes Attila the Hun, and Chengiz Khan, and their Mongolian hordes, automatically superior cultures, having invaded all the way into Europe, burning whole cities on their way?

But the even more strange part is that Strauss fails to see he has taken a position contradictory to his prior stance, of Jewish vs heathen, Jewish vs pagan, Jehovah vs Satan worship, where Jewish and Jehovah were always held superior and right, even if only to justify church that took most of the Jewish heritage, so as to erect its own monument of religion, with a triple fraud - falsified story of the Jewish king crucified by Rome, falsified story of conversion of Constantine, and falsification of his wish in the matter. And here hes holding those other cultures, which he calls heathen and pagan unyil now, suddenly superior to that of Jews!

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58. THE RESIDENCE OF JESUS AT CAPERNAUM.

" ... In the fourth gospel, which only mentions very transient visits of Jesus to Galilee, Capernaum is not given as his dwelling-place, and Cana is the place with which he is supposed to have the most connexion. ... "

Authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail shows successfully that the wedding feast where he, after he was asked by his mother about difficulty due to wine running short for guests, turned water into wine, could only be his own; and they've successfully argued that Mary Magdalena was the wife he married and had children with; Cana might have been their home?

" ... Luke thinks he has found the reason in a fact, which is more worthy of notice. According to him, Jesus after his return from baptism does not immediately take up his residence in Capernaum, but makes an essay to teach in Nazareth, and after its failure first turns to Capernaum. This Evangelist tells us in the most graphic style how Jesus presented himself at the synagogue on the sabbath-day, and expounded a prophetic passage, so as to excite general admiration, but at the same time to provoke malicious reflections on the narrow circumstances of his family. Jesus, in reply, is made to refer the discontent of the Nazarenes, that he performed no miracles before them as at Capernaum, to the contempt which every prophet meets with in his own country, and to threaten them in Old Testament allusions, that the divine benefits would be withdrawn from them and conferred on strangers. Exasperated by this, they lead him to the brow of the hill, intending to cast him down; he, however, passes unhurt through the midst of them (iv. 16–30)."

Strauss is dealing with parts that seem to have increasingly antisemitic tone, and he does not notice it, taking it as matter of fact; but they do not harmonise with the earlier ones, prior yo execution of John the Baptist, which wasted Jews and Jewish culture and religion for most part, writing of all others as heathen, pagan, at al, when not outright labelling them as Satan worship.

Besides, the passage above really does not seem a portrayal of a man who preaches love and mercy, since in the last bit he is as threatening as Jehovah about promising anyone not following him an exile from heaven; moreover, if people liked him and were impressed, why would they ridicule him for poverty of his family, if he was preaching love and kindness?

No, it makes sense only if he claimed his stature, king of Jews, and advocated overthrow of Rome; and Roman spies and soldiers being everywhere, then needed to escape, and did, because Jews helped.

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59. DIVERGENCIES OF THE EVANGELISTS AS TO THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE OF JESUS--DURATION OF HIS PUBLIC MINISTRY.

"In striking contrast with this lowest computation of time, is the tradition, also very ancient, that Jesus was baptized in his thirtieth year, but at the time of his crucifixion was not far from his fiftieth.44 But this opinion is equally founded on a misunderstanding. The elders who had conversations with John the disciple of the Lord, in Asia, πρεσβύτεροι οἱ κατὰ τὴν Ἀσίαν Ἰωάννῃ τῷ τοῦ Κυρίου μαθητῇ συμβεβληκότες,—on whose testimony Irenæus relies when he says, such is the tradition of John, παραδεδωκέναι ταῦτα τὸν Ἰωάννην,—had given no information further than that Christ taught, ætatem seniorem habens. That this ætas senior was the age of from forty to fifty years is merely the inference of Irenæus, founded on what the Jews allege as an objection to the discourse of Jesus, John viii. 57: Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? language which according to Irenæus could only be addressed to one, qui jam quadraginta annos excessit, quinquagesimum autem annum nondum attigit. But the Jews might very well say to a man a little more than thirty, that he was much too young to have seen Abraham, since he had not reached his fiftieth year, which, in the Jewish idea, completed the term of manhood.

"Thus we can obtain no precise information from our gospels as to how long the public labours of Jesus lasted; all we can gather is, that if we follow the fourth gospel we must not reckon less than two years and something over. But the repeated journeys to the feasts on which this calculation is founded are themselves not established beyond doubt.

"Opposed to this minimum, we gain a maximum, if we understand, from Luke iii. 1 ff. and 23, that the baptism of Jesus took place in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, and add to this that his crucifixion occurred under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate. For as Pilate was recalled from his post in the year of Tiberius’s death,46 and as Tiberius reigned rather more than seven years after the fifteenth year of his reign,47 it follows that seven years are the maximum of the possible duration of the ministry of Jesus after his baptism. But while one of these data, namely, that Jesus was crucified under Pilate, is well attested, the other is rendered suspicious by its association with a chronological error, so that in fact we cannot achieve here even a proximate, still less an accurate solution of our question"

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60. THE ATTEMPTS AT A CHRONOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE PARTICULAR EVENTS IN THE PUBLIC LIFE OF JESUS.

" ... John says (iii. 24) that when Jesus began his ministry, John was not yet cast into prison; Matthew makes the return of Jesus into Galilee subsequent to the imprisonment of the Baptist (iv. 12), hence it has been inferred that that return was from the first passover, and not from the baptism;48 but it is undeniable that Matthew places the commencement of the public ministry of Jesus in Galilee, and presupposes no earlier ministry at the feast in Jerusalem, so that the two statements, instead of dovetailing, as has been imagined, are altogether incompatible. ... "

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October 22, 2021 - October 22, 2021.

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CHAPTER IV.

JESUS AS THE MESSIAH.

61. Jesus, the Son of Man

62. How soon did Jesus conceive himself to be the Messiah, and find recognition as such from others?

63. Jesus, the Son of God

64. The divine mission and authority of Jesus. His pre-existence

65. The messianic plan of Jesus. Indications of a political element

66. Data for the pure spirituality of the messianic plan of Jesus. Balance

67. The relation of Jesus to the Mosaic law

68. Scope of the messianic plan of Jesus. Relation to the Gentiles

69. Relation of the messianic plan of Jesus to the Samaritans. His interview with the woman of Samaria

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61. JESUS, THE SON OF MAN.

"How so apparently vague an appellation came to be appropriated to the Messiah, we gather from Matt. xxvi. 64 parall., where the Son of man is depicted as coming in the clouds of heaven. This is evidently an allusion to Dan. vii. 13 f. where after having treated of the fall of the four beasts, the writer says: I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the Son of Man (‏כְּבַר אֱנָשׁ‎ ὡς υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου, LXX.) came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion. The four beasts (v. 17 ff.) were symbolical of the four great empires, the last of which was the Macedonian, with its offshoot, Syria. After their fall, the kingdom was to be given in perpetuity to the People of God, the saints of the Most High: hence, he who was to come with clouds of heaven could only be, either a personification of the holy people, or a leader of heavenly origin under whom they were to achieve their destined triumph—in a word, the Messiah; and this was the customary interpretation among the Jews. ... "

Four beasts are four great empires? And worse, someone supposedly godly in the sense of not Jupiter but kind and loving, has dominion? But that's nothing new it's still the old domination, rule, that Jehovah had!

" ... When, Matt. x. 23, on the first mission of the twelve apostles to announce the kingdom of heaven, he comforts them under the prospect of their future persecutions by the assurance that they would not have gone over all the cities of Israel before the coming of the Son of Man, we should rather, taking this declaration alone, think of a third person, whose speedy messianic appearance Jesus was promising, than of the speaker himself, seeing that he was already come, and it would not be antecedently clear how he could represent his own coming as one still in anticipation. So also when Jesus (Matt. xiii. 37 ff.) interprets the Sower of the parable to be the Son of Man, who at the end of the world will have a harvest and a tribunal, he might be supposed to refer to the Messiah as a third person distinct from himself. This is equally the case, xvi. 27 f., where, to prove the proposition that the loss of the soul is not to be compensated by the gain of the whole world, he urges the speedy coming of the Son of Man, to administer retribution. Lastly, in the connected discourses, Matt. xxiv., xxv. parall., many particulars would be more easily conceived, if the υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου whose παρουσία Jesus describes, were understood to mean another than himself.

"But this explanation is far from being applicable to the majority of instances in which Jesus uses this expression. When he represents the Son of Man, not as one still to be expected, but as one already come and actually present, for example, in Matt xviii. 11, where he says: The Son of Man is come to save that which was lost; when he justifies his own acts by the authority with which the Son of Man was invested, as in Matt. ix. 6; when, Mark viii. 31 ff. comp. Matt. xvi. 22, he speaks of the approaching sufferings and death of the Son of Man, so as to elicit from Peter the exclamation, οὐ μὴ ἔσται σοι τοῦτο, this shall not be unto thee; in these and similar cases he can only, by the υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, have intended himself. ... "

Next part is a tad unclear.

" ... And even those passages, which, taken singly, we might have found capable of application to a messianic person, distinct from Jesus, lose this capability when considered in their entire connexion. It is possible, however, either that the writer may have misplaced certain expressions, or that the ultimately prevalent conviction that Jesus was the Son of Man caused what was originally said merely of the latter, to be viewed in immediate relation to the former."

"Thus besides the fact that Jesus on many occasions called himself the Son of Man, there remains the possibility that on many others, he may have designed another person; and if so, the latter would in the order of time naturally precede the former. Whether this possibi

lity can be heightened ta a reality, must depend on the answer to the following question: Is there, in the period of the life of Jesus, from which all his recorded declarations are taken, any fragment which indicates that he had not yet conceived himself to be the Messiah?"

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62. HOW SOON DID JESUS CONCEIVE HIMSELF TO BE THE MESSIAH, AND FIND RECOGNITION AS SUCH FROM OTHERS ?

"Jesus held and expressed the conviction that he was the Messiah; this is an indisputable fact. Not only did he, according to the Evangelists, receive with satisfaction the confession of the disciples that he was the Χριστὸς (Matt. xvi. 16 f.) and the salutation of the people, Hosanna to the Son of David (xxi. 15 f.); not only did he before a public tribunal (Matt. xxvi. 64, comp. John xviii. 37) as well as to private individuals (John iv. 26, ix. 37, x. 25) repeatedly declare himself to be the Messiah; but the fact that his disciples after his death believed and proclaimed that he was the Messiah, is not to be comprehended, unless, when living, he had implanted the conviction in their minds.

"To the more searching question, how soon Jesus began to declare himself the Messiah and to be regarded as such by others, the Evangelists almost unanimously reply, that he assumed that character from the time of his baptism. All of them attach to his baptism circumstances which must have convinced himself, if yet uncertain, and all others who witnessed or credited them, that he was no less than the Messiah; John makes his earliest disciples recognise his right to that dignity on their first interview (i. 42 ff.), and Matthew attributes to him at the very beginning of his ministry, in the sermon on the mount, a representation of himself as the Judge of the world (vii. 21 ff.) and therefore the Messiah.

"Nevertheless, on a closer examination, there appears a remarkable divergency on this subject between the synoptical statement and that of John. While, namely, in John, Jesus remains throughout true to his assertion, and the disciples and his followers among the populace to their conviction, that he is the Messiah; in the synoptical gospels there is a vacillation discernible—the previously expressed persuasion on the part of the disciples and people that Jesus was the Messiah, sometimes vanishes and gives place to a much lower view of him, and even Jesus himself becomes more reserved in his declarations. This is particularly striking when the synoptical statement is compared with that of John; but even when they are separately considered, the result is the same."

"According to John (vi. 15), after the miracle of the loaves the people were inclined to constitute Jesus their (messianic) King; on the contrary, according to the other three Evangelists, either about the same time (Luke ix. 18 f.) or still later (Matt. xvi. 13 f.; Mark viii. 27 f.) the disciples could only report, on the opinions of the people respecting their master, that some said he was the resuscitated Baptist, some Elias, and others Jeremiah or one of the old prophets: in reference to that passage of John, however, as also to the synoptical one, Matt. xiv. 33, according to which, some time before Jesus elicited the above report of the popular opinion, the people who were with him in the ship10 when he had allayed the storm, fell at his feet and worshipped him as the Son of God, it may be observed that when Jesus had spoken or acted with peculiar impressiveness, individuals, in the exaltation of the moment, might be penetrated with a conviction that he was the Messiah, while the general and calm voice of the people yet pronounced him to be merely a prophet."

" ... According to John he sanctions the homage which Nathanael renders to him as the Son of God and King of Israel, in the very commencement of his public career, and immediately proceeds to speak of himself under the messianic title, Son of Man (i. 51 f.): to the Samaritans also after his first visit to the passover (iv. 26, 39 ff.), and to the Jews on the second (v. 46), he makes himself known as the Messiah predicted by Moses. According to the synoptical writers, on the contrary, he prohibits, in the instance above cited and in many others, the dissemination of the doctrine of his Messiahship, beyond the circle of his adherents. Farther, when he asks his disciples, Whom do men say that I am? (Matt. xvi. 15) he seems to wish11 that they should derive their conviction of his Messiahship from his discourses and actions, and when he ascribes the avowed faith of Peter to a revelation from his heavenly Father, he excludes the possibility of his having himself previously made this disclosure to his disciples, either in the manner described by John, or in the more indirect one attributed to him by Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount; unless we suppose that the disciples had not hitherto believed his assurance, and that hence Jesus referred the new-born faith of Peter to divine influence."

" ... as there is an essential similarity in the conditions under which he lays this injunction on the people, if we discern a probable motive for it on any occasion, we are warranted in applying the same motive to the remaining cases. This motive is scarcely any other than the desire that the belief that he was the Messiah should not be too widely spread. When (Mark i. 34) Jesus would not allow the ejected demons to speak because they knew him, when he charged the multitudes that they should not make him known (Matt. xii. 16), he evidently intended that the former should not proclaim him in the character in which their more penetrative, demoniacal glance had viewed him, nor the latter in that revealed by the miraculous cure he had wrought on them—in short, they were not to betray their knowledge that he was the Messiah. As a reason for this wish on the part of Jesus, it has been alleged, on the strength of John vi. 15, that he sought to avoid awakening the political idea of the Messiah’s kingdom in the popular mind, with the disturbance which would be its inevitable result.16 This would be a valid reason; but the synoptical writers represent the wish, partly as the effect of humility;17 Matthew, in connexion with a prohibition of the kind alluded to, applying to Jesus a passage in Isaiah (xlii. 1 f.) where the servant of God is said to be distinguished by his stillness and unobtrusiveness: partly, and in a greater degree, as the effect of an apprehension that the Messiah, at least such an one as Jesus, would be at once proscribed by the Jewish hierarchy."

Do they leave no stone unturned in their attempts to make Jews hunted, by everyone throughout the world, for all time? Wasn't it rather the fear of his being known to rome as king of Jews that was the more dangerous, as it did prove, eventually?

"From all this it might appear that Jesus was restrained merely by external motives, from the open declaration of his Messiahship, and that his own conviction of it existed from the first in equal strength; but this conclusion cannot be maintained in the face of the consideration above mentioned, that Jesus began his career with the same announcement as the Baptist, an announcement which can scarcely have more than one import—an exhortation to prepare for a coming Messiah. The most natural supposition is that Jesus, first the disciple of the Baptist, and afterwards his successor, in preaching repentance and the approach of the kingdom of heaven, took originally the same position as his former master in relation to the messianic kingdom, notwithstanding the greater reach and liberality of his mind, and only gradually attained the elevation of thinking himself the Messiah. This supposition explains in the simplest manner the prohibition we have been considering, especially that annexed to the confession of Peter. ... "

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63. JESUS, THE SON OF GOD.

"In Hos. xi. 1; Exod. iv. 22, the people of Israel, and in 2 Sam, vii. 14; Ps. ii. 7 (comp. lxxxix. 28), the king of that people, are called the son and the first-born of God. The kings (as also the people) of Israel had this appellation, in virtue of the love which Jehovah bore them, and the tutelary care which he exercised over them (2 Sam. vii. 14); and from the second psalm we gather the farther reason, that as earthly kings choose their sons to reign with or under them, so the Israelitish kings were invested by Jehovah, the supreme ruler, with the government of his favourite province. Thus the designation was originally applicable to every Israelitish king who adhered to the principle of the theocracy; but when the messianic idea was developed, it was pre-eminently assigned to the Messiah, as the best-beloved Son, and the most powerful vicegerent of God on earth."

" ... It is true that the abundant expressions having this tendency in the Gospel of John, appear to contradict those of Jesus on an occasion recorded by the synoptical writers (Mark x. 17 f.; Luke xviii. 18 f.), when to a disciple who accosts him as Good Master, he replies: Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God. Here Jesus so tenaciously maintains the distinction between himself and God, that he renounces the predicate of (perfect) goodness, and insists on its appropriation to God alone. ... "

This is bordering jihadi sort of sentiment!

" ... It is true that, even in the synoptical gospels, when Jesus answers affirmatively the question whether he be the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matt. xxvi. 65, parall.), the high priest taxes him with blasphemy; but he refers merely to what he considers the unwarranted arrogation of the theocratic dignity of the Messiah, whereas in the fourth gospel, when Jesus represents himself as the Son of God (v. 17 f., x. 30 ff.), the Jews seek to kill him for the express reason that he thereby makes himself ἴσον τῷ θεῷ, nay even ἑαυτὸν θεὸν. According to the synoptical writers, the high priest so unhesitatingly considers the idea of the Son of God to pertain to that of the Messiah, that he associates the two titles as if they were interchangeable, in the question he addresses to Jesus: on the contrary the Jews in the Gospel of John regard the one idea as so far transcending the other, that they listen patiently to the declaration of Jesus that he is the Messiah (x. 25), but as soon as he begins to claim to be the Son of God, they take up stones to stone him. In the synoptical gospels the reproach cast on Jesus is, that being a common man, he gives himself out for the Messiah; in the fourth gospel, that being a mere man, he gives himself out for a divine being. ... "

Even if these were not lies ordered by the church, which part of this is different from church burning st stake anyone who dared to utter an opinion on almost any matter that wasn't an expressly permitted one, as later as era of Thomas More? What were Salem witch trials but people forced to recant at pain of execution, for crimes far smaller?

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64. THE DIVINE MISSION AND AUTHORITY OF JESUS-HIS PRE-EXISTENCE.

" ... To him, as the Messiah, all power is given (Matt. xi. 27); first, over the kingdom which he is appointed to found and to rule with all its members (John x. 29, xvii. 6); next, over mankind in general (John xvii. 2), and even external nature (Matt, xxviii. 18); consequently, should the interests of the messianic kingdom demand it, power to effect a thorough revolution in the whole world. At the future commencement of his reign, Jesus, as Messiah, is authorized to awake the dead (John v. 28), and to sit as a judge, separating those worthy to partake of the heavenly kingdom from the unworthy (Matt. xxv. 31 ff.; John v. 22, 29); offices which Jewish opinion attributed to the Messiah,24 and which Jesus, once convinced of his Messiahship, would necessarily transfer to himself."

In short, free rein to invade, loot and massacre throughout the world, calling it mission; destroy all other cultures, calling them opposition to god; and establish your rule, calling it that of god!

And Rome, using this weapon in form of church that Rome transformed itself into, did just that - invading, massacring, colonising, looting, and calling it just in name of the hod whise son they claimed to worship after killing him, and perpetrating the hypocrisy by forcing him as a weapon to destroy all other cultures.

How, exactly, is this different from the Mongol hordes sweeping through the then known world, burning all in their path if they didnt surrender? Only in the use of hypocrisy to sanctimonious justification of it all?

No wonder Germany felt justified in doing to Europe, beginning mid-thirties in twentieth century, in exactly what Europe had done for centuries to other continents!

"The Evangelists are not equally unanimous on another point. According to the synoptical writers, Jesus claims, it is true, the highest human dignity, and the most exalted relation with God, for the present and future, but he never refers to an existence anterior to his earthly career: in the fourth gospel, on the contrary, we find several discourses of Jesus which contain the repeated assertion of such a pre-existence. We grant that when Jesus describes himself as coming down from heaven (John iii. 13, xvi. 28), the expression, taken alone, may be understood as a merely figurative intimation of his superhuman origin. It is more difficult, but perhaps admissible, to interpret, with the Socinian Crell, the declaration of Jesus, Before Abraham was, I am, πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι, ἐγω εἰμι (John viii. 58), as referring to a purely ideal existence in the pre-determination of God; but scarcely possible to consider the prayer to the Father (John xvii. 5) to confirm the δόξα (glory) which Jesus had with Him before the world was, πρὸ τοῦ τὸν κόσμον εἶναι, as an entreaty for the communication of a glory predestined for Jesus from eternity. But the language of Jesus, John vi. 62, where he speaks of the Son of man reascending αναβαίνειν where he was before ὅπου ἦν τὸ πρότερον, is in its intrinsic meaning, as well as in that which is reflected on it from other passages, unequivocally significative of actual, not merely ideal, pre-existence."

This seems like a hash of what he learned from India with ideas of his Jewish heritage, of course.

"It has been already conjectured25 that these expressions, or at least the adaptation of them to a real pre-existence, are derived, not from Jesus, but from the author of the fourth gospel, with whose opinions, as propounded in his introduction, they specifically agree; for if the Word was in the beginning with God (ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θέον), Jesus, in whom it was made flesh, might attribute to himself an existence before Abraham, and a participation of glory with the Father before the foundation of the world. Nevertheless, we are not warranted in adopting this view, unless it can be shown that neither was the idea of the pre-existence of the Messiah extant among the Jews of Palestine before the time of Jesus, nor is it probable that Jesus attained such a notion, independently of the ideas peculiar to his age and nation."

He might have indeed learned from India, and Luke embellished it further - but thus, of course, assuming innocence of Rome, which there is no reason whatsoever to do; and by the time Rome ordered and arranged the writing of the official gospels after council of Nicea, Rome had had contact enough with India, after crucifixion; there had been not only Thomas who came to India but Roman migration too, to coastal Southeast India, traces of colonies of which have been found.

"The latter supposition, that Jesus spoke from his own memory of his pre-human [292]and pre-mundane existence, is liable to comparison with dangerous parallels in the history of Pythagoras, Ennius, and Apollonius of Tyana, whose alleged reminiscences of individual states which they had experienced prior to their birth, are now generally regarded either as subsequent fables, or as enthusiastic self-delusions of those celebrated men. ... "

Racist hubris, plain and simple; for, by the time Strauss wrote this, European intellectuals were familiar with India, her philosophy and thought, even if at a most rudimentary level.

" ... For the other alternative, that the idea in question was common to the Jewish nation, a presumption may be found in the description, already quoted from Daniel, of the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven, since the author, possibly, and, at all events, many readers, imagined that personage to be a superhuman being, dwelling beforehand with God, like the angels. But that every one who referred this passage to the Messiah, or that Jesus in particular, associated with it the notion of a pre-existence, is not to be proved; for, if we exclude the representation of John, Jesus depicts his coming in the clouds of heaven, not as if he had come as a visitant to earth from his home in heaven, but, according to Matt. xxvi. 65 (comp. xxiv. 25), as if he, the earth-born, after the completion of his earthly course, would be received into heaven, and from thence would return to establish his kingdom: thus making the coming from heaven not necessarily include the idea of pre-existence. ... "

If Strauss is not being racist but merely rational and scientific, isn't it splitting hair, approving miracles of dead returning from heaven to establish a kingdom on earth? And why doesn't he realise that this language was merely a cloak for establishment of Roman colonial empires around the world, if he wasn't a racist imperialist?

"As it is thus evident that, immediately after the time of Jesus, the idea of a pre-existence of the Messiah was incorporated in the higher Jewish theology, it is no far-fetched conjecture, that the same idea was afloat when the mind of Jesus was maturing, and that in his conception of himself as the Messiah, this attribute was included. But whether Jesus were as deeply initiated in the speculations of the Jewish schools as Paul, is yet a question, and as the author of the fourth gospel, versed in the Alexandrian doctrine of the λόγος, stands alone in ascribing to Jesus the assertion of a pre-existence, we are unable to decide whether we are to put the dogma to the account of Jesus, or of his biographer."

Wasn't Paul a soldier of Rome?

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65. THE MESSIANIC PLAN OF JESUS. INDICATIONS OF A POLITICAL ELEMENT.

"The idea of the Messiah grew up amongst the Jews in soil half religious, half political: it was nurtured by national adversity, and in the time of Jesus, according to the testimony of the gospels, it was embodied in the expectation that the Messiah would ascend the throne of his ancestor David, free the Jewish people from the Roman yoke, and found a kingdom which would last for ever (Luke i. 32 f., 68 ff.; Acts i. 6). Hence our first question must be this. Did Jesus include this political element in his messianic plan?"

The question Strauss should be asking, is whether Rome made up a mythology to cover up reality, of a man who'd grown up knowing he was king of Jews, and expected to free them, beginning a struggle against the Roman subjugation of Jews, being executed, and his followers not giving up, by joining church and cutting off Jews from it, and giving the man a makeover, from a warrior into a kind man talking of love.

"That Jesus aspired to be a temporal ruler, has at all times been an allegation of the adversaries of Christianity, but has been maintained by none with so much exegetical acumen as by the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments,34 who, be it observed, by no means denies to Jesus the praise of aiming at the moral reformation of his nation. ... "

Did his nation need moral reformation more than Rome? After all, the discussion of the story of his conception as given here by Strauss doesn't exactly portray Rome as moral, or anything but a bunch of liars attempting to copy the worst of a story of Jupiter!

" ... According to this writer, the first indication of a political plan on the part of Jesus is, that he unambiguously announced the approaching messianic kingdom, and laid down the conditions on which it was to be entered, without explaining what this kingdom was, and wherein it consisted,35 as if he supposed the current idea of its nature to be correct. Now the fact is, that the prevalent conception of the messianic reign had a strong political bias; hence, when Jesus spoke of the Messiah’s kingdom without a definition, the Jews could only think of an earthly dominion, and as Jesus could not have presupposed any other interpretation of his words, he must have wished to be so understood. But in opposition to this it may be remarked, that in the Parables by which Jesus shadowed forth the kingdom of heaven; in the Sermon on the Mount, in which he illustrates the duties of its citizens; and lastly, in his whole demeanour and course of action, we have sufficient evidence, that his idea of the messianic kingdom was peculiar to himself. There is not so ready a counterpoise for the difficulty, that Jesus sent the apostles, with whose conceptions he could not be unacquainted, to announce the Messiah’s kingdom throughout the land (Matt. x.). These, who disputed which of them should be greatest in the kingdom of their master (Matt, xviii. 1; Luke xxii. 24); of whom two petitioned for the seats at the right and left of the messianic king (Mark x. 35 ff.); who, even after the death and resurrection of Jesus, expected a restoration of the kingdom to Israel (Acts i. 6);—these had clearly from the beginning to the end of their intercourse [294]with Jesus, no other than the popular notion of the Messiah; when, therefore, Jesus despatched them as heralds of his kingdom, it seems necessarily a part of his design, that they should disseminate in all places their political messianic idea."

Just one little step, and Strauss could have torn the blinkers imposed by the church lie - that this was only a saintly, ascetic, celibate and a peace loving reformer, rather than a freedom fighter for his people who wasn't a debauch like Romans.

"Among the discourses of Jesus there is one especially worthy of note in Matt. xix. 28 (comp. Luke xxii. 30). In reply to the question of Peter, We have left all and followed thee; what shall we have therefore? Jesus promises to his disciples that in the παλιγγενεσία, when the Son of man shall sit on his throne, they also shall sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. That the literal import of this promise formed part of the tissue of the messianic hopes cherished by the Jews of that period, is not to be controverted. It is argued, however, that Jesus spoke figuratively on this occasion, and only employed familiar Jewish images to convey to the apostles an assurance, that the sacrifices they had made here would be richly compensated in their future life by a participation in his glory.36 But the disciples must have understood the promise literally, when, even after the resurrection of Jesus, they harboured anticipations of worldly greatness; and as Jesus had had many proofs of this propensity, he would hardly have adopted such language, had he not intended to nourish their temporal hopes. The supposition that he did so merely to animate the courage of his disciples, without himself sharing their views, imputes duplicity to Jesus;—a duplicity in this case quite gratuitous, since, as Olshausen justly observes, Peter’s question would have been satisfactorily answered by any other laudatory acknowledgment of the devotion of the disciples. Hence it appears a fair inference, that Jesus himself shared the Jewish expectations which he here sanctions: but expositors have made the most desperate efforts to escape from this unwelcome conclusion. Some have resorted to an arbitrary alteration of the reading; others to the detection of irony, directed against the disproportion between the pretensions of the disciples, and their trivial services,38 others to different expedients, but all more unnatural than the admission, that Jesus, in accordance with Jewish ideas, here promises his disciples the dignity of being his assessors in his visible messianic judgment, and that he thus indicates the existence of a national element in his notion of the Messiah’s kingdom. It is observable, too, that in the Acts (i. 7), Jesus, even after his resurrection, does not deny that he will restore the kingdom to Israel, but merely discourages curiosity as to the times and seasons of its restoration.

"Among the actions of Jesus, his last entry into Jerusalem (Matt. xxi. 1 ff.) is especially appealed to as a proof that his plan was partly political. According to the Fragmentist, all the circumstances point to a political design: the time which Jesus chose,—after a sufficiently long preparation of the people in the provinces; the Passover, which they visited in great numbers; the animal on which he rode, and by which, from a popular interpretation of a passage in Zechariah, he announced himself as the destined King of Jerusalem; the approval which he pronounces when the people receive him with a royal greeting; the violent procedure which he hazards in the temple; and finally, his severe philippic on the higher class of the Jews (Matt. xxiii.), at the close of which he seeks to awe them into a reception of him as their messianic king, by the threat that he will show himself to them no more in any other guise."

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66. DATA FOR THE PURE SPIRITUALITY OF THE MESSIANIC PLAN OF JESUS--BALANCE.

"Nowhere in our evangelical narratives is there a trace of Jesus having sought to form a political party. On the contrary, he withdraws from the eagerness of the people to make him a king (John vi. 15); he declares that the messianic kingdom comes not with observation, but is to be sought for in the recesses of the soul (Luke xvii. 20 f.); it is his principle to unite obedience to God with obedience to temporal authority, even when heathen (Matt. xxii. 21); on his solemn entry into the capital, he chooses to ride the animal of peace, and afterwards escapes from the multitude, instead of using their excitement for the purposes of his ambition; lastly, he maintains before his judge, that his kingdom is not from hence οὐκ ἐντεῦθεν, is not of this world οὐκ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου (John xvi. 36), and we have no reason in this instance to question either his or the Evangelist’s veracity."

