Martin Farquhar Tupper - My Life as an Author

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CHAPTER XLVII.

FLYING.

A lecture which I gave at the Royal Aquarium on September 28, 1883, on
the Art of Human Flight, attracted at the time a good deal of newspaper
notice; my friend Colonel Fred. Burnaby being in the chair, supported by
several other aeronautical notables. From a rough copy by me I have
thought fit to preserve the exordium here, just as spoken.

* * * * *

"'Tis sixty years since,"--as the title-page to Waverley has it,--'tis
sixty years since a little Charterhouse schoolboy of thirteen called on
one Saturday afternoon (his half-holiday) at a shabby office up a court
in Fleet Street, with a few saved-up shillings of pocket-money in his
hand. His object was secretly to bribe a balloon agent to give him a
seat in the basket on the next flight from Vauxhall: however as, either
from prudential humanity or commercial greed, the clerk stated that five
pounds was the fixed price for a place, and as the aforesaid little
gentleman could only produce ten shillings, the negotiation came to
nothing,--and I, who had coveted from my cradle the privilege that a
bird enjoys from his nest, was fortunately refused that juvenile voyage
in the clouds: whereof when I told my excellent mother, her tearful joy
that I had _not_ made the perilous ascent affectionately consoled my
disappointment.

So it is that, as often happens throughout life, and I am a living proof
of it, our Failures prove to be the best Successes: for certainly if my
boyish whim had been granted, and I had thereafter taken habitually to
such aeronautical flights, at once perilous and unsettling, that young
Carthusian would scarcely have stood before you this day as an ancient
Proverbial Philosopher.

However, let that pass: I only acted--as oftentimes I since have longed
to act--on the desire we all feel to have "the wings of a dove, and fly
away and be at rest,"--floating afar from the dross and dust of earth
into the blue expanse of the heavenly ether:--a thing yet to be
accomplished!--or I will confess to be no prophet: in these days of
electricity, concentrated and accumulative after the fashion of M.
Faure, aided perhaps by some lighter gas, some condensed form of tamed
dynamite,--these elevating and motive powers being helped by exquisite
mechanism either as attached to the human form (if the flier be an
athlete) or quickening a vehicle with flapping wings impelled by
electricity, in which he might sit (if said flier is as burdened with
"too solid flesh" as some of us)--these mixed potencies, I say, of
electricity and gas, ought at this time of the day to be so manipulated
by our chemists and mechanicians as to issue--very soon too--in the
grand invention than would supersede every other sort of
locomotion,--human flight.

I once met at Baltimore, and since elsewhere, a clever young American
mathematician and engineer, Henry Middleton by name, who showed me, at
his father's place in South Carolina, parts of a model energised by the
motive-powers of gas and electricity, which he hoped would successfully
solve the problem of flying; but the Patent Office at Washington was
burnt down soon after, and in it I fear was his machine. At all events I
have heard nothing of his project since.

I may mention, too, that I believe I have among my audience this evening
Mr. De Lisle Hay, the author not only of that recent very graphic book
"Brighter Britain," but also of another, more cognate to our present
topic, entitled "Three Hundred Years Hence," now out of print, though
published only three years ago. In this latter work he has a chapter on
"Our Conquest of the Air," and imagines a lighter gas called by him
"lucegene," as also a bird-like human flight very much as I had
conceived it forty-one years ago. He tells me also that the best vehicle
for flying might be an imitation of the sidelong action of a flat fish
in water; but how far he has worked upon this idea I know not. Possibly,
if in the room, he may tell us after I release you.

It is most worthy of notice, that in the almost solitary Biblical
instance of winged angels (see Isaiah vi. 2, and a corresponding passage
in Ezekiel--all other angelic ministers being represented as
etherealised men) these are somewhat like birds in outline, though
having more wings,--with twain covering the head so as to cleave the
air, with twain to cover the feet so as to be a sort of tail or rudder,
while with twain they did fly: even as Blake, and Raffaelle, and some
other painters have depicted them. I mentioned this once to Professor
Owen, our great natural philosopher, in a talk I had with him on human
flight, and he thought such seraphim very remarkable in the light of
analogous comparative anatomy.

