Memorials and Other Papers — Volume 2

The riddle proposed by the Sphinx ran in these terms: "What creature is that which moves on four feet in the morning, on two feet at noonday, and on three towards the going down of the sun?" dipus, after some consideration, answered that the creature was MAN, who creeps on the ground with hands and feet when an infant, walks upright in the vigor of manhood, and leans upon a staff in old age. Immediately the dreadful Sphinx confessed the truth of his solution by throwing herself headlong from a point of rock into the sea; her power being overthrown as soon as her secret had been detected. Thus was the Sphinx destroyed; and, according to the promise of the proclamation, for this great service to the state dipus was immediately recompensed. He was saluted King of Thebes, and married to the royal widow Jocasta. In this way it happened, but without suspicion either in himself or others, pointing to the truth, that dipus had slain his father, had ascended his father's throne, and had married his own mother.

Through a course of years all these dreadful events lay hushed in darkness; but at length a pestilence arose, and an embassy was despatched to Delphi, in order to ascertain the cause of the heavenly wrath, and the proper means of propitiating that wrath. The embassy returned to Thebes armed with a knowledge of the fatal secrets connected with dipus, but under some restraints of prudence in making a publication of what so dreadfully affected the most powerful personage in the state. Perhaps, in the whole history of human art as applied to the evolution of a poetic fable, there is nothing more exquisite than the management of this crisis by Sophocles. A natural discovery, first of all, connects dipus with the death of Laius. That discovery comes upon him with some surprise, but with no shock of fear or remorse. That he had killed a man of rank in a sudden quarrel, he had always known; that this man was now discovered to be Laius, added nothing to the reasons for regret. The affair remained as it was. It was simply a case of personal strife on the high road, and one which had really grown out of aristocratic violence in the adverse party. dipus had asserted his own rights and dignity only as all brave men would have done in an age that knew nothing of civic police.

It was true that this first discovery—the identification of himself as the slayer of Laius—drew after it two others, namely, that it was the throne of his victim on which he had seated himself, and that it was his widow whom he had married. But these were no offences; and, on the contrary, they were distinctions won at great risk to himself, and by a great service to the country. Suddenly, however, the reappearance and disclosures of the shepherd who had saved his life during infancy in one moment threw a dazzling but funereal light upon the previous discoveries that else had seemed so trivial. In an instant everything was read in another sense. The death of Laius, the marriage with his widow, the appropriation of his throne, all towered into colossal crimes, illimitable, and opening no avenues to atonement. dipus, in the agonies of his horror, inflicts blindness upon himself; Jocasta commits suicide; the two sons fall into fiery feuds for the assertion of their separate claims on the throne, but previously unite for the expulsion of dipus, as one who had become a curse to Thebes. And thus the poor, heart-shattered king would have been turned out upon the public roads, aged, blind, and a helpless vagrant, but for the sublime piety of his two daughters, but especially of Antigone, the elder. They share with their unhappy father the hardships and perils of the road, and do not leave him until the moment of his mysterious summons to some ineffable death in the woods of Colonus. The expulsion of Polynices, the younger son, from Thebes; his return with a confederate band of princes for the recovery of his rights; the death of the two brothers in single combat; the public prohibition of funeral rights to Polynices, as one who had levied war against his native land; and the final reappearance of Antigone, who defies the law, and secures a grave to her brother at the certain price of a grave to herself— these are the sequels and arrears of the family overthrow accomplished through the dark destiny of dipus.

