A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies. Mrs. (Anna) Jameson

I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is not understood by the person I address, then I am guilty of using words (in so far as they represent truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead consciously; it is like adulterating coin.

      “Common people,” said Johnson, “do not accurately adapt their words to their thoughts, nor their thoughts to the objects;”—that is to say, they neither apprehend truly nor speak truly—and in this respect children, half-educated women, and ill-educated men, are the “common people.”

It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education that we are not sufficiently careful to habituate children to the accurate use of words. Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we looked into the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and modifications of conscious and unconscious lying—as exaggeration, equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation—might be traced to the early misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous, careless tone in which people say sometimes “words—words—mere words!” is unthinking and unwise. It tends to debase the value of that which is the only medium of the inner life between man and man: “Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne tenons les uns aux autres, que par la parole,” said Montaigne.

      70.

      “We are happy, good, tranquil, in proportion as our inner life is accessible to the external life, and in harmony with it. When we become dead to the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes of day and night (I do not speak here of the sympathetic influences of our fellow-creatures), then we may call ourselves philosophical, but we are surely either bad or mad.”

      “Or perhaps only sad?”

      There are moments in the life of every contemplative being, when the healing power of Nature is felt—even as Wordsworth describes it—felt in the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such moments converse, sympathy, the faces, the presence of the dearest, come so near to us, they make us shrink; books, pictures, music, anything, any object which has passed through the medium of mind, and has been in a manner humanised, is felt as an intrusive reflection of the busy, weary, thought-worn self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity, giving us a foretaste of that more diffused disembodied life which may hereafter be ours. Beautiful and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old superstitions which placed a haunting divinity in every grove, and heard a living voice responsive in every murmuring stream.

      This present Sunday I set off with the others to walk to church, but it was late; I could not keep up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay them, turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the river brink, and crossed the little bridge and strolled along, pensive yet with no definite or continuous subject of thought. How beautiful it was—how tranquil! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath of air! “And where the dead leaf fell there did it rest;” but so still it was that scarce a single leaf did flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the water’s edge was already encumbered with heaps of decaying foliage. Everywhere around, the autumnal tints prevailed, except in one sheltered place under the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificent lime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not a leaf turned or shed. I stood still opposite, looking on it quietly for a long time. It seemed to me a happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced. Then I turned, for close beside me sounded the soft, interrupted, half-suppressed warble of a bird, sitting on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its tiny weight. Some lines which I used to love in my childhood came into my mind, blending softly with the presences around me.

“The little bird now to salute the morn Upon the naked branches sets her foot, The leaves still lying at the mossy root, And there a silly chirruping doth keep, As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep; Praising fair summer that too soon is gone, And sad for winter, too soon coming on!” Drayton.

The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn, ran wimpling by; not as I had seen it but a few days before—rolling tumultuously, the dead leaves whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the mountain torrents, making one think of the kelpies, the water wraiths, and such uncanny things—but gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low sunlight; even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson clusters over the little pools near the bank, and reflected in them as in a mirror, I remember vividly as a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed to melt into my life. For such moments we are grateful: we feel then what God can do for us, and what man can not.—Carolside, November 5th, 1843.

      71.

      “In the early ages of faith, the spirit of Christianity glided into and gave a new significance to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms of heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of Christianity, for in that case the spirit would have burst through such extraneous formulæ, and set them aside at once and for ever.”

      72.

Questions. In the execution of the penal statutes, can the individual interest of the convict be reconciled with the interest of society? or must the good of the convict and the good of society be considered as inevitably and necessarily opposed?—the one sacrificed to the other, and at the best only a compromise possible?

      This is a question pending at present, and will require wise heads to decide it? How would Christ have decided it? When He set the poor accused woman free, was He considering the good of the culprit or the good of society? and how far are we bound to follow His example? If He consigned the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it for atonement or retribution, punishment or penance? and how far are we bound to follow His example?

      73.

      I marked the following passage in Montaigne as most curiously applicable to the present times, in so far as our religious contests are concerned; and I leave it in his quaint old French.

      “C’est un effet de la Providence divine de permettre sa saincte Eglise être agitée, comme nous la voyons, de tant de troubles et d’orages, pour éveiller par ce contraste les âmes pies et les ravoir de l’oisiveté et du sommeil ou les avail plongées une si longue tranquillité. Si nous contrepèsons la perte que nous avons faite par le nombre de ceux qui se sont dévoyés, au gain qui nous vient par nous être remis en haleine, ressuscité notre zêle et nos forces à l’occasion de ce combat, je ne sais si l’utilité ne surmonte point le dommage.”