How did Strauss expect to see anything of facts, if he not only stuck to the narratives sanctioned by church, but never thought for a moment, even of the fact that there really was no objective proof the narratives by apostles really were what it was said they were?

"Thus we have a series of indications to counterbalance those detailed in the preceding section. The adversaries of Christianity have held exclusively to the arguments for a political, or rather a revolutionary, project, on the part of Jesus, while the orthodox theologians adhere to those only which tell for the pure spirituality of his plan:39 and each party has laboured to invalidate by hermeneutical skill the passages unfavourable to its theory. It has of late been acknowledged that both are equally partial, and that there is need of arbitration between them."

If opposition to church dogma existed after centuries if persecution leading to subconscious terror of dissent, and more, Strauss woukd have done well to realise there was more to it than equal fault on both sides.

"This has been attempted chiefly by supposing an earlier and a later form of the plan of Jesus.40 Although, it has been said, the moral improvement and religious elevation of his people were from the first the primary object of Jesus, he nevertheless, in the beginning of his public life, cherished the hope of reviving, by means of this internal regeneration, the external glories of the theocracy, when he should be acknowledged by his nation as the Messiah, and thereby be constituted the supreme authority in the state. But in the disappointment of this hope, he recognised the divine rejection of every political element in his plan, and thenceforth refined it into pure spirituality. It is held to be a presumption in favour of such a change in the plan of Jesus, that there is a gladness diffused over his first appearance, which gives place to melancholy in the latter period of his ministry; that instead of the acceptable year of the Lord, announced in his initiative address at Nazareth, sorrow is the burthen of his later discourses, and he explicitly says of Jerusalem, that he had attempted to save it, but that now its fall, both religious and political, was inevitable. ... "

That latter part being whitewash by Rome to cover up murders by Rome and more.

" ... As, however, the evangelists do not keep the events and discourses proper to these distinct periods within their respective limits, but happen to give the two most important data for the imputation of a political design to Jesus (namely the promise of the twelve thrones and the public entrance into the capital), near the close of his life; we must attribute to these writers a chronological confusion, as in the case of the relation which the views of Jesus bore to the messianic idea in general: unless as an alternative it be conceivable, that Jesus uttered during the same period the [296]declarations which seem to indicate, and those which disclaim, a political design."

Strauss makes it seem guilty, even with a faint stink, if it was about freedom of Jews from Roman yoke, by labelling it political; and yet, which nation in Europe was free of politics?

" ... Jesus certainly expected to restore the throne of David, and with his disciples to govern a liberated people; in no degree, however, did he rest his hopes on the sword of human adherents (Luke xxii. 38; Matt. xxvi. 52), but on the legions of angels, which his heavenly Father could send him (Matt. xxvi. 53). Wherever he speaks of coming in his messianic glory, he depicts himself surrounded by angels and heavenly powers (Matt. xvi. 27, xxiv. 30 f., xxv. 31; John i. 52); before the majesty of the Son of man, coming in the clouds of heaven, all nations are to bow without the coercion of the sword, and at the sound of the angel’s trumpet, are to present themselves, with the awakened dead, before the judgment-seat of the Messiah and his twelve apostles. All this Jesus would not bring to pass of his own will, but he waited for a signal from his heavenly Father, who alone knew the appropriate time for this catastrophe (Mark xiii. 32), and he apparently was not disconcerted when his end approached without his having received the expected intimation. ... "

On one hand, he had little recourse for even the earthly kingdom than hope of God making it happen; on the other, Rome wasn't going to let traces of his activities show in accounts of his life, if they included more than speeches - but if he were only a spiritual man speaking of peace, why send a cohort to get him?

" ... They who shrink from this view, merely because they conceive that it makes Jesus an enthusiast,42 will do well to reflect how closely such hopes corresponded with the long cherished messianic idea of the Jews,43 and how easily, in that day of supernaturalism, and in a nation segregated by the peculiarities of its faith, an idea, in itself extravagant, if only it were consistent, and had, in some of its aspects, truth and dignity, might allure even a reasonable man beneath its influence."

"With respect to that which awaits the righteous after judgment,—everlasting life in the kingdom of the Father,—it is true that Jesus, in accordance with Jewish notions,44 compares it to a feast (Matt. viii. 11, xxii. 2 ff.), at which he hopes himself to taste the fruit of the vine (Matt. xxvi. 29), and to celebrate the Passover (Luke xxii. 16); but his declaration that in the αἰὼν μέλλων the organic relation between the sexes will cease, and men will be like the angels (ἰσάγγελοι, Luke xx. 35 ff.), seems more or less to reduce the above discourses to a merely symbolical significance.

"Thus we conclude that the messianic hope of Jesus was not political, nor even merely earthly, for he referred its fulfilment to supernatural means, and to a supermundane theatre (the regenerated earth): as little was it a purely spiritual hope, in the modern sense of the term, for it included important and unprecedented changes in the external condition of things: but it was the national, theocratic hope, spiritualized and ennobled by his own peculiar moral and religious views."

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67. THE RELATION OF JESUS TO THE MOSAIC LAW.

"The Mosaic institutions were actually extinguished in the church of which Jesus was the founder; hence it is natural to suppose that their abolition formed a part of his design:—a reach of vision, beyond the horizon of the ceremonial worship of his age and country, of which apologists have been ever anxious to prove that he was possessed.45 Neither are there wanting speeches and actions of Jesus which seem to favour their effort. Whenever he details the conditions of participation in the kingdom of heaven, as in the Sermon on the Mount, he insists, not on the observance of the Mosaic ritual, but on the spirit of religion and morality; he attaches no value to fasting, praying, and almsgiving, unless accompanied by a corresponding bent of mind (Matt. vi. 1–18); the two main elements of the Mosaic worship, sacrifice and the keeping of sabbaths and feasts, he not only nowhere enjoins, but puts a marked slight on the former, by commending the scribe who declared that the love of God and one’s neighbour was more than whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices, as one not far from the kingdom of God (Mark xii. 23 f.),46 and he ran counter in action as well as in speech to the customary mode of celebrating the Sabbath (Matt. xii. 1–13; Mark ii. 23–28, iii. 1–5; Luke vi. 1–10, xiii. 10 ff., xiv. 1 ff.; John v. 5 ff., vii. 22, ix. 1 ff.), of which in his character of Son of Man he claimed to be Lord. The Jews, too, appear to have expected a revision of the Mosaic law by their Messiah. ... "

It's funny isn't it, then, that the church - especially church of Rome - went right back and imposed, all of that which hed rejected or put aside, on its followers, and in his name too?!!! Was it to somehow pretend subconsciously to themselves that this made up for killing him and his people, and persecuting them for evermore?

"The above, however, presents only one aspect of the position assumed by Jesus towards the Mosaic law; there are also data for the belief that he did not meditate the overthrow of the ancient constitution of his country. This side of the question has been, at a former period, and from easily-conceived reasons, the one which the enemies of Christianity in its ecclesiastical form, have chosen to exhibit;48 but it is only in recent times that, the theological [298]horizon being extended, the unprejudiced expositors of the church49 have acknowledged its existence. In the first place, during his life Jesus remains faithful to the paternal law; he attends the synagogue on the sabbath, journeys to Jerusalem at the time of the feast, and eats of the paschal lamb with his disciples. It is true that he heals on the sabbath, allows his disciples to pluck ears of corn (Matt. xii. 1 ff.), and requires no fasting or washing before meat in his society (Matt. iv. 14, xv. 2). But the Mosaic law concerning the sabbath simply prescribed cessation from common labour, ‏מְלָאכָה‎ (Exod. xx. 8 ff., xxxi. 12 ff., Deut. v. 12 ff.), including ploughing, reaping (Exod. xxxiv. 21), gathering of sticks (Num. xv. 32 ff.), and similar work, and it was only the spirit of petty observance, the growth of a later age, that made it an offence to perform cures, or pluck a few ears of corn.50 The washing of hands before eating was but a rabbinical custom;51 in the law one general yearly fast was alone prescribed (Lev. xvi. 29 ff., xxiii. 27 ff.) and no private fasting required; hence Jesus cannot be convicted of infringing the precepts of Moses. ... "

And yet, German lands still impose closure of all work after half a day on Saturday- so much so, neither pharmacies nor milk supplies for babies are available, except if one knows which particular emergency pharmacy is open that particular weekend, by looking at the newspaper - if one knew about it, which a stranger on a visit woukdnt; and it's only recent that petrol stations keep some groceries for sale, so babies need not starve.

"In that very Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus exalts spiritual religion so far above all ritual, he clearly presupposes the continuation of sacrifices (Matt. v. 23 f.), and declares that he is not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil (Matt. v. 17). Even if πληρῶσαι, in all probability, refers chiefly to the accomplishment of the Old Testament prophecies, οὐκ ἦλθον καταλῦσαι must at the same time be understood of the conservation of the Mosaic law, since in the context, perpetuity is promised to its smallest letter, and he who represents its lightest precept as not obligatory, is threatened with the lowest rank in the kingdom of heaven.53 In accordance with this, the apostles adhered strictly to the Mosaic law, even after the feast of Pentecost; they went at the hour of prayer into the temple (Acts iii. 1), clung to the synagogues and to the Mosaic injunctions respecting food (x. 14), and were unable to appeal to any express declaration of Jesus as a sanction for the procedure of Barnabas and Paul, when the judaizing party complained of their baptizing Gentiles without laying on them the burthen of the Mosaic law."

Wasn't that Barabbas?

" ... The majority of the Pharisaical precepts referred to externals, and had the effect of burying the noble morality of the Mosaic law under a heap of ceremonial observances; a gift to the temple sufficed to absolve the giver from his filial duties (xv. 5), and the payment of tithe of anise and cummin superseded justice, mercy, and faith (xxiii. 23). ... "

Wasn't it exactly similar corruption in church of Rome that made Luther rebel, for reform, before he was forced to separate his path from Rome?

"Jesus, supposing that he had discerned morality and the spiritual worship of God to be the sole essentials in religion, must have rejected all which, being merely ritual and formal, had usurped the importance of a religious obligation, and under this description must fall a large proportion of the Mosaic precepts; but it is well known how slowly such consequences are deduced, when they come into collision with usages consecrated by antiquity. Even Samuel, apparently, was aware that obedience is better than sacrifice (1 Sam. xv. 22), and Asaph, that an offering of thanksgiving is more acceptable to God than one of slain animals (Ps. 1.); yet how long after were sacrifices retained together with true obedience, or in its stead! Jesus was more thoroughly penetrated with this conviction than those ancients; with him, the true commandments of God in the Mosaic law were simply, Honour thy father and thy mother, Thou shalt not kill, etc., and above all, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself. But [300]his deep-rooted respect for the sacred book of the law, caused him, for the sake of these essential contents, to honour the unessential; which was the more natural, as in comparison with the absurdly exaggerated pedantry of the traditional observances, the ritual of the Pentateuch must have appeared highly simple. To honour this latter part of the law as of Divine origin, but to declare it abrogated on the principle, that in the education of the human race, God finds necessary for an earlier period an arrangement which is superfluous for a later one, implies that idea of the law as a schoolmaster, νόμος παιδαγωγὸς (Gal. iii. 24), which seems first to have been developed by the Apostle Paul; nevertheless, its germ lies in the declaration of Jesus, that God had permitted to the early Hebrews, on account of the hardness of their hearts (Matt. xix. 8 f.), many things which, in a more advanced state of culture, were inadmissible."

The church labelled it donation, or tithe, instead of sacrifice demanded, but demanded it under other guises; and as to the last part, it seems unlikely that it was he calling his own people abusive names such as hard hearted - it must have been Rome that put that in, among other lies! After all, his family, neighbours, friends and relatives were Jews, and he wasn't exactly brought up by other people! Or is this a clue that he did indeed travel to India? Even if so, it's unlikely he'd call Jews hard hearted, without including himself - that bit clearly shows a Roman hand in writing it, whether it was Paul or the council of Nicea.

"A similar limitation of the duration of the law is involved in the predictions of Jesus (if indeed they were uttered by Jesus, a point which we have to discuss), that the temple would be destroyed at his approaching advent (Matt. xxiv. parall.), and that devotion would be freed from all local restrictions (John iv.); for with these must fall the entire Mosaic system of external worship. This is not contradicted by the declaration that the law would endure until heaven and earth should pass away (Matt. v. 18), for the Hebrew associated the fall of his state and sanctuary with the end of the old world or dispensation, so that the expressions, so long as the temple stands, and so long as the world stands, were equivalent. ... "

Clear hand of Rome in that first part.

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68. SCOPE OF THE MESSIANIC PLAN OF JESUS-RELATIONS TO THE GENTILES.

"Although the church founded by Jesus did, in fact, early extend itself beyond the limits of the Jewish people, there are yet indications which might induce a belief that he did not contemplate such an extension.61 When he sends the twelve on their first mission, his command is, Go not into the way [301]of the Gentiles—Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. x. 5 f.). That Matthew alone has this injunction, and not the two other synoptists, is less probably explained by the supposition that the Hebrew author of the first gospel interpolated it, than by the opposite one, namely, that it was wilfully omitted by the Hellenistic authors of the second and third gospels. For, as the judaizing tendency of Matthew is not so marked that he assigns to Jesus the intention of limiting the messianic kingdom to the Jews; as, on the contrary, he makes Jesus unequivocally foretell the calling of the Gentiles (viii. 11 f., xxi. 33 ff., xxii. 1 ff., xxviii. 19 f.): he had no motive for fabricating this particularizing addition; but the two other Evangelists had a strong one for its omission, in the offence which it would cause to the Gentiles already within the fold. ... This necessity on his part might account for his answer to the Canaanitish woman, whose daughter he refuses to heal, because he was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. xv. 24), were it not that the boon which he here denies is not a reception into the messianic kingdom, but a temporal benefit, such as even Elijah and Elisha had conferred on those who were not Israelites (1 Kings xvii. 9 ff.; 2 Kings v. 1 ff.)—examples to which Jesus elsewhere appeals (Luke iv. 25 ff.). ... That an aversion to the Gentiles may not appear to be his motive, it has been conjectured63 that Jesus, wishing to preserve an incognito in that country, avoided the performance of any messianic work. But such a design of concealment is only mentioned by Mark (vii. 25), who represents it as being defeated by the entreaties of the woman, contrary to the inclinations of Jesus; and as this Evangelist omits the declaration of Jesus, that he was not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, we must suspect that he was guided by the wish to supply a less offensive motive for the conduct of Jesus, rather than by historical accuracy. ... Thus it must be allowed that Jesus in this case seems to share the antipathy of his countrymen towards the Gentiles, ... "

"This narrative, however, is neutralized by another, in which Jesus is said to act in a directly opposite manner. The centurion of Capernaum, also a Gentile (as we gather from the remarks of Jesus), has scarcely complained of a distress similar to that of the Canaanitish woman, when Jesus himself volunteers to go and heal his servant (Matt. viii. 5). If, then, Jesus has no hesitation, in this instance, to exercise his power of healing in favour of a heathen, how comes it that he refuses to do so in another quite analogous case? Truly if the relative position of the two narratives in the gospels have any weight, he must have shown himself more harsh and narrow at the later period than at the earlier one. Meanwhile, this single act of benevolence to a Gentile, standing as it does in inexplicable contradiction to the narrative above examined, cannot prove, in opposition to the command expressly given to the disciples, not to go to the Gentiles, that Jesus contemplated their admission as such into the messianic kingdom."

"Even the prediction of Jesus that the kingdom of heaven would be taken from the Jews and given to the Gentiles, does not prove this. In the above interview with the centurion of Capernaum, Jesus declares that many shall come from the east and the west, and sit down with the patriarchs in the kingdom of heaven, while the children of the kingdom (obviously the Jews), for whom it was originally designed, will be cast out (Matt. viii. 11 f.). ... "

That part seems more in accord with Rome writing it!

" ... Yet more decidedly, when applying the parable of the husbandmen in the vineyard, he warns his countrymen that the kingdom of God shall be taken from them, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof (Matt. xxi. 43). All this may be understood in the sense intended by the prophets, in their promises that the messianic kingdom would extend to all nations; namely, that the Gentiles would turn to the worship of Jehovah, embrace the Mosaic religion in its entire form, and afterwards be received into the Messiah’s kingdom. It would accord very well with this expectation, that, prior to such a conversion, Jesus should forbid his disciples to direct their announcement of his kingdom to the Gentiles."

And Rome might have thought it best to cover sins of Rome in persecution of Jews, crucifixion of hundreds, and the final exodus enforced, by saying he prophesied all this, and him being worshipped by Rome, Rome had to do it it was ordained by his father!

"But in the discourses concerning his re-appearance, Jesus regards the publication of the gospel to all nations as one of the circumstances that must precede that event (Matt. xxiv. 14; Mark xiii. 10); and after his resurrection, according to the synoptists, he gave his disciples the command, Go ye, and teach all nations, baptizing them, etc. (Matt. xxviii. 19; Mark xvi. 15; Luke xxiv. 47); i.e. go to them with the offer of the Messiah’s kingdom, even though they may not beforehand have become Jews. Not only, however, do the disciples, after the first Pentecost, neglect to execute this command, but when a case is thrust on them which offers them an opportunity for compliance with it, they act as if they were altogether ignorant that such a direction had been given by Jesus (Acts x., xi.). The heathen centurion Cornelius, worthy, from his devout life, of a reception into the messianic community, is pointed out by an angel to the Apostle Peter. But because it was not hidden from God, with what difficulty the apostle would be induced to receive a heathen, without further preliminary, into the Messiah’s kingdom, he saw it needful to prepare him for such a step by a symbolical vision. In consequence of such an admonition Peter goes to Cornelius; but to impel him to baptize him and his family, he needs a second sign, the pouring out of the Holy Ghost on these uncircumcised. When, subsequently, the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem call him to account for this reception of Gentiles, Peter appeals in his justification solely to the recent vision, and to the Holy Ghost given to the centurion’s family. Whatever judgment we may form [303]of the credibility of this history, it is a memorial of the many deliberations and contentions which it cost the apostles after the departure of Jesus, to convince themselves of the eligibility of Gentiles for a participation in the kingdom of their Christ, and the reasons which at last brought them to a decision. Now if Jesus had given so explicit a command as that above quoted, what need was there of a vision to encourage Peter to its fulfilment? or, supposing the vision to be a legendary investiture of the natural deliberations of the disciples, why did they go about in search of the reflection, that all men ought to be baptized, because before God all men and all animals, as his creatures, are clean, if they could have appealed to an express injunction of Jesus? Here, then, is the alternative: if Jesus himself gave this command, the disciples cannot have been led to the admission of the Gentiles by the means narrated in Acts x., xi.; if, on the other hand, that narrative is authentic, the alleged command of Jesus cannot be historical. Our canon decides for the latter proposition. For that the subsequent practice and pre-eminent distinction of the Christian Church, its accessibility to all nations, and its indifference to circumcision or uncircumcision, should have lain in the mind of its founder, is the view best adapted to exalt and adorn Jesus; while that, after his death, and through the gradual development of relations, the church, which its Founder had designed for the Gentiles only in so far as they became Jews, should break through these limits, is in the simple, natural, and therefore the probable course of things."

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69. RELATION OP THE MESSIANIC PLAN OP JESUS TO THE SAMARITANS--HIS INTERVIEW WITH THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA.

"There is the same apparent contradiction in the position which Jesus took, and prescribed to his disciples, towards the inhabitants of Samaria. While in his instructions to his disciples (Matt. x. 5), he forbids them to visit any city of the Samaritans, we read in John (iv.) that Jesus himself in his journey through Samaria laboured as the Messiah with great effect, and ultimately stayed two days in a Samaritan town; and in the Acts (i. 8), that before his ascension he charged the disciples to be his witnesses, not only in Jerusalem and in all Judea, but also in Samaria. That Jesus did not entirely shun Samaria, as that prohibition might appear to intimate, is evident from Luke ix. 52 (comp. xvii. 11), where his disciples bespeak lodgings for him in a Samaritan village, when he has determined to go to Jerusalem; a circumstance which accords with the information of Josephus, that those Galileans who journeyed to the feasts usually went through Samaria.66 That Jesus was not unfavourable to the Samaritans, nay, that in many respects he acknowledged their superiority to the Jews, is evident from his parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke x. 30 ff.); he also bestows a marked notice on the case of a Samaritan, who, among ten cleansed, was the only one that testified his gratitude (Luke xvii. 16); and, if we may venture on such a conclusion from John iv. 25, and subsequent records, the inhabitants of Samaria themselves had some tincture of the messianic idea."

" ... Are all these various accounts well founded? If so, how could Jesus at one time prohibit his disciples from including the Samaritans in the messianic plan, and at another time, himself receive them without hesitation? Moreover, if the chronological order of the Evangelists deserve regard, the ministry of Jesus in Samaria must have preceded the prohibition contained in his instructions to his disciples on their first mission. For the scene of that mission being Galilee, and there being no space for its occurrence during the short stay which, according to the fourth Evangelist, Jesus made in that province before the first Passover (ii. 1–13), it must be placed after that Passover; and, as the visit to Samaria was made on his journey, after that visit also. How, then, could Jesus, after having with the most desirable issue, personally taught in Samaria, and presented himself as the Messiah, forbid his disciples to carry thither their messianic tidings? On the other hand, if the scenes narrated by John occurred after the command recorded by Matthew, the disciples, instead of wondering that Jesus talked so earnestly with a woman (John iv. 27), ought rather to have wondered that he held any converse with a Samaritan."

" ... The woman had entreated Jesus to give her of the water which was for ever to extinguish thirst, and Jesus immediately says, Go, call thy husband. Why so? It has been said that Jesus, well knowing that the woman had no lawful husband, sought to shame her, and bring her to repentance.71 Lücke, disapproving the imputation of dissimulation to Jesus, conjectures that, perceiving the woman’s dulness, he hoped by summoning her husband, possibly her superior in intelligence, to create an opportunity for a more beneficial conversation. But if Jesus, as it presently appears, knew that the woman had not at the time any proper husband, he could not in earnest desire her to summon him; and if, as Lücke allows, he had that knowledge in a supernatural manner, it could not be hidden from him, who knew what was in man, that she would be little inclined to comply with his injunction. If, however, he had a prescience that what he required would not be done, the injunction was a feint, and had some latent object. But that this object was the penitence of the woman there is no indication in the text, for the ultimate effect on her is not shame and penitence, but faith in the prophetic insight of Jesus (v. 19). And this was doubtless what Jesus wished, for the narrative proceeds as if he had attained his purpose with the woman, and the issue corresponded to the design. The difficulty here lies, not so much in what Lücke terms dissimulation,—since this comes under the category of blameless temptation (πειράζειν), elsewhere occurring,—as in the violence with which Jesus wrests an opportunity for the display of his prophetic gifts."

She asked for water, and he told her to get her husband? And she was supposed to be shamed? Alternatively he thought her husband might have more intelligence?

How far did misogyny permeate the West, until they never saw It? Answer is obvious, of course. The whole discourse is about fathers and sons, even though in thus case there only supposedly a mother; and then she's supposed to be virgin after childbirth, so women in general stay degraded in minds of west, particularly those affected in any way by later abrahmic faiths, for ever.

"By a transition equally abrupt, the woman urges the conversation to a point at which the Messiahship of Jesus may become fully evident. As soon as she has recognised Jesus to be a prophet, she hastens to consult him on the controversy pending between the Jews and Samaritans, as to the place appropriated to the true worship of God (v. 20). That so vivid an interest in this national and religious question is not consistent with the limited mental and circumstantial condition of the woman, the majority of modern commentators virtually confess, by their adoption of the opinion, that her drift in this remark was to turn away the conversation from her own affairs.72 If then the implied query concerning the place for the true worship of God, had no serious interest for the woman, but was prompted by a false shame calculated to hinder confession and repentance, those expositors should remember what they elsewhere repeat to satiety,73 that in the Gospel of John the answers of Jesus refer not so much to the ostensible meaning of questions, as to the under current of feeling of which they are the indications. In accordance with this method, Jesus should not have answered the artificial question of the woman as if it had been one of deep seriousness; he ought rather to have evaded it, and recurred to the already detected stain on her conscience, which she was now seeking to hide, in order if possible to bring her to a full conviction and open avowal of her guilt. But the fact is that the object of the Evangelist was to show that Jesus had been recognised, [306]not merely as a prophet, but as the Messiah, and he believed that to turn the conversation to the question of the legitimate place for the worship of God, the solution of which was expected from the Messiah,74 would best conduce to that end."

Again - her shame is that she hasn't a husband? And that's her guilt? What were women supposed to do, hunt them with snares? And most of this hasn't changed, in west either, despite all the struggle and strife and striving, by women, and by men who know it's wrong. It's not likely to, as long as the abrahmic cultures font see their horrible guilt in holding womanhood lesser, and heaping all garbage of male guilt on womanhood.

"Jesus evinces (v. 17) an acquaintance with the past history and present position of the woman. The rationalists have endeavoured to explain this by the supposition, that while Jesus sat at the well, and the woman was advancing from the city, some passer-by hinted to him that he had better not engage in conversation with her, as she was on the watch to obtain a sixth husband.75 But not to insist on the improbability that a passer-by should hold a colloquy with Jesus on the character of an obscure woman, the friends as well as the enemies of the fourth gospel now agree, that every natural explanation of that knowledge on the part of Jesus, directly counteracts the design of the Evangelist.76 For, according to him, the disclosure which Jesus makes of his privity to the woman’s intimate concerns, is the immediate cause, not only of her own faith in him, but of that of many inhabitants of the city (v. 39), and he obviously intends to imply that they were not too precipitate in receiving him as a prophet, on that ground alone. Thus in the view of the Evangelist, the knowledge in question was an effluence of the higher nature of Jesus, and modern supranaturalists adhere to this explanation, adducing in its support the power which John attributes to him (ii. 24 f.), of discerning what is in man without the aid of external testimony.77 But this does not meet the case; for Jesus here not only knows what is in the woman,—her present equivocal state of mind towards him who is not her husband,—he has cognizance also of the extrinsic fact that she has had five husbands, of whom we cannot suppose that each had left a distinct image in her mind traceable by the observation of Jesus. ... Such empirical knowingness (not omniscience) would moreover annihilate the human consciousness which the orthodox view supposes to co-exist in Jesus.78 But the possession of this knowledge, however it may clash with our conception of dignity and wisdom, closely corresponds to the Jewish notion of a prophet, more especially of the Messiah; in the Old Testament, Daniel recites a dream of Nebuchadnezzar, which that monarch himself had forgotten (Dan. ii.); in the Clementine Homilies, the true prophet is ὁ πάντοτε πάντα εἰδώς· τὰ μὲν γεγονότα ὡς ἐγένετο, τὰ δὲ γινόμενα ὡς γίνεται, τὰ δέ ἐσόμενα ὡς ἔσται;79 and the rabbins number such a knowledge of personal secrets among the signs of the Messiah, and observe that from the want of it, Bar-Cocheba was detected to be a pseudo-Messiah.

"Farther on (v. 23) Jesus reveals to the woman what Hase terms the sublimest principle of his religion, namely, that the service of God consists [307]in a life of piety; tells her that all ceremonial worship is about to be abolished; and that he is the personage who will effect this momentous change, that is, the Messiah. We have already shown it to be improbable that Jesus, who did not give his disciples to understand that he was the Messiah until a comparatively late period, should make an early and distinct disclosure on the subject to a Samaritan woman. ... "

"The result, then, of our examination of John’s Samaritan narrative is, that we cannot receive it as a real history: and the impression which it leaves as a whole tends to the same conclusion. Since Heracleon and Origen,84 the more ancient commentators have seldom refrained from giving the interview of Jesus with the woman of Samaria an allegorical interpretation, on the ground that the entire scene has a legendary and poetic colouring. Jesus is seated at a well,—that idyllic locality with which the old Hebrew legend associates so many critical incidents; at the identical well, moreover, which a tradition, founded on Gen. xxxiii. 19, xlviii. 22; Josh. xxiv. 32, reported to have been given by Jacob to his son Joseph; hence the spot, in addition to its idyllic interest, has the more decided consecration of national and patriarchal recollections, and is all the more worthy of being trodden by the Messiah. At the well Jesus meets with a woman who has come out to draw water, just as, in the Old Testament, the expectant Eliezer encounters Rebekah with her pitcher, and as Jacob meets with Rachel, the destined ancestress of Israel, or Moses with his future wife. Jesus begs of the woman to let him drink; so does Eliezer of Rebekah; after Jesus has made himself known to the woman as the Messiah, she runs back to the city, and fetches her neighbours: so Rebekah, after Eliezer has announced himself as Abraham’s steward, and Rachel, after she has discovered that Jacob is her kinsman, hasten homeward to call their friends to welcome the honoured guest. It is, certainly, not one blameless as those early mothers in Israel, whom Jesus here encounters; for this woman came forth as the representative of an impure people, who had been faithless to their marriage bond with Jehovah, and were then living in the practice of a false worship; while her good-will, her deficient moral strength, and her obtuseness in spiritual things, perfectly typify the actual state of the Samaritans. Thus, the interview of Jesus with the woman of Samaria is only a poetical representation of his ministry among the Samaritans narrated in the sequel; and this is itself a legendary prelude to the propagation of the gospel in Samaria after the death of Jesus."

" ... Are we then to suppose on the part of the apostolic history, a cancelling of hesitations and deliberations that really occurred; or on the part of Matthew, an unwarranted ascription of national bigotry to Jesus; or, finally, on the part of Jesus, a progressive enlargement of view?"

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October 22, 2021 - October 23, 2021.

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CHAPTER V.

THE DISCIPLES OF JESUS.

§ 70. Calling of the first companions of Jesus. Difference between the first two Evangelists and the fourth

71. Peter’s draught of fishes

72. Calling of Matthew. Connexion of Jesus with the publicans

73. The twelve apostles

74. The twelve considered individually. The three or four most confidential disciples of Jesus

75. The rest of the twelve, and the seventy disciples

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70. CALLING OF THE FIRST COMPANIONS OF JESUS. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE FIRST TWO EVANGELISTS AND THE FOURTH.

