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Title: The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions

Author: Frances Power Cobbe

Release date: December 12, 2020 [eBook #64021]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed
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produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)









                    THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
                    AND OTHER PLEAS AND DISCUSSIONS


                                   BY

                          FRANCES POWER COBBE

  AUTHOR OF “AN ESSAY ON INTUITIVE MORALS,” “RELIGIOUS DUTY,” “BROKEN
   LIGHTS,” “THE HOPES OF THE HUMAN RACE,” “THE PEAK IN DARIEN,” “THE
              DUTIES OF WOMEN,” “A FAITHLESS WORLD,” ETC.


                                 BOSTON
                   GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET
                                  1888




                               CONTENTS.


            ESSAY                                      PAGE
                  PREFACE                                 v

               I. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE        1

              II. THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS          35

             III. PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM                    69

              IV. THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING               111

               V. TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW               147

              VI. THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE  173




                                PREFACE.


We are all possessed of friends who, when any serious belief or matter
of practical conduct is in question, take up at the outset a thesis of
their own which they press on our acceptance with the best arguments at
their disposal. It is a rarer privilege to enjoy the intercourse of one
who does not invariably start with a ready-made opinion of what may be
true, right, or expedient in the doubtful case on which we wish to
consult him, but who will patiently turn over the matter with us,
suggest and register the various “pros and cons,” refer to admitted
principles and facts, and thus aid us to form a comprehensive judgment
for ourselves rather than induce us to accept his own. The discourse of
the first order of friends is an Argument, a Plea, a Contention; that of
the second, a Discussion.

In the same way, of course, an Essay may be either a Plea or a
Discussion. The author may take the position of Counsel for one side or
other of the case before the reader, or else he may charge as Judge, and
sum up the substance of such arguments as might have been used by two
advocates on the opposite sides. Either style of writing is perfectly
legitimate; and each has its particular fitness and utility.
Misunderstanding and perplexity only occur when the hasty reader
(newspaper critics being signally guilty in this matter) chooses to
assume that an avowedly one-sided Plea is intended for a Judicial
Discussion,[1] or treats a Discussion as a Plea for the side which the
critic dislikes.

In the present little collection of Essays, written at various times and
for various objects, it will be found that the first three belong to the
class which I have described as Pleas, and the last three more or less
to that of Discussions.

I plead that the Scientific Spirit of the Age, while it has given us
many precious things, is, in its present exorbitant development,
depriving us of things more precious still.

I plead that the Education of the Emotions (to be carried on chiefly
through the contagion of good and noble sentiments) is an object of
paramount importance, albeit nearly totally ignored in ordinary systems
of education.

I plead that, in the present disintegration of all religious opinion,
Judaism may yet become a progressive, and cease to be merely a tribal,
faith; and that, if it absorb the moral and spiritual essence of
Christianity, it may solve the great problem of combining a theology
consonant to modern philosophy with a worship hallowed by the sacred
associations of the remotest past.

In the last three Essays, I discuss the relation of Knowledge to
Happiness; I discuss the real—as distinguished from the
conventional—character of our common processes of Thought; and, finally,
I discuss the respective claims of Town and Country Life to be esteemed
most healthy and felicitous for body and mind.

I shall much rejoice if I win my readers to adopt the opinions which I
have advocated in the first half of the book.

I shall remain altogether indifferent as to which of the alternative
views put forth in the concluding Essays may seem to them most
impressive, and only congratulate myself if I shall have succeeded in
setting forth in due light and order the multitudinous points which
together constitute the materials for forming a sound judgment upon
them.

                                                    FRANCES POWER COBBE.

  HENGWRT, DOLGELLY,
        1888.




                                ESSAY I.
                   THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE.


That the present is pre-eminently the Age of Science is a fact equally
recognized by the majority who hail it with triumph and by the minority
who regard it with feelings wherein regret and apprehension have their
place. As in Literature an age of production is ever followed by an age
of criticism, so in the general history of human interests War,
Religion, Art, start in early days and run their swift course, while
Science creeps slowly after them, till at last she passes them on the
way and comes foremost in the race. We still in our time have War; but
it is no longer the conflict of valiant soldiers, but the game of
scientific strategists. We still have Religion; but she no longer claims
earth and heaven as her domain, but meekly goes to church by a path over
which Science has notified, “On Sufferance Only.” We still have Art; but
it is no longer the Art of Fancy, but the Art of the Intellect, wherein
the Beautiful is indefinitely postponed to the technically True, as
Truth is discerned by men who think _qu’il n’y a rien de vrai excepté le
laid_. All our multiform activities, from agriculture down to
dressmaking, are in these days nothing if not “scientific,” and to
thousands of worthy people it is enough to say that Science teaches this
or that, or that the interests of Science require such and such a
sacrifice, to cause them to bow their heads, as pious men of old did at
the message of a Prophet. “It is SCIENCE! Let it do what seemeth it
good.” The claims of the æsthetic faculty, and even of the moral sense,
to speak in arrest of judgment on matters entirely within their own
spheres, are ruled out of court.

By a paradoxical fatality, however, it would appear as if the obsession
of the Scientific Spirit is likely to be a little lightened for us by an
event which might have been expected to rivet the yoke on our necks. The
recently published Life of the most illustrious and most amiable man of
Science of this scientific age has suggested to many readers doubts of
the all-sufficiency of Science to build up not theories, but men. Mr.
Darwin’s admirably candid avowal of the gradual extinction in his mind
of the æsthetic[2] and religious elements has proved startling to a
generation which, even when it is ready to abandon Religion, would be
direfully distressed to lose the pleasures afforded by Art and Nature,
Poetry and Music. Instead of lifting the scientific vocation to the
skies (as was probably anticipated), this epoch-making Biography seems
to have gone far to throw a sort of dam across the stream, and to have
arrested not a few Science-worshippers with the query: “What shall it
profit a man if he discover the origin of species and know exactly how
earth-worms and sun-dews conduct themselves, if all the while he grow
blind to the loveliness of nature, deaf to music, insensible to poetry,
and as unable to lift his soul to the Divine and Eternal as was the
primeval Ape from whom he has descended? Is this all that Science can do
for her devotee? Must he be shorn of the glory of humanity when he is
ordained her Priest? Does he find his loftiest faculties atrophied when
he has become a 	machine for grinding general laws out of large
collections of facts”?[3]

While these reflections are passing through many minds, it may be
permitted to me to review some features of the Scientific Spirit of the
Age. Frankly, I shall do it from an adverse point of view. There were
many years of my life during which I regarded it with profound, though
always distant, admiration. Grown old, I have come to think that many
spirits in the hierarchy are loftier and purer; that the noblest study
of mankind is Man, rather than rock or insect; and that, even at its
best, Knowledge is immeasurably less precious than Goodness and Love.
Whether in these estimates I err or am justified, it would, in any case,
be superfluous for me to add my feeble voice to the glorification of the
Scientific Spirit. Diana of the Ephesians was never proclaimed so
vociferously “Great”; and perhaps, like the worshippers of the elder
goddess, it may be said of those of Science, “The most part know not
wherefore they have come together.” It will suffice if I succeed in
partially exhibiting how much we are in danger of losing by the
Scientific Spirit, while others show us, more or less truly, what we
gain thereby.

In speaking of “Science” in this paper, I must be understood to refer
only to the Physical Sciences, not to the mathematical or metaphysical.
The former (especially the Biological group) have of late years come so
much to the front that the old application of the word to the exact
sciences and to metaphysics and ethics has almost dropped out of popular
use. I also desire to explain at starting that I am not so blind as to
ignore the splendid achievements of modern physical science in its own
realm, nor the benefits which many applications of the Scientific Spirit
have brought in various other directions. It is the intrusiveness and
oppression of the Scientific Spirit in regions where it has no proper
work, and (still more often) its predominance in others where its place
should be wholly subordinate, against which a protest appears to be
needed. A score of causes have contributed in our generation to set
Science up and to pull other things down. The levels need to be
redressed. Time will not permit me to exhibit the results of the
excessive share taken of late years by the Scientific Spirit in many
practical matters wherein experience and common sense were safer guides,
_e.g._, in Agriculture. This side of the question I must leave
untouched, and limit myself to the discussion of the general influence
of the Scientific Spirit in Education, in Art, in Morals, and in
Religion.


Professor Tyndall, in the Preface to his great work on “Heat as a mode
of Motion,” calls Science “the noblest growth of modern times,” and adds
that “as a means of intellectual education its claims are still
disputed, though, once properly organized, greater and more beneficent
revolutions wait its employment here than those which have marked its
application in the material world” (2d ed., p. x). Since the publication
of this book, and indeed since the opening of the Age of Science, the
relative claims of Science and Literature to form the basis of
_intellectual_ instruction have been incessantly debated by men
qualified by experience in tuition (which I cannot claim to be) to form
a judgment on the subject. There has been, however, I think, too little
attention given on either side to the relative _moral_ influences of the
two studies.

In addressing the London Society for the Extension of University
Teaching on March 3 last, Sir James Paget expressed his dissent from
Professor Morley’s opinion (given on a similar occasion last year) that
“Literature was an excellent, if not a better study than Science.” Sir
James maintained, on the contrary, that “_nothing could better advance
human prosperity than Science_,” and he elaborately set forth the
specific benefits of a scientific education as he conceived them, as
follows:—

  There was first the teaching of the power of observing, then the
  teaching of accuracy, then of the difficulty of attaining to a real
  knowledge of the truth, and, lastly, the teaching of the methods by
  which they could pass from that which was proved to the thinking of
  what was probable.[4]

It would, of course, be unjust to hold Science to these definitions, as
if they exhausted her claims as our instructress. It may, however,
fairly be assumed that, in the view of one of the leading men of science
of the day, they are _paramount_. If any much higher results than they
were to be expected from scientific teaching, Sir James would scarcely
have omitted to present them first or last. To what, then, do these four
great lessons of Science amount? They teach—and, I think, teach
only—Observation, Accuracy, Intellectual Caution, and the acquirement of
a Method of advancing to the _thinking of what was probable_,—possibly
the method commonly known as Induction.

I must confess that these “great truths” (as Sir James oddly calls them)
represent to my mind only the culmination of the lower range of human
faculties; or, more strictly speaking, the perfect application to human
concerns of those faculties which are common to man and the lower
animals. A fox may be an “_observer_,” and an exceedingly _accurate_
one—of hen-roosts. He may be deeply sensible of “_the difficulty of
attaining to a real knowledge_”—of traps. Further than this, he may even
“_pass from the proved_”—existence of a pack of hounds in his cover to
“_thinking that it was probable_”—he would shortly be chased. To train a
MAN, it is surely indispensable to develop in him a superior order of
powers from these. His mind must be enriched with the culture of his own
age and country, and of other lands and ages, and fortified by
familiarity with the thoughts of great souls on the topics of loftiest
interest. He must be accustomed to think on subjects above those to
which his observation, or accuracy of description, or caution in
accepting evidence can apply, and on which (it is to be hoped) he will
reach some anchorage of faith more firm than Sir James Paget’s climax of
scientific culture, “_the passing from that which was proved to the
thinking of what was probable_.” He ought to handle the method of
deductive reasoning at least as well as that of induction, and beyond
these (purely intellectual) attainments a human education making claim
to completeness should cultivate the imagination and poetic sentiment;
should “soften manners,” as the _literae humaniores_ proverbially did of
old; should widen the sympathies, dignify the character, inspire
enthusiasm for noble actions, and chivalrous tenderness towards women
and all who need defence; and thus send forth the accomplished student a
_gentleman_ in the true sense of the word. The benefits attributed by
Sir James Paget to Scientific education, and even those with which, in
candor, we may credit it beyond his four “great truths,” fall, I venture
to think, deplorably short of such a standard of culture as this.

The deficiencies of Scientific education do not exhaust the objections
against it. There seem to be positive evils almost inseparable from such
training when carried far with the young. One of the worst is the danger
of the adoption by the student of materialistic views on all subjects.
He need not become a theoretic or speculative Materialist: that is
another risk, which may or may not be successfully eliminated. But he
will almost inevitably fall into practical materialism. Of the two sides
of human life, his scientific training will compel him to think always
in the first place of the lower. The material (or, as our fathers would
have called it, the _carnal_) fact will be uppermost in his mind, and
the spiritual meaning thereof more or less out of sight. He will view
his mother’s tears not as expressions of her sorrow, but as solutions of
muriates and carbonates of soda, and of phosphates of lime; and he will
reflect that they were caused not by his heartlessness, but by cerebral
pressure on her lachrymal glands. When she dies, he will “peep and
botanize” on her grave,—not with the poet’s sense of the
sacrilegiousness of such ill-placed curiosity, but with the serene
conviction of the meritoriousness of accurate observation among the
scientifically interesting “Flora” of a cemetery.

To this class of mind, thoroughly imbued with the Scientific Spirit,
Disease is the most important of facts and the greatest of evils. Sin,
on the other hand, is a thing on which neither microscope nor telescope
nor spectroscope, nor even stethoscope, can afford instruction. Possibly
the student will think it only a spectral illusion; or he will foresee
that it may be explained by and by scientifically, as a form of disease.
There may be discovered _bacilli_ of Hatred, Covetousness, and Lust,
respectively responsible for Murder, Theft, and Adultery. Already
hypocrisy is a recognized form of Hysteria. The state of opinion in
“Erewhon” may be hopefully looked for in England, when the Scientific
Spirit altogether prevails.

Besides its materializing tendency, a Scientific Education involves
other evils, among which may be counted the fostering of a callous and
irreverent spirit. To this I shall return presently. Of course every
tendency of a pursuit, good or bad, affects the young who are engaged in
it much more than the old, whose characters may have been moulded under
quite opposite influences. We must wait for a generation to see the
Scientific Spirit in its full development.

As to the instruction of young men and women in Physiological Science in
particular, I am exonerated from treating the subject by being
privileged to cite the opinions of two of the most eminent and
experienced members of the scholastic profession. I do so with great
thankfulness, believing that it will be a revelation to many parents,
blindly caught by scientific claptrap, to learn that such are the views
of men among the best qualified in England to pronounce judgment on the
subject.

The late lamented Mr. Thring, of Uppingham, wrote to me, Sept. 6, 1886:—

  My writings on Education sufficiently show how strongly I feel on
  the subject of a literary education, or rather how confident I am in
  the judgment that there can be no worthy education which is not
  based on the study of the highest thoughts of the highest men in the
  best shape. As for Science (most of it falsely so called), if a few
  leading minds are excepted, it simply amounts, to the average dull
  worker, to no more than a kind of upper shop work, weighing out and
  labelling and learning alphabetical formulæ,—a superior grocer
  assistant’s work, and has not a single element of higher mental
  training in it. Not to mention that it leaves out all knowledge of
  men and life, and therefore—is eminently fitted for life and its
  struggle! Physiology in its worse sense adds to this a brutalizing
  of the average practitioner, or rather a devilish combination of
  intellect worship and cruelty at the expense of feeling and
  character. For my part, if it were true that Vivisection had
  wonderfully relieved bodily disease for men, if it was at the cost
  of lost spirits, then let the body perish. And it is at the cost of
  lost spirits. I do not say that under no circumstances should an
  experiment take place, but I do say that under no circumstances
  should an experiment take place for teaching purposes. You will see
  how decided my judgments are on this matter.

The Rev. J. E. C. Welldon, Head Master of Harrow, has been good enough
to write to me as follows:—

  I am most willing to let you quote my words, whether what I said
  before or what I say now. You command my full sympathy in the
  crusade which you have so nobly declared against cruelty. I say this
  frankly, although I know that there is some difference between us in
  regard to the practice of Vivisection. But even if it be necessary
  that in some cases, and under strict conditions, vivisectional
  experiments should be made upon animals, I cannot doubt that the use
  of such experiments tends to exercise a demoralizing influence upon
  any person who may be called to make them. I hold, therefore, that
  the educational effect of Vivisection is always injurious. Knowledge
  is dearly purchased at the cost of tenderness, and I cannot believe
  that any morally-minded person could desire to familiarize the young
  with the sight of animal suffering. For my part, I look upon the
  hardness of heart with which some distinguished physiologists have
  met the protest raised against Vivisection as one of many signs that
  materialism means at the last an inversion of the ethical law;
  _i.e._, a preference of knowledge to goodness, of mind to spirit,
  or, in a word, of human things to divine. Surely it is a paradox
  that they who minimize the specific distinction between man and the
  animals should be the least tender in their views of animal
  sufferings, and that Christians who accentuate that distinction
  should be willing to spare animals pain at the cost of enhancing
  their own. I conceive it then to be a primary duty of a modern
  educator, at School or at College, to cultivate in his pupils, by
  all the means in his power, the sympathetic sentiment towards the
  animal world.

To turn to a less painful part of our subject.

Science and Art are constantly coupled together in common parlance and
in grants of public money; but, if ever incompatibility of temper formed
a just ground of divorce, it is surely in their case. When Science—like
Poverty—comes in at the door, Art—like Love—flies out at the window.
They move in different planes, and touch different parts of human
nature. Science appeals to the Intellect, Art to the Emotions; and we
are so constituted that our Intellects and Emotions are like buckets in
a well. When our Intellects are in the ascendant, our Emotions sink out
of sight; when our Emotions rise to the surface, our busy Intellects
subside into quiescence. It is only the idolatry of Science which could
make intelligent men overlook the fact that she and Art resemble two
leashed greyhounds pulling opposite ways, and never running together
unless there be some game (shall we surmise an endowment of public
money?) in view. The synthetic, reverential, sympathizing spirit of Art
is opposed, as the different poles of the magnet, to the analytic,
self-asserting, critical spirit of Science. The artist seeks Beauty;
finds likenesses; discerns the Ideal through the Real. The man of
Science seeks Facts; draws distinctions; strips the Real to the skin and
the bones.

A great light of the Scientific Age has been heard to say that when he
first visited the Vatican he “sat down before Raphael’s Transfiguration
and filled three pages of his note-book with its faults.” It was the
most natural thing in the world for him to do! How should a Physicist
approve of three figures suspended in the air in defiance of the laws of
gravitation? Or what could a Zoölogist say to an angel outrageously
combining in his person the wings exclusively belonging to the Order
_Aves_ with the arms and legs of _Bimana_? Worst of all, what must be
the feelings of a Physiologist confronted with a bas-relief of a Centaur
with two stomachs, or of a Cherub with none?

Poetry is the Art of Arts. If we desire to see what Science can do for
it, let us take a typical piece wherein Fancy revels and plays like an
Ariel with wreaths of lovely tropes,—say Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant,”
for example. We must begin by cutting out all the absurdly unscientific
statements; _e.g._, that the lily of the valley grows pale with passion,
that the hyacinth rings peals of music from its bells, and that the
narcissus gazes at itself in the stream. Then, in lieu of this folly, we
must describe how the garden has been thoroughly drained and
scientifically manured with guano and sewage. After this the flowers may
be mentioned under their proper classes, as monandria and polyandria,
cryptogams and phenogams. Such would be the result of bringing the
Scientific Spirit to bear on Poetry. Introduced into the border realm of
Fiction, it begins by marring with pedantic illustrations the otherwise
artistic work of George Eliot. Pushed further, it furnishes us with
medical novels, wherein the leading incident is a surgeon dissecting his
aunt. Still a step onward, we reach the brute realism of “A Mummer’s
Wife” and “La Joie de Vivre.” The distance between Walter Scott and Zola
measures that between Art and Science in Fiction.

To many readers it may appear that the antagonism of Science to Art may
be condoned in favor of her high claim to be the guide, not to Beauty,
but to Truth. But is it indeed _Truth_, in the sense which we have
hitherto given to that great and sacred word, at which Physical Science
is now aiming? Can we think of Truth merely as a vast heap of Facts,
piled up into an orderly pyramid of a Science, like one of Timur’s heaps
of skulls? To collect a million facts, test them, classify them, raise
by induction generalizations concerning them, and hand them down to the
next generation to add a few thousand more facts and (probably) to
reconstruct the pyramid on a different basis and another plan,—if this
be indeed to arrive at “Truth,” modern Science may boast she has touched
the goal. Yet in other days Truth was deemed something nobler than this.
It was the interests which lay behind and beyond the facts, their
possible bearing on man’s deepest yearnings and sublimest hopes, which
gave dignity and meaning to the humblest researches into rock and plant,
and which glorified such discoveries as Kepler’s till he cried in
rapture, “O God, I think thy thoughts after thee!” and Newton’s, till he
closed the “Principia” (as Parker said of him) by “bursting into the
Infinite and kneeling there.” In our time, however, Science has
repeatedly renounced all pretension to throw light in any direction
beyond the sequence of physical causes and effects; and by doing so she
has, I think, abandoned her claim to be man’s guide to Truth. The Alpine
traveller who engages his guides to scale the summit of the Jungfrau,
and finds them stop to booze in the _Wirthschaft_ at the bottom, would
have no better right to complain than those who fondly expected Science
to bring them to God, and are informed that she now never proceeds above
the Ascidian. So long as all the rivulets of laws traced by Science
flowed freshly onward towards the sea, our souls drank of them with
thankfulness. Now that they lose themselves in the sands, they have
become mere stagnant pools of knowledge.


We now turn to the influence of the Scientific Spirit on Morals.

Respecting the theory of ethics, the physico-Scientific Spirit has
almost necessarily been from the first Utilitarian, not Transcendental.
To Mr. Herbert Spencer the world first owed the suggestion that moral
intuitions are only results of hereditary experiences. “I believe,” he
wrote in 1868 to Mr. Mill, “that the experiences of utility, organized
and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have
been producing corresponding modifications which, by continued
transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of
moral intuition, certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct
which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.”
Mr. Darwin took up the doctrine at this stage, and in his “Descent of
Man” linked on the human conscience to the instincts of the lower
animals, from whence he held it to be derived. Similar instincts, he
taught, would have grown up in any other animal as well endowed as we
are, but those other animals would not necessarily attach their ideas of
right and wrong to the same conduct. “If, for instance, men were reared
under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a
doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a
sacred duty to kill their brothers.” (_Descent of Man_, vol. i. p. 73.)

These two doctrines—that Conscience is only the “capitalized experience
of the human tribe” (as Dr. Martineau has summarized Mr. Spencer) and
that there is no such thing as absolute or immutable Morality, but only
a convenient Rule for each particular class of intelligent animals—have
between them revolutionized theoretic ethics, and deeply imperilled, so
far as they are accepted, the existence of human virtue. It is in vain
that the plea is often entered on the side of faith that, after all,
Darwin only showed _how_ Conscience has been evolved, perhaps by Divine
prearrangement, and that we may allow its old authority all the same. He
has done much more than this. He has destroyed the possibility of
retaining the same reverence for the dictates of conscience. As he
himself asks, “_Would any of us trust in the convictions of a monkey’s
mind?_... The doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind,
which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of _any
value_.” (_Life_, vol. i. p. 316.) Who, indeed, can attach the same
solemn authority to the monitions of the

                  “Stern daughter of the Voice of God”

and to the prejudices of ancestors just emerging from apehood? It was
hard enough heretofore for tempted men to be chaste, sober, honest,
unselfish, while passion was clamoring for indulgence or want pining for
relief. The basis on which their moral efforts rested needed to be in
their minds as firm as the law of the universe itself. What fulcrum will
they find henceforth in the sand-heap of hereditary experiences of
utility?

Thus the Scientific Spirit has sprung a mine under the deepest
foundations of Morality. It may, indeed, be hereafter countermined. I
believe that it will be so, and that it will be demonstrated that many
of our broadest and deepest moral intuitions can have had no such
origin. The universal human expectation of Justice, to which all
literature bears testimony, can never have arisen from such
infinitesimal experience of actual Justice, or rather such large
experience of prevailing injustice, as our ancestors in any period of
history can have known. Nor can “the set of our (modern) brains” against
the destruction of sickly and deformed infants have come to us from the
consolidated experience of past generations, since the “utility” is all
on the side of Spartan infanticide. But for the present, and while
Darwinism is in the ascendant, the influence of the doctrine of
Hereditary Conscience is simply deadly. It is no more possible for a man
who holds such a theory to cherish a great moral ambition than for a
stream to rise above its source. The lofty ideal of Goodness, the hunger
and thirst after righteousness, which have been the mainspring of heroic
and saintly lives, must be exchanged at best for a kindly good nature
and a mild desire to avoid offence. The man of science may be anxious to
abolish vice and crime. They offend his tastes, and distract him from
his pursuits; but he has no longing to enthrone in their place a
positive virtue, demanding his heart and life’s devotion. He is almost
as much disturbed by extreme goodness as by wickedness. Nay, it has been
remarked, by a keen and sensitive observer, that the companionship of a
really great and entirely blameless man of science invariably proved a
“torpedo touch to aspiration.”

An obvious practical result of the present influence of Science on
Morals has been the elevation of Bodily Health into the _summum bonum_,
and the consequent accommodation of the standard of right and wrong to
that new aim. An immense proportion of the arguments employed in
Parliament and elsewhere, when any question touching public health is
under discussion, rest on the unexpressed major premise “that any action
which in the opinion of experts conduces to the bodily health of the
individual or of the community is _ipso facto_ lawful and right.” I
cannot here indicate the conclusions to which this principle leads. Much
that the Christian conscience now holds to be Vice must be transferred
to the category of Virtue; while the medical profession will acquire a
Power of the Keys which it is perhaps even less qualified to use than
the Successors of St. Peter.

Another threatening evil from the side of Science is the growth of a
hard and pitiless temper. From whatsoever cause it arise, it seems
certain that, with some noteworthy exceptions, the Scientific Spirit is
callous. In the mass of its literature, the expressions of sympathy with
civilized or savage, healthy or diseased mankind, or with the races
below us, are few and far between. Men and beasts are, in scientific
language, alike “specimens” (wretched word!); and, if the men be ill or
dying, they become “clinical material.” The light of Science is a “dry”
one. She leaves no glamour, no tender mystery anywhere. Nor has she more
pity than Nature for the weak who fall in the struggle for existence.
There is, indeed, a scientific contempt quite _sui generis_ for the
“poor in spirit,” the simple, the devoutly believing,—in short, for all
the humble and the weak,—which constitutes of the Scientific Spirit of
the Age a kind of Neo-Paganism, the very antithesis of Christianity. I
may add that it is no less the antithesis of Theism, which, while
abandoning the Apocalyptic side of Christianity, holds (perhaps with
added consciousness of its supreme value) to the spiritual part of the
old faith, and would build the Religion of the future on Christ’s
lessons of love to God and Man, of self-sacrifice and self-consecration.

Prior to experience it might have been confidently expected that the
Darwinian doctrine of the descent of Man would have called forth a fresh
burst of sympathy towards all races of men and towards the lower
animals. Every biologist now knows tenfold better reasons than Saint
Francis for calling the birds and beasts “little brothers and sisters.”
But, instead of instilling the tenderness of the Saint of Assisi,
Science has taught her devotees to regard the world as a scene of
universal struggle, wherein the rule must be, “Every one for himself,
and no God for any one.”

Ten years ago an eminent American physician remarked to me: “In my
country the ardor of scientific research is rapidly overriding the
proper benevolent objects of my profession. The cure of disease is
becoming quite a secondary consideration to the achievement of a correct
diagnosis, to be verified by a successful _post mortem_.” How true this
now holds of the state of things in English hospitals, that remarkable
book, “St. Bernard’s,” and its still more important key, “Dying
Scientifically,” have just come in time to testify.[5] No one who has
read these books will deny that the purely Scientific Spirit is (at all
events sometimes) a merciless spirit; and that Dr. Draper’s famous
boast, so often repeated, that “Science has never subjected any one to
physical torture” (Preface to “Conflict,” p. xi), is untrue.

Irreverence appears to be another “note” of the Scientific Spirit.
Literature always holds a certain attitude of conservatism. Its kings
will never be dethroned. But Science is essentially Jacobin. The one
thing certain about a great man of science is that in a few years his
theories and books, like French Constitutions, will be laid on the
shelf. Like coral insects, the scientists of yesterday, who built the
foundations of the science of to-day, are all dead from the moment that
their successors have raised over them another inch of the interminable
reef. The student of Literature, dealing with human life, cannot forget
for a moment the existence of such things as goodness which he must
honor, and wickedness which he must abhor. But Physical Science, dealing
with unmoral Nature, brings no such lessons to her votaries. There is
nothing to revere even in a well-balanced solar system, and nothing to
despise in a microbe. Taking this into consideration, it might have been
foreseen that the Scientific Spirit of the Age would have been deficient
in reverence; and, as a matter of fact, I think it will be conceded that
so it is. It is a spirit to which the terms “imperious” and “arrogant”
may not unfitly be applied, and sometimes we may add “overbearing,” when
a man of science thinks fit to rebuke a theologian for trespassing on
_his_ ground after he has been trampling all over the ground of
theology. Perhaps the difference between the new “bumptious” Spirit of
Science and the old exquisitely modest and reverent tone of Newton and
Herschel, Faraday and Lyell, is only due to the causes which distinguish
everywhere a Church Triumphant from a Church Militant. But, whatever
they may be, it seems clear that it will scarcely be in an age of
Science that the prophecy will be fulfilled that “the meek shall inherit
the earth.”[6]

Among the delicate and beautiful things which Science brushes away from
life, I cannot omit to number a certain modesty which has hitherto
prevailed among educated people. The decline of decency in England,
apparent to every one old enough to recall earlier manners and topics of
conversation, is due in great measure, I think, to the scientific
(medical) spirit. Who would have thought thirty years ago of seeing
young men in public reading-rooms snatching at the _Lancet_ and the
_British Medical Journal_ from layers of what ought to be more
attractive literature, and poring over hideous diagrams and revolting
details of disease and monstrosity? It is perfectly right, no doubt, for
these professional journals to deal plainly with these horrors, and with
the thrice abominable records of “gynæcology.” But, being so, it follows
that it is _not_ proper that they should form the furniture of a
reading-table at which young men and young women sit for general—not
medical—instruction. Nor is it only in the medical journals that
disease-mongering now obtains. The political press has adopted the
practice of reporting the details of illness of every eminent man who
falls into the hands of the doctors, and affords those gentlemen an
opportunity of advertising themselves as his advisers. The last
recollection which the present generation will retain of many an
illustrious statesman, poet, and soldier, will not be that he died like
a hero or a saint, bravely or piously, but that he swallowed such and
such a medicine, and, perhaps, was sick in his stomach. Death-beds are
desecrated that doctors may be puffed and public inquisitiveness
assuaged.

