LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
MR. MAURICE AND THE "SATURDAY REVIEW."
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.") Sul,—A late writer in the Saturday Review, in a bitter and impatient attack upon Mr. Maurice on the ground of obscurity and indistinctness, proceeds to bring against him a graver charge,
which I prefer should be stated in the reviewer's own words. He says :—
" Mr. Maurice's writings, on the other hand, afford illustration on illustration of that misapprehension of the import of general language which, as Mr. Mill observes, constitutes mysticism. 'Because,' says 31r Mill, ' we can think and speak of man in general, that is, of all persons, so far as possessing the common attributes of the species, without fasten- ing our thoughts permanently on some one individual person ; therefore man in general was supposed to be, not an aggregate of individual per- sons, but an abstract or universal man, distinct from these."
Now, Sir, how far Mr. Mill's definition of mysticism is correct, or how far, if correct, it might be applied with equal justice to Aristotle himself and his followers, who, in common acceptation, are least of all accounted mystical, I do not propose to consider But as applied to Mr. Maurice, and as expressing Mr. Maurice's teaching, no description, to my mind, can be further from the truth. I do not believe that the reviewer can point out any pas- sage in Mr. Maurice's writings, and they are tolerably numerous, where he has stated that our common humanity, or "man in general," is nothing more than—a genus post mulls—a pure logical abstraction. It seems to me that of all living writers Mr. Maurice is the least amenable to such a charge. It is true that Mr. Maurice believes in a Universal Humanity—a humanity which is not only the type but the perfection of our species—a humanity universal in this sense,—that all men, of all ages, of all ranks, of all climes, find in it the truest image of themselves. But that universal humanity Mr. Maurice has never taught us is a mere abstraction. It is exhibited to us in the person of the Son of God. If this be mysticism, then all our creeds and articles are mystical. Then the cravings of infant prayer are mystical. Then the intensest realism of the heart-stricken and heavy-laden is mystical also. But I will not weary your readers with these observations. Let me refer them at once to a passage in Mr.. Maurice's last book. Speaking of M. Comte, who had taxed theology with teaching the notions objected by the Saturday reviewer to Mr. Maurice, he observes that if the father of Positivism had been guided by the Creed, and not by the popular religious opinions of the day, he would have " read in it of God a. Father who is the Creator of Heaven and Earth," of one who " is. emphatically not a capricious Being," but "who had made Himself known to men through a Son, that Son entering into the nature of men, dying for men, rising for men, exalting His manhood at the right hand of God, being the Head and Judge of men. Here is the Common Humanity of Men." (" Social Morality," p. 428.) On that common humanity does Mr. Maurice base all his concep- tions of humanity, of its duties and of its perfections. Men of this generation may scoff at this teaching, but Plato and Aristotle would have thought otherwise. The exhibition of a perfect. humanity, at once universal and individual, they would have con- sidered not merely as the greatest boon the gods in their mercy and wisdom could have given to man in general, but above all, to philosophers.
I am afraid of trespassing on your space, but there is another taunt thrown out by the Saturday reviewer which has often been repeated by persons who have far less justification than he has for the objection,-1 mean the charge of haziness and indistinctness. in Mr. Maurice's writings. Now, indistinctness may arise from the nature of the subject, which is not susceptible of the sharp, incisive, and logical treatment, so much in vogue at present. To complain that the highest and the most spiritual of all truths are not made at once as clear and comprehensible as the rules of grammar and arithmetic is absurd. So again, indistinctness. may arise from deficient command of expression or haziness of conception. No one will deny Mr. Maurice the possession of a. style at once manly, clear, and expressive. In my own opinion, as a writer of transparent, limpid, forcible English, free from all jerkiness, vulgarity, and extravagance, free also from the dishonesty of bolstering out puny thoughts and feeble sentiments by big words, Mr. Maurice is second to none of his contemporaries. If his thoughts are as hazy as some affirm, how could he have attained to such a thorough command of expression, in which no such indistinctness is traceable? Clearness of expression with confusion of thought is rather a startling paradox. But after all, is not that haziness, of which readers complain, rather in themselves than ire Mr. Maurice? Are not the profound conscientiousness of Mr. Maurice and the loftiness of his mental attitude the real ground of this complaint ? When Mr. Maurice is engaged in illus- trating or enforcing some great truth, he takes a wide sweep. He is not satisfied with viewing it in the narrow limits in which it presents itself too often to the prejudices of his contemporaries. Other men would be satisfied with taking it as it stood, or perhaps with edging round it by the sheer force of intellectual vivacity, contented if they could present it in a new but not a clearer light. Not so Mr. Maurice. His mind is essen- tially inductive and historical. No writer, not Bacon himself, was ever more afraid than he is of mistaking his own conceptions of, the truth for the truth itself. He must trace the history of it "Per damns per ca3des ab ipso
Ducit opes animumque ferro."
Long before he has come to the close of his inquiry his readers have fallen off, unwilling or unable to follow him. In this age of conciseness and rapid results, no doubt many of them would gladly be spared this process. They would be better satisfied if without this rigid and conscientious preparation Mr. Maurice would state his conclusions at once, and save them the trouble of reflexion. They do not see, or do not care to see, that these inquiries are not only the data on which Mr. Maurice's conclusions rest—not only the authorities by which he fortifies himself and guards against his own mistakes and those of others ; but that they are develop- ing the life and order, as it were, of the truth itself, of the law, which he is investigating in the moral world with as much care and observation as a physicist would investigate a law in the material world. Even if the reader fails to master Mr. Maurice's profounder conception of the truth ; even if in the conscientious desire of Mr. Maurice to give all men their due, the reader is sometimes perplexed to determine into which scale his judgment is eventually thrown, he cannot fail of deriving many new thoughts, many striking and original hints from the process itself. For with all his care and conscientiousness in examining and representing the views of others, with all his unbounded gratitude to those from whom he differs most, as if he owed them the greatest intellectual obligations, there is no more original thinker at this day than Mr. Maurice, no one whose thoughts, original as they are, rest on more profound observation, or are more fruitful of thought to other men.