"The first two Evangelists agree in stating that Jesus, when walking by the sea of Galilee, called, first, the two brothers Andrew and Peter, and immediately after, James and John, to forsake their fishing nets, and to follow him (Matt. iv. 18–22; Mark i. 16–20). The fourth Evangelist also narrates (i. 35–51), how the first disciples came to attach themselves to Jesus, and among them we find Peter and Andrew, and, in all probability, John, for it is generally agreed that the nameless companion of Andrew was that ultimately favourite apostle. James is absent from this account, and instead of his vocation, we have that of Philip and Nathanael. But even when the persons are the same, all the particulars of their meeting with Jesus are variously detailed. In the two synoptical gospels, the scene is the coast of the Galilean sea: in the fourth, Andrew, Peter, and their anonymous friend, unite themselves to Jesus in the vicinity of the Jordan; Philip and Nathanael, on the way from thence into Galilee. In the former, again, Jesus in two instances calls a pair of brothers; in the latter, it is first Andrew and his companion, then Peter, and anon Philip and Nathanael, who meet with Jesus. But the most important difference is this: while, in Matthew and Mark, the brethren are called from their fishing immediately by Jesus; in John, nothing more is said of the respective situations of those who were summoned, than that they come, and are found, and Jesus himself calls only Philip; Andrew and his nameless companion being directed to him by the Baptist, Peter brought by Andrew, and Nathanael by Philip.

"Thus the two narratives appear to refer to separate events; and if it be asked which of those events was prior to the other, we must reply that John seems to assign the earlier date to his incidents, for he represents them as taking place before the return of Jesus from the scene of his baptism into Galilee; while the synoptists place theirs after that journey, especially if, according to a calculation often adopted, we regard the return into Galilee, which they make so important an epoch, as being that from the first Passover, not from the baptism. ... "

" ... To say that these disciples, acquired in Peræa, again dispersed themselves after the return of Jesus into Galilee,3 is to do violence to the gospels out of harmonistic zeal. But even supposing such a dispersion, they could not, in the short time which it is possible to allow for their separation from Jesus, have become so completely strangers to him, that he would have been obliged to re-open an acquaintance with them after the manner narrated by the synoptical writers. ... "

"If, then, each of these two diverse narratives professes to describe the first acquaintance of Jesus with his most distinguished disciples, it follows that one only can be correct, while the other is necessarily erroneous.4 It is our task to inquire which has the more intrinsic proofs of veracity. ... "

" ... As adequate inducements to the formation of such a legend, we may point, not only to the above cited Jewish notion of the Messiah as the searcher of hearts, but to a specific type of this vocation of the apostles, contained in the narrative (1 Kings xix. 19–21) of the mode in which the prophet Elijah summoned Elisha to become his follower. Here Jesus calls the brethren from their nets and their fishing; there the prophet calls his future disciple from the oxen and the plough; in both cases there is a transition from simple physical labour to the highest spiritual office—a contrast which, as is exemplified in the Roman history, tradition is apt either to cherish or to create. Further, the fishermen, at the call of Jesus, forsake their nets and follow him; so Elisha, when Elijah cast his mantle over him, left the oxen, and ran after Elijah. This is one apparent divergency, which is a yet more striking proof of the relation between the two narratives, than is their general similarity. The prophet’s disciple entreated that before he attached himself entirely to Elijah, he might be permitted to take leave of his father and mother; and the prophet does not hesitate to grant him this request, on the understood condition that Elisha should return to him. Similar petitions are offered to Jesus (Luke ix. 59 ff.; [312]Matt. viii. 21 f.) by some whom he had called, or who had volunteered to follow him; but Jesus does not accede to these requests: on the contrary, he enjoins the one who wished previously to bury his father, to enter on his discipleship without delay; and the other, who had begged permission to bid farewell to his friends, he at once dismisses as unfit for the kingdom of God. In strong contrast with the divided spirit manifested by these feeble proselytes, it is said of the apostles, that they, without asking any delay, immediately forsook their occupation, and, in the case of James and John, their father. Could anything betray more clearly than this one feature, that the narrative is an embellished imitation of that in the Old Testament intended to show that Jesus, in his character of Messiah, exacted a more decided adhesion, accompanied with greater sacrifices, than Elijah, in his character of Prophet merely, required or was authorized to require? The historical germ of the narrative may be this: several of the most eminent disciples of Jesus, particularly Peter, dwelling on the shores of the sea of Galilee, had been fishermen, whence Jesus during their subsequent apostolic agency may have sometimes styled them fishers of men. But without doubt, their relation with Jesus was formed gradually, like other human relations, and is only elevated into a marvel through the obliviousness of tradition."

" ... Equally unnatural is the manner in which Jesus is said to have received Simon. He accosts him with the words, Thou art Simon, the son of Jona,—a mode of salutation which seems, as Bengel has well remarked,8 to imply that Jesus had a supernatural acquaintance with the name and origin of a man previously unknown to him, analogous to his cognizance of the number of the Samaritan woman’s husbands, and of Nathanael’s presence under the fig-tree. Jesus then proceeds to bestow on Simon the significant surname of Cephas or Peter. If we are not inclined to degrade the speech of Jesus into buffoonery, by referring this appellation to the bodily organization of the disciple,9 we must suppose that Jesus at the first glance, with the eye of him who knew hearts, penetrated into the inmost nature of Simon, and discovered not only his general fitness [313]for the apostleship, but also the special, individual qualities which rendered him comparable to a rock. .... Even after a more lengthened conversation with Peter, such as Lücke supposes,10 Jesus could not pronounce so decidedly on his character, without being a searcher of hearts, or falling under the imputation of forming too precipitate a judgment. It is indeed possible that the Christian legend, attracted by the significance of the name, may have represented Jesus as its author, while, in fact, Simon had borne it from his birth. ... "

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71. PETER’S DRAUGHT OF FISHES.

"Jesus, oppressed by the throng of people on the shore of the Galilean sea, enters into a ship, that he may address them with more ease at a little distance from land. Having brought his discourse to a close, he desires Simon, the owner of the boat, to launch out into the deep, and let down his nets for a draught. Simon, although little encouraged by the poor result of the last night’s fishing, declares himself willing, and is rewarded by so extraordinary a draught, that Peter and his partners, James and John (Andrew is not here mentioned), are struck with astonishment, the former even with awe, before Jesus, as a superior being. Jesus then says to Simon, Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men, and the issue is that the three fishermen forsake all, and follow him."

"It is easy to show how, out of the expression preserved by the first Evangelist, the miraculous story of the third might be formed. If Jesus, in allusion to the former occupation of some of his apostles, had called them fishers of men; if he had compared the kingdom of heaven to a net cast into the sea, in which all kinds of fish were taken (Matt. xiii. 47); it was but a following out of these ideas to represent the apostles as those who, at the word of Jesus, cast out the net, and gathered in the miraculous multitude of fishes.22 If we add to this, that the ancient legend was fond of occupying its wonder-workers with affairs of fishing, as we see in the story related of Pythagoras by Jamblichus and Porphyry;23 it will no longer appear improbable, that Peter’s miraculous draught of fishes is but the expression about the fishers of men, transmuted into the history of a miracle, and this view will at once set us free from all the difficulties that attend the natural, as well as the supranatural interpretation of the narrative."

"Let us now compare these three fishing histories,—the two narrated of Jesus, and that narrated of Pythagoras,—and their mythical character will be obvious. That which, in Luke, is indubitably intended as a miracle of power, is, in the history of Jamblichus, a miracle of knowledge; for Pythagoras merely tells in a supernatural manner the number of fish already caught by natural means. The narrative of John holds a middle place, for in it also the number of the fish (153) plays a part; but instead of being predetermined by the worker of the miracle, it is simply stated by the narrator. One legendary feature common to all the three narratives, is the manner in which the multitude and weight of the fishes are described; especially as this sameness of manner accompanies a diversity in particulars. According to Luke, the multitude is so great that the net is broken, one ship will not hold them, and after they have been divided between the two vessels, both threaten to sink. In the view of the tradition given in the fourth gospel, it was not calculated to magnify the power of the miraculous agent, that the net which he had so marvellously filled should break; but as here also the aim is to exalt the miracle by celebrating the number and weight of the fishes, they are said to be μεγάλοι (great), and it is added that the men were not able to draw the net for the multitude of fishes: instead, however, of lapsing out of the miraculous into the common by the breaking of the net, a second miracle is ingeniously made,—that for all there were so many, yet was not the net broken. Jamblichus presents a further wonder (the only one he has, besides the knowledge of Pythagoras as to the number of the fish): namely, that while the fish were being counted, a process that must have required a considerable time, not one of them died. If there be a mind that, not perceiving in the narratives we have compared the finger-marks of tradition, and hence the legendary character of these evangelical anecdotes, still leans to the historical interpretation, whether natural or supernatural; that mind must be alike ignorant of the true character both of legend and of history, of the natural and the supernatural."

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72. CALLING OF MATTHEW. CONNEXION OF JESUS WITH THE PUBLICANS.

"The first gospel (ix. 9 ff.) tells of a man named Matthew, to whom, when sitting at the receipt of custom, Jesus said, Follow me. Instead of Matthew, the second and third gospels have Levi, and Mark adds he that was the son of Alphæus (Mark ii. 14 ff.; Luke v. 27 ff.). At the call of Jesus, Luke says that he left all; Matthew merely states, that he followed Jesus and prepared a meal, of which many publicans and sinners partook, to the great scandal of the Pharisees.

"From the difference of the names it has been conjectured that the Evangelists refer to two different events;26 but this difference of the name is more than counterbalanced by the similarity of the circumstances. In all the three cases the call of the publican is preceded and followed by the same occurrences; the subject of the narrative is in the same situation; Jesus addresses him in the same words; and the issue is the same.27 Hence the opinion is pretty general, that the three synoptists have in this instance detailed only one event. But did they also understand only one person under different names, and was that person the Apostle Matthew?"

"This is commonly represented as conceivable on the supposition that Levi was the proper name of the individual, and Matthew merely a surname;28 or that after he had attached himself to Jesus, he exchanged the former for the latter.29 To substantiate such an opinion, there should be some indication that the Evangelists who name the chosen publican Levi, intend under that designation no other than the Matthew mentioned in their catalogues of the apostles (Mark iii. 18; Luke vi. 15; Acts i. 13). On the contrary, in these catalogues, where many surnames and double names occur, not only do they omit the name of Levi as the earlier or more proper appellation of Matthew, but they leave him undistinguished by the epithet, ὁ τελώνης (the publican), added by the first Evangelist in his catalogue (x. 3); thus proving that they do not consider the Apostle Matthew to be identical with the Levi summoned from the receipt of custom."

"The close analogy between this call and that of the two pairs of brethren, must excite attention. They were summoned from their nets; he from the custom-house; as in their case, so here, nothing further is needed than a simple Follow me; and this call of the Messiah has so irresistible a power over the mind of the called, that the publican, like the fishermen, leaves all, and follows him. ... Hence the abruptness and impetuosity of the scene return upon us, and we are compelled to pronounce that such is not the course of real life, nor the procedure of a man who, like Jesus, respects the laws and formalities of human society; it is the procedure of legend and poetry, which love contrasts, and effective scenes, which aim to give a graphic conception of a man’s exit from an old sphere of life, and his entrance into a new one, by representing him as at once discarding the implements of his former trade, leaving the scene of his daily business, and straightway commencing a new life. The historical germ of the story may be, that Jesus actually had publicans among his disciples, and possibly that Matthew was one. These men had truly left the custom-house to follow Jesus; but only in the figurative sense of this concise expression, not in the literal one depicted by the legend."

"To this feast at the publican’s, of which many of the same obnoxious class partook, the Evangelists annex the reproaches cast at the disciples by the Pharisees and Scribes, because their master ate with publicans and sinners. Jesus, being within hearing of the censure, repelled it by the well-known text on the destination of the physician for the sick, and the Son of Man for sinners (Matt. ix. 11 ff. parall.). That Jesus should be frequently taunted by his pharisaical enemies with his too great predilection for the despised class of publicans (comp. Matt. xi. 19), accords fully with the nature of his position, and is therefore historical, if anything be so: the answer, too, which is here put into the mouth of Jesus, is from its pithy and concise character well adapted for literal transmission. Further, it is not improbable that the reproach in question may have been especially called forth, by the circumstance that Jesus ate with publicans and sinners, and went under their roofs. But that the cavils of his opponents should have been accompaniments of the publican’s dinner, as the evangelical account leads us to infer, especially that of Mark (v. 16), is not so easily conceivable.40 For as the feast was in the house (ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ), and as the disciples also partook of it, how could the Pharisees utter their reproaches to them, while the meal was going forward, without defiling themselves by becoming the guests of a man that was a sinner,—the very act which they reprehended in Jesus? ... "

That's quite simple - those taunting him did not claim to be godly in any way, that's all.

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73. THE TWELVE APOSTLES.

"Strictly speaking, therefore, it is merely presupposed in the gospels, that Jesus himself fixed the number of the apostles. Is this presupposition correct? There certainly is little doubt that this number was fixed during the lifetime of Jesus; for not only does the author of the Acts represent the twelve as so compact a body immediately after the ascension of their master, that they think it incumbent on them to fill up the breach made by the apostasy of Judas by the election of a new member (i. 15 ff.); but the Apostle Paul also notices an appearance of the risen Jesus, specially to the twelve (1 Cor. xv. 5). Schleiermacher, however, doubts whether Jesus himself chose the twelve, and he thinks it more probable that the peculiar relation ultimately borne to him by twelve from amongst his disciples, gradually and spontaneously formed itself.46 We have, indeed, no warrant for supposing that the appointment of the twelve was a single solemn act; on the contrary, the gospels explicitly narrate, that six of them were called singly, or by pairs, and on separate occasions; but it is still a question whether the number twelve was not determined by Jesus, and whether he did not willingly abide by it as an expedient for checking the multiplication of his familiar companions. The number is the less likely to have been fortuitous, the more significant it is, and the more evident the inducements to its choice by Jesus. He himself, in promising the disciples (Matt. xix. 28) that they shall sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, gives their number a relation to that of the tribes of his people; and it was the opinion of the highest Christian antiquity that this relation determined his choice.47 If he and his disciples were primarily sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. x. 6, xv. 24), it might seem appropriate that the number of the shepherds should correspond to that of the shepherdless tribes (Matt. ix. 36)."

" ... According to the synoptical Evangelists, it was not until after the resurrection, that Jesus gave his disciples authority to baptize (Matt. xxviii. 19, parall.). As, however, the rite of baptism was introduced by John, and we have reason to believe that Jesus, for a time, made that teacher his model, it is highly probable that he and his disciples also practised baptism, and hence that the positive statement of the fourth gospel is correct. But the negative statement that Jesus himself baptised not (iv. 2), has the appearance of an after-thought, intended to correct the import of the previous passages (iii. 22, iv. 1), and is most probably to be accounted for by the tendency of the fourth gospel to exalt Jesus above the Baptist, and by a corresponding dread of making Jesus exercise the function of the mere forerunner. The question whether Jesus did not baptize at least the apostles, afterwards occasioned much demur in the church."

"As to the subsistence of Jesus and his disciples, we have sufficient sources for it in the hospitality of the East, which, among the Jews, was especially available to the rabbins; in the companionship of rich women who ministered unto him of their substance (Luke viii. 2 f.); and finally in the γλωσσόκομον, mentioned, it is true, only by the fourth Evangelist (xii. 6, xiii. 29), which was ample enough to furnish assistance to the poor, as well as to supply the wants of the society, and in which, it is probable, presents from wealthy friends of Jesus were deposited. They who do not hold these means adequate without the labour of the disciples, or who think, on more general grounds, that the total renunciation of their secular employment on the part of the twelve, is improbable, must not try to force their opinion on the Evangelists, who by the stress which they lay on the expression [326]of the apostles, we have left all (Matt. xix. 27 ff.), plainly intimate the opposite view.

"We gather, as to the rank of the twelve disciples of Jesus, that they all belonged to the lower class: four, or perhaps more (John xxi. 2), were fishermen, one a publican, and for the others, it is probable from the degree of cultivation they evince, and the preference always expressed by Jesus for the poor πτωχοὺς, and the little ones, νηπίους (Matt. v. 3, xi. 5, 25), that they were of a similar grade. ... "

Who else could he have selected, for preaching a creed, with no financial rewards - whether creed of a nation's independence from Roman subjugation, or a religious one? Especially in the former case, he needed rough and tough men, and poor because they had less to lose; but in latter case, while educated rabbinical sort seem needed, they'd be from well to do families, and wouldn't readily forsake all to join in a cause thankless at the stage, however rewarding it be after a couple of centuries.

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74. THE TWELVE CONSIDEEED INDIVIDUALLY-THE THREE OR FOUR MOST CONFIDENTIAL DISCIPLES OF JESUS.

"Next to Peter, the catalogue of the first and third gospels places his brother Andrew; that of the second gospel and the Acts, James, and after him, John. ... "

"The two sons of Zebedee are the only disciples whose distinction rivals that of Peter. Like him, they evince an ardent and somewhat rash zeal (Luke ix. 54; once John is named alone, Mark ix. 38; Luke ix. 49); and it was to this disposition, apparently, that they owed the surname Sons of Thunder, ‏בני רנש‎ υἱοὶ βροντῆς (Mark iii. 17),53 conferred on them by Jesus. So high did they stand among the twelve, that either they (Mark xi. 35 ff.), or their mother for them (Matt. xx. 20 ff.), thought they might claim the first place in the Messiah’s kingdom. It is worthy of notice that not only in the four catalogues, but elsewhere when the two brothers are named, as in Matt. iv. 21, xvii. 1; Mark i. 19, 29, v. 37, ix. 2, x. 35, xiii. 3, xiv. 33; Luke v. 10, ix. 54; with the exception of Luke viii. 51, ix. 28; James is always mentioned first, and John is appended to him as his brother (ὁ ἀδελφὸς αὐτοῦ). This is surprising; because, while we know nothing remarkable of James, John is memorable as the favourite disciple of Jesus. Hence it is supposed that this precedence cannot possibly denote a superiority of James to John, and an explanation has been sought in his seniority.54 Nevertheless, it remains a doubt whether so constant a precedence do not intimate a pre-eminence on the part of James; at least, if, in the apprehension of the synoptists, John had been as decidedly preferred as he is represented to have been in the fourth gospel, we are inclined to think that they would have named him before his brother James, even allowing him to be the younger. ... "

"In the synoptical gospels, as we have observed, Peter, James, and John, form the select circle of disciples whom Jesus admits to certain scenes, which the rest of the twelve were not spiritually mature enough to comprehend; as the transfiguration, the conflict in Gethsemane, and, according to Mark (v. 37), the raising of the daughter of Jairus.55 After the death of Jesus, also, a James, Peter and John appear as the pillars of the church (Gal. ii. 9); this James, however, is not the son of Zebedee, who had been early put to death (Acts xii. 2), but James, the brother of the Lord (Gal. i. 19), who even in the first apostolic council appears to have possessed a predominant authority, and whom many hold to be the second James of the apostolic catalogue given in Acts i..56 It is observable from the beginning of the Acts, that James the son of Zebedee is eclipsed by Peter and John. As, then, this James the elder was not enough distinguished or even known in the primitive church, for his early martyrdom to have drawn much lustre on his name, tradition had no inducement, from subsequent events, to reflect an unhistorical splendour on his relation to Jesus; there is therefore no reason to doubt the statement as to the prominent position held by James, in conjunction with Peter and John, among the twelve apostles."

" ... In the synoptical gospels, not one of the disciples is bold enough to venture to the cross; but in the fourth, John is placed under it, and is there established in a new relation to the mother of his dying master: a relation of which we elsewhere find no trace (xix. 26 f.). On the appearance of the risen Jesus at the Galilean sea (xxi.), Peter, as the θερμότερος, casts himself into the sea; but it is not until after John, as the διορατικώτερος (Euthymius), has recognized the Lord in the person standing on the shore. ... Peter goes into the grave before John, it is true; but it is the latter in whose honour it is recorded, that he saw and believed, almost in contradiction to the statement of Luke, that Peter went home wondering in himself at that which was come to pass. Thus in the fourth gospel, John, both literally and figuratively, outruns Peter, for the entire impression which the attentive reader must receive from the representation there given of the relative position of Peter and John, is that the writer wished a comparison to be drawn in favour of the latter."

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75. THE REST OF THE TWELVE, AND THE SEVENTY DISCIPLES.

"Luke makes us acquainted with a circle of disciples, intermediate to the twelve and the mass of the partisans of Jesus. He tells us (x. 1 ff.) that besides the twelve, Jesus chose other seventy also, and sent them two and two before him into all the districts which he intended to visit on his last journey, that they might proclaim the approach of the kingdom of heaven. ... It is said, however, that the importance of this appointment lay in its significance, rather than in its effects. As the number of the twelve apostles, by its relation to that of the tribes of Israel, shadowed forth the destination of Jesus for the Jewish people; so the seventy, or as some authorities have it, the seventy-two disciples, were representatives of the seventy or seventy-two peoples, with as many different tongues, which, according to the Jewish and early Christian view, formed the sum of the earth’s inhabitants,70 and hence they denoted the universal destination of Jesus and his kingdom.71 Moreover, seventy was a sacred number with the Jewish nation; Moses deputed seventy elders (Num. xi. 16, 25); the Sanhedrim had seventy members;72 the Old Testament, seventy translators."

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October 23, 2021 - October 24, 2021.

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CHAPTER VI.

THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE THREE FIRST GOSPELS.

§ 76. The Sermon on the Mount

77. Instructions to the twelve. Lamentations over the Galilean cities. Joy over the calling of the simple

78. The parables

79. Miscellaneous instructions and controversies of Jesus

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76. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.

"The first long discourse in Matthew is that known as the Sermon on the Mount (v.–vii.). The Evangelist, having recorded the return of Jesus after his baptism into Galilee, and the calling of the fishermen, informs us, that Jesus went through all Galilee, teaching and healing; that great multitudes followed him from all parts of Palestine; and that for their instruction he ascended a mountain, and delivered the sermon in question (iv. 23 ff.). We seek in vain for its parallel in Mark, but Luke (vi. 20–49) gives a discourse which has the same introduction and conclusion, and presents in its whole tenor the most striking similarity with that of Matthew; moreover, in both cases, Jesus, at the termination of his discourse, goes to Capernaum, and heals the centurion’s servant. It is true that Luke gives a later insertion to the discourse, for previous to it he narrates many journeyings and cures of Jesus, which Matthew places after it; and while the latter represents Jesus as ascending a mountain, and being seated there during delivery of his discourse, Luke says, almost in contradiction to him, that Jesus came down and [335]stood in the plain. Further, the sermon in Luke contains but a fourth part of that in Matthew, while it has some elements peculiarly its own."

"The identity of the discourses being established, the first effort was to conciliate or to explain the divergencies between the two accounts so as to leave their credibility unimpeached. ... And without doubt each was ignorant of what he omits, but each knew that tradition associated this discourse with a sojourn of Jesus on a mountain. Matthew thought the mountain a convenient elevation for one addressing a multitude; Luke, on the contrary, imagined a descent necessary for the purpose: hence the double discrepancy, for he who teaches from a mountain is sufficiently elevated over his hearers to sit, but he who teaches in a plain will naturally stand. ... "

"The assemblage to whom the Sermon on the Mount was addressed, might from Luke’s account be supposed a narrow circle, for he states that the choice of the apostles immediately preceded the discourse, and that at its commencement Jesus lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and he does not, like Matthew, note the multitude, ὄχλους, as part of the audience. On the other hand, Matthew also mentions that before the sermon the disciples gathered round Jesus and were taught by him; and Luke represents the discourse as being delivered in the audience of the people (vii. 1); it is therefore evident that Jesus spoke to the crowd in general, but with a particular view to the edification of his disciples.10 We have no reason to doubt that a real harangue of Jesus, more than ordinarily solemn and public, was the foundation of the evangelical accounts before us."

" ... It is a capital principle with the Ebionites, as they are depicted in the Clementine Homilies, that he who has his portion in the present age, will be destitute in the age to come; while he who renounces earthly possessions, thereby accumulates heavenly treasures.13 The last beatitude relates to those who are persecuted for the sake of Jesus. Luke in the parallel passage has, for the Son of man’s sake; hence the words for my sake in Matthew, must be understood to refer to Jesus solely in his character of Messiah."

"The beatitudes are followed in Luke by as many woes οὐαὶ, which are wanting in Matthew. In these the opposition established by the Ebionites between this world and the other, is yet more strongly marked; for woe is denounced on the rich, the full, and the joyous, simply as such, and they are threatened with the evils corresponding to their present advantages, under the new order of things to be introduced by the Messiah; a view that reminds us of the Epistle of James, v. 1 ff. The last woe is somewhat stiffly formed after the model of the last beatitude, for it is evidently for the sake of the contrast to the true prophets, so much calumniated, that the false prophets are said, without any historical foundation, to have been spoken well of by all men. We may therefore conjecture, with Schleiermacher,15 that we are indebted for these maledictions to the inventive fertility of the author of the third gospel. He added this supplement to the beatitudes, less because, as Schleiermacher supposes, he perceived a chasm, which he knew not how to fill, than because he judged it consistent with the character of the Messiah, that, like Moses of old, he should couple curses with blessings. The Sermon on the Mount is regarded as the counterpart of the law, delivered on Mount Sinai; but the introduction, especially in Luke, reminds us more of a passage in Deuteronomy, in which Moses commands that on the entrance of the Israelitish people into the promised land, one half of them shall take their stand on Mount Gerizim, and pronounce a manifold blessing on the observers of the law, the other half on Mount Ebal, whence they were to fulminate as manifold a curse on its transgressors. We read in Josh. viii. 33 ff. that this injunction was fulfilled."

On one hand, no wonder force to the level of terror, inquisition, burning at stake et al was needed to impose this religion! Promising eternal misery if one is joyous now??!!!

On the other hand, church always followed hypocrisy and fraud, using these promises of inheritance of world for meek, etc., while catering to rich, selling favours and forgiveness for money, and telling everyone they have sinned!

No wonder West needed to rebel.

"At v. 17 ff. follows the transition to the main subject of the sermon; the assurance of Jesus that he came not to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil, etc. Now as Jesus herein plainly presupposes that he is himself the Messiah, to whom was ascribed authority to abolish a part of the law, this declaration cannot properly belong to a period in which, if Matt. xvi. 13 ff. be rightly placed, he had not yet declared himself to be the Messiah. Luke [339](xvi. 17) inserts this declaration together with the apparently contradictory one, that the law and the prophets were in force until the coming of John."

"So little, it appears from v. 20, is it the design of Jesus to inculcate a disregard of the Mosaic law, that he requires a far stricter observance of its precepts than the Scribes and Pharisees, and he makes the latter appear in contrast to himself as the underminers of the law. Then follows a series of Mosaic commandments, on which Jesus comments so as to show that he penetrates into the spirit of the law, instead of cleaving to the mere letter, and especially discerns the worthlessness of the rabbinical glosses (48). This section, in the order and completeness in which we find it in Matthew, is wanting in Luke’s Sermon on the Mount; a decisive proof that the latter has deficiencies. ... Probably tradition had apprized the Evangelist that Jesus, after the foregoing declaration as to the perpetuity of the Mosaic law, had enunciated his severe principle on the subject of divorce, and hence he gave it this position, not knowing more of its original connexion. ... "

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77. INSTRUCTIONS TO THE TWELVE. LAMENTATIONS OVER THE GALILEAN CITIES. JOY OVEE THE CALLING OF THE SIMPLE.

"All that the synoptists have strictly in common in the instructions to the twelve, are the rules for their external conduct; how they were to journey, and how to behave under a variety of circumstances (Matt. v. 9–11, 14; Mark vi. 8–11; Luke ix. 3–5). Here, however, we find a discrepancy; according to Matthew and Luke, Jesus forbids the disciples to take with them, not only gold, a scrip, and the like, but even shoes, ὑποδήματα, and a staff, ῥάβδον; according to Mark, on the contrary, he merely forbids their taking more than a staff and sandals, εἰ μὴ ῥάβδον μόνον and σανδάλια. This discrepancy is most easily accounted for by the admission, that tradition only preserved a reminiscence of Jesus having signified the simplicity of the apostolic equipment by the mention of the staff and shoes, and that hence one of the Evangelists understood that Jesus had interdicted all travelling requisites except these; the other, that these also were included in his prohibition. It was consistent with Mark’s love of the picturesque to imagine a wandering apostle furnished with a staff, and therefore to give the preference to the former view."

" ... The sequence of these propositions is about equally natural in both cases. Their completeness is alternately greater in the one than in the other; but Matthew’s additions generally turn on essentials, as in v. 16; those of Luke on externals, as in v. 7, 8, and in v. 4, where there is the singular injunction to salute no man by the way, which might appear an unhistorical exaggeration of the urgency of the apostolic errand, did we not know that the Jewish greetings of that period were not a little ceremonious. ... We have already discussed this point, and have found that a comparison is rather to the advantage of Matthew. The blessing pronounced on him who should give even a cup of cold water to the disciples of Jesus (v. 42), is at least more judiciously inserted by Matthew as the conclusion of the discourse of instructions, than in the endless confusion of the latter part of Mark ix. (v. 41), where ἐὰν (if), and ὃς ἂν (whosoever), seem to form the only tie between the successive propositions."

" ... Such are the directions to the apostles as to their conduct before tribunals (Matt. x. 19 f.; Luke xii. 11); the exhortation not to fear those who can only kill the body ... "

" ... In Matthew, the description of the ungracious reception which Jesus and John had alike met with, leads very naturally to the accusations against those places which had been the chief theatres of the ministry of the former; but it is difficult to suppose, according to Luke, that Jesus would speak of his past sad experience to the seventy, whose minds must have been entirely directed to the future, unless we conceive that he chose a subject so little adapted to the exigencies of those whom he was addressing, in order to unite the threatened judgment on the Galilean cities, with that which he had just denounced against the cities that should reject his messengers. ... "

" ... Matthew connects with this rejoicing of Jesus his invitation to the weary and heavy laden (v. 28–30). This is wanting in Luke, who, instead, makes Jesus turn to his disciples privately, and pronounce them blessed in being privileged to see and hear things which many prophets and kings yearned after in vain (23 f.): an observation which does not so specifically agree with the preceding train of thought, as the context assigned to it by Matthew, and which is moreover inserted by the latter Evangelist in a connexion (xiii. 16 f.) that may be advantageously confronted with that of Luke."