So far does the materialist spirit penetrate into literature that in
criticising books and men the most exaggerated importance is attached by
numberless writers to the physical conditions and “environments” of the
personages with whom they are concerned, till we could almost suppose
that—given his ancestry and circumstances—we could scientifically
construct the Man, with all his gifts and passions. As if, forsooth, a
dozen brothers were alike in character, or even all the kittens in a
litter! It is refreshing to read the brisk _persiflage_ on this kind of
thing in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ for March 1. The writer, reviewing
Mr. Lecky’s books, states that but little of that splendid historian’s
private life has been published, and adds:—

  “Je ne me plains pas de cette sécheresse, je la bénis. C’est un
  plaisir, devenu si rare aujourd’hui, de pouvoir lire un livre sans
  en connaître l’auteur: de juger une œuvre directement et en
  elle-même, sans avoir à étudier ce composé d’organes et de tissus,
  de nerfs et de muscles, d’où elle est sortie: sans la commenter à
  l’aide de la physiologie, de l’ethnographie, et de la climatologie:
  sans mettre en jeu l’atavisme et les diathèses héréditaires!”[7]

Turn we lastly to the influences of the Scientific Spirit on Religion.
It is hardly too much to affirm that the advance of that Spirit has been
to individuals and classes the signal for a subsidence of religious
faith and religious emotion.[8] Judging from Darwin’s experience, as
that of a typical man of science, just as such a one becomes an
embodiment of the Scientific Spirit, this religious sentiment flickers
and expires, like a candle in an airless vault. Speaking of his old
feelings of “wonder, admiration, and devotion” experienced while
standing amid the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, he wrote in later
years, when Science had made him all her own: “_Now_ the grandest scenes
would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It
may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colorblind”
(_Life_, vol. i. p. 311). Nor did the deadening influences stop at his
own soul. As one able reviewer of his “Life” in the _Spectator_ wrote:
“No sane man can deny Darwin’s influence to have been at least
contemporaneous with a general decay of belief in the unseen. Darwin’s
Theism faded from his mind without disturbance, without perplexity,
without pain. These words describe his influence as well as his
experience.”

The causes of the anti-religious tendency of modern science may be
found, I believe: 1st, in the closing up of that “Gate called
Beautiful,” through which many souls have been wont to enter the Temple;
2d, in the diametric opposition of its method to the method of spiritual
inquiry; and, 3d, to the hardness of character frequently produced (as
we have already noted) by scientific pursuits. These three causes, I
think, sufficiently account for the antagonism between the modern
Scientific and the Religious Spirits, quite irrespectively of the
bearings of critical or philosophical researches on the doctrines of
either natural or traditional religion. Had Science inspired her
votaries with religious _sentiment_, they would have broken their way
through the tangle of theological difficulties, and have opened for us a
highway of Faith at once devout and rational. But of all improbable
things to anticipate now in the world is a Scientific Religious
Reformation. Lamennais said there was one thing worse than Atheism;
namely, indifference whether Atheism be true. The Scientific Spirit of
the Age has reached this point. It is contented to be Agnostic, not
Atheistic. It says aloud, “I don’t know.” It mutters to those who
listen, “I don’t care.”

The Scientific Spirit has undoubtedly performed prodigies in the realms
of physical discovery. Its inventions have brought enormous
contributions to the material well-being of man, and it has widened to a
magnificent horizon the intellectual circle of his ideas. Yet
notwithstanding all its splendid achievements, if it only foster our
lower mental faculties while it paralyzes and atrophies the higher; if
Reverence and Sympathy and Modesty dwindle in its shadow; if Art and
Poetry shrink at its touch; if Morality be undermined and perverted by
it; and if Religion perish at its approach as a flower vanishes before
the frost,—then, I think, we must deny the truth of Sir James Paget’s
assertion, that “_nothing can advance human prosperity so much as
science_.” She has given us many precious things; but she takes away
things more precious still.




                               ESSAY II.
                     THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS.


Human Emotions—the most largely effective springs of human conduct—arise
either at first hand on the pressure of their natural stimuli, or at
second hand by the contagion of sympathy with the emotions of other men.
This last source of emotion has not, I conceive, received sufficient
attention in practical systems of education, and to the consideration of
it the present paper will be chiefly devoted.

Every human emotion appears to be transmissible by contagion, and to be
also more often so developed than it is solitarily evolved. For once
that Courage or Terror, Admiration or Contempt, or even Good-will and
Ill-will, spring of themselves in the breast of man, woman, or child,
each is many times _caught_ from another mind possessed of the same
feeling. By a subtle sympathy, not unshared by the lower animals, a
sympathy which sometimes works slowly and imperceptibly and is sometimes
communicated with electric velocity, one man conveys to another, as if
it were a flame, the emotion which burns in his own soul. Thenceforth
the recipient becomes a fresh propagator of the emotion to those with
whom he in his turn comes into physical contact. A few instances may be
named to make clear my meaning.

The most familiar example of the contagiousness of the emotions, as the
reader will instantly recall, is that of Fear, which has often spread
through whole armies with such inexplicable celerity and fatal results
that the ancients were fain to attribute the frenzy to the malevolence
of a god, and called such terrors “Panic.” The disasters which have
occurred during the last few years in so many European and American
theatres and churches afford sad evidence that, though “great Pan is
dead,” our liability to succumb to such waves of fear has not been
diminished by modern civilization. The proof of the special power of the
contagion lies in this: that there is every reason to believe that the
majority of the persons constituting the terror-stricken crowd would,
_if alone_, have met the danger with reasonable composure. There is also
happily, we may remember, such a thing as the contagion of Courage as
well as that of Terror. And many a time and oft in our history the
captain of a sinking ship, the commander of a retreating regiment, has,
by his individual intrepidity, restored the _morale_ of his men. Again,
a remarkable instance of the contagiousness of emotion is afforded by
the Popularity of the men who become in any country the idols of the
hour. The fact is very well known to the organizers of _claques_ and
_réclames_ in theatres, and of ovations in political life, that it is
enough for a small band of friends in an assembly to cheer and clap
hands, to induce hundreds, who had previously little interest in the
work or person praised, to join the hosannas. When a statesman has
succeeded in arousing enthusiasm for himself (possibly by persuading
scores of people and associations that “all his sympathies are with
their”—totally opposite aims), he may then safely disappoint each in
turn and veer round to the opposite point of the political and
theological compass from which he sailed with flowing canvas. His
popularity will not be forfeited or even lessened; for it is a mere
contagion of sentiment, not a rational or critical judgment. Herein lies
the special peril of democracies, that this kind of contagion of
personal enthusiasm rapidly becomes the largest factor in their
politics. From the nature of things, the masses cannot form judgments on
questions of state, referring, perhaps, to countries of which the very
names are unknown to them; and, therefore, they must of necessity choose
Men, not Measures. When we further examine who are the Men so chosen and
why, we arrive at the startling discovery that it is exclusively _by
rhetoric_ that the contagious admiration and sympathy of the masses can
be roused. Not sound statesmanship, not wise patriotism, not
incorruptible fidelity, not dignified consistency, not, in short, any
one quality fitting a man to be a safe or able minister, attracts the
enthusiasm of the multitude, or is even estimated at all by them. The
only gift they can appreciate is that which they themselves would
designate “_the Gift of the Gab_.” The lesson is a grave one for all
free countries. By such popular idolatry of great talkers were all the
old republics of Greece and Magna Graecia brought to destruction; and
the men who by such means acquired a bastard royalty over them so
exercised it as to make the name of “Tyrant” for ever abominable.

As concerns emotions connected with Religion, the contagion of them has
been notorious in all ages, for good or evil, according to the character
of the religion in question. The intoxication of the dances of old
Mænads and the modern Dervishes, the shrieks and self-woundings of the
priests of Baal and Cybele, the frenzied scenes of sacrifice to Moloch
and the Aztec gods, and a hundred other examples will occur to every
reader. Probably those on the largest scale of all recorded in history
were the first Crusades, when “Europe precipitated itself on Asia” in a
delirium of religious enthusiasm caught from Peter the Hermit and
Bernard of Clairvaux. The outbursts of the Anabaptists, the Flagellants
and Prophets of the Cevennes, in Christendom, and of Moslem fanatics
under Prophets and Mahdis (of which we have probably by no means heard
the last), and finally the Revivals of various sects in England and
America, and the triumphs of the Salvation Army, are all instances of
the part played by the contagion of emotion in the religion of the
community at large. I shall speak hereafter of its share in personal
religious experience.

In much smaller matters than religion, and where no explosion reveals
the contagion of sentiments, it is yet often possible to trace the
spread of an emotion, good or bad, from one individual of a family or
village to all the other members or inhabitants. It suffices for some
spiteful boy or idle girl to call a miserable old woman a witch, or to
express hatred of some foreigner or harmless eccentric, to set afloat
prejudices which end in something approaching to persecution of the
victims, who may be thankful they did not live two hundred years ago,
when, instead of being boycotted, they would have been burned. A child
in a school or large household who has the misfortune to be lame or
ugly, or to exhibit any peculiarity physical or mental, may, without any
fault on its side, become obnoxious to the blind dislike of a stupid
servant or jealous step-mother, and then—the contagion spreading and
intensifying as it extends—to the common hatred of the little
community,—a hatred justifying itself by the sullenness or deceptions to
which the poor victim at last is driven. Even domestic animals suffer
from this kind of contagious dislike, and benefit on the other hand by
contagious admiration and fondness.[9] “Give a dog a bad name and hang
him” is true in more senses than one.

We need not pursue this part of the subject further. Every day’s
experience may supply fresh illustrations of the immense influence of
contagion in the development of all human emotions. Nor is it by any
means to be set down as a weakness peculiar to or characteristic of a
feeble mind to be blindly susceptible of such contagion. Even the
strongest wills are bent and warped by the winds of other men’s
passions, persistently blowing in given directions. Original minds,
gifted with what the French call _l’esprit primesautier_, are perhaps,
indeed, affected rather more than less than commonplace people by the
emotions of those around them, because their larger natures are more
open to the sympathetic shock. Like ships with all sails set, they are
caught by every breeze. It is a question of degree how _much_ each man
receives of influence from his neighbors; but (to use the new medical
barbarism) we are never “immune” altogether from the contagion.


We may now approach our proper subject of the Education of the Emotions,
carrying with us the important fact that no means are so efficacious in
promoting good ones as the wise employment of the great agency of
Contagion; and, further, that this contagion works only by exhibiting
the genuine emotion to the person we desire to influence. Only by being
brave can we inspire courage. Only by reverencing holy things can we
communicate veneration. Only by being tender and loving can we move
other hearts to pity and affection.

Let us glance over the variety of circumstances wherein great good might
be effected by systematic attention to the natural laws of the
development of the emotions. We may begin by considering those connected
with the education of the young.

In the first place, parents duly impressed with the importance of the
subject would carefully suppress, or at least conceal, such of their own
emotions as they would regret to see caught up by their children. At
present, numberless sufficiently conscientious fathers and mothers, who
would be horrified at the suggestion of placing books teaching bad
lessons in the hands of their sons and daughters, yet carelessly allow
them to witness (and of course to receive the contagion of) all manner
of angry, envious, cowardly, and scornful emotions, just as they chance
to be called out in themselves. It would be to revolutionize many homes
to induce parents to revise their own sentiments, with a view to
deciding which they should communicate to their children. In one way in
particular, the result of such self-questioning might be startling.
Every good father desires his son to respect his mother, and would be
sorry to teach him only the half of the Fifth Commandment—_in words_.
Yet how do scores of such well-meaning men set about conveying the
sentiment of reverence which they recognize will be invaluable to their
sons? They treat those same mothers, in the presence of those same sons,
with such rudeness, dismiss their opinions with such levity, and perhaps
exhibit such actual contempt for their wishes that it is not in nature
but that the boy will receive a lesson of disrespect. His father’s
feelings, backed up as they are by the disabilities under which the
Constitution places women, can scarcely fail to impress the young mind
with that contempt for women in general, and for his mother in
particular, which is precisely the reverse of chivalry and filial piety.

Almost as important as the contagion of parental emotion is that of the
sentiments of Teachers; yet on this subject nobody seems to think it
needful even to institute inquiries. So far as I can learn, the sole
question asked nowadays when a professor is to be appointed to a Chair
at the Universities is, “Whether he be the man among the candidates who
knows most [or rather who _has the reputation_ of knowing most] of the
subject which he proposes to teach?” This point being ascertained, and
nothing serious alleged against his moral conduct, the fortunate
gentleman receives his appointment as a matter of course. Even electors
who personally detest the notorious opinions of the professor on
religion or politics acquiesce cheerfully in the choice; apparently
satisfied that he will carve out to his students the particular pound of
knowledge he is bound to give them, and not a drop of blood besides. The
same principle, I presume (I have little information on the subject),
prevails in schools generally, as it does in private education. A
professor or governess is engaged to instruct boys or girls, let us say
in Latin, History, or Physiology, and it is assumed that he or she will
act precisely like a teaching machine for that particular subject, and
never step beyond its borders. A little common sense would dissipate
this idle presumption,—supposing it to be really entertained, and that
the mania for cramming sheer knowledge down the throats of the young
does not make their elders wilfully disregardful of the moral poison
which may filter along with it. Every human being, as I have said,
exercises some influence over the emotions of his neighbor; but that of
a Teacher, especially if he be a brilliant one, over his students, often
amounts to a contagion of enthusiasm throughout the class. His
admirations are adored, the objects of his sneers despised, and every
opinion he enunciates is an oracle. And it is these professors and
teachers, forsooth, whose opinions on ethics, theology, and politics it
is not thought worth while to ascertain before installing them in their
Chairs to become the guides of the young men and women who are the hope
of the nation!

It does not require any direct, or even indirect, inculcation of
_opinion_ on the teacher’s part to do mischief. It is the contagion of
his emotions which is to be feared, if those emotions be base or bad.
Let him teach History and betray his enthusiasm for selfish and
sanguinary conquerors, or justify assassins and anarchists, or
jest—Gibbon fashion—at martyrs and heroes, will he not communicate those
base sentiments to his young audience? Or let him teach Science, and
convey to every student’s mind that deification of mere knowledge, that
insolent sense of superiority in the possession of it, that remorseless
determination to pursue it regardless of every moral restraint, which is
too often the “note” of modern scientism, will the instruction he
affords to his students’ brains counterbalance the harm he will do to
their hearts?

And, on the other hand, what a splendid vantage-ground for the
dissemination not merely of knowledge, but of elevated feelings, is that
of a Teacher! Merely in teaching a dead or modern language, a
fine-natured man communicates his own glowing feelings respecting the
masterpieces of national literature which it is his duty to expound.

The last point we need notice as regards the contagion of emotions among
the young is the subject of Companions. Here again, as in the case of
respect for mothers, there is great unanimity in theory. Every one
admits that bad companions are ruinous for boys or girls. But, when it
comes to taking precautions against the herding of innocent and
well-nurtured children with others who have been familiar with vice, I
see little trace of the anxious care and discrimination which ought to
prevail. Nay, in the case of the children of the poor, it seems to me
the law is often wickedly applied to compel good parents to send them,
against their own will and convictions, to sit beside companions who
have come straight to school out of slums of filth, moral and physical.
I have known Americans argue that it is right for children of all
classes to associate together, so that the well-trained may communicate
good ideas to the ill-trained. The reasoning appears to be on a par with
a proposal to send healthy people to sleep in a cholera hospital. But,
while we allow ourselves to be terrified beyond bounds by alarms about
the infection of bodily disease, we take hardly any precautions against
the more dreadful, and quite as real, infection of moral corruption.[10]

The general sentiment of boys and youths in the great public schools and
colleges of England—thanks to the high-minded Masters who have been at
their head—is, on the whole, good and honorable. It may be taken for
granted that a boy from Harrow, Eton, Rugby, Winchester, Westminster, or
Uppingham, and _a fortiori_ a man from Oxford or Cambridge, will despise
lying and cowardice and admire fair play and justice. How grand a
foundation for national character has thus been laid! What a debt do we
owe alike to the Masters and the “Tom Browns” who have communicated the
contagion of such noble emotions! In Continental _lycées_ and academies,
public opinion among the boys is, by all accounts, wofully inferior to
that which is current in our great schools. There has never been an
Arnold in a French Rugby.

As regards girls, their doubly emotional natures make it a matter of
moral life and death that their companions (of whose emotions they are
perfectly certain to experience the contagion) should be pure and
honorable-minded. It is most encouraging to every woman who reads Mrs.
Pfeiffer’s masterly new book, “Women and Work,” to see the rising
generation of girls displaying such splendid abilities and zeal for
instruction, and—as Mrs. Pfeiffer amply proves—without paying for it in
loss of bodily vigor. Fain would I see the “blessed Damozels,” who are
still standing behind the golden bars of noble homes, all flocking to
the new colleges for women, as their brothers do to Christchurch and
Trinity, there to imbibe parallel sentiments of truthfulness and
_pluck_, more precious than Greek, Latin, or mathematics!


Leaving now the subject of the Education of the Emotions of the Young,
by parents, teachers, and companions, I proceed to speak of the general
education of the emotions of the community by public and private
instrumentality,—a wide field, over which we can only glance. What
machinery is disposable to cultivate the better and discourage the lower
emotions, either by the exhibition of the direct natural stimulus to the
former and withdrawal of it in the latter cases, or by the aid of
contagion?

In the grand matter of Legislation I do not know that there is much more
to be done than has already been achieved by the abolition of those
public punishments of criminals—hanging, drawing and quartering,
flogging at the cart’s tail, and the pillory—which must have been
frightfully prolific of cruel passions in the spectators. To have taken
part in such executions, _e.g._ in the old stonings to death, in the
burning of witches and heretics, or in the minor but yet barbarous and
cowardly pelting of the helpless wretches in the pillory, must have been
an apprenticeship worthy of a Red Indian. Even to have been a passive
spectator of a Newgate execution in later years, amid the yelling crowd,
must have been excessively demoralizing, and in fact was at last
recognized by the Legislature to be so, instead of a wholesome warning.
It is a cause for rejoicing that there is an end of this kind of
contagious emotion in England, except in the case of experiments on
animals, of which the Act of 1876 sanctions the exhibition to classes
under special certificates which require the subjects to be fully
anæsthetized. On this point the warning of the late lamented Professor
Rolleston ought, I think, to have sufficed. He told the Royal
Commission: “The sight of a living, bleeding, and quivering organism
most undoubtedly does act in a particular way upon what Dr. Carpenter
calls the emotiono-motor nature in us.... When men are massed together,
the emotiono-motor nature is more responsive, it becomes more sensitive
to impression than it does at other times, and that of course bears very
greatly on the question of interference with vivisections before masses”
(_Minutes_, 1287[11]). The time will come when it will be looked upon as
a monstrous inconsistency that the spectacle of the execution of
murderers should be shut off from the _adult population on account of
its recognized ill effects in fostering contagious cruelty_, and, at the
same time, as many as nineteen certificates should be issued in one year
by the Home Office, specially authorizing the mutilation of harmless
animals _before classes of young men and women_.

Majestic public functions, coronations, thanksgivings, state entries
into great cities, and funerals of distinguished men afford admirable
machinery for the communication of noble emotions through the masses. It
was worth the cost and trouble of last year’s Jubilee ten times over to
have sent through so many brains and hearts the thrill of sympathy which
followed the Queen to the old throne of her fathers, while the kings of
the earth stood around her as witnesses that she had kept the oath to
her people, sworn there fifty years before. For one day England and all
her vast colonies beat with one heart, and the contagion of loyal
emotion, love, reverence, pride, and pity, for woman, empress, mother,
widow, ran round the globe. Sad was it (as many must have remembered)
that he who would have found the true words to give utterance to the
sentiment in the heaving breast of the nation, he whose proud duty it
would have been to welcome the Queen to his own Abbey, was lying on that
day silent beneath its pavement.

Beyond Legislation and Public Functions, the largest influence which
sways the emotions of all educated people is undoubtedly Literature. The
power of Books to awaken the most vivid feelings is a phenomenon at
which savages may well wonder. The magic which enables both the living
and the long departed to move us to the depths of our being by the aid
only of a few marks on sheets of paper is a never-ending miracle. It
were vain to attempt to do any justice to the subject, or show how the
contagion of piety, patriotism, enthusiasm for justice and truth, and
sympathy with other nations and other classes than our own, is borne to
us in the pages of the poets and historians and novelists of the world.
Pitiful it is to think how narrow must be the scope of the emotions of
any man whose breast has never dilated nor his eyes flashed over the
grandeur of the Book of Job, over Dante or Shakspere, and whose heart
has never been warmed and his sympathies extended, backwards through
time and around him in space, by Walter Scott, and Defoe, and Dickens,
and George Eliot. Alas that we must add that Literature can not only
kindle the noblest emotions, but also light up baleful fires, of the
basest and most sensual,—to look for which we have not now even to cross
the Channel! M. Zola has been translated into English.

After Literature I presume that the Stage is the greatest public agency
for the promotion of fine emotions, and it is to the honor of human
nature that it is found (at least in our country) to be most popular
when it fulfils its office best, and calls out sympathy for generous and
heroic actions. When the Roman audience rose _en masse_ to applaud the
line of Terence which first proclaimed the brotherhood of man,—“Homo
sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto,”—the highest mission of the Drama
was fulfilled. Of course no one desires the string of high emotion to be
exclusively or perpetually harped upon; and for my own part I think that
the mere production of the emotion of harmless merriment is one of the
greatest boons of the stage. The contagion of laughter, in a theatre or
out of it, is an altogether wholesome and beneficent thing. How it
unseats black Care from our backs! How it carries away, as on a fresh
spring breeze, a whole swarm of buzzing worries and grievances! How it
warms our hearts for ever after to the people with whom we have once
shared a good honest _fou rire_! “Behold how good and how pleasant a
thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,” and (with all
respect let us add) in hilarity! A good joke partaken with a man is like
the Arab’s salt. Our common emotion of humorous pleasure is a bond
between us which we would not thereafter lightly break.

The education of the emotions of actors and actresses, apart from that
which they afford to the emotions of the public, is a very curious
subject of consideration. Great part of the training of an actor
consists in learning to give the uttermost possible external expression
to those emotions which it is the task of other people to reduce to a
vanishing point. Undoubtedly (as one of the most gifted of the
profession has remarked), the “habit of representing fictitious feeling
tends to produce a superficial sensibility, and an exaggerated mode of
expressing the same.” But it may be questioned whether this extreme be
worse than the opposite, wherein the expression of the emotions is so
effectually repressed that the feelings themselves die out for want of
air and exercise,—a consummation not unknown in the reposeful “caste of
Vere de Vere.”

Besides Literature and the Stage, Music no doubt is a most marvellous
agency for calling out Emotion. It is, in fact, the Art of Emotion. The
musician plays with the strings of the human heart while he touches
those of his instrument. Since Collins wrote his “Ode to the Passions”
and Pope his “Ode on Saint Cecilia’s Day,” there is no need to describe
how every emotion known to man may be brought out by music. Something
may well be hoped for a generation which, rejecting the more trivial and
sensuous music of Italy, finds delight in the exalted play of the
emotions which follows the wands of Bach and Beethoven and Wagner. The
efforts now made to offer music at once cheap and good to as many of the
working classes as can be found to enjoy it is perhaps the most direct
way conceivable of fostering their best emotions.

The Beauty of Nature and of Art are also powerful levers of the higher
emotions, which it becomes us to use for the benefit of our fellows
whenever it is practicable to do so.


But, while these varied engines are at work to stir beneficently the
emotions of the masses, there are on the other hand certain agencies in
full play amongst us which have, I fear, a totally different effect;
which, in fact, can only tend to deaden, if not destroy, the most
precious of emotions, those of family affection. I do not know that the
question has ever been faced: What are the _moral_ effects of our
enormous Hospitals? From the side of the bodily interests of the
patients, they may be wholly advantageous.[12] But as regards the sacred
institutions of the Family, on which society itself is based, I ask
what, except evil, can result from the habitual separation of relatives
the moment that illness makes a claim for tenderness and care?

It is the law of human nature that the sentiment of sympathy should be
drawn forth by personal service to the suffering; and feelings of
gratitude and affection by the receipt of such personal service. In
comparison of these sources of emotion, those which act in times of
prosperity are weak and poor. If we subtract in imagination from our own
affections those which have come to us either through nursing or being
nursed in sickness and danger, the residue will represent all which we
leave within reach of the million. Many of us can remember quarrels
which have been reconciled, unkindnesses atoned for, and bonds of sacred
union in faith and eternal hope linked beside beds of pain when death
seemed standing at the door. These things form some of the highest
educational influences which Providence brings to bear on the human
spirit, and out of them arise the sweetest affections, the warmest
gratitude, the most vivid sense of a common nearness to God and the
Immortal Life.

And of all this the entire working class of the nation is systematically
deprived! Formerly it was only in cases of extreme poverty, where the
crowded lodging was an altogether unfit place to nurse the sufferer,
that recourse was had to the public Hospitals. Now it has become the
invariable practice the moment that illness, even of non-infectious
kind, declares itself, to send straight away to the hospital artisans,
small tradesmen, and farmers from their own comfortable abodes, servants
from the large and airy houses where they have labored faithfully, and
even children from their mothers’ arms. It is not a mere matter of
conjecture that such a custom must do harm and weaken the sense of
family obligation. It is a fact that it has done so already, and is
doing so more every day. Sons and daughters place their blind and
palsied parents in asylums; wives send their husbands in a decline to
Brompton Hospital; and it has become a surprising piece of filial
devotion if a daughter remain at home to take care of a bed-ridden
mother, even when her means fully permit of such sacrifice of time. What
deadly injury is all this to the hearts of men, women, and children!

Of course Hospitals have their important uses. No one denies it. Some
cases of disease and some degrees of poverty require such institutions.
But this does not justify the monstrous over-use of them now in vogue.
Even for the class whose homes are too crowded to admit of nursing being
properly or safely done in them, I cannot but think that small Cottage
Hospitals, where the wife or mother or daughter would be free to perform
her natural duties by the bedside, and where she would be shown how best
to perform them, would be infinitely preferable for every reason, moral
and physical, to our present Palaces of Pain. Excellent also in all ways
will be the plan of Nurses provided for the poor in their own homes by
the Queen’s wise gift of the balance of her Women’s Jubilee Fund. The
secret of the excessive resort to Hospitals is of course the
encouragement to patients given by the medical schools attached to them,
for the sake of obtaining a large supply of “clinical material.”


Lastly, we come to speak of the Education of the Religious Emotions. We
have already referred to the outbursts of contagious enthusiasm in the
Crusades and Revivals. It remains to say a few words respecting the
various sources of religious emotion, at first and second hand.

A fundamental difference between the Catholic and Puritan mind seems to
be that the former seizes on every available means for producing
religious emotion _through the senses_; the latter turns away from such
means with intense mistrust, and limits itself to appeals _through the
mind_. Dark and solemn churches like that at Assisi decorated by Giotto
(which the friar who showed it told me was the “best place in the whole
world for prayer”), gorgeous altars, splendid functions, pictures,
music, incense,—all these are to the Catholic and High Churchman
veritable “means of grace”; _i.e._, they call out in them emotions which
either are religious or they think lead to religion. Long Prayers,
Hymns, Bible-readings, and preachings,—these, on the other hand, are the
Evangelicals’ means of grace, and they produce in them emotions
distinctly religious. We must, I think, treat these differences as
matters of spiritual _taste_, concerning which it is proverbially idle
to dispute. Both have their advantages, and both their great perils: the
Catholic method has the peril of lapping the soul in a fool’s paradise
of fancied piety, which is only sensuous excitement; the Puritan method
has that of creating the hysteria of a Revival. In each case it is the
contagion of _the emotion of a multitude_ which creates the danger.
Solitary religious emotion, either produced by the glory and majesty of
Nature or by lonely prayer and communings with God, can lead to no evil;
nay, is the climax of purest joy vouchsafed to man. Not misguided are
those who enter into their chambers and shut the door “to pray to Him
who sees in secret,” or who go up into the hills and woods

                                            “To seek
              That Being in whose honor shrines are weak,
              Upreared by human hands.”