Ovid also in a passage before me advocates our imitation of birds if we
would fly bodily: in his "De Icari Casu," he says (with omissions)--

"Naturamque novat: nam ponit in ordine pennas
A minima coeptas, longam breviore sequenti: ...
Sic imitentur aves: geminas libravit in alas
Ipse suum corpus, motaque pependit in aura."

Which, being interpreted, means this,--

"Nature he reproduces, ranging fine
From least to longest feathery plumes aline,
Thus imitating birds, that on the air
With balanced wings are poised in lightness there."

Whilst our noble Laureate in "Locksley Hall" goes in for aerial
machines, "Argosies of magic sails," and "airy navies grappling in the
central blue."

As to that essay of mine published in the first number of Ainsworth's
Magazine, August 1842, long before the Patent Aerial Company started
their projects, and very much noticed at the time,--Mr. Claude Hamilton
ingrafted it in his work on Flying; the Duke of Argyll in a note before
me commends this principle of copying nature as the true one; a Signor
Ignazio of Milan in 1877 adopted almost exactly my Flying Man,--which
was for the lecture enlarged from Cruikshank's etching of my own sketch:
an aerial flapping machine, a sort of flying wheelbarrow, was some
twenty years ago exhibited at Kensington: whilst in the _Daily
Telegraph_ for July 10, 1874, you will find recorded the untimely death
of one M. de Groof, the Flying Man, who unhappily perished at Cremorne
after a successful flight of 5000 feet. All these are on record.

Extract from Proverbial Philosophy (Series iv. p. 375).

_Of Change and Travel._

"All of us have within us the wandering Crusoe spirit;
We come of Norse sea-rovers, and adventurers full of hope:
And man was bade to tame his earth, to rule it and subdue it,--
Whereby our feet-soles tingle at an untrod Alpine peak--
But shall we not fly anon with wings, to shame these creeping paces,
Even as steam hath worked all speed on land and sea before?
Is not this firmament of air part of the human heritage,
Which man must conquer duteously, as first his Maker willed?
There needeth but a lighter gas, well-tutored to our skill,
The springing spirit to some shape of delicate steel and silk,--
A bird-like frame of Daedalus, and gummed Icarian plumes,
Ancient inventions, long forgotten, to be found anew!
When shall the chemist mix aright this rarer lifting essence
To make the lord of earth but equal to his many sparrows?
When will discovery help us to such conquest of the air,
And teach us swifter travel than our creeps by land and water?"

And finally from my "Three Hundred Sonnets" hear Sonnet No. 189--

"_Spirit._"

"Throw me from this tall cliff,--my wings are strong,
The hurricane is raging fierce and high,
My spirit pants, and all in heat I long
To fly right upward to a purer sky,
And spurn the clouds beneath me rolling by;
Lo thus, into the buoyant air I leap
Confident and exulting, at a bound
Swifter than whirlwinds happily to sweep
On fiery wing the reeling world around:
Off with my fetters!--who shall hold me back?
My path lies there,--the lightning's sudden track
O'er the blue concave of the fathomless deep,--
O that I thus could conquer space and time,
Soaring above this world in strength sublime!"

CHAPTER XLVIII.

LUTHER.

I gave a second lecture, one on Luther, at the same place, and on the
like solicitation of Mr. Le Fevre, President of the Balloon Society; the
date being November 9, 1883.

Of this lecture, not to be tedious, I will here give only the
peroration.