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78. THE PARABLES

"According to Matthew (chap. xiii.), Jesus delivered seven parables, all relating to the βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν. Modern criticism, however, has doubted whether Jesus really uttered so many of these symbolical discourses on one occasion.47 The parable, it has been observed, is a kind of problem, to be solved by the reflection of the hearer; hence after every parable a pause is requisite, if it be the object of the teacher to convey real instruction, and not to distract by a multiplicity of ill-understood images.48 It will, at least, be admitted, with Neander, that parables on the same or closely-related subjects can only be spoken consecutively, when, under manifold forms, and from [346]various points of view, they lead to the same result.49 Among the seven parables in question, those of the mustard-seed and the leaven have a common fundamental idea, differently shadowed forth—the gradual growth and ultimate prevalence of the kingdom of God: those of the net and the tares represent the mingling of the good with the bad in the kingdom of God; those of the treasure and the pearl inculcate the inestimable and all-indemnifying value of the kingdom of God; and the parable of the sower depicts the unequal susceptibility of men to the preaching of the kingdom of God. Thus there are no less than four separate fundamental ideas involved in this collection of parables—ideas which are indeed connected by their general relation to the kingdom of God, but which present this object under aspects so widely different, that for their thorough comprehension a pause after each was indispensable. Hence, it has been concluded, Jesus would not merit the praise of being a judicious teacher, if, as Matthew represents, he had spoken all the above parables in rapid succession.50 If we suppose in this instance, again, an assemblage of discourses similar in kind, but delivered on different occasions, we are anew led to the discussion as to whether Matthew was aware of the latter circumstance, or whether he believed that he was recording a continuous harangue. ... If it were his intention to communicate a series of parables, with [347]the explanations that Jesus privately gave to his disciples of the two which were most important, and were therefore to be placed at the head of the series, there were only three methods on which he could proceed. First, he might make Jesus, immediately after the enunciation of a parable, give its interpretation to his disciples in the presence of the multitude, as he actually does in the case of the first parable (10–23). But the representation is beset with the difficulty of conceiving how Jesus, surrounded by a crowd, whose expectation was on the stretch, could find leisure for a conversation aside with his disciples.52 This inconvenience Mark perceived, and therefore chose the second resource that was open to him—that of making Jesus with his disciples withdraw after the first parable into the house, and there deliver its interpretation. But such a proceeding would be too great a hindrance to one who proposed publicly to deliver several parables one after the other; for if Jesus returned to the house immediately after the first parable, he had left the scene in which the succeeding ones could be conveniently imparted to the people. Consequently, the narrator in the first gospel cannot, with respect to the interpretation of the second parable, either repeat his first plan, or resort to the second; he therefore adopts a third, and proceeding uninterruptedly through two further parables, it is only at their close that he conducts Jesus to the house, and there makes him impart the arrear of interpretation. ... "

"Luke, also, has only three of the seven parables given in Matt. xiii.; namely, those of the sower, the mustard-seed, and the leaven; so that the parables of the buried treasure, the pearl, and the net, as also that of the tares in the field, are peculiar to Matthew. ... "

" ... But the addition in question is not only out of harmony with the imagery, but with the tendency of this parable. For while hitherto its aim had been to exhibit the national contrast between the perversity of the Jews, and the willingness of the Gentiles: it all at once passes to the moral one, to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy. That after the Jews had contemned the invitation to partake of the kingdom of God, the heathens would be called into it, is one complete idea, with which Luke very properly concludes his parable; [355]that he who does not prove himself worthy of the vocation by a corresponding disposition, will be again cast out of the kingdom, is another idea, which appears to demand a separate parable for its exhibition. ... "

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79. MISCELLANEOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND CONTROVERSIES OF JESUS.

"The next discourse that presents itself (Matt. xix. 3–12, Mark x. 2–12), though belonging, according to the Evangelists, to the last journey of Jesus, is of the same stamp with the disputations which they, for the most part, assign to the last residence of Jesus in Jerusalem. Some Pharisees propose to Jesus the question, at that time much discussed in the Jewish schools, whether it be lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause. To avoid a contradiction between modern practice and the dictum of Jesus, it has been alleged that he here censures the species of divorce which was the only one known at that period, namely, the arbitrary dismissal of a wife; but not the judicial separation resorted to in the present day. But this very argument involves the admission, that Jesus denounced all the forms of divorce known to him; hence the question still remains whether, if he could have had cognizance of the modern procedure in dissolving matrimony, he would have held it right to limit his general censure. Of the succeeding declaration, [358]prompted by a question of the disciples, namely, that celibacy may be practised for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, Jesus himself says, that it cannot be understood by all, but only by those to whom it is given (v. 11). That the doctrine of Jesus may not run counter to modern opinion, it has been eagerly suggested, that his panegyric on celibacy had relation solely to the circumstances of the coming time, or to the nature of the apostolic mission, which would be impeded by family ties. But there is even less intimation of this special bearing in the text, than in the analogous passage 1 Cor. vii. 25 ff., and, adhering to a simple interpretation, it must be granted that we have here one of the instances in which ascetic principles, such as were then prevalent, especially among the Essenes, manifest themselves in the teaching of Jesus, as represented in the synoptical gospels."

"Jesus not only speaks of the ravening, ἁρπαγή, and wickedness, πονηρία, with which the Pharisees fill the cup and platter, and honours them with the title of fools, ἄφρονες, but breaks forth into a denunciation of woe, οὐαὶ, against them and the scribes and doctors of the law, threatening them with retribution for all the blood that had been shed by their fathers, whose deeds they approved. We grant that Attic urbanity is not to be expected in a Jewish teacher, but even according to the oriental standard, such invectives uttered at table against the host and his guests, would be the grossest dereliction of what is due to hospitality. This was obvious to Schleiermacher’s acute perception; and he therefore supposes that the meal passed off amicably, and that it was not until its close, when Jesus was again out of the house, that the host expressed his surprise at the neglect of the usual ablutions by Jesus and his disciples, and that Jesus answered with so much asperity.104 But to assume that the writer has not described the meal itself and the incidents that accompanied it, and that he has noticed it merely for the sake of its connexion with the subsequent discourse, is an arbitrary mode of overcoming the difficulty. For the text runs thus: And he went in and sat down to meat. And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner. And the Lord said unto him, εἰσελθὼν δὲ ἀνέπεσεν· ὁ δὲ Φαρισαῖος ἰδὼν ἐθαύμασεν, ὁτι οὐ πρῶτον ἐβαπτίσθη—· εἶπε δὲ ὁ Κύριος πρὸς αὐτὸν. It is manifestly impossible to thrust in between these sentences the duration of the meal, and it must have been the intention of the writer to attach he marvelled ἐθαύμασεν to he sat down to meat ἀνέπεσεν, and he said εἶπεν to he marvelled ἐθαύμασεν. But if this could not really have been the case, unless Jesus violated in the grossest manner the simplest dictates of civility, there is an end to the vaunted accuracy of Luke in his allocation of this discourse: and we have only to inquire how he could be led to give it so false a position. This is to be discovered by comparing the manner in which the two other synoptists mention the offence of the Pharisees, at the omission of the ablutions before meals by Jesus and his disciples: a circumstance to which they annex discourses different from those given by Luke. In Matthew (xv. 1 ff), scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem ask Jesus why his disciples do not observe the custom of washing before meat? It is thus implied that they knew of this omission, as may easily be supposed, by report. In Mark (vii. 1 ff.), they look on (ἰδόντες,) while some disciples of Jesus eat with unwashen hands, and call them to account for this irregularity. Lastly, in Luke, Jesus himself [363]dines with a Pharisee, and on this occasion it is observed that he neglects the usual washings. This is an evident climax: hearing, witnessing, taking food together. Was it formed, in the descending gradation, from Luke to Matthew, or, in the ascending one, from Matthew to Luke?"

"Another passage in this discourse has been the subject of much discussion. It is that (v. 35) in which Jesus threatens his cotemporaries, that all the innocent blood shed from that of Abel to that of Zacharias, the son of Barachias, slain in the temple, will be required of their generation. The Zacharias of whom such an end is narrated 2 Chron. xxiv. 20 ff. was a son, not of Barachias, but of Jehoiada. On the other hand, there was a Zacharias, the son of Baruch, who came to a similar end in the Jewish war.106 Moreover, it appears unlikely that Jesus would refer to a murder which took place 850 B.C. as the last. Hence it was at first supposed that we have in v. 35 a prophecy, and afterwards, a confusion of the earlier with the later event; and the latter notion has been used as an accessory proof that the first gospel is a posterior compilation. ... "

Obviously that was one of those specifically ordered in by Rome after church had united with Rome, to find excuses for persecution of Jews by Rome, and blame them for it.

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October 24, 2021 - October 24, 2021.

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CHAPTER VII.

DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

§ 80. Conversation of Jesus with Nicodemus

81. The discourses of Jesus, John v.–xii.

82. Isolated maxims of Jesus, common to the fourth gospel and the synoptical ones

83. The modern discussions on the authenticity of the discourses in the Gospel of John. Result

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80. CONVERSATION OF JESUS WITH NICODEMUS.

"The first considerable specimen which the fourth gospel gives of the teaching of Jesus, is his conversation with Nicodemus (iii. 1–21). In the previous chapter (23–25) it is narrated, that during the first passover attended by Jesus after his entrance on his public ministry, he had won many to faith in him by the miracles, σημεῖα, which he performed, but that he did not commit himself to them because he saw through them: he was aware, that is, of the uncertainty and impurity of their faith. Then follows in our present chapter, as an example, not only of the adherents whom Jesus had found even thus early, but also of the wariness with which he tested and received them, a more detailed account how Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews and a Pharisee, applied to him, and how he was treated by Jesus.

"It is through the Gospel of John alone that we learn anything of this Nicodemus, who in vii. 50 f. appears as the advocate of Jesus, so far as to protest against his being condemned without a hearing, and in xix. 39 as the partaker with Joseph of Arimathea of the care of interring Jesus. Modern criticism, with reason, considers it surprising that Matthew (with the other synoptists) does not even mention the name of this remarkable adherent of Jesus, and that we have to gather all our knowledge of him from the fourth gospel; since the peculiar relation in which Nicodemus stood to Jesus, and his participation in the care of his interment, must have been as well known to Matthew as to John. This difficulty has been numbered among the arguments which are thought to prove that the first gospel was not written by the Apostle Matthew, but was the product of a tradition considerably more remote from the time and locality of Jesus.1 But the fact is that the common fund of tradition on which all the synoptists drew had preserved no notice of this Nicodemus. With touching piety the Christian legend has recorded in the tablets of her memory, the names of all the others who helped to render the last honours to their murdered master—of Joseph of Arimathea and the two Marys (Matt. xxvii. 57–61 parall.); why then was Nicodemus the only neglected one—he who was especially distinguished among those who tended the remains of Jesus, by his nocturnal interview with the teacher sent from God, and by his advocacy of him among the chief priests and Pharisees? It is so difficult to conceive that the name of this man, if he had really assumed such a position, would have vanished from the popular evangelical tradition [366]without leaving a single trace, that one is induced to inquire whether the contrary supposition be not more capable of explanation: namely, that such a relation between Nicodemus and Jesus might have been fabricated by tradition, and adopted by the author of the fourth gospel without having really subsisted."

"John xii. 42, it is expressly said that many among the chief rulers believed on Jesus, but concealed their faith from dread of excommunication by the Pharisees, because they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God. ... "

Such an inference is only valid if people knew God, and in abrahmic religion it is explicitly forbidden to entertain such a notion if one is not, say, equivalent of pope; nay, one would be burnt at stake for much less, as were many. So if a bunch of guys surrounding an impressive one, say, go about calling him messiah, one woukd play safer by not taking it seriously, even if Jews did not do inquisition. After all, supposedly he forbade his apostles to admit, much less advertise, his being a messiah, much less connected to god, and it wasn't as if he was helped for all to see or hovering in skies, which, if so, would be the first things advertised by church through millennia since! No, one has to take everything said by church against Jews with, not a pinch but a bucket, of salt.

" ... That towards the end of his career many people of rank believed in Jesus, even in secret only, is not very probable, since no indication of it appears in the Acts of the Apostles; for that the advice of Gamaliel (Acts v. 34 ff.) did not originate in a positively favourable disposition towards the cause of Jesus, seems to be sufficiently demonstrated by the spirit of his disciple Saul. Moreover the synoptists make Jesus declare in plain terms that the secret of his Messiahship had been revealed only to babes, and hidden from the wise and prudent (Matt. xi. 25; Luke x. 21), and Joseph of Arimathea is the only individual of the ruling class whom they mention as an adherent of Jesus. How, then, if Jesus did not really attach to himself any from the upper ranks, came the case to be represented differently at a later period? In John vii. 48 f. we read that the Pharisees sought to disparage Jesus by the remark that none of the rulers or of the Pharisees, but only the ignorant populace, believed on him; and even later adversaries of Christianity, for example, Celsus, laid great stress on the circumstance that Jesus had had as his disciples ἐπιῤῥήτους ἀνθρώπους, τελώνας καὶ ναύτας τοὺς πονηροτάτους.3 This reproach was a thorn in the side of the early church, and though as long as her members were drawn only from the people, she might reflect with satisfaction on the declarations of Jesus, in which he had pronounced the poor, πτωχοὺς, and simple, νηπίους, blessed: yet so soon as she was joined by men of rank and education, these would lean to the idea that converts like themselves had not been wanting to Jesus during his life. But, it would be objected, nothing had been hitherto known of such converts. Naturally enough, it might be answered; since fear of their equals would induce them to conceal their relations with Jesus. Thus a door was opened for the admission of any number of secret adherents among the higher class (John xii. 42 f.). But, it would be further urged, how could they have intercourse with Jesus unobserved? Under the veil of the night, would be the answer; and thus the scene was laid for the interviews of such men with Jesus (xix. 39). This, however, would not suffice; a representative of this class must actually appear on the scene: Joseph of Arimathea might have been chosen, his name being still extant in the synoptical tradition; but the idea of him was too definite, and it was the interest of the legend to name more than one eminent friend of Jesus. Hence a new personage was devised, whose Greek name Νικόδημος seems to point him out significantly as the representative of the dominant class.4 That this development of the legend is confined to the fourth gospel, is to be explained, partly by the generally admitted lateness of its origin, and partly on the ground that in the evidently more cultivated circle in which it arose, the limitation of the adherents of Jesus to the [367]common people would be more offensive, than in the circle in which the synoptical tradition was formed. Thus the reproach which modern criticism has cast on the first gospel, on the score of its silence respecting Nicodemus, is turned upon the fourth, on the score of its information on the same subject."

" ... This may still be in the main genuine; Jesus may have held such a conversation with one of his adherents, and our Evangelist may have embellished it no further than by making this interlocutor a man of rank. Neither will we, with the author of the Probabilia, take umbrage at the opening address of Nicodemus, nor complain, with him, that there is a want of connexion between that address and the answer of Jesus. The requisition of a new birth (γεννηθῆναι ἄνωθεν), as a condition of entrance into the kingdom of heaven, does not differ essentially from the summons with which Jesus opens his ministry in the synoptical gospels, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. New birth, or new creation, was a current image among the Jews, especially as denoting the conversion of an idolater into a worshipper of Jehovah. ... "

So, in short, he wasn't starting a new religion, at all, but cleansing and polishing his own that he was born and brought up into, Judaism, and perhaps then for extending it beyond its original adherents!

" ... It was customary to say of Abraham, that when, according to the Jewish supposition, he renounced idolatry for the worship of the true God, he became a new creature (‏בריה חדשה‎).6 The proselyte, too, in allusion to his relinquishing all his previous associations, was compared to a new-born child.7 That such phraseology was common among the Jews at that period, is shown by the confidence with which Paul applies, as if it required no explanation, the term new creation, καινὴ κτίσις, to those truly converted to Christ. Now, if Jesus required, even from the Jews, as a condition of entrance into the messianic kingdom, the new birth which they ascribed to their heathen proselytes, Nicodemus might naturally wonder at the requisition, since the Israelite thought himself, as such, unconditionally entitled to that kingdom: and this is the construction which has been put upon his question v. 4.8 But Nicodemus does not ask, How canst thou say that a Jew, or a child of Abraham, must be born again? His ground of wonder is that Jesus appears to suppose it possible for a man to be born again, and that when he is old. It does not, therefore, astonish him that spiritual new birth should be expected in a Jew, but corporeal new birth in a man. ... "

Definitely Roman double twist there!

" ... Our wonder at the ignorance of the Jewish doctor, therefore, returns upon us; and it is heightened when, after the copious explanation of Jesus (v. 5–8), that the new birth which he required was a spiritual birth, γεννηθῆναι ἐκ τοῦ πνεύματος, Nicodemus has made no advance in comprehension, but asks with the same obtuseness as before (v. 9), How can these things be? ... "

The Jewish doctor was the sincere one, honest, and right, too. Most others, when they convert, are at best being convinced; few have anything more than a mental change, and most have been converted by force, terror, and imposition. This is just as true of those born and brought up into any abrahmic religion that, offers not tradition, but a demand of faith.

" ... First, then, it must occur to us, that in all descriptions and recitals, contrasts are eagerly exhibited; hence in the representation of a colloquy in which one party is the teacher, the other the taught, there is a strong temptation to create a contrast to the wisdom of the former by exaggerating the simplicity of the latter. Further, we must remember the satisfaction it must give to a Christian mind of that age, to place a master of Israel in the position of an unintelligent person, by the side of the Master of the Christians. Lastly, it is, as we shall presently see more clearly, the constant method of the fourth Evangelist in detailing the conversations of Jesus, to form the knot and the progress of the discussion, by making the interlocutors understand literally what Jesus intended figuratively."

"V. 14 and 15 Jesus proceeds from the more simple things of the earth, ἐπιγείοις, the communications concerning the new birth, to the more difficult [369]things of heaven, ἐπουρανίοις, the announcement of the destination of the Messiah to a vicarious death. The Son of Man, he says, must be lifted up (ὑψωθῆναι, which, in John’s phraseology, signifies crucifixion, with an allusion to a glorifying exaltation), in the same way, and with the same effect, as the brazen serpent Num. xxi. 8, 9. ... "

Being lifted up is crucifixion?

How many more indications are needed before they see that this was all Roman writing?

" ... Is it credible, that Jesus already, at the very commencement of his public ministry, foresaw his death, and in the specific form of crucifixion? and that long before he instructed his disciples on this point, he made a communication on the subject to a Pharisee? Can it be held consistent with the wisdom of Jesus as a teacher, that he should impart such knowledge to Nicodemus? ... "

Good question, if there was any likelihood that the accounts weren't tampered with by Rome. As it is they weren't merely tampered with, but practically rewritten to suit the creed to be forced on people, to suit Rome.

" ... Even Lücke puts the question why, when Nicodemus had not understood the more obvious doctrine, Jesus tormented him with the more recondite, and especially with the secret of the Messiah’s death, which was then so remote? He answers: it accords perfectly with the wisdom of Jesus as a teacher, that he should reveal the sufferings appointed for him by God as early as possible, because no instruction was better adapted to cast down false worldly hopes. ... "

How many more indications are needed before they see that this was all Roman writing?

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81. THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS, JOHN V-XII.

" ... But the chief point in the argument is, that in this gospel John the Baptist speaks, as we have seen, in precisely the same strain as the author of the gospels, and his Jesus. It cannot be supposed, that not only the Evangelist, but the Baptist, whose public career was prior to that of Jesus, and whose character was strongly marked, modelled his expressions with verbal minuteness on those of Jesus. Hence only two cases are possible: either the Baptist determined the style of Jesus and the Evangelist (who indeed appears to have been the Baptist’s disciple); or the Evangelist determined the style of the Baptist and Jesus. ... "

Or the writer designated by Rome, post council of Nicea, did It?

" ... Jesus proceeds to represent his flesh as the bread from heaven, which he will give for the life of the world, and to eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and to drink his blood, he pronounces to be the only means of attaining eternal life. ... "

Rome really went to the limits and beyond, just so the shocked populace would think, no, it can't be that revolting, it's too much, there must be a mystical meaning, ... - and thus swallow this!

" ... Having once said, apparently in accordance with Alexandrian ideas, that Jesus had described himself as the bread of life, how could he fail to be reminded of the bread, which in the Christian community was partaken of as the body of Christ, together with a beverage, as his blood? ... "

" ... It is indeed said, that Jesus wished to sift his disciples, to remove from his society the superficial [375]believers, the earthly-minded, whom he could not trust; but the measure which he here adopted was one calculated to alienate from him even his best and most intelligent followers. ... "

Or Rome did it, to stupify people!

More basis for antisemitism here -

" ... All that is new in these chapters, is quickly repeated, as the mention of the departure of Jesus whither the Jews cannot follow him (vii. 33 f., viii. 21, comp. xiii. 33, xiv. 2 ff., xvi. 16 ff.); a declaration, to which are attached, in the first two instances, very improbable misapprehensions or perversions on the part of the Jews, who, although Jesus had said, I go unto him that sent me, are represented as imagining, at one time, that he purposed journeying to the dispersed among the Gentiles, at another, that he meditated suicide. How often, again, in this chapter are repeated the asseverations, that he seeks not his own honour, but the honour of the Father (vii. 17 f., viii. 50, 54); that the Jews neither know whence he came, nor the father who sent him (vii. 28, viii. 14, 19, 54); that whosoever believeth in him shall have eternal life, shall not see death, while whosoever believeth not must die in his sins, having no share in eternal life ... "

"The discourses of Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles extend to x. 18. From v. 25, the Evangelist professes to record sayings which were uttered by Jesus three months later, at the Feast of Dedication. When, on this occasion, the Jews desire from him a distinct declaration whether he be the Messiah, his immediate reply is, that he has already told them this sufficiently, and he repeats his appeal to the testimony of the Father, as given in the works, ἔργα, done by Jesus in his name (as in v. 36). Hereupon he observes that his unbelieving interrogators are not of his sheep, whence he reverts to the allegory of the shepherd, which he had abandoned, and repeats part of it word for word. ... "

And they keep on with antisemitism provoking language -

" ... This commentators will not admit, and they can appeal, not without a show of reason, to the statement of the Evangelist, v. 36, that Jesus withdrew himself from the public eye, and to his ensuing observations on the obstinate unbelief of the Jews, in which he seems to put a period to the public career of Jesus; whence it would be contrary to his plan to make Jesus again step forward to deliver a valedictory discourse. I will not, with the older expositors, oppose to these arguments the supposition that Jesus, after his withdrawal, returned to pronounce these words in the ears of the Jews; but I hold fast to the proposition that by the introduction above quoted, the Evangelist can only have intended to announce an actual harangue. It is said, indeed, that the aorist in ἔκραξε and εἶπε has the signification of the pluperfect, and that we have here a recapitulation of the previous discourses of Jesus, notwithstanding which the Jews had not given him credence. ... "

When they say, Jews did not believe, they forget that those who did were Jews too; and inquisition did burn at stake those who were not Jews, too.

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82. ISOLATED MAXIMS OF JESUS, COMMON TO THE FOURTH GOSPEL AND THE SYNOPTIC ONES.

" ... So long, therefore, as Galilee and Nazareth are admitted to be the πατρίς of Jesus, the passage in question cannot be vindicated from the absurdity of representing, that Jesus was instigated to return thither by the contempt which he knew to await him. Consequently, it becomes the interest of the expositor to recollect, that Matthew and Luke pronounce Bethlehem to be the birthplace of Jesus, whence it follows that Judea was his native country, which he now forsook on account of the contempt he had there experienced.37 But according to iv. 1, comp. ii. 23, iii. 26 ff., Jesus had won a considerable number of adherents in Judea, and could not therefore complain of a lack of honour, τιμή; moreover the enmity of the Pharisees, hinted at in iv. 1, was excited by the growing consequence of Jesus in Judea, and was not at all referable to such a cause as that indicated in the maxim: ὅτι προφήτης κ.τ.λ. Further, the entrance into Galilee is not connected in our passage with a departure from Judea, but from Samaria; and as, according to the import of the text, Jesus departed from Samaria and went into Galilee, because he had found that a prophet has no honour in his own country, Samaria might rather seem to be pointed out as his native country, in conformity with the reproach cast on him by the Jews, viii. 48; though even this supposition would not give consistency to the passage, for in Samaria also Jesus is said, iv. 39, to have had a favourable reception. ... "

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83. THE MODEEN DISCUSSIONS ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE DISCOURSES IN THE GOSPEL OF JOHN. RESULT.

"It is alleged by the friends of the fourth gospel that its discourses are distinguished by a peculiar stamp of truth and credibility; that the conversations which it represents Jesus as holding with men of the most diverse disposition and capacity, are faithful delineations of character, satisfying the strictest demands of psychological criticism. In opposition to this, it is maintained to be in the highest degree improbable, that Jesus should have adopted precisely the same style of teaching to persons differing widely in their degrees of cultivation; that he should have spoken to the Galileans in the synagogue at Capernaum not more intelligibly than to a master of Israel; that the matter of his discourses should have turned almost entirely on one doctrine—the dignity of his person; and that their form should have been such as to seem selected with a view to perplex and repel his hearers. Neither, it is further urged, do the interlocutors express themselves in conformity with their position and character. The most educated Pharisee has no advantage in intelligence over a Samaritan woman of the lowest grade; the one, as well as the other, can only put a carnal interpretation on the discourse which Jesus intends spiritually; their misconstructions, too, are frequently so glaring, as to transcend all belief, and so uniform that they seem to belong to a standing set of features with which the author of the fourth gospel has chosen, for the sake of contrast, to depict those whom he brings into conversation with Jesus. Hence, I confess, I understand not what is the meaning of verisimilitude in the mind of those who ascribe it to the discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of John."

" ... But neither the above relation, if admitted, nor the remark that John apparently attached himself to Jesus in early youth, when impressions sink deepest, and from the time of his master’s death lived in a circle where the memory of his words and deeds was cherished, suffices to render it probable that John could retain in his mind long series of ideas, and complicated dialogues, until the period in which the composition of his gospel must be placed. For critics are agreed that the tendency of the fourth gospel, its evident aim to spiritualize the common faith of Christians into the Gnosis, and thus to crush many errors which had sprung up, is a decisive attestation that it was composed at a period when the church had attained a degree of maturity, and consequently in the extreme old age of the apostle."

" ... But if Jesus taught first in one style, then in another, how was it that the synoptists selected almost exclusively the practical and popular, John, nearly without exception, the dogmatic and speculative portions of his discourse? ... "

"We therefore hold it to be established, that the discourses of Jesus in John’s gospel are mainly free compositions of the Evangelist; but we have admitted that he has culled several sayings of Jesus from an authentic tradition, and hence we do not extend this proposition to those passages which are countenanced by parallels in the synoptical gospels. ... Severed from their original connexion, and broken up into smaller and smaller fragments, they present when reassembled the appearance of a mosaic, in which the connexion of the parts is a purely external one, and every transition an artificial juncture. The discourses of Jesus in John present just the opposite appearance. Their gradual transitions, only rendered occasionally obscure by the mystical depths of meaning in which they lie,—transitions in which one thought develops itself out of another, and a succeeding proposition is frequently but an explanatory amplification of the preceding,69—are indicative of a pliable, unresisting mass, such as is never presented to a writer by the traditional sayings of another, but such as proceeds from the stores of his own thought, which he moulds according to his will. For this reason the contributions of tradition to these stores of thought (apart from the sayings which are also found in the earlier gospels) were not so likely to have been particular, independent dicta of Jesus, as rather certain ideas which formed the basis of many of his discourses, and which were modified and developed according to the bent of a mind of Alexandrian or Greek culture. ... "

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October 25 2021 - October 25, 2021.

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CHAPTER VIII.

EVENTS IN THE PUBLIC LIFE OF JESUS, EXCLUSIVE OF THE MIRACLES.

§ 84. General comparison of the manner of narration that distinguishes the several Evangelists

85. Isolated groups of anecdotes. Imputation of a league with Beelzebub, and demand of a sign

86. Visit of the mother and brethren of Jesus. The woman who pronounces the mother of Jesus blessed

87. Contentions for pre-eminence among the disciples. The love of Jesus for children

88. The purification of the temple

89. Narratives of the anointing of Jesus by a woman

90. The narratives of the woman taken in adultery, and of Mary and Martha

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84. GENERAL COMPARISON OF THE MANNER OF NARRATION THAT DISTINGUISHES THE SEVERAL EVANGELISTS.

"If, before proceeding to the consideration of details, we compare the general character and tone of the historical narration in the various gospels, we find differences, first, between Matthew and the two other synoptists; secondly, between the three first evangelists collectively and the fourth."

" ... we cannot disapprove the decision of this criticism, that Matthew’s whole narrative resembles a record of events which, before they were committed to writing, had been long current in oral tradition, and had thus lost the impress of particularity and minuteness. But it must be admitted, that this proof, taken alone, is not absolutely convincing; for in most cases we may verify the remark, that even an eye-witness may be unable graphically to narrate what he has seen."

"But our modern critics have not only measured Matthew by the standard of what is to be expected from an eye-witness, in the abstract; they have also compared him with his fellow-evangelists. They are of opinion, not only that John decidedly surpasses Matthew in the power of delineation, both in their few parallel passages and in his entire narrative, but also that the two other synoptists, especially Mark, are generally far clearer and fuller in their style of narration. ... But it is chiefly in the lively description of particular incidents, that we perceive the decided superiority of Luke, and still more of Mark, over Matthew. Let the reader only compare the narrative of the execution of John the Baptist in Matthew and Mark (Matt. xiv. 3; Mark vi. 17), and that of the demoniac or demoniacs of Gadara (Matt. viii. 28 ff. parall.)."

"These facts are, in the opinion of our latest critics, a confirmation of the fourth Evangelist’s claim to the character of an eye-witness, and of the greater proximity of the second and third Evangelists to the scenes they describe, than can be attributed to the first. But, even allowing that one who does not narrate graphically cannot be an eye-witness, this does not involve the proposition that whoever does narrate graphically must be an eye-witness. In all cases in which there are extant two accounts of a single fact, the one full, the other concise, opinions may be divided as to which of them is the original.4 When these accounts have been liable to the modifications of tradition, it is important to bear in mind that tradition has two tendencies: the one, to sublimate the concrete into the abstract, the individual into the general; the other, not less essential, to substitute arbitrary fictions for the historical reality which is lost. ... "

Still, it doesn't occur to Strauss that none of them were quite authentic; that they'd all been pruned, whitewashed, tailored, and the more genuine ones ordered destroyed.