The converse of the emotions of Awe and Reverence—namely, the tendency
to jest and ridicule—are supposed by some to be dangerous enemies to
religion. I do not believe they are so. I think a genuine sense of humor
and a keen eye for the ludicrous is a most precious protection against
absurdities and excesses. Like Tenderness and Strength, the sense of the
Sublime and of the Ridiculous are complementary to each other, and exist
only in perfection together in the same character. It is the man who
cannot laugh who never weeps.

Finally, we reach the point where the religious emotions, produced
either alone or by contagion, effect the greatest of spiritual miracles:
that “conversion” or revulsion of the soul which ancient India, no less
than Christendom, likened to a New or Second Birth. It would appear
that, when this mysterious change does not take place by the solitary
work of the Divine on the human spirit, it does so by the attractive
power of another human soul, which has itself already undergone the
great transformation. It is the _living_ Saint who conveys spiritual
_life_. He need not be a very great or far advanced soul in the
spiritual realm. Many a simple person with no exceptional gifts has
“turned to the wisdom of the just” the hearts of strong men, whom the
most eloquent and thoughtful of preachers have failed to move by a hair.
But the greater the saint, the greater naturally must be his power. It
was the contagion of Divine Love, caught from him who felt it most of
all the sons of men, which moved the little band in the upper chamber of
Jerusalem—who moved the world.

It is worthy of notice that when a man so powerfully influences another
as to “convert” him in the true sense, _i.e._ to bring him to the higher
spiritual life, it very often happens that at the same time he
“converts” him in the lower sense, to the doctrines of the special
Church to which he himself belongs. The man has received the impulse of
religion from that particular direction. It has come to him colored by
the hues of his friend’s piety, and he accepts it, doctrines and all, as
he finds it. The matter has been one of emotional contagion, not of
critical argument on either side.

It is impossible to form the faintest estimate of the good—the highest
kind of good—which a single devout soul may accomplish in a lifetime by
spreading the holy contagion of the Love of God in widening circles
around it. But just as far as the influence of such men is a cause for
thankfulness, so great would be the calamity of a time, if such should
ever arrive, when there should be a dearth of saints in the world, and
the fire on the altar should die down. A Glacial Period of Religion
would kill many of the sweetest flowers in human nature; and woe to the
land where (as it would seem is almost the present case in France at
this moment) the priceless tradition of Prayer is being lost, or only
maintained in fatal connection with outworn superstitions.


To resume the subject of this paper. We have seen that the Emotions,
which are the chief springs of human conduct, may either be produced by
their natural stimuli or conveyed by contagion from other minds, but
that they can neither be _commanded_ nor _taught_. If we desire to
convey good and noble emotions to our fellow-creatures, the only means
whereby we can effect that end is by filling our own hearts with them
till they overflow into the hearts of others. Here lies the great truth
which the preachers of Altruism persistently overlook. It is better to
_be_ good than to _do_ good. We can benefit our kind in no way so much
as by being ourselves pure and upright and noble-minded. We can never
_teach_ Religion to such purpose as we can _live_ it.

It was my privilege to know a woman who for more than twenty years was
chained by a cruel malady to what Heine called a “mattress grave.”
Little or nothing was it possible for her to do for any one in the way
of ordinary service. Her many schemes of usefulness and beneficence were
all stopped. Yet, merely by attaining to the lofty heights of spiritual
life and knowledge, that suffering woman helped and lifted up the hearts
of all who came around her, and did more real good, and of the highest
kind, than half the preachers and philanthropists in the land. Even now,
when her beautiful soul has been released at last from its earthly cage,
it still lifts many who knew her to the love of God and Duty to remember
what she was, and to the faith in immortality to think what now she must
be, within the golden gates.




                               ESSAY III.
                          PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM.


When the new “Science of Religions” has been further developed, it will
probably be recognized that the character of each is determined, not
only by its own proper dogmas, but by those of the religion which it has
superseded. Men do not, as they often imagine, tear up an old faith by
the roots and plant a new one on the same ground. They only cut across
the old and graft the new on its stem. Thus it comes to pass, for
example, that much of the sap of Roman Paganism runs through the pores
of Latin Christianity, and much of that of Odin worship through those of
Teuton and Scandinavian Protestantism. Still more certainly does the
faith held by an individual man in his earlier years dye his mind with
its peculiar color, so that no subsequent conversion ever wholly
obliterates it, but makes him like a frescoed wall on which yellow has
been painted over blue, leaving as the result—green. The tint of
Anglican piety may be discerned even beneath a pervert Cardinal’s
scarlet robe. A Romish acolyte, transformed into the most brilliant of
sceptical essayists, still boasts that the ecclesiastical set of his
brain enables him “alone in his century” to understand Christ and Saint
Francis.[13] A Jew, baptized and become Prime Minister of England, wrote
novels and made history altogether in the vein of the author of the Book
of Esther. Beneath the wolf’s clothing of the whole pack of modern
Secularists, Agnostics, and Atheists, friction reveals (for the present
generation, at all events) a flock of harmless Christian sheep.

For this reason hasty efforts to fuse religious bodies which happen to
manifest tendencies to doctrinal agreement seem predestined to failure.
Much else besides mere readiness to pronounce similar symbols of faith
is needed to gather men permanently into one temple. Amalgamation
attempted prematurely can only result in accentuating those diversities
of sentiment which have stronger power to dissever than any intellectual
affinities have charms to unite. Ecclesiastical schisms are infinitely
easier to effect than ecclesiastical coalitions.

Nevertheless, the levelling of the fences which have for ages kept men
of different religions apart is, _per se_, a matter for such earnest
rejoicing that we may well exult at any instance of it, independently of
ulterior hopes or projects. Especially must our sympathies with those
who are thus clearing the ground be quickened when the faith to be
dis-immured is an old and venerable one, the nearest of all to our
own,—a faith whereof any important modification must be fraught with
incalculable consequences to the civilized world. The new Reform among
the Jews is emphatically such a movement,—an effort to throw down the
high and jealous walls behind which Judaism has kept itself in
seclusion. The gates of the Ghettos, which for a thousand years shut in
the Jews at night in every city in Europe, were not more rigid obstacles
to social sympathy and intercourse than have been the nation’s own
iron-bound prejudices and customs. But just as these Ghettos themselves,
so long “little provinces of Asia dropped into the map of Europe,” have
been thrown open at last by the growing enlightenment of Christian
States, so the Jewish moral walls of prejudice are being cast down by
the advanced sentiment of cultured Jews.

It is the specialty of the higher religions to unfold continually new
germs of truth, while the lower ones remain barren and become overgrown
with the rank fungi of myth and fable. I do not speak now of the results
of external influences bearing on every creed, and tending to vivify and
fructify it. Such influences have done much, undoubtedly, even for
Christianity itself, which has been stirred by all the agencies of the
Saracen conquests, the classic Renaissance, modern ethics and
metaphysics, modern critical science, and at last in our time by the
extension of the theological horizon over the broad plains of Eastern
sacred literature. I am speaking specially of the prolific power of the
richer creeds to go on, generation after generation, bringing forth
fresh, golden harvests, like the valleys of California. If we look for
an instance of the opposite barrenness, we shall find it in the worn-out
religions of China, ice-bound and arid as the desolate plains and
craters of the moon; the Tae-ping rebellion having been perhaps a
solitary development of heat caused by the impingement on them of the
orb of Christianity. If, on the other hand, we seek for a supreme
instance of fertility, we find it in the religion of Nazareth, which
seems to enjoy perpetual seed-time and perpetual harvest.

The question is one of more than historical interest: Is Judaism
likewise a religion capable of bearing fresh corn and wine and oil for
the nations? We know that both Christianity and Islam are developments
of the Jewish idea,—the Semitic development (Islam) carrying out its
monotheistic doctrine in all its rigidity, but losing somewhat on the
moral and spiritual side; the Aryan development (Christianity)
abandoning the strictly monotheistic doctrine, but carrying far forward
the moral and the spiritual part. But both these Banyan-like branches
have struck root for themselves, and their growth can no longer be
treated as derived from the trunk of Judaism. Our problem is, Can
Judaism further develop itself along its own lines? Or is it (as
generally believed) destined to permanent immobility, with no possible
future before it save gradual dismemberment and decay? Shall we best
liken it to Abraham’s oak at Mamre, whose leaf has not failed after
three thousand years of sun and storm, and when the very levin-bolt of
heaven has blasted its crown,—or to the hewn and painted mast of some
laden argosy wherein float the fortunes of Israel?

There are, it would appear, three parties now existing among modern
Jews. There is, first, the large Orthodox party, which holds by the
verbal inspiration of the Old Testament and the authority of the
Talmud.[14]

Secondly, there is the party commonly called that of Reformed Jews,
which separated about forty years ago from the Orthodox by a schism
analogous to that which cut off the Free Kirk from the Kirk of Scotland.
The _raisons d’être_ of this reform were certain questions of ritual
(the older ritual having fallen into neglect) and the relinquishment by
the reforming party of the authority of the Talmud. The progress so
effected occasioned great heart-burnings,—now happily extinguished,—and
proceeded no further than these very moderate reforms.[15]

Lastly, there is a third Jewish party, existing chiefly in Germany and
America, and numbering a few members among the younger generations in
England. For convenience’ sake, I shall distinguish it from the older
Reformed party by calling it the party of the New Reform, or of Broad
Church Jews, the analogy between its attitude towards Orthodox Judaism
and that of the late lamented Dean Stanley and his friends to the Church
of England being singularly close.

The attitude even of the Orthodox and older Reformed Jews (alike for our
present purpose) is, theoretically, not wholly unprogressive, not
necessarily purely tribal. They have admitted principles inconsistent
with stagnant tribalism. They believe that, though the _ceremonialism_
of Judaism is for Jews alone, yet the mission of Judaism is to spread
through all the nations its great central _doctrine_ of the Unity of
God. As Philipsohn (who, it is said, has since somewhat receded from his
position) observed in his Lectures so far back as 1847:—

  Judaism has never declared itself to be in its specific form the
  religion of all mankind, but has asserted itself to be the religion
  of all mankind in and by the religious idea.... Talmudism itself
  admits that he even who no longer observes the law, but who utters
  as his confession of faith the words, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our
  God the Eternal is One,” may be considered still to be a Jew.
  _Development of the Religious Idea_, p. 256.

The saying of the Talmud, “The pious among all nations shall have a
place in the world to come,” has become a stock quotation, and has been
of the utmost value to modern Jewish orthodoxy. Thus even this most
conservative party among the Jews is not without a certain expansive
principle. It must be admitted, however, that it does little or nothing
to make that principle practically efficacious, and is content to wait
for the advent of Messiah to convert the nations by miracle without any
trouble to Jews to strive to enlighten them beforehand. Considering what
the Jews for ages have had to bear from those who vouchsafed to try to
convert _them_, we may pardon this lack of zeal for proselytism as far
from unnatural; yet the consequences have been deplorable. He who holds
a precious truth concerning eternal things, and fails to feel it to be
(as Mrs. Browning says) “like bread at sacrament,” to be passed on to
those beside him, loses his right to it, and much of his profit in it.
It is “treasure hid in a field.” The attitude is anti-social and
misanthropic of a people who practically say to their neighbors: “We
possess the most precious of all truths, of which we are the divinely
commissioned guardians and witnesses. But we do not intend to make the
smallest effort to share that truth with you, and generations of you may
go to the grave without it for all we care. We are passive witnesses,
not active apostles. By and by, the Messiah will appear, and convert all
who are alive in his time, whether they will or not; but, for the
present, Christendom is joined to idols, and we shall let it alone.” The
faith which speaks thus stands self-condemned. If a creed be not
aggressive and proselytizing, like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, it
confesses either mistrust of itself or else misanthropic indifference to
the welfare of mankind. Thus the Orthodox and the elder Reformed Jews
have tacitly pronounced their own sentence.

Turn we now from these to the new Reformation. This last is a
development of Judaism, truly _on its own lines_, but yet extending far
beyond anything contemplated by the elder bodies. To measure it aright,
we must cast back a glance over the path which Judaism traversed in
earlier times, and note how completely this new and vast stride is a
continuance of that march towards higher and wider religious truth.

From the earliest conception of Jahveh as the Tribal God,—a conception
which even Kuenen admits to be native to the race of Israel, and
untraceable to any other people,—from this conception, which plainly
assumed the existence of other and rival gods of neighboring nations, it
was an enormous step in advance to pass to the idea of One only Lord of
all the earth, whose House should be a “House of prayer for all
nations.”

Still vaster was the progress from anthropomorphic and morally imperfect
ideas of the character of the tribal God to the adoration of Isaiah’s
“High and Holy One, who inhabiteth eternity,” who dwells in the high and
holy place with the pure in heart and the contrite.

Again, there was made a bound forward by Judaism when the earlier simple
secularism and disbelief of, or indifference to, a future world vanished
before the belief in Immortality which grew up in spite of the teachings
of Antigonus and Sadok, and (after the Dispersion) never faded out again
altogether.

And finally, with the development of the Prophetic spirit, Worship
assumed more its true forms of praise, confession of sin, and
thanksgiving; and, at the fall of Jerusalem, the bloody sacrifices (long
limited to the sacred enclosure) came to an end forever amid the smoking
ruins.

These were truly great steps of progress made by Israel of old; but the
last of them left the nation to carry into its sorrowful exile an
intolerable burden of ceremonialism and dusty superstitions, whereof the
Talmud is now the lumber-room, and possessed also by an unhappy demon of
anti-social pride, which forbade it to extend to or accept from other
nations the right hand of human brotherhood. The Jews did not go out
from Jerusalem as the little band of Christian missionaries had gone,
eager to scatter their new wealth of truth among the nations, and,
though stoned and crucified by those whom they sought to bless, yet ever
after by their children’s children to be revered and canonized. The Jews
went out as misers of truth, holding their full bags of treasure hid in
their breasts. Nor in the ages following the Dispersion, while
Christianity diverged further and further from pure Theism, and through
Mariolatry and Hagiolatry sank well-nigh to polytheism and idolatry, do
we ever once hear of an attempt by any Jewish teacher, even by such a
man as Maimonides, to call back the wandering nations by proclaiming in
their ears the “schema Israel”—“THE LORD YOUR GOD THE ETERNAL IS ONE.”
Before the expulsion from Palestine, for a brief period, Judaism (as one
of its bitterest enemies has remarked) showed promise of becoming a
proselytizing creed, “when, under the influence of Greek philosophy and
other liberalizing influences, it was tending from the condition of a
tribal to that of a universal creed. But Plato succumbed to the Rabbins.
Judaism fell back for eighteen centuries into rigid tribalism, and, as
Lord Beaconsfield cynically said of it, has ever since ‘no more sought
to make converts than the House of Lords.’”[16]

At last the long pause in the progress of Judaism, considered as a
religion, seems drawing to an end; and we may hail its present advance
as the continuance of that noble march which the Jewish race began to
the music of Miriam’s timbrel.

This last step forward of Reformed Judaism consists, according to its
latest interpreter, in “the struggle now consciously and now
unconsciously maintained to emancipate the Jewish faith from every
vestige of tribalism, and to enshrine its wholly catholic doctrines in a
wholly catholic form.” This end is to be pursued through the
“DENATIONALIZATION of the Jewish religion, by setting aside all the
rules and ceremonies which do not possess an essentially religious
character or are maintained merely for the sake of the national, as
distinct from the religious, unity.”

The following are the modes in which this programme may be followed
out:—

1. Reformed Judaism abandons the Messianic hope. It neither desires nor
expects the coming of Messiah, and the resettlement of the Jews in
Palestine as a nation it regards as retrogression toward tribalism.[17]
2. It rejects the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament,
nor does it recognize the perfection and immutability of the law
contained within the Pentateuch. 3. It rejects the theory of a Divine
tradition recorded in the Mischna, and does not admit the authority of
the Talmudic laws. 4. It puts aside, as no longer binding, all the
legal, hygienic, and agrarian ordinances of the Pentateuch, together
with the laws relating to marriages and to the Levites. 5. It cuts down
the feasts and fasts to the Sabbath, the Passover, and four others. 6.
It adopts the vernacular of each country for a larger or smaller part of
the service of the synagogue, instead of retaining the whole in Hebrew.

Besides these six great changes, there are two others looming in the
distance. Reformed Judaism still regards the rite of circumcision as
binding, though several distinguished reformers (notably Geiger) have
recommended that proselytes should not be required to adopt it. Of the
change of the Sabbath day from Saturday to Sunday, I am informed that
the transference of the holy day has already been made by one synagogue
in Berlin, which holds its services on the Sunday, and by many
independent Jewish men of business; and that it is very much desired in
some other quarters. The difficulty attendant on this change obviously
is: that it would prove so favorable to the interests of Jews in a
secular sense that, if adopted, the charge of worldly motives is certain
to be brought against those who advocate it.

These, then, in brief, are the negations of Reformed Judaism. On the
positive side, it reaffirms those dogmas which are the kernel of
Judaism,—“the Unity of God; His just judgment of the world; the free
relation of every man to God; the continual progress of humanity; the
immortality of the soul; and the Divine election of Israel” (understood
to signify that the Jews, under the will of God, possess a specific
religious mission not yet entirely fulfilled). As to the observances of
Reformed Judaism, the framework of life and habit under which it
proposes to exist, “they will remain distinctively Jewish, and must not
bear the mere stamp of nineteenth century religious opinion.” The Jewish
Reformer thus, like many another Radical, is an aristocrat at heart, and
shrinks from descending to the level of a _parvenue_ faith. In my humble
judgment, he is entirely right in his decision. So long as he places the
interests of truth and honesty above all, he cannot do better than hold
fast by everything which reminds himself and the world of his pedigree
through a hundred generations of worshippers of Jehovah.

The extent to which such reformation as that now sketched prevails at
this hour among Jews is difficult to ascertain. The movement has been
going on for some time, and yet counts but a moderate number of
adherents, chiefly, as I have said, German and American Jews. Nay, what
is most unhopeful, the disease of religious indifference, that moral
phylloxera which infests the choicest spiritual vineyards, is working
its evil way among the broader-minded Jews, as it works (we know too
well) among the broader-minded Christians. To unite depth of conviction
with width of sympathy has ever been a rare achievement. “Tout
comprendre sera tout pardonner,” may be rendered, in intellectual
matters, “To find truth everywhere is to contend for it nowhere.”

There is good room to hope, however, that if some fall out of the ranks,
the Reformed party will yet possess enough energy, vigor, and cohesion
to make its influence erelong extensively felt.


It is a startling prospect which has been thus opened before us. If
anything seemed fixed in the endless flux of nations and religions, it
was the half-petrified religion of the Jew. That the stern figure which
we have beheld walking alone through the long procession of history
should come at last and take a place beside his brothers is hard to
picture. We live in a time when,

                  “Faiths and empires gleam,
                  Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.”

Every solid body is threatened with disintegration; and the new powers
of cohesion, if such there be, have scarcely come into play. But, of all
changes fraught with momentous consequences, none could well be more
important than that of a stripping off of its tribal gaberdine by
Judaism, and the adoption of “a law fit for law universal.” The old
fable is realized. The wind and hail of persecution blew and pelted the
Jew for a thousand years, and he only drew his cloak closer around him.
The sunshine of prosperity and sympathy has shone upon him, and, lo! his
mantle is already dropping from his shoulders.

For the present we can only treat the matter as a grand project, but we
may endeavor to estimate the value of a Reformation of Judaism such as
Luther accomplished for Christianity. In the first place, it is, I
conceive, the sole chance for the permanent continuance of the Jewish
religion that it should undergo some such regeneration. If the proposed
Reform perish in the bud, Orthodox Judaism will doubtless survive for
some generations, but, according to the laws which govern human
institutions, its days must be numbered. In former times, when every
nation in Europe held aloof from its neighbors in fear and jealousy, it
was possible for alien tribes, like the Jews and gypsies, to move among
all, holding rigidly to their own tribal alliances and observances;
hated and mistrusted, indeed, but scarcely more so than their Christian
next-door neighbors. But now that Christian nations are all blending
together under the influence of perpetual intercourse, and their
differences of belief, governments, costumes, habits, and ideas are
effacing themselves year by year, the presence of a non-fusing,
non-intermarrying, separatist race—a race brought by commerce into
perpetual friction with all the rest—becomes an intolerable anomaly.

For once Mr. Goldwin Smith was in the right in this controversy, when he
remarked that “the _least_ sacred of all races would be that which
should persistently refuse to come into the allegiance of humanity.”

The Jews have shown themselves the sturdiest of mankind, but the
influences brought to bear on them now are wholly different from those
which they met with such stubborn courage of old. Political ambition, so
long utterly closed to them, but to which Lord Beaconsfield’s career
must evermore prove a spur; pleasure and self-indulgence, to which their
wealth is an ever ready key; the scepticism and materialism of the time,
to which their acute and positive minds seem to render them even more
liable than their contemporaries,—these are not the elements out of
which martyrs and confessors are made. A reformed, enlightened,
world-wide creed, which a cultivated gentleman may frankly avow and
defend in the _salons_ of London, Paris, Berlin, or New York, and in the
progress of which he may feel some enthusiasm,—a creed which will make
him free to adopt from Christianity all that he recognizes in it of
spiritually lofty and morally beautiful,—such a creed may have a future
before it of which no end need be foreseen. But for unreformed Judaism
there can be nothing in store but the gradual dropping away of the
ablest, the most cultured, the wealthiest, the men of the world and the
men of the study,—the Spinozas, the Heines, the Disraelis—and the
persistence only for a few generations of the more ignorant, fanatical,
obscure, and poor.

Again, besides giving to Judaism a new lease of life, the Reform
projected would undoubtedly do much to extinguish that passion of
_Judenhasse_ which is the disgrace of Eastern Christendom, and the
source of such manifold woes to both races. The root of that passion is
the newly awakened sense (to which I have just referred) of impatience
at the existence of a nation within every nation, having separate
interests of its own and a solidarity between its members, ramifying
into every trade, profession, and concern of civil life. Were this
solidarity to be relinquished, and the mutual secret co-operation of
Jews[18] reduced to such natural and fitting friendliness as exists
between Scotchmen in England, and were it to become common for Jews to
marry Christians and discuss freely with Christians their respective
views,—were this to happen, mutual respect and sympathy would very
quickly supersede mutual prejudice and mistrust. After two generations
of such Reformed Judaism, the memory of the difference of race would, I
am persuaded, be reduced to that pleasant interest wherewith we trace
the ancestry of some of our eminent statesmen to “fine old Quaker
families,” or remark that some of our most brilliant men of letters have
in their veins the marvellous Huguenot blood.[19]

It is superfluous to add that the Jewish people, thus thoroughly adopted
into the comity of European nations, and Judaism recognized as the great
and enlightened religion of that powerful and ubiquitous race, the true
mission of Judaism, as taught by Bible and Talmud—that of holding up the
torch of monotheistic truth to the world—would begin its practical
accomplishment. The Latin nations in particular, to whom religion has
presented itself hitherto in the guise of ecclesiasticism and
hagiolatry, and who are fast verging into blank materialism as the sole
alternative they know, would behold at last, with inevitable respect, a
simple and noble worship, at once historical and philosophic, without
priestly claims, and utterly at war with every form of monasticism and
superstition. The impression on these, and even on the Northern nations,
of such a spectacle could not be otherwise than elevating, and possibly,
in the Divine order of the world, might be the means whereby the tide of
faith, so long ebbing out in dismal scepticism, should flow once more up
the rejoicing shores.

Even if this be too much to hope, I cannot doubt that many Christian
Churches would draw valuable lessons from the presence among them of a
truly reformed Judaism. Especially in these days of irreverence, of
finikin Ritualism on one side and Salvation Army rowdyism on the other,
it would be a measureless advantage to be summoned to revert in thought
to the solemn and awe-inspired tone of Hebrew devotion which still
breathes in the services of the synagogue. It has been a loss to
Christians as well as to Jews that these services have hitherto been
conducted in Hebrew.[20] Had the synagogue services in London been
conducted in the English language, I believe that many of the popular
misapprehensions concerning Judaism would never have existed, while the
impression of profound reverence which the prayers convey would have
reacted advantageously on Christian worship, too liable to oscillate
between formalism and familiarity.[21]

I am bound to add, on the other side, that it appears to me there are
some very great advantages on the side of Christianity of which it
behooves reforming Jews to take account. These are not matters of dogma,
but of sentiment; and not only may they be appropriated by Jews without
departing by a hair’s breadth from their own religious platform, but
they may every one be sanctioned (if any sanction be needed for them) by
citations from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. The great difference
between Judaism and Christianity on their moral and spiritual sides, in
my humble judgment, lies in this: that the piety and charity, scattered
like grains of gold through the rock of Judaism, were by Christ’s
burning spirit fused together, and cast into golden coin to pass from
hand to hand. Jews have continually challenged Christians to point to a
single precept in the Gospel which has not its counterpart in the Old
Testament. They are perhaps in the right, and possibly no such isolated
precept can be found differentiating the two creeds; but, both by that
which is left aside and by that which it chose out and emphasized,
Christianity is, practically, a new system of ethics and religion.

To these three things in Christianity I would direct the attention of
Jewish reformers:—

The Christian idea of love to God.

The Christian idea of love to Man.

The Christian sentiment concerning Immortality.

For the first, far be it from me to wrong the martyr race by a doubt
that thousands of Jews have nobly obeyed the First Great Commandment of
the Law (given in Deuteronomy vi. 4, as well as repeated by Christ) and
“loved the Lord their God with all their heart and soul and strength,”
even to the willing sacrifice of their lives through fidelity to Him.
The feelings of loyalty entertained by a Jew in the old days of
persecution to the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” must have been
often a master-passion as fervid as it was deep-rooted. But alongside of
this hereditary loyalty to the God and King of Israel there might well
grow somewhat of that tender personal piety which springs from the
Evangelical idea of God as holding personal relations with each devout
and forgiven soul.

Of the two theories of religion,—that which starts with the idea of a
Tribe or Church, and that which starts with the unit of the individual
soul,—Judaism has hitherto held the former. It has been essentially a
corporate religion; and to be “cut off from the congregation,” like
Spinoza, has been deemed tantamount to spiritual destruction. It is
surely time that Reformed Judaism should now adopt the far higher theory
of religious individualism, and teach men to seek those sacred private
and personal relations with the Lord of Spirits which, when once
enjoyed, cause the notions of any mere corporate privileges to appear
childish. Had the deep experiences which belong to such personal piety
been often felt by modern Jews (as they certainly were by many of the
old Psalmists), it could not have happened that modern Jewish literature
should have been so barren as it is of devotional works and of spiritual
poetry. To a serious reverential spirit (a sentiment far above the level
of that of the majority of Christians), Jews too rarely join those more
ardent religious affections and aspirations which it is the glory of
Christianity to inspire in the hearts of her saints. Had they known
these feelings vividly and often, we must have had a Jewish Thomas à
Kempis, a Jewish Saint Theresa, a Jewish Tauler, Fénelon, Taylor,
Wesley. It will not suffice to say in answer that Jews did not need such
treatises of devotion and such hymns of ecstatic piety, having always
possessed the noblest of the world in their own Scriptures. Feelings
which really rise to the flood do not keep in the river-bed for a
thousand years.

Again, the Christian idea of Love to Man possesses an element of
tenderness not perceptible in Jewish philanthropy. Jews are splendidly
charitable not alone to their own poor, but also to Christians. Their
management of their public and private charities has long been
recognized as wiser and more liberal than that of Christians at home or
abroad. They are faithful and affectionate husbands and wives;
peculiarly tender parents; pious children; kindly neighbors. The cruel
wrongs of eighteen centuries have neither brutalized nor imbittered
them. Well would it be if whole classes of drunken, wife-beating
Englishmen would take example in these respects from them! But of
certain claims beyond these, claims always recognized by Christian
teachers, and not seldom practically fulfilled by Christian men and
women,—the claims of the erring to be forgiven, of the fallen to be
lifted out of the mire,—Jews have hitherto taken little account. The
parable of the Lost Sheep is emphatically Christian; and among
Christians only, till quite recently, have there been active agencies at
work to seek and save ruined women, drunkards, criminals, the “perishing
and dangerous classes.”[22] Mary Magdalene did well to weep over the
feet of Jesus Christ. It was Christ who brought into the world
compassion for her and for those like her. And for the forgiveness of
enemies, also, the Christian spirit, if not absolutely unique, is yet
supreme. The very core of the Christian idea fitly found its expression
on the Cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
That divinest kind of charity, which renounces all contests for rights,
and asks not what it is _bound_ to do, but what it may be _permitted_ to
do, to bless and serve a child of God,—that charity may, I think, justly
be historically named Christian. Of course, every pure Theism is called
on to teach it likewise.

