Spare Hours

There is a sad pleasure, —non ingrata amaritudo, and a sort of meditative tenderness, in contemplating the little life of this “dear youth,” and in letting the mind rest upon these his earnest thoughts; to watch his keen and fearless, but child-like spirit, moving itself aright – going straight onward “along the lines of limitless desires” – throwing himself into the very deepest of the ways of God, and striking out as a strong swimmer striketh out his hands to swim; to see him “mewing his mighty youth, and kindling his undazzled eye at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance:”

“Light intellectual, and full of love,Love of true beauty, therefore full of joy,Joy, every other sweetness far above.”

It is good for every one to look upon such a sight, and as we look, to love. We should all be the better for it; and should desire to be thankful for, and to use aright a gift so good and perfect, coming down as it does from above, from the Father of lights, in whom alone there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

Thus it is, that to each one of us the death of Arthur Hallam – his thoughts and affections – his views of God, of our relations to Him, of duty, of the meaning and worth of this world, and the next, – where he now is, have an individual significance. He is bound up in our bundle of life; we must be the better or the worse of having known what manner of man he was; and in a sense less peculiar, but not less true, each of us may say,

– “The tender grace of a day that is deadWill never come back to me.”– “O for the touch of a vanished hand,And the sound of a voice that is still!”“God gives us love! Something to loveHe lends us; but when love is grownTo ripeness, that on which it throveFalls off, and love is left alone:“This is the curse of time. Alas!In grief we are not all unlearned;Once, through our own doors Death did pass;One went, who never hath returned.“This starRose with us, through a little arcOf heaven, nor having wandered far,Shot on the sudden into dark.“Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace;Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul,While the stars burn, the moons increase,And the great ages onward roll.“Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet,Nothing comes to thee new or strange,Sleep, full of rest from head to feet;Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.”

Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella.– Go in peace, soul beautiful and blessed.

“O man greatly beloved, go thou thy way till the end, for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.” – Daniel.

“Lord, I have viewed this world over, in which thou hast set me; I have tried how this and that thing will fit my spirit, and the design of my creation, and can find nothing on which to rest, for nothing here doth itself rest, but such things as please me for a while, in some degree, vanish and flee as shadows from before me. Lo! I come to Thee – the Eternal Being – the Spring of Life – the Centre of rest – the Stay of the Creation – the Fulness of all things. I join myself to Thee; with Thee I will lead my life, and spend my days, with whom I aim to dwell forever, expecting, when my little time is over, to be taken up ere long into thy eternity.” – John Howe, The Vanity of Man as Mortal.

Necesse est tanquam immaturam mortem ejus defleam: si tamen fas est aut flere, aut omnino mortem vocare, quâ tanti juvenis mortalitas magis finita quam vita est. Vivit enim, vivetque semper, atque etiam latius in memoria hominum et sermone versabitur, postquam ab oculis recessit.

The above notice was published in 1851. On sending to Mr. Hallam a copy of the Review in which it appeared, I expressed my hope that he would not be displeased by what I had done. I received the following kind and beautiful reply: —

“Wilton Crescent, Feb. 1, 1851.

“Dear Sir, – It would be ungrateful in me to feel any displeasure at so glowing an eulogy on my dear eldest son Arthur, though after such a length of time, so unusual, as you have written in the North British Review. I thank you, on the contrary, for the strong language of admiration you have employed, though it may expose me to applications for copies of the Remains, which I have it not in my power to comply with. I was very desirous to have lent you a copy, at your request, but you have succeeded elsewhere.

“You are probably aware that I was prevented from doing this by a great calamity, very similar in its circumstances to that I had to deplore in 1833 – the loss of another son, equal in virtues, hardly inferior in abilities, to him whom you have commemorated. This has been an unspeakable affliction to me, and at my advanced age, seventy-three years, I can have no resource but the hope, in God’s mercy, of a reunion with them both. The resemblance in their characters was striking, and I had often reflected how wonderfully my first loss had been repaired by the substitution, as it might be called, of one so closely representing his brother. I send you a brief Memoir, drawn up by two friends, with very little alteration of my own. – I am, Dear Sir, faithfully yours,

Henry Hallam.“Dr. Brown,“Edinburgh.”