" ... The decision with which the other inference is drawn, is in fact merely an after-taste of the old orthodox opinion, that all our gospels proceed immediately from eye-witnesses, or at least through a medium incapable of error. Modern criticism has limited this supposition, and admitted the possibility that one or the other of our gospels may have been affected by oral tradition. Accordingly it maintains, not without probability, that a gospel in which the descriptions are throughout destitute of colouring and life, cannot be the production [389]of an eye-witness, and must have suffered from the effacing fingers of tradition. But the counter proposition, that the other gospels, in which the style of narration is more detailed and dramatic, rest on the testimony of eye-witnesses, would only follow from the supposed necessity that this must be the case with some of our gospels. For if such a supposition be made with respect to several narratives of both the above kinds, there is no question that the more graphic and vivid ones are with preponderant probability to be referred to eye-witnesses. But this supposition has merely a subjective foundation. It was an easier transition for commentators to make from the old notion that all the gospels were immediately or mediately autoptical narratives, to the limited admission that perhaps one may fall short of this character, than to the general admission that it may be equally wanting to all. But, according to the rigid rules of consequence, with the orthodox view of the scriptural canon, falls the assumption of pure ocular testimony, not only for one or other of the gospels, but for all; the possibility of the contrary must be presupposed in relation to them all, and their pretensions must be estimated according to their internal character, compared with the external testimonies. From this point of view—the only one that criticism can consistently adopt—it is as probable, considering the nature of the external testimonies examined in our Introduction, that the three last Evangelists owe the dramatic effect in which they surpass Matthew, to the embellishments of a more mature tradition, as that this quality is the result of a closer communication with eye-witnesses."

"Matthew (viii. 16 f.) states in general terms, that on the evening after the cure of Peter’s mother-in-law, many demoniacs were brought to Jesus, all of whom, together with others that were sick, he healed. Mark (i. 32) in a highly dramatic manner, as if he himself had witnessed the scene, tells, that on the same occasion, the whole city was gathered together at the door of the house in which Jesus was; at another time, he makes the crowd block up the entrance (ii. 2); in two other instances, he describes the concourse as so great, that Jesus and his disciples could not take their food (iii. 20, vi. 31); and Luke on one occasion states, that the people even gathered together in innumerable multitudes so that they trode one upon another (xii. 1). All highly vivid touches, certainly: but the want of them can hardly be prejudicial to Matthew, for they look thoroughly like strokes of imagination, such as abound in Mark’s narrative, and often, as Schleiermacher observes,7 give it almost an apocryphal appearance. ... On the mention of a blind beggar of Jericho, Mark is careful to give us his name, and the name of his father (x. 46). From these particulars we might already augur, what the examination of single narratives will prove: namely, that the copiousness of Mark and Luke is the product of the second function of the legend, which we may call the function of embellishment. Was this embellishment gradually wrought out by oral tradition, or was it the arbitrary addition of our Evangelists? Concerning this, there may be a difference of opinion, and a degree of probability in relation to particular passages is the nearest approach that can be made to a decision. In any case, not only must it be granted, that a narrative adorned by the writer’s own additions is more remote from primitive truth than one free from such additions; but we may venture to pronounce that the earlier efforts of the legend are rapid sketches, tending to set off only the leading points whether of speech or action, and that at a later period it aims rather to give a symmetrical effect to the whole, including collateral incidents; so that, in either view, the closest approximation to truth remains on the side of the first gospel."

" ... It is true that the three first Evangelists sometimes mention, by way of conclusion, the offence that Jesus gave to the narrow-hearted, and the machinations of his enemies against him (Matt. viii. 34, xii. 14, xxi. 46, xxvi. 3 f.; Luke iv. 28 f., xi. 53 f.); and, on the other hand, the fourth Evangelist closes some discourses and miracles by the remark, that in consequence of them, many believed on Jesus (ii. 23, iv. 39, 53, vii. 31, 40 f., viii. 30, x. 42, xi. 45). But in the synoptical gospels, throughout the period previous to the residence of Jesus in Jerusalem, we find forms implying that the fame of Jesus had extended far and wide (Matt. iv. 24, ix. 26, 31; Mark i. 28, 45, v. 20, vii. 36; Luke iv. 37, v. 15, vii. 17, viii. 39); that the people were astonished at his doctrine (Matt. vii. 28; Mark i. 22, xi. 18; Luke xix. 48), and miracles (Matt. viii. 27, ix. 8, xiv. 33, xv. 31), and hence followed him from all parts (Matt. iv. 25, viii. 1, ix. 36, xii. 15, xiii. 2, xiv. 13). In the fourth gospel, on the contrary, we are continually told that the Jews sought to kill Jesus (v. 18, vii. 1); the Pharisees wish to take him, or send out officers to seize him (vii. 30, 32, 44; comp. viii. 20, x. 39); stones are taken up to cast at him (viii. 59, x. 31); and even in those passages where there is mention of a favourable disposition on the part of the people, the Evangelist limits it to one portion of them, and represents the other as inimical to Jesus (vii. 11–13). He is especially fond of drawing attention to such circumstances, as that before the final catastrophe all the guile and power of the enemies of Jesus were exerted in vain, because his hour was not yet come (vii. 30, viii. 20); that the emissaries sent out against him, overcome by the force of his words, and the dignity of his person, retired without fulfilling their errand (vii. 32, 44 ff.); and that Jesus passed unharmed through the midst of an exasperated crowd (viii. 59, x. 39; comp. Luke iv. 30). The writer, as we have above remarked, certainly does not intend us in these instances to think of a natural escape, but of one in which the higher nature of Jesus, his invulnerability so long as he did not choose to lay down his life, was his protection. ... "

There it is, again - blame Jews, or even him, for crucifixion; blame anybody but the real culprits responsible, namely, Roman rulers who crucified Jews on an everyday basis, by dozens if not more, on an average. Somehow, prevent the real memory, of the king of Jews and his strife to free Jews from Roman yoke, from being out in the open, and represent his execution by Rome as divine laying down his life as a sacrifice for humanity, while representing Rome as the only path to access the Divine.

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85. ISOLATED GROUPS OF ANECDOTES-IMPUTATION OF A LEAGUE WITH BEELZEBUB, AND DEMAND OP A SIGN.

" ... Matthew mentions two instances, in which a league with Beelzebub was imputed to Jesus, and a sign demanded from him; circumstances which in Mark and Luke happen only once.8 The first time the imputation occurs (Matt. ix. 32 ff.), Jesus has cured a dumb demoniac; at this the people marvel, but the Pharisees observe, He casts out demons through the prince (ἄρχων) of the demons. Matthew does not here say that Jesus returned any answer to this accusation. On the second occasion (xii. 22 ff.), it is a blind and dumb demoniac whom Jesus cures; again the people are amazed, and again the Pharisees declare that the cure is effected by the help of Beelzebub, the ἄρχων of the demons, whereupon Jesus immediately exposes the absurdity of the accusation. That it should have been alleged against Jesus more than once when he cast out demons, is in itself probable. It is [392]however suspicious that the demoniac who gives occasion to the assertion of the Pharisees, is in both instances dumb (in the second only, blindness is added). Demoniacs were of many kinds, every variety of malady being ascribed to the influence of evil spirits; why, then, should the above imputation be not once attached to the cure of another kind of demoniac, but twice to that of a dumb one? The difficulty is heightened if we compare the narrative of Luke (xi. 14 f.), which, in its introductory description of the circumstances, corresponds not to the second narrative in Matthew, but to the first; for as there, so in Luke, the demoniac is only dumb, and his cure and the astonishment of the people are told with precisely the same form of expression:—in all which points, the second narrative of Matthew is more remote from that of Luke. But with this cure of the dumb demoniac, which Matthew represents as passing off in silence on the part of Jesus, Luke connects the very discourse which Matthew appends to the cure of the one both blind and dumb; so that Jesus must on both these successive occasions, have said the same thing. This is a very unlikely repetition, and united with the improbability, that the same accusation should be twice made in connexion with a dumb demoniac, it suggests the question, whether legend may not here have doubled one and the same incident? How this can have taken place, Matthew himself shows us, by representing the demoniac as, in the one case, simply dumb, in the other, blind also. Must it not have been a striking cure which excited, on the one hand, the astonishment of the people, on the other, this desperate attack of the enemies of Jesus? Dumbness alone might soon appear an insufficient malady for the subject of the cure, and the legend, ever prone to enhance, might deprive him of sight also. If then, together with this new form of the legend, the old one too was handed down, what wonder that a compiler, more conscientious than critical, such as the author of the first gospel, adopted both as distinct histories, merely omitting on one occasion the discourse of Jesus, for the sake of avoiding repetition."

The whole thing reminds one of nothing so much as the inquisition in general, and burning of Jean D'Arc at stake by church, in particular - for far less as a specifically alarming act consodering the occult power, even though far more at the time in terms of the effect on general circumstances.

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86. VISIT OF THE’ MOTHER AND BRETHREN OF JESUS--THE WOMAN WHO PRONOUNCES THE MOTIIER OF JESUS BLESSED.

"All the synoptists mention a visit of the mother and brethren of Jesus, on being apprised of which Jesus points to his disciples, and declares that they who do the will of God are his mother and his brethren (Matt. xii. 46 ff.; Mark iii. 31 ff.; Luke viii. 19 ff.). Matthew and Luke do not tell us the object of this visit, nor, consequently, whether this declaration of Jesus, which appears to imply a disowning of his relatives, was occasioned by any special circumstance. On this subject Mark gives us unexpected information; he tells us (v. 21) that while Jesus was teaching among a concourse of people, who even prevented him from taking food, his relatives, under the idea that he was beside himself, went out to seize him, and take him into the keeping of his family.15 In describing this incident, the Evangelist makes use of the expression, ἔλεγον ὅτι ἐξέστη (they said, he is beside himself), and it was merely this expression, apparently, that suggested to him what he next proceeds to narrate: οἱ γραμματεῖς ἔλεγον, ὅτι Βεελζεβοὺλ ἔχει κ.τ.λ. (the scribes said, he hath Beelzebub, etc., comp. John x. 20). With this reproach, which however he does not attach to an expulsion of demons, he connects the answer of Jesus; he then recurs to the relatives, whom he now particularizes as the mother and brethren of Jesus, supposing them to have arrived in the meantime; and he makes their announcement call forth from Jesus the answer of which we have above spoken.

"These particulars imparted by Mark are very welcome to commentators, as a means of explaining and justifying the apparent harshness of the answer which Jesus returns to the announcement of his nearest relatives, on the ground of the perverted object of their visit. But, apart from the difficulty that, on the usual interpretation of the accounts of the childhood of Jesus, it is not to be explained how his mother could, after the events therein described, be thus mistaken in her son, it is very questionable whether we ought to accept this information of Mark’s. ... "

" ... After the refutation of the Pharisaic reproach, and the discourse on the return of the unclean spirit, a woman in the crowd is filled with admiration, and pronounces the mother of Jesus blessed, on which Jesus, as before on the announcement of his mother, replies; Yea, rather blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it! ... "

All this discussion about what he said is peculiar to West; India takes it as routine, and in fact sums it up in a neat phrase, to the effect that one needn't enquire for roots of a spiritual person. It's more than understood that once on spiritual path, one is, one ought to be, first and foremost free of worldly bonds, and only then can hope to progress. Divine Avataars are another matter, but while they are required to fullfill all duties and go through human experience, they are living at a higher level.

" ... But how the woman could feel herself hurried away into so enthusiastic an exclamation, precisely on hearing the abstruse discourse on the return of the expelled demons, or even the foregoing reprehensive reply to the Pharisees, it is difficult to understand, ... "

Oh good heavens! This he finds difficult to understand??!!!!

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87. CONTENTIONS FOE PRE-EMINENCE AMONG THE DISCIPLES. THE LOVE OF JESUS FOR CHILDREN.

" ... Matthew and Mark concur in mentioning a dispute about pre-eminence, which was excited by the two sons of Zebedee. These disciples (according to Mark), or their mother for them (according to Matthew), petitioned for the two first places next to Jesus in the messianic kingdom (Matt. xx. 20 ff.; Mark x. 35 ff.). ... "

This, more than any other, exposes the conspiracy of Rome, of church, and rents the veils they attempted to cover truth with; for who woukd petition for a top place in, much less for "two first places next to Jesus in the messianic kingdom", if it had been understood in the spiritual sense, purely, instead of a spiritual crown over a kingdom of earth, so to speak? And if they were led falsely to believe this, it's highly unsuitable behaviour from a messiah; not suitable coming from anyone who stood for a spiritual preacher. No, it's clear that whatever was understood in terms of God, this was a movement of kingdom of Jews being strived for, with the messiah being exactly what the Jews expected, a king of the Jews in line of descendants of David.

" ... However credible it may be that with the worldly messianic hopes of the disciples, Jesus should often have to suppress disputes among them on the subject of their future rank in the Messiah’s kingdom, it is by no means probable that, for example, the sentence, Whosoever will be great among you, let him be the servant of all: should be spoken, 1st, on the presentation of the child; 2ndly, in connexion with the prayer of the sons of Zebedee; 3rdly, in the anti-pharisaic discourse, and 4thly, at the last supper. There is here obviously a traditional confusion, whether it be (as Sieffert in such cases is fond of supposing) that several originally distinct occurrences have been assimilated by the legend, i.e. the same discourse erroneously repeated on various occasions; or that out of one incident the legend has made many, i.e. has invented various occasions for the same discourse. ... "

He might have had to remind them, explain to them, more than once; but that anyone would petition for a top place at all, shows that such a person had no clue; and that person cannot be mother of a disciple, much less of a close one. Or did her son's never converse with her? In which case she'd hardly dare to make such a petition.

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88. THE PURIFICATION OF THE TEMPLE.

"Jesus, during his first residence in Jerusalem, according to John (ii. 14 ff.), according to the synoptists, during his last (Matt. xxi. 12 ff. parall.), undertook the purification of the temple. ... "

On this incident hangs, chiefly, the argument by the church about claim that it was Jews who quarrel with him, and were responsible for the rest; but Judaism and Jewish history as seen by them has no recriminations, no negative feelings, about one who was one of their own, and a king to boot. They may not accept him as god or his final messiah, but nor do the adherents of the last abrahmic religion; they count him as a prophet, only not the final one. One expects Jews to retain some animosity if this incident were major enough to have caused "Jews" to be responsible for the rest, but they don't; and so it was unlikely it was more than a quarrel with some men, and much less important than that of Luther with church of Rome. The latter did persecute Luther and his followers, and attempt to have him assassinated, but that's routine of Rome - from their own Caesar to king of Jews to Queen Elizabeth I and many more along the millennia. As for this incident, Rome, when uniting with church, used it to hang the deception, to claim it was Jews who caused death of their own, to cover up guilt of Rome. If there had been any truth therein, church wouldn't have kept up with Jews in those three early centuries before the council of Nicea, all the while corresponding to keep track of the various common celebrations or festivals and other religious events, such as Easter, Passover and more. It was only after the betrayal of Jews by church in uniting with Rome that church had to learn to figure out how to fix Easter Sunday.

" ... Modern interpreters soften the picture by supposing that Jesus used the scourge merely against the cattle32 (a supposition, however, opposed to the text, which represents all πάντας as being driven out by the scourge); yet still they cannot avoid perceiving the use of a scourge at all to be unseemly in a person of the dignity of Jesus ... "

How does torturing poor animals reconcile with someone, supposedly not only spiritual, but supposedly kind, loving, beatific, at all times? It's either one or other. If he tortured cattle, beat them, he was no more than king of Jews.

" ... But it is no inconsiderable argument against John’s position of the event, that Jesus, with his prudence and tact, would hardly have ventured thus early on so violent an exercise of his messianic authority.35 For in that first period of his ministry he had not given himself out as the Messiah, and under any other than messianic authority, such a step could then scarcely have been hazarded; moreover, he in the beginning rather chose to meet his cotemporaries on friendly ground, and it is therefore hardly credible that he should at once, without trying milder means, have adopted an appearance so antagonistic. But to the last week of his life such a scene is perfectly suited. Then, after his messianic entrance into Jerusalem, it was his direct aim in all that he did and said, to assert his messiahship, in defiance of the contradiction of his enemies; then, all lay so entirely at stake, that nothing more was to be lost by such a step. ... "

The action and it's nature speaks more of taking control as king and messiah, than as a spiritual man preaching kindness and love.

"As regards the nature of the event, Origen long ago thought it incredible, that so great a multitude should have unresistingly submitted to a single man,—one, too, whose claims had ever been obstinately contested: his only resource in this exigency is to appeal to the superhuman power of Jesus, by virtue of which he was able suddenly to extinguish the wrath of his enemies, or to render it impotent; and hence Origen ranks this expulsion among the greatest miracles of Jesus.36 Modern expositors decline the miracle,37 but Paulus is the only one among them who has adequately weighed Origen’s remark, that in the ordinary course of things the multitude would have opposed themselves to a single person. Whatever may be said of the surprise caused by the suddenness of the appearance of Jesus38 (if, as John relates, he made himself a scourge of cords, he would need some time for preparation), of the force of right on his side39 (on the side of those whom he attacked, however, there was established usage); or, finally, of the irresistible impression produced by the personality of Jesus40 (on usurers and cattle-dealers—on brute men, as Paulus calls them?): still, such a multitude, certain as it might be of the protection of the priesthood, would not have unresistingly allowed themselves to be driven out of the temple by a single man. Hence Paulus is of opinion that a number of others, equally scandalized by the sacrilegious traffic, made common cause with Jesus, and that to their united strength the buyers [402]and sellers were compelled to yield.41 But this supposition is fatal to the entire incident, for it makes Jesus the cause of an open tumult; and it is not easy either to reconcile this conduct with his usual aversion to everything revolutionary, or to explain the omission of his enemies to use it as an accusation against him. For that they held themselves bound in conscience to admit that the conduct of Jesus was justifiable in this case, is the less credible, since, according to a rabbinical authority,42 the Jews appear to have been so far from taking umbrage at the market in the court of the Gentiles (and this is all we are to understand by the word ἱερὸν),43 that the absence of it seemed to them like a melancholy desolation of the temple. According to this, it is not surprising that Origen casts a doubt on the historical value of this narrative, by the expression, εἴγε καὶ αὐτὴ γεγένηται (if it really happened), and at most admits that the Evangelist, in order to present an idea allegorically, καὶ γεγενημένῳ συνέχρήσατο πράγματι (also borrowed the form of an actual occurrence)."

" ... For our only positive data in relation to this occurrence are the passages cited by the synoptists from Isaiah and Jeremiah, prohibiting that the temple should be made a den of robbers; and the passage from Malachi iii. 1–3, according to which it was expected that in the messianic times Jehovah would suddenly come to his temple, that no one would stand before his appearing, and that he would undertake a purification of the people and the worship. Certainly these passages seem to have some bearing on the irresistible reforming activity of Jesus in the temple, as described by our Evangelists; but there is so little indication that they had reference in particular to the market in the outer court of the temple, that it seems necessary to suppose an actual opposition on the part of Jesus to this abuse, in order to account for the fulfilment of the above prophecies by him being represented under the form of an expulsion of buyers and sellers."

So he attempted, step by step, to fulfil the prophecies about the messiah, as set out in the books?

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89. NARRATIVES OF THE ANOINTING OF JESUS BY A WOMAN.

"An occasion on which Jesus was anointed by a woman as he sat at meat, is mentioned by all the Evangelists (Matt. xxvi. 6 ff.; Mark xiv. 3 ff.; Luke vii. 36 ff.; John xii. 1 ff.), but with some divergencies, the most important of which lie between Luke and the other three. First, as to the chronology; Luke places the incident in the earlier period of the life of Jesus, before his departure from Galilee, while the other three assign it to the last week of his life; secondly, as to the character of the woman who anoints Jesus: she is, according to Luke, a woman who was a sinner, γυνὴ ἁμαρτωλὸς; according to the two other synoptists, a person of unsullied reputation; according to John, who is more precise, Mary of Bethany. From the second point of difference it follows, that in Luke the objection of the spectators turns on the admission [403]of so infamous a person, in the other gospels, on the wastefulness of the woman; from both, it follows, that Jesus in his defence dwells, in the former, on the grateful love of the woman, as contrasted with the haughty indifference of the Pharisees, in the latter, on his approaching departure, in opposition to the constant presence of the poor. There are yet the minor differences, that the place in which the entertainment and the anointing occur, is by the two first and the fourth Evangelists called Bethany, which according to John xi. 1, was a κώμη (town), by Luke a πόλις (city), without any more precise designation; further, that the objection, according to the three former, proceeds from the disciples, according to Luke, from the entertainer. Hence the majority of commentators distinguish two anointings, of which one is narrated by Luke the other by the three remaining Evangelists."

" ... The first difference relates to the house in which the entertainment is said to have been given; according to the two first Evangelists, it was the house of Simon the leper, a person elsewhere unnoticed; the fourth does not, it is true, expressly name the host, but since he mentions Martha as the person who waited on the guests, and her brother Lazarus as one of those who sat at meat, there is no doubt that he intended to indicate the house of the latter as the locality of the repast.46 Neither is the time of the occurrence precisely the same, for according to Matthew and Mark the scene takes place after the solemn entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem, only two days at the utmost before the passover; according to John, on the other hand, before the entrance, as early as six days prior to the passover.47 Further, the individual whom John states to be that Mary of Bethany so intimately united to Jesus, is only known to the two first evangelists as a woman, γυνὴ;48 neither do they represent her as being, like Mary, in the house, and one of the host’s family, but as coming, one knows not whence, to Jesus, while he reclined at table. Moreover, the act of anointing is in the fourth gospel another than in the two first. In the latter, the woman pours her ointment of spikenard on the head of Jesus; in John, on the contrary, she anoints his feet, and dries them with her hair,49 a difference which gives the whole scene a new character. ... "

This last mentioned detail is argued in recent times as too intimate from a stranger, and evidence of an intimate relationship between the man and the woman; it furthermore required his compliance for as long as it took, else he need not have allowed it; and it was in public view, witnessed by several disciples, so the relationship was no secret. These were some of the arguments supporting the argument that the two of them were husband and wife, and known as such.

"Thus between the narrative of John, and that of Matthew and Mark, there is scarcely less difference than between the account of these three collectively, and that of Luke: whoever supposes two distinct occurrences in the one case, must, to be consistent, do so in the other; and thus, with Origen, hold, at [404]least conditionally, that there were three separate anointings. So soon, however, as this consequence is more closely examined, it must create a difficulty, for how improbable is it that Jesus should have been expensively anointed three times, each time at a feast, each time by a woman, that woman being always a different one; that moreover Jesus should, in each instance, have had to defend the act of the woman against the censures of the spectators!51 Above all, how is it to be conceived that after Jesus, on one and even on two earlier occasions, had so decidedly given his sanction to the honour rendered to him, the disciples, or one of them, should have persisted in censuring it?"

It would be consistent, however, with church of Rome attempting to wipe out all traces of fact of his wife and family, in the rewritten gospels after council of Nicea, and meanwhile proceeding to wipe out his descendents who had been from the branch of the family - his wife with child - that escaped to Southwest France after crucifixion.

" ... The breaking of the box of ointment, in Mark, although a dramatic particular, is readily rejected as a mere embellishment; but does not John’s statement of the quantity of spikenard as a pound, border on exaggeration? and ought not the extravagance which Olshausen, in relation to this disproportionate consumption of ointment, attributes to Mary’s love, to be rather referred to the Evangelist’s imagination, which would then also have the entire credit of the circumstance, that the house was filled with the odour of the ointment? It is worthy of notice, that the estimate of the value of the perfume at 300 denarii, is given by John and Mark alone; as also at the miraculous feeding of the multitude, it is these two Evangelists who rate the necessary food at 200 denarii. If Mark only had this close estimate, how quickly would it be pronounced, at least by Schleiermacher, a gratuitous addition of the narrator! What then is it that, in the actual state of the case, prevents the utterance of this opinion, even as a conjecture, but the prejudice in favour of the fourth gospel? Even the anointing of the head, which is attested by two of the synoptists, is, because John mentions the feet instead of the head, rejected as unusual, and incompatible with the position of Jesus at a meal:65 whereas the anointing of the feet with precious oil was far less usual; and this the most recent commentator on the fourth gospel admits."

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90. THE NARRATIVES OF THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY, AND OF MARY AND MARTHA.

"In the Gospel of John (viii. 1–11), the Pharisees and scribes bring a woman taken in adultery to Jesus, that they may obtain his opinion as to the procedure to be observed against her; whereupon Jesus, by appealing to the consciences of the accusers, liberates the woman, and dismisses her with an admonition. ... The circumstance of Jesus writing on the ground has a legendary and mystical air, for even if it be not correctly explained by the gloss of Jerome: eorum videlicet, qui accusabant, et omnium mortalium peccata, it yet seems to imply something more mysterious than a mere manifestation of contempt for the accusers. Lastly, it is scarcely conceivable that every one of those men who dragged the woman before Jesus, zealous for the law, and adverse to his cause as they are supposed to be, should have had so tender a conscience, as on the appeal of Jesus to retire without prosecuting their design, and leave the woman behind them uninjured; this rather [410]appears to belong merely to the legendary or poetical embellishment of the scene. ... "

"In any case, the narrative of an interview between Jesus and a woman of the above character must be very ancient, since, according to Eusebius, it was found in the Gospel of the Hebrews, and in the writings of Papias.74 It was long thought that the woman mentioned in the Hebrew gospel and by Papias was identical with the adulteress in John; but against this it has been justly observed, that one who had the reproach of many sins, must be distinct from her who was detected in the one act of adultery.75 I wonder, however, that no one has, to my knowledge, thought, in connexion with the passage of Eusebius, of the woman in Luke of whom Jesus says that her many sins, ἁμαρτίαι πολλαὶ, are forgiven. It is true that the word διαβληθείσης does not fully agree with this idea, for Luke does not speak of actual expressions of the Pharisee in disparagement of the woman, but merely of the unfavourable thoughts which he had concerning her; and in this respect the passage in Eusebius would agree better with the narrative of John, which has an express denunciation, a διαβάλλειν."

It's unclear why they didn't concern themselves with their own virtue, instead of that of others, particularly women; but then it's abrahmic culture, and it's cheap and easy to victimise women.

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October 25, 2021 - October 26, 2021.

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CHAPTER IX.

MIRACLES OF JESUS.

§ 91. Jesus considered as a worker of miracles

92. The demoniacs, considered generally

93. Cases of the expulsion of demons by Jesus, considered singly

94. Cures of lepers

95. Cures of the blind

96. Cures of paralytics. Did Jesus regard diseases as punishments?

§ 97. Involuntary cures

98. Cures at a distance

99. Cures on the sabbath

100. Resuscitations of the dead

101. Anecdotes having relation to the sea

102. The miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes

103. Jesus turns water into wine

104. Jesus curses a barren fig-tree

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91. JESUS CONSIDERED AS A WORKER OF MIRACLES.

" ... not only was it predetermined in the popular expectation that the Messiah should work miracles in general,—the particular kinds of miracles which he was to perform were fixed, also in accordance with Old Testament types and declarations. Moses dispensed meat and drink to the people in a supernatural manner (Exod. xvi. 17): the same was expected, as the rabbins explicitly say, from the Messiah. At the prayer of Elisha, eyes were in one case closed, in another, opened supernaturally (2 Kings vi.): the Messiah also was to open the eyes of the blind. By this prophet and his master, even the dead had been raised (1 Kings xvii.; 2 Kings iv.): hence to the Messiah also power over death could not be wanting.2 Among the prophecies, Isa. xxxv. 5, 6 (comp. xlii. 7) was especially influential in forming this portion of the messianic idea. It is here said of the messianic times: Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing."

"Jesus, in so far as he had given himself out and was believed to be the Messiah, or even merely a prophet, had to meet this expectation when, according to several passages already considered (Matt. xii. 38, xvi. 1, parall.), his Pharisaic enemies required a sign from him; when, after the violent expulsion of the traders and money-changers from the temple, the Jews desired from him a sign that should legitimate such an assumption of authority (John ii. 18); and when the people in the synagogue at Capernaum, on his requiring faith in himself as the sent of God, made it a condition of this faith that he should show them a sign (John vi. 30).

"According to the gospels, Jesus more than satisfied this demand made by his cotemporaries on the Messiah. Not only does a considerable part of the evangelical narratives consist of descriptions of his miracles; not only did his disciples after his death especially call to their own remembrance and to that of the Jews the δυνάμεις (miracles) σημεῖα (signs) and τέρατα (wonders) wrought by him (Acts ii. 22; comp. Luke xxiv. 19): but the people also were, even during his life, so well satisfied with this aspect of his character that many believed on him in consequence (John ii. 23; comp. vi. 2), contrasted him with the Baptist who gave no sign (John x. 41), and even believed that he would not be surpassed in this respect by the future Messiah (John vii. 31). The above demands of a sign do not appear to prove that Jesus had performed no miracles, especially as several of them occur immediately after important miracles, e.g. after the cure of a demoniac, Matt. xii. 38; and after the feeding of the five thousand, John vi. 30. ... "

Obviously, they did not; but his being a messiah meant delivering them from subjection to Rome and assuming his position as king; which didn't happen. What it did not mean was the twist given by church after uniting with Rome for sake of survival.

" ... If however it be preferred to sever the connexion between these demands of a sign and the foregoing miracles, it is possible that Jesus may have wrought numerous miracles, and yet that some hostile Pharisees, who had not happened to be eyewitnesses of any of them, may still have desired to see one for themselves.

"That Jesus censures the seeking for miracles (John iv. 48) and refuses to comply with any one of the demands for a sign, does not in itself prove that he might not have voluntarily worked miracles in other cases, when they appeared to him to be more seasonable. ... "

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92. THE DEMONIACS, CONSIDERED GENERALLY.

" ... The power to cast out devils is before anything else imparted by Jesus to his disciples (Matt. x. 1, 8; Mark iii. 15, vi. 7; Luke ix. 1), who to their great joy succeed in using it according to their wishes (Luke x. 17, 20; Mark vi. 13)."