With regard to women, the attitude of Judaism is peculiar. It has always
recognized some “Rights of Women,” and has never fallen into the
absurdity of cherishing mental or physical weakness in them as honorable
or attractive. As Mrs. Cyril Flower (then Miss Constance de Rothschild)
showed in an interesting article published some years ago, the “Hebrew
Woman,” so magnificently described in the last chapter of Proverbs, has
always been the Jewish ideal: “Strength and honor are her clothing. She
openeth her mouth with wisdom.” No jealousy, but, on the contrary,
joyful recognition, awaited in each age the vigorous actions of Miriam
and Deborah, of Judith and Esther, and of the mother of the seven
martyrs in the Book of Maccabees. Jewish marriages (till quite recently
formed always on the Eastern rather than on the Western system) are
proverbially faithful and affectionate; and the resolution of Jews never
to permit their wives to undertake labor outside their homes (such as
factory work and the like) has undoubtedly vastly contributed to the
health and welfare of the nation. Yet, notwithstanding all this,
something appears to be lacking in Jewish feeling concerning women. Too
much of Oriental materialism still lingers. Too little of Occidental
chivalry and romance has yet arisen. In this respect, strange to say,
the East is prose, the West poetry. The relations of men and women,
above all of husband and wife, cannot be ranked as perfect till some
halo of tender reverence be added to sturdy good-will and fidelity.[23]

And, beyond their human brethren and sisters, Christians have found (it
is one of those late developments of the fertile Christian idea of which
I have spoken) that the humbler races of living creatures have also
claims upon us,—moral claims founded on the broad basis of the right of
simple sentiency to be spared needless pain; religious claims founded on
the touching relation which we, the often forgiven children of God, bear
to “the unoffending creatures which he loves.” This tender development
of Christianity, and the discovery consequent on it, that “he prayeth
well who loveth well both man and bird and beast,” is assuredly worthy
of the regard of those Reformers who would make Judaism a universal
religion. Semitic literature has hitherto betrayed a hardness and
poverty on this side which it is needful should now be remedied, if
Judaism is to ride on the full tide of Aryan sympathies.

And, lastly, the Christian sentiment concerning Immortality deserves
special attention from Reforming Jews. The adoption of the dogma of a
Future Life has scarcely even yet, after some fifty generations,
imprinted on the Jewish mind the full consciousness of

                 “That great world of light which lies
                 Behind all human destinies.”

Jews have, it would appear, essentially the _esprit positif_. They are
content to let the impenetrable veil hang between their eyes and the
future world,—that veil which the Aryan soul strives impatiently, age
after age, to tear away, or on which it throws a thousand phantasms from
the magic-lanthorn of fancy. Millions of Christians have lived with
their “treasures” truly placed in that world where moth and rust do not
corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. Especially have the
bereaved among us dwelt on earth with their hearts already in heaven
where their beloved ones await them. To too great an extent, no doubt,
has this “other-worldliness” been carried, especially among ascetics;
but, on the whole, the firm anchorage of Christian souls beyond the tomb
has been the source of infinite comfort and infinite elevation. Of this
sort of projection of the spirit into the darkness, this rocket-throwing
of ropes of faith over the deeps of destruction, whereby the mourner’s
shipwrecked soul is saved and reinstated, the Jewish consciousness seems
yet scarcely cognizant. Perhaps these days of pessimism and mental fog
are not those wherein any one is likely to find his faith in immortality
quickened. As Dr. Johnson complained that he was “injured” by every man
who did not believe all that he believed, so each of us finds his hope
of another life chilled by the doubts which, like icebergs, float in the
sea of thought we are traversing. But, for those Jews who thoroughly
accept the dogma of immortality, it would surely be both a happiness and
a source of moral elevation to give to such a stupendous fact its place
in the perspective of existence. There is infinite difference between
the molelike vision which sees nothing beyond the grassroots and the
worms of earth, though dimly aware of a world of sunlight above, and the
eagle glance which can measure alike things near and afar; between the
man who counts his beloved dead as lost to him because he beholds and
hears and touches them no more, and the man who can say calmly amid his
sorrow,—

                “Take them, thou great Eternity!
                  Our little life is but a gust,
                Which bends the branches of thy tree,
                  And trails its blossoms in the dust.”

Turning now from the results on Judaism itself and on Christianity at
large of a great Jewish Reformation, we may indulge in some reflections
on the possible bearings of such an event on that not inconsiderable
number of persons who, all over Europe, are hanging loosely upon or
dropping silently away from the Christian Churches. I am not speaking of
those who become Atheists or Agnostics and renounce all interest in
religion, but of those who, like Robert Elsmere, pass into phases of
belief which may be broadly classed under the head of Theism. These
persons believe still in God and in the life to come, and hold
tenaciously by the moral and spiritual part of Christianity, perhaps
sometimes feeling its beauty and truth more vividly than some orthodox
Christians who deem the startling, miraculous, and “apocalyptic” part to
constitute the essence of their faith. But this “apocalyptic part,” and
all which Dr. Martineau has called the “Messianic mythology,” they have
abandoned. Of the number of these persons, it is hard to form an
estimate. Some believe that the Churches are all honeycombed by them,
and that a panic would follow could a census of England be taken in a
Palace of Truth. Not a few in the beginning and middle of this century
quitted their old folds, and under the names of “Unitarians,” “Free
Christians,” and “Theists” have thenceforth stood confessedly apart.[24]
But of late years the disposition to make any external schism has
apparently died away. The instinct, once universal, to build a new nest
for each brood of faith seems perishing among us. The Church-forming
spirit, so vigorous of old in Christianity and in Buddhism, is visibly
failing, and making way for new phases of development, of which the
Salvation Army may possibly afford us a sample. Among cultivated people
subtle discrimination of differences and fastidiousness as regards
questions of taste are indefinitely stronger than that desire for a
common worship which, in the breasts of our forefathers, who “rolled the
psalm to wintry skies,” and dared death merely to pray together, must
have mounted to a passion. Englishmen generally still cling to public
worship, but it is chiefly where an ancient liturgy supplies by old and
holy words a dreamy music of devotion, into which each feels at liberty
to weave his own thoughts. Wherever the demand is made for prayers which
shall definitely express the faith and aspirations of the modern-minded
worshipper, there the subtleties and the fastidiousness come into play,
and, instead of being drawn together, men sorrowfully discover that they
are made conscious by common worship of a hundred discrepancies of
opinion, a thousand disharmonies of taste and feeling. In all things, we
men and women of the modern Athens are not “too superstitious,” but too
critical; and in religion, which necessarily touches us most vitally,
our critical spirit threatens to paralyze us with shyness. The typical
English gentleman and lady of to-day are at the opposite pole of
sentiment in this respect from the Arab who kneels on his carpet on the
crowded deck for his evening orison, or from the Italian _contadina_ who
tells her beads before the wayside Madonna. Doubtless, here is one
reason among many why such multitudes remain without any definite place
in the religions of the land. They hang languidly about the old hive,
feebly humming now and then, but feeling no impulse to swarm, and
finding no queen-spirit to lead them to another home where they might
build their proper cells and make their own honey.

But, whether embodied in any religious sect or Church, or hanging
loosely upon one, the persons of whom we have been speaking, as
believers in God and in the spiritual, but not the apocalyptic side of
Christianity,—_Christian Theists_, as we may best call them,—are of
course nearer in a theological point of view than any others to those
Reformed Jews whom we may call _Jewish Theists_. The intellectual creeds
of each, in fact, might, without much concession on either side, be
reduced to identical formulæ. Now, Christian Theists have hitherto
wanted a rallying point, and have been taunted with the lack of any
historic basis for their religion. Why (it will be asked by many) should
not this Reformed Judaism afford such a rallying point, and the old
rocky foundations laid by Moses support a common temple of Christian and
Jewish Theism?

It may prove that such a consummation may be among the happy reunitings
and reconstructions of the far future. But for the present hour, and for
the reasons I have given in the beginning of this paper, I do not
believe it can be near at hand. I am also quite sure that it would be
the extreme of unwisdom to hamper and disturb the progress of Reformed
Judaism along its own lines by any hasty efforts at amalgamation with
outsiders, who would bring with them another order of religious habits
and endless divergencies of opinion.

Let Reformed Judaism relight the old golden candlestick, and set it
aloft, and it will give light unto all which are in the house,—not only
the House of Israel, but in the House of Humanity. A glorious future may
in God’s Providence await such purified, emancipated Judaism. It is
true, it may not exhibit the special form of religion which one party or
another among us altogether desires to see extended in the world. Some
radical reformers who sympathize in its general scope would wish to find
it stripping off altogether its Jewish character, and torn up from the
root of Mosaism. Many more orthodox Christians will undervalue it
because it shows no indication of a tendency to adopt from Christianity
such doctrines as the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the Atonement, even
while, on the spiritual side, it is imbued with the essential ideas of
him whom it will doubtless recognize as the great Jewish Rabbi and
Prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. But it is not for us to seek to modify,
scarcely even to criticise, such a movement as this. A respectful
interest and a hopeful sympathy seem to me the only sentiments wherewith
Christians and Christian Theists should stand aside and watch this last
march forward of that wondrous patriarchal faith, whereof Christianity
itself is the firstborn son, and Islam the younger; and which now in the
end of the ages prepares to cross a new Jordan, and take possession of a
new Holy Land.

  ⁂ NOTE.—It is proper to mention, in republishing this essay at the
  desire of Jewish friends, that it was received on its first
  appearance with the utmost possible disfavor by the Jewish press.




                               ESSAY IV.
                        THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING.


Endless books have been written about the Laws of Thought, the Nature of
Thought, and the Validity of Thought. Physiologists and metaphysicians
have vied with one another to tell us in twenty different ways how we
think and why we think and what good our thinking may be supposed to be
as affording us any real acquaintance with things in general outside our
thinking-machine. One school of philosophers tells us that Thought is a
secretion of the brain (_i.e._, that Thought is a form of Matter), and
another that it is purely immaterial, and the only reality in the
universe,—_i.e._, that Matter is a form of Thought. The meekest of men
“presume to think” this, that, and the other; and the proudest
distinction of the modern sage is to be a “Thinker,” especially a “free”
one. But with all this much ado about Thought, it has not occurred to
any one, so far as I am aware, to attempt a fair review of what any one
of us thinks in the course of the twenty-four hours; what are the number
of separable thoughts which, on an average, pass through a human brain
in a day; and what may be their nature and proportions in the shape of
Recollections, Reflections, Hopes, Contrivances, Fancies, and
Reasonings. We are all aware that when we are awake a perpetual stream
of thoughts goes on in “what we are pleased to call our minds,”
sometimes slow and sluggish, as the water in a ditch; sometimes bright,
rapid, and sparkling, like a mountain brook; and now and then making
some sudden, happy dash, cataract-wise, over an obstacle. We are also
accustomed to speak as if the sum and substance of all this thinking
were very respectable, as might become “beings endowed with the lofty
faculty of thought”; and we always tacitly assume that our thoughts have
logical beginnings, middles, and endings—commence with problems and
terminate in solutions—or that we evolve out of our consciousness
ingenious schemes of action or elaborate pictures of Hope or Memory. If
our books of mental philosophy ever obtain a place in the Circulating
Libraries of another planet, the “general reader” of that distant world
will inevitably suppose that on our little Tellus dwell a thousand
millions of men, women, and children, who spend their existence as the
interlocutors in Plato’s Dialogues passed their hours under the grip of
the dread Socratic elenchus, arguing, sifting, balancing, recollecting,
hard at work as if under the ferule of a schoolmaster.

The real truth about the matter seems to be that, instead of taking this
kind of mental exercise all day long, and every day, there are very few
of us who ever do anything of the kind for more than a few minutes at a
time; and that the great bulk of our thoughts proceed in quite a
different way, and are occupied by altogether less exalted matters than
our vanity has induced us to imagine. The normal mental locomotion of
even well-educated men and women, save under the spur of exceptional
stimulus, is neither the flight of an eagle in the sky nor the trot of a
horse upon the road, but may better be compared to the lounge of a
truant school-boy in a shady lane, now dawdling pensively, now taking a
hop-skip-and-jump, now stopping to pick blackberries, and now turning to
right or left to catch a butterfly, climb a tree, or make
dick-duck-and-drake on a pond; going nowhere in particular, and only
once in a mile or so proceeding six steps in succession in an orderly
and philosophical manner.

It is far beyond my ambition to attempt to supply this large lacune in
mental science, and to set forth the truth of the matter about the
actual Thoughts which practically, not theoretically, are wont to pass
through human brains. Some few observations on the subject, however, may
perhaps be found entertaining, and ought certainly to serve to mitigate
our self-exaltation on account of our grand mental endowments, by
showing how rarely and under what curious variety of pressure we employ
them.

The first and familiar remark is that every kind of thought is liable to
be colored and modified in all manner of ways by our physical conditions
and surroundings. We are not steam thinking-machines, working evenly at
all times at the same rate, and turning out the same sort and quantity
of work in the same given period, but rather more like windmills,
subject to every breeze, and whirling our sails at one time with great
impetus and velocity, and at another standing still, becalmed and
ineffective. Sometimes it is our outer conditions which affect us,
sometimes it is our own inner wheels which are clogged and refuse to
rotate; but, from whatever cause it arises, the modification of our
thoughts is often so great as to make us arrive at diametrically
opposite conclusions on the same subject and with the same _data_ of
thought, within an incredibly brief interval of time. Some years ago,
the President of the British Association frankly answered objections to
the consistency of his inaugural address by referring to the different
aspects of the ultimate problems of theology in different “moods” of
mind. When men of such eminence confess to “moods,” lesser mortals may
avow their own mental oscillations without painful humiliation, and even
put forward some claim to consistency if the vibrating needle of their
convictions do not swing quite round the whole compass, and point at two
o’clock to the existence of a Deity and a Life to come, and at six to a
nebula for the origin, and a “streak of morning cloud” for the
consummation of things. Possibly, also, the unscientific mind may claim
some praise on the score of modesty if it delay for the moment to
instruct mankind in either its two o’clock or its six o’clock creed, and
wait till it has settled down for some few hours, weeks, or months, to
any one definite opinion.

Not to dwell for the present on these serious topics, it is only
necessary to carry with us through our future investigations that every
man’s thoughts are continually fluctuating and vibrating, from inward as
well as outward causes. Let us glance for a moment at some of these.
First, there are the well-known conditions of health and high animal
spirits, in which every thought is rose-colored; and corresponding
conditions of disease and depression, in which everything we think of
seems to pass, like a great bruise, through yellow, green, blue, and
purple to black. A liver complaint causes the universe to be enshrouded
in gray; and the gout covers it with an inky pall, and makes us think
our best friends little better than fiends in disguise. Further, a whole
treatise would be needed to expound how our thoughts are further
distempered by food, beverages of various kinds, and narcotics of great
variety. When our meals have been too long postponed, it would appear as
if that Evil Personage who proverbially finds mischief for idle hands to
do were similarly engaged with an idle digestive apparatus, and the
result is that, if there be the smallest and most remote cloud to be
seen in the whole horizon of our thoughts, it sweeps up and over us just
in proportion as we grow hungrier and fainter, till at last it
overwhelms us in depression and despair. “Why?” we ask ourselves, “why
has not A. written to us for so long? What will B. think of such and
such a transaction? How is our pecuniary concern with C. to be settled?
What is the meaning of that odd little twitch we have felt so often here
or there about our persons?” The answer to our thoughts, prompted by the
evil genius of famine, is always lugubrious in the extreme. “A. has not
written because he is dead. B. will quarrel with us forever because of
that transaction. C. will never pay us our money, or we shall never be
able to pay C. That twitch which we have so thoughtlessly disregarded is
the premonitory symptom of the most horrible of all human maladies, of
which we shall die in agonies and leave a circle of sorrowing friends
before the close of the ensuing year.” Such are the _idées noires_ which
present themselves when we want our dinner; and the best-intentioned
people in the world, forsooth! recommend us to summon them round us by
fasting, as if they were a company of cherubim instead of imps of quite
another character! But the scene undergoes a transformation bordering on
the miraculous when we have eaten a slice of mutton and drunk half a
glass of sherry. If we revert now to our recent meditations, we are
quite innocently astonished to think what could possibly have made us so
anxious without any reasonable ground. Of course, A. has not written to
us because he always goes grouse-shooting at this season. B. will never
take the trouble to think about our little transaction. C. is certain to
pay us, or we can readily raise money to pay him; and our twitch means
nothing worse than a touch of rheumatics or an ill-fitting garment.

Beyond the alternations of fasting and feasting, still more amazing are
the results of narcotics, alcoholic beverages, and of tea and coffee.
Every species of wine exercises a perceptibly different influence of its
own, from the cheery and social “sparkling grape of Eastern France” to
the solemn black wine of Oporto, the fit accompaniment of the blandly
dogmatic post-prandial prose of elderly gentlemen of orthodox
sentiments. A cup of strong coffee clears the brain and makes the
thoughts transparent, while one of green tea drives them fluttering like
dead leaves before the wind. Time and learning would fail to describe
the yet more marvellous effects of opium, hemlock, henbane, hashish,
bromide, and chloral. Every one of these narcotics produces a different
hue of the mental window through which we look out on the world;
sometimes distorting all objects in the wildest manner (like opium),
sometimes (like chloral) acting only perceptibly by removing the sense
of disquiet and restoring our thoughts to the white light of commonsense
cheerfulness; and again acting quite differently on the thoughts of
different persons, and of the same persons at different times.

Only secondary to the effects of inwardly imbibed stimulants or
narcotics are those of the outward atmosphere, which in bracing weather
makes our thoughts crisp like the frosted grass, and in heavy November
causes them to drip chill and slow and dull, like the moisture from the
mossy eaves of the Moated Grange. Burning, glaring Southern sunshine
dazes our minds as much as our eyes, and a London fog obfuscates them,
so that a man might honestly plead that he could no more argue clearly
in the fog than the Irishman could spell correctly with a bad pen and
muddy ink.

Nor are mouths, eyes, and lungs by any means the only organs through
which influences arrive at our brain, modifying the thoughts which
proceed from them. The sense of Smelling, when gratified by the odors of
woods and gardens and hay-fields, or even of delicately perfumed rooms,
lifts all our thoughts into a region wherein the Beautiful, the Tender,
and the Sublime may impress us freely; while the same sense, offended by
disgusting and noxious odors, as of coarse cookery, open sewers, or
close chambers inhabited by vulgar people, thrusts us down into an
opposite stratum of feeling, wherein poetry entereth not, and our very
thoughts smell of garlic. Needless to add that in a still more
transcendent way Music seizes on the thoughts of the musically-minded,
and bears them off in its talons over sea and land, and up to Olympus
like Ganymede. Two easily distinguishable mental influences seem to
belong to music, according as it is heard by those who really appreciate
it or by others who are unable to do so. To the former it opens a book
of poetry, which they follow word for word after the performer, as if he
read it to them, thinking the thoughts of the composer in succession
with scarcely greater uncertainty or vagueness than if they were
expressed in verbal language of a slightly mystical description. To the
latter the book is closed; but though the listener’s own thoughts unroll
themselves uninterrupted by the composer’s ideas, they are very
considerably colored thereby. “I delight in music,” said once Sir
Charles Lyell to me: “I am always able to think out my work better while
it is going on!” As a matter of fact, he resumed at the moment a
disquisition concerning the date of the Glacial Period at the precise
point at which it had been interrupted by the performance of a symphony
of Beethoven, having evidently mastered in the interval an intricate
astronomical knot. To ordinary mortals with similar deficiency of
musical sense, harmonious sound seems to spread a halo like that of
light, causing every subject of contemplation to seem glorified, as a
landscape appears in a dewy sunrise. Memories rise to the mind and seem
infinitely more affecting than at other times, affections still living
grow doubly tender, new beauties appear in the picture or the landscape
before our eyes, and passages of remembered prose or poetry float
through our brains in majestic cadence. In a word, the sense of the
Beautiful, the Tender, the Sublime, is vividly aroused, and the
atmosphere of familiarity and commonplace, wherewith the real beauty and
sweetness of life are too often veiled, is lifted for the hour. As in a
camera-obscura or mirror, the very trees and grass which we had looked
on a thousand times are seen to possess unexpected loveliness. But all
this can only happen to the non-musical soul when the harmony to which
it listens is really harmonious, and when it comes at an appropriate
time, when the surrounding conditions permit and incline the man to
surrender himself to its influences; in a word, when there is nothing
else demanding his attention. The most barbarous of the practices of
royalty and civic magnificence is that of employing music as an
accompaniment to feasts. It involves a confusion of the realm of the
real and ideal, and of one sense with another, as childish as that of
the little girl who took out a peach to eat while bathing in the sea.
Next to music during the dinner-time comes music in the midst of a
cheerful evening party, where, when every intellect present is strung up
to the note of animated conversation and brilliant repartee, there is a
sudden _douche_ of solemn chords from the region of the pianoforte, and
presently some well-meaning gentleman endeavors to lift up all the lazy
people, who are lounging in easy-chairs after a good dinner, into the
empyrean of emotion “sublime upon the seraph wings of ecstasy” of
Beethoven or Mozart; or some meek damsel, with plaintive note, calls on
them, in Schubert’s _Addio_, to break their hearts at the memory or
anticipation of those mortal sorrows which are either behind or before
every one of us, and which it is either agony or profanation to think of
at such a moment. All this is assuredly intensely barbarous. The same
people who like to mix up the ideal pleasure of music with incongruous
enjoyments of another kind would be guilty of giving a kiss with their
mouths full of bread and cheese. As to what we may term extra-mural
music, the hideous noises made by the aid of vile machinery in the
street, it is hard to find words of condemnation strong enough for it.
Probably the organ-grinders of London have done more in the last twenty
years to detract from the quality and quantity of the highest kind of
mental work done by the nation than any two or three colleges of Oxford
or Cambridge have effected to increase it. One mathematician alone, as
he informed the writer, estimated the cost of the increased mental labor
they have imposed upon him and his clerks at several thousand pounds’
worth of first-class work, for which the State practically paid in the
added length of time needed for his calculations. Not much better are
those church bells which now sound a trumpet before the good people who
attend “matins” and other daily services at hours when their profane
neighbors are wearily sleeping or anxiously laboring at their appointed
tasks.

Next to our bodily Sensations come in order of influence on our thoughts
the Places in which we happen to do our thinking. Meditating like the
pious Harvey “Among the Tombs” is one thing; doing the same on a breezy
mountain side among the gorse and the heather, quite another. Jostling
our way in a crowded street or roaming in a solitary wood, rattling in
an English express train or floating by moonlight in a Venetian gondola
or an Egyptian dahabieh, though each and all favorable conditions for
thinking, create altogether distinct classes of lucubrations. If we
endeavor to define what are the surroundings among which Thought is best
sustained and most vigorous, we shall probably find good reason to
reverse not a few of our accepted and familiar judgments. The common
idea, for example, that we ponder very profoundly by the seashore, is, I
am persuaded, a baseless delusion. We _think_ indeed that we are
thinking, but for the most part our minds merely lie open, like so many
oysters, to the incoming waves, and with scarcely greater intellectual
activity. The very charm of the great Deep seems to lie in the fact that
it reduces us to a state of mental emptiness and vacuity, while our
vanity is soothed by the notion that we are thinking with unwonted
emphasis and perseverance. Amphitrite, the enchantress, mesmerizes us
with the monotonous passes of her billowy hands, and lulls us into a
slumberous hypnotism wherein we meekly do her bidding, and fix our eyes
and thoughts, like biologized men, on the rising and falling of every
wave. If it be tempestuous weather, we watch open-mouthed till the
beautiful white crests topple over and dash in storm and thunder up the
beach; and, if it be a summer evening’s calm, we note with placid,
never-ending contentment how the wavelets, like little children, run up
softly and swiftly on the golden strand to deposit their gifts of shells
and seaweed, and then retreat, shy and ashamed of their boldness, to
hide themselves once again under the flowing skirts of Mother Ocean.

Again, divines and poets have united to bolster up our convictions that
we do a great deal of important thinking at night when we lie awake in
bed. Every preacher points to the hours of the “silent midnight,” when
his warnings will surely come home, and sit like incubi on the breast of
sinners who, too often perhaps, have dozed in the day-time as they flew,
bat-wise, over their heads from the pulpit. Shelley, in “Queen Mab,”
affords us a terrible night scene of a king who, after his dinner of
“silence, grandeur, and excess,” finds sleep abdicate his pillow
(probably in favor of indigestion); and Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall,”
threatens torments of memory still keener to the “shallow-hearted cousin
Amy” whenever she may happen to lie meditating—

    “In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”

Certainly, if there be any time in the twenty-four hours when we might
carry on consecutive chains of thought, it would be when we lie still
for hours undisturbed by sight or sound, having nothing to do, and with
our bodies so far comfortable and quiescent as to give the minimum of
interruption to our mental proceedings. Far be it from me to deny that
under such favorable auspices some people may think to good purpose.
But, if I do not greatly err, they form the exception rather than the
rule among bad sleepers. As the Psalmist of old remarked, it is
generally “mischief” which a man—wicked or otherwise—“devises upon his
bed”; and the truth of the observation in our day is proved from the
harsh Ukases for domestic government which are commonly promulgated by
Paterfamilias at the breakfast table, and by the sullenness _de parti
pris_ which testifies that the sleepless brother, sister, or maiden aunt
has made up his or her mind during the night to “have it out” with
So-and-so next morning. People are a little faint and feverish when they
lie awake, and nothing occurs to divert their minds and restore them to
equanimity, and so they go on chewing the bitter cud of any little
grudge. Thus it comes to pass that, while Anger causes Sleeplessness,
Sleeplessness is a frequent nurse of Anger.[25]

Finally, among popular delusions concerning propitious conditions of
Thoughts, must be reckoned the belief (which has driven hermits and
philosophers crazy) that thinking is better done in abnormal isolation
than in the natural social state of man. Of course there is benefit
quite incalculable in the reservation of some portion of our days for
solitude. How much excuse is to be made for the shortcomings, the
ill-tempers, the irreligion of those poor people who are scarcely alone
for half an hour between the cradle and the grave, God alone can tell.
But, with such reasonable reservation of our hours and the occasional
precious enjoyment of lonely country walks or rides, the benefits of
solitude, even on Zimmermann’s showing, come nearly to an end; and there
is little doubt that, instead of thinking more, the more hours of
loneliness we devote to doing it, the _less_ we shall really think at
all, or even retain capacity for thinking and not degenerate into
cabbages. Our minds need the stimulus of other minds, as our lungs need
oxygen to perform their functions. After all, if we analyze the
exquisite pleasure afforded us by brilliant and suggestive conversation,
one of its largest elements will be found to be that it has quickened
our thoughts from a heavy amble into a gallop. A really fine talk
between half a dozen well-matched and thoroughly cultivated people, who
discuss an interesting subject with their manifold wealth of allusions,
arguments, and illustrations, is a sort of mental Oaks or Derbyday,
wherein our brains are excited to their utmost speed, and we get over
more ground than in weeks of solitary mooning meditation. It is
superfluous to add that if our constitutional mental tendency be that of
the gentleman who naïvely expressed his feelings by saying impressively
to a friend, “I take _great_ interest in my own concerns, I _assure_ you
I do,” it seems doubly desirable that we should overstep our petty
ring-fence of personal hopes, fears, and emotions of all kinds, and roam
with our neighbors over their dominions, and into further outlying
regions of public and universal interest. Of all ingenious prescriptions
for making a miserable moral hypochondriac, it is difficult to imagine a
better than the orthodox plan of the “Selig-gemachende Kirche” for
making a Saint. Take your man or woman, with a morbidly tender
conscience and a pernicious habit of self-introspection. If he or she
have an agonizing memory of wrong, sin, or sorrow overshadowing the
whole of life, so much the better. Then shut the individual up in a cell
like a toad in a stone, to feed on his or her own thoughts, till death
or madness puts an end to the experiment.

But if the seaside and solitude and the midnight couch have been much
overrated as propitious conditions of thought, there are, _per contra_,
certain other conditions of it the value of which has been too much
ignored. The law of the matter seems to be that real hard Thought, like
Happiness, rarely comes when we have made elaborate preparation for it;
and that the higher part of the mind which is to be exercised works much
more freely when a certain lower part (concerned with “unconscious
cerebration”) is busy about some little affairs of its own department
and its restless activity is thus disposed of. Not one man in fifty does
his best thinking quite motionless, but instinctively employs his limbs
in some way when his brain is in full swing of argument and reflection.
Even a trifling fidget of the hands with a paper-knife, a flower, a
piece of twine, or the bread we crumble beside our plate at dinner,
supplies in a degree this _desideratum_, and the majority of people
never carry on an animated conversation involving rapid thought without
indulging in some such habit. But the more complete employment of our
unconscious cerebration in walking up or down a level terrace or
quarter-deck, where there are no passing objects to distract our
attention and no need to mark where we plant our feet, seems to provide
even better for smooth-flowing thought. The perfection of such
conditions is attained when the walk in question is taken of a still,
soft November evening, when the light has faded so far as to blur the
surrounding withered trees and flowers, but the gentle gray sky yet
affords enough vision to prevent embarrassment. There are a few such
hours in every year which appear absolutely invaluable for calm
reflection, and which are grievously wasted by those who hurry indoors
at dusk to light candles and sit round a yet unneeded fire.

