Existentialists

"What he [Charles Stewart Parnell] did say was that there were two ways, and two ways only, in which Ireland could be governed. One was by full Home Rule. The other was through a Dictator. But for such Dictatorship there was one man unfit, and he was Mr. Arthur Balfour. I was the more impressed by this because he had said to me only a few minutes before that he had been reading a most remarkable book, which threw more light on the Irish question than any book he had seen. I had eagerly asked what this new source of knowledge was, and he replied, "It is a book called The English in Ireland by a Mr. Froude.""

"We seem to be in companionship with a spirit who is transfusing himself into our souls, and so vitalising them by his superior energy, that life, both outward and inward, presents itself to us in higher relief, in colours brightened and deepened."

"Froude's novel must be introduced to the twentieth century with the distinction of being the only book piously burnt at Oxford in the nineteenth century. On February 27, 1849, a few weeks after its publication, Professor Sewell, lecturer in Exeter College, vehemently denounced the work in his lecture, and discovering that a student present had a copy before him seized it furiously and dashed it in the Hall fire."

"I do not think that sufficient credit has ever been given to James Anthony Froude for the manful industry that he showed in wrestling with the Spanish sixteenth-century archives at Simancas. No one who has not attempted a like task has any idea of its difficulties. The bitterest of Froude's critics, Professor Freeman, probably could not have read a Spanish sixteenth century letter to save his life."

"In the spring of 1879... I sat next to Froude [at dinner], who had just returned from South Africa. He had, during his stay there, contributed a number of articles to the public press upon the condition and future of that country. He talked delightfully, but he took an extraordinarily pessimistic view of the position of the white races in South Africa. He pointed out to me that there was a virile and intelligent race, physically stronger than the average European, who were multiplying and increasing faster than white men under the influence of civilisation, and that these Zulus and Kaffirs would ultimately demolish the white race. I asked him what was his policy, and in a gloomy tone he informed me there was no policy but to exterminate them. I pointed out to him the extreme difficulty of such a policy in these days of sentiment and humanitarianism. He replied: "If you do not adopt that policy, they will exterminate you." A few months afterwards I noted that he was giving a series of lectures at the Philosophical Institute in Edinburgh on South Africa. My curiosity was excited as to how he would put his singularly bloodthirsty theories into a shape which would be palatable to his audience. In the meantime he had entirely changed his views, and his method for settling the South African problem was to treat the native races with firmness but perfect justice. Notwithstanding his rare literary ability, he did not impress me as a reliable or far-seeing thinker."

"The Providence that watches over the affairs of men works out of their mistakes, at times, a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought."

"The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies; but he cannot wholly escape their influence."

"After my death I wish no other herald, no other speaker of my living actions, to keep my honour from corruption, but such an honest chronicler as Froude."

"Nature is less partial than she appears, and all situations in life have their compensations along with them."

"The right to resist depends on the power of resistance. A nation which can maintain its independence possesses already, unless assisted by extraordinary advantages of situation, the qualities which conquest can only justify itself by conferring. It may be held to be as good in all essential conditions as the nation which is endeavouring to overcome it; and human society has rather lost than gained when a people loses its freedom which knows how to make a wholesome use of freedom. But when resistance has been tried and failed—when the inequality has been proved beyond dispute by long and painful experience—the wisdom, and ultimately the duty, of the weaker party is to accept the benefits which are offered in exchange for submission: and a nation which at once will not defend its liberties in the field, nor yet allow itself to be governed, but struggles to preserve the independence which it wants the spirit to uphold in arms by insubordination and anarchy and secret crime, may bewail its wrongs in wild and weeping eloquence in the ears of mankind,—may at length, in a time when the methods by which sterner ages repressed this kind of conduct are unpermitted, make itself so intolerable as to be cast off and bidden go upon its own bad way: but it will not go for its own benefit. It will have established no principle, and vindicated no natural right. Liberty profits only those who can govern themselves better than others can govern them, and those who are able to govern themselves wisely have no need to petition for a privilege which they can keep or take for themselves."

"Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself."

"I came home from the Cape, and almost lived on the way, with Mr. Froude; a mind which I am sure you would have appreciated and enjoyed as thoroughly as I did. I don't know if you are as warm an admirer of his writing as I am; to me there is no English prose equal to some passages of his; such, for instance, as that about the middle of the first chapter of his history—"For indeed a change was coming upon the world." It was rather a sad mind too, sometimes grand, sometimes pathetic and tender, usually cynical, but often relating with the highest appreciation and with wonderful beauty of language some gallant deed of one of his heroes of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. He seemed to have gone through every phase of thought, and come to the end "all is vanity." He himself used to say the interest of life to a thinking man was exhausted at thirty or thirty-five. After that there remained nothing but disappointment of earlier visions and hopes. Thank goodness I have not thought quite so fast! Sometimes there was something almost fearful in the gloom and utter disbelief and defiance of his mind."

"The general modern histories, such as Lingard's and Froude's are too well known to need further description; but it may be remarked that there is inadequate justification for the systematic detraction of Froude's History which has become the fashion. He held strong views, and he made some mistakes; but his mistakes were no greater than those of other historians, and there are not half a dozen histories in the English language which have been based on so exhaustive a survey of original materials."

"The independence of nations is spoken of sometimes as if it rested on another foundation—as if each separate race or community had a divine titledeed to dispose of its own fortunes, and develop its tendencies in such direction as seems good to itself. But the assumption breaks down before the enquiry, What constitutes a nation? And the right of a people to self-government consists and can consist in nothing but their power to defend themselves. No other definition is possible. Are geographical boundaries, is a distinct frontier, made the essential? Mountain chains, rivers, or seas form, no doubt, the normal dividing lines between nation and nation, because they are elements of strength, and material obstacles to invasion. But as the absence of a defined frontier cannot take away a right to liberty where there is strength to maintain it, a mountain barrier conveys no prerogative against a power which is powerful enough to overleap that barrier, nor the ocean against those whose larger skill and courage can convert the ocean into a highway."

"Among wild beasts and savages might constitutes right. Among reasonable beings right is for ever tending to create might. Inferiority of numbers is compensated by superior cohesiveness, intelligence, and daring. The better sort of men submit willingly to be governed by those who are nobler and wiser than themselves; organization creates superiority of force; and the ignorant and the selfish may be and are justly compelled for their own advantage to obey a rule which rescues them from their natural weakness. There neither is nor can be an inherent privilege in any person or set of persons to live unworthily at their own wills, when they can be led or driven into more honourable courses; and the rights of man—if such rights there be—are not to liberty, but to wise direction and control."

"When the ties of kindred and of speech have force enough to bind together a powerful community, such a community may be able to defend its independence. If it fail, the pretension in itself has no claim on the consideration of the rest of mankind."

"When two countries, or sections of countries, stand geographically so related to one another that their union under a common government will conduce to the advantage of one of them, such countries will continue separate as long only as there is equality of force between them, or as long as the country which desires to preserve its independence possesses a power of resistance so vigorous that the effort to overcome it is too exhausting to be permanently maintained."

"The landlord may become a direct oppressor. He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to squeeze the most that he can out of them fairly or unfairly. The Russian government has been called despotism tempered with assassination. In Ireland landlordism was tempered by assassination. Unfortunately the wrong man was generally assassinated. The true criminal was an absentee, and his agent was shot instead of him. A noble lord living in England, two of whose agents had lost their lives already in his service, ordered the next to post a notice in his Barony that he intended to persevere in what he was doing, and if the tenants thought they would intimidate him by shooting his agents, they would find themselves mistaken."