" ... the attempt made by generally unprejudiced inquirers, such as Winer,7 to show that Jesus did not share the popular opinion on demoniacal possession, but merely accommodated his language to their understanding, appears to us a mere adjustment of his ideas by our own. ... "

" ... Justin and the rabbins more nearly particularize, as spirits that torment the living, the souls of the giants, the offspring of those angels who allied themselves to the daughters of men; the rabbins further add the souls of those who perished in the deluge, and of those who participated in building the tower of Babel;25 and with this agree the Clementine Homilies, for, according to them also, these souls of the giants, having become demons, seek to attach themselves, as the stronger, to human souls, and to inhabit human bodies.26 As, however, in the continuation of the passage first cited, Justin endeavours to convince the heathens of immortality from their own ideas, the opinion which he there expresses, of demons being the souls of the departed in general, can scarcely be [419]regarded as his, especially as his pupil Tatian expressly declares himself against it;27 while Josephus affords no criterion as to the latent idea of the New Testament, since his Greek education renders it very uncertain whether he presents the doctrine of demoniacal possession in its original Jewish, or in a Grecian form. If it must be admitted that the Hebrews owed their doctrine of demons to Persia, we know that the Deves of the Zend mythology were originally and essentially wicked beings, existing prior to the human race; of these two characteristics, Hebraism as such might be induced to expunge the former, which pertained to Dualism, but could have no reason for rejecting the latter. Accordingly, in the Hebrew view, the demons were the fallen angels of Gen. vi., the souls of their offspring the giants, and of the great criminals before and immediately after the deluge, whom the popular imagination gradually magnified into superhuman beings. But in the ideas of the Hebrews, there lay no motive for descending beyond the circle of these souls, who might be conceived to form the court of Satan. Such a motive was only engendered by the union of the Græco-roman culture with the Hebraic: the former had no Satan, and consequently no retinue of spirits devoted to his service, but it had an abundance of Manes, Lemures, and the like,—all names for disembodied souls that disquieted the living. ... "

"It is well known that the older theology, moved by a regard for the authority of Jesus and the Evangelists, espoused the belief in the reality of demoniacal possession. The new theology, on the contrary, especially since the time of Semler,28 in consideration of the similarity between the condition of the demoniacs in the New Testament and many naturally diseased subjects of our own day, has begun to refer the malady of the former also to natural causes, and to ascribe the evangelical supposition of supernatural causes to the prejudices of that age. ... "

" ... But the most vulnerable point of Olshausen’s opinion concerning demons is this: it is too much for him to believe that Jesus asked the name of the demon in the Gadarene; since he himself doubts the personality of those emanations of the kingdom of darkness, it cannot, he thinks, have been thus decidedly supposed by Christ;—hence he understands the question, What is thy name? (Mark v. 9) to be addressed, not to the demon, but to the man,31 plainly in opposition to the whole context, for the answer, Legion, appears to be in no degree the result of a misunderstanding, but the right answer—the one expected by Jesus."

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93. CASES OF THE EXPULSION OF DEMONS BY JESUS, CONSIDERED SINGLY.

"Among the circumstantial narratives which are given us in the three first gospels of cures wrought by Jesus on demoniacs, three are especially remarkable: the cure of a demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum, that of the Gadarenes possessed by a multitude of demons, and lastly, that of the lunatic whom the disciples were unable to cure.

"In John the conversion of water into wine is the first miracle performed by Jesus after his return from the scene of his baptism into Galilee; but in Mark (i. 23 ff.) and Luke (iv. 33 ff.) the cure of a demoniac in the synagogue of Capernaum has this position. Jesus had produced a deep impression by his teaching, when suddenly, a demoniac who was present, cried out in the character of the demon that possessed him, that he would have nothing to do with him, that he knew him to be the Messiah who was come to destroy them—the demons; whereupon Jesus commanded the demon to hold his peace and come out of the man, which happened amid cries and convulsions on the part of the demoniac, and to the great astonishment of the people at the power thus exhibited by Jesus."

Strauss gives an explanation in accord with psychology as known in his times.

"But many difficulties oppose themselves to this natural conception of the case. The demoniac is supposed to learn that Jesus was the Messiah from the people in the synagogue. On this point the text is not merely silent, but decidedly contradicts such an opinion. The demon, speaking through the man, evidently proclaims his knowledge of the Messiahship of Jesus, in the words, οἶδά δε τίς εἶ κ.τ.λ., not as information casually imparted by man, but as an intuition of his demoniacal nature. Further, when Jesus cries, Hold thy peace! he refers to what the demon had just uttered concerning his messiahship; for it is related of Jesus that he suffered not the demons to speak because they knew him (Mark i. 34; Luke iv. 41), or because they [424]made him known (Mark iii. 12). If then Jesus believed that by enjoining silence on the demon he could hinder the promulgation of his messiahship, he must have been of opinion, not that the demoniac had heard something of it from the people in the synagogue, but contrariwise that the latter might learn it from the demoniac; and this accords with the fact, that at the time of the first appearance of Jesus, in which the Evangelists place the occurrence, no one had yet thought of him as the Messiah."

He follows up with facts and analysis, that of others and his own.

"If it be asked, how the demoniac could discover that Jesus was the Messiah, apart from any external communication, Olshausen presses into his service the preternaturally heightened activity of the nervous system, which, in demoniacs as in somnambules, sharpens the presentient power, and produces a kind of clear-sightedness, by means of which such a man might very well discern the importance of Jesus as regarded the whole realm of spirits. The evangelical narrative, it is true, does not ascribe that knowledge to a power of the patient, but of the demon dwelling within him, and this is the only view consistent with the Jewish ideas of that period. The Messiah was to appear, in order to overthrow the demoniacal kingdom (ἀπολέσαι ἡμᾶς, comp. 1 John iii. 8; Luke x. 18 f.) and to cast the devil and his angels into the lake of fire (Matt. xxv. 41; Rev. xx. 10): it followed of course that the demons would recognize him who was to pass such a sentence on them. This however might be deducted as an admixture of the opinion of the narrator, without damage to the rest of the narrative; but it must first be granted admissible to ascribe so extensive a presentient power to demoniacal subjects. Now, as it is in the highest degree improbable that a nervous patient, however intensely excited, should recognize Jesus as the Messiah, at a time when he was not believed to be such by any one else, perhaps not even by himself; and as on the other hand this recognition of the Messiah by the demon so entirely agrees with the popular ideas;—we must conjecture that on this point the evangelical tradition is not in perfect accordance with historical truth, but has been attuned to those ideas. There was the more inducement to this, the more such a recognition of Jesus on the part of the demons would redound to his glory. ... "

"In the above history of the cure of a demoniac, we have a case of the simplest kind; the cure of the possessed Gadarenes on the contrary (Matt. viii. 28 ff.; Mark v. 1 ff.; Luke viii. 26 ff.) is a very complex one, for in this instance we have, together with several divergencies of the Evangelists, instead of one demon, many, and instead of a simple departure of these demons, their entrance into a herd of swine."

" ... At first the pith of the incident seems to be, that the demoniac had instantaneously recognized and supplicated Jesus; but the narrator drops this original idea, and reflecting that the prayer of the demon must have been preceded by a severe command from Jesus, he corrects his previous omission, and remarks that Jesus had given his command in the first instance.

"To their mention of this command, Mark and Luke annex the question put by Jesus to the demon: What is thy name? In reply, a multitude of demons make known their presence, and give as their name, Legion. ... Let us examine the reasons that render it probable: the wish immediately expressed by the demons to enter the herd of swine, does not in Matthew presuppose a multitude of demons in each of the two possessed, since we cannot know whether the Hebrews were not able to believe that even two demons only could possess a whole herd of swine: but a later writer might well think it requisite to make the number of the evil spirits equal the number of the swine. Now, what a herd is in relation to animals, an army or a division of an army is in relation to men and superior beings, and as it was required to express a large division, nothing could more readily suggest itself than the Roman legion, which term in Matt. xxvi. 53, is applied to angels, as here to demons. ... "

"All the narratives agree in this, that the demons (in order, as Mark says, not to be sent out of the country, or according to Luke, into the deep) entreated of Jesus permission to enter into the herd of swine feeding near; that this was granted them by Jesus; and that forthwith, owing to their influence, the whole herd of swine (Mark, we must not ask on what authority, fixes their number at about two thousand) were precipitated into the sea and drowned. ... "

Strauss analyses and discusses this in light of thinking of his time, and further says -

" ... Thus the prayer in question cannot possibly have been offered by real demons, though it might by Jewish maniacs, sharing the ideas of their people. According to these ideas it is a torment to evil spirits to be destitute of a corporeal envelopment, because without a body they cannot gratify their sensual desires;61 if therefore they were driven out of men they must wish to enter into the bodies of brutes, and what was better suited to an impure spirit πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον, than an impure animal ζῶον ἀκάθαρτον, like a swine?62 So far, therefore, it is possible that the Evangelists might correctly represent the fact, only, in accordance with their national ideas, ascribing to the demons what should rather have been referred to the madness of the patient. ... "

Funny, he criticised the virgin birth a good deal, but never criticised the authorities that myth rests on - the church of Rome; Jews, Judaism, and everything related, he's at once ready to take up a disparaging attitude, except when church is in line with them.

" ... Thus there appears to attach to Jesus the charge of an injury done to the property of another, and the opponents of Christianity have long ago made this use of the narrative.75 It must be admitted that Pythagoras in a similar case acted far more justly, for when he liberated some fish from the net, he indemnified the fishermen who had taken them.

"Thus the narrative before us is a tissue of difficulties, of which those relating to the swine are not the slightest. It is no wonder therefore that commentators began to doubt the thorough historical truth of this anecdote earlier than that of most others in the public life of Jesus, and particularly to sever the connexion between the destruction of the swine and the expulsion of the demons by Jesus. ... The prominent part which is played in these endeavours at explanation, by the accidental coincidence of many circumstances, betrays that maladroit mixture of the mythical system of interpretation with the natural which characterizes the earliest attempts, from the mythical point of view. Instead of inventing a natural foundation, for which we have nowhere any warrant, and which in no degree explains the actual narrative in the gospels, adorned as it is with the miraculous; we must rather ask, whether in the probable period of the formation of the evangelical narratives, there are not ideas to be found from which the story of the swine in the history before us might be explained?"

"We have already adduced one opinion of that age bearing on this point, namely, that demons are unwilling to remain without bodies, and that they have a predilection for impure places, whence the bodies of swine must be best suited to them: this does not however explain why they should have precipitated the swine into the water. But we are not destitute of information that will throw light on this also. Josephus tells us of a Jewish conjuror who cast out demons by forms and means derived from Solomon, that in order to convince the bystanders of the reality of his expulsions, he set a vessel of water in the neighbourhood of the possessed person, so that the departing demon must throw it down and thus give ocular proof to the spectators that he was out of the man.79 In like manner it is narrated of Apollonius of Tyana, that he commanded a demon which possessed a young man, to [431]depart with a visible sign, whereupon the demon entreated that he might overturn a statue that stood near at hand; which to the great astonishment of the spectators actually ensued in the very moment that the demon went out of the youth.80 If then the agitation of some near object, without visible contact, was held the surest proof of the reality of an expulsion of demons: this proof could not be wanting to Jesus; nay, while in the case of Eleazar, the object being only a little (μικρὸν) removed from the exorciser and the patient, the possibility of deception was not altogether excluded, Matthew notices in relation to Jesus, more emphatically than the two other Evangelists, the fact that the herd of swine was feeding a good way off (μακρὰν), thus removing the last remnant of such a possibility. That the object to which Jesus applied this proof, was from the first said to be a herd of swine, immediately proceeded from the Jewish idea of the relation between unclean spirits and animals, but it furnished a welcome opportunity for satisfying another tendency of the legend. Not only did it behove Jesus to cure ordinary demoniacs, such as the one in the history first considered; he must have succeeded in the most difficult cures of this kind. ... "

And now he comes to a critical point, suddenly, mentioning it for the first time -

" ... It is the evident object of the present narrative, from the very commencement, with its startling description of the fearful condition of the Gadarene, to represent the cure as one of extreme difficulty. But to make it more complicated, the possession must be, not simple, but manifold, as in the case of Mary Magdalene, out of whom were cast seven demons ... "

- before continuing -

" ... As in relation to an inanimate object, as a vessel of water or a statue, the influence of the expelled demons could not be more clearly manifested by any means, than by its falling over contrary to the law of gravity; so in animals it could not be more surely attested in any way, than by their drowning themselves contrary to their instinctive desire of life. Only by this derivation of our narrative from the confluence of various ideas and interests of the age, can we explain the above noticed contradiction, that the demons first petition for the bodies of the swine as a habitation, and immediately after of their own accord destroy this habitation. The petition grew, as we have said, out of the idea that demons shunned incorporeality, the destruction, out of the ordinary test of the reality of an exorcism;—what wonder if the combination of ideas so heterogeneous produced two contradictory features in the narrative?"

" ... Jesus, when his disciples ask him why they could not cast out the demon, answers; Because of your unbelief, and proceeds to extol the power of faith, even though no larger than a grain of mustard seed, as sufficient to remove mountains (v. 19 ff.): it cannot be doubted that in this expression of dissatisfaction Jesus apostrophizes his disciples, in whose inability to cast out the demon, he finds a proof of their still deficient faith. ... "

" ... Elisha attempts to bring a dead child to life, by sending his staff by the hands of his servant Gehazi, who is to lay it on the face of the child; but this measure does not succeed, and Elisha is obliged in his own person to come and call the boy to life. The same relation that exists in this Old Testament story between the prophet and his servant, is seen in the New Testament narrative between the Messiah and his disciples: the latter can do nothing without their master, but what was too difficult for them, he effects with certainty. Now this feature is a clue to the tendency of both narratives, namely, to exalt their master by exhibiting the distance between him and his most intimate disciples; or, if we compare the evangelical narrative before us with that of the demoniacs of Gadara, we may say: the latter case was made to appear one of extreme difficulty in itself; the former, by the relation in which the power of Jesus, which is adequate to the occasion, is placed to the power of the disciples, which, however great in other instances, was here insufficient."

And now another contradiction reiterated -

"If in conclusion we cast a glance on the gospel of John, we find that it does not even mention demoniacs and their cure by Jesus. This omission has not seldom been turned to the advantage of the Apostle John, the alleged author, as indicating a superior degree of enlightenment.94 If however this apostle did not believe in the reality of possession by devils, he must have had, as the author of the fourth gospel, according to the ordinary view of his relation to the synoptical writers, the strongest motives for rectifying their statements, and preventing the dissemination of what he held to be a false opinion, by setting the cures in question in a true light. But how could the Apostle John arrive at the rejection of the opinion that the above diseases had their foundation in demoniacal possession? According to Josephus it was at that period a popular Jewish opinion, from which a Jew of Palestine who, like John, did not visit a foreign land until late in life, would hardly be in a condition to [437]liberate himself; it was, according to the nature of things and the synoptical accounts, the opinion of Jesus himself, John’s adored master, from whom the favourite disciple certainly would not be inclined to swerve even a hair’s breadth. But if John shared with his cotemporaries and with Jesus himself the notion of real demoniacal possession, and if the cure of demoniacs formed the principal part, nay, perhaps the true foundation of the alleged miraculous powers of Jesus: how comes it that the Apostle nevertheless makes no mention of them in his gospel? That he passed over them because the other Evangelists had collected enough of such histories, is a supposition that ought by this time to be relinquished, since he repeats more than one history of a miracle which they had already given; and if it be said that he repeated these because they needed correction,—we have seen, in our examination of the cures of demoniacs, that in many a reduction of them to their simple historical elements would be very much in place. There yet remains the supposition that, the histories of demoniacs being incredible or offensive to the cultivated Greeks of Asia Minor, among whom John is said to have written, he left them out of his gospel for the sake of accommodating himself to their ideas. But we must ask, could or should an apostle, out of mere accommodation to the refined ears of his auditors, withhold so essential a feature of the agency of Jesus? Certainly this silence, supposing the authenticity of the three first gospels, rather indicates an author who had not been an eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus; or, according to our view, at least one who had not at his command the original tradition of Palestine, but only a tradition modified by Hellenistic influence, in which the expulsions of demons, being less accordant with the higher culture of the Greeks, were either totally suppressed or kept so far in the background that they might have escaped the notice of the author of the gospel."

- as usual, Strauss, or Europe, or West in general, is highly confused between the various streams of cultural herirage.

On one hand, there are Egypt, Greece and Rome, all considered highly cultured, albeit not identical; on the other, the Judaic tradition inherited by church. So on one hand Jews are seen as less cultured, and on the other, the others are clubbed under the label heathen, along with other ancient cultures of the world!

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94. CURES OF LEPERS.

Strauss starts off with a prejudice, probably not conscious, that helps cover up deficiency in Europe adroitly.

"Among the sufferers whom Jesus healed, the leprous play a prominent part, as might have been anticipated from the tendency of the climate of Palestine to produce cutaneous disease."

It's hardly possible that climate of what he calls Palestine - a pejorative epithet applied to the region that was more properly named Israel, as Europe did to lands and their cultures colonised by European populations or powers, usually - was ever radically different from that of Mediterranean coastal regions in general, or southern Europe in particular. What is known in recent times, apart from it being a desert, is that it's extremely hot in day and correspondingly cold at nights. This can only differ in other coastal lands around Mediterranean sea by virtue of bodies of water or mountains. A wet or colder climate is hardly known to be healthier, per se, as such, however better for agriculture it be.

What is likely, however, is that the state of hygiene wasn't great, due to washing of body and clothing being not as regular, frequent and routine, as necessary; this was equally true of Europe, due chiefly to cold climate, which determined custom; and other factors didn't help. So for example other diseases spread, and death of women was routine in childbirth, until better understanding of hygiene and its relationship to washing was understood. Europeans still don't shower or bathe as frequently as do people in India or U.S., taking an obstinate pride in custom.

But it's convenient for Strauss to make general statements heaping disdain on what, on the other hand, is called Holy Land in Europe, due to church!

"One of these cases is common to all the synoptical writers, but is placed by them in two different connexions: namely, by Matthew, immediately after the delivery of the Sermon on the Mount (viii. 1 ff.); by the other Evangelists, at some period, not precisely marked, at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus in Galilee (Mark i. 40 ff.; Luke v. 12 ff.). According to the narratives, a leper comes towards Jesus, and falling on his knees, entreats that he may be cleansed; this Jesus effects by a touch, and then directs the leper to present himself to the priest in obedience to the law, that he may be pronounced clean (Lev. xiv. 2 ff.). ... "

" ... And in the fabulous region of Oriental and more particularly of Jewish legend, the sudden appearance and disappearance of leprosy presents itself the first thing. When Jehovah endowed Moses, as a preparation for his mission into Egypt, with the power of working all kinds of signs, amongst other tokens of this gift he commanded him to put his hand into his bosom, and when he drew it out again, it was covered with leprosy; again he was commanded to put it into his bosom, and on drawing it out a second time it was once more clean (Exod. iv. 6, 7). Subsequently, on account of an attempt at rebellion against Moses, his sister Miriam was suddenly stricken with leprosy, but on the intercession of Moses was soon [440]healed (Num. xii. 10 ff.). Above all, among the miracles of the prophet Elisha the cure of a leper plays an important part, and to this event Jesus himself refers (Luke iv. 27.). The Syrian general, Naaman, who suffered from leprosy, applied to the Israelitish prophet for his aid; the latter sent to him the direction to wash seven times in the river Jordan, and on Naaman’s observance of this prescription the leprosy actually disappeared but was subsequently transferred by the prophet to his deceitful servant Gehazi (2 Kings v.). I know not what we ought to need beyond these Old Testament narratives to account for the origin of the evangelical anecdotes. What the first Goël was empowered to do in the fulfilment of Jehovah’s commission, the second Goël must also be able to perform and the greatest of prophets must not fall short of the achievements of any one prophet. If then, the cure of leprosy was without doubt included in the Jewish idea of the Messiah; the Christians, who believed the Messiah to have really appeared in the person of Jesus, had a yet more decided inducement to glorify his history by such traits, taken from the Mosaic and prophetic legend; with the single difference that, in accordance with the mild spirit of the New Covenant (Luke ix. 55 f.) they dropped the punitive side of the old miracles."

"But in this narrative there is a peculiarity which distinguishes it from the [441]former. Here there is no simple cure, nay, the cure does not properly form the main object of the narrative: this lies rather in the different conduct of the cured, and the question of Jesus, were there not ten cleansed, etc. (v. 17), forms the point of the whole, which thus closes altogether morally, and seems to have been narrated for the sake of the instruction conveyed.99 That the one who appears as a model of thankfulness happens to be a Samaritan, cannot pass without remark, in the narrative of the Evangelist who alone has the parable of the Good Samaritan. As there two Jews, a priest and a Levite, show themselves pitiless, while a Samaritan, on the contrary, proves exemplarily compassionate: so here, nine unthankful Jews stand contrasted with one thankful Samaritan. May it not be then (in so far as the sudden cure of these lepers cannot be historical) that we have here, as well as there, a parable pronounced by Jesus, in which he intended to represent gratitude, as in the other case compassion, in the example of a Samaritan? It would then be with the present narrative as some have maintained it to be with the history of the temptation. But in relation to this we have both shown, and given the reason, that Jesus never made himself immediately figure in a parable, and this he must have done if he had given a narrative of ten lepers once healed by him. If then we are not inclined to relinquish the idea that something originally parabolic is the germ of our present narrative, we must represent the case to ourselves thus: from the legends of cures performed by Jesus on lepers, on the one hand; and on the other, from parables in which Jesus (as in that of the compassionate Samaritan) presented individuals of this hated race as models of various virtues, the Christian legend wove this narrative, which is therefore partly an account of a miracle and partly a parable."

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95. CURES OF THE BLIND.

"The narrative common to all the three synoptical writers is that of a cure of blindness wrought by Jesus at Jericho, on his last journey to Jerusalem (Matt. xx. 29 parall.): but there are important differences both as to the object of the cure, Matthew having two blind men, the two other Evangelists only one; and also as to its locality, Luke making it take place on the entrance of Jesus into Jericho, Matthew and Mark on his departure out of Jericho. ... "

"It seems probable that Matthew was led to add a second blind man by his recollection of a previous cure of two blind men narrated by him alone (ix. 27 ff.). Here, likewise, when Jesus is in the act of departure,—from the place, namely, where he had raised the ruler’s daughter,—two blind men follow him (those at Jericho are sitting by the way side), and in a similar manner cry for mercy of the Son of David, who here also, as in the other instance, according to Matthew, immediately cures them by touching their eyes. ... "

" ... the washing in the pool of Siloam which was prescribed to the patient was perhaps continued many days—was a protracted cure by means of the bath—and the words ἦλθε βλέπων he came seeing, do not necessarily imply that he came thus after his first bath, but that at a convenient time after the completion of his cure, he came again seeing."

" ... The narrator interprets the name of the pool, Siloam, by the Greek ἀπεσταλμένος (v. 7); a false explanation, for one who is sent is called ‏שָׁלוּחַ‎, whereas ‏שִּׁלחַ‎ according to the most probable interpretation signifies a waterfall.127 The Evangelist, however, chose the above interpretation, because he sought for some significant relation between the name of the pool, and the sending thither of the blind man, and thus seems to have imagined that the pool had by a special providence received the name of Sent, because at a future time the Messiah, as a manifestation of his glory, was to send thither a blind man. ... "

" ... The observation has been already made by others, that the fourth Evangelist has fewer miracles than the synoptical writers, but that this deficiency in number is compensated by a superiority in magnitude.131 Thus while the other Evangelists have simple paralytics cured by Jesus, the fourth gospel has one who had been lame thirty-eight years; while, in the former, Jesus resuscitates persons who had just expired, in the latter, he calls back to life one who had lain in the grave four days, in whom therefore it might be presumed that decomposition had begun; and so here, instead of a cure of simple blindness, we have that of a man born blind,—a heightening of the miracle altogether suited to the apologetic and dogmatic tendency of this gospel. ... "

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96. CURES OF PARALYTICS. DID JESUS REGARD DISEASES AS PUNISHMENTS ?

"An important feature in the history of the cure of the man born blind has been passed over, because it can only be properly estimated in connexion with a corresponding one in the synoptical narratives of the cure of a paralytic (Matt. ix. 1 ff.; Mark ii. 1 ff.; Luke v. 17 ff.), which we have in the next place to consider. Here Jesus first declares to the sick man: ἀφέωνταί σοί αἱ ἁμαρτίαι σου, thy sins are forgiven thee, and then as a proof that he had authority to forgive sins, he cures him. It is impossible not to perceive in this a reference to the Jewish opinion, that any evil befalling an individual, and especially disease, was a punishment of his sins; an opinion which, presented in its main elements in the Old Testament (Lev. xxvi. 14 ff.; Deut. xxviii. 15 ff.; 2 Chron. xxi. 15, 18 f.) was expressed in the most definite manner by the later Jews.133 Had we possessed that synoptical narrative only, we must have believed that Jesus shared the opinion of his cotemporary fellow-countrymen on this subject, since he proves his authority to forgive sins (as the cause of disease) by an example of his power to cure disease (the consequence of sin). But, it is said, there are other passages where Jesus directly contradicts this Jewish opinion; whence it follows, that what he then says to the paralytic was a mere accommodation to the ideas of the sick man, intended to promote his cure."

" ... Here the disciples, seeing on the road the man whom they knew to have been blind from his birth, put to Jesus the question, whether his blindness was the consequence of his own sins, or of those of his parents? The case was a peculiarly difficult one on the Jewish theory of retribution. With respect to diseases which attach themselves to a man in his course through life, an observer who has once taken a certain bias, may easily discover or assume some peculiar delinquencies on the part of this man as their cause. With respect to inborn diseases, on the contrary, though the old Hebraic opinion (Exod. xx. 5; Deut. v. 9; 2 Sam. iii. 29), it is true, presented the explanation that by these the sins of the fathers were visited on their posterity: yet as, for human regulations, the Mosaic law itself ordained that each should suffer for his own sins alone (Deut. xxiv. 16; 2 Kings xiv. 6); and as also, in relation to the penal justice of the Divine Being, the prophets predicted a similar dispensation (Jer. xxxi. 30; Ezek. xviii. 19 f.); rabbinical acumen resorted to the expedient of supposing, that men so afflicted might probably have sinned in their mother’s womb,135 and this was doubtless the notion which the disciples had in view in their question, v. 2. Jesus says, in answer, that neither for his own sin nor for that of his parents, did this man come into the world blind; but in order that by the cure which he, as the Messiah, would effect in him, he might be an instrument in manifesting the miraculous power of God. This is generally understood as if Jesus repudiated the whole opinion, that disease and other evils were essentially punishments of sin. But the words of Jesus are expressly limited to the case before him; he simply says, that this particular misfortune had its foundation, not in the guilt of the individual, but in higher providential designs. ... in the passage in question in the fourth gospel, there is not the slightest intimation that the declaration of Jesus had a more general meaning."

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97. INVOLUNTARY CURES.

"Occasionally in their general statements concerning the curative power of Jesus, the synoptical writers remark, that all kinds of sick people only sought to touch Jesus, or to lay hold on the hem of his garment, in order to be healed, and that immediately on this slight contact, a cure actually followed (Matt. xiv. 36; Mark iii. 10, vi. 56; Luke vi. 19). In these cases Jesus operated, not, as we have hitherto always seen, with a precise aim towards any particular sufferer, but on entire masses, without taking special notice of each individual; his power of healing appears not here, as elsewhere, to reside in his will, but in his body and its coverings; he does not by his own voluntary act dispense its virtues, but is subject to have them drawn from him without his consent."

" ... After all the narrators have described how the woman, as timid as she was believing, came behind Jesus and touched the hem of his garment, Mark and Luke state that she was immediately healed, but that Jesus, being conscious of the egress of curative power, asked who touched me? The disciples, astonished, ask in return, how he can distinguish a single touch amidst so general a thronging and pressure of the crowd. According to Luke, he persists in his assertion; according to Mark, he looks inquiringly around him in order to discover the party who had touched him: then, according to both these Evangelists, the woman approaches trembling, falls at His feet and confesses all, whereupon Jesus gives her the tranquillizing assurance that her faith has made her whole. Matthew has not this complex train of circumstances; he merely states that after the touch Jesus looked round, discovered the woman, and announced to her that her faith had wrought her cure."

" ... That the woman according to Matthew also, only touched Jesus from behind, implied the effort and the hope to remain concealed; that Jesus immediately looked round after her, implied that he was conscious of her touch. This hope on the part of the woman became the more accountable, and this consciousness on the part of Jesus the more marvellous, the greater the crowd that surrounded Jesus and pressed upon him; hence the companionship of the disciples in Matthew is by the other two Evangelists changed into a thronging [459]of the multitude (βλέπεις τὸν ὄχλον συνθλίβοντά σε). Again, Matthew mentions that Jesus looked round after the woman touched him; on this circumstance the supposition might be founded that he had perceived her touch in a peculiar manner; hence the scene was further worked up, and we are shown how Jesus, though pressed on all sides, had yet a special consciousness of that particular touch by the healing power which it had drawn from him; while the simple feature ἐπιστραφεὶς καὶ ἰδὼν αὐτὴν, he turned him about, and when he saw her, in Matthew, is transformed into an inquiry and a searching glance around upon the crowd to discover the woman, who then is represented as coming forward, trembling, to make her confession. Lastly, on a comparison of Matt xiv. 36, the point of this narrative, even as given in the first gospel, appears to lie in the fact that simply to touch the clothes of Jesus had in itself a healing efficacy. Accordingly, in the propagation of this history, there was a continual effort to make the result follow immediately on the touch, and to represent Jesus as remaining, even after the cure, for some time uncertain with respect to the individual who had touched him, a circumstance which is in contradiction with that superior knowledge elsewhere attributed to Jesus. Thus, under every aspect, the narrative in the first gospel presents itself as the earlier and more simple, that of the second and third as a later and more embellished formation of the legend."