There is also another specially favorable opportunity for abstruse
meditation, which I trust I may be pardoned for venturing to name. It is
the grand occasion afforded by the laudable custom of patiently
listening to dull speakers or readers in the lecture-room or the pulpit.
A moment’s reflection will surely enable the reader to corroborate the
remark that we seldom think out the subject of a new book or article, or
elaborate a political or philanthropic scheme, a family compact, or the
_menu_ of a large dinner, with so much precision and lucidity as when
gazing with vacant respectfulness at a gentleman expatiating with
elaborate stupidity on theology or science. The voice of the charmer as
it rises and falls is almost as soothing as the sound of the waves on
the shore, but not quite equally absorbing to the attention; while the
repose of all around gently inclines the languid mind to alight like a
butterfly on any little flower it may find in the arid waste, and suck
it to the bottom. This beneficent result of sermon and lecture-hearing
is, however, sometimes deplorably marred by the stuffiness of the room,
the hardness and shallowness of the seats (as in that place of severe
mortification of the flesh, the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street),
and lastly by the unpardonable habit of many orators of lifting their
voices in an animated way, as if they really had something to say, and
then solemnly announcing a platitude,—a process which acts on the nerves
of a listener as it must act on those of a flounder to be carried up
into the air half a dozen times in the bill of a heron and then dropped
flat on the mud. Under trials like these, the tormented thoughts of the
sufferer, seeking rest and finding none, are apt to assume quite
unaccountable and morbid shapes, and indulge in freaks of an irrational
kind, as in a dream. The present writer and some sober-minded
acquaintances have, for example, all felt themselves impelled at such
hours to perform aërial flights of fancy about the church or
lecture-room in the character of stray robins or bats. “Here,” they
think gravely (quite unconscious for the moment of the absurdity of
their reflection), “here, on this edge of a monument, I might stand and
take flight to that cornice an inch wide, whence I might run along to
the top of that pillar; and from thence, by merely touching the bald tip
of the preacher’s head, I might alight on the back of that plump little
angel on the tomb opposite, while a final spring would take me through
the open pane of window and perch me on the yew-tree outside.” The whole
may perhaps be reckoned a spontaneous mythical self-representation of
the Psalmist’s cry: “Oh that I had wings like a dove, for then would I
flee away and be at rest.”

Another kind of meditation under the same aggravated affliction is
afforded by making fantastic pictures out of the stains of damp and
tracks of snails on the wall, which often (in village churches
especially) supply the young with a permanent subject of contemplation
in “the doctor with his boots,” the “old lady and her cap,” and the huge
face which would be quite perfect if the spectator might only draw an
eye where one is missing, as in the fresco of Dante in the Bargello.
Occasionally, the sunshine kindly comes in and makes a little lively
entertainment on his own account by throwing the shadow of the
preacher’s head ten feet long on the wall behind him, causing the action
of his jaws to resemble the vast gape of a crocodile. All these,
however, ought perhaps to be counted as things of the past; or, at
least, as very “Rural Recreations of a Country Parishioner,” as A. K. H.
B. might describe them. It is not objects to distract and divert the
attention which anybody can complain of wanting in the larger number of
modern churches in London.

But, if our thoughts are wont to wander off into fantastic dreams when
we are bored, they have likewise a most unfortunate propensity to swerve
into byways of triviality no less misplaced when, on the contrary, we
are interested to excess, and our attention has been fixed beyond the
point wherein the tension can be sustained.

Every one has recognized the truth of Dickens’s description of Fagin, on
his trial, thinking of the pattern of the carpet; and few of us can
recall hours of anguish and anxiety without carrying along with their
tragic memories certain objects on which the eye fastened with
inexplicable tenacity. In lesser cases, and when we have been listening
to an intensely interesting political speech, or to a profoundly
thoughtful sermon (for even _Habitans in Sicco_ may sometimes meet such
cases), the mind seems to “shy” suddenly, like a restive horse, from the
whole topic under consideration, and we find ourselves, intellectually
speaking, landed in a ditch.

Another singular phenomenon under such circumstances is that, on
returning, perhaps after the interval of years, to a spot wherein such
excessive mental tension has been experienced, some of us are suddenly
vividly impressed with the idea that we have been sitting there during
all the intervening time, gazing fixedly on the same pillars and
cornices, the same trees projected against the evening sky, or whatever
other objects happen to be before our eyes. It would appear that the
impression of such objects made on the retina, while the mind was wholly
and vehemently absorbed in other things, must be somehow photographed on
the brain in a different way from the ordinary pictures to which we have
given their fair share of notice as they passed before us, and that we
are dimly aware they have been taken so long. The sight of them once
again bringing out this abnormal consciousness is intensely painful, as
if the real self had been chained for years to the spot, and only a
phantom “I” had ever gone away and lived a natural human existence
elsewhere.

Passing, now, from the external conditions of our Thinking, if we
attempt to classify the Thoughts themselves, we shall arrive, I fear, at
the painful discovery that the majority of us think most about the least
things, and least about the greatest; and that, in short, the mass of
our lucubrations is in the inverse ratio of their value. For example, a
share of our thoughts, quite astonishing in quantity, is occupied by
petty and trivial Arrangements. Rich or poor, it is an immense amount of
thought which all (save the most care-engrossed statesmen or absorbed
philosophers) give to these wretched little concerns. The wealthy
gentleman thinks of how and where and when he will send his servants and
horses here and there, of what company he shall entertain, of the
clearing of his woods, the preservation of his game, and twenty matters
of similar import; while his wife is pondering equally profoundly on the
furniture and ornaments of her rooms, the patterns of her flower-beds or
her worsted-work, the _menu_ of her dinner, and the frocks of her little
girls. Poor people need to think much more anxiously of the perpetual
problem, “How to make both ends meet,” by pinching in this direction and
earning something in that, and by all the thousand shifts and devices by
which life can be carried on at the smallest possible expenditure. One
of the very worst evils of limited means consists in the amount of
thinking about sordid little economies which becomes imperative when
every meal, every toilet, and every attempt at locomotion is a
battle-field of ingenuity and self-denial against ever-impending debt
and difficulty. Among men, the evil is most commonly combated by
energetic efforts to _earn_ rather than to _save_; but among women, to
whom so few fields of honest industry are open, the necessity for a
perpetual guard against the smallest freedom of expense falls, with all
its cruel and soul-crushing weight, and on the faces of thousands of
them may be read the sad story of youthful enthusiasm all nipped by
pitiful cares, anxieties, and meannesses, perhaps the most foreign of
all sentiments to their naturally liberal and generous hearts.

Next to actual arrangements which have some practical use, however
small, an inordinate quantity of thought is wasted by most of us on
wholly unreal plans and hypotheses which the thinker never even supposes
to bear any relation with the living world. Such are the endless moony
speculations, “_if_ such a thing had not happened” which did happen, or
“_if_ So-and-so had gone hither” instead of thither, or “_if_ I had only
said or done” what I did not say or do, “there would have
followed”—heaven knows what. Sometimes we pursue such endless and
aimless guessings with a companion, and then we generally stop short
pretty soon with the vivid sense of the absurdity of our behavior;
unless in such a case as that of the celebrated old childless couple,
who, looking back over their fireside on forty years of unbroken union,
proceeded to speculate on what they should have done _if_ they had had
children, and finally quarrelled and separated for ever on a divergence
of opinion respecting the best profession for their (imaginary) second
son. But, when alone, we go on weaving interminable cobwebs out of such
gossamer threads of thought, like poor Perrette with her pot of milk,—a
tale the ubiquity of which among all branches of the Aryan race
sufficiently proves the universality of the practice of building
_châteaux en Espagne_.

Of course, with every one who has a profession or business of any kind,
a vast quantity of thought is expended necessarily upon its details,
insomuch that to prevent themselves, when in company from “talking shop”
is somewhat difficult. The tradesman, medical man, lawyer, soldier,
landholder, have each plenty to think of in his own way; and in the case
of any originality of work—such as belongs to the higher class of
literature and art—the necessity for arduous and sustained thought in
composition is so great that (on the testimony of a great many wives) I
have come to the conclusion that a fine statue, picture, or book is
rarely planned without at least a week of domestic irritation and
discomfort, and the summary infliction of little deserved chastisement
on the junior branches of the distinguished author or artist’s family.

Mechanical contrivances obviously give immense occupation to those
singular persons who can love Machines, and do not regard them (as I
must confess is my case) with mingled mistrust, suspicion, and
abhorrence, as small models of the Universe on the Atheistic Projection.
Again, for the discovery of any chemical _desideratum_, ceaseless
industry and years of thought are expended; and a Palissy deems a
quarter of a lifetime properly given to pondering upon the best glaze
for crockery. Only by such sacrifices, indeed, have both the fine and
the industrial arts attained success; and happy must the man be counted
whose millions of thoughts expended on such topics have at the end
attained any practical conclusion to be added to the store of human
knowledge. Not so (albeit the thoughts are much after the same working
character) are the endless meditations of the idle on things wholly
personal and ephemeral, such as the inordinate care about the details of
furniture and equipage now prevalent among the rich in England, and the
lavish waste of feminine minds on double acrostics, art, embroidery,
and, above all, Dress! A young lady once informed me that, after having
for some hours retired to repose, her sister, who slept in the same
room, had disturbed her in the middle of the night: “Eugénie, waken up!
I have thought of a trimming for our new gowns!” Till larger and nobler
interests are opened to women, I fear there must be a good many whose
“dream by night and thought by day” is of trimmings.

When we have deducted all these silly and trivial and useless thoughts
from the sum of human thinking,—and evil and malicious thoughts, still
worse by far,—what small residuum of room is there, alas, for anything
like real serious reflection! How seldom do the larger topics presented
by history, science, or philosophy engage us! How yet more rarely do we
face the great questions of the whence, the why, and the whither of all
this hurrying life of ours, pouring out its tiny sands so rapidly! To
some, indeed, a noble philanthropic purpose or profound religious faith
gives not only consistency and meaning to life, but supplies a
background to all thoughts,—an object high above them, to which the
mental eye turns at every moment. But this is, alas! the exception far
more than the rule; and, where there is no absorbing human affection, it
is on trifles light as air and interests transitory as a passing cloud
that are usually fixed those minds whose boast it is that their thoughts
“travel through eternity.”

Alone among Thoughts of joy or sorrow, hope or fear, stands the grim,
soul-chilling thought of Death. It is a strange fact that, face it and
attempt to familiarize ourselves with it as we may, this one thought
ever presents itself as something fresh, something we had never really
thought before,—“_I shall die!_” There is a shock in the simple words
ever repeated each time we speak them in the depths of our souls.

There are few instances of the great change which has passed over the
spirit of the modern world more striking than the revolution which has
taken place in our judgment respecting the moral expediency of
perpetually thinking about Death. Was it that the whole Classic world
was so intensely entrancing and delightful that, to wean themselves from
its fascinations and reduce their minds to composure, the Saints found
it beneficial to live continually with a skull at their side? For
something like sixteen centuries Christian teachers seem all to have
taken it for granted that merely to write up “Memento mori” was to give
to mankind the most salutary and edifying counsel. Has anybody faith in
the same nostrum now, and is there a single Saint Francis or Saint
Theresa who keeps his or her pet skull alongside of his Bible and
Prayerbook?

A parallel might also be drawn between the medical and spiritual
treatment in vogue in former times and in our own. Up to our generation,
when a man was ill, the first idea of the physician was to bleed him and
reduce him in every way by “dephlogistic” treatment, after which it was
supposed the disease was “drawn off”; and, if the patient expired, the
survivors were consoled by the reflection that Dr. Sangrado had done all
which science and skill could effect to preserve so valuable a life. In
the memory of some now living, the presence of a medical man with a
lancet in his pocket (instantly used on the emergency of a fall from
horseback or a fit of apoplexy, epilepsy, or intoxication), was felt by
alarmed relations to be quite providential. Only somewhere about the
period of the first visitation of cholera in 1832 this phlebotomizing
dropped out of fashion; and, when the doctors had pretty nearly
abandoned it, a theory was broached that it was the human constitution,
not medical science, which had undergone a change, and that men and
women were so much weaker than heretofore that, even in fever, they now
needed to be supported by stimulants. Very much in the same way it would
appear that in former days our spiritual advisers imagined they could
cure moral disease by reducing the vital action of all the faculties and
passions, and bringing a man to feel himself a “dying creature” by way
of training him to live. Nowadays our divines endeavor to fill us with
warmer feelings and more vigorous will, and tell us that

                “’Tis life of which our veins are scant;
                O Life, not Death, for which we pant;
                More life, and fuller, _that_ we want.”

Is it possible that human nature is really a little less vigorous and
passionate than it was when Antony and Cleopatra lived on the earth, or
when the genius of Shakspere made them live on the stage?




                                ESSAY V.
                        TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW.


The father of Grecian philosophy held that “Man was created to know and
to contemplate.” The father of Hebrew philosophy—whose “Song,” if not
his “Wisdom,” is canonical, and whose judgment, if not his life, is
supposed to have been divinely guided—taught the somewhat different
lesson: “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

We have been more or less steadily trying the validity of Solomon’s
dictum for about three thousand years. Would it be premature to take
stock of the results, and weigh whether it be really for human
well-being or the reverse that Knowledge is “increasing,” not only at
the inevitable rate of the accumulating experience of generations, but
also at the highly accelerated pace attained by our educational
machinery? It is at least slightly paradoxical that the same State
should call on its clergy to teach as an infallible truth that “he that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” and at the same time decree for
all its subjects, as if it were a highly benevolent measure, universal
compulsory education.

I fear that the prejudice in favor of Knowledge is so potent that no
reader will give me credit for entering on this inquiry in any other
spirit than one of banter. Nevertheless, I propose in the present paper
to examine, to the best of my ability, the general bearings of
book-knowledge upon human happiness and virtue, and so attain to some
conclusion on the matter, and decide whether Solomon did or did not give
proof of profound sagacity in originating the axiom that “Ignorance is
bliss” in the usual negative form of Hebrew verities; and also in
foretelling (nearly thirty centuries before the present London
publishing season) that “of the making of books there is no end.”
Knowledge, like other evils, it seems, is infinitely reproductive.

The larger and simpler objections to book-lore lie on the surface of the
case. First. Health, bodily activity, and muscular strength are almost
inevitably exchanged in a certain measure for learning. Ardent students
are rarely vigorous or agile; and, in the humbler ranks, the loss of
ruddy cheeks and stalwart limbs among the children of the peasantry,
after schools have been established in a village, has been constantly
observed. The close and heated class-rooms in which the poor urchins sit
(often in winter with clothes and shoes drenched through with rain or
snow) form a bad exchange, in a physical point of view, for the scamper
across the common, and the herding of sheep on the mountain. Let us put
the case at its lowest. Suppose that, out of three persons who receive
an ordinary book-education, one always loses a certain share of health;
that he is never so vigorous as he would have been, and is more liable
to consumption, dyspepsia, and other woes incident to sedentary
humanity, of which again he bequeaths a tendency to his offspring. Here
is surely some deduction from the supposed sum of happiness derivable
from knowledge. Can all the flowers of rhetoric of all the poets make
atonement for the loss of the bounding pulse, the light, free step, the
cool brain of perfect health?

Secondly. It is not only the health of life’s noon and evening which is
more or less compromised by study, but the morning hours of life’s
glorious prime, hours such as never can come again on this side heaven,
which are given to dull, dog’s-eared books and dreary “copies,” and
sordid slates, instead of to cowslips and buttercups, the romp in the
hay-field, and the flying of the white kite, which soars up into the
deep dark blue and carries the young eyes after it where the unseen lark
is singing and the child-angels are playing among the rolling clouds of
summer. There was once a child called from such dreams to her
lesson,—the dreary lesson of learning to spell possibly those very words
which her pen is now tracing on this page. The little girl looked at her
peacock, sitting in his glory on the balustrade of the old granite
steps, with nothing earthly ever to do but to sun himself and eat nice
brown bread and call “Pea-ho!” every morning, and the poor child burst
into a storm of weeping, and sobbed, “I wish I were a peacock! I wish I
were a peacock!” Truly Learning ought to have something to show to
compensate for the thousand tears shed in similar anguish! School-rooms
are usually the ugliest, dullest, most airless and sunless rooms in the
houses where they exist; and yet in these dens we ruthlessly imprison
children day after day, year after year, till childhood itself is over,
never, never to return. And _then_ the young man or woman may go forth
freely among the fields and woods, and find them fair and sweet, but
never so fair or so sweet as they were in the wasted years of infancy.
Who can lay his hand on his heart, and say that a cowslip or a daffodil
smells now as it used to smell when it was so very much easier to pluck
it, quite on our own level? Do strawberries taste as they did, and is
there the same drop of honey in each of the flowerets of the red clover?
Are modern kittens and puppies half so soft and so funny as they were in
former days when we were young? No one will dare affirm any of these
things who has reached years of discretion. Is it not then a most
short-sighted policy—giving away of a bird in hand for a bird in the
bush—to sacrifice the joyous hours of young existence for the value of
advantages (if advantages indeed they be) to be reaped in later and
duller years? Watch a child at play, O reader, if you have forgotten
your own feelings. Let it be Coleridge’s

                     “Little singing, dancing elf,
                     Singing, dancing by itself.”

Catch, if your dim orbs are sharp enough, those cloudless blue eyes
looking straight into yours, and hear the laugh which only means the
best of all possible jokes, “I _am_ so happy!” Then go to your stupid
desk, and calculate algebraically what amount of classics and
mathematics are equivalent to that ecstasy of young existence, wherein

         “Simply to feel that we breathe, that we live,
         Is worth the best joy which life elsewhere can give.”

The pagan Irish believed in a paradise for the virtuous dead, and called
it “Innis-na-n’Oge,” the “Island of the Young.” We all live there the
first dozen years of mortality; and, unless we prove unusually
excellent, I fear it may be long before we arrive at a better place.

But hitherto we have taken for granted that the little prisoners of the
school-room are all sure to live and come into their fortunes of
erudition, earned with so many tear-blisters on their lesson-books. Of
course, however, this is far from being the true state of the case. The
poor little child, whose happiness—innocent, certain, and immediate
happiness—is bartered so ruthlessly for the remote and contingent
benefit of his later years, may very probably never see those years at
all; nay, in a fixed average number of cases, it is absolutely certain
that he will not grow into a man. Can anything be much more sad than
such an abortive sacrifice? Who does not remember Walter Scott’s “Pet
Marjory,” with her infantine delight in her visits to the country, and
the calves and the geese, and the “bubbly-jocks”; and how she wrote down
in her private journal that she was learning the multiplication table,
and that seven times seven was a “divlish thing,” and quite impossible
to acquire; and how, when somehow at last even the still more dreadful
“eight times eight” had been lodged in her poor little brains, there
came a day when she cried suddenly to her mother, “Oh, my head! my
head!” and then in a few brief hours there was an end of lessons and
their advantages for Marjory forever?

And yet again, when some ardent lad has passed through school and
college, foregoing all the sports of his age, and receiving prizes and
honors, till he stands a first-class man of Oxford or Cambridge, and his
father’s sacrifices and his mother’s yearnings and all his own gallant
and self-denying labors seem on the point of reaping their reward, how
often does it come to pass that with the close of the struggle come the
reaction, the decline, the hasty journey abroad, the hoping against
hope, and then—death!

Thirdly. There is the waste of Eyesight in education. It is understood,
when we see a young man with the “light of the body” dimmed behind glass
spectacles, that he has hurt his eyes by poring over books. A farmer, a
sportsman, or a soldier, purblind at twenty-five or thirty, is a rare
thing to see. It is the scholar, lawyer, or divine who has paid the
penalty of seeing God’s beautiful world evermore through those
abominable bits of glass. And for what mighty advantage? Again I say, it
ought to be something excessively valuable for which a man will exchange
the apple of his eye. Suppose Bell Taylor were to ask a blind gentleman
a fee of a thousand pounds to give him his sight as he has given it to
more than one born blind. The blind man, if he possessed the money,
would doubtless pour it out like water to obtain the priceless boon of
vision. And _this_ is the gift which our boys exchange for a moderate
acquaintance with the Greek language, to be forgotten in a few years
after they leave school!

Half the vast Teutonic nation beholds the universe from behind
spectacles; owing, no doubt, to their vaunted compulsory education,
aided by their truculent black types. And we open-eyed Britons are
exhorted, forsooth, to admire and follow in the steps of those barnacled
Prussians!

Such are three of the most obvious losses to be placed in the scale
against the gains of Knowledge,—the loss to many of bodily health; to
all of the unshackled freedom of childhood; and to not a few of perfect
eyesight.

But we cannot suppose it was to any of these things Solomon alluded when
he linked Knowledge and Sorrow in one category. It is not likely that
those studies of his, about the hyssop and the cedar, injured his
health; nor that the royal sage sat on his famous ivory throne to
receive the Queen of Sheba in a pair of spectacles. As to the loss of
the pleasures of childhood, his well-known opinion of the value of the
Rod (to the wisdom of which the subsequent conduct of his son Rehoboam
afforded an illustration) makes it probable that he would have approved
of the torture of infants through the instrumentality of lessons.
Knowledge and Sorrow had, no doubt, some other connection in his mind;
and that connection we have still to mark.

It is a paradox only too readily verified that the mind as well as the
body suffers in more ways than one from the acquirement of book
knowledge. In the first place, the Memory, laden with an enormous mass
of facts, and accustomed to shift the burden of carrying them to written
notes and similar devices, loses much of its natural tenacity. The
ignorant clodhopper always remembers the parish chronicles better than
the scholarly parson. The old family servant, who is strongly suspected
of not knowing how to write and whose spectacles are never forthcoming
when there is any necessity to read, is the living annalist of the
house, and was never yet known to forget an order, except now and then
on purpose. Not only are the interests, and consequently the attention
and retentive powers, of illiterate persons monopolized by the practical
concerns of life and the tales of the past which may have reached their
ears, but they have actually clearer heads, less encumbered by a
multitude of irrelevant ideas, and can recall whatever they need, at a
moment’s notice, without tumbling over a whole lumber-room full of
rubbish to get at it. The old Rabbinical system of schooling, which
mainly consisted in the committal to memory of innumerable aphorisms and
dicta of sages and prophets, possessed this enormous advantage over
modern instruction,—that whatever a man had so learned he possessed at
his fingers’ ends, ready for instant use in every argument. But, as half
the value of knowledge in practical life depends on the rapidity with
which it can be brought to bear at a given moment on the point of issue,
and as a ready-witted man will not merely outshine in discussion his
slow-brained antagonist, but forestall and outrun him in every way, save
in the labors of the library, it follows that to sacrifice the ready
money of the mind for paper hard to negotiate is extremely bad economy.
Mere book-learning, instead of rendering the memory more strong and
agile, accustoms it to hobble on crutches.

Other mental powers suffer even more than the memory by the introduction
of books. That method which we familiarly call the “Rule of Thumb”—that
is, the method of the Artist—is soon lost when there come to be
treatises and tables of calculation to form, instead, the Method of the
Mechanic. The boats of Greece are to this day _sculptured_ rather than
wrought by the shipwrights, even as the old architects cut their marble
architraves by the eye of genius trained to beauty and symmetry, not by
the foot-rule of precedent and book-lore. The wondrous richness and
harmony of coloring of Chinese and Indian and Turkish stuffs and carpets
and porcelain are similarly the result, not of any rules to be reduced
to formulæ, but of taste unfettered by pattern-books, unwarped by
Schools of Art Manufacture, bequeathed through long generations, each
acquainted intimately with the aforesaid “rule of thumb.”

For the Reasoning powers, the noblest in the scale of human faculties,
it may be fairly doubted whether the modern increase of Knowledge has
done much to strengthen them, when we find ourselves still unprotected
by common sense against such absurdities as those which find currency
amongst us. Men are treated amongst us like fowls, crammed to the crop
with facts, facts, facts, till their digestion of them is impaired.

As to the Imagination, books are like the stepping-stones whereon fancy
trips across an otherwise impassable river to gather flowers on the
further bank. But it may be questioned whether the reading eye ever
really does the same work as the hearing ear. The voice of tradition
bears, as no book can do, the burden of the feelings of generations. A
ballad learned orally from our mother’s lips seems to have far other
meaning when we recall it, perchance long years after that sweet voice
has been silent, than the stanzas we perused yesterday through our
spectacles in a volume freshly reviewed in the _Times_.

Such are the somewhat dubious results of book-lore on the faculties
exercised in its acquisition. It is almost needless to remark that there
are also certain positive vices frequently engendered by the same
pursuit. Bacon’s noble apophthegm, that “a little knowledge leads to
atheism, but a great deal brings us back to God,” needs for commentary
that “a little” must be taken to signify what many people think “much.”
Read in such a sense, it applies not only to religious faith, but to
faith in everything, and most particularly to faith in Knowledge itself.
Nobody despises books so much as those who have read many of them,
except those still more hopeless infidels who have written them. Watch
the very treatment given to his library by a bookworm. Note how the
volumes are knocked about, and left on chairs, and scribbled over with
ill-penned notes, and ruthlessly dog’s-eared and turned down on their
faces on inky tables, and sat upon in damp grass under a tree! Contrast
this behavior towards them with the respectful demeanor of unlettered
mortals, who range the precious and well-dusted tomes like soldiers on
drill on their spruce shelves; nobody pushed back out of the line,
nobody tumbling sideways against his neighbor, nobody standing on his
head! History is not jumbled ignominiously with romance; moral treatises
are not made sandwiches of (as we have beheld) between the yellow covers
of Zola; and “Sunday books” have a prominent pew all to themselves,
where they are not rubbed against by either profane wit or worldly
wisdom. Such is the different appreciation of literature by those to
whom it is very familiar and by those to whom it preserves still a
little of the proverbial magnificence of all unknown things.

We used to hear, some years ago, so much about the Pride of Learning
that it would be a commonplace to allude to that fault among the
contingent disadvantages of study. One of the Fathers describes how he
was flogged by an angel for his predilection for Cicero,—an anecdote
which must have made many a school-boy, innocent of any such error, feel
that life was only a dilemma between the rods of terrestrial and
celestial pedagogues. But it is obvious that the saint had in his mind a
sense that the reading of “Tusculan Disputations” had set him up—saint
though he was—above the proper spirit of implicit docility and
unqualified admiration for more sacred instructions. The critical
spirit, which is the inevitable accompaniment of high erudition, is
obviously a good way off from that ovine frame of mind which divines, in
all ages, have extolled as the proper attitude for their flocks. Nay, in
a truer and better sense than that of the open-mouthed credulity so idly
inculcated, it must be owned that, short of that really great knowledge
of which Bacon spoke and which allies itself with the infinite wisdom of
love and faith, there are few things more hurtful to a man than to be
aware that he knows a great deal more than those about him. The main
difference between what are called self-made men and those who have been
educated in the upper grades is that the former, from their isolation,
have a constant sense of their own knowledge, as if it were a Sunday
coat, while the others wear it easily as their natural attire. The best
thing which could happen to a village Crichton would be to be
mercilessly snubbed by an Oxford don. The days when women were
“Précieuses” and “Blue Stockings” were those in which it was a species
of miraculous Assumption of Virgins when they were lifted into the
heaven of Latin Grammar.

But, passing over the injury to healthy eyesight and mental vigor
contingent on learning, and the moral faults sometimes engendered
thereby, I proceed to ask another question. What is the ethical value of
the Knowledge bought at such a price, and heaped together by mankind
during the thirty centuries since Solomon uttered his warning? How has
it contributed to their moral welfare?

Surely it is true that even as Art too often gilds sensuality, and
renders it attractive to souls otherwise above its influence, so
Knowledge must open new roads to temptation, and take off from sin that
strangeness and horror which is one of the best safeguards of the soul.
The old jest of the confessor, who asked the penitent whether he did
such and such dishonest tricks, and received the reply, “No, Father; but
I will do them next time,” was only a fable of one form of the mischief
of knowledge; and that not the most fatal form either. To know how to do
wrong is one small step towards doing it. To know that scores and
hundreds and thousands of people, in all lands and ages, have done the
same wrong, is a far larger encouragement to the timidity of guilt. Not
only is it dangerous to know that there is a descent to Avernus, but
specially dangerous to know that it is easy and well trodden. Dr. Watts
was injudicious, to say the least of it, to betray to children that the
way to perdition is a

                   “Broad road, where thousands go,”

which, moreover,

                      “Lies near, and opens fair.”

Better let people suppose that it has become quite grass-grown and
impassable.

Many offences, such as drunkenness, debauchery, swindling, adulteration,
and false weights, are diseases propagated, chiefly, if not solely, like
small-pox by direct infection conveyed in the knowledge that A, B, C,
and D do the same things. David was not so far wrong to be angry; and
divines need not be so anxious to excuse him for being so, when he saw
the “wicked” flourishing “like green bay-trees.” Such sights are, to the
last degree, trying and demoralizing.

In a yet larger and sadder sense, the knowledge of the evil of the
world, of the baseness, pollution, cruelty, which have stained the earth
from the earliest age till this hour, is truly a knowledge fraught with
dread and woe. He who can walk over the carnage field of history and
behold the agonies of the wounded and the fallen, the mutilations and
hideous ruin of what was meant to be such beautiful humanity,—he who can
see all this, ay, or but a corner of that awful Aceldama, and yet retain
his unwavering faith in the final issue of the strife, and his
satisfaction that it has been permitted to human free will, must be a
man of far other strength than he who judges of the universe from the
peaceful prosperity of his parish, and believes that the worst of ills
is symbolized by the stones under which “the rude forefathers of the
hamlet sleep.” Almost every form of knowledge is some such trial of
faith. Look at zoölogy and palæontology. What revelations of pain and
death in each hideous artifice of jagged tooth, and ravening beak, and
cruel claw! What mysterious laws of insect and fungus life developed
within higher organisms, to whom their presence is torture! What savage
scenes of pitiless strife in the whole vast struggle for existence of
every beast and bird, every fish and reptile! Turn to ethnology, and
gather up the facts of life of all the barbarian tribes of Africa and
Polynesia; of the countless myriads of their progenitors; and of those
who dwelt in Europe and Asia in bygone æons of prehistoric time. Is not
the story of these squalid, half-human, miserable creatures full of woe?
Our fathers dreamed of a Paradise and of a primeval couple dwelling
there in perfect peace and innocence. We have at last so eaten of the
Tree of Knowledge that we have been driven out of even the ideal Eden;
and instead thereof we behold the earliest parents of our race, dwarf
and hirsute, shivering and famished, contending with mammoths in a
desert world, and stung and goaded by want and pain along every step in
the first advance from the bestiality of the baboon into the
civilization of a man.