And now, having reviewed the incidents of the story, in what respect is it that we object to the solution of the Sphinx's riddle? We do not object to it as a solution of the riddle, and the only one possible at the moment; but what we contend is, that it is not the solution. All great prophecies, all great mysteries, are likely to involve double, triple, or even quadruple interpretations— each rising in dignity, each cryptically involving another. Even amongst natural agencies, precisely as they rise in grandeur, they multiply their final purposes. Rivers and seas, for instance, are useful, not merely as means of separating nations from each other, but also as means of uniting them; not merely as baths and for all purposes of washing and cleansing, but also as reservoirs of fish, as high-roads for the conveyance of commodities, as permanent sources of agricultural fertility, &c. In like manner, a mystery of any sort, having a public reference, may be presumed to couch within it a secondary and a profounder interpretation. The reader may think that the Sphinx ought to have understood her own riddle best; and that, if she were satisfied with the answer of dipus, it must be impertinent in us at this time of day to censure it. To censure, indeed, is more than we propose. The solution of dipus was a true one; and it was all that he could have given in that early period of his life. But, perhaps, at the moment of his death amongst the gloomy thickets of Attica, he might have been able to suggest another and a better. If not, then we have the satisfaction of thinking ourselves somewhat less dense than dipus; for, in our opinion, the full and final answer to the Sphinx's riddle lay in the word DIPUS. dipus himself it was that fulfilled the conditions of the enigma. He it was, in the most pathetic sense, that went upon four feet when an infant; for the general condition of helplessness attached to all mankind in the period of infancy, and which is expressed symbolically by this image of creeping, applied to dipus in a far more significant manner, as one abandoned by all his natural protectors, thrown upon the chances of a wilderness, and upon the mercies of a slave. The allusion to this general helplessness had, besides, a special propriety in the case of dipus, who drew his very name (Swollen-foot) from the injury done to his infant feet. He, again, it was that, in a more emphatic sense than usual, asserted that majestic self-sufficientness and independence of all alien aid, which is typified by the act of walking upright at noonday upon his own natural basis. Throwing off all the power and splendor borrowed from his royal protectors at Corinth, trusting exclusively to his native powers as a man, he had fought his way through insult to the presence of the dreadful Sphinx; her he had confounded and vanquished; he had leaped into a throne,—the throne of him who had insulted him,—without other resources than such as he drew from himself, and he had, in the same way, obtained a royal bride. With good right, therefore, he was foreshadowed in the riddle as one who walked upright by his own masculine vigor, and relied upon no gifts but those of nature. Lastly, by a sad but a pitying image, dipus is described as supporting himself at nightfall on three feet; for dipus it was that by his cruel sons would have been rejected from Thebes, with no auxiliary means of motion or support beyond his own languishing powers: blind and broken-hearted, he must have wandered into snares and ruin; his own feet must have been supplanted immediately: but then came to his aid another foot, the holy Antigone. She it was that guided and cheered him, when all the world had forsaken him; she it was that already, in the vision of the cruel Sphinx, had been prefigured dimly as the staff upon which dipus should lean, as the third foot that should support his steps when the deep shadows of his sunset were gathering and settling about his grave.

In this way we obtain a solution of the Sphinx's riddle more commensurate and symmetrical with the other features of the story, which are all clothed with the grandeur of mystery. The Sphinx herself is a mystery. Whence came her monstrous nature, that so often renewed its remembrance amongst men of distant lands, in Egyptian or Ethiopian marble? Whence came her wrath against Thebes? This wrath, how durst it tower so high as to measure itself against the enmity of a nation? This wrath, how came it to sink so low as to collapse at the echo of a word from a friendless stranger? Mysterious again is the blind collusion of this unhappy stranger with the dark decrees of fate. The very misfortunes of his infancy had given into his hands one chance more for escape: these misfortunes had transferred him to Corinth, and staying there he was safe. But the headstrong haughtiness of youthful blood causes him to recoil unknowingly upon the one sole spot of all the earth where the coefficients for ratifying his destruction are waiting and lying in ambush. Heaven and earth are silent for a generation; one might fancy that they are treacherously silent, in order that dipus may have time for building up to the clouds the pyramid of his mysterious offences. His four children, incestuously born, sons that are his brothers, daughters that are his sisters, have grown up to be men and women, before the first mutterings are becoming audible of that great tide slowly coming up from the sea, which is to sweep away himself and the foundations of his house. Heaven and earth must now bear joint witness against him. Heaven speaks first: the pestilence that walketh in darkness is made the earliest minister of the discovery,—the pestilence it is, scourging the seven-gated Thebes, as very soon the Sphinx will scourge her, that is appointed to usher in, like some great ceremonial herald, that sad drama of Nemesis,—that vast procession of revelation and retribution which the earth, and the graves of the earth, must finish. Mysterious also is the pomp of ruin with which this revelation of the past descends upon that ancient house of Thebes. Like a shell from modern artillery, it leaves no time for prayer or evasion, but shatters by the same explosion all that stand within its circle of fury. Every member of that devoted household, as if they had been sitting—not around a sacred domestic hearth, but around the crater of some surging volcano—all alike, father and mother, sons and daughters, are wrapt at once in fiery whirlwinds of ruin. And, amidst this general agony of destroying wrath, one central mystery, as a darkness within a darkness, withdraws itself into a secrecy unapproachable by eyesight, or by filial love, or by guesses of the brain—and that is the death of dipus. Did he die? Even that is more than we can say. How dreadful does the sound fall upon the heart of some poor, horror-stricken criminal, pirate or murderer, that has offended by a mere human offence, when, at nightfall, tempted by the sweet spectacle of a peaceful hearth, he creeps stealthily into some village inn, and hopes for one night's respite from his terror, but suddenly feels the touch, and hears the voice, of the stern officer, saying, "Sir, you are wanted." Yet that summons is but too intelligible; it shocks, but it bewilders not; and the utmost of its malice is bounded by the scaffold. "Deep," says the unhappy man, "is the downward path of anguish which I am called to tread; but it has been trodden by others." For dipus there was no such comfort. What language of man or trumpet of angel could decipher the woe of that unfathomable call, when, from the depth of ancient woods, a voice that drew like gravitation, that sucked in like a vortex, far off yet near, in some distant world yet close at hand, cried, "Hark, dipus! King dipus! come hither! thou art wanted!" Wanted! for what? Was it for death? was it for judgment? was it for some wilderness of pariah eternities? No man ever knew. Chasms opened in the earth; dark gigantic arms stretched out to receive the king; clouds and vapor settled over the penal abyss; and of him only, though the neighborhood of his disappearance was known, no trace or visible record survived— neither bones, nor grave, nor dust, nor epitaph.

