A Prophecy
John Stuart Mill
From a Review of ``Letters from Palmyra'', in the London and Westminister Review for January, 1838
The time was, when it was thought that the best and most appropriate
office of fictitious narrative was to awaken high aspirations, by the
representation, in interesting circumstances, of characters
conformable indeed to human nature, but whose actions and sentiments
were of a more generous and loftier cast than are ordinarily to be met
with by everybody in every-day life. But, now-a-days, nature and
probability are thought to be violated, if there be shown to the
reader, in the personages with whom he is called upon to sympathize,
characters on a larger scale than himself, or than the persons he is
accustomed to meet at a dinner or a quadrille party. Yet from such
representations, familiar from early youth, have not only the noblest
minds in modern Europe derived much of what made them noble, but even
the commoner spirits what made them understand and respond to
nobleness. And this is education. It would be well if the
more narrow-minded portion, both of the religious and of the
scientific education-mongers, would consider whether the books which
they are banishing from the hands of youth were not instruments of
national education to the full as powerful as the catalogues of
physical facts and theological dogmas which they have
substituted,---as if science and religion were to be taught, not by
imbuing the mind with their spirit, but by cramming the memory with
summaries of their conclusions. Not what a boy or a girl can repeat by
rote, but what they have learnt to love and admire, is what forms
their character. The chivalrous spirit has almost disappeared from
books of education; the popular novels of the day teach nothing but
(what is already too soon learnt from actual life) lessons of
worldliness, with at most the huckstering virtues which conduce to
getting on in the world; and, for the first time perhaps in history,
the youth of both sexes of the educated classes are universally
growing up unromantic. What will come in mature time from such a
youth, the world has not yet had time to see. But the world may rely
upon it, that catechisms, whether Pinnock's or the Church of
England's, will be found a poor substitute for those old romances,
whether of chivalry or of fairy, which, if they did not give a true
picture of actual life, did not give a false one, since they did not
profess to give any, but (what was much better) filled the youthful
imagination with pictures of heroic men, and of what are at least as
much wanted, heroic women. The book before us does this: and greatly
is any book to be valued, which in this age, and in a form suited to
it, does its part towards keeping alive the chivalrous spirit, which
was the best part of the old romances; towards giving to the
aspirations of the young and susceptible a noble direction, and
keeping present to the mind an exalted standard of worth, by placing
before it heroes and heroines worthy of the name.
It is an additional title to praise in this author, that his great
women are imagined in the very contrary spirit to the modern cant,
according to which an heroic woman is supposed to be something
intrinsically different from the best sort of heroic men. It was not
so thought in the days of Artemisia or Zenobia, or in that era of
great statesmen and stateswomen, the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, when the daughters of royal houses were governors of
provinces, and displayed, as such, talents for command equal to any of
their husbands or brothers; and when negotiations which had baffled
the first diplomatists of Francis and of Charles V. were brought to a
successful issue by the wisdom and dexterity of two princesses. The
book before us is, in every line, a virtual protest against the narrow
and degrading doctrine which has grown out of the false refinement of
later times. And it is the author's avowed belief, that one of the
innumerable great purposes of Christianity was to abolish the
distinction between the two characters, by teaching that neither of
them can be really admirable without the qualities supposed to be
distinctive of the other, and by exhibiting, in the person of its
divine Founder, an equally perfect model of both.
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