Turn to astronomy, and we peer, dazed and sick, into the abysses of time
and space opened beneath us; bottomless abysses where no plummet can
sound, and all our toylike measures of thousands of ages and millions of
miles drop useless from our hands. Can any thought be more tremendous
than the question, What are _we_ in this immensity? We had fondly
fancied we were Creation’s last and greatest work, the crown and glory
of the universe, and that our world was the central stage for the drama
of God. Where are we now? When the “stars fall from heaven,” will they
“fall on the earth even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs”? Nay,
rather will one of the heavenly host so much as notice when our little
world, charged with all the hopes of man, bursts like a bubble, and
falls in the foam of a meteor shower, illumining for a single night some
planet calmly rolling on its way?

Let us pass from the outer into the inner realm, and glance at the
developments of human thought. The knowledge of Philosophy, properly so
called, from Pythagoras and Plato to Kant and Spencer,—is it a Knowledge
the increase of which is wholly without “sorrow”? Not the most pathetic
poem in literature seems to me half so sad as Lewes’s History of
Philosophy. Those endless wanderings amid the labyrinths of Being and
Knowing, Substance and Phenomenon, Nominalism and Realism, which, to
most men, seem like a troubled “dream within a dream,” to him who has
taken the pains to understand them rather appear like the wanderings of
the wretch lost in the catacombs. He roams hither and thither, and feels
feebly along the walls, and stumbles in the dark, finding himself in a
passage which has no outlet, and turns back to seek another way of
escape, and grasps at something he deems may contain a clew to the far
distant daylight, and, lo! it is but an urn filled with dust and dead
men’s bones.

Faust is the true type of the student of metaphysics when he marks the
skull’s “spectral smile”:—

               “Saith it not that thy brain, like mine,
               Still loved and sought the beautiful,
               Loved truth for its own sake, and sought,
               Regardless of aught else the while,
               Like mine the light of cloudless day,
               And in unsatisfying thought
               By twilight glimmers led astray,
               Like mine, at length, sank overwrought?”

There _may_ be truth within our reach. Some of us deem we have found it
in youth, and, passing out of the metaphysic stage of thought, use our
philosophy as a scaffolding wherewith to build the solid edifice of
life, gradually heeding less and less how that scaffolding may prove
rotten or ill-jointed. But, even in such a case, the knowledge of all
that _has_ been, and _is_ not, in the world of man’s highest thought is
a sorrowful one. As we wander on from one system to another, we feel as
if we were but numbering the gallant ships with keels intended to cut
such deep waters, and topmasts made to bear flags so brave, which lie
wrecked and broken into drift-wood along the shore of the enchanted
Loadstone Isle.

What is, then, the conclusion of our long pleading? Knowledge is
acquired at the cost of a certain measure of health, and eyesight, and
youthful joy. Knowledge involves the deterioration of some faculties as
well as the strengthening of others. Knowledge engenders sundry moral
faults. In the realms of history, of physical and of mental science, the
survey of things obtained through knowledge is full of sadness and
solemnity. The telescope which has revealed to us a thousand galaxies of
suns has failed to show us the Heaven which we once believed was close
overhead.

Is then the pursuit of Knowledge, after all, truly a delusion, the worst
and weariest of human mistakes, a thing to which we are driven by our
necessities on one hand and lured by our thirst for it on the other, but
which, nevertheless, like the martyrs’ cup of salt water, only burns our
lips with its bitter brine?

Not so! a thousand times, no! Knowledge, like Virtue, is not good
because it is useful, but useful because it is good. It is useful
contingently, and good essentially. The joy of it is simple, and not
only needs not to be supplemented by accessory advantages, but is well
worth the forfeit of many advantages to obtain. The most miserable
wretch we can imagine is the ignorant convict locked up in a solitary
cell, with nothing to employ his thoughts but unattainable vice and
frustrated crime, whereon his stupid judges leave him to ruminate as if
such poison were moral medicine to heal the diseases of his soul. And,
on the other hand, one of the happiest beings we can imagine is the man
at the opposite end of the intellectual scale, who lives in the free
acquirement of noble knowledge. What is any “increase of sorrow”
incurred thereby, compared to the joy of it? To build Memory like a
gallery hung round with all the loveliest scenes of nature and all the
masterpieces of art; to make the divine chorus of the poets sing for us
their choicest strains whenever we beckon them from their cells; to talk
familiarly, as if they were our living friends, with the best and wisest
men who have ever lived on earth, and link our arms in theirs in the
never-withering groves of an eternal Academe,—this is to burst the
bounds of space and bring the ages together, and lift ourselves out of
the sordid dust to sit at the banquet of heroes and of gods.




                               ESSAY VI.
                 THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE.


Whether it is best to live rapidly or slowly; whether the “twenty years
of Europe” be preferable to the “cycle of Cathay”; and what is to be
said on behalf of each of the two modes of existence,—supposing that we
have the choice between them,—seem to be questions not unworthy of a
little consideration. It is quite possible that the common impulse to be
“in among the throngs of men,” and to cram a month’s ideas and
sensations into a day, may be the truest guide to happiness; indeed, it
is rather sorrowful to doubt that it should be so, considering how every
successive census shows the growth of the urban over the rural
populations, and how strongly the magnets of the great cities seem
destined in future years to draw into them all the loose attractable
human matter in each country. Nevertheless, it must be admitted to be
also possible that, like the taste for tobacco or alcohol or opium, the
taste for town life may be an appetite the indulgence of which is
deleterious, and that our gains of enjoyment thereby obtained may be
practically outbalanced by the loss of pleasures which slip away
meanwhile unperceived. It would be satisfactory, once for all, to feel
assured that in choosing either town or country life (when we have the
choice), we not only follow immediate inclination, but make deliberate
selection of that which must necessarily be the higher and happier kind
of life, on which, when the time comes for saying good-night, we shall
look back without the miserable regret that we have permitted the nobler
duties and the sweeter joys to escape us, while we have spent our years
in grasping at shadows and vanities. The dog with the bone in his mouth,
who drops it to catch the bone in the water, is a terrible warning to
all mankind. But which is the real bone, and which is only the
reflection? The question is not easily answered.

Let us premise that it is of English country life and town life alone I
mean to speak. Foreigners—Frenchmen, for example—who live in the country
seem always to do so under protest, and to wish to convey to the
traveller that, like the patriarch, they are only strangers and
sojourners in the rural districts, seeking a better country, even a
Parisian. Molière’s Comtesse d’Escarbagnas, who has been six weeks in
the capital once in her life, and who indignantly asks her visitor, “_Me
prenez-vous pour une provinciale, Madame?_” is the type of them all. Of
course, country life taken thus as a temporary and rather disgraceful
banishment can never display its true features or produce its proper
quantum of enjoyment.

And again, among English forms of country life, it is life in _bona
fide_ rural districts which we must take for our type. All round London
there now exists a sort of intellectual cordon, extending from twenty to
thirty miles into Kent and Surrey, and about ten miles into Herts and
Essex. Professor Nichols might have mapped it as he did our starry
cluster, by jotting down every house on the boundary inhabited by
politicians, literary men, and artists, and then running a line all
round from one to another. Within this circumference (of course,
extending year by year), the ideas, habits, and conversation of the
inhabitants are purely Londonesque. The _habitué_ of London
dinner-parties finds himself perfectly at home at every table where he
sits down, and may take it for granted that his hosts and their guests
will all know the same familiar characters, the same anecdotes of the
season, the books, the operas, the exhibitions; and, much more than all
this, will possess the indescribable easy London manner of lightly
tripping over commonplace subjects, and seriously discussing only really
interesting ones, which is the art of conversational perspective. Beyond
the invisible mental London Wall which we have described, the wanderer
seems suddenly to behold another intellectual realm. As the author of
the “Night Thoughts” describes a rather more startling experience, he
stands on the last battlement, which

                “Looks o’er the vale of non-existence,”—

at the end of all things wherewith he is familiar. He has, in short,
penetrated into the Rural Districts of the Mind, where men’s ideas have
hedges and ditches no less than their fields.

And once again we must take English country life in its most elevated
and perfect form,—that of the hereditary landed gentry,—to contrast it
most advantageously with the life of towns. To understand and enjoy
country life as it may be enjoyed, a man should not only live in one of
those “Stately Homes of England,” of which Mrs. Hemans was so enamoured,
but be born and have spent his youth in such a house, built by his
fathers in long past generations. A wealthy merchant or a great lawyer
who buys in his declining years the country seat of some fallen family,
to enjoy therein the honorable fruits of his labors may probably be a
much more intelligent person than the neighboring squire, whose acres
have descended to him _depuis que le monde est monde_. But he can no
more make himself into a country gentleman, and acquire the tastes and
ideas of one, or learn to understand _from the inside_ the loves and
hates, pleasures and prejudices of squiredom, than he can acquire the
_dolce favella Toscana_ by buying himself a Florentine barony.

And, lastly, our typical country life must neither be that of people so
great and wealthy as to be called frequently by political interests up
to Parliament, and who possess two or more great estates (a man can no
more have two _homes_ than he can have two heads), nor yet that of
people in embarrassed and narrow circumstances. The genuine squire is
never rich in the sense in which great merchants and manufacturers are
rich; for, however many acres he may possess, it is tolerably certain
that the claims on them will be quite in proportion to their extent.
There is, in fact, a _kind of money_ which never comes out of land; a
certain freedom in the disposal of large sums quite unknown among the
landed gentry, at least in these days. But, if not possessed of a heavy
balance at their bankers, the country family must have the wherewithal
for the young men to shoot and hunt and fish, and for the girls to ride
or amuse themselves with garden and pleasure-grounds according to taste.
All these things, being elements of the typical English country life,
must be assumed as at least attainable at will by our “Country Mouse” if
he is not to be put altogether out of countenance by his brother of the
town.

As for the Town Mouse, he need not be rich, nor is it more than a
trifling advantage to him (felt chiefly at the outset of his career)
that his father or grandfather should have occupied the same social
position as himself. All that is needed is that, in the case of a man,
he should belong to a good club, and go out often to dinner; and, in the
case of a lady, that she should have from one hundred to five hundred
people on her visiting list. Either of these fortunate persons may,
without let or hindrance, experience pretty nearly all the intellectual
and moral advantages and disadvantages of living in a town, provided
their place of abode be London. Over every other city in the empire
there steals some breath of country air, if it be small; or, if it be
large, its social character is so far modified by special commercial,
industrial, or ecclesiastical conditions that its influence cannot be
held to be merely that of a town _pur et simple_; nor are the people who
come out of it properly typically towny, but rather commercial-towny,
manufacturing-towny, or cathedral-towny, as the case may be.

Turn we now from these preliminaries to the characteristics of the Town
life and the Country life, each in its own most perfect English form.
Let us see first what is to be said for each, and then strike our
balance. Very briefly we may dismiss the commonly recognized external
features of both, and pass as rapidly as possible to the more subtle
ones, which have scarcely perhaps been noted as carefully as their
importance as items in the sum of happiness will warrant.


                         TOWN MOUSE _loquitur_.

“I confess I love London. It _is_ a confession, of course, for everybody
who lives in the country seems to think there is a particular virtue in
doing so, resembling the cognate merit of early rising. Even that
charming town poet, Mr. Locker, practically admits the same when he
says,—

                 ‘I hope I’m fond of much that’s good,
                   As well as much that’s gay;
                 I’d like the country _if I could_,
                   I like the Park in May.’

“The truth is that one wants _to live_, not to vegetate; to do as much
good, either to ourselves or other people, as time permits; to receive
and give impressions; to feel, to act, to _be_ as much as possible in
the few brief years of mortal existence; and this concentrated Life can
be lived in London as nowhere else. If a man have any ambition, here it
may best be pursued. If he desire to contend for any truth or any
justice, here is his proper battle-field. If he love pleasure, here are
fifty enjoyments at his disposal for one which he can obtain in the
country. The mere sense of forming part of this grand and complicated
machine, whereof four millions of men and women work the wheels, makes
my pulse beat faster, and gives me a sense as if I were marching to the
sound of trumpets. Then the finish and completeness of London life is
delightful to the thoroughly civilized mind. It is only the
half-reclaimed savage who is content with unpaved and unlighted roads,
ill-trained servants, slovenly equipages, and badly cooked, badly
attended dinners. Like my little nibbling prototype who served his feast
‘_sur un tapis de Turquie_,’ I like everything, down to the little card
on which my _menu_ is written, to be perfect about me. The less I am
reminded by disagreeable sensations of my animal part, the more room is
left for the exercise of my higher intellectual functions. The ascetic
who lives on locusts and wild honey, and _catches the locusts_, has far
less leisure to think about better things than the alderman who sits
down every day to ten courses, served by a well-trained staff of London
servants. The sense of order, of ease, of dignity and courtesy, is
continually fostered and flattered in the great Imperial City, which,
notwithstanding its petty faults of local government, is still the
freest and noblest town the globe has ever borne. People talk of the
‘freedom’ of the country, and my quondam host, the Country Mouse, is
perpetually boasting of his ‘crust of bread and liberty.’ But, except
the not very valuable license to wear shabby old clothes, I am at a loss
to discover wherein the special freedom of rural life consists. You are
certainly watched, and your actions, looks, and behavior commented on
fifty times more by your idle neighbors in the country, gasping for
gossip, than by your busy neighbors in town, who never trouble
themselves to turn their heads when you pass them in the street, or even
to find out your name if you live next door. In the country, you have
generally the option of going on either of three or four roads. In
London, you have the choice of as many thousand streets. In the country,
you may ‘kill something’ whenever you take your walks abroad, if that
special privilege of the British gentleman be dear to your soul, and you
care to shoot, hunt, or fish. Or, if you belong to the softer sex or
sort, you may amuse yourself in your garden or shrubbery, play tennis,
teach in the village school, or pay a visit to some country neighbor who
will bore you to extinction. In London, you have ten times as large a
choice of occupations, and five hundred times as pleasant people to
visit; seeing that in the country even clever men and women grow dull,
and in town the most stupid get _frotté_ with other people’s ideas and
humor.

“Again,—and this is a most important consideration in favor of
London,—when a man has no particular bodily pain or mental affliction,
and is not in want of money, the worst evil which he has to dread is
_ennui_. To be bored is the ‘one great grief of life’ to people who have
no other grief. But can there be any question whether _ennui_ is better
avoided in London or in the country? Even in the month of August, as
somebody has remarked, ‘when London is “empty,” there are always more
people in it than anywhere else’; and where there are people there must
be the endless play of human interests and sympathies. Nay, for my part,
I find a special gratification in the cordiality wherewith my
acquaintances, left stranded like myself by chance in the dead season,
hail me when we meet in Pall Mall like shipwrecked mariners on a rock;
and in the respectful enthusiasm wherewith I am greeted in the
half-deserted shops, where in July I made my modest purchases, unnoticed
and unknown. In the country, on the contrary, _Ennui_ stalks abroad all
the year round; and the puerile ceremonies wherewith the ignorant
natives strive to conjure away the demon—the dismal tea and tennis
parties, the deplorable archery meetings, and, above all, the really
frightful antediluvian institution, called ‘Spending a Day’—only place
us more helplessly at his mercy. We conjugate the reflective verb ‘to be
Bored,’ in all moods and tenses; not in the light and airy way of
townsfolk, when they trivially observe they were ‘bored at such a party
last night,’ or decline to be ‘bored by going to hear such a preacher on
Sunday morning,’ but sadly and in sober earnest, as men who recognize
that boredom is a chronic disease from which they have no hope of
permanent relief. There is, in short, the same difference between
_ennui_ in the country and _ennui_ in town as between thirst in the
midst of Sahara and thirst in one’s home, where one may ring the bell at
any moment and call for soda water.”


So speaks the modern Town Mouse, describing the more superficial and
obvious advantages of his abode over those of his friend in the country.
And (equally on the surface of things) straightway replies—


                             COUNTRY MOUSE.

“There is some sense in these boasts of my illustrious friend and guest,
but against them I think I can produce equivalent reasons for preferring
the country. In the first place, if he lives _faster_, I live _longer_;
and I have better health than he all the time. My lungs are not clogged
with smoke, my brain not addled by eternal hurry and interruption, my
eyes not dimmed by fog and gaslight into premature blindness. While his
limbs are stiffening year by year till he can only pace along his
monotonous pavement, I retain till the verge of old age much of the
agility and vigor wherewith I walked the moors and climbed the mountains
in my youth. He is pleased at having twenty times as many sensations in
a day as I; but, if nineteen out of the twenty be jarring noises,
noxious smells, plague, worry, and annoyance, I am quite content with my
humbler share of experience. Even if his thick-coming sensations and
ideas be all pleasant, I doubt if he ever have the leisure necessary to
enjoy them. Very little would be gained by the most exquisite dinner
ever cooked, and the finest wines ever bottled, if a man should be
obliged to gobble them standing up, while his train, just ready to
start, is whistling behind him. Londoners _gulp_ their pleasures, we
country folk _sip_ such as come in our way; think of them a long time in
advance with pleasant anticipation, and ruminate on them and talk them
over for months afterwards. I submit that even a few choice
gratifications thus carefully prized add to a man’s sense of happiness
as much as double the number which are received when he is too weary to
enjoy or too hurried to recall them.

“Again, the permanent and indefeasible delights of the country seem
somehow to be more indispensable to human beings than the high-strung
gratifications of the town. The proof of this fact is that, while _we_
can live at home all the year round, Town Mice, after eight or nine
months’ residence at longest, begin to hate their beloved city, and pine
for the country. Even when they are in the full fling of the London
season, it is instructive to notice the enthusiasm and sparkle wherewith
they discuss their projected tours a few weeks later among Swiss
mountains or up Norwegian fiords. Also it may be observed how of all the
entertainments of the year the most popular are the Flower-shows, and
the afternoon Garden-parties in certain private grounds. Even the
wretched, unmanly sport of Hurlingham has become fashionable, chiefly
because it has brought men and women out of London for a day into the
semblance of a country place. Had the gentlemen shot the poor pigeons in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields or Bloomsbury, the admiring spectators of their
prowess would have been exceedingly few. Nay, it is enough to watch in
any London drawing-room wherein may stand on one table a bouquet of the
costliest hot-house flowers, and on the other a bowl of primroses in
March, of hawthorn in May, and of purple heather in July, and see how
every guest will sooner or later pay some little affectionate attention
to the vase which brings the reminiscence of the fields, woods, and
mountains, taking no notice at all of the gorgeous azaleas and
pelargoniums, gardenias, and camellias, in the rival nosegay. It is very
well to boast of the ‘perfection’ and ‘finish’ of London life, but the
‘perfection’ fails to supply the first want of nature,—fresh air; and
the ‘finish’ yet waits for a commencement in cheerful sunlight
unobscured by smoke and fog, and a silence which shall not be marred all
day and night by hideous, jarring, and distracting sounds. What man is
there who would prefer to live in one of the Venetian palace chambers,
gorgeously decorated and adorned with frescos and marbles, and gilding
and mirrors, but with a huge high wall, black, damp, and slimy, within
two feet of the windows, shutting out the light of day and the air of
heaven, rather than in a homely English drawing-room, furnished with
nothing better than a few passable water-color sketches and some
chintz-covered chairs and sofas, but opening down wide on a sunny
garden, with an acacia waving its blossoms over the emerald sward, and
the children weaving daisy chains round the neck of the old collie who
lies beside them, panting with the warmth of the weather and his own
benevolence?

“Then as to the dulness of our country conversation, wherewith my
distinguished friend the Town Mouse has rather impolitely taunted us. Is
it because we take no particular interest in his gossip of the clubs
that he thinks himself justified in pronouncing us stupid? Perhaps we
also think him a trifle local (if we may not say provincial) in his
choice of topics, and are of opinion that the harvest prospects of our
country, and the relations of agricultural labor to capital, are
subjects quite as worthy of attention as his petty and transitory
_cancans_ about articles in reviews, quarrels, scandals, and jests. East
Indians returning to Europe after long absence are often amazed that
nobody at home cares much to hear why Colonel Chutnee was sent from
Curriepoor to Liverabad, or how it happened that Mrs. Cayenne broke off
her engagement with old General Temperatesty. And in like manner perhaps
a Londoner may be surprised without much reason that his intensely
interesting ‘latest intelligence’ is rather thrown away upon us down in
the shires.”


These, as we premised, are the obvious and salient advantages and
disadvantages of Town and Country life respectively observed and
recognized by everybody who thinks on the subject. It is the purport of
the present paper to pass beyond them to some of the more subtle and
less noticed features of either mode of existence, and to attempt to
strike some kind of balance of the results as regards individuals of
different character and the same individual in youth and old age.

When we ask seriously the question which, of any two ways of spending
our years, is the most conducive to Happiness, we are apt to overlook
the fact that it is not the one which supplies us with the most numerous
isolated items of pleasure, but the one of which the whole current tends
to maintain in us the _capacity_ for enjoyment at the highest pitch and
for as long a time as possible. There is something exceedingly stupid in
our common practice of paying superabundant attention to all the
external factors of happiness down to the minutest rose-leaf which can
be smoothed out for our ease, and all the time forgetting that there
must always be an internal factor of _delightability_ to produce the
desired result, just as there must be an eye wherewith to see as well as
candles to give light. The faculty of _taking_ enjoyment, of _finding_
sweetness in the rose, grandeur in the mountain, refreshment in food and
rest, interest in books, and happiness in loving and being loved, is—as
we must perceive the moment we consider it—indefinitely more precious
than any gratification which can be offered to the senses, the
intellect, or the affections, just as eyesight is more valuable than the
finest landscape, and the power of loving better than the homage of a
world. Yet, as Shelley lamented,—

                      “Rarely, rarely comest thou,
                      Spirit of Delight”;

and we allow it to remain absent from our souls, and grow accustomed to
living without it, while all the time we are plodding on, multiplying
gratifications and stimulants, while the delicate and evanescent sense
they are meant to please is becoming numb and dead. We often, indeed,
make religio-philosophical remarks on the beautiful patience and
cheerfulness of sufferers from agonizing disease, and we smile at the
unfailing hilarity wherewith certain Mark Tapleys of our acquaintance
sustain the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We quote, with high
approval, the poet who sings that

                   “Stone walls do not a prison make,
                   Nor iron bars a cage.”

Nevertheless, the singular phenomenon of evident, unmistakable Happiness
enjoyed, in despite of circumstances, never seems to teach us how
entirely secondary all objective circumstances needs must be to the
subjective side of the question, and how much more rational it would be
on our part to look first to securing for ourselves the longest and
completest tenure of the internal elements of enjoyment before we turn
our attention to the attainment of those which are external.

The bearing of this remark on the present subject is, of course,
obvious. Is it Life in Town or Life in the Country wherein the springs
of happiness flow with perennial freshness, and wherein the Spirit of
Delight will burn brightest and longest? To solve this problem, we must
turn over in our minds the various conditions of such a state of mind
and spirits, the most generally recognized of which is bodily Health.

There is not the smallest danger in these days that any inquirer,
however careless, should overlook the vast importance of physical
soundness to every desirable mental result. Indeed, on the contrary, we
may rather expect shortly to find our teachers treating Disease as the
only real delinquency in the world, and all crimes and vices as mere
symptoms of disordered nerves or overloaded stomach,—kleptomania,
dipsomania, homicidal mania, or something equally pardonable on the part
of automata like ourselves. Seriously speaking, a high state of health,
such as the “Original” described himself as having attained, or even
something a few degrees less perfect, is, undoubtedly, a potent factor
in the sum of happiness, causing every separate sensation—sleeping,
waking, eating, drinking, exercise, and rest—to be delightful; and the
folly of people who seek for Happiness, and yet barter away Health for
Wealth or Fame, or any other element thereof, is like that of a man who
should sell gold for dross. Admitting this, it would seem to follow that
Life in the Country, generally understood to be the most wholesome, must
be the most conducive to the state of enjoyment. But there are two
points not quite cleared up on the way to this conclusion. First, bodily
health seems to be, to some people, anything but the blessing it ought
to be, rendering them merely coarse and callous, untouched by those
finer impulses and sentiments which pain has taught their feebler
companions, and so shutting them out from many of the purest and most
spiritual joys of humanity. Paley questioned whether the sum of
happiness would not be increased to most of us by one hour of moderate
pain in every twenty-four; and, though few would directly ask for the
increment of enjoyment so attained, there are perhaps still fewer who
would desire to unlearn all the lessons taught in the school of
suffering, or find themselves with the gross, oxlike nature of many a
farmer or publican, whose rubicund visage bears testimony to his
vigorous appetite and to the small amount of pain, sorrow, or anxiety
which his own or anybody else’s troubles have ever caused him. Taking it
all in all, it seems doubtful, then, whether the most invariably robust
people are really much higher than those with more fluctuating health
who have taken from the bitter cup the sweet drop which is always to be
found at the bottom by those who seek it. For those, unhappiest of all,
whom disease has only rendered more selfish and self-centred and
rebellious, there is, of course, no comparison possible.

And, secondly, Is it thoroughly proved that country life is invariably
healthier than the life of towns? The maladies arising from bad air,
late hours, and that overwork and overstrain which is the modern Black
Death, are of course unknown in the calm-flowing existence of a rural
squire and his family. But there are other diseases which come of
monotonous repose, unvarying meals, and general _tedium vitae_, quite as
bad as the scourges of the town. Of all sources of ill health, I am
inclined to think lack of interest in life, and the constant society of
dull and disheartening people, the very worst and most prolific.
Undoubtedly, it is so among the upper class of women; and the warnings
of certain American physicians against the adoption by girls of any
serious or earnest pursuit seems painfully suggestive of a well-founded
alarm lest their own lists of hysterical and dyspeptic patients should
show a falling off under the new impetus given to women’s work and
study. In London, people have very much less leisure to think about
their ailments, or allow the doctor’s visit to become a permanent
institution, as is so often the case in country houses. The result is
that (whether or not statistics prove the existence of more sickness in
town than in the country) at least we do not hear of eternally ailing
people in London nearly so often as we do in country neighborhoods,
where there are always to be found as stock subjects of local interest
and sympathy old Mr. A.’s gout, and Lady B.’s liver complaint; and those
sad headaches which yet fortunately enable poor Mrs. C. to spend at
least one day in the week in her darkened bedroom out of the reach of
her lord’s intolerable temper.[26] Be it also that the maladies which
townsfolk mostly escape—namely, dyspepsia, hysteria, and neuralgia—are
precisely those which exercise the most direct and fatal influence on
human powers of enjoyment, whereas the ills to which flesh is heir in
great cities, among the upper and well-fed classes, are generally more
remotely connected therewith.

But—_pace_ the doctors and all their materialistic followers—I question
very much whether bodily health, the mere absence of physical disease,
be nearly as indispensable a condition of happiness as certain
peculiarities of the mental and moral constitution. The disposition to
Anxiety, for instance, which reduces many lives to a purgatory of
incessant care,—about money, about the opinion of society, or about the
health and well-being of children,—is certainly a worse drawback to
peace and happiness than half the diseases in the Registrar-General’s
list. This anxious temperament is commonly supposed to be fostered and
excited in towns, and laid to sleep in the peaceful life of the country;
and, if it were certainly and invariably so, I think the balance of
happiness between the two would well-nigh be settled by that fact alone.
But again there is something to be said on the side of the town. An
African traveller has described to me how, after months exposed to the
interminable perils from man and brute and climate, he felt, after his
first night on board a homeward-bound English ship, a reaction from the
tension of anxiety which revealed to himself the anguish he had been
half-unconsciously enduring for many months. In like manner the city man
or the statesman feels, when at last he takes his summer holiday, under
what tremendous pressure of care he has been living during the past
year, or session, in London; and he compares it, naturally enough, with
the comparatively careless life of his friend, the country squire. But
every one in London does not run a race for political victory or social
success, and there are yet some sober old ways of business—both legal
and mercantile—which do not involve the alternative of wealth or ruin
every hour. For such people I apprehend London life is actually rather a
cure for an anxious temperament than a provocative of care. There is no
time for dwelling on topics of a painful sort, or raising spectres of
possible evils ahead. Labors and pleasures, amusements and monetary
worries, succeed each other so rapidly that the more serious anxieties
receive less and less attention as the plot of London life thickens year
by year. One nail drives out another, and we are now and then startled
to remember that there has been really for days and months a reasonable
fear of disaster hanging over us to which we have somehow scarcely given
a thought, while in the country it would have filled our whole horizon,
and we should scarcely have forgotten it day or night.