The following extracts, from the Memoir of Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam mentioned above, which has been appended to a reprint of his brother’s Remains (for private circulation), form a fitting close to this memorial of these two brothers, who were “lovely and pleasant in their lives,” and are now by their deaths not divided: —

“But few months have elapsed since the pages of In Memoriam recalled to the minds of many, and impressed on the hearts of all who perused them, the melancholy circumstances attending the sudden and early death of Arthur Henry Hallam, the eldest son of Henry Hallam, Esq. Not many weeks ago the public journals contained a short paragraph announcing the decease, under circumstances equally distressing, and in some points remarkably similar, of Henry Fitzmaurice, Mr. Hallam’s younger and only remaining son. No one of the very many who appreciate the sterling value of Mr. Hallam’s literary labors, and who feel a consequent interest in the character of those who would have sustained the eminence of an honorable name; no one who was affected by the striking and tragic fatality of two such successive bereavements, will deem an apology needed for this short and imperfect Memoir.

“Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, the younger son of Henry Hallam, Esq., was born on the 31st of August 1824; he took his second name from his godfather, the Marquis of Lansdowne… A habit of reserve, which characterized him at all periods of life, but which was compensated in the eyes of even his first companions by a singular sweetness of temper, was produced and fostered by the serious thoughtfulness ensuing upon early familiarity with domestic sorrow.

“‘He was gentle,’ writes one of his earliest and closest school-friends, ‘retiring, thoughtful to pensiveness, affectionate, without envy or jealousy, almost without emulation, impressible, but not wanting in moral firmness. No one was ever more formed for friendship. In all his words and acts he was simple, straightforward, true. He was very religious. Religion had a real effect upon his character, and made him tranquil about great things, though he was so nervous about little things.’

“He was called to the bar in Trinity Term, 1850, and became a member of the Midland Circuit in the summer. Immediately afterwards he joined his family in a tour on the Continent. They had spent the early part of the autumn at Rome, and were returning northwards, when he was attacked by a sudden and severe illness, affecting the vital powers, and accompanied by enfeebled circulation and general prostration of strength. He was able, with difficulty, to reach Siena, where he sank rapidly through exhaustion, and expired on Friday, October 25. It is to be hoped that he did not experience any great or active suffering. He was conscious nearly to the last, and met his early death (of which his presentiments, for several years, had been frequent and very singular) with calmness and fortitude. There is reason to apprehend, from medical examination, that his life would not have been of very long duration, even had this unhappy illness not occurred. But for some years past his health had been apparently much improved; and, secured as it seemed to be by his unintermitted temperance, and by a carefulness in regimen which his early feebleness of constitution had rendered habitual, those to whom he was nearest and dearest had, in great measure, ceased to regard him with anxiety. His remains were brought to England, and he was interred, on December 23d, in Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, by the side of his brother, his sister, and his mother.

“For continuous and sustained thought he had an extraordinary capacity, the bias of his mind being decidedly towards analytical processes; a characteristic which was illustrated at Cambridge by his uniform partiality for analysis, and comparative distaste for the geometrical method, in his mathematical studies. His early proneness to dwell upon the more recondite departments of each science and branch of inquiry has been alluded to above. It is not to be inferred that, as a consequence of this tendency, he blinded himself, at any period of his life, to the necessity and the duty of practical exertion. He was always eager to act as well as speculate; and, in this respect, his character preserved an unbroken consistency and harmony from the epoch when, on commencing his residence at Cambridge, he voluntarily became a teacher in a parish Sunday-school, for the sake of applying his theories of religious education, to the time when, on the point of setting forth on his last fatal journey, he framed a plan of obtaining access, in the ensuing winter, to a large commercial establishment, in the view of familiarizing himself with the actual course and minute detail of mercantile transactions.