"And now, in conclusion, let us answer these reasonable questions: What
has Martin Luther done and suffered that we at this distant interval of
four centuries should reverence his memory with gratitude and
admiration? What was the lifework he was raised up to do, and how did he
do it? and what influence have his labours of old on the times in which
we live?--We must remember that in the sixteenth century priestcraft had
culminated to its rankest height of fraud, cruelty, vice, and
superstition: the lay-folk everywhere were its serfs and victims, not to
mention also numbers of the worthier clerics who hated but could, not
break their bonds. Luther was the solitary champion to head and lead
both the remonstrant layman and the better sort of monk up to the then
well-nigh forlorn hope of combating Antichrist in his stronghold: Luther
broke those chains for ever off the necks of groaning nations,--freeing
to this day from that bitter bondage not alone Germany, Sweden, France,
and England, but the very ends of the earth from America to China:
without the energies of Luther nearly four hundred years ago, and the
living spirit of Luther working in us now, we should be still in our own
persons adding to the Book of Martyrs in the flames of the Inquisition,
still immersed in blankest ignorance, with the Bible everywhere
forbidden, and scientific research condemned, still cringing slaves at
the feet of confessors who fraudulently sell absolution for money, still
both spiritually and politically the mean vassals of an Italian priest
instead of brave freemen under our English Queen. Luther relit the
well-nigh, extinguished lamp of true religion, and it shines for him all
the more gloriously to this hour: Luther refreshed the gospel salt that
had through corruption lost its savour, until now it is more antiseptic
than ever as the cure of evil, more purifying than ever as the quickener
of good: Luther, under God's good grace and providence, has rescued the
conscience and reason of our whole race from the thraldom of
self-elected spiritual despots, who worked upon the superstitious fears
of men as to another-world in order to strengthen their own power in
this: Luther, for the result of his great labours, is more to us now
than ever was the fabulous Hercules of old,--for he has cleansed the
real Augaean stable,--more than any mythical William Tell,--for he has
ensured the boon of everlasting liberty, more to us than a whole army of
so-called heroes in conquest, patriotism, or even local
philanthropy,--for the enemies he fought and vanquished were our
spiritual foes,--the country he opened to us is the heavenly one,--the
good-doing, he inaugurated is wide as the world, and shines an electric
universal threefold light of faith, hope, and charity."

_Luther._

_Written by request, for the four-hundredth anniversary of his
birth._

"Martin Luther! deathless name,
Noblest on the scroll of Fame,
Solitary monk,--that shook
All the world by God's own book;
Antichrist's Davidian foe,
Strong to lay Goliath low,
Thee, in thy four-hundredth year,
Gladly we remember here.

"How, without thy forceful mind,
Now had fared all human kind,--
Curst and scorch'd and chain'd by Rome,
In each heart of hearth and home?
But for thee, and thy grand hour,
German light, and British power,
With Columbia's faith and hope,
All were crush'd beneath the Pope!

"God be thank'd for this bright morn,
When Eisleben's babe was born!
For the pious peasant's son,
Liberty's great fight hath won,--
When at Wittenberg he stood
All alone for God and good,
And his Bible flew unfurl'd,
Flag of freedom to the world!"

The Reverend E. Bullinger set this to excellent music; and it was
translated for Continental use into German, French, Swedish, and
Hungarian in the same metre.

As quite a cognate subject here shall be added my ballad on Wycliffe,
also written by request:--

_Wycliffe._

"Distant beacon on the night
Full five centuries ago,--
Harbinger of Luther's light,
Now four hundred years aglow,--
Priest of Lutterworth we see
All of Luther-worth in thee!

"Lo, the wondrous parallel,--
Both gave Bibles to their land;
While, the rage of Rome to quell,
Princes stood on either hand,
John of Gaunt, and Saxon John,
Cheered each bold confessor on.

"Both are rescuers of souls,
Cleansing those Augaean styes--
Superstition's hiding holes,
Nunneries and monkeries;
Both gave liberty to men,
Bearding lions in their den!

"Wycliffe, Luther! glorious pair,
Great Twin Brethren of mankind;
Conscience was your guide and care,
Purifying heart and mind;
Both before your judges stood,
'Here I stand, for God and good.'