And, again, quite as important as bodily health and freedom from anxiety
is the possession of a certain childlike freshness of character; a
simplicity which enables men and women, even in old age, to enjoy such
innocent pleasures as come in their way without finding them pall, or
despising them as not worth their acceptance. Great minds and men of
genius seem generally specially gifted with this invaluable attribute of
perennial youth; while little souls, full of their own petty importance
and vanities, lose it before they are well out of the school-room. The
late sculptor, John Gibson (whose works will be, perhaps, appreciated
when all the monstrosities of modern English statuary are consigned to
the lime-kiln), used to say in his old age that he wished he could live
over again every day and hour of his past life precisely as he had spent
it. Let the reader measure what this means in the mouth of a man of
transparent veracity, and it will appear that the speaker must needs
have carried on through his seventy years the freshness of heart of a
boy, never wearied by his ardent pursuit of the Beautiful, and supported
by the consciousness that this pursuit was not wholly in vain. People
who are always “looking for the next thing,” taking each pleasure not as
pleasure _per se_, but merely as a useful stepping-stone to something
else which may possibly be pleasure, or as a subject to be talked of;
people who are always climbing, like boys at a fair, up the slippery
pole of ambition,—cannot possibly know the meaning of such genuine and
ever fresh enjoyment.

Is a man likely to grow more or less simple-hearted and single-minded in
Town or in the Country? Alas! there can be little or no doubt that
London life is a sad trial to all such simplicity; and that nothing is
more difficult than to preserve, in its hot, stifling atmosphere, the
freshness and coolness of any flower of sentiment, or the glory of any
noble, unselfish enthusiasm. Social wear and tear, and the tone of
easy-letting-down commonly adopted by men of the world towards any lofty
aspiration, compel those who would fain cherish generous and
conscientious motives to cloak them under the guise of a hobby or a
whim, and, before many years are over, the glow and bloom of almost
every enthusiasm is rubbed off and spoiled.

But it is time to pass from the general subjective conditions of
happiness common to us all to those individual tastes and idiosyncrasies
which are probably more often concerned in the preference of town or
country life. We are all of us mingled of pretty nearly the same
ingredients of character; but they are mixed in very different
proportions in each man’s brewing, and in determining the flavor of the
compound everything depends on the element which happens to prevail. By
some odd chance, few of us, notwithstanding all our egotism and
self-study, really know ourselves well enough to recognize whether we
are by nature gregarious or solitary, acted upon most readily by
meteorological or by psychological influences, capable of living only on
our affections or requiring the exercise of our brains. We are always,
for example, talking about the gloom or brightness of the weather, as if
we were so many pimpernels, to whom the sun is everything and a cloudy
day or a sharp east wind the most pitiable calamity. The real truth is
that, to ninety-nine healthy English men and women out of a hundred,
atmospheric conditions are insignificant compared to social ones; and
the spectacle of a single member of the family in the dumps, or even the
suspicion that the servants are quarrelling in the kitchen, detracts
more from our faculty of enjoyment than a fall of the barometer from
Very Dry to Stormy. In the same way we talk about people “loving the
country” or “loving the town,” just as if the character which fitted in
and found its natural gratification in the one were qualified to enjoy
quite equally the other. Obviously, in some of us the passion for Nature
and natural beauty is so prominent that, if it be starved (as it must
needs be in a great city) or only tantalized by the sight of pictures
reminding us of woods and hills and fresh breezes when we are stifled
and jostled in the crowded rooms of Burlington House or the Grosvenor
Gallery, we miss so much out of life that nothing can make up for it,
and no pleasures of the intellect in the company of clever people, or
gratification of taste in the most luxurious home, are sufficient to
banish the regret. A young branch swaying in the breeze of spring, and
the song of the lark rising out of the thyme and the clover, are better
than all the pictures, the concerts, the conversation which the town can
offer. And just in the opposite way there are others amongst us in whom
the æsthetic element is subordinate to the social, and who long to take
a part in the world’s work rather than to stand by and watch the grand
panorama of summer and winter move before them while they remain
passive. Is it not patently absurd to talk as if persons so differently
constituted as these could find happiness,—the one where his ingrained
passion for Nature is permanently denied its innocent and easy
gratification, the other where his no less deeply rooted interest in the
concerns of his kind is narrowed within the petty sphere of rural social
life?

But let us now pass on, hoping that we have found the round man for the
round hole, and the square man for the square one. What are the more
hidden and recondite charms of the two modes of life, of which the Town
Mouse and the Country Mouse have rehearsed the superficial characters?
What is the meaning in the first place of that taste for “Life at High
Pressure,” against which W. R. Greg cautioned us, and Matthew Arnold
inveighed? How was it that the sage Dr. Johnson felt undoubtedly a
twinge of the same unholy passion when he remarked to the faithful
Boswell how delightful it was to drive fast in a post-chaise,—in _such_
a post-chaise, and over such roads as existed in his time? I apprehend
that the love for rapid movement comes from the fact that it always
conveys to us a sense of vivid volition, and effectually stirs both our
pulses and our brains, causing us not only to seem to ourselves, but
actually to become, more intelligent. At first the bustle and hurry of
London life bewilder the visitor; and, finding it impossible to think,
move, and speak as fast as is needful, he feels as a feeble old lady
might do arm-in-arm with Jack in his Seven-league boots. But after a
little while he learns to step out mentally as rapidly as his neighbors,
and thereby acquires the double satisfaction of the intrinsic pleasure
of thinking quickly and not dwelling on ideas till they become tedious,
and the further sense of gratified vanity in being as clever as other
people. This last is again a curious source of metropolitan
satisfaction. It is all very well to boast of having “also dwelt in
Arcadia.” Such pastoral pride is humility beside the conceit of being a
thorough-bred Londoner. There may live many men with souls so dead as
never to themselves to have said—anything signifying peculiar
appropriation of the soil of Scotland, or of any other “native land.”
But who has ever yet met a Cockney who was not from the bottom to the
top of his soul proud of being a Londoner, and deeply convinced that he
and his fellows can alone be counted as standing “in the foremost files
of time”? Of course, whilst he is actually in London, he has no
provocation to betray his self-satisfaction among people who can all
make the same boast. But watch him the moment he passes into the
country. Observe the pains he takes that the natives shall fully
understand what manner of man, even a Londoner, they have the privilege
of entertaining, and no doubt will remain as to how immensely superior
he feels himself to those who habitually dwell “far from the madding
crowd.” If he wander into the remoter provinces, say of Scotland, Wales,
or Ireland, there is always in his recognition of the hospitality shown
to him a tone like that of the shipwrecked apostle in Malta: “The
Barbarous people there showed us no small kindness.” He manages to
convey by looks, words, and manners his astonishment at any vestiges of
civilization which he may meet on those distant shores, and exhibits
graceful forbearance in putting up with the delicious fresh fruit,
cream, vegetables, and home-fed beef and mutton of his entertainers in
lieu of the stale produce of the London shops. One such stranded Cockney
I have known to remark that he “observed” that the eggs at N——, and at
another country house where he occasionally visited, had in them a
“peculiar milky substance,” about whose merits he seemed doubtful; and
another I have heard, after landing at Holyhead on his return from
Ireland, complacently comparing his watch (which had, like himself,
faithfully kept London time during all his tour) with the clock in the
station, and observing to his fellow-passengers “that there was not a
single clock right in Dublin,—they were all twenty minutes too
slow,—and, when he went to Galway, he found them still worse.”

Even if a man sincerely prefer country life, and transfer his abode from
London to the rural districts, he still retains a latent satisfaction at
having lived once in the very centre of human interests, close to the
throbbing heart of the world. The old squire, who has been too gouty and
too indolent to run up to town for twenty years, will still brighten up
at the names of the familiar streets and play-houses, and will tell
anecdotes, the chief interest of which seems to lie in the fact that he
formerly lodged in Jermyn Street, or bought his seals at the corner of
Waterloo Place, or had his hair cut in Bond Street, preparatory to going
to the play in Drury Lane.

As volunteers enjoy a field day with the manœuvres and marches, so a
Londoner experiences a dim sense of pleasure in forming part of the huge
army of four millions of human beings who are for ever moving hither and
thither, and yet strangely bringing about, not confusion, but order. The
Greek philosophers and statesmen, who thought such a little tiny “Polis”
as Athens or Sparta (not an eighth part of one postal district of
London) almost a miracle of divine order, would have fallen down and
worshipped at the shrine of Gog and Magog for having provided that a
whole nation should be fed, housed, clothed, washed, lighted, warmed,
taught, and amused for years and generations in a single city eight
miles long. It is impossible not to feel an ever fresh interest and even
surprise in the solution of so marvellous a problem as this human
ant-hill presents, and Londoners themselves, perhaps even more than
their visitors, are wont to watch with pleasant wonder each occurrence
which brings its magnitude to mind: the long quadruple train of splendid
equipages filing through Hyde Park of a summer afternoon; the scene
presented by the river at the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race; or the
overwhelming spectacle of such crowds as greeted the Queen on her
Jubilee.

The facility wherewith a busy-minded person, possessed of moderate
pecuniary resources, can carry out almost any project in London, is
another great source of the pleasure of town life. At every corner a
cab, a hansom, an omnibus, an underground station, or a penny steamboat,
is ready to convey him rapidly and securely to any part of the vast
area; and a post-pillar or post-office or telegraph office, to forward
his letter or card or telegram. He has acquired the privilege of
Briareus for doing the work of a hundred hands, while the scores of
penny and half-penny newspapers give him the benefit of the hundred eyes
of Argus to see how to do it.

Not many people seem to notice wherein the last and greatest of London
pleasures, that of London society, has its special attraction. It is
contrasted with the very best society which the Country can ever afford,
by offering the charm of the _imprévu_. There are always indefinite
possibilities of the most delightful and interesting new acquaintances
or of the renewal of old friendships in London: whereas even in the most
brilliant circles in the country we are aware, before we enter a house,
that our host’s choice of our fellow-guests must have lain within a very
narrow and restricted circle, and that, if a stranger should happily
have fallen from the skies into the neighborhood, his advent would have
been proclaimed in our note of invitation. Now it is much more piquant
to meet an agreeable person unexpectedly than by formal rendezvous; and,
for that large proportion of mankind who are not particularly agreeable,
it is still more essential that they should be presented freshly to our
acquaintance. Other things being equal, a Stranger Bore is never half so
great a bore as a Familiar Bore, of whose boredom we have already had
intimate and painful experience. There yet hangs about the Stranger Bore
somewhat of the mists of early day, and we are a little while in
piercing them and thoroughly deciding that he _is_ a bore and nothing
better. Often, indeed, for the first hour or two of acquaintanceship, he
fails to reveal himself in his true colors, and makes remarks and tells
anecdotes the dulness of which we shall only thoroughly recognize when
we have heard them repeated on twenty other occasions. With our own
Familiar Bore no illusion is possible. The moment we see him enter the
room, we know everything that is going to be said for the rest of the
evening, and Hope itself escapes out of Pandora’s box. Thus, even if
there were proportionately as many bores in London as in the provinces,
we should still, in town, enjoy a constant change of them, which would
considerably lighten the burden. This, however, is very far from being
the case; and the stupid wives of clever men and the dull husbands of
clever wives, who alone smuggle into the inner coteries (few people
having the effrontery to omit them in their invitations), are so far
rubbed up and instructed in the best means of concealing their
ignorance, silliness, or stupidity, that they are often quite harmless
and inoffensive, and even qualified to shine with a mild reflected
lustre in rural society in the autumn. Certain immutable laws made and
provided by society against bores are brought sooner or later to their
knowledge. They do not tell stories more than five minutes long in the
narration, nor rehearse jokes till they fancy they can recall the point,
nor entertain their friends by an abridgment of their own pedigree, or
by a catalogue of the ages, names, heights, and attainments in the Latin
grammar of their hopeful offspring. To all this sort of thing the
miserable visitor in the country is liable to be subjected in every
house the threshold of which he may venture to cross; for, even if his
host and hostess be the most delightful people, they generally have some
old uncle or aunt, or privileged and pompous neighbor, with whom nobody
has ever dared to interfere in his ruthless exercise of the power to
bore, and who will fasten on a new-comer just as mosquitoes do on fresh
arrivals at a seaport after having tormented all the old inhabitants.

And if London Bores are as lions with drawn teeth and clipped claws,
London pleasant people on the other hand are beyond any doubt the
pleasantest in the world; more true and kind and less eaten up by vanity
and egotism than Parisians, and twice as agile-minded as the very
cleverest German.

Again, a great charm of London is that wealth is of so much less social
weight there than anywhere else. It is singular what misapprehensions
are current on this subject, and how apt are country people to say that
money is everything in town, whereas the exact converse of the
proposition is nearer the truth. In a country neighborhood, the man who
lives in the largest house, drives the handsomest horses, and gives the
most luxurious entertainments is allowed with little question to assume
a prominent position, be he never so dull and never so vulgar; and,
though respect will still be paid to well-born and well-bred people of
diminished or narrow fortune, their position as regards their _nouveau
riche_ neighbors is every year less dignified or agreeable. Quite on the
contrary in town: with no income beyond what is needful to subscribe to
a club and wear a good coat, a man may take his place (hundreds _do_ so
take a place) in the most delightful circles, welcomed by all for his
own worth or agreeability, for the very simple and sufficient reason
that people like his society and want nothing more from him. In a city
where there are ten thousand people ready to give expensive dinners, it
is not the possession of money enough to entertain guests which can by
itself make the owner an important personage, or cause the world to
overlook the fact that he is a snob; nor will the lack of wealth prevent
those thousands who are on the look-out only for a pleasant and
brilliant companion from cultivating one, be he never so poor. The
distinction between the rural and the urban way of viewing a new
acquaintance as regards both birth and fortune is very curiously
betrayed by the habit of townsfolk to ask simply “_what_ a man may be”
(meaning, “Is he a lawyer, a _littérateur_, a politician, a
clergyman,—above all, is he a pleasant fellow?”) and that of country
gentry invariably to inquire, “_Who_ is he?” (meaning, Has he an estate,
and is he related to the So-and-so’s of such a place?) It is not a
little amusing sometimes to witness the discomfiture of both parties
when a bland old gentleman is introduced in London to some man of
world-wide celebrity, whose antecedents none of the company ever dreamed
of investigating, and the squire courteously intimates, as the
pleasantest thing he can think of to say, that he “used to meet often in
the hunting field a gentleman of that name who had a fine place in
Cheshire,” or that “he remembers a man who must surely have been his
father—a gentleman-commoner of Christchurch.”

For those men and women—numerous enough in these days—who hold rather
pronounced opinions of the sort not relished in country circles, who are
heretics regarding the religious or political creed of their relatives
and neighbors, London offers the real Broad Sanctuary, where they may
rest in peace, and be no more looked upon as black sheep, suspicious and
uncomfortable characters, the “gentleman who voted for Topsy Turvey at
the last election,” or “the lady who doesn’t go to church on Sundays.”
In town, not only will their errors be overlooked, but they will find
scores of pleasant and reputable persons who share the worst of them and
go a great deal further, and in whose society they will soon begin to
feel themselves by comparison quite orthodox, and perhaps rather
conservative characters.

And lastly, besides all the other advantages of London which I have
recapitulated, there is one of which very little note is ever taken. If
many sweet and beautiful pleasures are lost by living there, many sharp
and weary pains also therein find a strange anodyne. There is no time to
be very unhappy in London. Past griefs are buried away under the
surface, since we may not show them to the unsympathizing eyes around;
and present cares and sorrows are driven into dark corners of the mind
by the crowd of busy every-day thoughts which inevitably take their
place. A man may feel the heart-ache in the country, and wander mourning
by the solitary shore or amid the silent winter woods. But let him go,
after receiving a piece of sad intelligence, into the busy London
streets, and be obliged to pick his way amid the crowd; to pass by a
score of brilliant shops, avoid being run over by an omnibus, give a
penny to a streetsweeper, push through the children looking at Punch,
close his ears to a German band, hail a hansom and drive to his office
or his chambers,—and at the end of the hour how many thoughts will he
have given to his sorrow?

Before it has had time to sink into his mind, many days of similar fuss
and business will have intervened; and by that time the edge of the
grief will be dulled, and he will never experience it in its sharpness.
Of the influence of this process, continually repeated, on the
character, a good deal might be said; and there may be certainly room to
doubt whether thus perpetually shirking all the more serious and solemn
passages of life is conducive to the higher welfare. After we have
suffered a good deal, and the readiness of youth to encounter every new
experience and drink every cup to the dregs has been exchanged for the
dread of strong emotions and the weariness of grief which belong to
later years, there is an immense temptation to spare our own hearts as
much as we can; and London offers the very easiest way, without any
failure of kindness, duty, or decorum, to effect such an end.
Nevertheless, the sacred faculties of sympathy and unselfish sorrow are
not things to be lightly tampered with; and it is to be feared that the
consequences of any conscious evasion of their claims must always be
followed by that terrible Nemesis, the hardening of our hearts and the
disbelief in the sympathy of our neighbors. We have made love and
friendship unreal to ourselves, and it becomes impossible to continue to
believe they are real to other people. Yet, I think, if the shelter be
not wilfully or intentionally sought, if it merely come in the natural
course of things that the business and variety of town life prevent us
from dwelling on sorrows which cannot be lightened by our care, it seems
a better alternative than the almost infinite durability and emphasis
given to grief in the monotonous life of the country.

If these be the advantages of Town life, however, there are to be set
against them many and grievous drawbacks. First, as the Country Mouse
justly urges, half those quickly following sensations and ideas which
constitute the highly-prized rapidity of London life are essentially
disagreeable in themselves, and might be dispensed with to our much
greater comfort. In the country, for example, out of fifty sights,
forty-nine at least are of pretty or beautiful objects, even where there
is no particularly fine scenery. Woods, gardens, rivers, country roads,
cottages, wagons, ploughs, cattle, sheep, and over all, always, a broad
expanse of the blessed sky, with the pomps of sunrises and sunsets, and
moonlight nights and snow-clad winter days,—these are things on which
everywhere (save in the Black Country, which is not the _country_ at
all) the eye rests in peace and delight. In the town, out of the same
number of glances of our tired eyeballs, we shall probably behold a
score of huge advertisements, a line of hideous houses with a butcher’s
shop as the most prominent object, an omnibus and a brewer’s dray, a
score of bricklayers returning (slightly drunk) from dinner, and a
handsome carriage with the unfortunate horses champing their gag-bits in
agony from their tight bearing-reins while the coachman flicks them with
his whip. In the country, again, out of fifty odors the great majority
will be of fresh herbage, or hay, or potato or bean fields, or of newly
ploughed ground, or burning weeds or turf. In the town, we shall endure
the sickly smell of drains, of stale fish, of raw meat, of carts laden
with bones and offal, the insufferable effluvium of the city cook-shops;
and last—not least—pervading every street and shop and park, puffed
eternally in our faces, the vilest tobacco. And finally, in the country,
our ears are no less soothed and flattered than our senses of smelling
and sight. The golden silence when broken at all is disturbed only by
the noise of running waters, of cattle lowing, sheep bleating, thrushes
and larks and cuckoos singing, rooks cawing on the return home at
evening, or the exquisite “sough” of the night wind as it passes over
the sleeping woods as in a dream. In the town, we have the relentless
roar and rattle of a thousand carts, cabs, drags, and omnibuses, the
perpetual grinding of organs and hurdy-gurdies, the unintelligible and
ear-piercing cries of the costermongers in the streets, and generally,
to complete our misery, the jangle of a pianoforte heard through the
thin walls of our house, as if there were no partitions between us and
the detestable children who thump through their scales and polkas for
six hours out of the twenty-four. Such are the sufferings of the senses
in London,—surely worth setting against the luxuries it is supposed to
command, but which it only commands for the rich, whereas neither rich
nor poor have any immunity from the ugly sights, ugly smells, and ugly
noises wherewith it abounds. But, beyond these mortifications of the
flesh, London entails on its thoroughgoing votaries a heavier
punishment. Sooner or later on every one who really works in London
there comes a certain pain, half physical, half mental, which seems to
have its bodily seat somewhere about the diaphragm, and its mental place
between our feelings and our intellect,—a sense, not of being tired and
wanting rest, for that is the natural and wholesome alternative of all
strong and sustained exercise of our faculties, but of being “like dumb
driven cattle,” and of having neither power to go on nor to stop. We
seem to be under some slave-master who whips us here and there, and
forbids us to sit down and take breath. We want fresh air, but our walks
through the crowded streets or parks only add fatigue to our eyes and
weariness and excitement to our brains. We need food, but it does us
little good; and sleep, but we waken up before half the night is past
with our brains busy already with the anxieties of the morrow. We are
conscious we are using up brains, eyesight, health, everything which
makes life worth possessing, and yet we are entangled in such a mesh of
engagements and duties that we cannot break loose. We can only break
_down_; and that is what we pretty surely do when this state of things
has lasted a little too long.

Perhaps the reader is inclined to say, Why not try the golden mean, the
compromise between town and country, to be found in some _rus in urbe_
in Fulham or Hampstead, or a villa a little way further, at Richmond or
Norwood or Wimbledon? I beg leave humbly to contend that the venerable
Aristotelian “Meson” is as great a mistake in geography as in ethics,
and that it will be generally found that people adopting the Half-way
House system of lodgement will be disposed to repeat the celebrated
Scotch ode with slight variations. “Their heart is”—in London; “their
heart is not,”—by any means, in Hampstead or Twickenham. Their days are
spent either in waiting at railway stations to go in or out of town, or
in the yet more tantalizing anticipation of friends who have promised to
“give them a day,” and for whom they have provided the modern substitute
for the fatted calf, but who, on the particular morning of their
engagement, are sure to be swept off their consciences by an unexpected
ticket for the opera, which they “could not enjoy if they had gone so
far in the morning as dear Mr. A.’s delightful villa.” Of course, it is
possible to live in the outer circle of real London, and have fresh air
and comparative quiet, infinitely valuable. But he who goes further
afield, the ambitious soul who dreams of cocks and hens, or even soars
to a paddock and a cow, is destined to disillusion and despair. He tries
to “make the best of both worlds,” and he gets the worst of both. The
genuine Londoner considers his proffers of hospitality as an imposition;
and the genuine country cousin is indignant, on accepting them, to find
how far is his residence from the exhibitions and the shops. His trees
are black, his roses cankered, and his soul imbittered by the
defalcations of friends, the blunders and extortions of cabmen, and his
own infructuous effort to be always in two places at once.

Nor is the second and, apparently, more facile resource of the tired
Londoner—that of quartering himself on his kind country friends for his
holidays—very much more successful. The country would indeed be
delightful for our Christmas fortnight or our Easter or Whitsuntide
week, if we were permitted to enjoy in it that repose we so urgently
need and so fondly seek. We are quite enamoured, when we first turn our
steps from the smoky city, with the trees and fields; and we enjoy
indescribably our rides and drives and walks, the varied aspects of
nature, and the beasts and birds wherewith we are surrounded. But one
thing we have not bargained for, and that is—country Society. Of course
we love our friends and relations in whose homes we are received with
kindness and affection, whom we know to be the salt of the earth for
goodness, and who love us enough to feel an interest even in our
towniest gossip. But _their_ country friends, the neighboring
gentlefolk, the clergyman’s wife, the family doctor, the people who are
invariably invited to meet us at the long formal country dinner! This is
the trial beneath which our new-found love of rural life is apt to
succumb. Sir Cornewall Lewis’s too famous _dictum_ returns, slightly
modified, to our memories—As “life would be tolerable but for its
pleasures,” so the country would be enchanting, were it not for its
society. Could we be allowed to live in the country, and see only our
hosts, we should be as happy as kings and queens. But to fly, for the
sake of rest and quiet, from the tables where we might have met some of
the most brilliant men and women of the day, and then to find that we
shall incur the disgrace of being unsociable curmudgeons if we object to
spend the afternoon in playing tennis with the rector’s stupid
daughters, and to dine afterwards at the house of a particularly dull
and vulgar neighbor with whom we would fain avoid such acquaintance as
may justify him in visiting us in town, this is surely an evil destiny!
When, alas! will all the good and kind people who invite town friends to
come and rest with them in the country forbear to make their acceptance
the occasion for a round of rural dissipation, and believe that their
weary brother would be only too glad, did civility permit, to inscribe
on the door of his bedroom during his sojourn the affecting Italian
epitaph, _Implora pace!_

The Country Mouse has naturally said as little as possible of the
drawbacks of his favorite mode of existence,—metaphorically speaking,
the dampness of his “Hollow Tree,” and its liability to be infested by
Owls. It may be well to jot off a few of the less recognized offsets to
the pleasures of rural life before listening to any eulogies thereof.

The real evil of country life I apprehend is this: the whole happiness
or misery of it is so terribly dependent on the character of those with
whom we live that, if we are not so fortunate as to have for our
companions the best and dearest, wisest and pleasantest, of men and
women (in which case we may be far happier than in any other life in the
world), we are infinitely worse off than we can ever be in town. One,
two, or perhaps three relatives and friends, who form our permanent
housemates, make or mar all our days by their good or evil tempers,
their agreeability or stupidity, their affection and confidence, or
their dislike and jealousy. _Être avec les gens qu’on aime, cela
suffit_, says Rousseau; and he speaks truth. But _être avec les gens
qu’on n’aime pas_, and buried in a dull country house with them, without
any prospect of change, is as bad as having a millstone tied round our
necks and being drowned in the depth of the sea. In a town house, if the
fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, scold and wrangle, if the
husband be a bear or the wife a shrew, there is always the refuge of the
outer circle of acquaintances wherein cheer and comfort, or, at least,
variety and relief, may be found. Reversing the pious Dr. Watts’s maxim,
we cry,—

                   “Whatever brawls disturb the home,
                   Let peace be in the street.”

The Club is the shelter of henpecked man; a friend’s house, or Marshall
and Snellgrove’s, the refuge of a cockpecked woman. On the stormiest
domestic debate, the advent of a visitor intervenes, throwing temporary
oil on the waters, and compelling the belligerents to put off their
quarrels and put on their smiles; and, when the unconscious peacemaker
has departed, it is often found difficult, if not impossible, to take up
the squabble just where it was left off. But there is no such luck for
cross-grained people in country houses. Humboldt’s “Cosmos” contains
several references to certain observations made by two gentlemen who
passed a winter together on the inhospitable northern shores of Asia,
and one of whom bore the alarming name of Wrangle. It is difficult to
imagine any trial more severe than that of spending the six dark months
of the year with Wrangle on the Siberian coast of the Polar Sea. But
this is a mere fancy sketch, whereas hundreds of unlucky English men and
women spend their winters every year in country houses, limited,
practically, to the society of a Mr. or a Mrs. Wrangle who makes life a
burden by everlasting fault-finding, squabbling, worry, suspicion, jar,
and jolt. As regards children or dependent people or the wives of
despotic husbands, the case is often worse than this. By a terrible law
of our nature, an unkindness, harshness, or injustice done once to any
one has a frightful tendency to produce hatred of the victim (I have
elsewhere called the passion _heteropathy_) and a restlessness to heap
wrong on wrong, and accusation upon accusation, to justify the first
fault. Woe to the hapless stepchild or orphan nephew or penniless
cousin, or helpless and aged mother-in-law, who falls under this
terrible destiny in a country house where there are few eyes to witness
the cruelty and no tongue bold enough to denounce it! The misery endured
by such beings, the poor young souls which wither under the blight of
the perpetual unmerited blame, and the older sufferers mortified and
humiliated in their age, must be quite indescribable. Perhaps by no
human act can truer charity be done than by resolutely affording moral
support, if we can do no more, to such butts and victims; and, if it be
possible, to take them altogether away out of their ill-omened
conditions, and “deliver him that is oppressed from the hand of the
adversary.” It is astonishing how much may be done by very humble
spectators to put a check to evils like these, even by merely showing
their own surprise and distress in witnessing them; and, on the
contrary, how deplorably ready are nine people out of ten to fall in
with the established prejudices and unkindnesses of every house they
enter.

Very little of this kind of thing goes on in towns. People are too busy
about their own affairs and pleasures, and their feelings of all kinds
are too much diffused among the innumerable men and women with whom they
come in contact, to permit of concentrated dislike settling down on any
inmate of their homes in the thick cloud it is apt to do in the country.

Here we touch, indeed, on one great secret of the difference of Town and
Country life. All sentiments, amiable and unamiable, are more are less
dissipated in town, and concentrated and deepened in the country. Even a
very trifling annoyance, an arrangement of hours of meals too late or
too early for our health, a smoky chimney, a bad coachman, a door below
stairs perpetually banged, assumes a degree of importance when
multiplied by the infinite number of times we expect to endure it in the
limitless monotony of country life. Our nerves become in advance
irritated by all we expect to go through in the future, and the
consequence is that a degree of heat enters into family disputes about
such matters which greatly amazes the parties concerned to remember when
the wear and tear of travel or of town life have made the whole mode of
existence in a country home seem a placid stream, with scarcely a pebble
to stir a ripple.