“Insensibly and unconsciously he had made himself a large number of friends in the last few years of his life: the painful impression created by his death in the circle in which he habitually moved, and even beyond it, was exceedingly remarkable, both for its depth and extent. For those united with him in a companionship more than ordinarily close, his friendship had taken such a character as to have almost become a necessity of existence. But it was upon his family that he lavished all the wealth of his disposition – affection without stint, gentleness never once at fault, considerateness reaching to self-sacrifice: —

“Di cìo si biasmi il debolo intellettoE’ l’parlar nostro, che non ha valoreDi ritrar tutto cìo che dice amore.H. S. M.F. L.”

EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES

EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES

Πρῶτον χὀρτον, εἶτα στάχυω, εἶτα πλήρη σῖτον ἐν τῷ στάχυϊ.

One of the chief sins of our time is hurry: it is helter-skelter, and devil take the hind-most. Off we go all too swift at starting, and we neither run so fast nor so far as we would have done, had we taken it cannily at first. This is true of a boy as well as of a blood colt. Not only are boys and colts made to do the work and the running of full-grown men and horses, but they are hurried out of themselves and their now, and pushed into the middle of next week where nobody is wanting them, and beyond which they frequently never get.

The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their wholesome, their entire growth, for health is just the development of the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the blade – then the ear – then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear; and thus, as Dr. Temple wisely says, “not to forget wisdom in teaching knowledge.” If the blade be forced, and usurp the capital it inherits; if it be robbed by you its guardian of its birthright, or squandered like a spendthrift, then there is not any ear, much less any corn; if the blade be blasted or dwarfed in our haste and greed for the full shock and its price, we spoil all three. It is not easy to keep this always before one’s mind, that the young “idea” is in a young body, and that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be cared for than what is vainly called accomplishment. We are preparing him to run his race, and accomplish that which is one of his chief ends; but we are too apt to start him off at his full speed, and he either bolts or breaks down – the worst thing for him generally being to win. In this way a child or boy should be regarded much more as a mean than as an end, and his cultivation should have reference to this; his mind, as old Montaigne said, should be forged, as well as – indeed, I would say, rather than – furnished, fed rather than filled, – two not always coincident conditions. Now exercise – the joy of interest, of origination, of activity, of excitement – the play of the faculties, – this is the true life of a boy, not the accumulation of mere words. Words – the coin of thought – unless as the means of buying something else, are just as useless as other coin when it is hoarded; and it is as silly, and in the true sense as much the part and lot of a miser, to amass words for their own sakes, as to keep all your guineas in a stocking and never spend them, but be satisfied with every now and then looking greedily at them and making them chink. Therefore it is that I dislike – as indeed who doesn’t? – the cramming system. The great thing with knowledge and the young is to secure that it shall be their own – that it be not merely external to their inner and real self, but shall go in succum et sanguinem; and therefore it is, that the self-teaching that a baby and a child give themselves remains with them forever – it is of their essence, whereas what is given them ab extra, especially if it be received mechanically, without relish, and without any energizing of the entire nature, remains pitifully useless and wersh. Try, therefore, always to get the resident teacher inside the skin, and who is forever giving his lessons, to help you and be on your side.

Now in children, as we all know, he works chiefly through the senses. The quantity of accurate observation – of induction, and of deduction too (both of a much better quality than most of Mr. Buckle’s); of reasoning from the known to the unknown; of inferring; the nicety of appreciation of the like and the unlike, the common and the rare, the odd and the even; the skill of the rough and the smooth – of form, of appearance, of texture, of weight, of all the minute and deep philosophies of the touch and of the other senses, – the amount of this sort of objective knowledge which every child of eight years has acquired – especially if he can play in the lap of nature and out of doors – and acquired for life, is, if we could only think of it, marvellous beyond any of our mightiest marches of intellect. Now, could we only get the knowledge of the school to go as sweetly and deeply and clearly into the vitals of the mind as this self-teaching has done, and this is the paradisiac way of it, we should make the young mind grow as well as learn, and be in understanding a man as well as in simplicity a child; we should get rid of much of that dreary, sheer endurance of their school-hours – that stolid lending of ears that do not hear – that objectless looking without ever once seeing, and straining their minds without an aim; alternating, it may be, with some feats of dexterity and effort, like a man trying to lift himself in his own arms, or take his head in his teeth, exploits as dangerous, as ungraceful, and as useless, except to glorify the showman and bring wages in, as the feats of an acrobat.