"A natural right to liberty, irrespective of the ability to defend it, exists in nations as much as and no more than it exists in individuals. Had nature meant us to live uncontrolled by any will but our own, we should have been so constructed that the pleasures of one would not interfere with the pleasures of another, or that each of us would discharge by instinct those duties which the welfare of the community requires from all. In a world in which we are made to depend so largely for our well-being on the conduct of our neighbours, and yet are created infinitely unequal in ability and worthiness of character, the superior part has a natural right to govern; the inferior part has a natural right to be governed; and a rude but adequate test of superiority and inferiority is provided in the relative strength of the different orders of human beings."

"On the whole, and as a rule, superior strength is the equivalent of superior merit; and when a weaker people are induced or forced to part with their separate existence, and are not treated as subjects, but are admitted freely to share the privileges of the nation in which they are absorbed, they forfeit nothing which they need care to lose, and rather gain than suffer by the exchange."

"It remains a lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to knowledge, is no substitute for it; that when conscience undertakes to dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous. It is well that we should look this matter in the face; and as particular stories leave more impression than general statements, I will mention one, perfectly well authenticated, which I take from the official report of the proceedings:—Towards the end of 1593 there was trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a 'notorious witch' called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular offence or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again. Her legs were put in the caschilaws — an iron frame which was gradually heated till it burned into the flesh — but no confession could be wrung from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched, perhaps, by the sufferings of those who were dear to her. They were brought into court, and placed at her side; and the husband first was placed in the 'lang irons' — some accursed instrument; I know not what. Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,' — the iron boot you may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home, crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There was a machine called the piniwinkies — a kind of thumbscrew, which brought blood from under the finger nails, with a pain successfully terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything they wished. She confessed her witchcraft — so tried, she would have confessed to the seven deadly sins — and then she was burned, recalling her confession, and with her last breath protesting her innocence. It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more wholesome lesson — more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand that in their most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people."

"The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher emotions. We learn in it to sympathise with what is great and good; we learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the mystery of our mortal existence, and in the companionship of the illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we escape from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life, and our minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key."

"The student running over the records of other times finds certain salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation, may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in Scottish character."

"You have the misfortune to possess a soil and climate of unexampled excellence, and a position on the globe the most attractive to every ambitious and aggressive Power. The independence of South Africa will come when you can reply to these Powers with shot and shell (vociferous cheering); and you will do that when you have ceased to turn your energies into the most immediate and easy way of making money for yourselves, and have set heartily to work to bring out the resources of your soil. I honour and admire the achievement of national independence, because it can be achieved only by courage and self-denial and hardihood of habit of life."

"Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last."

"Where freedom is so precious that without it life is unendurable, men with those convictions fight too fiercely to be permanently subdued. Truth grows by its own virtue, and falsehood sinks and fades. An oppressed cause, when it is just, attracts friends, and commands moral support, which converts itself sooner or later into material strength. As a broad principle it may be said, that as nature has so constituted us that we must be ruled in some way, and as at any given time the rule inevitably will be in the hands of those who are then the strongest, so nature also has allotted superiority of strength to superiority of intellect and character; and in deciding that the weaker shall obey the more powerful, she is in reality saving them from themselves, and then most confers true liberty when she seems most to be taking it away. There is no freedom possible to man except in obedience to law; and those who cannot prescribe a law to themselves, if they desire to be free must be content to accept direction from others."

"The classic for the period from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Armada and one of the great masterpieces of English historical literature. Based upon very wide research in English and continental archives. Not accurate in detail and coloured throughout by a strong anti-catholic bias, but invaluable."

"It is strange, when something rises before us as a possibility which we have hitherto believed to be very dreadful, we fancy it is a great crisis; that when we pass it we shall be different beings; some mighty change will have swept over our nature, and we shall lose entirely all our old selves, and become others. … Yet, when the thing, whether good or evil, is done, we find we were mistaken; we are seemingly much the same — neither much better nor worse; and then we cannot make it out; on either side there is a weakening of faith; we fancy we have been taken in; the mountain has heen in lahour, and we are perplexed to find the good less powerful than we expected, and the evil less evil."