"As regards the common substance of the narratives, it has in recent times been a difficulty to all theologians, whether orthodox or rationalistic, that the curative power of Jesus should have been exhibited apart from his volition. Paulus and Olshausen agree in the opinion,153 that the agency of Jesus is thus reduced too completely into the domain of physical nature; that Jesus would then be like a magnetiser who in operating on a nervous patient is conscious of a diminution of strength, or like a charged electrical battery, which a mere touch will discharge. Such an idea of Christ, thinks Olshausen, is repugnant to the Christian consciousness, which determines the fulness of power resident in Jesus to have been entirely under the governance of his will; and this will to have been guided by a knowledge of the moral condition of the persons to be healed. It is therefore supposed that Jesus fully recognized the woman even without seeing her, and considering that she might be spiritually won over to him by this bodily succour, he consciously communicated to her an influx of his curative power; but in order to put an end to her false shame and constrain her to a confession, he behaved as if he knew not who had touched him. But the Christian consciousness, in cases of this kind, means nothing else than the advanced religious culture of our age, which cannot appropriate the antiquated ideas of the Bible. Now this consciousness must be neutral where we are concerned, not with the dogmatical appropriation, but purely with the exegetical discovery of the biblical ideas. The interference of this alleged Christian consciousness is the secret of the majority of exegetical errors, and in the present instance it has led the above named commentators astray from the evident sense of the text. For the question of Jesus in both the more detailed narratives τίς ὁ ἁψάμενός μου; who touched me? repeated as it is in Luke, and strengthened as it is in Mark by a searching glance around, has the appearance of being meant thoroughly in earnest; and indeed it is the object of these two Evangelists to place the miraculous nature of the curative power of Jesus in a particularly clear light by showing that the mere touching of his clothes accompanied by faith, no previous knowledge on his part of the person who touched, nor so much as a word [460]from him, being requisite, was sufficient to obtain a cure. Nay, even originally, in the more concise account of Matthew, the expressions προσελθοῦσα ὄπισθεν ἥφατο having come behind him, she touched, and ἐπιστραθεὶς καὶ ἰδὼν αὐτὴν he turned him about, and when he saw her, clearly imply that Jesus knew the woman only after she had touched him. If then, it is not to be proved that Jesus had a knowledge of the woman previous to her cure and a special will to heal her; nothing remains for those who will not admit an involuntary exhibition of curative power in Jesus, but to suppose in him a constant general will to cure, with which it was only necessary that faith on the part of the diseased person should concur, in order to produce an actual cure. But that, notwithstanding the absence of a special direction of the will to the cure of this woman on the part of Jesus, she was restored to health, simply by her faith, without even touching his clothes, is assuredly not the idea of the Evangelists. On the contrary, it is their intention to substitute for an individual act of the will on the part of Jesus, the touch on the part of the sick person; this it is which, instead of the former, brings into action the latent power of Jesus: so that the materialistic character of the representation is not in this way to be avoided."

" ... Hence, according to a later opinion, the saint must continue to work miracles when his bones are distributed as relics, and the body of Christ must be present in the transubstantiated host; hence also, according to an idea developed much earlier, the curative power of the men celebrated in the New Testament must be attached to their body and its coverings. The less the church retained of the words of Jesus, the more tenaciously she clung to the efficacy of his mantle, and the further she was removed from the free spiritual energy of the apostle Paul, the more consolatory was the idea of carrying home his curative energy in a pocket-handkerchief."

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98. CURES AT A DISTANCE.

"The cures performed at a distance are, properly speaking, the opposite of these involuntary cures. The latter are effected by mere corporeal contact without a special act of the will; the former solely by the act of the will without corporeal contact, or even local proximity. But there immediately arises this objection: if the curative power of Jesus was so material that it dispensed itself involuntarily at a mere touch, it cannot have been so spiritual that the simple will could convey it over considerable distances; or conversely, if it was so spiritual as to act apart from bodily presence, it cannot have been so material as to dispense itself independently of the will. ... "

That sounds strangely like an echo of seemingly perfect logical discourse from a bunch of flatearthers! Strauss here assumes that if someone has willpower, he or she cannot have physical power to cure by touch, which really has no logic; and while he can deny that such physical power existed in someone, finding contradictions in accounts thereof isn't refutation, or even denial - which he has not stated clearly.

" ... Since we have pronounced the purely physical mode of influence in Jesus to be improbable, free space is left to us for the purely spiritual, and our decision on the latter will therefore depend entirely on the examination of the narratives and the facts themselves."

Again, Strauss finding disparities in the accounts does not refute anything. But more than anything else, if Strauss does not call the fraud by church in imposing virgin birth, and he does not realise that the story is made up by church in painting a king of Jews as a saintly guy talking of mercy and kindness who was hated by Jews, his splitting hair about gospels is merely a toddler's stamping a foot.

" ... But the most important difference is one which runs through the entire narrative, namely, that all which according to Matthew the centurion does in his own person, is in Luke done by messengers, for here in the first instance he makes the entreaty, not personally, as in Matthew, but through the medium of the Jewish elders, and when he afterwards wishes to prevent Jesus from entering his house, he does not come forward himself, but commissions some friends to act in his stead. ... "

Strange, a supplication for a cure to a person, and an attempt to prevent entrance of the person expected to perform the cure!

" ... But the incident of a distinguished official person applying to Jesus to cure a dependent or relative, and of Jesus at a distance operating on the latter in such a manner, that about the time in which Jesus pronounced the curative word, the patient at home recovered, is so singular in its kind that a threefold repetition of it may be regarded as impossible, and even the supposition that it occurred twice only, has difficulties; hence it is our task to ascertain whether the three narratives may not be traced to a single root."

" ... In both Luke and John, namely, a kind of embassy is spoken of, which towards the close of the narrative comes out of the house of the officer; in the former it consists of the centurion’s friends, whose errand it is to dissuade Jesus from giving himself unnecessary trouble; in the latter, of servants who rejoicingly meet their master and bring him the news of his son’s recovery. ... "

" ... But especially the double message in Luke is, according to Schleiermacher, a feature very unlikely to have been invented. How if, on the contrary, it very plainly manifested itself to be an invention? While in Matthew the centurion, on the offer of Jesus to accompany him, seeks to prevent him by the objection: Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, in Luke he adds by the mouth of his messenger, wherefore neither thought I myself worthy to come unto thee, by which we plainly discover the conclusion on which the second embassy was founded. ... "

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99. CURES ON THE SABBATH.

"Jesus, according to the gospels, gave great scandal to the Jews by not seldom performing his curative miracles on the sabbath. One example of this is common to the three synoptical writers, two are peculiar to Luke, and two to John."

"Decisive evidence, alike for the necessity of viewing this as a miraculous cure, and for the possibility of explaining the origin of the anecdote, is to be obtained by a closer examination of the Old Testament narrative already mentioned, 1 Kings xiii. 1 ff.. A prophet out of Judah threatened Jeroboam, while offering incense on his idolatrous altar, with the destruction of the altar and the overthrow of his false worship; the king with outstretched hand commanded that this prophet of evil should be seized, when suddenly his hand dried up so that he could not draw it again towards him, and the altar was rent. On the entreaty of the king, however, the prophet besought Jehovah for the restoration of the hand, and its full use was again granted.184 Paulus also refers to this narrative in the same connexion, but only for the purpose of applying to it his natural method of explanation; he observes that Jeroboam’s anger may have produced a transient convulsive rigidity of the muscles and so forth, in the hand just stretched out with such impetuosity. But who does not see that [473]we have here a legend designed to glorify the monotheistic order of prophets, and to hold up to infamy the Israelitish idolatry in the person of its founder Jeroboam? The man of God denounces on the idolatrous altar quick and miraculous destruction; the idolatrous king impiously stretches forth his hand against the man of God; the hand is paralyzed, the idolatrous altar falls asunder into the dust, and only on the intercession of the prophet is the king restored. Who can argue about the miraculous and the natural in what is so evidently a mythus? And who can fail to perceive in our evangelical narrative an imitation of this Old Testament legend, except that agreeably to the spirit of Christianity the withering of the hand appears, not as a retributive miracle, but as a natural disease, and only its cure is ascribed to Jesus; whence also the outstretching of the hand is not, as in the case of Jeroboam, the criminal cause of the infliction, continued as a punishment, and the drawing of it back again a sign of cure; but, on the contrary, the hand which had previously been drawn inwards, owing to disease, can after the completion of the cure be again extended. ... "

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100. RESUSCITATIONS OF THE DEAD.

"The Evangelists tell us of three instances in which Jesus recalled the dead to life. One of these is common to the three synoptists, one belongs solely to Luke, and one to John."

" ... Matthew tells us that Jesus, having reached the house, put forth the minstrels already assembled for the funeral, together with the rest of the crowd, on the ground that there would be no funeral there; this is perfectly intelligible. But Mark and Luke tell us besides that he excluded his disciples also, with the exception of three, from the scene about to take place, and for this it is difficult to discover a reason. ... "

Here comes another attack of antisemitism founded in ignorance -

" ... We must indeed admit the possibility that with the bad custom which prevailed among the Jews of burying their dead a few hours after their decease, a merely apparent corpse might easily be carried to the grave;210 but all by which it is attempted to show that this possibility was here a reality, is a tissue of fictions. ... "

Strauss knows obviously nothing about living in a hot climate! Burying dead within a few hours isn't "bad custom", it's a dire necessity for the life and hygiene of the living, unless the dead are cremated rather than buried, which too must happen within a few hours, as soon as possible, less than a day.

Strauss lived out his life in a cold climate, and even in late twentieth century with heated buildings and hit water showers, a Bavarian has been known to proudly confess publicly to not even changing underwear for at least a weak, showering no more than once a month - which would disgust and horrify majority of Indian population.

So the unthinking comment from Strauss could only be due to his antisemitism founded in church preaching for two millennia, and here used subconsciously to shield himself from possible wrath of church against writing this book looking critically at writings approved by church.

"From the arrival of Jesus in Bethany the evangelical narrative is somewhat more favourable to the natural explanation. It is true that Martha’s address to Jesus (v. 21 f.), Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died, but I know that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, he will give it thee, ἀλλὰ καὶ νῦν οἶδα, ὅτι, ὅσα ἂν αἰτήσῃ τὸν θεὸν, δώσει σοι ὁ θεὸς, appears evidently to express the hope that Jesus may be able even to recall the dead one to life. However, on the assurance of Jesus which follows, Thy brother shall rise again, ἀναστήσεται ὁ ἀδελφός σου, she answers despondingly, Yes, at the last day. This is certainly a help to the natural explanation, for it seems retrospectively to give to the above declaration of Martha (v. 22) the general sense, that even now, although he has not preserved the life of her brother, she believes Jesus to be him to whom God grants all that he desires, that is, the favourite of the Deity, the Messiah. But the expression which Martha there uses is not πιστεύω but οἶδα, and the turn of phrase: I know that this will happen if thou only willest it to be so, is a common but indirect form of petition, and is here the more unmistakable, because the object of the entreaty is clearly indicated by the foregoing antithesis. Martha evidently means, Thou hast not indeed prevented the death of our brother, but even now it is not too late, for at thy prayer God will restore him to thee and us. Martha’s change of mind, from the hope which is but indirectly expressed in her first reply (v. 24) to its extinction in the second, cannot be held very surprising in a woman who here and elsewhere manifests a very hasty disposition, and it is in the present case sufficiently explained by the form of the foregoing assurance of Jesus (v. 23). Martha had expected that Jesus would reply to her indirect prayer by a decided promise of its fulfilment, and when he answers quite generally and with an expression which it was usual to apply to the resurrection at the last day (ἀναστήσεται), she gives a half-impatient half-desponding reply.218 But that general declaration of Jesus, as well as the yet more indefinite one (v. 25 f.), I am the resurrection and the life, is thought favourable to the rationalistic view: Jesus, it is said, was yet far from the expectation of an extraordinary result, hence he consoles Martha merely with the general hope that he, the Messiah, would procure for those who believed in him a future resurrection and a life of blessedness. As however Jesus had before (v. 11) spoken confidently to his disciples of awaking Lazarus, he must then have altered his opinion in the interim—a change for which no cause is apparent. Further, when (v. 40) Jesus is about to awake Lazarus, he says to Martha, Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldst believe thou shouldst see the glory of God? evidently alluding to v. 23, in which therefore he must have meant to predict the resurrection which he was going to effect. That he does not declare this distinctly, and that he again veils the scarcely uttered promise in relation to the brother (v. 25) in general promises for the believing, is the effect of design, the object of which is to try the faith of Martha, and extend her sphere of thought."

"Even supranaturalists admit that the expression of Martha when Jesus commanded that the stone should be taken away from the grave, Κύριε, ἤδη ὄζει (v. 39), is no proof at all that decomposition had really commenced, nor consequently that a natural resuscitation was impossible, since it may have been a mere inference from the length of time since the burial. But more weight must be attached to the words with which Jesus, repelling the objections of Martha, persists in having the tomb opened (v. 40): Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldst believe thou shouldst see the glory of God? How could he say this unless he was decidedly conscious of his power to resuscitate Lazarus? According to Paulus, this declaration only implied generally that those who have faith will, in some way or other, experience a glorious manifestation of the divinity. But what glorious manifestation of the divinity was to be seen here, on the opening of the grave of one who had been buried four days, unless it were his restoration to life? and what could be the sense of the words of Jesus, as opposed to the observation of Martha, that her brother was already within the grasp of decay, but that he was empowered to arrest decay? But in order to learn with certainty the meaning of the words τὴν δόξαν τοῦ θεοῦ in our present passage we need only refer to v. 4, where Jesus had said that the sickness of Lazarus was not unto death, πρὸς θάνατον, but for the glory of God, ὑπὲρ τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ. Here the first member of the antithesis, not unto death, clearly shows that the δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ signifies the glorification of God by the life of Lazarus, that is, since he was now dead, by his resurrection: a hope which Jesus could not venture to excite in the most critical moment, without having a superior assurance that it would be fulfilled. After the opening of the grave, and before he says to the dead man, Come forth! he thanks the Father for having heard his prayer. ... "

"But, setting aside the miraculous part of the histories in question, each succeeding one is both intrinsically more improbable, and externally less attested, than the foregoing. As regards the internal improbability, one element of this, which indeed lies in all, and therefore also in the first, is especially conspicuous in the second. ... "

Strauss brings up a good question now, from another source -

" ... These resuscitated individuals, not excepting even Lazarus, recede altogether from our observation after their return to life, and hence Woolston was led to ask why Jesus rescued from the grave precisely these insignificant persons, and not rather John the Baptist, or some other generally useful man. Is it said, he knew it to be the will of Providence that these men, once dead, should remain so? ... "

And promptly answers it, from other sources, with an inane -

" ... But then, it should seem, he must have thought the same of all who had once died, and to Woolston’s objection there remains no answer but this: as it was positively known concerning celebrated men, that the breach which their deaths occasioned was never filled up by their restoration to life, legend could not annex the resurrections which she was pleased to narrate to such names, but must choose unknown subjects, in relation to which she was not under the same control."

Which is a meaningless tautology, unless the reader is meant to infer, that the stories of resurrection are false; if the latter, why wouldn't he say so? It could only be a lack of courage, in not opposing church doctrine so clearly.

" ... Such a narrative, once formed, is itself the substance, the alleged locality, the accident: by no means can the locality be the substance, to which the narrative is united as the accident, as it would follow from Schleiermacher’s supposition. Since then it cannot well be conceived that an incident of this kind, if it really happened, could remain foreign to the general tradition, and hence unknown to the author of the first gospel: the fact of this author’s ignorance of the incident gives rise to a suspicion that it did not really happen.

"But this ground of doubt falls with incomparably greater weight, on the narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus in the fourth gospel. If the authors or collectors of the three first gospels knew of this, they could not, for more than one reason, avoid introducing it into their writings. For, first, of all the resuscitations effected by Jesus, nay, of all his miracles, this resurrection of Lazarus, if not the most wonderful, is yet the one in which the marvellous presents itself the most obviously and strikingly, and which therefore, if its historical reality can be established, is a pre-eminently strong proof of the extraordinary endowments of Jesus as a divine messenger;245 whence the [492]Evangelists, although they had related one or two other instances of the kind, could not think it superfluous to add this also. But, secondly, the resurrection of Lazarus had, according to the representation of John, a direct influence in the development of the fate of Jesus; for we learn from xi. 47 ff., that the increased resort to Jesus, and the credit which this event procured him, led to that consultation of the Sanhedrim in which the sanguinary counsel of Caiaphas was given and approved. Thus the event had a double importance—pragmatical as well as dogmatical; consequently, the synoptical writers could not have failed to narrate it, had it been within their knowledge. Nevertheless, theologians have found out all sorts of reasons why those Evangelists, even had the fact been known to them, should refrain from its narration. Some have been of opinion that at the time of the composition of the three first gospels, the history was still in every mouth, so that to make a written record of it was superfluous;246 others, on the contrary, have conjectured that it was thought desirable to guard against its further publication, lest danger should accrue to Lazarus and his family, the former of whom, according to John xii. 10, was persecuted by the Jewish hierarchy on account of the miracle which had been preformed in him; a caution for which there was no necessity at the later period at which John wrote his gospel. ... The proposition, that the resurrection of Lazarus was not recorded by the synoptists because it was generally known in their circle, proves too much; since on this rule, precisely the most important events in the life of Jesus, his baptism, death, and resurrection, must have remained unwritten. Moreover, writings, which like our gospels, originate in a religious community, do not serve merely to make known the unknown; it is their office also to preserve what is already known. In opposition to the other explanation, it has been remarked by others, that the publication of this history among those who were not natives of Palestine, as was the case with those for whom Mark and Luke wrote, could have done no injury to Lazarus; and even the author of the first gospel, admitting that he wrote in and for Palestine, could hardly have withheld a fact in which the glory of Christ was so peculiarly manifested, merely out of consideration to Lazarus, who, supposing the more improbable case that he was yet living at the time of the composition of the first gospel, ought not, Christian as he doubtless was, to refuse to suffer for the name of Christ; and the same observation would apply to his family. The most dangerous time for Lazarus according to John xii. 10, was that immediately after his resurrection, and a narrative which appeared so long after, could scarcely have heightened or renewed this danger; besides, in the neighbourhood of Bethany and Jerusalem whence danger was threatened to Lazarus, the event must have been so well-known and remembered that nothing was to be risked by its publication."

" ... But this renunciation of the apostolic origin of the first gospel, does not by any means enable us to explain the ignorance of its author and his compeers of the resurrection of Lazarus. For besides the remarkable character of the event, its occurrence in the very heart of Judæa, the great attention excited by it, and its having been witnessed by the apostles,—all these considerations render it incomprehensible that it should not have entered into the general tradition, and from thence into the synoptical gospels. It is argued that these gospels are founded on Galilean legends, i.e. oral narratives and written notices by the Galilean friends and companions of Jesus; that these were not present at the resurrection of Lazarus, and therefore did not include it in their memoirs; and that the authors of the first gospels, strictly confining themselves to the Galilean sources of information, likewise passed over the event.250 But there was not such a wall of partition between Galilee and Judæa, that the fame of an event like the resurrection of Lazarus could help sounding over from the one to the other. Even if it did not happen during a feast time, when (John iv. 45) many Galileans might be eye-witnesses, yet the disciples, who were for the greater part Galileans, were present (v. 16), and must, so soon as they returned into Galilee after the resurrection of Jesus, have spread abroad the history throughout this province, or rather, before this, the Galileans who kept the last passover attended by Jesus, must have learned the event, the report of which was so rife in the city. ... "

" ... We, nevertheless, distinctly declare that we regard the history of the resurrection of Lazarus, not only as in the highest degree improbable in itself, but also destitute of external evidence; and this whole chapter, in connexion with those previously examined, as an indication of the unauthenticity of the fourth gospel."

" ... According to rabbinical,254 as well as New Testament passages (e.g. John v. 28 f., vi. 40, 44; 1 Cor. xv.; 1 Thess. iv. 16), the resuscitation of the dead was expected of the Messiah at his coming. Now the παρουσία, the appearance of the Messiah Jesus on earth, was in the view of the early church broken by his death into two parts; the first comprised his preparatory appearance, which began with his human birth, and ended with the resurrection and ascension; the second was to commence with his future advent on the clouds of heaven, in order to open the αἰὼν μέλλων, the age to come. As the first appearance of Jesus had wanted the glory and majesty expected in the Messiah, the great demonstrations of messianic power, and in particular the general resurrection of the dead, were assigned to his second, and as yet future appearance on earth. ... "

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101. ANECDOTES HAVING RELATIONS TO THE SEA.

"As in general, at least according to the representations of the three first Evangelists the country around the Galilean sea was the chief theatre of the ministry of Jesus; so a considerable number of his miracles have an immediate reference to the sea. One of this class, the miraculous draught of fishes granted to Peter, has already presented itself for our consideration; besides this, there are the miraculous stilling of the storm which had arisen on the sea while Jesus slept, in the three synoptists; Matthew, Mark, and John; the summary of most of those, the walking of Jesus on the sea, likewise during a storm, in incidents which the appendix to the fourth gospel places after the resurrection; and lastly, the anecdote of the coin that was to be angled for by Peter, in Matthew.

"The first-named narrative (Matt. viii. 23 ff. parall.) is intended, according to the Evangelist’s own words, to represent Jesus to us as him whom the winds and the sea obey, οἱ ἄνεμοι καὶ ἡ θάλασσα ὑπακούουσιν. Thus, to follow out the gradation in the miraculous which has been hitherto observed, it is here presupposed, not merely that Jesus could act on the human mind and living body in a psychological and magnetic manner; or with a revivifying power on the human organism when it was forsaken by vitality; nay, not merely as in the history of the draught of fishes earlier examined, that he could act immediately with determinative power, on irrational yet animated existences, but that he could act thus even on inanimate nature. The possibility of finding a point of union between the alleged supernatural agency of Jesus, and the natural order of phenomena, here absolutely ceases: here, at the latest, there is an end to miracles in the wider and now more favoured sense; and we come to those which must be taken in the narrowest sense, or to the miracle proper. ... "

He discusses the above, rationally -

"But it is only that limited observation of nature which in noting the particular forgets the general, that can regard storms, tempests, and similar phenomena (which in connexion with the whole have their necessary place and beneficial influence) as evils and departure from original law: and a theory of the world in which it is seriously upheld, that before the fall there were no storms and tempests, as, on the other hand, no beasts of prey and poisonous plants, partakes—one does not know whether to say, of the fanatical, or of the childish. But to what purpose, if the above explanation will not hold, could Jesus be gifted with such a power over nature? As a means of awakening faith in him, it was inadequate and superfluous: because Jesus found individual adherents without any demonstration of a power of this kind, and general acceptance even this did not procure him. As little can it be regarded as a type of the original dominion of man over external nature, a dominion which he is destined to reattain; for the value of this dominion consists precisely in this, that it is a mediate one, achieved by the progressive reflection and the united efforts of [497]ages, not an immediate and magical dominion, which costs no more than a word. Hence in relation to that part of nature of which we are here speaking the compass and the steam-vessel are an incomparably truer realization of man’s dominion over the ocean, than the allaying of the waves by a mere word."

One finds oneself perplexed - he is denying the biblical accounts of Jesus, but not the orthodox view of Oldhausen in holding nature's phenomena such as storms, as related to sin? And it's more of an achievement to invent compass and steam engine than quieten a storm?

" ... But the subject has another aspect, since the dominion of man over nature is not merely external and practical, but also immanent or theoretical, that is, man even when externally he is subjected to the might of the elements, yet is not internally conquered by them; but, in the conviction that the powers of physical nature can only destroy in him that which belongs to his physical existence, is elevated in the self-certainty of the spirit above the possible destruction of the body. ... "

That sounds twisted and bordering on lacking sense, until -

" ... This spiritual power, it is said, was exhibited by Jesus, for he slept tranquilly in the midst of the storm, and when awaked by his trembling disciples, inspired them with courage by his words. But for courage to be shown, real danger must be apprehended: now for Jesus, supposing him to be conscious of an immediate power over nature, danger could in no degree exist: therefore he could not here give any proof of this theoretical power."

That double twist leaves one uncertain if it did make sense! So - in short, cutting through twists and knots - if one can calm a storm, one lacks courage? By that logic, someone intelligent shouldn't teach, because such a person wouldn't know what lesser persons go through? Or to bring it clearer, gym trainers for weight loss must be those who have lost corresponding amounts of weight? Funnily enough the last bit makes sense, although the one about teachers does not.

" ... His address to the disciples is said to have proceeded, like the celebrated saying of Cæsar, from the confidence that a man who was to leave an impress on the world’s history, could not so lightly be cut short in his career by an accident. ... "

Whereas, his end via execution by Rome, beginning a concatenation of events and actions and thought that led to more horrors perpetrated on his people by Roman empire in guise of church, until genocide of twentieth century - was better? Why, because it all left a mark, unlike a, ending by a storm?

" ... That those who were in the ship regarded the subsidence of the storm as the effect of the words of Jesus, proves nothing, for Jesus nowhere confirms their inference.259 But neither does he disapprove it, although he must have observed the impression which, in consequence of that inference, the result had made on the people;260 he must therefore, as Venturini actually supposes, have designedly refrained from shaking their high opinion of his miraculous power, in order to attach them to him the more firmly. ... "

So, if he didn't quieten the seas and a storm, it amounts to bordering dishonesty on his part in allowing his disciples to assume he did? Or an inability to know that they'd so interpret his words, implying he didn't know what his disciples thought? That'd contradict every assumption about such a person's capabilities as a teacher, much less any divinity.

"But, setting this altogether aside, was it likely that the natural presages of the storm should have been better understood by Jesus, who had never been occupied on the sea, than by Peter, James, and John, who had been at home on it from their youth upwards?

"It remains then that, taking the incident as it is narrated by the Evangelists, we must regard it as a miracle; but to raise this from an exegetical result to a real fact, is, according to the above remarks extremely difficult: whence there arises a suspicion against the historical character of the narrative. Viewed more nearly however, and taking Matthew’s account as the basis, there is nothing to object to the narrative until the middle of v. 26. It might really have happened that Jesus in one of his frequent passages across the Galilean sea, was sleeping when a storm arose; that the disciples awaked him with alarm, while he, calm and self-possessed, said to them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? What follows—the commanding of the waves, which [498]Mark, with his well-known fondness for such authoritative words, reproduces as if he were giving the exact words of Jesus in a Greek translation (σιώπα, πεφίμωσο!)—might have been added in the propagation of the anecdote from one to another. There was an inducement to attribute to Jesus such a command over the winds and the sea, not only in the opinion entertained of his person, but also in certain features of the Old Testament history. Here, in poetical descriptions of the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, Jehovah is designated as he who rebuked the Red Sea, ἐπετίμησε τῇ ἐρυθρᾷ θαλάσσῇ (Psa. cvi. 9; LXX. comp. Nahum i. 4), so that it retreated. Now, as the instrument in this partition of the Red Sea was Moses, it was natural to ascribe to his great successor, the Messiah, a similar function; accordingly we actually find from rabbinical passages, that a drying up of the sea was expected to be wrought by God in the messianic times, doubtless through the agency of the Messiah, as formerly through that of Moses. That instead of drying up the sea Jesus is said only to produce a calm, may be explained, on the supposition that the storm and the composure exhibited by Jesus on the occasion were historical, as a consequence of the mythical having combined itself with this historical element; for, as according to this, Jesus and his disciples were on board a ship, a drying up of the sea would have been out of place."

" ... If then it be granted that nothing further remains as an historical foundation for our narrative, than that Jesus exhorted his disciples to show the firm courage of faith in opposition to the raging waves of the sea, [499]it is certainly possible that he may once have done this in a storm at sea; but just as he said: if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye may say to this mountain, Be thou removed, and cast into the sea (Matt. xxi. 21), or to this tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea (Luke xvii. 6), and both shall be done (καὶ ὑπήκουσεν ἂν ὑμῖν, Luke): so he might, not merely on the sea, but in any situation, make use of the figure, that to him who has faith, winds and waves shall be obedient at a word (ὅτι καὶ τοῖς ἀνέμοις ἐπιτάσσει καὶ τῷ ὕδατι, καὶ ὑπακούουσιν αὐτῷ, Luke). If we now take into account what even Olshausen remarks, and Schneckenburger has shown,266 that the contest of the kingdom of God with the world was in the early times of Christianity commonly compared to a voyage through a stormy ocean; we see at once, how easily legend might come to frame such a narrative as the above, on the suggestions afforded by the parallel between the Messiah and Moses, the expressions of Jesus, and the conception of him as the pilot who steers the little vessel of the kingdom of God through the tumultuous waves of the world. Setting this aside, however, and viewing the matter only generally, in relation to the idea of a miracle-worker, we find a similar power over storms and tempests, ascribed, for example, to Pythagoras.

"We have a more complicated anecdote connected with the sea, wanting in Luke, but contained in John vi. 16 ff., as well as in Matt. xiv. 22 ff., and Mark vi. 45 ff., where a storm overtakes the disciples when sailing by night, and Jesus appears to their rescue, walking towards them on the sea. Here, again, the storm subsides in a marvellous manner on the entrance of Jesus into the ship; but the peculiar difficulty of the narrative lies in this, that the body of Jesus appears so entirely exempt from a law which governs all other human bodies without exception, namely, the law of gravitation, that he not only does not sink under the water, but does not even dip into it; on the contrary, he walks erect on the waves as on firm land. If we are to represent this to ourselves, we must in some way or other, conceive the body of Jesus as an ethereal phantom, according to the opinion of the Docetæ; a conception which the Fathers of the Church condemned as irreligious, and which we must reject as extravagant. Olshausen indeed says, that in a superior corporeality, impregnated with the powers of a higher world, such an appearance need not create surprise:268 but these are words to which we can attach no definite idea. If the spiritual activity of Jesus which refined and perfected his corporeal nature, instead of being conceived as that which more and more completely emancipated his body from the psychical laws of passion and sensuality, is understood as if by its means the body was exempted from the physical law of gravity:—this is a materialism of which, as in a former case, it is difficult to decide whether it be more fantastical or childish. ... We must also recollect that on his baptism in the river Jordan, Jesus did not exhibit this property, but was submerged like an ordinary man. Now had he at that time also the power of sustaining himself on the surface of the water, and only refrained from using it? and did he thus increase or reduce his specific gravity by an act of his will? or are we to suppose, as Olshausen would [500]perhaps say, that at the time of his baptism he had not attained so far in the process of subtilizing his body, as to be freely borne up by the water, and that he only reached this point at a later period? These are questions which Olshausen justly calls absurd: nevertheless they serve to open a glimpse into the abyss of absurdities in which we are involved by the supranaturalistic interpretation, and particularly by that which this theologian gives of the narrative before us."