Did the Sphinx follow with her cruel eye this fatal tissue of calamity to its shadowy crisis at Colonus? As the billows closed over her head, did she perhaps attempt to sting with her dying words? Did she say, "I, the daughter of mystery, am called; I am wanted. But, amidst the uproar of the sea, and the clangor of sea-birds, high over all I hear another though a distant summons. I can hear that thou, dipus, the son of mystery, art called from afar: thou also wilt be wanted." Did the wicked Sphinx labor in vain, amidst her parting convulsions, to breathe this freezing whisper into the heart of him that had overthrown her?

Who can say? Both of these enemies were pariah mysteries, and may have faced each other again with blazing malice in some pariah world. But all things in this dreadful story ought to be harmonized. Already in itself it is an ennobling and an idealizing of the riddle, that it is made a double riddle; that it contains an exoteric sense obvious to all the world, but also an esoteric sense—now suggested conjecturally after thousands of years—possibly unknown to the Sphinx, and certainly unknown to dipus; that this second riddle is hid within the first; that the one riddle is the secret commentary upon the other; and that the earliest is the hieroglyphic of the last. Thus far as regards the riddle itself; and, as regards dipus in particular, it exalts the mystery around him, that in reading this riddle, and in tracing the vicissitudes from infancy to old age, attached to the general destiny of his race, unconsciously he was tracing the dreadful vicissitudes attached specially and separately to his own.

