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Toleration, in that instance, would have been self-murder, and many other examples might be alleged, in which their necessary measures of self-defence have been exaggerated into cruelty, and their most indispensable precautions distorted into persecution. Yet shall we not pretend that they were exempt from the common laws of mortality, or entirely free from all the errors of their age.
Living cheek by jowl with us, there are hundreds and thousands of persons who are ruining their minds by a kind of literary debauch. They endeavour to follow on the footsteps of the specialists; they struggle to learn a little of everything, and they end by knowing nothing. They commit mental suicide: and, although no disgrace attaches to this species of self-murder, yet disgrace is not the only thing we have to fear in the course of our brief pilgrimage. We emerge from eternity, we plunge into eternity; we have but a brief space to poise ourselves in the light ere we drop into the gulf of doom, and our duty is to be miserly over every moment and every faculty that is vouchsafed to us. The essentials of thought and knowledge are contained in a very few books, and the most toilsome drudge who ever preached a sermon, drove a rivet, or swept a floor may become perfectly educated by exercising a wise self-restraint, by resolutely refusing to be guided by the ambitious advice of airy cultured persons, and by mastering a few good books to the last syllable. Mr. Ruskin is one of our greatest masters of English, and his supremacy as a thinker is sufficiently indicated by Mazzini's phrase "Ruskin has the most analytic mind in Europe." No truer word was ever spoken than this last, for, in spite of his dogmatic disposition, Mr. Ruskin does utter the very transcendencies of wisdom. Now this glorious writer of English, this subtlest of thinkers, was rigidly kept to a very few books until he reached manhood. Under the eye of his mother he went six times through the Bible, and learned most of the Book by heart. This in itself was a discipline of the most perfect kind, for the translators of the Bible had command of the English tongue at the time when it was at its noblest. Then Mr. Ruskin read Pope again and again, thus unconsciously acquiring the art of expressing meaning with a complete economy of words. In the evening he heard the Waverley Novels read aloud until he knew the plot, the motive, the ultimate lesson of all those beautiful books. When he was fourteen years old, he read one or two second-rate novels over and over again; and even this was good training, in that it showed him the faults to be avoided. Before his boyhood was over, he read his Byron with minute attention, and once more he was introduced to a master of expression. Byron is a little out of fashion now, alas! and yet what a thinker the man was! His lightning eye pierced to the very heart of things, and his intense grip on the facts of life makes his style seem alive. No wonder that the young Ruskin learned to think daringly under such a master! Now many people fancy that our great critic must be a man of universal knowledge. What do they think of this narrow early training? The use and purport of it all are plain enough to us, for we see that the gentle student's intellect was kept clear of lumber; his thoughts were not battened down under mountains of other men's, and, when he wanted to fix an idea, he was not obliged to grope for it in a rubbish heap of second-hand notions. Of course he read many other authors by slow degrees; but, until his manhood came, his range was restricted. The flawless perfection of his work is due mainly to his mother's sedulous insistence on perfection within strict bounds. Again, and keeping still to authors, Charles Dickens knew very little about books. His keen business-like intellect perceived that the study of life and of the world's forces is worth more than the study of letters, and he also kept himself clear of scholarly lumber. He read Fielding, Smollett, Gibbon, and, in his later life, he was passionately fond of Tennyson's poetry; but his greatest charm as a writer and his success as a social reformer were both gained through his simple power of looking at things for himself without interposing the dimness that falls like a darkening shadow on a mind that is crammed with the conceptions of other folk. Look at the practical men! Nasmyth scarcely read at all; Napoleon always spoke of literary persons as "ideologists;" Stephenson was nineteen before he mastered his Bible; Mahomet was totally uneducated; Gordon was content with the Bible, "Pilgrim's Progress," and Thomas
I heard him one day make the threat, and at once spoke to him on the subject, showing him that it was wicked even to threaten to do so, although he might not intend to commit the act; but much more horrible would it be actually to destroy his life, because he would have to appear in the presence of an offended God without having the possibility of repenting and seeking for forgiveness for one of the greatest crimes a man can commit murder self-murder being of equal magnitude with it.
They repeated their resentments, that while he wandered over the delightful countries of Asia and Greece, he was stifling, by contumacious and deceitful delays, the evidences of his crimes; for it was bruited abroad, that Martina, she who was famous for poisonings, and sent, as I have above related, by Cneius Sentius towards Rome, was suddenly dead at Brundusium; that poison lay concealed in a knot of her hair, but upon her body were found no symptoms of self-murder.
There he sat, unmoved, immoveable a sad and melancholy victim of the worst species of hypochondria that which exhibits as one of its pathognomonic symptoms, the desire, the determination, persevered in through all difficulties, all oppositions, all wiles and schemes, to commit self-murder.
According to Brierre de Boismont, voluntary mutilation or death was very rare among the Chaldeans, the Persians, or the Hebrews, their precepts being different from those mentioned. The Hebrews in particular had an aversion to self-murder, and during a period in their history of 4000 years there were only eight or ten suicides recorded.
In me it has been the fruitful parent of a thousand sins selfishness, hardness of heart, forgetfulness of God. In one of my sons vanity was the cause of rapine, injustice, extravagance, ruin, self-murder. Both my daughters were undone by vanity, thought it only wore the more harmless shape of dress, idleness, and dissipation.
"I know, I feel that every word you have uttered is true, maist true and undeniable as are the sentiments o' this holy book," grasping again the Bible; "but can ye wha, by the command o' books and education, can dive farther into the nature o' the mind than ane like me explain this mystery, that, when my soul is filled wi' the darkness o' sorrow, and my rebellious purpose o' self-murder whispers in my mind treachery and war against God, thae truths ye hae uttered, for they hae occurred to me before, tak flight like guid angels, and leave me to warsle wi' a power that subdues me?
O my Guardian, I thank thee. My burden is departed; my sin of self-murder is atoned." "Benita da Ferreira, are you gone?" No answer. "Benita Clifford, do you hear me?" "I hear you," said the voice of Benita, speaking in English, although Jacob, forgetting, had addressed her in Portuguese. "Where is the gold?" "In my keeping." "Tell me, I command you."
The landlord had sequestrated the stock belonging to her father a circumstance that had plunged him deeper in his despondency and misery, and explained the very altered state in which I had found him. The attorney, a hard man, laughed at the device of threatened self-murder, resorted to for the purpose of exciting his sympathy, and robbing his client's pocket.
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