And now, at last, let us begin to seek out wherein lie the more hidden
delights of the country life; the violets under the hedge which sweeten
all the air, but remain half-unobserved even by those who would fain
gather up the flowers. We return in thought to one of those old homes,
bosomed in its ancestral trees and with the work-day world far enough
away behind the park palings so that the sound of wheels is never heard
save when some friend approaches by the smooth-rolled avenue. What is
the key-note of the life led by the men and women who have grown from
childhood to manhood and womanhood in such a place, and then drop slowly
down the long years which will lead them surely at last to that bed in
the green churchyard close by, where they shall “sleep with their
fathers”? That “note” seems to me to be a peculiar sense—exceeding that
of mere calmness—of _stability_, of a repose of which neither beginning
nor end is in sight. Instead of a “changeful world,” this is to them a
world where no change comes, or comes so slowly as to be imperceptible.
Almost everything which the eye rests upon in such a home is already
old, and will endure for years to come, probably long after its present
occupants are under the sod. The house itself was built generations
since, and its thick walls look as if they would defy the inroads of
time. The rooms were furnished, one, perhaps, at the father’s marriage;
another, tradition tells us, by a famous great-grandmother; the halls—no
one remembers by whom or how long ago. The old trees bear on their boles
the initials of many a name which has been inscribed long years also on
the churchyard stones. The garden, with its luxuriant old-fashioned
flowers and clipped box borders and quaint sun-dial, has been a garden
so long that the rich soil bears blossoms with twice the perfume of
other flowers; and, as we pace along the broad terraced walks in the
twilight, the odors of the well-remembered bushes of lavender and
jessamine and cistus (each growing where it has stood since we were
born) fall on our senses like the familiar note of some dear old tune.
The very sounds of the landrail in the grass, the herons shrieking among
their nests, the rooks darkening the evening sky, the cattle driven in
to milking and lowing as they go, all in some way suggest the sense, not
of restlessness and turmoil like the noises of the town, but of calm and
repose and the unchanging order of an “abode of ancient Peace.”

Then the habits of the owners of such old seats are sure to fall into a
sort of rhyme. There are the lesser beats at intervals through the long
day, when the early laborer’s bell, and the gong at nine o’clock, and
one o’clock, and seven o’clock, sound the call to prayers and to meals.
And there are the weekly beats, when Sunday makes the beautiful refrain
of the psalm of life. And yet again there are the half-yearly summer
strophe and winter antistrophe of habits of each season, taken up and
laid down with unfailing punctuality, while the family life oscillates
like a pendulum between the first of May, which sees the domestic exodus
into the fresh, vast old drawing-room, and the first of November, which
brings the return into the warm, oak-panelled library. To violate or
alter these long-established rules and precedents scarcely enters into
the head of any one, and the child hears the old servants (themselves
the most dear and permanent institutions of all) speak of them almost as
if they were so many laws of nature. Thus he finds life from the very
beginning set for him to a kind of music, simple and beautiful in its
way; and he learns to think that “Order is Heaven’s first law,” and that
change will never come over the placid tenor of existence. The
difficulty to him is to realize in after years that any vicissitudes
have really taken place in the old home, that it has changed owners, or
that the old order has given place to new. He almost feels—thinking
perhaps of his mother in her wonted seat—that Shelley’s dreamy
philosophy must be true

              “That garden sweet, that lady fair,
              And all bright shapes and odors there,
              In truth have never passed away:
              ’Tis we, ’tis ours, have changed, not they.”

The anticipation of perpetual variety and change which is the lesson
commonly taught to children by town life,—the Micawber-like expectation
of “something turning up,” to amuse or distract them, and for which they
are constantly in a waiting frame of mind, is precisely reversed for the
little scion of the old country family. For him nothing is ever likely
to turn up beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of fair weather and foul,
the sickness of his pony, the death of his old dog or the arrival of his
new gun. All that is to be made out of life he invents for himself in
his sports and in his rambles, till the hour arrives when he is sent to
school. And when the epochs of school and college are over, when he
returns as heir or master, life lays all spread out before him in a
long, straight, honorable road, all his duties and his pleasures lying
by the wayside, ready for his acceptance. For the girl there is often
even longer and more unbroken monotony, lasting (unless she marry) into
early womanhood and beyond it. Nothing can exceed the _eventlessness_ of
many a young lady’s life in such a home. Her walks to her village
school, or to visit her cottage friends in their sicknesses and
disasters; her rides and drives along the familiar roads which she has
ridden and driven over five hundred times already; the arrival of a new
book, or of some old friend (more often her parent’s contemporary than
her own),—make up the sum of her excitements, or even expectations of
excitement, perhaps, through all the years when youth is most eager for
novelty, and the outer world seems an enchanted place. The effects on
the character of this extreme regularity and monotony, this life at Low
Pressure, vary, of course, in different individuals. Upon a dull mind
without _motu proprio_ or spring of original ideas, it is, naturally,
depressing enough; but it is far from equally injurious to those
possessed of some force of character, provided they meet the affection
and reasonable indulgence of liberty without which the heart and
intellect can no more develop healthfully than a baby can thrive without
milk, or a child’s limbs grow agile in swaddling clothes. The young mind
slowly working out its problems for itself, unwarped by the influence
(so enormous in youth) of thoughtless companions, and devouring the
great books of the world, ferreted out of a miscellaneous library by its
own eager appetite and self-guided taste, is perhaps ripening in a
healthier way than the best taught town child, with endless “classes”
and masters for every accomplishment under the sun. Even the imagination
is better cultivated in loneliness, when the child, through its solitary
rambles by wood and shore, spins its gossamer webs of fancy, and invents
tales of heroism and wonder such as no melodrama or pantomime ever yet
brought to the town child’s exhausted brain. Then the affections of the
country child are concentrated on their few objects with a passionate
warmth of which the feelings of the town child, dissipated amidst scores
of friends and admirers, affords no measure whatever. The admiration
amounting to worship paid by many a little lonely girl to some older
woman who represents to her all of grace and goodness she has yet
dreamed, and who descends every now and then from some far-off Elysium
to be a guest in her home, is one of the least read and yet surely one
of the prettiest chapters of innocent human sentiment. As to the graver
and more durable affections nourished in the old home,—the fond
attachment of brothers and sisters, the reverence for the father, the
love, purest and deepest of all earthly loves, of mother for child and
child for mother,—there can be little doubt that their growth in the
calm, sweet country life must be healthier and deeper rooted than it can
well be elsewhere.

And finally, almost certainly, such a peaceful and solitary youth soon
enters the deeper waters of the moral and spiritual life, and breathes
religious aspirations which have in them, in those early years, the
freshness and the holiness of the morning. Happy and good must, indeed,
be that later life from the heights of which any man or woman can dare
to look back on one of these lonely childhoods without a covering of the
face. Talk of hermitages or monasteries! The real nursery of religion is
one of these old English homes, where every duty is natural, easy,
beautiful; where the pleasures are so calm, so innocent, so interwoven
with the duties that the one need scarcely be defined from the other;
and where the spectacle of Nature’s loveliness is forever suggesting the
thought of Him who built the blue dome of heaven, and scattered over all
the ground his love-tokens of flowers. The happy child dwelling in such
a home, with a father and mother who speak to it sometimes of God and
the life to come, but do not attempt to intrude into that Holy of
Holies, a young soul’s love and penitence and resolution, is the place
on earth, perhaps, best fitted to nourish the flame of religion. Of the
cruelty and wickedness and meanness of the world the child hears only as
of the wild beasts or poisonous reptiles who may roam or crawl in
African deserts. They are too far off to force themselves on the
attention as dreadful problems of the Sphinx to be solved on pain of
moral death. Even sickness, poverty, and death appear oftenest as
occasions for the kindly and helpful sympathy of parents and guides.

To turn to lighter matters. Of course among the first recognized
pleasures of the country is the constant intercourse with, or rather
_bathing in_, Nature. We are up to the lips in the ocean of fresh air,
grass, and trees. It is not one beautiful object or another which
attracts us (as sometimes happens in town), but, without being
interrupted by thinking of them individually, they influence us _en
masse_. Dame Nature has taken us on her lap, and soothes us with her own
lullaby. Probably, on the whole, country folks admire each separate view
and scrap of landscape less than their visitors from the town, and
criticise it as little as school-boys do their mother’s dress. But they
love Nature as a whole, and her real influence appears in their genial
characters, their healthy nervous systems, and their optimistic
opinions. Nor is it by any means only inanimate nature wherewith they
are concerned. Not to speak of their poorer neighbors (of whom they know
much more, and with whom they usually live in far more kindly relations
than townsfolk with theirs), they have incessant concern with brutes and
birds. How much, to some of us, the leisurely watching of stately
cattle, gentle sheep, and playful lambs, the riding and driving of
generous, kindly-natured horses and the companionship of loving dogs,
add to the sum of the day’s pleasures and tune the mind to its happiest
key-note, it would be difficult to define. For my own part, I have never
ceased to wonder how Christian divines have been able to picture Heaven
and leave it wholly unpeopled by animals. Even for their own sakes (not
to speak of justice to the oft ill-treated brutes), would they not have
desired to give their humble companions some little corner in their
boundless sky? A place with perpetual music going on and not a single
animal to caress,—even those which Mahomet promised his followers,—his
own camel, Balaam’s ass, and Tobit’s dog,—would, I think, be a very
incomplete and unpleasant paradise indeed!

It has often been said that the passion of Englishmen for field sports
is really due to this love of Nature and of animals; that, like
sheepdogs (who, when they are not trained to guard sheep, will, by an
irresistible impulse, follow and harry them), they feel compelled to
have _something to do_ with hares and foxes and partridges and grouse,
and salmon; and they find that the only thing to be done is to course
and hunt and shoot and angle for them. Into this mystery I cannot dive.
The propensity which can make kind-hearted men (as many sportsmen
unquestionably are) not merely endure to kill, but actually take
pleasure in killing, innocent living things, and changing what is so
beautiful in life and joy into what is so ineffably sad and piteous,
wounded and dying, remains always to me utterly incomprehensible. But it
is simply a fact that lads trained from boyhood to take pleasure in such
“sports,” and having, I doubt not, an “hereditary set of the brain”
towards them, like so many greyhounds or pointers, never feel the
_ribrezzo_, or the remorse, of the bird or beast murderer, but, escaping
all reflection, triumph in their own skill, and at the same time enjoy
the woods and fields and river-sides where their quarry leads them. To
do them justice,—as against many efforts lately made to confound them
with torturers of a very different class,—they know little of the pain
they inflict, and they endeavor eagerly to make that pain as brief as
possible. Nevertheless, Sport is an inexplicable passion to the
non-sporting mind; and, moreover, one not very easy to contemplate with
philosophical forbearance, much less with admiration.

A larger source of wonder is it to reflect that this same unaccountable
passion for killing pheasants and pursuing foxes has so deep a root in
English life that its arrest and disappointment by such a change of the
Game laws as would lead to the abolition of game would practically
revolutionize all our manners. The attraction of the towns already
preponderates over that of the country; but till lately the grouse have
had the honor of proroguing annually the British Senate, and the
partridges, the pheasants, the woodcocks, and the foxes induce pretty
nearly every man who can afford to shoot or hunt them to bring his
family to the country during the season wherein they are to be pursued.
Of course women, left to themselves, would mostly choose to spend their
winters in town, and their summers from May till November in the
country. But Sport determines the Session of Parliament, and the Session
determines the season; and, as women love the London Season quite as
much as men like foxhunting, both parties are equally bound to the same
unfortunate division of time, and year after year passes, and the lilacs
and laburnums and hawthorns and limes in the old country homes waste
their loveliness and their sweetness unseen, while the little children
pine in Belgravian and South Kensington mansions when they ought to be
romping among their father’s hay-fields and galloping their ponies about
his park. All these arrangements, and, further, the vast establishments
of horses and hounds, the enormous expenditure on guns and game-keepers
and beaters and game-preserving,—the sole business of thousands of
workingmen, and the principal occupation and interest of half the
gentlemen in the country,—would be swept away by a stroke.

By some such change as this, or, more probably, by the pressure of a
hundred sources of change, it is probable, nay, it is certain, that the
old form of country life (which I have been describing, perhaps, rather
as it was a few years ago than it is now) will pass away and become a
thing of memory. When that time arrives, I cannot but think that England
and the world will lose a phase of human existence which, with all its
lights and shadows, has been, perhaps, the most beautiful and perfect
yet realized on earth. Certainly, it has offered to many a happiness,
pure, stable, dignified, and blameless, such as it will be hard to
parallel in any of the novel types of high pressure modern life.

And, on the other hand, there is nothing so mournful as the life of an
old ancestral home in the country! Everything reminds us of the lost,
the dead who once called these stately chambers their habitations, whose
voices once echoed through the halls, and for whose familiar tread we
seem yet to wait; whose entrance, as of yore, through one of the lofty
doors would scarcely surprise us; whom we almost expect, when we return
after long absence, to see rising from their accustomed seats with open
arms to embrace us, as in the days gone by. The trees they planted, the
walks and flower-beds they designed; the sword which the father brought
back from his early service; the tapestry the mother wrought through her
long years of declining health; the dog grown blind and old, the
companion of walks which shall never be taken again; the instrument
which once answered to a sweet touch forever still,—these things make us
feel Death and change as we never feel them amid the instability and
eager interests of town existence. All things remain as of old “since
the fathers fell asleep.” The leaves of the woods come afresh and then
fade; the rooks come cawing home; the church bells ring, and the old
clock strikes the hour. Only there is one chair pushed a little aside
from its wonted place, an old horse turned out to graze in peace for his
latter days; a bedroom upstairs into which no one goes, save in silent
hours, unwatched and furtively.

As time goes by, and one after another of those who made youth blessed
have dropped away, and we begin to count the years of those who remain,
and watch gray hairs thickening on heads we remember golden, and talk of
the hopes and ambitions of early days as things of the past,—things
which might have been, but now, we know, will never be on earth,—when
all this comes to pass, then the sense of the _tragedy_ of life becomes
too strong for us. The dear home, loved so tenderly, is for us little
better than the cenotaph of the lost and dead; the warning to ourselves
that over all our busy schemes and hopes the pall will soon come
down,—“the night cometh when no man can work.”

I believe it is this deep, sorrowful sense of all that is most sad and
most awful in our mortal lot, a sense which we escape amid the rushing
to and fro of London, but which settles down on our souls in such a home
as I have pictured, which makes the country unendurable to many, as the
shadows of the evening lengthen. To accept it, and look straight at the
grave towards which they are walking down the shortened vista of their
years, taxes men’s courage and faith beyond their strength, and they fly
back to the business and the pleasures wherein such solemn thoughts are
forgotten and drowned. And yet beneath our cowardice there is the
longing that our little race should round itself once again to the old
starting point; that where we spent our blessed childhood, and rested on
our mother’s breast, and lisped our earliest prayers, there also we
should lay down the burden of life, and repent its sins, and thank the
Giver for its joys, and fall asleep,—to awaken, we hope, in the eternal
Home.

-----

Footnote 1:

  Several such critics, writing of the essay in this book on the
  “Scientific Spirit of the Age” when it appeared in the _Contemporary
  Review_ for July, condemned me for failing to do adequate justice to
  Science, quite regardless of my reiterated assertions (see pp. 6, 7,
  34) that I was writing exclusively on the adverse side, and left the
  glorification of the modern Diana of the Ephesians to the mixed
  multitude of her followers.

Footnote 2:

  “Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as
  the works of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave
  me great delight, and even as a school-boy I took intense delight in
  Shakespeare. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me
  considerable, and music very great delight. But now, for many years, I
  cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have also almost lost my
  taste for pictures or music.”—Darwin’s _Life_, vol. i. p. 101.

Footnote 3:

  Darwin’s _Life_, vol. i. p. 101. Said of himself by Darwin.

Footnote 4:

  That organ of the Scientific party, the _British Medical Journal_,
  eulogizing this address, remarked that “Sir James is a master of
  English, clothing all his thoughts in the most elegant language.” To
  the mere literary mind the above definitions may be thought to leave
  something to be desired on the score of “elegance.”

Footnote 5:

  Speaking of this latter book, the Manchester _Guardian_ (March 17)
  remarked that “the charges in ‘St Bernard’s’ were supported by details
  of cases reported in medical journals and by statements made by
  lecturers of distinction. The quotations are precise and easily
  verified. The hospitals will do well to take some notice of a medical
  man who avers that the healing of patients is subordinated to the
  professional advantages of the staff and the students, that cures are
  retarded for clinical study, that new drugs are tried upon hospital
  patients, who are needlessly examined and made to undergo unnecessary
  operations. They cannot afford to pass over the statement that the
  dying are tortured by useless operations, and that the blunders of
  students are covered by their teachers for the credit of the
  hospital.” Every one of these offences against justice and humanity is
  directly due to the inspiration of the Scientific Spirit.

Footnote 6:

  It was long before Science acquired her natural voice. For more than a
  thousand years she submitted servilely to Aristotle and his
  interpreters. But the Science of the Dark Ages was only a branch of
  learning of which a Picus of Mirandola or an Admirable Crichton could
  master the whole, along with the classics and mathematics of the
  period. The genuine Scientific Spirit was not yet born; and when it
  woke at last in Galileo and Kepler, and down to our own day, the
  Religious spirit was still paramount over the Scientific. It is only
  in the present generation that we witness at once the evolution of the
  true scientific spirit and of scientific arrogance.

Footnote 7:

  While I am writing these pages, the _Globe_ informs us that there
  reigns at present in Paris a mania for medical curiosities and
  surgical operations. “It has become the right thing to get up early
  and hurry off to witness some special piece of dexterity with the
  scalpel. The novel yields its attraction to the slightly stronger
  realism of the medical treatise, and the picture galleries have the
  air of a pathological museum. It is suggested that the theatres, if
  they want to hold their own, must represent critical operations in a
  thoroughly realistic manner on the stage.”

Footnote 8:

  In the very noteworthy paper by Mr. Myers in the _Nineteenth Century_
  for May on the “Disenchantment of France,” there occurs this remark:
  “In that country where the pure dicta of Science reign in the
  intellectual classes with less interference from custom, sentiment, or
  tradition, than even in Germany itself, we should find that Science,
  at her present point, is a depressing disintegrating energy” (p. 663).
  Elsewhere he says that France “makes M. Pasteur her national _hero_”!

Footnote 9:

  I have heard a pitiful example of this kind of prejudice. An orphan
  boy and his ugly mongrel dog were the objects of universal dislike and
  ridicule in the house of his uncle, a Scotch farmer. The lad always
  sat of an evening far back from the circle by the fireside, with his
  crouching dog under his stool lest it should be kicked. One day the
  little son of the house, of whom the farmer and his wife were dotingly
  fond, went out with the boy and dog, and, a snow-storm coming on, they
  were all lost on the hills. Next morning the dog returned to the farm,
  making wild signs that the farmer should follow him, which he and his
  wife did at once, in great anxiety. At last, the dog brought them to a
  spot where they found the boy stiff and cold, but their child still
  alive. The boy had taken off his own coat and wrapped it round the
  child, whom he laid on his breast, and then, lying under him on the
  snow, had died. Let us hope that at least the dog reaped some tardy
  fruits of the farmer’s repentance.

Footnote 10:

  I will cite an example from my own experience, which may help to make
  parents realize the subtle peril of which I speak. Twenty-five years
  ago I was engaged in an effort to help Mary Carpenter in the care of
  the Red Lodge Reformatory for girl-thieves at Bristol. Our poor little
  charges had all been convicted of larceny, or some kindred offence,
  but they were not technically “fallen” girls: another establishment
  received young women of this “unfortunate” class. Twice, however, it
  happened, during my residence with Miss Carpenter, that girls who had
  been on the streets were by mistake sent to us when convicted of
  theft, and were of course received and placed with the others, all
  being under the most careful surveillance both in the school-rooms,
  playgrounds, and dormitory. Nevertheless, in each case, before the
  “unfortunate” had been three days in the Lodge, by some inexplicable
  contagion the whole school of fifty girls were demoralized so
  completely that the aspect of the children and change in their
  behavior gave warning to their experienced janitress to trace the
  history of the new-comer more exactly, and, as the result proved, to
  detect where the infection had come in.

Footnote 11:

  In Dr. Ingleby’s just published Essays there is a very pertinent story
  from Saint Augustine concerning this contagion of the emotion of
  cruelty. A certain Alypius detested, on report, the spectacle of the
  Gladiators, but was induced to enter the amphitheatre, protesting that
  he would not look at the show: “So soon as he saw the blood,” says
  Saint Augustine, “he therewith drank down savageness; nor turned away,
  but fixed his eye, drinking in pleasure unawares, and was delighted
  with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime; nor
  was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came
  into.”—_Saint Augustine’s Confessions_, Bk. vi., c. 8. Similar
  perversions occur at all brutal exhibitions. A friend sends me the
  following instance from his own knowledge. “A party of English people
  went to the Bull Ring of San Sebastian. When the first horse was
  ripped up and his entrails trailed on the ground, a young lady of the
  party burst into tears and insisted on going away. Her brothers
  compelled her to remain; and a number of horses were then mutilated
  and killed before her eyes. Long before the end of the spectacle the
  girl was as excited and delighted as any Spaniard in the assembly.”

Footnote 12:

  Readers of that singular book, “St. Bernard’s” (Swan, Sonnenschein &
  Co., 1887, new edition 1888), and its sequel, “Dying Scientifically,”
  may possibly entertain doubts on this subject.

Footnote 13:

  “C’est pourquoi, seul dans mon siècle, j’ai sû comprendre Jésus Christ
  et St. François d’Assise.”—_M. Renan._

Footnote 14:

  The heads of this party in England are the venerable Rabbi Nathan
  Adler and his son and colleague, Rev. Herman Adler, who hold a kind of
  Patriarchate over all English Orthodox Jews. The principal synagogue
  of this party (to which the Rothschild family hereditarily belongs,
  also the Cohens, Sir G. Jessel, etc.) is in Great Portland Street. The
  _Eglise mère_ is in the City, and there are many other synagogues
  belonging to it scattered over London and England. The Portuguese
  branch of the Orthodox party (the most rigidly Orthodox of all), to
  which Sir Moses Montefiore belonged, has its chief synagogue in Bevis
  Marks. The late distinguished Rabbi Artom, brother of Cavour’s private
  secretary, was minister of this synagogue.

Footnote 15:

  The Reformed Jews, among whom Sir Julian Goldsmid and Mr. F. D.
  Mocatta hold distinguished places, have only one synagogue in London,
  that in Berkeley Street. The minister of this wealthy and important
  congregation is the Rev. D. Marks. A special liturgy, differing
  chiefly from the Orthodox by omissions of Talmudic passages, is in use
  in this synagogue.

Footnote 16:

  Professor Goldwin Smith, in the _Nineteenth Century_.

Footnote 17:

  It will be noticed that nothing can be further apart than these ideas
  of a Reformed Judaism from those put forward by George Eliot in
  “Daniel Deronda.” Equally remote are they from the crude endeavor to
  return to a supposed primitive Judaism through the “worship of the
  letter” of the Old Testament, which was hailed some years ago with
  premature satisfaction by a certain school of Protestant Christians.
  See the interesting “History of the Karaite Jews,” by the Rev. W. H.
  Rule, D.D., 1870.

Footnote 18:

  As an example of this, I can mention the following fact. All the
  Jewish journals in Germany (amounting to nine out of ten of all the
  newspapers in the country) support a certain cruel practice. And why?
  It has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with finance,
  nothing to do with any matter wherein Jews have a different interest
  from other people. The key to this mystery is simply that seven or
  eight of the most guilty persons are Jews. This “clandestine
  manipulation of the press,” and tribe-union for purposes disconnected
  with tribal interests, constitutes a _cabal_, and necessarily creates
  antagonism and disgust. Nothing of this kind can be laid at the door
  of English Jews, and it is much to be wished that they would
  expostulate with their brethren on its imbittering effects abroad.

Footnote 19:

  I cannot but think that too much has been made, particularly under the
  influence of the modern mania for “heredity,” of the exceptional
  character of the Jewish race. Of course, the Jews are a most
  remarkable people, so vigorous physically as to be able to colonize
  either India or Greenland, and after a thousand years of Ghetto
  existence to remain (to the confusion of all sanitation-mongers) the
  healthiest race in Europe. On the mental side, their multifarious
  gifts and their indomitable sturdiness are no less admirable. But
  their fidelity to their race and religion is not unmatched. Not to
  speak of the miserable Gypsies, the Parsees offer a more singular
  spectacle; for their members have always been a handful compared to
  the Jews (not above 150,000 at the utmost), and during the ten ages of
  their exile they have exhibited a spirit of concession towards the
  customs of their neighbors which has left the actual dogmas of their
  religion the sole bond of their national integrity. They worshipped
  the One good God under the law of Zoroaster three, perhaps four,
  millenniums ago, and they worship Him faithfully still, though a mere
  remnant of a race, dwelling in the midst of idolaters, and with no
  distinctive badgelike circumcision, no haughty disdain of “Gentile”
  nations, no hope of a restoration to their own land. Their priests
  have been illiterate and despised, not erudite and honored rabbis.
  Their sacred books have twice become obsolete in language, and
  incomprehensible both to clergy and laity. Their Prophet has faded
  into an abstraction. But their faith in Ahura-Mazda, the “Wise
  Creator,” the “Rich in Love,” remains as clear to-day among them as
  when it first rose upon the Bactrian plains in the morning of the
  world. The virtues of truth, chastity, industry, and beneficence
  inculcated by the Zend-Avesta, and attributed by the Greek historians
  to their ancestors of the age of Cyrus, are still noticeable among
  them in marked contrast to their Hindu neighbors; as are likewise
  their muscular strength and hardy frames. Even as regards their
  commercial aptitudes, the Parsees offer a singular parallel to the
  Jews. The _Times_ remarked some years ago that out of the 150,000
  Parsees there were an incredible number of very wealthy men, and six
  were actual millionaires. One of the last, Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy,
  gave away in his lifetime the sum of £700,000 sterling in charities to
  men of every religion.

Footnote 20:

  The congregations use Prayer-books with the vernacular in parallel
  columns.

Footnote 21:

  I refer especially to the magnificent services for the Day of
  Atonement as used in the Reformed Synagogue. There are also many noble
  prayers in the collection of Sabbath and other services for various
  festivals. The whole liturgy is majestic, though somewhat deficient as
  regards the expression of spiritual aspiration.

Footnote 22:

  So rapidly moves the world that, since this Essay was first published,
  a whole systematic work of charity of this specially Christian
  character has been established by benevolent Jewish ladies in London.
  I have before me the “Report of the Jewish Ladies’ Association for
  Prevention and Rescue Work” for 1886–87, printed for private
  circulation. The president of the association is Lady Rothschild; the
  honorable secretaries, Mrs. Cyril Flower and Mrs. J. L. Jacobs.
  Nothing can seem more wisely kind and merciful than the whole scheme
  as here detailed. We are told that the poor Jewish girls reclaimed
  from a life of vice (into which only of late years have many been
  known to fall) “are taught not only to follow the observances of their
  faith, but also to lead pure and useful lives; and no pains will be
  spared to make them better women as well as capable earners of their
  own livelihood.... The committee feel convinced they will not be
  allowed to fail in their strenuous endeavor to bring back those who
  are, as it were, sunk in moral death, to a _new life_.”

Footnote 23:

  See this affectingly brought out in that charming book, “The Jews of
  Barnow.”

Footnote 24:

  A clever book, exhibiting great acquaintance with current phases of
  opinion, appeared a few years ago, offering by its title some promise
  of dealing with the case of the Christian Theists of whom I am
  speaking. The author proposes to discuss “Natural Religion,” but he
  shortly proceeds to describe a great many things which, in the common
  language of mankind, are not _religious_ at all,—scientific ardor,
  artistic taste, or mere recognition of the physical order of the
  universe,—and to urge that these, or nothing, must constitute the
  religion of the future. The Israelites who had gazed up in awe and
  wonder at the rolling clouds on Sinai, from whence came the thunders
  and voices, and the stern and holy Law, and were immediately
  afterwards called on to worship a miserable little image of a calf,
  and told, “These be Thy Gods, O Israel!” might, one would think, have
  felt the same sense of bathos which we experience when we are solemnly
  assured that these sciences and arts _are_ henceforth our “Religion.”
  A drowning man proverbially catches at straws, and people who feel
  themselves sinking in the ocean of Atheism seize on every spar which
  comes under their hands, and cry, “We may float yet awhile by this.”
  No one can blame them for trying to do so; but it is rather hard to
  expect all the world to recognize as an ironclad the hencoop on which
  they sit astride.

  Among the “Natural Religions,” as he is pleased to call them, of which
  he has brought us intelligence (some of which are not natural, and
  none of which are properly Religions), the author of this book has
  disdained to mention that ancient but ever new form of opinion which
  in former days went by the name of Natural Religion. The words were
  not happily selected, and belong indeed to an archaic theological
  terminology. But they were understood by everybody to mean, _not_ the
  recognition of the virtues of physical science, nor admiration of fine
  scenery, nor enthusiasm for art, nor recognition of natural laws; for
  all these things had names of their own. But it was understood to mean
  the recognition and worship of a super-mundane, intelligent, and
  righteous _Person_,—in other words, of GOD. It contemplated God
  “mainly above Nature,” _not_, as the author of this book says must
  henceforward be done, “mainly in Nature” (“Natural Religion,” p. 160).
  For admirable pictures, however, of the modern Artist, who would
  rather have painted a good picture than have done his duty, and of the
  modern Man of Science who, “consumed by the passion of research,”
  finds “right and wrong become meaningless words,” see p. 120.

Footnote 25:

  A Chief of the Police Force has informed me that arrests of
  desperadoes are always made, if practicable, at about four A.M.; that
  hour being found by experience to be the one when animal courage is at
  its lowest ebb and resistance to be least apprehended.

Footnote 26:

  I have heard this peculiar but common form of feminine affliction
  classified as the “Bad Husband Headache.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
 2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
 3. Footnotes were re-indexed using numbers and collected together at
      the end of the last chapter.
 4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.







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