"Each had liv'd a martyr's life,
Still protesting for the faith;
Yet amid that fiery strife,
Each escap'd the martyr's death;
Rescued from the fangs of Rome,
Both died peacefully at home."

CHAPTER XLIX.

FINAL.

A few last words as to sundry life-experiences. Whether we notice it or
not, we are guided and guarded and led on through many changes and
chances to the gates of death in a marvellously predestined manner; if
we pray about everything, we shall see and know that, as Pope says,

"In spite of wrong, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right;"

and the trustful assurance that the highest wisdom and mercy and power
orders all things will give us comfort under whatever circumstances. I
believe in prayer as the universal panacea, philosophically as well as
devoutly; and that "walking with God" is our highest wisdom as well as
our deepest comfort.

* * * * *

Let no man think that a sick-bed is the best place to repent in. When
the brain is clouded by bodily ailment there is neither capacity nor
even will to mend matters; a man is at the best then tired, lazy, and
dull, but if there is pain too all is worse. Listen to one of my old
sonnets, and take its good advice:--

"Delay not, sinner, till the hour of pain
To seek repentance: pain is absolute,
Exacting all the body, all the brain,
Humanity's stern king from head to foot:
How canst thou pray, while fever'd arrows shoot
Through this torn targe,--while every bone doth ache,
And the soared mind raves up and down her cell
Restless, and begging rest for mercy's sake?
Add not to death the bitter fear of hell;
Take pity on thy future self, poor man,
While yet in strength thy timely wisdom can;
Wrestle to-day with sin; and spare that strife
Of meeting all its terrors in the van
Just at the ebbing agony of life."

I have great faith in first impressions of intuitive liking or
disliking. Second thoughts are by no means best always nor even often.
Charity sometimes tries to induce, one to think better of such a person
or such a situation than a first feeling shrinks from,--but it won't do
for long: the man or the place will continue to be distasteful. My
spirit apprehends instinctively the right and the true; and through life
I have relied on intuitions; which some have called a rashness,
recommending colder cautions; but these latter have seldom paid their
way. A country parson was right in his diagnosis of Iscariot's character
as that of "a low mean fellow;" and he judged reasonably that all the
patient kindliness of One who strove to make such His "own familiar
friend" was so much charity almost thrown away, except indeed as to
spiritual improvement of the charitable.

* * * * *

It is right that in a book of self-revelations, like this genuine
autobiography, some special recognition should be made before its close
of gratitude to the Great Giver of all good, and of the spiritual
longings of His penitent. These feelings I prefer to show after the
author's poetic custom in verse. Let the first be a trilogy of
unpublished sonnets lately written on

_What We Shall Be._

I.

"We--all and each--have faculties and powers
Here undeveloped, lying deep within,
Crush'd by the weight of circumstance and sin;
Latent, as germs conceal their hidden flowers,
Till some new clime, with genial suns and showers
Give them the force consummate life to win:
Even so we, poor prisoners of Time,
Victims of others' evil and our own,
Cannot expand in this tempestuous clime,
But full of excellences in us sown,
Must wait that better life, and there, full blown,
In spiritual perfectness sublime
The prizes of our nature we shall gain,
Which now we struggle for in vain--in vain!"

II.

"Who does not feel within him he could be
Anything, everything, of great and good?
That, give him but the chance, he could and would
Soar on the wings of triumph strong and free?
And think not this is vanity, for he,
If one of Glory's heirs, is of the band
'I said that ye are gods!'--on this we stand
Through the eternal ages infinite,
Growing like Christ in hope and love and light
As grafted into Him: there shall we see,
And know as we are known; no hindrance then
Shall bind our wings, or shut our eyes or ears;
Led upward, onward, through ten million years,
We shall expand in spirit,--but still be Men."

III.