"It is ill changing the creed to meet each rising temptation. The soul is truer than it seems, and refuses to be trifled with."

"Our characters change as world eras change, as our features change, slowly from day to day. Nothing is sudden in this world. Inch hy inch; drop by drop; line by line. Even when great convulsions shatter down whole nations, cities, monarchies, systems, human fortunes, still they are but the finish, the last act of the same long preparing, slowly devouring change, in which the tide of human affairs for ever ebbs and flows, without haste, and without rest."

"Some few intense enjoyments are given us in life; among them all, perhaps, there is none with so deep a charm as to sit by the side of those we love, and watch them sleeping. Sleep is so innocent, so peaceful in its mystery and its helplessness; and sitting there we can fancy ourselves the guardian angels holding off the thousand evils imagination paints for ever hanging over what is most precious, most dear to us. The long deep-drawn breathing; the smile we love to hope is called up over the features by our own presence in the heart; there are no moments in life we would exchange for the few we have spent by the side of these."

"How can we help loving best those who first gave us possession of ourselves? All the day long they were together: living as they did, they could not help being so; only parting at night for a few short hours to dream over the happy past day, and to meet again the next morning, the happier for their brief separation. It was a new life to him: what had often hung before him as a fairy vision — what he had longed for, but never found; and here, as if sent down from heaven, was what more than answered to his wildest dreams. Now for the first time he found himself loved for himself — slighted and neglected as he had been .... suddenly he was singled out by a fascinating woman, who made no secret of the pleasure his friendship gave her."

"She would gladly have been more to him than she could be — because she felt (she did not deny it to herself) that she would sooner have been his wife than Leonard's. But why, because they could not be all to one another, must they be as nothing?"

"When a woman's heart is flowing over for the first time with deep and passionate love, she is all love. Every faculty of her soul rushes together in the intensity of the one feeling; thought, reflection, conscience, duty, the past, the future, they are names to her light as the breath which speaks them; her soul is full."

"The trials of life will not wait for us. They come at their own time, not caring much to inquire how ready we may be to meet them."

"For me this world was neither so high nor so low as the Church would have it; chequered over with its wild light shadows, I could love it and all the children of it, more dearly, perhaps, because it was not all light."

"A dreamer he was, and ever would be. Yet dreaming need not injure us, if it do but take its turn with waking; and even dreams themselves may be turned to beauty, by favoured men to whom nature has given the powers of casting them into form."

"Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment. "Here is a theory of the world which you bring for my acceptance: well, there is the world; try — will the key fit? can you read the language into sense by it?" was the only method; and so I was led always to look at broad results, at pages and chapters, rather than at single words and sentences, where for a few lines a false key may serve to make a meaning. So of these broad observations I only expected a broad solution."

"Life complete, is lived in two worlds; the one inside, and the one outside. The first half of our days is spent wholly in the former; the second, if it is what it ought to be, wholly in the latter — till our education is almost finished; theories are only words to us, and church controversy is not of things but of shadows of things. Through all that time life and thought beyond our own experience is but a great game played out by book actors; we do not think, we only think we think, and we have been too busy in our own line to have a notion really of what is beyond it. But while so much of our talk is so unreal, our own selves, our own risings, fallings, aspirings, resolutions, misgivings, these are real enough to us; these are our hidden life, our sanctuary of our own mysteries."

"It was brought home to me that two men may be as sincere, as earnest, as faithful, as uncompromising, and yet hold opinions far asunder as the poles. I have before said that I think the moment of this conviction is the most perilous crisis of our lives; for myself, it threw me at once on my own responsibility, and obliged me to look for myself at what men said, instead of simply accepting all because they said it. I begin to look about me to listen to what had to be said on many sides of the question, and try, as far as I could, to give it all fair hearing."

"Women's eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy is at once to be interesting."