But you will ask, how is all this to be avoided if everybody must know how far the sun is from Georgium Sidus, and how much of phosphorus is in our bones, and of ptyalin and flint in human spittle – besides some 10,000 times 10,000 other things which we must be told and try to remember, and which we cannot prove not to be true, but which I decline to say we know.

But is it necessary that everybody should know everything? Is it not much more to the purpose for every man, when his turn comes, to be able to do something; and I say, that other things being equal, a boy who goes bird-nesting, and makes a collection of eggs, and knows all their colors and spots, going through the excitements and glories of getting them, and observing everything with a keenness, an intensity, an exactness, and a permanency, which only youth and a quick pulse, and fresh blood and spirits combined, can achieve, – a boy who teaches himself natural history in this way, is not only a healthier and happier boy, but is abler in mind and body for entering upon the great game of life, than the pale, nervous, bright-eyed, feverish, “interesting” boy, with a big head and a small bottom and thin legs, who is the “captain,” the miracle of the school; dux for his brief year or two of glory, and, if he live, booby for life. I am, of course, not going in for a complete curriculum of general ignorance; but I am for calling the attention of teachers to drawing out the minds, the energies, the hearts of their pupils through their senses, as well as pouring in through these same apertures the general knowledge of mankind, the capital of the race, into this one small being, who it is to be hoped will contrive to forget much of the mere words he has unhappily learned.

For we may say of our time in all seriousness, what Sydney Smith said in the fulness of his wisdom and his fun, of the pantologic master of Trinity – Science is our forte; omniscience is our foible. There is the seed of a whole treatise, a whole organon in this joke; think over it, and let it simmer in your mind, and you will feel its significance and its power. Now, what is science so called to every 999 men in 1000, but something that the one man tells them he has been told by some one else – who may be one among say 50,000 – is true, but of the truth of which these 999 men (and probably even the teaching thousandth man) can have no direct test, and, accordingly, for the truth or falsehood of which they, by a law of their nature, which rejects what has no savor and is superfluous, don’t care one fig. How much better, how much dearer, and more precious in a double sense, because it has been bought by themselves, – how much nobler is the knowledge which our little friend, young Edward Forbes, “that marvellous boy,” for instance – and what an instance! – is picking up, as he looks into everything he sees, and takes photographs upon his retina – the camera lucida of his mind – which never fade, of every midge that washes its face as a cat does, and preens its wings, every lady-bird that alights on his knee, and folds and unfolds her gauzy pinions under their spotted and glorious lids. How more real is not only this knowledge, but this little knowledger in his entire nature, than the poor being who can maunder amazingly the entire circle of human science at second, or it may be, twentieth hand!

There are some admirable, though cursory remarks on “Ornithology as a Branch of Liberal Education,” by the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, the great Greek scholar, in a pamphlet bearing this title, which he read as a paper before the last meeting of the British Association in Aberdeen. It is not only interesting as a piece of natural history, and a touching coöperation of father and son in the same field – the one on the banks of his own beautiful Dee and among the wilds of the Grampians, the other among the Himalayas and the forests of Cashmere; the son having been enabled, by the knowledge of his native birds got under his father’s eye, when placed in an unknown country to recognize his old feathered friends, and to make new ones and tell their story; it is also valuable as coming from a man of enormous scholarship and knowledge – the most learned physician of his time – who knew Aristotle and Plato, and all those old fellows, as we know Maunder or Lardner – a hard-working country surgeon, who was ready to run at any one’s call – but who did not despise the modern enlightenments of his profession, because they were not in Paulus Agineta; though, at the same time, he did not despise the admirable and industrious Paul because he was not up to the last doctrine of the nucleated cell, or did not read his Hippocrates by the blaze of Paraffine; a man greedy of all knowledge, and welcoming it from all comers, but who, at the end of a long life of toil and thought, gave it as his conviction that one of the best helps to true education, one of the best counteractives to the necessary mischiefs of mere scientific teaching and information, was to be found in getting the young to teach themselves some one of the natural sciences, and singling out ornithology as one of the readiest and most delightful for such a life as his.