"Each hath his specialty; we see in some
Music or painting, eloquence or skill,
With, or without, an effort of the will,
As by spontaneous inspiration come
Ev'n in this mingled crowd of good and ill,
To make us hail a Wonder:--but Elsewhere
Without or let or hindrance we shall use
Forces neglected here, but nurtured there;
Till all the powers of every classic Muse,
Ninefold, may dwell in each--as each may choose:
Since Heaven for creatures must have creature gifts,
Not only love, religion, gratitude,
But also light, and every force that lifts
Man's spirit to the heights of Great and Good."

For a second take my recent open protest against the pestilential
atheism so rife in our midst:--

I.

"My Father! everpresent, everwise, and everkind,--
The Life that pulses at my heart, the Light within my mind,--
My Maker, Guardian, Guide, and God, my never-failing Friend,
Who hitherto hast blest me, and wilt bless me to the end,--
How should I not acknowledge Thee in all my words and ways,
And bring my doubts to Thee in prayer, the prayer that turns to
praise?
How can I cease to trust Thee, who hast guided me so long,
And been from earliest childhood to old age my strength and song?

II.

"My Father! Great Triunity! For Thou art One in Three,
The mystery of mysteries, a threefold joy to me,--
What deep delight to dwell upon the philosophic plan
Of Thy divine self-sacrifice in God becoming man,
And taking on Thyself in Christ the sins and woes of all
Redeemed to higher glory from the ruin of their fall,
As humbled and enlightened and enlivened into love,
By the Pure Spirit of sweet peace, the-heart-indwelling Dove!

III.

"My Father, Abba, Father! For Thou callest me Thy child,
As in Thy holy Jesus and Good Spirit reconciled,--
O Father, in this evil day when atheism is found
Dropping its poison seeds about in all our fallow-ground,
Shall I keep coward silence, and ungenerously forget
The Friend that hitherto hath helped me--and shall help me yet?
Shall unbelief, all unabashed, proclaim that God is Not,--
Nor faith with honest zeal be quick this hideous lie to blot?

IV.

"Ho! Christian soldier,--to the front! and boldly speak aloud
The dear old truths denied by yonder Sadducean crowd,--
That every inch and every instant we are guided well
By Him who made, and loved, and loves us more than tongue can tell;
That, though there be dread mysteries of cruelty and crime,
And marvellous long-suffering patience with these wrongs of time,
Still, wait a little longer, and we soon shall know the cause
For every seeming error in the Ruler's righteous laws!

V.

"A little longer, and our faith and hope and works of love
Shall reap munificent reward in those blest orbs above,
Where He (who being God of old became our brother here)
Shall welcome us and speed us on' from glorious sphere to sphere,
Until before His Father's throne the Spirit with the Son
Shall give to every Christian then the crown his Lord hath won;
And through the ages in all worlds our wondrous ransomed race
Shall bless the Universal King of Providence and Grace!"

For a third, my testimony as to the wonders that surround us: I have
called this poem The Infinities.

I.

"Lift up your eyes to yon star-jewelled sky,
Gaze on that firmament caverned on high,--
Marvellous universe, infinite space,
Studded with suns in fixt order and place,
Each with its system of planets unseen,
Meshed in their orbits by comets between,
Worlds that are vaster than mind may believe,
Whirling more swiftly than thought can conceive,
O ye immensities! Who shall declare
The glory of God in His galaxies there?

II.

"Look too on this poor planet of ours,
Torn by the storms of mysterious powers,
Evil contending with good from its birth,
Wrenching in battle the heartstrings of earth,--
Ah! what infinities circle us here,
Strangeness and wonderment swathing the sphere!
Providence ruleth with care most minute,
Yet is fell cruelty torturing the mute,
Infinite marvels of wrong and of right,
Blessing and blasting each day and each night.

III.

"All things in mystery; riddles unread;
Nothing but dimness of guesses instead;
Only beginning, where none see the end,
Nor where these infinite energies tend;
Saving that chrysalis-creatures are we,
Till we grow wings in that aeon-to-be!
Everything infinite: Nature, and Art,
The schemes of man's mind, and the throbs of his heart;
Infinite cravings for better, and best,
Tempered by infinite longings for rest.