"All, all nature is harmonious, and must and shall be harmony for ever; even we, poor men, with our wild ways and frantic wrongs, and crimes, and follies, to the beings out beyond us and above us, seem, doubtless, moving on our own way under the broad dominion of universal law. The wretched only feel their wretchedness: in the universe all is beautiful. Ay, to those lofty beings, be they who they will, who look down from their starry thrones on the strange figures flitting to and fro over this earth of ours, the wild recklessness of us mortals with each other may well lose its painful interest. Why should our misdoings cause more grief to them than those of the lower animals to ourselves? Pain and pleasure are but forms of consciousness; we feel them for ourselves, and for those who are like ourselves. To man alone the doings of man are wrong; the evil which is with us dies out beyond us; we are but a part of nature, and blend with the rest in her persevering beauty. Poor consolers are such thoughts, for they are but thoughts, and, alas! our pain we feel."

"Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality."

"Now, to a single-minded man, who is either brave enough or reckless enough to surrender himself wholly to one idea, and look neither right nor left, but only forward, what earthly consequences may follow is not material. Persecution strengthens him; and so he is sure he is right, whether his course end in a prison or on a throne is no matter at all. But men of this calibre are uncommon in any age or in any country — very uncommon in this age and this country."

"Look not to have your sepulchre built in after ages hy the same foolish hands which still ever destroy the living prophet. Small honour for you if they do build it; and may be they never will build it."

"Minds vary in sensitiveness and in self-power, as bodies do in susceptibility of attraction and repulsion. When, when shall we learn that they are governed by laws as inexorable as physical laws, and that a man can as easily refuse to obey what has power over him as a steel atom can resist the magnet?"

"What is right or duty without power? To tell a man it is his duty to submit his judgment to the judgment of the church, is like telling a wife it is her duty to love her husband — a thing easy to say, but meaning simply nothing. Affection must be won, not commanded."

"Belief is the result of the proportion, whatever it he, in which the many elements which go to make the human being are combined. In some the grosser nature preponderates; they believe largely in their stomachs, in the comforts and conveniences of life, and being of such kind, so long as these are not threatened, they gravitate steadily towards the earth. Numerically this is the largest class of believers, with very various denominations indeed; bearing the names of every faith beneath the sky, and composing the conservative elements in them, and therefore commonly persons of much weight in established systems. But they are what I have called them: their hearts are where I said they were, and as such interests are commonly selfish, and self separates instead of unites, they are not generally powerful against any heavy trial. Others of keener susceptibility are yet volatile, with slight power of continuance, and fly from attraction to attraction in the current of novelty. Others of stronger temper gravitate more slowly, but combine more firmly, and only disunite again when the idea or soul of the body into which they form dies out, or they fall under the influence of some very attractive force indeed. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a body which is really organised by a living idea can lose a healthy member except by violence."

"Once in our lives we have all to choose. More or less we have all felt once the same emotions. We have not always been what the professions make of us. Nature made us men, and she surrenders not her children without a struggle. I will go back to my story now with but this one word, that it is these sons of genius, and the fate they meet with, which is to me the one sole evidence that there is more in "this huge state" than what is seen, and that in very truth the soul of man is not a thing which comes and goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in which it is set to dwell, but a very living force, a very energy of God's organic Will, which rules and moulds this universe. For what are they? Say not, say not, it is but a choice which they have made; and an immortality of glory in heaven shall reward them for what they have sacrificed on earth. It may be so; but they do not ask for it. They are what they are from the Divine power which is in them, and you would never hear their complainings if the grave was the gate of annihilation."

"You will never have perfect men, Plato says, till you have perfect circumstances. Perhaps a true saying! — but, till the philosopher is born who can tell us what circumstances are perfect, a sufficiently speculative one. At any rate, one finds strange enough results — often the very best coming up out of conditions the most unpromising. Such a bundle of odd contradictions we human beings are, that perhaps full as many repellent as attracting influences are acquired, before we can give our hearts to what is right."