I end these intentionally irregular remarks by a story. Some years ago I was in one of the wildest recesses of the Perthshire Highlands. It was in autumn, and the little school supported mainly by the Chief, who dwelt all the year round in the midst of his own people, was to be examined by the minister, whose native tongue, like that of his flock, was Gaelic, and who was as awkward and ineffectual, and sometimes as unconsciously indecorous, in his English, as a Cockney is in his kilt. It was a great occasion: the keen-eyed, firm-limbed, brown-cheeked little fellows were all in a buzz of excitement as we came in, and before the examination began every eye was looking at us strangers as a dog looks at his game, or when seeking it; they knew everything we had on, everything that could be known through their senses. I never felt myself so studied and scrutinized before. If any one could have examined them upon what they thus mastered, Sir Charles Trevelyan and John Mill would have come away astonished, and, I trust, humble. Well then, the work of the day began; the mill was set a-going, and what a change! In an instant their eyes were like the windows of a house with the blinds down; no one was looking out; everything blank; their very features changed – their jaws fell, their cheeks flattened, they drooped and looked ill at ease – stupid, drowsy, sulky – and getting them to speak, or think, or in any way to energize, was like trying to get any one to come to the window at three of a summer morning, when, if they do come, they are half awake, rubbing their eyes and growling. So with my little Celts. They were like an idle and half asleep collie by the fireside, as contrasted with the collie on the hill and in the joy of work; the form of dog and boy are there – he, the self of each, was elsewhere (for I differ from Professor Ferrier in thinking that the dog has the reflex ego, and is a very knowing being.) I noticed that anything they really knew roused them somewhat; what they had merely to transmit or pass along, as if they were a tube through which the master blew the pea of knowledge into our faces, was performed as stolidly as if they were nothing but a tube.

At last the teacher asked where Sheffield was, and was answered; it was then pointed to by the dux, as a dot on a skeleton map. And now came a flourish. “What is Sheffield famous for?” Blank stupor, hopeless vacuity, till he came to a sort of sprouting Dougal Cratur – almost as wee, and as glegg, and as tousy about the head, as my own Kintail terrier, whom I saw at that moment through the open door careering after a hopeless rabbit, with much benefit to his muscles and his wind – who was trembling with keenness. He shouted out something which was liker “cutlery” than anything else, and was received as such amid our rapturous applause. I then ventured to ask the master to ask small and red Dougal what cutlery was; but from the sudden erubescence of his pallid, ill-fed cheek, and the alarming brightness of his eyes, I twigged at once that he didn’t himself know what it meant. So I put the question myself, and was not surprised to find that not one of them, from Dougal up to a young strapping shepherd of eighteen, knew what it was.

I told them that Sheffield was famous for making knives, and scissors, and razors, and that cutlery meant the manufacture of anything that cuts. Presto! and the blinds were all up, and eagerness, and nous, and brains at the window. I happened to have a Wharncliffe, with “Rodgers and Sons, Sheffield,” on the blade. I sent it round, and finally presented it to the enraptured Dougal. Would not each one of those boys, the very boobiest there, know that knife again when they saw it, and be able to pass a creditable competitive examination on all its ins and outs? and wouldn’t they remember “cutlery” for a day or two! Well, the examination over, the minister performed an oration of much ambition and difficulty to himself and to us, upon the general question, and a great many other questions, into which his Gaelic subtilty fitted like the mists into the hollows of Ben-a-Houlich, with, it must be allowed, a somewhat similar tendency to confuse and conceal what was beneath; and he concluded with thanking the Chief, as he well might, for his generous support of “this aixlent CEMETERY of ædication.” Cemetery indeed! The blind leading the blind, with the ancient result; the dead burying their dead.