IV.

"Then, as the telescope's miracle drew
Infinite Heaven's vast worlds into view,
So doth the microscope's marvel display
Infinite atomies, wondrous as they!
A mere drop of water, a bubble of air,
Teems with perfections of littleness there;
Infinite wisdom in exquisite works
All but invisible everywhere lurks,
While we confess as in great so in small,
Infinite skill in the Maker of all.

V.

"And there be grander infinities still,
Where, in Emmanuel, good has quench'd ill;
Infinite humbleness, highest and first,
Choosing the doom of the lowest and worst;
Infinite pity, and patience,--how long?
Infinite justice, avenging all wrong,
Infinite purity, wisdom, and skill,
Bettering good through each effort of ill,
Infinite beauty and infinite love,
Shining around and beneath and above!"

And let this simple hymn be the old man's last prayer, bridging over the
long interval of well-nigh fourscore years between cradle and grave with
a child's first piety:--

_Love and Life._

"'My son, give Me thine heart;'
Yes, Abba, Father, yes!
Perfect in goodness as Thou art,
I will not give Thee less.

"But I am dark and dead,
And need Thy grace to live;
Father, on me Thy Spirit shed,
To me that sunshine give!

"Thus only can I say
When Thou dost ask my love,
I will return in earth's poor way
Thy gift from heaven above.

"There is no good in me
But droppeth from on high,
Then quicken me with life from Thee,
That I may never die.

"For if I am a son--
O grace beyond compare!--
A child of God, with Jesus one,
In Him I stand an heir;

"In Him I live and move,
And only so can give
An immortality of love,
To Thee by whom I live.

"Then melt this heart of stone,
And grant the heart of flesh,
That all I am may be Thine own,
Renewed to love afresh."

About the much-vexed question of Eschatology and the final state of the
dead, I have long since grown to the happy doctrine of Eternal
Hope--ultimately for all; perhaps even siding with Burns, who (as the
only logical way of eliminating evil) gives a chance to the "puir Deil:"
albeit the path for some must be through the terrible Gehenna of fire to
purify, and with few stripes or many to satisfy conscience and evoke
character. As for that text in Ecclesiastes about the "tree lying where
it fell," commonly supposed to prove an unchanging state for ever,--it
is obvious to answer that when a tree _is_ cut down, its final course of
usefulness only then _begins_, by being sawn up and converted into
furniture; much as when a human being's work here is finished, he is
taken hence to be utilised elsewhere. Everlasting progress is the law of
our existence, whether here or elsewhere,--no stopping, far less
annihilation. And then the character of our Maker is Love, this Love
having satisfied Justice by self-sacrifice, and nothing is more
reiterated in the Psalms than that "His mercy endureth for ever;" which
cannot be true if bodies and spirits--even of the wicked--are to be
condemned by Him to endless torment. Adequate punishment, and that for
the wretched creature's own improvement, is only in accordance with the
voice of reason, and the voice of inspired wisdom too; for though our
Lord Christ warns against a fearful retribution (involved in the phrase
of "the undying worm and the unquenchable fire," as He was looking over
the wall of Jerusalem into Tophet and the valley of Hinnom where the
offal from the thousands of sacrifices was perpetually rotting and being
burned, so taking his parable from an incident, as usual)--He yet "went
and preached after death to the spirits in prison," probably to those
who were then enduring some such purgatorial punishment. After all, this
sentence of King Solomon as to a fallen tree, so often misapplied, is
not one of the higher forms of inspiration; even St. Paul qualifies his
own sometimes; and there are several disputable texts in Proverbs: and,
if taken literally for exposition, we all must admit that the felling,
of a tree is the immediate precursor to its further life of usefulness.
Let us, then, rationally hope that the dead in Christ will be improved
from good to better and best; and that even those who have failed to
live for Him in this world may by some purifying education in the next
come finally to the happy far-off end of being saved by Him at last.

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