But the difficulty, and perhaps the dissatisfaction, which some men experience in reference to his writings is to be attributed not a little to the attitude of mind assumed by Mr. Maurice. He takes up a mental position very distinct from other men, and apparently, it not really, opposed to them. And this not from any sense of superiority or a love of difference, as might be thought, or a desire of singularity, but, in fact, from a strong feeling of sympathy and an anxiety to do full justice to those from whom he dissents, in most cases, if not in all. For there are certain constitutions of mind with which, wide as his sympathies are, Mr. Maurice cannot sympathize—and hardly attempts it— some to whom, in my opinion, he can scantily do justice. I need not particularize. What I mean will appear in the sequel. With these exceptions, the tendency of Mr. Maurice is not to differ, but to reconcile—not to reconcile opposites by mutual concessions— not by paring a little from this and then a little from that, and so patching up an implicit agreement in which each man is to sacrifice more or less of his convictions. No one hates such a process more than Mr. Maurice, no one would denounce it more vehemently than he. But whilst he would exhort every man to hold firmly to the truth which be believes, and not to sacrifice a tittle of his convictions for any considerations whatever—most of all for a specious unity—he endeavours to discover the true reconciliation of apparent opposites by finding their meeting-point in some higher truth or broader principle. Supposing two mariners were steering. a ship, and one should affirm that this was the right course, according to certain rocks and promontories laid down in the chart, but the other should insist that the chart ought indeed to be followed, but that these were not the rocks and promontories referred to, one of Mr. Maurice's mind would not attempt to settle the difficulty by taking part with one or the other ; but admitting that both were equally interested in the safety of the ship, and equally anxious for right guidance, he would rather say, let us look to the stars, and determine our bearings, and then we shall be better able to adjust this dispute. Now, in general, men are apt to be impatient with such an adviser, to accuse him of being impracticable and singular. They would rather that he should at once give his determination on one aide or the other. Whilst, in fact, it is Mr. Maurice's extreme anxiety for the truth, his dread of seeing it dwarfed or obscured by the passions and prejudices of men, his conviction that the undeviat- ing pursuit of it is the only safe path, and his wish to make this apparent to all, that stir him to take it out of the region of con- troversy, and transplant it into a purer and calmer atmosphere. If, then, it seems to some a little more remote from the practical than it was before, and to others somewhat hazy and indefinite, these feelings are to be attributed more to their own habits of thought than to Mr. Maurice. how it first presented itself to its first exponent ; how it was obscured by misgivings or mistakes ; how it provoked opposition ; how this opposition brought it out into fresh life and vigour at the very time when it seemed most oppressed ; how it floated on from age to age in succession, now apparently lost, now rising above the waves,— You will, doubtless, remember how Bacon—that impersonation for good and for evil of our national thought—discarding the mere empirical man on one side, and the pure theorist on the other, gives the palm to him who rises just enough into generalization to guide his practice, and adheres strictly enough to practice to steady his generalization. He is the perfect man who is con- tinually hovering between the two confines of theory and experi- ence without taking up his permanent abode in either ; least of all in the region of higher generalities,—a fairy soil which Bacon contemplated with a sort of religious horror. In the present state of experimental science the rule may be a sound one. When men have to trust to their own reason, and walk by the dim, reflected light of natural science, Bacon's caution may be needful. Yet no one can shut his eyes to the fact that the greatest discoveries and the most rapid advancement in science have been made not by those who have observed, but by those who have departed from, Bacon's warnings. It is not the men who have followed strictly on the heels of practice, or who have kept their eyes fixed upon particulars, who have solved difficulties, reconciled contradictions, and loosened the shackles of scientific inquiry. It is precisely the man who has absorbed the narrower axioms of science into wider generalizations, not by the sober process of induction, but by the intuition of divination.
Something analogous to this may be traced in the writings of Mr. Maurice. A desire to set free theology from the trammels of theological controversy, to place it in a purer light, to bring it more immediately under the radiance of the highest truths, is apparent in every page. Doctrines which appear unto others as little better than mysteries or pure theological abstractions are in his mind not only the essentials of all true knowledge, but the fertile source of all true holiness in practice. They cannot be laid aside or neglected without introducing irremediable confusion into all the relations of man to God and of man to his fellow-man. So little has the realism of Mr. Maurice anything in common with mediaeval scholasticism.
I should be sorry, Sir, if an impression were to gain ground among the younger men of the day, that the writings of Mr. Maurice are so obscure that they cannot be understood without a greater amount of study and attention than men in general are able to bestow. I should be equally sorry to have it thought that they are little better than scholastic speculations unsuited to the requirements of the age. No two suppositions would be more unjust or more unfounded. I am not one of the " illuminated," to whom the reviewer scoffingly alludes, and I differ from Mr. Maurice on more points than one ; but I cannot listen to such accusations as the reviewer urges, without endeavouring, how- ever feebly, to protest against them.—I am, Sir, &c.,
J. S. BREWER.
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