THE TEMPLARS' DIALOGUES

DIALOGUES

ORIGINAL ADVERTISEMENT, IN APRIL, 1824

I have resolved to fling my analysis of Mr. Ricardo's system into the form of Dialogues. A few words will suffice to determine the principles of criticism which can fairly be applied to such a form of composition on such a subject. It cannot reasonably be expected that dialogues on Political Economy should pretend to the appropriate beauty of dialogues as dialogues, by throwing any dramatic interest into the parts sustained by the different speakers, or any characteristic distinctions into their style. Elegance of this sort, if my time had allowed of it, or I had been otherwise capable of producing it, would have been here misplaced. Not that I would say even of Political Economy, in the words commonly applied to such subjects, that "Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta doceri:" for all things have their peculiar beauty and sources of ornament—determined by their ultimate ends, and by the process of the mind in pursuing them. Here, as in the processes of nature and in mathematical demonstrations, the appropriate elegance is derived from the simplicity of the means employed, as expressed in the "Lex Parcimonić" ("Frustra fit per plura, quod fieri fas erat per pauciora"), and other maxims of that sort. This simplicity, however, must be looked for in the order and relation of the thoughts, and in the steps through which they are trained to lead into each other, rather than in any anxious conciseness as to words; which, on the contrary, I have rather sought to avoid in the earlier Dialogues, in order that I might keep those distinctions longer before the reader from which all the rest were to be derived. For he who has fully mastered the doctrine of Value is already a good political economist. Now, if any man should object, that in the following dialogues I have uniformly given the victory to myself, he will make a pleasant logical blunder: for the true logic of the case is this: Not that it is myself to whom I give the victory; but that he to whom I give the victory (let me call him by what name I will) is of necessity myself; since I cannot be supposed to have put triumphant arguments into any speaker's mouth, unless they had previously convinced my own understanding. Finally, let me entreat the reader not to be impatient under the disproportionate length (as he may fancy it) of the opening discussions on Value: even for its own sake, the subject is a matter of curious speculation; but in relation to Political Economy it is all in all; for most of the errors (and, what is much worse than errors, most of the perplexities) prevailing in this science take their rise from this source. Mr. Ricardo is the first writer who has thrown light on the subject; and even he, in the last edition of his book, still found it a "difficult" one (see the Advertisement to the Third Edition). What a Ricardo has found difficult, cannot be adequately discussed in few words; but, if the reader will once thoroughly master this part of the science, all the rest will cost him hardly any effort at all.

* * * * * INTRODUCTORY DIALOGUE (SPEAKERS THROUGHOUT THE DIALOGUES ARE PHĆDRUS, PHILEBUS, AND X. Y. Z.)

Phćdrus. This, Philebus, is my friend X. Y. Z., whom I have long wished to introduce to you; he has some business which calls him into this quarter of the town for the next fortnight; and during that time he has promised to dine with me; and we are to discuss together the modern doctrines of Political Economy; most of which, he tells me, are due to Mr. Ricardo. Or rather, I should say, that I am to become his pupil; for I pretend to no regular knowledge of Political Economy, having picked up what little I possess in a desultory way amongst the writers of the old school; and, out of that little, X. obligingly tells me that three fourths are rotten. I am glad, therefore, that you are in town at this time, and can come and help me to contradict him. Meantime X. has some right to play the tutor amongst us; for he has been a regular student of the science: another of his merits is, that he is a Templar as well as ourselves, and a good deal senior to either of us.

Philebus. And for which of his merits is it that you would have me contradict him?

Phćd. O, no matter for his merits, which doubtless are past all computation, but generally as a point of hospitality. For I am of the same opinion as M——, a very able friend of mine in Liverpool, who looks upon it as criminal to concede anything a man says in the process of a disputation: the nefarious habit of assenting (as he justly says) being the pest of conversation, by causing it to stagnate. On this account he often calls aside the talking men of the party before dinner, and conjures them with a pathetic earnestness not to agree with him in anything he may advance during the evening; and at his own table, when it has happened that strangers were present who indulged too much in the habit of politely assenting to anything which seemed to demand no particular opposition, I have seen him suddenly pause with the air of the worst-used man in the world, and exclaim, "Good heavens! is there to be no end to this? Am I never to be contradicted? I suppose matters will soon come to that pass that my nearest relations will be perfidiously agreeing with me; the very wife of my bosom will refuse to contradict me; and I shall not have a friend left on whom I can depend for the consolations of opposition."

Phil. Well, Phćdrus, if X. Y. Z. is so much devoted as you represent to the doctrines of Mr. Ricardo, I shall perhaps find myself obliged to indulge your wishes in this point more than my own taste in conversation would lead me to desire.

X. And what, may I ask, is the particular ground of your opposition to Mr. Ricardo?

Phćd. I suppose that, like the man who gave his vote against Aristides, because it wearied him to hear any man surnamed the just, Philebus is annoyed by finding that so many people look up to Mr. Ricardo as an oracle.

Phil. No: for the very opposite reason; it is because I hear him generally complained of as obscure, and as ambitiously paradoxical; two faults which I cannot tolerate: and the extracts from his writings which I have seen satisfy me that this judgment is a reasonable one.

Phćd. In addition to which, Philebus, I now recollect something which perhaps weighs with you still more, though you have chosen to suppress it; and that is, that you are a disciple of Mr. Malthus, every part of whose writings, since the year 1816 (I am assured), have had one origin—jealousy of Mr. Ricardo, "quem si non aliqua nocuisset, mortuus esset."

