THE USE OF PARADOX.
Pi-l"Paradox Club," to which Mr. Edward Garnett has ust introduced us in an agreeable little book* distin- guished by a good deal of poetical feeling, appears to use the word " paradox " rather in the general sense of unnatural or extravagant, than in its more proper sense of that which administers a kind of slap in the face to conventional opinion, • The Paradox Ciub. By Edward Garnett. London: T. Fiber Unwin.
in order to make those who entertain the conventional opinion better understand not necessarily that they are wrong, but certainly that they have forgotten how very far from plain- sailing it is to be right. The use of paradox is to awaken people to the various unsolved difficulties and evident short- comings in judgments which seem to be conspicuous for their good sense, and which may, indeed, really be as near an approach to good sense as any judgment on the subject which could be embodied in anything like the same number of words, but which conceal half the obstacles in the way of holding the opinion adopted, and foreshorten all that they do not conceal. Thus, it is not a paradox to say, as one of the Paradox Club says, "In apprenticing a boy to the most humdrum business, we can guarantee his future, pro- vided he is fairly dishonest ;" or, as another of the Club says, who maintains the superiority of woman to man, "The time is approaching when man will have the courage to sacrifice himself to his convictions, and refuse to drive a woman to the degradation of marrying her inferior." These are extravagant sayings, but they are not paradoxes. A paradox is a saying which, by its apparently flat contradiction of what is ordinarily taken to be true, forces us to think more deeply of the assump- tions involved in that ordinary thought, as, for instance, the Greek paradox that "the half is often more than the whole." This saying brings vividly before the mind how much better it is to set other people fairly thinking for themselves on a great question, than to think it fully out for them, since in the former case you get their minds into activity, and give them a motive for keeping up that activity after your stimulus is removed ; whereas if you round off the process for them and satisfy them, they probably relapse into in- activity almost as soon as they have followed you to the end. So, too, it was a paradox when Leasing said that if there were held out to him in one hand truth, and in the other the love of truth, and he might choose freely between the two, he would prefer the latter to the former,—a paradox which really out- paradoxes paradox, because it is simply impossible for any one who with all his heart desires the truth, to be willing to rest in the condition of unsatisfied desire, and to forego the attain- ment of what he so profoundly yearns for. But though Lessing's was a paradox which exceeds all legitimate paradoxes, and, so to speak, gives itself the lie in the very moment of utterance, Leasing had, of course, a real meaning in it, and that meaning was that the active love of truth (which, far from being satiated and chloroformed into indifference by the possession of truth, would only be stimulated to propagating the truth found in new fields and to the prosecution of new truth) is a far better thing than torpid and indolent acquiescence in true propositions, which, though it exercises a man's memory, need not stir a single new ripple of life in either his intellect or his heart. Hence, though Lessing's paradox exceeded the bounds of paradox, it answered the purpose of calling attention to the essential characteristic of the love of truth,—that it is not a wish to possess something that we can keep within ourselves, but a wish to be possessed by something greater and nobler than ourselves. In the same way, Cardinal Newman was always fond of legitimate paradox,—though he kept his paradox well within the bounds which Lessing permitted it to pass,—as, for instance, when he said that the first condition for the capacity of true spiritual love was to be capable of tame spiritual hate :— " And wouldst thou reach, rash scholars mine, Love's high unruffled state ?
Awake ! Thy easy dreams resign, First learn thee how to hate ;— Hatred of sin, and zeal, and fear, Lead up the holy hill ; Track them till Charity appear A self-denial still.
Dim is the philosophic flame, By thought severe unfed : Boblc-lore ne'er served when trial came, Nor gifts, when faith was dead."
The paradox there which draws attention to the difference between the higher love and mere kindliness or the wish to make every one more comfortable, asserts that the. former implies all kinds of bitter self-denial, and often the special self- denial of making even those who are dearest very much the reverse of comfortable, and so is a very happy illustration of what a paradox should be. Probably no man has ever been capable of the highest charity to whom that highest charity has not at times been a self-denial, as it must have been to St. Paul, when he first admitted the thought that those whom he had, with a good conscience, been persecuting for their desertion of orthodox Judaism, were perhaps more deeply possessed by the love of God than himself. St. Paul was, indeed, just an instance of what Dr. Newman meant by saying that the power to hate truly what is evil must be involved in the power to love truly what is good, and must, indeed, usually precede the growth of the highest kind of love. There is a power to hate in all the noblest love, as there is a power to love in all the noblest hate, which prevents personal feeling of either kind from degenerating into "respect of persons,"—that is, into a passion which has regard to the person only, and not to the deeper spiritual quality which either dignifies or degrades the person. Thus, nothing shows more completely the deficiency in Shelley's apparently angelic power of love, than his deficiency in the power to hate what is hideous in those whom he supposed himself to love. His treatment of his friend Hogg, for instance, after Hogg's most disgraceful conduct towards his wife, betrays the elf-like character of Shelley's nature, which had not in it the highest capacity of love because it had not in it the highest capacity of hate.
But the freest use of paradox for the purpose of calling attention to the truth which conventional common-sense misses through the automatic character of the habits of mind by which it lives, is to be found in some of the greatest of the inspired writings. Thus, Isaiah is one of the greatest masters of poetical paradox in the literature of the world, as, for example, when he enlarges on the blessings of affliction or the fertility which is engendered in the heart of barren desolation :—" Sing, 0 barren, thou that didst not bear ; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child; for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord." And, again, where has there been a nobler flight of imagination than in the passage in which the prophet calls upon those who have no money to buy and eat, to buy wine and milk "without money and without price "? No other language could have made so startling the contrast between the poverty of the blessings which are bought with human wealth, and the riches of those which are bought with- out it, though not without lavishing freely the treasures of the heart and soul. But the most fruitful use of paradox that was ever made is the use of it made by the Saviour himself in words that have probably pierced deeper than any other words in the Gospel,—" Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone ; but if it die, it brin.geth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." That is paradox, but paradox which opens the deepest meanings of life, instead of paradox which leads astray by the extravagance of false analogies.
The need for paradox is no doubt rooted deep in the very nature of the use we make of language. Just as everything that we do habitually, we come to do automatically, without being in any real sense conscious of what we do, or even of the purposes in the execution of which we first did it, so language is no sooner employed habitually than it comes to be used as a mere algebra,—to the meaning of which we pay no more attention than we pay to the particular sounds that go to make up the ringing of a bell which reminds us that cer- tain daily duties have to be done. And there is no harm in this when the only object of the language is to remind us of the mechanical duties which we have to discharge ; but, unfortunately, there is harm in it when the use to which we ought to turn our words is to remind us of the great realities of life, and when they fail to do so simply from the narcotic influence of habitual use. Then we need awakening anew to the old significance which lay beneath the words which have ceased to exert any magic over us ; and nothing awakens to the true meaning of language like paradox, which, while it appears to contradict the superficial sense attaching to the formulas of our daily life, really points to the hidden depth beneath them and the unseen height above, and restores to us the freshness and the wonder of the thoughts which had shrivelled with our constant manipulation of them till they seemed to have lost their sap. This function of paradox is the same which is ascribed to that divine life itself which makes all things new,—and which the human poet or creator, humbly shares with the creative power of God himself :—
"lie found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round ; He spoke and loosed our hearts in tears, He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease ; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sunlit fields again ; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. Our youth return'd, for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, spirits dried up and closely furled, The freshness of the early world."
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