The Sun.
London, England, 1858-12-22 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Lectures and Addresses on Literitry arid" Social
Topics. By the late Rev. F. W. Robertson,' of
Brighton. Smith and Elder.
This volume contains a collection of the lectures
and addresses delivered by the late Rev. F: Robert-
son, of Brighton, on various occasions, principally
at the Mechanics' Institute of that town. They
are well worthy of an enlarged audience and a more.
enduring form. They evidence a cultivated taste
and extended sympathies. They do credit alike to
the head and the heart of the writer. The preface
gives a brief record of his life and labours, which
is full of interest, and shows how consistently he
practised what he preached. His popularity, and
the success of his ministry among the working inen
whom he addressed, is not surprising. His clear
and correct arguments, his patience and toleration
of opposing opinions, and the eloquence of his ap-
peals, not to their passions or prejudices, but to
that reason and conscience in which he admitted
them to be his equals, were certain of producing
effect where intelligence and good intention met
him. Perhaps the most remarkable feature in these
addresses is the broad and tolerant spirit which per-
vades them. There is a total freedom from narrow-
ness of mind or prejudice, a respect for the Opinions
of others, which is very rare in any sphere, and is,
perhaps unavoidably, especially so in the pulpit.
The principle that each man has a right to his own
judgment and opinion, is consistently maintained
throughout, only it is insisted that he should act
up to those conscientious convictions, honestly and
fearlessly. The habit of admiring and appreciating
excellence in our opponents is another duty strongly
inculcated. Mr. Robertson's was one of those cul.
tivated and comprehensive tastes that can perceive
the merits of the most opposite styles. The follow-
ing passage expresses this strongly :
" Cultivate universality of taste. There is no surer
mark of a half-educated mind than the incapacity of ad-
miring various forms of excellence. Men who cannot
praise Dryden without dispraising Coleridge; nor feel the
stern, earthly truthfulness of Crabbe without disparaging
the wild, ethereal, impalpable music of Shelley; nor exalt
Spenser except by sneering at Tennyson, are precisely the
persons to whom it should in consistency seem strange that
in God's world there is a place for the eagle and the wren,
a separate grace to the swan and the huntating-bird, their
own fragrance to the cedar and the violet. Enlarge your
tastes, that you may enlarge your heart as well as your plea-
sures ; feel all that is beautiful—love all that is good. The
first maxim in religion and in art is—sever yourself from
sectarianism ; pledge yourself to no school ; cut your life
adrift from all party ; be a slave to no maxims ; stand
forth, unfettered and free, servant only to the truth. And
if you say, ' But this will force each of us to stand alone.'
I reply—Yes, grandly alone I untrammelled by the preju-
dices of any, and free to admire the beauty, and love the
goOdness of them all." •
The lecture from which the foregoing passage is
quoted is one of the best in the volume. It is the
second of two lectures on the influence of poetry on
the working classesi in which the elevating and
yet levelling influence of that divine art is
clearly shown ; elevating in its aspirations after all
that is true and noble, it levels the petty distinc-
tions of rank and wealth to the equality of our com-
mon humanity. In alluding to those utilitarian
critics, who ask what is the use of poetry, Mr,
Robertson speaks of its power to bind together the
most unsympathetic classes
"Milton, by all the associations of education and refined
taste, belonged to the royalists and the church ; but he
threw himself, in spite of the vulgarities which repelled
him personally from its worship and left him at last with-
out visible worship, on the side of the conventicle, because
in the days of the Stuarts the cause of the conventicle was
the cause of liberty and truth.
" Dante was a Romanist ; but no slave was he of Popery.
His world-wide conception represents the heathens and the
Christians of all ages as the subjects of one moral govern-
ment, responsible to the laws impressed upon humanity
rather than those written by the Church; and his severe
justice does not scruple to consign a long list of bishops
and popes to the eternal penalty of crimes.
" Or, again, Byron and Shelley—aristocrats both by
birth, yet no minions of a caste, nor champions of heredi-
tary privilege—they were men ; and their power lay in
this, that they were the champions of human rights, as well
as utterers of the passion that is in men. So far as they are
great, they are universal ; so far as they are small or bad,
they are narrow and egotistical. And, as time rolls on,
that which is of self, limited and evil, will become obsolete,
and wither, as the mortal warp and woof shrivelled on the
arm of Halbert Glendinning, when he plunged it into the
sacred flame to grasp the Volume of Truth at the bidding
of the White Lady of Avenel ; and that of their works
which remain unconsumed will be the living flesh of the
humanity that never dies—so much as is true to universal
nature and to fact.
"It is thus that the poets universalise and unite. 'One
touch of nature makes the whole world kin.' And, hence,
Poetry has been silently doing a work for the poorer classes
when they were not aware of it ; for even that Poetry which
does not interest them may be opening the hearts of the
richer classes towards them. Did Burns teach the nobles
no sympathy with the cares, and the loves, and the trials of
the cotter's life ? And when poor Hood wrote the Song
of the Shirt,' so touchingly expressive of the sorrows of an
unknown class, the over-worked neecllewomen, and all Eng-
land thrilled to the appeal—
" 0 men, with sisters dear !
0 men, with mothers and wives !