X. No, no, Phćdrus; we must not go so far as that; though undoubtedly it is true that Mr. Malthus has often conducted his opposition in a most vexatious and disingenuous manner.

Phil. How so? In what instance? In what instance?

X. In this, for one. Mr. Malthus, in his "Political Economy" (1820), repeatedly charged Mr. Ricardo with having confounded the two notions of "cost" and "value:" I smile, by the way, when I repeat such a charge, as if it were the office of a Ricardo to confound, or of a Malthus to distinguish: but

"Non usque adeo permiscuit imis Longus summa dies, ut non—si voce Metelli Serventur leges—malint a Cćsare tolli."

[Footnote: For the sake of the unclassical reader, I add a prose translation:—Not to such an extent has the lapse of time confounded things highest with things lowest, as that—if the laws can be saved only by the voice of a Metellus—they would not rather choose to be abolished by a Cćsar.]

Phil. "Imis!" Why, I hope, if Mr. Ricardo may do for the Cćsar of the case, Mr. Malthus is not therefore to be thought the Metellus. "Imis," indeed!

X. As to this, he is: his general merits of good sense and ingenuity we all acknowledge; but for the office of a distinguisher, or any other which demands logic in the first place, it is impossible to conceive any person below him. To go on, however, with my instance:— this objection of Mr. Malthus' about "cost" and "value" was founded purely on a very great blunder of his own—so great, that (as I shall show in its proper place) even Mr. Ricardo did not see the whole extent of his misconception: thus much, however, was plain, that the meaning of Mr. Malthus was, that the new doctrine of value allowed for wages, but did not allow for profits; and thus, according to the Malthusian terminology, expressed the cost but not the value of a thing. What was Mr. Ricardo's answer? In the third edition of his book (p. 46), he told Mr. Malthus that, if the word "cost" were understood in any sense which excluded profits, then he did not assert the thing attributed to him; on the other hand, if it were understood in a sense which included profits, then of course he did assert it; but, then, in that sense Mr. Malthus himself did not deny it. This plain answer was published in 1821. Will it be believed that two years after (namely, in the spring of 1823), Mr. Malthus published a pamphlet, in which he repeats the same objection over and over again, without a hint that it had ever met with a conclusive explanation which it was impossible to misunderstand? Neither must it be alleged that Mr. Malthus might not have seen this third edition; for it is the very edition which he constantly quotes in that pamphlet.

Phćd. What say you to this, my dear Philebus? You seem to be in perplexity.

X. But an instance of far greater disingenuousness is this: Mr. Ricardo, after laying down the general law of value, goes on to state three cases in which that law will be modified; and the extraordinary sagacity with which he has detected and stated these modifications, and the startling consequences to which they lead, have combined to make this one of the most remarkable chapters in his books. Now, it is a fact, gentlemen, that these very restrictions of his own law—so openly stated as restrictions by Mr. Ricardo—are brought forward by Mr. Malthus as so many objections of his own to upset that law. The logic, as usual, is worthy of notice; for it is as if, in a question about the force of any projectile, a man should urge the resistance of the air, not as a limitation of that force, but as a capital objection to it. What I here insist on, however, is its extreme disingenuousness. But this is a subject which it is unpleasant to pursue; and the course of our subject will of itself bring us but too often across the blunders and misstatements of Mr. Malthus. To recur, therefore, to what you objected about Mr. Ricardo—that he was said to be paradoxical and obscure—I presume that you use the word "paradoxical" in the common and improper sense, as denoting what has a specious air of truth and subtlety, but is in fact false; whereas I need not tell you that a paradox is the very opposite of this—meaning in effect what has a specious air of falsehood, though possibly very true; for a paradox, you know, is simply that which contradicts the popular opinion—which in too many cases is the false opinion; and in none more inevitably than in cases as remote from the popular understanding as all questions of severe science. However, use the word in what sense you please, Mr. Ricardo is no ways interested in the charge. Are my doctrines true, are they demonstrable? is the question for him; if not, let them be overthrown; if that is beyond any man's power, what matters it to him that the slumbering intellect of the multitude regards them as strange? As to obscurity, in general it is of two kinds—one arising out of the writer's own perplexity of thought; which is a vicious obscurity; and in this sense the opponents of Mr. Ricardo are the obscurest of all economists. Another kind—