What if the whole event was spiritual, experienced on another level, and either recounted later literally, or even recalled only on physical level? That makes it one of a higher level than if it had been physical.

"But the account of the fourth gospel also is not wanting in peculiar features, which betray an unhistorical character. It has ever been a cross to harmonists, that while according to Matthew and Mark, the ship was only in the middle of the sea when Jesus reached it: according to John, it immediately after arrived at the opposite shore; that while, according to the former, Jesus actually entered into the ship, and the storm thereupon subsided: according to John, on the contrary, the disciples did indeed wish to take him into the ship, but their actually doing so was rendered superfluous by their immediate arrival at the place of disembarkation. ... "

That fits the interpretation, that it was all in spiritual realm, even better. But then -

" ... According to the synoptists, the sole witnesses were the disciples, who saw Jesus come towards them, walking on the sea: John adds to these few immediate witnesses, a multitude of mediate ones, namely, the people who were assembled when Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes. These, when on the following morning they no longer find Jesus on the same spot, make the calculation, that Jesus cannot have crossed the sea by ship, for he did not get into the same boat with the disciples, and no other boat was there (v. 22); while, that he did not go by land, is involved in the circumstance that the people when they have forthwith crossed the sea, find him on the opposite shore (v. 25), whither he could hardly have arrived by land in the short interval. Thus in the narrative of the fourth gospel, as all natural means of passage are cut off from Jesus, there remains for him only a supernatural one, and this consequence is in fact inferred by the multitude in the astonished question which they put to Jesus, when they find him on the opposite shore: Rabbi, when camest thou hither? As this chain of evidence for the miraculous passage of Jesus depends on the rapid transportation of the multitude, the Evangelist hastens to procure other boats ἄλλα πλοιάρια for their service (v. 23). Now the multitude who take ship (v. 22, 26 ff.) are described as the same whom Jesus had miraculously fed, and these amounted (according to v. 10) to about 5000. If only a fifth, nay, a tenth of these passed over, there needed for this, as the author of the Probabilia has justly observed, a whole fleet of ships, especially if they were fishing boats; but even if we suppose them vessels of freight, these would not all have been bound for Capernaum, or have changed their destination for the sake of accommodating the crowd. This passage of the multitude, therefore, appears only to have been invented,279 on the one hand, to confirm by their evidence the walking of Jesus on the sea; on the other, as we shall presently see, to gain an opportunity for making Jesus, who according to the tradition had gone over to the opposite shore immediately after the multiplication of the loaves, speak yet further with the multitude on the subject of this miracle."

That may have, all, been part of the Rome rewriting, to insist and fix it at physical level. Was that because Rome did not wish people other than church authorities to have a clue? Or did church not have a clue? Why else fix your only god at a lowest possible level?

"We have seen, by an example already adduced, that it was usual with the Hebrews and early Christians, to represent the power of God over nature, a power which the human spirit when united to him was supposed to share, under the image of supremacy over the raging waves of the sea. In the narrative of the Exodus this supremacy is manifested by the sea being driven out of its place at a sign, so that a dry path is opened to the people of God in its bed; in the New Testament narrative previously considered, the sea is not removed out of its place, but only so far laid to rest that Jesus and his disciples can cross it in safety in their ship: in the anecdote before us, the sea still remains in its place as in the second, but there is this point of similarity to the first, that the passage is made on foot, not by ship, yet as a necessary consequence of the other particular, on the surface of the sea, not in its bed. Still more immediate inducements to develop in such a manner the conception of the power of the miracle-worker over the waves, may be found both in the Old Testament, and in the opinions prevalent in the time of Jesus. Among the miracles of Elisha, it is not only told that he divided the Jordan by a stroke of his mantle, so that he could go through it dry shod (2 Kings ii. 14), but also that he caused a piece of iron which had fallen into the water to swim (2 Kings vi. 6); an ascendancy over the law of gravitation which it would be imagined the miracle-worker might be able to evince in relation to his own body also, and thus to exhibit himself, as it is said of Jehovah, Job ix. 8, LXX., περιπατῶν ὡς ἐπ’ ἐδάφους ἐπὶ θαλάσσης, walking upon the sea as upon a pavement. In the time of Jesus much was told of miracle-workers who could walk on the water. Apart from conceptions exclusively Grecian,280 the Greco-oriental legend feigned that the hyperborean Abaris possessed an arrow, by means of which he could bear himself up in the air, and thus traverse rivers, seas, and abysses, and popular superstition attributed to many wonder-workers the power of walking on water. Hence the possibility that with all these elements and inducements existing, a similar legend should be formed concerning Jesus, appears incomparably stronger, than that a real event of this kind should have occurred:—and with this conclusion we may dismiss the subject."

" ... narrative of Peter’s draught of fishes, so here to institute a comparison between its other features, and the narrative of Jesus walking on the sea. In both cases, Jesus is perceived by the disciples in the twilight of early morning; only in the latter instance he does not, as in the former, walk on the sea, but stands on the shore, and the disciples are in consternation, not because of a storm, but because of the fruitlessness of their fishing. In both instances they are afraid of him; in the one, they take him for a spectre, in the other, not one of them ventures to ask him who he is, knowing that it is the Lord. ... "

There it is again, the abrahmic dominant concept - of human fear of the only god they are avowed to believe, worship, have faith in! If fear be the relationship, it's not with Divine.

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102. THE MIRACULOUS MULTIPLICATION OF THE LOAVES AND FISHES.

"That Jesus miraculously multiplied prepared articles of food, feeding a great multitude of men with a few loaves and fishes, is narrated to us with singular unanimity by all the Evangelists (Matt. xiv. 13 ff.; Mark vi. 30 ff.; Luke ix. 10 ff.; John vi. 1 ff.). And if we believe the two first, Jesus did not do this merely once; for in Matt. xv. 32 ff.; Mark viii. 1 ff. we read of a second multiplication of loaves and fishes, the circumstances of which are substantially the same as those of the former. It happens somewhat later; the place is rather differently described, and the length of time during which the multitude stayed with Jesus is differently stated; moreover, and this is a point of greater importance, the proportion between the stock of food and the number of men is different, for, on the first occasion, five thousand men are satisfied with five loaves and two fishes, and, on the second, four thousand with seven loaves and a few fishes; on the first twelve baskets are filled with the fragments, on the second only seven. Notwithstanding this, not only is the substance of the two histories exactly the same—the satisfying of a multitude of people with disproportionately small means of nourishment; but also the description of the scene in the one, entirely corresponds in its principal features to that in the other. In both instances, the locality is a solitary region in the vicinity of the Galilean sea; Jesus is led to perform the miracle because the people have lingered too long with him; he manifests a wish to feed the people from his own stores, which the disciples regard as impossible; the stock of food at his disposal consists of loaves and fishes; Jesus makes the people sit down, and, after giving thanks, distributes the provisions to them through the medium of the disciples; they are completely satisfied, and yet a disproportionately great quantity of fragments is afterwards collected in baskets; lastly, in the one case as in the other, Jesus after thus feeding the multitude, crosses the sea."

What immediately strikes is the number of people. Five thousand is far too large a number for crowd management, never mind feeding arrangements. Seating arrangements alone would be highly non trivial.

" ... Is it conceivable that the disciples, after they had themselves witnessed how Jesus was able to feed a great multitude with a small quantity of provision, should nevertheless on a second occasion of the same kind, have totally forgotten the first, and have asked, Whence should we have so much bread in the wilderness as to feed so great a multitude? ... it would remain just as inconceivable as ever, that the striking similarity of the circumstances [509]preceding the second feeding of the multitude to those preceding the first, should not have reminded even one of the disciples of that former event Paulus therefore is right in maintaining, that had Jesus once already fed the multitude by a miracle, the disciples, on the second occasion, when he expressed his determination not to send the people away fasting, would confidently have called upon him for a repetition of the former miracle."

"In any case then, if Jesus on two separate occasions fed a multitude with disproportionately small provision, we must suppose, as some critics have done, that many features in the narrative of the one incident were transferred to the other, and thus the two, originally unlike, became in the course of oral tradition more and more similar; the incredulous question of the disciples especially having been uttered only on the first occasion, and not on the second. ... "

"Hence later critics have, with more292 or less293 decision, expressed the opinion, that here one and the same fact has been doubled, through a mistake of the first Evangelist, who was followed by the second. They suppose that several narratives of the miraculous feeding of the multitude were current which presented divergencies from each other, especially in relation to numbers, and that the author of the first gospel, to whom every additional history of a miracle was a welcome prize, and who was therefore little qualified for the critical reduction of two different narratives of this kind into one, introduced both into his collection. This fully explains how on the second occasion the disciples could again express themselves so incredulously: namely, because in the tradition whence the author of the first gospel obtained the second history of a miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes, it was the first and only one, and the Evangelist did not obliterate this feature because, apparently, he incorporated the two narratives into his writing just as he read or heard them. Among other proofs that this was the case, may be mentioned the constancy with which he and Mark, who copied him, not only in the account of the events, but also in the subsequent allusion to them (Matt. xvi. 9 f.; Mark viii. 19 f.), call the baskets in the first feeding, κόφινοι, in the second σπυρίδες.294 It is indeed correctly maintained, that the Apostle Matthew could not possibly take one event for two, and relate a new history which [510]never happened:295 but this proposition does not involve the reality of the second miraculous feeding of the multitude, unless the apostolic origin of the first gospel be at once presupposed, whereas this yet remains to be proved. ... A similar instance of duplication occurs in the Pentateuch in relation to the histories of the feeding of the Israelites with quails, and of the production of water out of the rock, the former of which is narrated both in Exod. xvi. and Num. xi., the latter in Exod. xvii. and again in Num. xx., in each instance with an alteration in time, place, and other circumstances. ... "

" ... such a conception of the matter, as Paul us justly remarks, and as even Olshausen intimates, is precluded by the statement of the Evangelists, that real food was distributed among the multitude; that each enjoyed as much as he wanted; and that at the end the residue was greater than the original store. It is thus plainly implied that there was an external and objective increase of the provisions, as a preliminary to the feeding of the multitude. Now, this cannot be conceived as effected by means of the faith of the people in a real manner, in the sense that that faith co-operated in producing the multiplication of the loaves. The intermediation which Olshausen here supposes, can therefore have been only a teleological one, that is, we are to understand by it, that Jesus undertook to multiply the loaves and fishes for the sake of producing a certain moral condition in the multitude. But an intermediation of this kind affords me not the slightest help in forming a conception of the event; for the question is not why, but how it happened. Thus all which Olshausen believes himself to have done towards rendering this miracle more intelligible, rests on the ambiguity of the expression, intermediation; and the inconceivableness of an immediate influence of the will of Jesus on irrational nature, remains chargeable upon this history as upon those last examined."

As usual, the story parallels one from old testament with a previous prophet.

" ... If the Mosaic manna presents itself as that which was most likely to be held a type of the bread miraculously augmented by Jesus; the fish which Jesus also multiplied miraculously, may remind us that Moses gave the people, not only a substitute for bread in the manna, but also animal food in the quails (Exod. xvi. 8, xii. 13; Num. xi. 4 ff.). On comparing these Mosaic narratives with our evangelical ones, there appears a striking resemblance even in details. The locality in both cases is the wilderness; the inducement to the miracle here as there, is fear lest the people should suffer from want in the wilderness, or perish from hunger; in the Old Testament history, this fear is expressed by the people in loud murmurs, in that of the New Testament, it results from the shortsightedness of the disciples, and the benevolence of Jesus. The direction of the latter to his disciples that they should give the people food, a direction which implies that he had already formed the design of feeding them miraculously, may be paralleled with the command which Jehovah gave to Moses to feed the people with manna (Exod. xvi. 4), and with quails (Exod. xvi. 12; Num. xi. 18–20). But there is another point of similarity which speaks yet more directly to our present purpose. As, in the evangelical narrative, the disciples think it an impossibility that provision for so great a mass of people should be procured in the wilderness, so, in the Old Testament history, Moses replies doubtingly to the promise of Jehovah to satisfy the people with flesh (Num. xi. 21 f.). To Moses, as to the disciples, the multitude appears too great for the possibility of providing sufficient food for them; as the latter ask, whence they should have so much bread in the wilderness, so Moses asks ironically whether they should slay the flocks and the herds (which they had not). And as the disciples object, that not even the most impoverishing expenditure on their part would thoroughly meet the demand, so Moses, clothing the idea in another form, had declared, that to satisfy the people as Jehovah promised, an impossibility must happen (the fish of the sea be gathered together for them); objections which Jehovah there, as here Jesus, does not regard, but issues the command that the people should prepare for the reception of the miraculous food."

And further,

" ... If we search for an intermediate step, a very natural one between Moses and the Messiah is afforded by the prophets. We read of Elijah, that through him and for his sake, the little store of meal and oil which he found in the possession of the widow of Zarephath was miraculously replenished, or rather was made to suffice throughout the duration of the famine (1 Kings xvii. 8–16). This species of miracle is developed still further, and with a greater [518]resemblance to the evangelical narrative, in the history of Elisha (2 Kings iv. 42 ff.). As Jesus fed five thousand men in the wilderness with five loaves and two fishes, so this prophet, during a famine, fed a hundred men with twenty loaves, (which like those distributed by Jesus in John, are called barley loaves,) together with some ground corn (‏כַּרְמֶל‎, LXX. παλάθας); a disproportion between the quantity of provisions and the number of men, which his servant, like the disciples in the other instance, indicates in the question: What! should I set this before a hundred men? Elisha, like Jesus, is not diverted from his purpose, but commands the servant to give what he has to the people; and as in the New Testament narrative great stress is laid on the collection of the remaining fragments, so in the Old Testament it is specially noticed at the close of this story, that notwithstanding so many had eaten of the store, there was still an overplus.307 The only important difference here is, that on the side of the evangelical narrative, the number of the loaves is smaller, and that of the people greater; but who does not know that in general the legend does not easily imitate, without at the same time surpassing, and who does not see that in this particular instance it was entirely suited to the position of the Messiah, that his miraculous power, compared with that of Elisha, should be placed, as it regards the need of natural means, in the relation of five to twenty, but as it regards the supernatural performance, in that of five thousand to one hundred? ... "

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103. JESUS TURNS WATER INTO WINE.

"Not only, however, has the miracle before us been impeached in relation to possibility, but also in relation to utility and fitness. It has been urged both in ancient316 and modern317 times, that it was unworthy of Jesus that he should not only remain in the society of drunkards, but even further their intemperance by an exercise of his miraculous power. ... by this miracle Jesus did not, as was usual with him, relieve any want, any real need, but only furnished an additional incitement to pleasure; showed himself not so much helpful as courteous; rather, so to speak, performed a miracle of luxury, than of true beneficence. ... "

" ... nothing was more natural than to be reminded by the opposition of water and wine on which the miracle turns, of the opposition between him who baptized with water (Matt. iii. 11), who at the same time [522]came neither eating nor drinking (Luke i. 15; Matt. xi. 18), and him who, as he baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire, so he did not deny himself the ardent, animating fruit of the vine, and was hence reproached with being a wine-bibber οἰνοπότης (Matt. xi. 19); especially as the fourth gospel, in which the narrative of the wedding at Cana is contained, manifests in a peculiar degree the tendency to lead over the contemplation from the Baptist to Jesus. On these grounds Herder,321 and after him some others,322 have held the opinion, that Jesus by the above miraculous act intended to symbolize to his disciples, several of whom had been disciples of the Baptist, the relation of his spirit and office to those of John, and by this proof of his superior power, to put an end to the offence which they might take at his more liberal mode of life. But here the reflection obtrudes itself, that Jesus does not avail himself of this symbolical miracle, to enlighten his disciples by explanatory discourses concerning his relation to the Baptist; an omission which even the friends of this interpretation pronounce to be surprising. ... "

"Again, the disproportionate quantity of wine with which Jesus supplies the guests, must excite astonishment. Six vessels, each containing from two to three μετρητὰς, supposing the Attic μετρητὴς, corresponding to the Hebrew bath, to be equivalent to 1½ Roman amphoræ, or twenty-one Wirtemberg measures,325 would yield 252–378 measures.326 What a quantity for a company who had already drunk freely! What enormous vessels! ... they to whom the supply of so extravagant and dangerous a quantity of wine on the part of Jesus is incredible, must conclude that the narrative is unhistorical."

"Peculiar difficulty is occasioned by the relation in which this narrative places Jesus to his mother, and his mother to him. According to the express statement of the Evangelist, the turning of water into wine was the beginning [523]of the miracles of Jesus, ἀρχὴ τῶν σημείων; and yet his mother reckons so confidently on his performing a miracle here, that she believes it only necessary to point out to him the deficiency of wine, in order to induce him to afford supernatural aid; and even when she receives a discouraging answer, she is so far from losing hope, that she enjoins the servants to be obedient to the directions of her son (v. 3, 5). How is this expectation of a miracle on the part of the mother of Jesus to be explained? Are we to refer the declaration of John, that the metamorphosis of the water was the first miracle of Jesus, merely to the period of his public life, and to presuppose as real events, for his previous years, the apocryphal miracles of the Gospels of the Infancy? Or, believing that Chrysostom was right in regarding this as too uncritical,327 are we rather to conjecture that Mary, in consequence of her conviction that Jesus was the Messiah, a conviction wrought in her by the signs that attended his birth, expected miracles from him, and as perhaps on some earlier occasions, so now on this, when the perplexity was great, desired from him a proof of his power? ... "

The recent discussions about the event, chiefly that in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, points out that provision of needs of guests at a wedding is the affair of the hosts, and a good guest does not interefere; leading to the question as to whose wedding it was, and concluding that it was his own, hence the role of his mother in asking his help in the matter, an act natural to the mother in her role as the hostess of the feast, under those circumstances.

" ... Now in the present case we need halt neither at the character of eastern legend in general, nor at metamorphoses in general, since transmutations of this particular element of water are to be found within the narrower circle of the ancient Hebrew history. Besides some narratives of Moses procuring for the Israelites water out of the flinty rock in the wilderness (Exod. xvii. 1 ff.; Num. xx. 1 ff.)—a bestowal of water which, after being repeated in a modified manner in the history of Samson (Judges xv. 18 f.), was made a feature in the messianic expectations;340—the first transmutation of water ascribed to Moses, is the turning of all the water in Egypt into blood, which is enumerated among the so-called plagues (Exod. vii. 17 ff.). Together with this mutatio in deterius, there is in the history of Moses a mutatio in melius, also effected in water, for he made bitter water sweet, under the direction of Jehovah (Exod. xiv. 23 ff.341); as at a later era, Elisha also is said to have made unhealthy water good and innoxious (2 Kings ii. 19 ff.342). As, according to the rabbinical passage quoted, the bestowal of water, so also, according to this narrative in John, the transmutation of water appears to have been transferred from Moses and the prophets to the Messiah, with such modifications, however, as lay in the nature of the case. ... "

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104. JESUS CURSES A BARREN FIG-TREE.

"The anecdote of the fig-tree which Jesus caused to wither by his word, because when he was hungry he found no fruit on it, is peculiar to the two first gospels (Matt. xxi. 18 ff.; Mark xi. 12 ff.), but is narrated by them with divergencies which must affect our view of the fact. ... "

Funny, the church clergy that objected to the gospels discovered after centuries of being hidden in desert, on grounds that they portray him as someone conscious of his powers in early youth, and somewhat of a bully threatening playmates - which is an average boy's natural behaviour - do not see this, cursing a tree for lacking fruits at the very moment he was hungry, as more than a bully behaviour, cruel, even, but allow this to be counted as a miracle! Not that this is unexpected from those that consider torture of cattle as something of no consequence, and philosophy of West after all is majorly responsible for the dire state of the earth now, what with caring for environment understood far too late in West, predominantly seeking to control everything.

"If we were restricted to the manner in which the first Evangelist states the consequence of the curse of Jesus: and immediately the fig-tree withered away καὶ ἐξηράνθη παραχρῆμα ἡ συκῆ, it would be difficult here to carry out a natural explanation; for even the forced interpretation of Paulus, which makes the word παραχρῆμα (immediately) only exclude further human accession to the fact, and not a longer space of time, rests only on an unwarranted transference of Mark’s particulars into the narrative of Matthew. In Mark, Jesus curses the fig-tree on the morning after His entrance into Jerusalem, and not till the following morning the disciples remark, in passing, that the tree is withered. ... still, when the prediction was fulfilled, Jesus did nevertheless ascribe the result to his own supernatural influence. For in speaking of what he has done in relation to the fig-tree, he uses the verb ποιεῖν (v. 21 Matt.); which cannot except by a forced interpretation, be referred to a mere prediction. But more than this, he compares what he has done in relation to the fig-tree, with the removal of mountains; and hence, as this, according to every possible interpretation, is an act of causation, so the other must be regarded as an influence on the tree. In any case, when Peter spoke of the fig-tree as having been cursed by Jesus (v. 21 Mark), either the latter must have contradicted the construction thus put on his words, or his silence must have implied his acquiescence. If then Jesus in the issue ascribes the withering of the tree to his influence, he either by his address to it designed to produce an effect, or he ambitiously misused the accidental result for the sake of deluding his disciples; a dilemma, in which the words of Jesus, as they are given by the Evangelists, decidedly direct us to the former alternative."

Whereas, if there was any truth to the figure church presents, as that of a kind, loving, saintly figure advocating mercy and love and forgiveness, and also to the tales of his power of performing diverse miracles, one would think he'd perform one and bless that tree, causing it to immediately come alive with blossoms, fruits, and birdsong from nests in it! So one of the two must be made up, and since saintly, kind people aren't as likely to be remembered if they are without power, it's the figure church presents that is untrue.

" ... Another example of the kind is not found in the canonical accounts of the life of Jesus; the apocryphal gospels alone, as has been above remarked, are full of such miracles. In one of the synoptical gospels there is, on the contrary, a passage often quoted already (Luke ix. 55 f.), in which it is declared, as the profound conviction of Jesus, that the employment of miraculous power in order to execute punishment or to take vengeance, is contrary to the spirit of his vocation; and the same sentiment is attributed to Jesus by the Evangelist, when he applies to him the words of Isaiah: He shall not break a bruised reed, etc. (Matt. xii. 20). Agreeably to this principle, and to his prevalent mode of action, Jesus must rather have given new life to a withered tree, than have made a green one wither; and in order to comprehend his conduct on this occasion, we must be able to show reasons which [529]he might possibly have had, for departing in this instance from the above principle, which has no mark of unauthenticity. The occasion on which he enunciated that principle was when, on the refusal of a Samaritan village to exercise hospitality towards Jesus and his disciples, the sons of Zebedee asked him whether they should not rain down fire on the village, after the example of Elijah. Jesus replied by reminding them of the nature of the spirit to which they belonged, a spirit with which so destructive an act was incompatible. In our present case Jesus had not to deal with men who had treated him with injustice, but with a tree which he happened not to find in the desired state. Now, there is here no special reason for departing from the above rule; on the contrary, the chief reason which in the first case might possibly have moved Jesus to determine on a judicial miracle, is not present in the second. The moral end of punishment, namely, to bring the punished person to a conviction and acknowledgment of his error, can have no existence in relation to a tree; and even punishment in the light of retribution is out of the question when we are treating of natural objects destitute of volition.347 For one to be irritated against an inanimate object, which does not happen to be found just in the desired state, is with reason pronounced to be a proof of an uncultivated mind; to carry such indignation to the destruction of the object is regarded as barbarous, and unworthy of a reasonable being; and hence Woolston is not wrong in maintaining, that in any other person than Jesus, such an act would be severely blamed. ... But that this tree, because just at that time it presented no fruit, would not have borne any in succeeding years, was by no means self-evident:—nay, the contrary is implied in the narrative, since the form in which the curse of Jesus is expressed, that fruit shall never more grow on the tree, presupposes, that without this curse the tree might yet have been fruitful.

"Thus the evil condition of the tree was not habitual but temporary; still further, if we follow Mark, it was not even objective, or existing intrinsically in the tree, but purely subjective, that is, a result of the accidental relation of the tree to the momentary wish and want of Jesus. ... "

Evil? Being for the moment without fruit, or blossoms, shouldn't that be considered pathetic?

" ... For according to an addition which forms the second feature peculiar to Mark in this narrative, it was not then the time of figs (v. 13); it was not therefore a defect, but, on the contrary, quite in due order, that this tree, as well as others, had no figs on it, and Jesus (in whom it is already enough to excite surprise that he expected to find figs on the tree so out of season) might at least have reflected, when he found none, on the groundlessness of his expectation, and have forborne so wholly unjust an act as the cursing of the tree. ... "

And this is the figure imposed on world as saintly, forgiving, merciful, not only worthy of worship but the only one? What's wrong with church of Rome, and with West in general? Or should one take the holocaust and genocides, the inquisition and the colonial empires perpetrated babarisms, as more befitting the one whose worship imposes church of Rome?

" ... Even some of the fathers stumbled at this addition of Mark’s and felt that it rendered the conduct of Jesus enigmatical;349 and to descend to later times, Woolston’s [530]ridicule is not unfounded, when he says that if a Kentish countryman were to seek for fruit in his garden in spring, and were to cut down the trees which had none, he would be a common laughing-stock. ... "

So they are aware of this, and yet led missions supported by military might, through the innocent world! Mere conquistadores?

" ... Expositors have attempted to free themselves from the difficulty which this addition introduces, by a motley series of conjectures and interpretations. On the one hand, the wish that the perplexing words did not stand in the text, has been turned into the hypothesis that they may probably be a subsequent gloss.350 On the other hand, as, if an addition of this kind must stand there, the contrary statement, namely, that it was then the time of figs, were rather to be desired, in order to render intelligible the expectation of Jesus, and his displeasure when he found it deceived; it has been attempted in various ways to remove the negative out of the proposition. ... In any case, if the whole course of the year were unfavourable to figs, a fruit so abundant in Palestine, Jesus must almost as necessarily have known this as that it was the wrong season; so that the enigma remains, how Jesus could be so indignant that the tree was in a condition which, owing to circumstances known to him, was inevitable."

Covering up barbaric acts by lies, of course - what suits church of Rome better, after all!

Strauss now proceeds to discuss why Mark did not refrain from including comment about it being not a season to expect fruit on fig tree, when, as a consequence of his mentioning it, his master would be seen in not too good a light. He discusses various times and places where fruit might be expected in the region, and it all points to an unreal, unreasonable expectation leading to a curse.

"But even when we have thus set aside this perplexing addition of Mark’s, that the tree was not really defective, but only appeared so to Jesus in consequence of an erroneous expectation: there still subsists, even according to Matthew, the incongruity that Jesus appears to have destroyed a natural object on account of a deficiency which might possibly be merely temporary. He cannot have been prompted to this by economical considerations, since he was not the owner of the tree; still less can he have been actuated by moral views, in relation to an inanimate object of nature; hence the expedient has been adopted of substituting the disciples as the proper object on which Jesus here intended to act, and of regarding the tree, and what Jesus does to it, as a mere means to his ultimate design. ... "

So it was intended as a threat to humanity? Obey or else face extinction?

" ... This is the symbolical interpretation, by which first the fathers of the church, and of late the majority of orthodox theologians among the moderns, have thought to free Jesus from the charge of an unsuitable action. According to them, anger towards the tree which presented nothing to appease his hunger, was not the feeling of Jesus, in performing this action; his object not simply the extermination of the unfruitful plant: on the contrary, he judiciously availed himself of the occasion of finding a barren tree, in order to impress a truth on his disciples more vividly and indelibly than by words. This truth may either be conceived under a special form, namely, that the Jewish nation which persisted in rendering no pleasing fruit to God and to the Messiah, would be destroyed; or under the general form, that every one who was as destitute of good works as this tree was of fruit, had to look forward to a similar condemnation. ... "

What a convenient justification for genocides, boots, and other devastation perpetrated shamelessly by conquistadores around the world!

" ... If however Jesus gave an interpretation of his act in the alleged symbolical sense, the Evangelists have not merely been silent concerning this discourse, but have inserted a false one in its place; for they represent Jesus, after his procedure with respect to the tree, not as being silent, but as giving, in answer to an expression of astonishment on the part of his disciples, an explanation which is not the above symbolical one, but a different, nay, an opposite one. For when Jesus says to them that they need not wonder at the withering of the fig-tree, since with only a little faith they will be able to effect yet greater things, he lays the chief stress on his agency in the matter, not on the condition and the fate of the tree as a symbol: therefore, if his design turned upon the latter, he would have spoken to his disciples so as to contravene that design; or rather, if he so spoke, that cannot have been his design. For the same reason, falls also Sieffert’s totally unsupported hypothesis, that Jesus, not indeed after, but before that act, when on the way to the fig-tree, had held a conversation with his disciples on the actual condition and future lot of the Jewish nation, and that to this conversation the symbolical cursing of the tree was a mere key-stone, which explained itself: for all comprehension of the act in question which that [533]introduction might have facilitated, must, especially in that age when there was so strong a bias towards the miraculous, have been again obliterated by the subsequent declaration of Jesus, which regarded only the miraculous side of the fact. ... "

How quick West is to seek support for antisemitism and colonial empires, in every twisted word from the king of Jews crucified by Rome!

" ... But it by no means follows from hence that we too should refrain from all reflection on the subject, and believingly receive the miracle without further question; on the contrary, we cannot avoid observing, that the particular miracle which we have now before us, does not admit of being explained as a real act of Jesus, either upon the general ground of performing miracles, or from any peculiar object or motive whatever. Far from this, it is in every respect opposed both to his theory and his prevailing practice, and on this account, even apart from the question of its physical possibility, must be pronounced more decidedly, than any other, to be such a miracle as Jesus cannot really have performed."

Strauss fails to see that there is no evidence Rome was not lying all along, and that the discord is between the image presented by church of Rome of a benefic, beatific figure on one hand, and this wanton destruction of a tree via a curse on the other; other than letting the tale stand as a threat to those not obedient to church of Rome and complying, there was no reason for this discordant tale to be not expunged from the records like much else, whether just after council of Nicea, or during inquisition. But it suited the policy of terror always maintained by church, whether in preaching of hell to all those non obeying, in general, or preaching antisemitism and conducting centuries of inquisition in particular.

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October 26, 2021 - October 28, 2021.