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives—"
and when, in consequence, plan after plan was tried, and
investigations instituted, and a kindlier interest evoked to
ameliorate their condition, tell us—Had Poetry done no-
thing for the 'Working Classes ?
"Again, Poetry discovers good in men who differ from
us, and so teaches us that we arc one with them. For the
poet belongs to the world rather than to his party; speaks
his party's feelings which are human ; not their watch-
words and formulas, which, being forms of the intellect, are
transitory, often false, always limited. Thus, Romanism
and Puritanism, and their modern feeble descendants, as
dogmatic systems, are forbidding enough. But listen to
Dante, and you will feel that purgatory, false as a dogma,
is true as the symbolism of an everlasting fact of the human
soul. Hear Milton sing, and the heart of Puritanism is re-
cognised as a noble and a manly thing. And, however re-
pelled you may be by the false metaphysics, the pretensions
to infallible interpretations, the cant phrases, and the im-
portant intolerance which characterize the dwarf and
dwindled Puritanism of our own days, out of which all pith
and manhood appear to have departed, who does not feel
to be disposed to be tender to it for Cowper's gentle sake ?
However out of date the effort of the Tractarian may seem
to you, to reproduce the piety of the past through the forms
of the past, instead of striving, like a true prophet, to in-
terpret the aspirations of the present in fbrms which shall
truly represent and foster them, what man is there to whose
heart Keble has not shown hat in Tractarianism, too,
there is a "soul of goodness," a life and a meaning which
mere negations cannot destroy."
Again, speaking of the refining influence of poetry,
especially in the three departments which were the
peculiar sphere of romantic poetry—love, honour,
and war—he overthrows, with a genuine and elo-
quent indignation, the cold and calculating argu-
ments of those 'rho think a secure investment of
capital is the grand object of life. After alluding to
the remark of one whom he calls "a truly great
man," the American Channing, that if armies were
dressed in a hangman's garb, the false glory of
military enthusiasm would be destroyed, he ob-
serves :
" It is wonderful how the generous enthusiasm of Dr.
Charming has led him into such a sophism. Take away
honour, and imagination, and Poetry from war, and it be-
conies carnage. Doubtless. And take away public spirit
and invisible principles from resistance to a tax, and Hamp-
den becomes a noisy demagogue. Take away the grandeur
of his cause, and Washington is a rebel, instead of the
purest of patriots. Take away imagination from love, and
what remains ? Let people treat with scorn the defenders
of its liberties, and invest them with the symbols of degra-
dation, and it will soon have no one to defend it. This is
but a truism.
" But it is a falsity if it implies that the mere change of
symbolic dress, unless the dress truly represented a previous
change of public feeling, Would reverse the feeling with
which the profession of arms is regarded. So long as
people found it impossible to confound warrior with the
hangman, all that a change of garb could do would be to
invest the sign with new dignity. Things mean become
noble by association ; the thistle—the leek—the broom of
the Plants.genets—the garter—and the death's head and
cross bones on the front of the Black Brunswickers, typical
of the stern resolve to avenge their chief—methinks
those symbols did not exactly change the soldier into a
sexton I"
In alluding to the possibility of aFrench invasion,
which was the subject of the day when this lecture
was given, he speaks as follows :
"No one who loves his country,—no one who knows
what is meant by the sack of a town, especially by French
soldiers—can contemplate the possibility of such an event,
without a fervent hope that that day may never come. Nor
does it become us to. boast ; the enthusiasm of the platform
is easy, and costs little; and we may be called upon, before
very long, to show by something more than words, whether
there be steel in our hearts and hands, or not.
"But this much I will dare to say. If a foreign foot be
planted on our sacred soil—if the ring of the rifle of the
Chasseurs do Vincennes be heard upon these shores, ter-
rible as the first reverses might be when discipline could
ho met only by raw enthusiasm—thanks to gentlemen who
have taught us the sublime mysteries of ' capital' in lieu
of the old English superstitions of honour and religion—
they may yet chance to learn that British chivalry did not
breathe her last at Moodkee or Ferozeshah, or Sobraon, or
Goojerat, or Meeanee, or Hyderabad. They may yet be
taught that there is something beyond the raw hysterics of
a transient excitement in the spirit of self-sacrifice which
we have learned front our Master's cross. They may yet
discover that amongst the artisans, and peasants, and
working men of England, there are a thousand thousand
worthy to be brothers of those heroic eleven who sleep be-
neath.the rocks of Trukkee, with the red thread of Honour
round their wrists."
In his Addresses on more business-like subjects,
a clear and practical sense takes the place of poetic
enthusiasm. His remarks on the Early Closing
Movement, and on the Improvement of Labourers'
Cottages, show a thorough knowledge of human
nature and its necessities, and a keen perception of
the many ways in which a good purpose may be
diverted from its original intention. The two
addresses, especially treating of the Mechanics'
Institute he was so anxious to assist, are well wor-
thy of perusal. The first was delivered shortly
after the opening, of the establishment, which was
supported by the working men themselves, and
entirely under their management. The second was
given on the occasion of a fierce controversy among
the members. Some of them were anxious to in-
troduce into the library the works of Tom Paine
and other infidel publications. The others were
equally averse to their introduction. Mr. Robert-
son's address on this occasion is a striking example
of the liberality and justice of his judgment, He